Member-only story
Woman Solves Her Own Murder By Scratching Her Killer
Brave Lucille Hultgren collected the evidence police needed, although it came too late to put the killer behind bars.
When an elderly Californian woman was brutally murdered in her own home in 1988, investigators hoped they would swiftly be able to find the perpetrator and bring him to justice.
Unfortunately, this did not happen — and it would take 34 years and a little help from the victim herself to finally close the case. This is Lucille Hultgren’s story.
Where is Lucille?
Lucille Hultgren had just celebrated her 79th birthday and was well-known and liked in her local community of Galt near Sacramento, where she lived alone following her husband’s death in 1984.
She was a regular churchgoer as well as a mother to two adult sons, and her fellow parishioners counted her among their own family as they sat side-by-side at Sunday services. That was why they found it strange when she didn’t attend church the weekend after they last saw her on her birthday, May 20th 1988.
In a 2013 article in the Galt Herald, then-Galt Police Chief Doug Mathews said two of her friends decided to visit Lucille’s house on Poplar Street to check on her once church…
