On October 13, 1974, the body of a 19-year-old newlywed named Arlis Perry was found brutally murdered inside the Memorial Church at Stanford University.
It would take almost 44 years for her case to be solved. Detectives were finally able to make a breakthrough from new DNA evidence found on her clothing.
Arlis Perry was originally from Bismarck, North Dakota. Friends and family described her as warm, kind-hearted, and deeply religious.
She married Bruce Perry, her high school sweetheart, and moved to California with him while he studied at Stanford University. She had some difficulty adjusting to life in California.
She had only been in California for a short time and had not yet made many close friends when she died. She frequently visited Memorial Church, a place where she felt at home.
At the time of her death, Arlis was working as a receptionist at a Palo Alto law firm while her husband was a second-year pre-medical student at Stanford.
On the night of October 12, the couple had gotten into a minor disagreement about car troubles. Arlis decided to take a walk and went to pray at Memorial Church.
Bruce assumed she would return soon, but when she still wasn’t back by 3 a.m., he went out looking for her. The church doors were locked, and the building appeared to be empty.
Bruce went back home, thinking she might be there, but as morning arrived, he began to fear the worst.
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The next morning, a campus security guard named Stephen Crawford found Arlis inside the Memorial Church at 5:45 a.m. He had locked up the church six hours earlier and suddenly noticed that the church doors were slightly ajar.
Arlis’s body was near the altar. She was nude from the waist down and was lying on her back with her arms outstretched. Her jeans were next to her.
A 24-inch altar candle had been inserted into her body, and another candle was placed on her chest. She had been strangled and brutally beaten.
According to the Santa Clara County Office of the Medical Examiner-Coroner, she died at around midnight due to a knife wound in the back of her head. Stanford University offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the murderer.
The police first investigated Bruce, but he was quickly ruled out. Stephen Crawford was questioned but never formally charged. He claimed to have locked up the church at midnight and hadn’t noticed anything suspicious at the time.
Fingerprints and blood evidence did not reveal the identity of the killer. The church showed no signs of forced entry. The police interviewed other people, but nothing came up.
Rumors began spreading about how a cult had targeted Arlis for trying to convert its members to Christianity. Some thought she might have been followed to California from her hometown.
The case went cold and remained unsolved for decades. Then, in 2018, new DNA testing on evidence from the crime scene pointed to Stephen Crawford as the culprit. When authorities arrived at his house to arrest him, he pulled out a gun and shot himself. He died instantly.
“During the execution of the search warrant, sheriff’s deputies made verbal contact at a closed front door with an occupant in the apartment,” read a statement from the San Jose Police Department.
“As deputies made entry, they observed an adult male with a handgun, and the deputies immediately backed away. A short time later, a gunshot was heard. No deputies discharged their weapons.”
“Deputies eventually entered the residence and discovered an adult male with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. The male was pronounced deceased at the scene. No one else was present or injured.”
Crawford had a criminal history. In 1992, he was arrested for committing a series of thefts in the ’70s. He stole a bunch of rare art and books from Stanford’s libraries and the anthropology department.
He was a military veteran and had once been an armed police officer before taking a job as an unarmed security guard. Police found serial killer literature in his home, so it’s possible that he had more victims aside from Arlis.
By Emily Chan
Emily Chan is a writer who covers lifestyle and news content. She graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in... More about Emily Chan
