When Richard Hanchett discovered the identity of his biological mother, Ruth Marie Terry, she had already been dead for decades. Terry, a young Tennessee woman who gave her newborn up for adoption in Michigan in 1958, became known to Massachusetts police as “The Lady of the Dunes,” an unidentified murder victim found on a Provincetown beach in 1974. Her hands were severed to prevent identification, and her skull was crushed. It took 48 years and forensic genetic genealogy for the FBI to identify her in 2022. Investigators later tied her death to her husband, who was named as her killer a year later. The chilling story is now the focus of Oxygen’s true-crime series, “Lady of the Dunes: Hunting the Cape Cod Killer.” Her son, Richard Hanchett, joins NewsNation’s “Banfield.”
