SOLVED AFTER 44 YEARS: The Case of Arlis Perry

hey guys it's bella and welcome back to my channel i hope you're all having an incredible day today welcome back to another episode of mystery monday except today's case is not a mystery at all it was solved after 44 years before we get into today's case i do just want to thank today's sponsor seekersnotes seekersnotes is a free to download hidden object game for mobile phones and it is a beautiful game all of the locations are so well thought out and the game has a storyline to match with so many twists and turns the main objective of the game is to get through each scene to eventually save the city which is called darkwood and there are over 8 000 quests and 1 000 artifacts to collect so it's super fun and there's always something to do it's the kind of game that you can play by yourself when you just need to chill and relax which is personally when i love to play it like when i'm just having a bath or after i've finished filming a video and i just need some time to myself before i 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unsolved for 44 years until dna evidence was able to find her killer just two years ago in 2018. alice perry was born alice k daikoma on the 22nd of february in 1955 in linton north dakota she was the youngest of three children to marvin and jean devout christians who raised their children to be closely connected to the presbyterian church in 1963 the family relocated to bismarck the capital of north dakota which was a small quiet isolated little city on the eastern banks of the missouri river and was surrounded by forests marvin and jean ran an automotive company named diecamus standard and helped found the bismarck reformed church later renamed the bismarck community church where marvin served as an elder and sunday school superintendent alice was described as being compassionate kind and was very trusting she had a bit of a sense of naivety about her due to always seeing the best in people on weekends she taught sunday school and worked for young life which is a christian youth organization that is dedicated to spreading the word of jesus christ to adolescents and teens to help develop their faith just like her parents alice was a devout christian and her father marvin actually said she lived a pretty sheltered life having never left bismarck before she attended bismarck high school where she met bruce perry her high school sweetheart bruce was the second of four children to mother donna and father duncan perry his mother was a stay-at-home wife and his father was a dentist and he had a pretty comfortable childhood and was a very popular kid growing up both alice and bruce were born and raised in the quiet town in the american midwest and by all accounts the two were really just like an all-american type of couple alice was a conservative religious cheerleader who was very kind and very bright and bruce was an athlete who set many local records for track and field events and was also very intelligent and very focused on his studies as he was planning on attending stanford university in 1973 bruce and alice graduated from high school and based on bruce's athletic performance he was accepted into stanford and moved the 2500 kilometers away to california to attend and enroll as a pre-med student majoring in human biology alice remained in bismarck attending classes at bismarck junior college and the two decided to maintain a long-distance relationship until alice could move to california as well and that year of long distance must have been so crazy for them because in 1974 you couldn't just text people or facetime them you had to contact them with letters and occasionally calling on the landline and all the while bruce is going through this massive life change not only had he just moved from his conservative hometown in north dakota which is all he had ever known to this big tech savvy very liberal california but he also had his work cut out for him as a pre-med student alice spent the year keeping herself busy with classes she had a job at the duncan perry dentist office which was owned by bruce's father so she could save up some money for a big move to california she was also focusing on a church she was working with a bunch of christian organizations such as young life and the fellowship of christian athletes and she was also out spreading the word of the gospel of christ to non-believers as a missionary in may of 1974 when the couple were both 19 years old bruce headed back to bismarck and asked alice to marry him the wedding was held on the 17th of august in 1974 at the bismarck reform church and for the next week the two had a little honeymoon at a cabin that alice's parents owned before they headed off to california in september upon arriving in california they moved into quillen hall in stanford's escondido village which was a residence at stanford university reserved purely for married couples bruce had a lot of work cut out for him being a second year pre-med student at this time so he spent most of his time studying and in classes and also working because he also had a job to try and provide for him and his wife alice spent most of her time on campus as a homemaker she would also in her spare time go for walks and jogs around the campus which she just really loved she thought the place was so beautiful and she would also often visit the stanford memorial church as i mentioned alice had never left bismarck before so she was having a little bit of trouble making friends in california she would write friends and family back in bismarck and would just say how she felt really lonely and kind of isolated and bored especially with bruce being gone a lot of the time in one letter she wrote to a friend back in bismarck and she said friends are hard to find here many times i've been tempted to go knock on doors asking if anybody needs a friend but i guess we just have to appreciate each other and trust the lord for new friends too eventually alice did get a job as a receptionist at a law firm and i think this really helped with like her loneliness and her boredom and her tone in her letters back to her friends and family and bismarck really changed saying that she just loved the weather in california and that after getting her job at the law firm everything kind of felt like it was falling into place on