Marie Montgomery, 73, was killed on December 12, 1977, in her St. Louis apartment during what investigators later treated as a robbery that turned deadly. The intruder forced entry, shot her in the neck and right arm, and ransacked the rooms; a wristwatch was taken. She was found by her niece after missing Sunday church services.

Authorities later focused on Winford LaVern Stokes Jr. as the suspect. Stokes was arrested on January 15, 1978, on armed robbery and armed criminal action charges and sent for a pre-trial mental evaluation at the Malcolm Bliss Mental Health Center, from which he escaped the same day. He was indicted in June 1978 for Montgomery’s murder and held in a secure medical setting while awaiting trial; he escaped again with other inmates and was captured in Chicago on December 11, 1978. On September 10, 1979, Stokes pleaded guilty to second-degree murder as part of multiple felony pleas and received concurrent sentences totaling fifty years.

Did anyone who knew Marie or her routines in that neighborhood notice anything unusual in the days before December 12, 1977?