Frances Aileen Pruitt was 26 when she was murdered in Birmingham, Alabama, in the summer of 1992. Estranged from her husband and struggling with cocaine addiction, she had turned to prostitution. On June 17, 1992, she was picked up by 45-year-old Jack Harrison Trawick and driven to a dirt road behind Hill Crest Hospital. Trawick later confessed to stabbing her in the throat and inflicting 57 knife wounds; her mutilated remains were found two days later by a security guard.

Investigators initially arrested Pruitt’s estranged husband but released him after Trawick’s confession. Trawick was arrested on October 29, 1992, and later convicted in a separate capital case; in the Pruitt case he received life without parole. Few details are public about Pruitt’s life beyond the immediate circumstances of her death.

Did anyone in Birmingham at that time know Aileen Pruitt, her routine, or the area behind Hill Crest Hospital?