Elena Semander was a 20‑year‑old University of Houston student who was murdered on February 7, 1982. A former field hockey scholarship athlete at the University of Denver, she had returned home to Houston to live with her parents, Zack and Harriett Semander, while continuing her studies. Family members noticed her missing the morning they were preparing to attend their Greek Orthodox Church after she had gone out the night before wearing her sister’s rabbit fur coat.

Her body was later found in the back of a garbage truck; she had been strangled and left in a dumpster at an apartment complex near her home. Within three months, 28‑year‑old Coral Eugene Watts was arrested in Texas and confessed to killing 12 women, including Elena, but prosecutors did not try him for her murder because of a plea deal that granted immunity from further charges in exchange for cooperation and a guilty plea to aggravated burglary. That deal and Texas law reductions affected the length of his incarceration.

Elena is remembered through a scholarship in her name at The Kincaid School, and her mother Harriett Semander led a long campaign opposing Watts’s early release, attending parole hearings and working on legal reform.