Dennis Wayne Chaffee, 33, was found shot to death in the basement of his Cedar Rapids home on the evening of Monday, July 18, 1983. His parents discovered their grandchildren — a boy and a girl, each one and a half years old — alone upstairs, thirsty and dirty but physically unharmed. Chaffee, a Vietnam veteran who had worked 15 years at the same job, had been shot multiple times with a small-caliber weapon: once in the arm and twice in the head. The murder weapon was not recovered.

Investigators considered a burglary gone wrong because Chaffee collected antiques and musical instruments, but that theory was later ruled out. A verbal autopsy report was released on July 20, 1983, but police provided little other information and the trail went cold. Decades later the case was included in a police effort to apply new DNA technology to cold cases, yet the murder remains unsolved and no arrests or publicly identified suspects have been announced.

Does anyone who lived in Cedar Rapids in 1983 remember unusual activity near Chaffee’s home or his collection that might help explain what happened?