On the night of July 4, 1982, a priest driving along a quiet, isolated road on the outskirts of Salem, Oregon, saw something that made him slow down. A Domino’s delivery car was stopped on the shoulder, the driver’s door wide open, the engine still running. Pizza boxes lay scattered on the ground beside it. There was no sign of the driver anywhere.

A short time later, another man pulled up at the same spot on his way home from watching fireworks with his children. He knew the family of the young woman who worked for Domino’s, and the sight of that abandoned car filled him with dread. The two men walked to the nearest phone and called the police. When officers arrived, they saw the scene for themselves: the car sitting in the road, the pizza boxes thrown on the ground near it, the engine and headlights still on, the parking brake engaged.

Everything pointed to a driver who had expected to step away for only a few seconds. There were no houses anywhere near that road at the time, and no sign of the person who had been behind the wheel. It looked as though the driver had gotten out, taken the pizzas, and then something had happened almost immediately. The officers found tire tracks near the location, including one that ran directly over a pizza box lying on the ground, as if a vehicle had driven across it.

Another box was open, with a clear shoe print on it, suggesting some kind of struggle. A Domino’s employee cap lay near the car, and a few yards away, a name tag reading “Sherry. ” There was no blood, no obvious signs of a violent fight, but then the crime scene investigators noticed one unusual detail. At first, it looked like another set of tire tracks in the dirt beside the car.

On closer inspection, they realized the marks had actually been made by the soles of someone’s shoes being dragged along the ground. The police now had a clear theory of what had happened on that road. The delivery driver had arrived in the isolated area with three pizzas. At some point, someone had pulled up beside her, claiming to be the customer who had ordered them.

She had engaged the parking brake, gotten out, and taken the pizzas—and that was when the attack happened. Based on the drag marks, the attacker had likely knocked her unconscious or simply pulled her toward another vehicle before driving off with her. The officers contacted the Domino’s branch, and management confirmed that the abandoned car belonged to Sherry Ayer, an eighteen-year-old who had recently graduated from high school. Born on December 6, 1963, in Salem, she was an only child raised among a large, close-knit extended family.

She was known for her kindness and optimism, the friend who could always be counted on for support. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life, so instead of going straight to college, she decided to take a break and earn her own money. She and a cousin rented an apartment together to split the costs, and Sherry took a job delivering pizzas for Domino’s. Her family had not been enthusiastic about it.

The job meant driving alone around the city, sometimes late at night, delivering to strangers. It was the early 1980s, when almost everyone still paid in cash, making delivery drivers easy targets for robbery. Sherry was also very small, barely five foot two and around a hundred pounds. Her family worried about her safety, but Sherry wanted the job, and despite their fears, she took it.

On July 4, 1982, her manager called her. She was supposed to have the day off, but it was Independence Day and the restaurant was struggling to keep up with the flood of orders. They needed extra drivers, and he asked if she could come in for the evening shift. She agreed.

She was trying to save as much money as she could, and she was always happy to pick up an extra shift when one came along. Around 9:30 that night, Sherry left the restaurant with three pizza orders to deliver. It was late, but people all over Salem were still celebrating the Fourth of July, setting off fireworks and enjoying the holiday. The investigators spoke with the employee who had taken her last delivery order, and that conversation gave them several important details.

According to the employee, the customer had been a man who sounded like he was in his thirties or forties. He ordered three large pizzas with toppings, then gave an address, a phone number, and a name. He also asked whether a particular delivery driver could bring the order. That driver was on vacation, which was why the restaurant had called Sherry in for the extra shift.

The employee told the caller that the woman he asked for wasn’t working that night, but the man placed the order anyway, and it was assigned to Sherry. The police quickly confirmed that there were no houses at the address the man had given. That part of Salem was almost completely undeveloped at the time; when Sherry arrived, she would have seen only a rural road lined with trees and open land. The phone number belonged to a motel not far from where her car was found, and the name the caller had used appeared to be entirely fake.

The investigators suspected the order had been placed either from the motel itself or from a nearby pay phone. They went to the motel and checked the guests, but no one there seemed to have any connection to Sherry’s disappearance. They tried to lift fingerprints from the pay phone, but that turned up nothing. The shoe print and tire track left on the scattered pizza boxes yielded no usable fingerprints either.

