On the morning of Thursday, December 1st, 1988, a project inspector arrived at a construction

site in Beaverton, Oregon for a routine drive-through before the workday began. As he moved

through the site, a black Honda Accord caught his attention. It was a newer model, parked

where it didn't belong. The window was down.

The keys were sitting on the passenger seat, and the license plates were missing.

The inspector called the police to have it towed, but when officers arrived and opened the trunk,

they found something no one was expecting.

Inside was the body of 30-year-old Deborah Atropes.

Deborah had been reported missing just two days earlier by her estranged husband, Robert Aetrops. Robert lived about five miles away on a rural county road in a log cabin he and Deborah shared before their separation roughly five months earlier.

After the split, Deborah moved into an apartment in Salem, nearly 30 miles away.

Robert told police he had been expecting Deborah the night she disappeared.

She had gone to a hair appointment after work and was supposed to pick up their eight-month-old daughter afterward.

When she never arrived, Robert began making phone calls, to friends, to her parents, even to the babysitter. No one had seen Deborah

since she left work. Later that night, Robert called the police. By the next morning,

Deborah Atrop's was officially listed as a missing person, but the discovery of her body in the

trunk of her own car quickly turned a missing person case into a homicide investigation,

and detectives didn't take long to focus their attention on Robert.

Despite years of investigation, the case stalled and eventually went cold.

More than three decades later, investigators reopened the case,

this time armed with forensic tools that didn't exist in 1988.

When the results came back, detectives believed they finally had evidence to support their long-held

suspicions. On March 23rd, 2023, Robert Aetropes was arrested for the murder of his wife.

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