Debbie Dudley Davis, 35, was found murdered in her ground-floor Westover Hills apartment in Richmond, Virginia, after her running car was discovered a few blocks away. The killing occurred on the night of September 18 or in the early hours of September 19, 1987. Inside a largely undisturbed apartment, Davis’s naked body lay on her bed; she had been raped, tortured, and strangled with a ligature and a ratchet-type device made from a vacuum cleaner attachment. Entry had been forced through a kitchen window.

The investigation initially produced few leads; no fingerprints were left at the scene. Authorities later arrested 25-year-old Timothy Wilson Spencer, who was living at a nearby halfway house and had recently been released from prison for burglary. Semen from the Davis scene was matched to Spencer by DNA testing, with the odds reported as one in 705 million that the sample belonged to someone else. Spencer was tried and convicted of rape, burglary, and capital murder in Davis’s case and was sentenced to death in September 1988.

Did anyone who knew Debbie or lived in Westover Hills in 1987 notice anything unusual around September 18–19?