On Sunday evening, June 29, 1986, a security guard on the top level of the Johns Hopkins Hospital parking garage in Baltimore caught a smell that stopped him cold. It was not exhaust or hot concrete. It was death. He walked toward a blue 1977 Toyota Corolla sitting alone in a remote corner of the roof deck.

Beneath the trunk, reddish fluid was dripping onto the pavement. Police arrived with a crowbar. Inside was Margaret Yietman, 46, wrapped in an Afghan from her own sofa, shot once in the back of the head, and left in the Maryland heat for roughly five days. Margaret was not a gangster’s girlfriend in the usual sense.

She was a federal employee, a divorced mother of two, a woman friends called Muffy. She had worked tracing guns used in crimes and later handled security clearances for the Office of Naval Research, part of the Defense Department world. She took aerobics classes. She went to church.

She wrote long letters to her sister. And the man she loved was Arthur Kunz, 52, a wiry, sharp Long Island bomb expert who had built a career defusing explosives for law enforcement. To Margaret, he was safety. To detectives after her murder, he became the prime suspect.

Margaret grew up hard in Washington, a few blocks from the US Capitol. Her father drank too much. Her mother worked in a drugstore. As the oldest child, Margaret became a second parent to her younger sister and brother.

School was difficult; she later realized she had dyslexia, but she kept going, juggling night classes and work for over a decade to chip away at a psychology degree at Northern Virginia Community College. That persistence and loyalty made her exactly the kind of person a manipulator looks for. Then came Arty Kunz, and on paper he looked impressive. In 1968, while serving as a Long Island officer, he reportedly detached a grenade wired into a politician’s dashboard and carried it away for safe detonation.

In 1970, he was photographed with Governor Nelson Rockefeller holding a bomb blanket he was credited with helping develop. In 1976, after the car bombing that killed former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington, Kunz testified before Congress that bomb-making ingredients were too easy to buy. That was his public image: competent, brave, a man who walked toward danger while other people ran from it. Margaret told her sister she was dating the bomb expert for the United States.

Their affair began around 1980 while both worked in the federal orbit. It lasted about five years and was never stable. Margaret’s own letters described hills and valleys. Kunz told her he was separated from his wife, Angie, on Long Island, saying he stayed married because she was dying of cancer.

That was a lie, or at best a grotesque distortion. He kept Margaret hidden, did personal calls from work, disappeared for days, and refused to let their worlds touch. In one letter, she admitted, “I never know what is the truth. ” But she stayed.

The wider frame made the situation far more dangerous. Philip “Rusty” Rastelli was not some neighborhood tough. By the early 1970s, he had emerged as the boss of the Bonanno family, one of New York’s five Mafia families. He spent much of his reign in and out of prison, but power often traveled through visitors, messages, and loyal captains.

By 1985, prosecutors said the enterprise around Teamsters Local 814 and the moving industry was worth 250 million dollars a year. The scheme worked through control of the union local, which represented moving and storage workers; squeezing companies that wanted strikes avoided and rules relaxed; converting labor power into profit once the Bonanno side gained control in 1974; feeding the machine by making out paychecks to fictitious workers so cash could be diverted into a slush fund; and distributing the take in Christmas envelopes counted into stacks for union officials and organized crime figures. That was sophisticated mob business: payroll, fear, and envelopes. There was also bid rigging.

On June 10, 1985, a federal indictment laid out how moving companies colluded on public contracts. One example was the 1979 move of the FBI office from East 69th Street to 26 Federal Plaza. The bid came in at 142,000 dollars, padded by 5,000 through collusive bidding. One company owner paid 2,000 dollars a month from February through June 1980 to stay in the rigged system.

Another arrangement in 1976 allegedly involved 10,000 dollars a year so the Bonanno side could buy out the Genovese interest in Local 814 and collect the illegal stream for itself. The same family tied to those schemes was under immense pressure in 1985 and 1986. On December 16, 1985, Gambino boss Paul Castellano was shot dead outside Sparks Steak House in Manhattan. Giuliani’s prosecutors were making cases.

Informants were talking. The commission case was redefining how the feds went after Mafia leadership. Rastelli was indicted in the Local 814 matter and convicted on October 15, 1986. Then, on November 19, 1986, leaders of the Mafia’s ruling council were convicted in New York.

