From A&E, this is Cold Case Files, the podcast.

It's October 25, 1978.

Deep in the Mojave Desert, Route 14 rambles south, into the one stoplight town of Rosamond, California.

Here, every face is familiar, and everyone knows Tanna Woolley, a 20-year-old beauty queen, a student, and quintessential girl next door.

On a Wednesday morning, Tanna's mother, Helen, takes a call about her daughter.

It was between, I think, 9.30 and 10, and her boss, Patty April, called me,

and said that Tanna had not come to work.

Helen Woolley is a mother who knows her daughter and knows, even as she hangs at the phone,

that something is very wrong.

Helen gets into her car and heads over to Tanna's apartment.

When I pulled up, her car was there.

I opened the door and the first thing I saw was her and I didn't go any further.

Tanna Wolley's body hangs over the side of her bed. She is naked from the waist down, has one blue

sock on her foot and the other wrapped around her neck. Detectives bagged the victim's clothes

and bedding and send the

body to the local morgue. There, the cause of death is officially determined to be strangulation.

Seaman is recovered, confirming initial suspicions of a sexual assault. In 1978, however,

nothing further can be done with the forensic evidence. Meanwhile, a father waits for someone to explain to him what happened to his daughter.

Do you have any idea who it is?

And when they're saying, no, we don't, then they are wondering, well, where are you going to go with us?

If there's no witnesses, there's no

real suspects. All you're looking for is to find the guy that would do something like this.

...