ALOHA MURDER SOLVED

A FAMILY'S QUEST FOR ANSWERS IN THE MURDER OF 19-YEAR-OLD NANCY ANDERSONHAWAII'S LONGEST UNSOLVED MYSTERY-LEADS TO A BREAKTHROUGH BY A DNA MASTER SLEUTH

- K. C. BAKER

Strolling on the warm sands of Honolulu's Waikiki Beach quickly became part of 19-year-old Nancy Anderson's routine when she arrived in Hawaii from Colorado in the fall of 1971. A recent high school graduate, Nancy reasoned that moving halfway around the world might help her to figure out what she wanted to do with her life. "She was trying to find herself," says Mary Schiattone, one of Nancy's nine siblings. "She knew it's beautiful, and if you're going to go anywhere, why not Hawaii?"

In Honolulu, Nancy rented a room in an apartment on Aloha Drive, got a job at McDonald's and made lots of new friends. "Nancy, like the rest of our family, was raised to be trusting and kind," says Mary.

But less than three months after moving to Waikiki, the effervescent young woman with so many hopes for the future was brutally slain. On the afternoon of Jan. 7, 1972, her roommate Jody Spooner, 19, woke up from a nap to the sound of running water in Nancy's bathroom. When she entered her roommate's bedroom, she found Nancy dead on the floor. Initially Spooner thought it was suicide. But when police arrived, they immediately suspected murder: Nancy had been stabbed 63 times, and she died from a knife wound to the heart. "It was unimaginable," says her brother Jack Anderson. "A beautiful 19-year-old girl with her whole life in front of her. Why? Who would do such a thing?"

That question haunted Nancy's family and police for more than 50 years as her unsolved murder eventually became Hawaii's oldest cold case. The journey to capturing Nancy's killer is featured in "The Aloha Murder," a new episode of People Magazine Investigates, airing on Investigation Discovery on Dec. 2 at 9/8c and streaming on Max.