The case that took 44 years to be solved: Arlis Perry

Arlis Perry was a 19-year-old newlywed living with her husband at Stanford University in 1974. She was murdered inside the Standford Memorial Church. The case was unsolved for 44 years until the killer was apprehended in 2018 utilizing DNA profiling.

Arlis Dykema was born on February 22, 1955, in Linton, North Dakota. She was the youngest of three children; her parents, Marvin and Jean, were devout Christians who wanted their children to be involved in the Presbyterian Church.

The family relocated to Bismarck, North Dakota, the state capital, in 1963. Her parents owned an auto dealership and founded the Bismarck Community Church. Arlis was regarded as trusting, joyful, and optimistic, with a desire to see the best in others. She worked for a Christian youth group and taught Sunday school.

Arlis’s father, Marvin, stated that his daughter lived a very secluded life, never leaving Bismarck. She met Bruce Perry at Bismarck High School, where they became high school sweethearts.

Bruce Perry was the second of four children, the son of a stay-at-home mother and a dentist. Arlis and Bruce were both born in the same town. Arlis was a conservative cheerleader who was the sweetest person, and Bruce was a track and field star who set numerous school records. And intended to enroll at Stanford University.

They graduated from high school in 1973. Bruce attended Stanford University, a 25-hour journey away. He was a pre-med student with a major in human biology. Arlis remained in Bismarck and attended Bismarck Junior College. And the two of them kept dating. Arlis got a job at Bruce’s father’s dentist’s office. She was still involved in her church and missions, such as teaching about Jesus to nonbelievers.

Bruce returned to North Dakota in 1974, when both he and Arlis were 19 years old, he asked Arlis to marry him. They married on August 17, 1974, at the Bismarck Community Church, and spent their honeymoon at a cabin owned by Arlis’s parents.

They relocated to Palo Alto, California in September to attend Stanford University, where they stayed in Quillen Hall in Escondido Village, a residence hall for married couples and partners with children.

Bruce was now a second-year pre-med student with a job to support himself and his wife. Arlis adored the campus; she felt it was lovely, and she frequently went for walks and runs, as well as visited the Stanford Memorial Church. Arlis would write to her friends and relatives back home in North Dakota, saying that she was lonely and isolated and that she did not do much because Bruce was so busy with school and work.

Arlis then worked as a receptionist at a nearby law firm. Then her letters to her friends and family changed; she stated she liked living in California, the weather was wonderful, and she felt like everything was finally falling into place.

The Stanford Campus was fairly crowded on October 12th. Arlis had some letters she wanted to send to friends and family. Bruce decided to join Arlis at 11:30 p.m. so they could spend some time together and because he didn’t like the idea of her walking around by herself at night.

They got into an argument about their car while walking. Arlis informed Bruce that she wanted to go to the church to unwind and have some alone time, and Bruce returned to the apartment.

Stephen Crawford worked as a church security guard at night. He reported seeing Arlis enter the church at 11:50 p.m. There were already two people in the church who watched Arlis walk into the church, go to a pew, and kneel to pray. She was still praying when they left.

The church was meant to close at midnight, but Stephen arrived at about 12:10 a.m. He looked around the church, did not see anyone, and announced that he was locking it up. He then locked the church up when there was no response.

Bruce became concerned between 12:15 and 12:30 a.m. and went to the church, which was half a mile away from their apartment. When Bruce arrives at the church, he discovers that all of the doors are locked. Bruce decided to walk around campus in search of Arlis. He looked everywhere, but there was no sign of her. He returns to his apartment and waits for her, and at 3 a.m., he decides to contact the police and report his wife missing.

Bruce told authorities that she may have fallen asleep in the church. So they walked to the church and checked all the locked doors, calling out to see if anyone was inside, but no one answered.

At 5:45 a.m., Stephen Crawford, the nighttime security guard, returned to the church to open it for the day and discovered that one of the doors was unlocked; police later stated that the door was pushed open from the inside. When Stephen Crawford enters the church, he discovers Arlis Perry’s body in the front pews on the left side of the altar.

She was naked up to her waist and lying on her back. Her jeans were slung over the bottom portion of her torso. An ice pick protruded from the left side of her head behind her ear, and the ice pick’s handle was never found. Her neck was broken, her arms were crossed over her chest, and her legs were spread open.

She was sexually assaulted with one of the twenty-four-inch long alter candles and was still inside her when she was discovered. Her blouse was ripped open, and another altar candle was pushed between her breasts, arms folded over it.

Even though there was no indication of a struggle, the markings on her body suggested that she had been beaten and strangled. There was a kneeling pillow with semen on it beside her body. On one of the candles, a latent palm print was discovered.