the night of the 12th of october things on the stampin campus were kind of bustling there was a lot of like i think it was like a public holiday so there was a lot of little parties going on and from the main quad you could hear a lot of music from different little small parties and gatherings in different students rooms it was a really nice cool evening and alice had some letters she wanted to go and walk down to the mailbox to post off to friends and family back in bismarck at around 11 30 p.m bruce decided to come with her so they could spend some quality time together and also because he didn't really like her walking alone at night which is fair because you know some men have just made simple mundane tasks terrifying for women eventually on their walk the two got into like a little argument about who put air into one of the ties of their car because it had deflated like just a silly little argument that couples tend to get into but alice said she wanted to go to the church so that she could cool down and just have some time to herself so bruce headed back to the apartment which was only about a kilometer away from the church stephen crawford was the nightwatch security guard on duty at the church and he said that he saw alice enter at around 11 50 p.m when she arrived there were two other silent worshipers there and they said they saw her enter walked to the front pews entered on the left-hand side of the altar and knelt to pray according to these two witnesses she was still deep in prayer when they left at midnight the church was meant to close at midnight but crawford was running a little late to lock it up so he got there at around 12 10 a.m and he looked in didn't really see anybody so he just kind of called out said if anyone's in here i'm looking up it's time for you to leave he didn't hear anything back and so he locked the church up by around 12 15 to 12 30 a.m when alice still hadn't returned to the apartment bruce started to get a little worried so he decided to head to the church to check on her see if everything was okay but when he got there all of the doors to the church were locked he then decided to go around the campus to have a look for her because there was really nowhere else she could have gone as i mentioned she was having trouble making friends so she didn't have anyone that she would go and visit and she wasn't the type to just go and jim in on a random party that was happening on campus so he just kind of walked around the main part of the campus looking for her but saw no signs of her he decided to double check their route home hoping he would maybe run into her and when he didn't he headed back to the apartment to wait for her hoping that she would come home soon he waited for her at the apartment until about 3am when he finally decided to call police and report her missing he told dispatchers that he thought that she may have fallen asleep inside the church and then had been locked in since so two police dispatchers went to the church when they got there all of the doors were locked so they called out nobody called back nothing seemed suspicious and they just assumed that bruce and alice were kind of having like a little domestic dispute and eventually she would come back home at 5 45 a.m stephen crawford the night watched security guard that had locked the church up just after midnight went back to open it up for the day and found that one of the doors was already unlocked which police would later discover had actually been forced open from the inside when crawford entered the church he found the body of alice perry on the left-hand side of the altar in the front pews where the two witnesses had seen her the night before she was found naked from the waist down and her jeans that she had been wearing have been draped across the lower half of her body she was also found with an ice pick jutting out behind her back left ear and the handle of the ice pick was never recovered so it's assumed the murderer took it with them although a small bone in her neck had been broken it was determined that the ice pick was her cause of death her arms were crossed over her chest and her legs were spread open she had been sexually assaulted with one of the altar candles that was a meter long and was found still inside of her her blouse had been ripped open and another ultra candle was pressed between her breasts with her arms crossed over it it was also theorized from markings on her body that she had been beaten and strangled although there were no indications of a struggle near her body was a kneeling pillow which was found to have semen on it and there was also a latent palm print found on one of the candles almost immediately after the discovery investigators headed to bruce and alice's apartment to let bruce know what had happened and also to question him with most investigations those closest to the victim are always questioned first and in this case considering they had only moved to california just weeks ago bruce was really the only person alice knew when police arrived at the apartment they were met at the door by bruce who was covered in blood so definitely not the best time to get a nosebleed bruce claims that he gets chronic nosebleeds whenever he gets stressed out and i'm sure your wife being gone all night would be a very stressful thing but it definitely was not the best first impression when police come to your house about your murdered wife and you're covered in blood so because of this investigators actually didn't tell him that alice had been murdered they said they wanted him to come down to the station and answer some questions and officially file a missing person's report and when he got there they questioned him for two hours they kept presenting him with different scenarios and he got really angry when they presented scenarios suggesting that alice was cheating on him and he found out or that alice was pregnant and he wasn't happy about it bruce voluntarily provided his fingerprints and he also voluntarily took a polygraph test and as i'm sure you're all aware polygraph tests are not reliable they should always be taken with a grain of salt blah blah blah take a shot every time i've said that one of my videos but back then in 1974 they didn't have all of the capabilities that we have now in regards to you know dna testing and investigations so