The evidence was almost worthless. The police were facing a grim situation. An eighteen-year-old girl had vanished from an isolated road, leaving behind almost nothing that could tell them where she had been taken or by whom. They organized a large-scale search, sending teams to cover several miles around the area where her car was found, including the woods and the nearby river.

At the same time, they asked anyone who had been in the area that night to come forward with information. Because it was the Fourth of July, many people had been driving around Salem that evening, including near the spot where Sherry’s car was discovered. Eventually, several independent witnesses reported seeing two vehicles that caught the investigators’ attention: a dark Chevrolet Monte Carlo and an old, bright green pickup truck. Police tried to identify the owners of every similar vehicle registered in the county, but none of those efforts led anywhere.

They were left with almost no strong leads. The news of Sherry’s disappearance spread quickly through Salem, and a large number of volunteers joined the search. Her extended family, family friends, and strangers from the community spent hours combing mile after mile of the surrounding area, but no one could find any trace of her. The day after she vanished, Domino’s received a disturbing phone call.

A man claimed he was holding Sherry and demanded a ransom for her return. But he provided no details and offered no proof that she was with him, or even that she was still alive. He never called back, and the police could not trace the call or get any useful information from it. Another dead end.

Over the next few days, the search efforts gradually wound down. The police could not keep dedicating so many resources indefinitely without finding something. They continued to ask the public for information, and soon a tip caught their attention. A few days after the police released descriptions of the two vehicles witnesses had seen near the area where Sherry disappeared, someone called the investigators about the bright green pickup truck.

According to the tipster, a man named Darrell Wilson owned a truck that looked very similar. When officers went to talk to Wilson, they immediately noticed something suspicious. His truck was now brown, and the paint looked very fresh. He was brought in for questioning and admitted that the truck had previously been bright green but that he had repainted it shortly after the vehicle description appeared in the news.

Wilson insisted the timing was no more than a coincidence. He said he had already been planning to change the color and that it had nothing to do with Sherry’s disappearance. He also initially claimed he had never met her, though he later changed his story and said he had seen her once at a party. Investigators looked for any possible connection between Wilson and Sherry and soon learned that his girlfriend worked with Sherry’s mother.

But there was another detail that made the situation even stranger. Wilson’s girlfriend had a nine-year-old sister who had disappeared without a trace just three weeks after Sherry did, shortly before the investigators began questioning Wilson. None of the connections were especially strong, but the police now had a man who seemed linked in some way to two separate disappearances. Wilson was brought in for questioning several times and answered the investigators’ questions, but when they asked him to take a polygraph test, he refused.

He claimed to have an alibi for the night Sherry disappeared. According to Wilson, he had gone camping with friends at a lake outside the city, and the group had spent the night there. His friends confirmed that Wilson had arrived at the lake with them. There was only one problem: no one could account for his whereabouts between roughly 6:30 p.

m. and 3:30 the next morning. Sherry had disappeared in the middle of that time frame, and the drive from the lake to Salem took less than an hour. The police obtained search warrants for Wilson’s home and truck.

While crime scene technicians looked for anything that might link him to Sherry, the case took an unusual turn. Sherry’s parents were still holding onto hope that their daughter would be found alive, and at some point they contacted a psychic from Texas named John Catchings, who had previously worked with law enforcement. Catchings said that even before Sherry’s parents called him, he had a vision. According to him, he woke up in the middle of the night and saw the spirit of a young woman standing beside his bed.

He then began seeing images of a house and a man. After reviewing information about Sherry’s case, Catchings claimed that the young woman he saw was Sherry and that she had already died. He later traveled to Oregon, where local police showed him Sherry’s car and took him to Wilson’s house. Catchings immediately said it was the same house he had seen in his vision, then claimed that Wilson was responsible for Sherry’s murder.

He also described what he believed had happened during the abduction, and many parts of his account closely matched the theory the investigators had already developed based on the evidence at the scene. But despite all the suspicion surrounding Wilson, the searches turned up nothing. Crime scene experts found no evidence inside his truck indicating that Sherry had been there, and the search of his house came up empty. The police brought Wilson in for another round of questioning, hoping he might change his story or perhaps confess.

