If you’ve seen the latest installment of Unsolved Mysteries on Netflix, you may be curious to find out more about what happened to one of this season’s subjects: Sigrid Stevenson.
A graduate student at Trenton State College, which is now The College of New Jersey, Stevenson 25 years old when she was found murdered on the stage of the auditorium inside a campus building called Kendall Hall.
The murder took place on September 4, 1977, and has remained cold for decades. But thanks to some intrepid detectives, her name is still making headlines to this day and the search continues to identify her attacker.
The details of Stevenson’s murder are rather gruesome. Stevenson was believed to have been sexually assaulted due to the condition she was found in: her blouse was tied around her mouth, her underwear was removed, and a vaginal swab found sperm was present in her body. She was discovered in a pool of blood, wrapped in a piano blanket from the very same piano that she was been playing throughout the weekend as she awaited classes to start back up for the fall term. She had recently gone on a trip, where she had traveled by hitchhiking.
Stevenson also had ligature marks on her wrists that could mean she was handcuffed. She also had bruises and lacerations on her body and head.
Strangely, there were no footprints found in the pool of blood around her. Theories as to who could have done this to her abound, considering the accounts of theater students who spoke with Sigrid while they were putting on a play that weekend. She had been sleeping in the green room and playing the piano during the day while she waited for classes to resume. One witness said Stevenson mentioned an argument with a man the night before her murder, but he hasn’t been identified.
Though there were several suspects examined throughout the years, no one has been charged with her murder.
To make sense of this head scratching case, we spoke to Terry Dunn Meurer, who co-created Unsolved Mysteries in 1987 and continues to produce it through Cosgrove-Meurer Productions.
Unsolved Mysteries Co-Creator Terry Dunn Meurer on Sigrid Stevenson Murder
For Meurer, the key to solving Stevenson’s murder would be finding a DNA match to the partial DNA sample that law enforcement has from the 47-year-old crime scene.
“They have some partial DNA, but they need a suspect. It’s not enough. There’s not enough information in the DNA to put it into CODIS or one of the databases to see if there’s someone there,” Meurer tells MovieMaker.
“They need to find an actual suspect or a suspect’s family member, just like they tested against the guy that they thought did it. They need a suspect.”
Without someone’s DNA to compare against the partial DNA sample that law enforcement has from the 47-year-old crime scene, the case may remain cold for a while — unless someone comes forward of their own accord.
“You always hope that someone’s going to come forward and say this has been haunting me my whole life and I did it. Or I know who did it, or my boyfriend did it. But you never know,” she says. “It could have been a campus police officer, maybe somebody in their family, that whole drinking in a bar — you never know if there’s some kind of confession that someone has made along the way that somebody might remember later.
The Murder Center Stage episode of Unsolved Mysteries is now streaming on Netflix.
Main Image: A recreation of the night of Sigrid Stevenson’s murder in 1977. Unsolved Mysteries: Volume 4, courtesy of Netflix