polygraphs really were almost taken as bible he passed police trusted he wasn't a suspect anymore and they finally told him that his wife had been murdered the next morning at 11am the sunday service still went ahead at the stanford memorial church however the congregation full of journalists and grieving students was moved to the front lawn so that they could preserve the crime scene inside of the church the dean of stamford chapel reverend hamilton kelly who was holding the sunday service had actually seen the crime scene beforehand and he said that he believed it was symbolic as if it was part of a satanic ritual but he said he wasn't going to let evil triumph and that church services would continue as normal investigations continued and police decided to question anyone and everyone who may have been in the vicinity of the church the night of the murder they questioned bruce despite him being ruled out as a suspect at this point and he said that on their walk nothing seemed sketchy there didn't seem to be anybody following them or anything a passerby who had been outside of the church at around midnight said that he had seen a sandy blonde head man with his hair parted to the side entered the church at around that time the man was said to be around 25 years old and had a medium stocky build the fbi put together a profile of alice's killer they said that he was probably a loner probably with military background between 17 and 22 and that he likely kept a diary and possessions from his murders as trophies police were able to determine that alice had been murdered at around midnight but that she had been sexually assaulted with the candles afterward this would mean that when crawford came back at around 12 10 to call out to lock up the church that likely she was with her perpetrator and that he had forced alice to be quiet this theory also aligned with what was said by another witness sometime between 12 15 and 12 30 a witness said that they had passed by the church and that they heard like a weird sound coming from inside the church and they stopped to listen but didn't hear anything else so they just thought that they'd imagined it and kept walking crawford said that he did a sweep of the church at around 2am and we know for sure that police did a sweep of the outside of the church at around 3am when bruce called them to report her missing during both of these searches all of the doors to the church were reported to have been locked so either the killer stayed with the body from 12 until 3 a.m and somehow just managed to hide the body at 2 am when crawford did a sweep and then at 3am they heard the police and then after the police left they broke out through the side door which was found to have been forced open from the inside or crawford was lying because i mean it just doesn't make sense either he was in there torturing her for like three hours and somehow managed to hide himself and alice when crawford did a sweep at 2am i don't know i think it's more likely that crawford was lying about his swoop at 2am just to hide his negligence due to his ability to access the building crawford was actually considered a suspect himself however he was ruled out as he passed a polygraph test and his hand did not match the latent palm print found on the candle reverend robert hamilton kelly dean of the stanford chapel raised suspicions as he too had access to the building but he also passed a polygraph test and his handprint did not match the one on the candle police actually compared the handprint on the candle to over a hundred suspects but never found a match seven people were determined to have visited the church the night of alice's murder including alice herself six of these people were ruled out as having been the killer all but one they couldn't identify which was the sandy blonde head man a few days after the murder on the 15th of october a memorial was held for alice at the stanford memorial church and i don't know about you but i feel like they could have probably picked a better place for the memorial because those who knew her bruce and his family sat just meters away from where her body was found one of alice's co-workers from the law firm attended the memorial as well and he said that when he got there and he saw bruce he actually had no idea that it was bruce until the memorial service he thought bruce was somebody else entirely alice had only been working at the law firm for two weeks at the time that she was murdered and so she didn't really want bruce to come and visit her because she wanted to establish herself as a good worker and as a valuable employee before she started bringing like personal people and personal business into the firm so while bruce never visited her at work the day before her murder another man actually did he was in his early 20s he had sandy blonde hair he was around 5 10 and he was on the like more athletically built side so the co-worker just assumed that it was bruce he said the conversation between alice and this man lasted for about 15 minutes it seemed pretty serious in nature and when alice came back she seemed pretty upset so he didn't press it and just assumed it was bruce and never found out that it wasn't now the description of the guy is pretty generic especially for the area that it was in like the sandy blonde hair 510 athletically built dude like it's not much to go off but just the fact that the police didn't even really try and find the guy i mean i feel like it's something that you should try and look into a little more especially considering there was a signing of a similar description at the church at around the time alice was murdered there was very little follow-up on this lead but they did ask bruce if he knew anything about this he said that he didn't he'd never heard of it he has no idea who this guy was and it seems like something alice probably wouldn't tell him because it seems like something that she thought he might get upset over on the 18th of october alice's body was returned to bismarck and there was another memorial held for her at the bismarck reform church where her and bruce had married just two months prior she was buried in a local plot but less than two weeks later her temporary grave marker at her burial site was stolen and it was the only one at the cemetery that had been stolen this definitely stirred up some