October 31, 1981 New York City

The bodies of 39-year-old Ronald Sysman and 20-year-old Elizabeth Platsman are discovered

inside Ron's apartment.

Both victims have been shot to death, execution-style, and since the apartment has been ransacked,

their speculation that the crime might be drug-related.

However, convicted son of Sam serial killer David Berkowitz eventually shares information

that Ron and Liz were killed by associates of his who were members of a satanic cult,

but this is never substantiated, and the murders continue to remain unsolved.

After that, the trail went cold.

Hello everyone and welcome to our latest episode of The Trail, went cold.

I'm your host Robin Warder, and since we are currently in the month of October, we're

going to be covering an unsolved double homicide which took place around Halloween.

The 1981 murders of Ronald Sysman and Elizabeth Platsman.

As you probably know, it's always been my yearly tradition to spend the last few weeks

of October covering mysteries which have some sort of Halloween slant to them, and before

I entered the world of podcasting, I wrote a bunch of true crime articles for listfirst.com.

On October 31, 2014, I published an article there titled Ten Creepy Unsolved Mysteries

That Happened on Halloween, and every year around this time, it seems like this list

gets reworked by various websites and YouTube videos which all usually feature the same

cases, but make no mistake about it, my article is the original.

I've since done trail went cold episodes about quite a few of the cases on that list,

but what I haven't talked about until now are the murders of Ronald Sysman and Elizabeth

...