A family destroyed: on July 7, 1984, investigators in Toledo, Ohio, found 30-year-old Virginia Temple and her 9-year-old daughter Rachelle hidden in a crawl space at the family home on Auburn Avenue. Both were strangled. Younger children were found alone inside the house after relatives reported Virginia missed her usual contact on the morning of July 7.

Police linked the killings to a multi-state crime spree by Alton Coleman and Debra Brown that began earlier that summer. Coleman had reportedly befriended Virginia Temple on July 5. The pair were later recognized and arrested in Evanston, Illinois, on July 20, 1984. Prosecutors in Ohio did not pursue separate trials for the Temple murders, instead focusing on other killings linked to Coleman and Brown.

Coleman was executed by Ohio on April 26, 2002; Brown’s death sentence was later commuted and she is serving life. The killings of Virginia and Rachelle remain a brutal and painful chapter in the wider spree. Did anyone in Toledo know the Temples or see anything unusual around their Auburn Avenue home in early July 1984?