Police approach Bruce and inform him of what occurred. And to interrogate him. When the cops arrive to question Bruce, they notice that he is covered in blood. Bruce informed them that he suffers from severe nosebleeds whenever he is stressed.

Police opted not to inform Bruce that his wife had been murdered; instead, they wanted him to come down to the station, and when he did, they questioned him for two hours, creating various situations to elicit a reaction from him. For example, Arlis was cheating and he discovered it, or Arlis was pregnant and he was unhappy about it.

Bruce voluntarily provided his fingerprints for testing and underwent a polygraph examination. He had passed the test and was no longer considered a suspect. That is when they inform him that his wife has been murdered. Stanford Chapel’s dean relocated the Sunday Service to the front lawn rather than inside the church. The dean had seen the crime scene before and thought it was symbolic, like a satanic ritual.

Someone passing by the church reported seeing a man with sandy blonde hair enter the church at the same moment Arlis did. He was thought to be roughly 25 years old and of medium build.

The FBI got involved and developed a profile of the murderer. They believe the killer is a loner with a military background who is between the ages of 17 and 22, and the killer collects the victims’ possessions as souvenirs. Arlis was murdered after midnight, but then sexually assaulted, according to police.

Stephen Crawford, the church’s nighttime security guard, stated that when he arrived at 12:10 a.m., to close up the church, Arlis was most likely in the church with her killer. Someone came forward and stated that when they passed by the church between 12:15 and 12:30, they heard a strange sound coming from inside the church, and when they stopped, the noise stopped as well.

When Bruce called the police to report Arlis missing, Stephen Crawford said he did a sweep of the church around 2 a.m., and police made a sweep of the outside of the church around 3 a.m. All of the sweep reports stated that all of the doors were locked.

Crawford was considered a suspect because he failed to do his job, which was to protect the building. He passed a polygraph test, and the latent palm print found on the scene did not match. As a result, he was no longer a suspect.

There was some suspicion regarding the Stanford Chapel dean because he had access to the church as well, but he passed a polygraph test and there was no match to the palm print that was also discovered. The handprint was compared to over 100 suspects but no match was found.

They were able to rule out the six people in the church, except for one, the man with sandy blonde hair who was sighted around the church around midnight the night Arlis was murdered.

Arlis’s memorial service was held at the same church on October 15th. One of Arlis’ coworkers stated that when Bruce arrived at the law firm to see Arlis, he did not realize it was Bruce; he was thinking of someone else. Arlis had been working at the law business for two weeks and wanted to establish herself as a solid worker before bringing her personal life to work.

Another man paid Arlis a visit at work. He was in his early twenties, with sandy blonde hair and an athletic body. The man and Arlis talked for approximately 15 minutes, and when Arlis returned, she was upset. Police asked about Bruce’s knowledge of a man visiting Arlis while she was at work. And he stated that he had no idea who the individual could have been.

Arlis’s body was returned to Bismarck, North Dakota, on October 18th, when another memorial service was performed at the same church where she and Bruce got married two months before. Her temporary burial marker was stolen two months later when she was buried, and it was the only one stolen.

When others found out about this, they began spreading rumors and suspicions, wondering if the perpetrator was from Bismarck and had followed her all the way to California to murder her.

The police did inform the public that two objects on her body had been taken and that the perpetrator must have taken them as a trophy. Bruce’s parents stated that while doing long distance, Arlis and a friend drove to Mandan, which is about a 10- to 15-minute trip from her house.

As part of their job, Bruce’s parents stated that the two of them were attempting to convert members of a satanic cult to Christianity. The cult was known as the Process Church of Final Judgment. They were into Scientology and satanism, and they would do rituals.

According to some sources, Arlis’s knees were bent and her ankles were drawn together in the shape of a diamond or pentagram, while others claimed her pants were thrown over her lower half, representing freemasonry. The police would come out and claim that her legs had been discovered straight and that it had nothing to do with satanic rituals.

Thirteen years later, in 1987, a book titled “The Ultimate Evil,” published by Maury Terry, reopened the entire satanic, pentagram world….once more. He was at odds with the Police for dismissing Arlis and the process church of final judgment. He claimed that the man Arlis was arguing with at work the day before she was murdered was a follower of the cult.

He further alleged that Arlis purposefully provoked an argument with Bruce in order to get some alone time with the man. Maury Terry’s book became popular, and everyone wanted to buy it. Due to the strong demand for the book, the bookstores were sold out and the library had a waitlist. Because his book was so popular, he sold out 1000-seat capacity venues where he would sit and discuss the case’s theories. Because everyone was invested in the case, he needed a larger venue.

In his book, he discusses a theory about a man named David Berkowitz, also known as the Son of Sam. He went on a murder spree in New York City between 1976 and 1977, killing 6 people and injuring 7, and when he was apprehended, he claimed that his neighbor’s dog commanded him to do it. And is currently serving six life sentences.

