On the morning of October 29, 1972, 23-year-old Marla Jean Hires left her home in Stanton, California, before sunrise to drive to her job as a claims adjuster at Southern California Edison in Rosemead. She was a wife and the mother of a two-year-old and drove a blue 1971 Mazda RX2 sedan. That morning she wore a purple blouse, brown flare pants, brown heels and carried a brown purse; she was not seen alive again.

Her body was found the next morning wrapped in old drapery and carpet and discarded down an embankment off Imperial Highway near Kellogg Drive in Yorba Linda. Her vehicle was later found abandoned near a Sumitomo Bank in Stanton, close to where the suspect lived and worked. DNA testing decades later linked the case to Edwin Dean Richardson, who was charged in 2004 and pled guilty to first-degree murder in 2006; he admitted to raping and strangling Hires and received life in prison.

Did anyone in the Stanton or Yorba Linda area remember seeing Marla’s blue Mazda or her that morning?