Kelly Ann Ward was 26 when she disappeared from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in the winter of 1986. For years her family had no answers. In February 1997 partial skeletal remains were found in a landfill area in Swatara Township; those remains were treated as a homicide but remained unidentified for many years. After a reopening of the case in 2007 prompted by Kelly’s cousin Faun, the remains were finally identified in 2014 as Kelly Ann Ward.

The identification linked the case to Joseph D. Miller, a convicted serial killer already serving multiple life sentences for murders of other young Black women in the Harrisburg area. The landfill where Kelly’s remains were found was near sites where Miller disposed of other victims. In April 2016 Miller confessed, saying he had met Kelly at a bar, that a dispute over money escalated, and that he beat her to death; in June 2016 he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and received two additional consecutive life terms.

If anyone knew Kelly, where she worked, the bars she frequented, or remembers her in Harrisburg in the 1980s, please share what you know.