1969 Garden State Parkway Murders Revisted

It was 40 years ago today that Susan Davis and Elizabeth Perry, both 19 year old college students, packed their belongings from the Ocean City rooming house, drove across the causeway, ate their last breakfast at the Point Diner, and then drove onto the Garden State Parkway on their way home to Pennsylvania.

It was early in the morning, as they wanted to beat the Memorial Day weekend traffic.

Later in the day a New Jersey State Policeman, on his first patrol of the day, discovered their 1965 blue Chevrolet convertable on the side of the road, top down, and had it towed by Blazer's auto on Tilton Road.

Blazer put the car in his lot, and then went fishing for the weekend.

When the girls failed to return home, their parents notified the police, and then hired an airplane to search the roads they would have traveled, with no success.

By Tuesday morning, after the holiday was over, Blazer returned from his fishing trip, and saw the newspaper headlines about the missing girls, and the State Police realized that the car that was towed off the Parkway before the weekend was the missing car.

Searching the woods off the Parkway near where the car was found, just by the bridge over Patcong Creek, a Parkway employee Wood Faunce, discovered the bodies of the girls a few yards apart, stabbed to death.

The police set up a booth at the Point Diner, the last place they were seen alive, and solicited the public for information.

Following hundreds of leads, they came up empty, as the case was cold from the beginning.

Now, forty years later, people wonder what happened, what could have happened?

One major suspect, although not in the eyes of the police, serial murder Ted Bundy, was in the area at the time. Bundy had lived in Philadelphia, attended Temple University, and was driving a professor's car to California, using their credit card for gas.

Bundy says he went to New York city, went to the porn parlors at Times Square, and then drove down to Ocean City where he looked at all the girls on the 9th street beach. Davis and Perry were staying in a rooming house on 9th Street, a half block from the boardwalk, but wouldn't spend much time there. They went to the beach during the day and to Somers Point rock & roll bars at night.

Even though they were underage at the time, when the drinking age was 21, that was not a problem for beautiful college girls who dressed up and acted mature in those days.

After the bars closed at 2 am, they mingled with some new friends they had met, and then returned to their rooming house around 4 am where they packed their bags and headed across the Ocean City - Somers Point causeway to the Point Diner.

That's where they were last seen, and the autopsy showed that they ate breakfast about an hour before they were murdered.

There was one witness who says that they may have picked up a young man with his arm in a sling, who was hitch hiking. Others think they may have left with two young me who they had met earlier.

Bundy was considered a suspect by his prison psychologist who said, after Bundy was executed in Florida in 1989, that Bundy confessed to him of killing two victims at once, the first time he did it, and notified Atlantic City Prosecutor Jeffrey Blitz, who discounted the Bundy story.

The New Jersey State Police didn't want to consider Bundy a suspect either, because if it was his first crime, their mishandling of the towing of the victim's car and late start of the investigation would have made them somewhat responsible for the fifty or so other murders Bundy has been suspect of committing afterwards.

But now, forty years later, another possible scenario has emerged, and it seems, has yet to be properly investigated.

MORE TO COME