rumors a lot of people thought that the killer was from bismarck that maybe they followed her to california to kill her came back to bismarck and stole the gravestone as another one of their trophies especially considering detectives had released information that like two of her personal possessions had been stolen off her body when she was murdered bruce's parents actually fueled these rumors by saying that for the year that bruce and alice were doing long distance that alice and a friend had gone to mandan which is just a neighboring town of bismarck in north dakota and the perry's claimed that the two were trying to convert members of a local satanic cult to christianity as part of their work with young life the cult was known as the process church of final judgment and they were associated with scientology and satanism and members were known to carry out rituals in parks and caves in bismarck police mostly dismissed this theory because it couldn't be confirmed that alice had ever visited this cult and the murder didn't really seem to have any like satanic similarities to it only the fact that it happened in a church even reverend hamilton kelly took back his statements about the murder possibly having any satanic or ritualistic connections but despite all of this this theory or rumor really just stuck and grew as time went on there was reports that when alice's body was found her knees were bent and her ankles were drawn together in the shape of like a diamond or a pentagram others have said that her jeans were draped over her lower half in a way that symbolized the freemasons investigators disputed these claims they said that her legs were in fact found straight they were not shaped like a diamond or a pentagram like so many people incorrectly believed in 1987 13 years after the murder a book titled the ultimate evil written by maury terry opened this theory up once again murray spoke about the perry's rumors and criticized investigators for dismissing the links between alice and the process church of final judgment he claimed that the man who alice was seen arguing with by a co-worker the day before her murder was a member of the cult who had followed her to california he also claims that alice may have starred in an argument with bruce the night of her murder so that she could have some alone time in his book he further points out a series of caves behind bismarck university which he said were used by the process church for rituals and then a bunch of the locals went to check out these caves and the caves then subsequently had to be closed due to the influx of visitors which all of the visitors thought was super sketchy and meant that there really was rituals going on inside these caves the book kind of blew up at this point and all of the local bookstores sold out of the book the library for years had a waitlist of over 50 people and had to reduce the time that people could take this book out for because of the wait list maury terry himself traveled to bismarck to discuss the book and he sold out this like 1000 capacity seat venue and after it sold out he still had like a line around the block of people that wanted to see him so very last minute they changed the venue to be able to hold all of the people who were so interested in hearing about his theories in his book murray shines light on a man named david berkowitz and berkowitz is infamously known as son of sam due to his murder spree that took place in new york city between 1976 and 77. he murdered six people wounded seven others and then when he was arrested he claimed that his neighbor's dog had given him the orders to commit the crimes he was found to be mentally competent enough to stand trial and was sentenced to six life sentences for the crimes after his arrest he kind of gained a spotlight for writing letters to authorities and four years after alice's murder in 1978 he sent one of these letters to alice's home state in north dakota claiming the process church of final judgement hired a hitman to kill her after she tried to convert them to christianity he claimed that the cult that killed alice was nationwide and that they had carried out multiple different murders across the country and he knew this because he was a part of the cult he also tried to say that charles manson and otis tool were part of the cult as well and on the 23rd of october in 1979 he sent an officer from north dakota a book about satanism in which he had written alice perry hunted stalked and slain followed to california stanford university two detectives from the santa clara sheriff's department traveled to new york to question him about these claims but after 30 minutes within the interview he cut the interview short refused to speak to them anymore saying he was scared that people in the prison would think that he was a snitch police determined he had nothing of value and that he was just doing this as like another publicity stunt to further his like 15 minutes of fame i guess you could say some people speculated the crime wasn't planned at all and that it was just an opportunistic murder some say that maybe there was somebody there who was taking refuge or wanted to desecrate the church and he was there acting sketchy so alice decided to confront him which is when they got into a physical altercation they speculate that when crawford came at 12 10 to lock up that the killer had either put his hand over alice's mouth so she wouldn't make noise or had threatened her with the ice pick alice's case was also linked by theorists to the murder of leslie purlove and janet taylor as all three women were murdered in stanford both alice and leslie's cases had witnesses come forward stating they'd seen a blonde man at both crime scenes and all three murders were thought to be carried out by a sexual psychopath all three crimes did have notable differences however such as the fact that alice was murdered with a weapon whereas both janet and leslie were murdered by strangulation with their own clothes or by the killer's hands janet and leslie's crimes were also considered pretty low risk as they happen in isolated areas without much chance of being caught alice's murder was much more high risk however because it happened at a church which was in the middle of a quadrant where a lot of people were still walking around with friends and having parties around