Two Friends Were Killed While Hitchhiking To Los Angeles, And A Cryptic Call Eight Years Later Pointed To A Suspect
In July 1983, a pair of Swedish tourists named Marie Lilienberg and Maria Wahlen were hitchhiking from northern California to Los Angeles when they were brutally murdered.
At the time, the case garnered a lot of attention from the media before going cold. It was brought back to the forefront after an anonymous phone call was made in September 1991 to the Swedish consulate in San Diego.
Lilienberg and Wahlen first met in January 1983 when they were working as maids at a skiing resort in Colorado.
Lilienberg was studying to become a gymnastics teacher in Sweden, while Wahlen was a preschool teacher. After the skiing season ended, they visited Hawaii together.
Later, they decided to spend the summer exploring the California coast. They were running low on money, so they planned to hitchhike for the trip.
The two women were last seen in Redwood City on July 22, 1983. They were going to hitchhike to Los Angeles, catch a flight to New York, and then another flight to Sweden.
Wahlen wrote down the details of their journey in her diary, which stopped being updated on the day the women were last seen. Several of their belongings were found in a dumpster behind a business in Los Angeles County.
Their fathers kept in regular contact with them, and when they hadn’t heard from their daughters, they traveled to California in August 1983.
On August 18, the bodies of Lilienberg and Wahlen were discovered by deer hunters in the Los Padres National Forest.
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The bodies were badly decomposed, so their identities had to be confirmed by dental records from Sweden. The women were both unclothed. They were assaulted and stabbed to death.
On September 26, 1991, the Swedish consulate in San Diego received a phone call from an anonymous caller about the murders.
The caller claimed to know a Canadian man named Loren who drove through San Diego every year on the way to Mexico.
Apparently, Loren hated women and had once encountered two Swedish women in 1983 who tried to scam him.
Later, the police were able to identify Loren and the anonymous caller, but no one was ever charged with the murders. To this day, the case remains unsolved.
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