Instead, the case took an unexpected turn. Just hours after he was released, Wilson was found dead in his home. It quickly became clear that he had taken his own life. He left no note, and given everything that had happened, the investigators found the timing highly suspicious.

They kept looking for anything that could link Wilson directly to Sherry’s disappearance, but despite all their efforts, they found nothing. Over the following months, investigators continued to follow up on new reports, but by then they were convinced Wilson was involved. Most of their efforts focused on trying to find Sherry’s body. They never did.

Without any new evidence, the case went cold. In 2005, twenty-three years after Sherry disappeared, the local police department set up a cold case unit, and Sherry’s case was one of the first they decided to reopen. Investigators began reviewing the files left by the original investigators and quickly saw how convinced everyone had been that Wilson was responsible. But the new team did not want to rely entirely on conclusions made decades earlier.

They decided to take a fresh look at other possible suspects. While reviewing the old files, the investigators discovered a series of murders that had occurred in Salem in the mid-1980s, and they began to wonder whether the same person might have been responsible for Sherry’s disappearance as well. The first murder took place on February 19, 1984, almost two years after Sherry vanished. A twenty-one-year-old woman named Rebecca Darling disappeared from the store where she worked the night shift.

All her belongings were left behind, and the police had no leads. Her body was found a month later in a river about six miles outside Salem. Her hands were bound, and the investigators determined she had been strangled, but they could not identify her killer. A few weeks later, another young woman disappeared under similar circumstances.

Eighteen-year-old college student Katherine Wirdemond left a party in her car around two in the morning, but at some point her vehicle was found abandoned in the middle of the road. Four days later, her body was discovered near the spot where Rebecca’s had been found, leading the police to suspect a connection between the two crimes. This time, the investigation quickly led the police to suspect twenty-five-year-old William Scott Smith. Several reports pointed to him, including witnesses who had seen a Pontiac near Katherine’s abandoned car.

Smith happened to own a very similar car, giving investigators reason to look at him more closely. Then a tow truck driver called the police with another important detail. He said Smith had called him in the middle of the night after his Pontiac had fallen into a ditch, near the same area where Katherine’s car had been found. None of that was enough to prove Smith had committed either crime, but investigators soon learned there were other reasons to scrutinize him.

He already had a serious criminal record involving harassment, threats, and stalking. They also discovered that about a month before Rebecca was killed, Smith had repeatedly called a twenty-year-old woman in Salem and threatened to kill and sexually assault her. She eventually went to the police, and Smith was arrested. He did not deny anything, and he was eventually sentenced to time in jail.

Since Smith was already in jail, the investigators working on the Rebecca and Katherine murders decided to question him there. They urged him to confess if he was responsible, saying it was a chance to clear his conscience, but Smith continued to deny any connection to either crime. After some time, his parents came to visit him and told him that if he was really involved, he should tell the truth. Surprisingly, after that conversation, Smith changed his mind and agreed to a deal with the prosecution.

In exchange for dropping some additional charges related to several thefts, he confessed to both murders. He then described each murder in such precise detail that the investigators had no real doubt he was responsible. A judge eventually sentenced him to two life sentences with no possibility of parole for at least twenty years. The cold case investigators learned that after Smith was arrested, the police had actually checked whether he was involved in Sherry’s disappearance.

At the time, however, he had provided an alibi. Smith worked as a truck driver, and he claimed that on the night of Sherry’s abduction, he had been working far away from Salem. Based on that information, the investigators eventually ruled him out. But more than two decades later, the cold case team began to question how solid that alibi really was.

They dug deeper, and to their surprise, they found a record showing that Smith had been pulled over by a patrol officer in Silverton, a town a short drive from Salem. The traffic stop occurred on the same night Sherry disappeared, which meant Smith had actually been close enough to have committed the crime. The investigators tried to find physical evidence to support their suspicions, but after all those years, they found nothing. So instead, they decided to visit Smith in prison.

Their first interview with him took place in late 2006. Smith denied killing Sherry, but the investigators felt his denial was not particularly convincing. From the way he responded to their questions, they came away with the impression that he might be on the verge of finally telling them what had happened. They also realized that although Smith was technically eligible for parole at some point, his chances of leaving prison before becoming elderly were very slim.

