Dorothy Holmes was 43 when she was murdered on October 19, 1975, the last known victim in a string of brutal slayings in Detroit’s Cass Corridor earlier that year. The series ran from February to October 1975 and claimed at least seven women, ages 16 to 43. Many of the victims were sex workers who were reportedly lured into a man’s vehicle, then assaulted and killed.

Witnesses described a tall, muscular African-American man in his early to mid-30s with unusually large hands and feet, a detail that earned the unknown assailant the nicknames Bigfoot Killer and The Cass Ripper. In January 1976 police arrested 29-year-old Carl Mayweather Jr. after an attempted rape in River Rouge; his size and shoe measurements briefly focused attention on him. Investigators later established solid alibis for Mayweather in at least four of the murders and removed him as a suspect.

The identity of the Bigfoot Killer remains unknown and Dorothy Holmes’s homicide is unsolved. Did anyone in Detroit in 1975 have information about the Cass Corridor killings or the man witnesses described?