Here is where the case turns toxic. Arthur Kunz was not just cheating on his wife. According to later reporting and police information relayed to the family, his wife Angie was the niece, even said to be the favorite niece, of Philip Rastelli. Kunz sat in the middle of two worlds that should never have touched: he worked for the government, and he was tied by marriage to the Bonannos.

One month before Margaret died, Kunz remarried Angie in Las Vegas on May 31, 1986. Margaret apparently had no idea. Once Kunz remarried, Margaret was no longer just a secret. She was a live liability: a woman who called, who expected marriage, who knew enough to become dangerous.

According to a coworker, Kunz had begun refusing her calls at work and said Margaret had been harassing him and his wife by telephone. Around the same time, Angie moved to Washington from Long Island. Margaret had also told friends her car brakes had been tampered with; a mechanic warned her this was not normal wear. During the week of June 24, 1986, Margaret went to an aerobics class after work, returned home to 7414 East Moreland Road in Annandale, left her leotards, and went out again.

She was never seen alive after that. Investigators later believed she was likely killed inside her apartment. There was no forced entry, which meant she let the killer in or at least did not fear whoever came through that door. She was wrapped in the Afghan usually kept on her couch, suggesting the body was moved from the apartment to the car after the shooting, requiring time, privacy, and a certain icy competence.

The evidence started piling up around Kunz. He owned a . 22 caliber gun, the same caliber investigators associated with the fatal shot. Eyeglasses found beneath Margaret’s body were identical to the kind he wore.

He showed up with fresh scratches on his arm and a soft cast, then gave different explanations. He knew the Johns Hopkins garage because Margaret’s daughter had been treated there the year before, and family said he specifically mentioned avoiding the remote rooftop where the car was later found. Missing from Margaret’s apartment were journals from her coffee table and photographs of her with Kunz. An empty frame still hung on the dining room wall.

Somebody removed the story of the relationship. Police clearly knew about the Bonanno connection early. In the homicide file, later reviewed by reporters, there was a Mafia family tree with Rusty Rastelli highlighted. Family members said police told them Angie was the niece of the Bonanno boss.

Former detective Gerald Goldstein said he believed he had enough evidence to arrest Kunz, yet no arrest came. No jury heard the case. No neat explanation was ever given for why the prosecution did not move. Former undercover FBI agent Joseph Pistone, known to history as Donnie Brasco, was asked about the scenario.

He had not heard of Kunz specifically, but his reaction was blunt. Both the mob and law enforcement, he said, would have known if an ATF officer was married to Rastelli’s niece, and that would have put Kunz in the hot seat. Pistone also said of Rastelli: “Rastelli was someone you didn’t cross. ”

Kunz denied everything.

When confronted years later, he said Margaret was only a companion and that he had no reason to kill her. Asked whether a mob hit was possible, his answer was chilling in its vagueness: “Anything is possible. ” He also suggested Margaret had a promiscuous life, a claim friends and family rejected completely. To them, she was not juggling men.

She was waiting on one man who kept feeding her just enough hope to keep her attached. The forensic trail should have helped. Instead, it turned into another nightmare. There was blood and skin under Margaret’s fingernails, suggesting she fought.

But the testing in 1986 was weak. Later, the actual fingernail clippings disappeared after being sent to a Maryland State Police lab in 2000. A hair recovered from the crime scene was sent to the FBI in 2002, then effectively vanished. In 2003, testing of semen found on Margaret’s skirt did not match Kunz.

That did not clear him. It only proved the case was messier than one clean theory. The most disciplined reading of the evidence suggests Margaret was killed by someone she knew, or someone vouched for by someone she knew. Her body was handled with enough control to suggest planning.

The car was wiped clean. The body was moved across state lines from northern Virginia to Baltimore, complicating jurisdiction. The relationship evidence in her apartment was partially removed. Those are behaviors consistent with a calculated cleanup.

The motive could have been personal, domestic, or mob-related, probably all three at once. Rusty Rastelli died on June 24, 1991, aged 73, after being released from federal prison because he was dying of liver cancer. He had been serving a 12-year sentence for labor racketeering. The Bonanno family moved on, eventually producing the ultimate irony when boss Joseph Massino became the first New York Mafia boss to cooperate with the government.

Kunz left ATF, went back to Long Island, and worked as a carpenter. Margaret never got justice. Her daughter grew older without her. Her grandsons never met her.

Her sister and best friend kept carrying the case long after institutions let it go.