On September 29, 1968, a 22-year-old art student named Wendy Joe Howison left her family’s Los Angeles home to buy a hairdryer advertised for sale at a Thrifty Drugstore on Fairfax Avenue. She was a senior at San Fernando Valley State College, a young woman with a warm smile, a small poodle named Pierre, and a close bond with her older sister, Linda. That Sunday morning, she called Linda and invited her along. Linda, a mother of two young boys, declined to spend the day with her family.

It was an ordinary decision, one Linda would carry for the rest of her life. Wendy drove the short distance, bought the hairdryer, paid, and left the store. She stopped at a gas station down the street, filled her tank, and then vanished. No one saw anything unusual.

When she did not return that evening, her mother, Kathleen, called the police. They told her to wait, that Wendy would likely turn up. She did not. Monday morning, the family moved on their own.

Gil Court, Wendy’s brother-in-law and a private investigator, organized a civilian search and hired a helicopter to sweep the neighborhood. Less than an hour in, Wendy’s boyfriend, riding in the helicopter, pointed down at a green Ford Thunderbird parked on Fairfax near Olympic Boulevard. It was Wendy’s car. The pilot later said he could not understand how the boyfriend had spotted it from that height; it was like finding a needle in a haystack.

The detail did not go unnoticed by detectives. Gil went to the car. The keys were not in the ignition. They were on the floor of the back seat, as if dropped in a hurry.

He opened the trunk. He later said it was the worst day of his life. He returned to the house in silence. Linda saw his face, and she knew.

Wendy was dead. The evidence showed she had fought forcefully against her attacker. Her watch and jewelry remained on her body, ruling out robbery. The only thing missing was the hairdryer she had gone out to buy.

It was never recovered, and no reason for its disappearance was ever found. Detectives focused on the people in Wendy’s life. Four men were questioned: her current boyfriend, an ex-boyfriend, Gil, and a close male friend. All took polygraph tests.

Gil passed. The boyfriend failed. The failed polygraph was not evidence of guilt, but combined with his impossible spotting of the car from the helicopter, suspicion clung to him for decades. Yet no physical evidence connected anyone to the crime, and no arrest was made.

A witness had seen a white man near Wendy at the store and again at the gas station, following her without her notice. No name, no plate number, just a ghost. The case went cold. Wendy’s room stayed exactly as she left it.

Her father, Lee, visited the police station year after year, offering rewards, asking if technology had changed. Before he died, he called Linda to his side and said: “Don’t forget your sister. Do what you think you can do to find out who did this. ” Both Lee and Kathleen passed away without ever learning the truth.

In 1998, Detective Frank Bolan reopened the case. He brought in LAPD criminalist Harry Klan Jr. , who examined Wendy’s preserved clothing using DNA technology that had only been in use for four years. An unknown male genetic profile was isolated.

Blood was drawn from all four original suspects. All were completely cleared. The real killer had never appeared in the investigation. But the DNA sample was too small and too degraded to upload into the national database.

Three more tests over the next decade failed. Bolan, standing outside a bar one night, told Klan the case would be solved long after he was gone. He retired and eventually died before seeing the outcome. In the summer of 2016, Klan ran the sample one final time.

The technology had advanced. He texted Detective Richard Benson, one of the original detectives of the LAPD cold case unit: “Are you sitting down? ” The DNA had finally produced a match. The name was Edwin Dean Richardson.

Benson had never heard of him. He had no connection to Wendy, her family, or her neighborhood. Richardson was a drifter. His criminal history included a 1960 conviction for attempted robbery and kidnapping, for which he served eight years.

He was paroled in April 1968. Five months later, Wendy was murdered. His mother lived in Mid City Los Angeles, minutes from Fairfax Avenue. He had no reason to know Wendy.

He was simply there, a freshly paroled man with nowhere to be. Wendy was not targeted. She was simply present, and he chose her. Investigators found a pattern.

In 1977, a woman named Jo Anna Boner disappeared from Belmont County, Ohio. Her body was found on New Year’s Eve, dumped in a ravine across the West Virginia border. Richardson fled before he could be caught. He was eventually traced to a trailer park in Arizona and extradited to Ohio.

On the flight back, he began talking calmly, boasting about another unsolved case in which he had concealed a victim’s remains. He described it with pride. Investigators already knew the case. The woman was Mara Jean Hires, 23, a wife and mother of a two-year-old.

In 1972, she had left her home in Stanton, California, before sunrise to get to work early. Her body was found wrapped in carpet and drapery at the Yorba Linda Country Club. In 2004, DNA matched Richardson, who was already in prison for Boner’s murder. In 2006, at age 70 and on an oxygen tank, he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to life.

He died in prison in 2013, at age 77, three years before his DNA was matched to Wendy. When Benson confirmed the match, Richardson was already dead. He cursed. “Even alive and in prison is better than dead,” he said, because then he could have charged him again.

Richardson had died believing he had gotten away with it. He had not. Investigators used the blood sample from the Orange County case and ran it directly against the DNA from Wendy’s clothing. It matched, confirmed absolutely.

After 48 years, four DNA tests, and a killer who had already died in prison, it was him. In 1969, a year after Wendy disappeared, a young woman named Margie Chute vanished near the same Thrifty store on Fairfax Avenue. Her body was found in Burbank, beaten and strangled. Her car was recovered in the same Thrifty parking lot where Wendy had shopped.

Detectives believed Richardson almost certainly killed her, but the physical evidence from that case had been lost. It remains officially unsolved. Benson said plainly: “This guy didn’t stop at one or two or three. There’s no chance in hell.

”

In the summer of 2017, Benson called Linda, now Linda Drouin. She had just turned 70, and she was out at brunch with her husband when the phone rang. She assumed it was a telemarketer and let it go to voicemail. Forty-eight years of waiting, and the answer arrived as a message she almost did not listen to.

Later, sitting alone in her car, she pressed play. An LAPD detective asking her to come in. He had something to tell her about her sister’s case. She drove to LAPD headquarters wearing Wendy’s necklace.

Across from Benson and retired Deputy District Attorney Peter Burman sat two old cardboard boxes containing Wendy’s belongings, school papers, letters, her driver’s license, objects that had been in evidence storage for 48 years. The boxes still carried the original evidence tags from 1968. The paper wrapping inside was disintegrating after nearly half a century. Benson looked at Linda and said the words her father had died waiting to hear: “We found who killed your sister.

” Linda sat quietly. “I wish there was some way I could thank you,” she said. “It just means so much. ”

When the meeting ended, Benson and Burman carried the boxes to the car.

Linda’s husband, Tony, thanked the detective. “The LAPD did its job,” he said. “The case is closed, but it will never really be closed because we will never forget Wendy. ”

Wendy Joe Howison is no longer a cold case file.

She is the woman who loved her poodle, played piano, and smiled in photographs. The truth came home 48 years later, in a room with two disintegrating cardboard boxes and a necklace that once belonged to a 22-year-old art student. Her father kept showing up until he could not, and her sister kept the promise he left behind.