Terra Wedlaw was 19 and had recently arrived in Nashville from Tampa when she was killed after meeting a man in a motel room. On October 18, 1977, she went with 20th-century drifter Laron Ronald Williams to a room at the Capitol Park Inn; after sex, he strangled her and left her body in the room. Detectives focused on Williams after finding Terra’s birth certificate among his belongings, and he was arrested within weeks.

While held in the Metro Jail, Williams was identified publicly as a suspect in the strangulation deaths of two other 24-year-old women, Mary Jo Corn and Bessie Wallace, whose bodies were found nude, bound with rope, and strangled. Ultimately prosecutors charged Williams only with Terra Wedlaw’s murder; in January 1979 he pleaded guilty and received a 10-year sentence with parole possible after four years.

The surviving record emphasizes the killer’s movements and later crimes more than Terra’s life.