Julia Dianne Gabriel, known as Dianne, was a 38-year-old real estate agent from Mooresville, North Carolina, last seen on July 18, 1983, when she went to appraise a property on Lake Norman. Two days later her pale-green 1981 Buick Skylark was found abandoned in a restaurant parking lot with the passenger-side window shattered. Extensive air, land, and water searches produced no sign of her for seven months.

In February 1984, some of Dianne’s personal effects were recovered in woods near where the car had been abandoned: ripped blue slacks, red shoes, a pocketbook, and car keys. Those findings shifted the inquiry toward foul play. Investigators linked circumstantial and fiber evidence to a suspect, Johnny Joseph Head, and prosecutors alleged he had lured Dianne to his home, bound and strangled her. In March 1985 Head was convicted of second-degree murder without the victim’s body and sentenced to 50 years; Dianne’s body has never been found.