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Murdered On Her Lunch Break: Now Police Have Solved Her Cold Case
Mary Mathis Davis was killed 36 years ago, but her family has been informed the perpetrator is now identified.
It has been nearly four decades since a young mother-of-two was attacked and murdered as she took a break from a shift at work, but authorities in North Carolina have at last announced they feel certain they know who did it.
Mary Mathis Davis was 29 and worked at Lanier Hardware in Lexington in the spring of 1987. She had completed her morning’s work on May 30th and stepped outside to take her lunch break as usual. However, she failed to return.
The following day, Mary’s body was discovered behind a former Winn-Dixie grocery store around 20 minutes’ walk from her workplace. She had been raped and strangled to death.
Although a homicide investigation was launched, there were few leads for detectives to go on at a time when forensic technology was in its infancy.
However, in a remarkably prescient move that would prove pivotal later on, crime scene technicians painstakingly collected and retained almost everything they could find from the site in which the body was dumped.
