Venora Hyatt, 44, of Mobile, Alabama, was kidnapped and murdered on April 16, 1976. Court records and later reporting link her killing to a series of violent attacks on women in Mobile after the perpetrator’s release on parole. Those records say the killer returned the next day to mutilate her body, a detail that matched other crimes in the sequence and later helped tie the cases together.

Authorities did not immediately charge anyone in Hyatt’s death. The investigation gained traction after the October 1976 arrest of a suspect in the separate killing of convenience store clerk Cheryl Payton. Mobile County later charged 29-year-old Thomas Wayne Whisenhant of Irvington with the murders of both Payton and Hyatt. Federal appellate records state that Whisenhant confessed to Hyatt’s killing, and court materials show he pleaded guilty in 1981 to the first-degree murders of Venora Hyatt and Patricia Hitt, receiving life sentences without parole for each.

Did anyone in Mobile at the time notice patterns or incidents that now look connected to these crimes?