Hi, crime junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And I'm Britt. And Britt, in all my years of,

not just making true crime stories, but consuming them as well, I've never heard a story that starts

like this. One of our reporters reached out to an LAPD cold case guy to ask him about an unsolved

case from the 70s. And he's like, oh, that case, that case is actually solved. But he couldn't tell us who did it.

What do you mean he couldn't tell you? Same reaction. So we pressed him. Like, how can it be solved if you don't know who committed the crime. And he said, well, the detective who worked

the case when it was solved wouldn't tell him the killer's name, which made no sense to me.

Police departments normally want to shout it from the rooftops if they solve a cold case.

I mean, it's usually even a matter of public record, but not here.

Here, it's not even an internal record.

So we set out to answer the one question that this detective couldn't.

And if you stick with me, I am proud to tell you that at the end of this episode,

you'll be one of the first to know who killed Melanie Howell was found stabbed to death inside her apartment, something weird had been going on.

Her boyfriend at the time, who I'm going to call Dale, told us that Melanie had been really scared in the days leading up to her death.

Just two nights before she was killed, Dale says that she called him late at night from her apartment

where she lived alone,

and she was terrified because there was a man

that she caught watching her through her window.

He told her to call the police,

and when he rushed over from his place,

which wasn't far,

he actually saw a man coming out

of the bushes across the street. And without a second thought, this dude just takes off after him,

...