Zurijeta Sakanovic was 21 when she was found murdered in a guest room at the Budgetel Inn in Clive, Iowa, on September 4, 1997. A supervisor discovered her cleaning cart abandoned in a hallway and then found Zurijeta’s body on the room floor, wrapped in a comforter. She had been bound, strangled, and stabbed multiple times.

The killing went cold for years and the family ultimately returned to Bosnia. Investigators noted a similarity to the 1993 hotel-room murder of Patricia Lange; both victims had been bound and left in a similar manner. In January 2000, former hotel maintenance worker Donald Arthur Piper was arrested after DNA testing matched his blood to a stain on the comforter. At trial in June 2002, Piper was convicted of first-degree murder in Zurijeta’s death and received an additional life term in prison.

Does anyone have memories of the Budgetel Inn or information from the late 1990s that might shed light on Zurijeta’s last day?