Lady of the Dunes’ late husband has been linked to two other deaths - now his friend speaks out
When the ‘Lady of the Dunes’ was identified last year, after almost half a century, as Tennessee woman Ruth Marie Terry, suspicion quickly centred on the man she’d married shortly before her death. The revelation, along with further details about his questionable past, left a family friend ‘speechless’ – and now Guy Rockwell Muldavin has been confirmed as the Cape Cod victim’s killer. Sheila Flynn reports
The latest headlines from our reporters across the US sent straight to your inbox each weekday
Your briefing on the latest headlines from across the US
Your briefing on the latest headlines from across the US
The name ‘Guy Rockwell Muldavin’ exploded onto the internet last year unexpectedly, dangling a possible culprit in an infamous murder whose victim, the ‘Lady of the Dunes,’ had also been explosively identified. Cape Cod authorities, after almost 50 years, finally gave the headless torso a name: Ruth Marie Terry, a 37-year-old newlywed originally from Tennessee.
Muldavin, who died in 2002, was then named as her husband – and prime suspect in her murder. And now, less than one year later, he’s been confirmed as Ms Terry’s killer, the case officially closed.
The first mention of his name in connection with the murder (and, soon, as.the prime suspect in two others) left one family friend “speechless,” he told The Independent last year.
But it wasn’t the first time Muldavin’s name had been in the headlines; 14 years earlier, he’d fled after his ex-wife and 18-year-old stepdaughter disappeared. He was questioned but seemingly never charged in those presumed deaths, according to media reports at the time.
He went on to have at least two more long-term relationships with women, both of whom were mentioned in Muldavin’s 2002 obituary: his widow, Phyllis, who died in 2021; and a “sister,” Joan Towers. She was not a blood relation but the two referred to each other affectionately as siblings after a romantic relationship turned platonic, a family friend told The Independent.
The friend said he could not reconcile the details coming out about Muldavin with the man he’d known.
At the time, both he and Muldavin had been living in California - the state where the latter died - and “nowhere near Provincetown, Massachusetts or Reno, Nevada or any other locations that are referred to” now in connection with Muldavin, the friend told The Independent.
“He was great,” the friend said of the Muldavin he knew. “I really loved him. I mean, he was terrific. And I was very close to him ... I’m speechless, because none of it makes any sense.”
He said, however, that he knew little of Muldavin’s history, other than the fact he believed he’d been born in New Mexico.
Muldavin was born in 1923, police say, though details are scant regarding the early life of a man whose aliases include Raoul Guy Rockwell and Guy Muldavin Rockwell. According to a 1960 UPI report following his later brushes with the law, Muldavin “was schooled in Switzerland, New York, and Connecticut as well as tutored privately on his family cattle ranch at Tibera, N. M.”
By the time he was a young adult, Muldavin had made his way to New York, where he was working as a professor at the Academy of Dramatic Arts, according to the obituary for his first wife, Joellen Mae Loop. A former beauty pageant contestant and model, she died in January 2002 - just two months before Muldavin passed away.
The starry-eyed beauty and Muldavin - known to her as Guy Raoul Rockwell - “fell in love” in New York, the obituary continued.
“She left her career and the big-city nightmare and moved into a tree stump along a river in California,” read the obituary, published in a Washington state paper. “Her husband sang at KIEM radio stationn Monday through Friday at 5 o’clock.
“The couple later moved to the northwest, where Rockwell took a job in the Seattle Bon Marche furniture department. The couple then owned a large antique shop. They were married ten years.”
Though the obituary does not state when the pair’s marriage dissolved, Muldavin was living in Seattle and running an antique shop in 1960 when another of his wives, Manzanita Aileen “Manzy” Ryan, disappeared.
She and her 18-year-old daughter vanished on April Fool’s Day of that year, UPI reported; in July, Muldavin divorced Manzanita, claming desertion, and married Evelyn Emerson.
When police went to the home he’d shared with Manzanita - his second wife, according to UPI - “bits of human tissue and pieces of human body were located in a newly sealed septic tank.”
The report also pointed out that, five days after he married Ms Emerson, her stepmother had given him a cashier’s check for $10,000 “to buy antiquities for quick resale in Canada.”
He and the money vanished, around the same time serious questions began swirling about the fate of Manzanita and Dolores. Muldavin was eventually picked up in an apartment in Greenwich Village, on the other side of the country in New York.
He was described by media at the time as “a sometimes actor and DJ in California, an antiques dealer in Seattle and a ‘bunco artist and great lover’ everywhere he went,” according to SFGate.com.
“The New York Daily News reported he had ‘three wives and many sweethearts’ by 1960 and was known around Greenwich Village for his nightly soirees with ‘beatniks, art lovers, celebrities and celebrity hunters, all bound by Muldavin’s magnetism and offbeat philosophy.’”
Whatever happened within the justice system, Muldavin appears to have been free and up to his old tricks by the early 1970s, when police believe he married Ruth Marie Terry. A 37-year-old Tennessee woman, she had been married once before but little remains known about the rest of her life.
Her death, however, is famous; a 12-year-old and a dog found her body on 26 July 1974 in the dunes near Provincetown, Cape Cod, her hands amputated and head nearly severed. Unidentifiable, she earned the monker The Lady of the Dunes - a name she kept until last year, when the FBI announced that forensic genealogy had finally revealed who she was.
While his former wife was lying buried in a Massachusetts cemetery plot, however, Muldavin continued to forge relationships and build a life on the West Coast. He married Phyllis Roper, who was listed as his widow in his 2002 obituary. She died in 2021.
Authorities this week confirmed that Muldavin had killed Ms Terry not long after marrying her in “either 1973 or 1974.”
The couple then “travelled after their wedding, stopping in Tennessee to see Ms Terry’s family,” Cape & Islands District Attorney Robert Galibois said Monday in a statement.
“Through investigative efforts, the Massachusetts State Police learned that Ms Terry and Mr Muldavin travelled during the summer of 1974,” he continued. “When Mr. Muldavin returned from that trip, he was driving what was believed to be Ms. Terry’s vehicle and indicated to witnesses that Ms. Terry had passed away. Ms. Terry was never seen by her family again.
“Ms Terry’s brother tried to find his sister with Mr Muldavin only stating that they had a fight during their honeymoon, and he had not heard from his wife again.”
Marking the end of a haunting chapter in the Cape’s history, he said authorities had “determined that Mr Muldavin was responsible for Ms Terry’s death in 1974” – going on to extend his condolences to The Lady of the Dunes’ family and to thank the” law enforcement and forensic scientists who dedicated their efforts into the identification of Ms Terry and the identification of her killer.”
He reaffirmed the Cape’s authorities to investigate any other unsolved cases, though perhaps its most famous Jane Doe can finally find peace.
“The victims,” he said, “are never forgotten.”