On January 12, 1972, 19-year-old Joanne Pecheone was found raped and murdered on a wooded pathway off South Park Drive in Utica, New York. Her hands had been tied with her own shoelaces, she had been gagged with a piece of her clothing and a strap from her purse, and her bra had been cut in the front.

Decades later investigators focused on John Hopkins, a man already imprisoned for the murders of two teenage girls and the attempted murder of another. Detectives noted striking similarities between Joanne’s killing and Hopkins’s known crimes: use of a victim’s shoelaces to bind hands, cutting of the bra in front, and restraint or gagging methods paralleling a 15-year-old survivor’s account. Hopkins reportedly told a corrections officer he had killed three people. Hopkins died by suicide in prison in 2000; the Oneida County District Attorney’s Office declared the case closed and considered it solved in February 2011.

Are there readers who remember Joanne or who have information about her case?