Wendy Wilson was 16 when she left Fairbanks on March 1, 1981, to visit her boyfriend at a home near Eielson Air Force Base. The trip followed familiar roads and should have ended that night, but she never returned. Her body was found days later near Eielson; investigators determined she had been strangled and shot in the head.

Her killing matched a pattern in the same area: 21-year-old Marlene Peters had been recovered days earlier, and months later 18-year-old Lori King’s remains were located nearby. Detectives focused on connections to the base and identified Technical Sergeant Thomas Richard Bunday, who had been stationed at Eielson, as a prime suspect by early 1982. In March 1983 Bunday admitted in detail to five Fairbanks-area murders, including Wendy’s, but because no arrest warrant was in hand he was released and died by suicide on March 15, 1983, before Alaska could take custody. No prosecution followed.

Wendy’s disappearance began as an ordinary errand and became central to a cluster of killings that alarmed the Fairbanks area. Did anyone who knew Wendy or who traveled the Eielson corridor in 1981 see anything unusual around March 1?