So they decided to offer him a deal. If he told them the truth about Sherry and explained exactly what had happened to her, they would arrange for him to be transferred to a more comfortable prison. Although Smith had confessed to two murders years earlier, the investigators were not especially optimistic that he would accept. But to their surprise, he agreed.

Smith confessed that he had been involved in the abduction and killing of Sherry, but he said he had not acted alone. According to him, a second man was involved, someone named Roger. Smith said Sherry had not actually been their intended target. He and Roger had previously seen another woman who worked as a delivery driver at the same Domino’s, and they had originally planned to abduct her and demand a ransom.

They had chosen an isolated road and made up a fake address to lure her there. Once everything was in place, they put the plan into action. Roger called the restaurant and placed the order, then specifically asked for that employee to make the delivery. When he was told she had the day off, he and Smith were disappointed, but they decided to go through with the plan anyway.

The two men drove Smith’s car to the isolated road and waited. When Sherry arrived, one of them signaled for her to stop and told her he was the customer who had placed the order. Sherry stopped, got out of her car, and took the pizza boxes. At that moment, Roger grabbed her and forced her into the car.

They then drove Sherry toward the river. Smith never said whether she had been sexually assaulted, but he admitted that at some point they abandoned their original plan to keep her alive for a ransom. Instead, Smith strangled her and threw her body into the same river where Rebecca Darling and Katherine Wirdemond would later be found. Smith provided the investigators with details that had never been released to the public.

He knew the name of the Domino’s employee they had originally asked for, and he even remembered the toppings they had ordered on the pizzas. Such details left the investigators no room to doubt his sincerity. After twenty-four years, they finally had an answer to what had happened to Sherry and who was responsible. There was one major problem regarding Roger.

By the time Smith confessed, his partner had already died of cancer several years earlier. He could no longer be brought to justice. But the investigators finally had the answer about what had happened to Sherry. The investigation also made clear that their predecessors had overlooked a suspect who, in hindsight, deserved far more attention.

The main reason was not even the alibi Smith had given them. By that time, the investigators had become so convinced that Darrell Wilson was responsible that they focused almost entirely on him and failed to seriously consider other possibilities. In the end, Wilson had turned out to have nothing at all to do with Sherry’s murder. Smith was eventually sentenced to a third life sentence, but his story did not end there.

Six years after his confession, in 2012, a retired investigator was reviewing recordings and reports from Smith’s interviews when he noticed something unusual. From time to time, Smith seemed to mention details related to another unsolved case without ever directly admitting responsibility for it. That file concerned twenty-one-year-old Terri Monroe, who had disappeared after spending an evening with friends at a bar. Her disappearance occurred in 1981, one year before Sherry was killed.

The retired investigator passed this information on to the police, and when investigators went to talk to Smith again, it did not take long for him to confess. He admitted that he had abducted Terri near the bar, driven her to a river, killed her, and thrown her body in. As with his previous confessions, he provided a number of specific details that investigators believed only the killer would know. Smith was eventually sentenced to a fourth life sentence.

Even then, the investigators were not convinced they had identified all his victims. They knew he had stalked other women, and he seemed to use a particular tactic when approaching them. On isolated roads, he would lightly bump his car into a woman’s car, then pull over to the side of the road and try to convince her to get out so they could inspect the damage. Police spoke with several women who said Smith had tried to do the same thing to them, but they had felt suspicious, kept their car doors locked, and driven away.

That led investigators to wonder whether there were other women he had managed to take, and whether Smith was responsible for other crimes that had never been attributed to him. Today, Smith is sixty-seven years old and remains behind bars with no realistic chance of release. As for Sherry, her case is now considered solved, but she is still officially listed as a missing person. Investigators searched the river where Smith said he had left her, even draining part of it, but after all those years, they could not find any trace of her remains.

Finally, there is one more detail about Darrell Wilson worth mentioning. Just a few weeks after Sherry disappeared, nine-year-old Danyelle Good, the younger sister of a woman connected to Wilson, vanished from her own home. Wilson was found dead just three weeks later, hours after police had questioned him again about Sherry. No evidence ever emerged linking Wilson to Danyelle’s disappearance, but since we now know he had nothing to do with Sherry’s murder, it is hard not to wonder whether what happened to Wilson shortly afterward was connected to Danyelle’s case instead.

Unfortunately, more than four decades later, no one knows the truth for certain.