Judith Ann Oesterling was a 19-year-old White woman from Rushville, Indiana, who came to Florida in the summer of 1974 and worked at a South Florida massage parlor. By early 1975 she was part of the Miami-area massage-parlor scene and regularly hitchhiked. Reports differ on exact dates, but contemporaneous accounts and later statements place the fatal events on January 25, 1975; one biographical record gives January 26.

Oesterling was last associated with the massage parlor operated by Sue Jane Tiger Sue Walter. Witnesses reportedly saw her leave work that evening; her body was later recovered from a canal in western Broward County. She had suffered a severe beating, was still alive when she entered the water, and drowning was described as the ultimate cause of death. For months the homicide was unsolved.

In October 1975 Walter, then 22, confessed that she had participated in the killing and implicated her boyfriend, Clarence Deacon Carnivale, as the principal attacker. Walter told investigators Carnivale beat Oesterling with his fists and a rock, that Oesterling was bound and sexually assaulted, and that she was thrown into the canal. Carnivale could not be prosecuted — he had been shot to death on June 13, 1975. Walter later pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and received a 15-year sentence.

Did anyone in the Miami-area massage-parlor community in early 1975 remember Judith or the people named in these accounts?