Brenda LaComb was 19 and a nine-month-old son’s mother when she vanished after leaving her grandmother’s Lowell, Massachusetts, apartment in the early hours after midnight on May 16, 1982. She had been playing cards and drinking wine that evening and left after receiving a phone call; she did not show up the next day for her son’s appointment, which her family says she would not have missed intentionally.

On June 4, 1982, a jogger found human remains behind a stone wall off Littleton County Road in Harvard, Massachusetts. Dental records identified the remains as Brenda LaComb. She was found partially naked and badly beaten; decomposition prevented a definitive cause of death, but authorities ruled the death unnatural and consider it a homicide. Investigators have suggested she may have been picked up or abducted after leaving her grandmother’s home and likely killed outside Lowell.

No arrests have been announced and no suspects publicly named. Family members have pursued leads for decades, including the possibility of exhumation to seek modern DNA testing. Anyone with information about Brenda, her whereabouts that night, or the people she associated with is asked to come forward.