On April 9, 1959, NASA announced which seven pilots would become the first US astronauts, Frank Lloyd Wright died, and Vyron Martin found his wife Ruth dead on the sofa in their cabin on Marsh-Miller Lake. She was naked and shot in the head with a .22 caliber bullet.

Here’s an article with more details. [The original article I linked to is gone, I am linking now to a different one.] According to the article, the police came across the 47 year old case while in the process of bar coding all crime scene evidence they’d been storing. That caught my eye because I was recently out at the Nassau and Suffolk Police Departments, looking into their process of storing evidence. This whole system of bar coding evidence is very impressive.

I tried to find someone alive who knew Ruth. Sadly, her husband Vyron died in 1980. He was still living in the town where she was murdered. I see Ruth was nine years older than Vyron, very unusual at time. I’m sure someone must exist somewhere, but I couldn’t find any living relatives.

The article hints at possible DNA evidence, but it doesn’t say what they found exactly. I wonder what they have.