On the evening of August 6, 1982, 40-year-old Barbara Simons was at the Hexagon Bar in Minneapolis when she accepted a ride home from a man identified as Paul Michael Stephani. The next day her body was found on an embankment of the Mississippi River; she had been stabbed more than 100 times.

A waitress at the Hexagon Bar told investigators Barbara hoped the man she was with was nice, and provided a clear description of him. Police later received an anonymous phone call from the so-called Weepy-Voiced Killer in which the caller confessed to stabbing a woman 40 times and apologised. Two weeks after Simons was killed, Stephani attacked Denise Williams with a screwdriver; Williams survived after fighting back and a nearby resident witnessed the assault.

The Hexagon Bar description and the witness to the Williams attack linked Stephani to Simons’s murder. He was convicted of Barbara Simons’s murder and of assaulting Denise Williams and received sentences totaling 58 years. Did anyone in Minneapolis in 1982 recognize the man described by the waitress or recall seeing him with Barbara that night?