Ronnie Sue Gorlin, 27, disappeared from North Miami Beach on July 22, 1975, while visiting family and preparing for an upcoming marriage. She had been working as a respiratory therapist in Pennsylvania and was home when she visited former coworkers at the Asthmatic Children’s Foundation and said she planned to stop at the 163rd Street Shopping Center before visiting her hospitalized mother. Her rented burgundy-and-white Oldsmobile Cutlass was left at the shopping center with a rear tire deliberately punctured and positioned so it obstructed traffic.

Gorlin’s body was found floating facedown in the Graham Canal near Northwest 138th Street and 105th Avenue on July 23. She had been stripped of nearly all clothing, sexually assaulted and subjected to severe violence including knife injuries and reported sexual mutilation; drowning was listed as the cause of death. Detectives theorized an attacker punctured the tire, waited for her to return, and approached under the guise of offering help.

Eight days later Elyse Rapp vanished under similar circumstances and was found less than a mile away; investigators considered the two killings positively linked and the cases became central to the so-called Flat Tire or Canal Murders. No arrest has been announced. Did anyone who shopped at the 163rd Street Shopping Center in July 1975 see a man offering assistance to a stranded motorist?