Teal Pittington was 18 and a cosmetology student and waitress when she disappeared from Santa Fe on the evening of August 15, 1984. She was last seen in the parking lot of a variety store on Cerrillos Road and had planned to meet a friend later that night but never arrived. Her severely decomposed remains were found the following spring in a culvert about a mile south of the New Mexico Girls Ranch in Lamy and identification required dental records.

An autopsy determined she had been raped and strangled with her own bra. Investigators centered on two persons of interest but made no arrests. Marion Owen Jent, an on-again/off-again boyfriend she was living with, was seen driving her car after her disappearance and later abandoned it; he told police she had gone to New Orleans and had lent him the car, and he passed a polygraph. Jent has since died. The other suspect was David Morton, a man with a prior history of killing women; he was questioned and pointed to a friend who had dated Teal, but that lead did not break the case. The bra used in the strangulation is missing from the files, hindering modern testing.

Did anyone who knew Teal or lived near Cerrillos Road in August 1984 notice anything unusual that night?