In 1978, four years after Arlis’s murder, David Berkowitz wrote to Arlis’s home in North Dakota, claiming that the process church of Final Judgment hired a hitman to kill her because she wanted to convert them to Christianity. He told them that the cult was nationwide and that they would kill individuals all throughout the country; he knew this because he claimed to be a member of the cult.

He stated that Charles Manson, the Manson family cult’s leader, and serial killer Otis Toole were also members of the group. David Berkowitz sent a book to a police officer in North Dakota in 1979 and in the book he wrote,

Two officers from California flew all the way to New York to question Berkowitz about the murder, and after 30 minutes he stopped talking and stated he didn’t want the other convicts to think he was a snitch. Police thought he was useless and moved on.

Arlis’s murder was linked to the murders of two other women at Stanford University. People came forward to say they saw the same type of man, with sandy blonde hair, roaming the area around the time of the murder. Arlis was murdered with a weapon, whilst the two women were strangled by the killer’s hands or their own clothes.

The killings of the two women occurred in low-risk places for the killer to be apprehended, while Arlis’s murder occurred in a high-risk area, the church being in the midst of campus, where people were continuously going by, and there was a night guard who did sweeps of the church every hour.

Ted Bundy was questioned by police. He was frequently in California between 1973 and 1974, however, he was ruled out as a suspect since he had an alibi that checked out on the night of Arlis’s murder.

In June 2016, 42 years after Arlis’s death, a 65-year-old man named Bryan McKraken came forward, claiming to have been at Stanford Memorial Church on the night Arlis was murdered. He reports that at midnight, he was strolling by the church when he heard flute music coming from inside and proceeded to investigate. When he walks into the church, he notices a young white male sporting a light-colored afro wig and playing the flute.

Bryan identified the man as a member of Stanford’s marching band. Bryan didn’t immediately suspect murder because there was a woman lying on the altar with candles surrounding her, and she resembled Arlis. Years later, he realized it occurred on the same night that Arlis was murdered.

Two detectives proceed to question the man playing the flute, and during the interview, the man mentions the light-colored afro wig, which confirms Bryan’s statement. But that was the extent of the interrogation, and police announced that he was not a person of interest.

The police received a break in 2016, with DNA testing far more advanced than it was 40 years ago. They discovered a DNA profile of a male found on Arlis’s jeans the night she was murdered.

Police planned to interview everyone in the vicinity that night and collect DNA samples from each person. And with that, they were able to eliminate everyone but the church’s night guard, Stephen Crawford.

Stephen Crawford, now 72, was a veteran of the United States Air Force who began working at Stanford University in the Department of Public Safety in 1971, where he was a police officer for a year before a new police chief decided to reorganize the department, where 75 percent of the police officers were offered jobs as security guards.

Stephen despised the fact that this was happening to him, as well as the school. He left Stanford in 1976 to work somewhere else. His ex-wife reported him in 1992 for creating a false diploma with a blank certificate obtained from Stanford.

He was prosecuted and arrested for stealing over 300 valued things worth thousands of dollars from Stanford University. He received merely a six-month suspended sentence and two years of probation.

He relocated to San Jose, California, in 1993, where he lived at the Del Coronado apartment complex, worked as an insurance adjuster, and led a relatively quiet life. Even though his palm print didn’t match and he passed a polygraph test, Stephen Crawford was never ruled out as a suspect because there wasn’t enough physical evidence to arrest him.

They compared his DNA to the DNA recovered on Arlis Perry’s jeans the night she was murdered 44 years later, and they were a match. At 9:05 a.m., on June 20, 2018, investigators went to Stephen Crawford’s apartment. Stephen shouted out to them, asking them to wait a moment while he got dressed.

A few minutes later, police entered the building using the master key they obtained from the building manager. When the police entered they saw Crawford seated on the bed with a handgun and backed away. They entered after hearing a gunshot and discovering Crawford on the floor with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

When they searched his apartment, they discovered a copy of Maury Terry’s book “The Ultimate Evil,” as well as a handwritten suicide note on his desk, written in 2016, when investigators began to reinvestigate him, and there was no mention of Arlis in the suicide note.

Arlis’ father died three months before the breakthrough, and her mother was 88 at the time of the breakthrough. Bruce Perry is now a pediatric mental health clinician and researcher. He is also a senior member of Canadian and Australian childhood institutes.

He works with children who have experienced trauma as a result of high-profile occurrences such as the Columbine High School massacre, the Oakland City bombing, the Waco siege, and the YFZ Ranch custody issues.

He focuses on the long-term repercussions of trauma and how our experiences as children affect us as we grow older. He is also an author, having written three books, one of which is titled “What Happened to You? “Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing,” with Oprah Winfrey.