Arlis Perry

Arlis Kay Perry ( Dykema; February 22, 1955 – October 12, 1974) was a 19-year-old American newlywed who was murdered inside Stanford Memorial Church, within the grounds of Stanford University in California, on October 12, 1974.

The murder went unsolved for more than forty years before police named Stephen Blake Crawford as the perpetrator following DNA profiling in 2018. Crawford, a security guard at Stanford who reportedly discovered the body, killed himself before he could be arrested.

Background Arlis Kay Dykema grew up in Bismarck, North Dakota, where she and Bruce D. Perry were high-school sweethearts. In August 1974, six weeks before her death, Arlis moved to the Stanford University campus with her husband, who was a sophomore pre-med student. At the time of her murder, Arlis had been working as a receptionist at a local law firm.

Murder

Around 11:30 p.m. the night of October 12, 1974, the Perrys had an argument about their car's tire pressure. Perry told her husband that she wanted to pray alone inside the Stanford Memorial Church, and they parted. She was found face-up with her hands folded across her chest. An ice pick was sticking out of the back of her head, though the handle had broken off and was missing. There were also signs of strangulation. Police reported that Perry was naked from the waist down. A three-foot (1 meter) long altar candle was inserted in her vagina, and another placed between her breasts. Her jeans had been arranged across her legs in a diamond pattern.

Investigation Crawford told police he had locked up the church a little after midnight after noticing no apparent activity inside. He also claimed (later found to be false) to have rechecked the doors around 2:00 a.m. and found they were still locked. When Crawford visited the church at 5:45 a.m. to open it for the day, he said he found the west side door open and that it had been forced from the inside. In 2018, however, Crawford was definitively linked to the murder following a more advanced DNA test. On June 28, as police arrived at Crawford's residence at Camden Avenue in San Jose, California, from Stanford University, with a search warrant, Crawford committed suicide with a pistol before he could be arrested.

Alleged Son of Sam link Serial killer David Berkowitz mentioned the Perry murder in a few letters, suggesting that he heard details of the crime from "Manson II", the alleged culprit. In the San Jose Mercury News, Jessie Seyfer noted that "investigators interviewed Berkowitz in prison and now believe he has nothing of value to offer" regarding the Perry case. However, investigative reporter Maury Terry noted that Berkowitz had volunteered information about the case without being prompted, writing in 1979: "ARLISS PERRY, HUNTED, STALKED AND SLAIN. FOLLOWED TO CALIFORNIA. STANFORD UNIV."

Terry interviewed Perry's friends in Bismarck, discovering that someone on the Stanford campus had taken a telephone listing under Bruce Perry's name. The resultant confusion when Perry's best friend and Bruce's mother attempted to reach the Perrys at the fraudulent phone number apparently led Perry to call the number herself and speak to someone in residence there.

In a September 27, 1974 letter to her friend, Perry wrote:

Media The case was covered in detail, along with the John Getreu murders, in a February 2020 episode of Casefile True Crime Podcast.

The supposed links between David Berkowitz and the Perry murder were outlined in the Netflix documentary The Sons of Sam: A Descent Into Darkness.