the campus there was also a night watchman who often did sweeps of the church every couple of hours and it was around the time that he was due to come and lock it up as well which is very high risk ted bundy was also interviewed in relation to alice's murder and if you're somehow unaware of who ted bundy is he is one of the most infamous sexual sadist killers and confessed to 30 murders however it's always been widely believed that the true number was higher several of bundy's crimes were committed on college campuses and he visited california often between 1973 and 74. ultimately though he was ruled out as a suspect as he had an airtight alibi for the night of alice's murder in june of 2016 the new york post reported that a 65 year old man named brian mccracken had come forward claiming that he was at stanford memorial church the night of the murder he claimed he was walking past the church at around midnight when he heard flute music coming from inside and decided to check it out and when he entered the church he saw a young skinny white male wearing a light-colored afro wig and was playing the flute and he said he recognized this man from stanford's marching band with him was a woman that was lying naked on the altar with candles around her and she bought striking similarities to alice apparently mccracken thought that they were playing some kind of game and he left without really ever thinking much about it he actually didn't realize that he'd seen this on the same night as alice's murder until 2011 so he never reported it to police until 2011. two detectives then went and tracked down the flutist and they wanted to interview him under the guise of like being reporters and wanting to question him about his music career in their interview the man actually mentioned the light blonde afro wig so that kind of confirmed brian's story that he had seen this guy and that he was wearing this afro wig however the santa clara sheriff's department came out and publicly stated that he was not being considered a person of interest as dna testing advanced throughout the years police were routinely going back and retesting things from the case until they finally got their breakthrough in 2016 they located a dna profile of an unknown male on alice's jeans that she'd been wearing the night she was murdered over the next two years investigators went through and re-interviewed everybody who was in the vicinity of the church that night and took dna samples from each one by one they eliminated every single person besides former night watch security guard stephen crawford who was now 72 years old and not doing well health-wise crawford was a veteran of the us air force and began working for stanford in 1971 in the department of public safety he worked there as a police officer for a year before a new police chief decided to reorganize the department and 75 of the officers were forced out of their current positions and offered jobs as security guards instead crawford was one of these officers he was not happy about this transition and resented stanford for it and two years later in 1976 he left to work security elsewhere in 1992 he got into some legal trouble when his ex-wife reported him for forging a fake diploma with a blank certificate he'd stolen from stanford his home was then searched and he was charged and arrested with stealing hundreds over 300 valuable items from stanford including like books that dated back to the 16th century the items he stole amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars and so his theft was considered a felony he was sentenced to only a six-month suspended sentence with two years of probation in 1993 he moved to san jose in california in an area just off of highway 85 he moved into the first floor of the del coronado apartment complex where he had lived in apartment 185 ever since he began working as an insurance adjuster and lived a quiet life without any further run-ins with the law now crawford was never officially ruled out as a suspect despite the fact that his palm print didn't match the palm print on the candle despite the fact that he passed a polygraph test detectives just always thought there was like something sketchy about him but they just never had any evidence to arrest him this was until 2018 when they compared his dna to the dna that was found on alice's jeans from the night of her murder and it was a match on the morning of thursday the 28th of june in 2018 detectives knocked on the front door of stephen crawford's apartment at 9 05 am crawford called out telling them to give him a minute because he was getting dressed and then after several minutes have passed detectives decided to let themselves in as they were getting a little suspicious as to what was going on they had a master key that was given to them from the building manager and when they entered crawford was sitting on the bed with a handgun and so detectives backed away moments later they heard a gunshot and when they re-entered the room they found crawford lying on the floor with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head honestly a coward's way out how sad that there will never be any form of justice whatsoever for this case he was 74 when they found him so he got to live a long full life unlike alice and then he didn't ever have to suffer any consequences for his actions when his apartment was searched they found a copy of the ultimate evil book by maury terry on his desk they also found a handwritten suicide note which had been written two years prior when detectives started reinvestigating him meaning he had this planned for some time now the note was in scribbles and was pretty difficult to read but it had no mention of alice unfortunately alice's father marvin passed away just three and a half months before the breakthrough having never received closure her mother jean was 88 years old at the time and she was heartbroken by the fact that her husband would never receive the closure he tried so desperately to find and that is the end of this case that's all of the information that i have for you thanks for watching and hopefully i'll see you in my next video bye guys

Channel: Bella Fiori

Views: 1,532,144

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Id: CnAe6xTnvro

Length: 30min 30sec (1830 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 18 2020