Her body was found beneath the cross in a locked chapel — arms spread, clothes torn, an ice pick embedded in her skull. Rumors of cults swirled. The case stayed cold for 40 years — until police knocked on the door of the man who guarded the church that night.
It was just past midnight when 19-year-old Arlis Perry left her new husband in their Stanford University dorm and walked toward the campus chapel to pray. They’d had a minor argument. She wanted to clear her head. It was a quiet October night in 1974. The chapel doors were still open. No one saw her alive again.
Hours later, the church was locked. But when the custodian opened it the next morning, he found something that would traumatize the community for decades.
Arlis’s body was sprawled beneath the altar in a horrifying pose: arms outstretched as if crucified, her jeans pulled down, her blouse torn open. A church candle had been shoved between her breasts. Another was inserted into her vagina. And embedded in the back of her skull was an ice pick. It was staged. Deliberate. Ritualistic. But who would kill a teenager — a devout Christian from small-town North Dakota — in such a gruesome, symbolic way?
The Crime That Felt Like a Message
The case gripped the Bay Area. Arlis had only been in California for six weeks. She’d just married Bruce Perry, a promising pre-med student. Their life was supposed to be starting. Instead, it had ended in one of the most disturbing crime scenes ever recorded on a university campus.
From the beginning, the theories were tangled in fear and symbolism. There were no signs of forced entry. No defensive wounds. No fingerprints. Just a posed body in a sacred place, and the looming sense that this wasn’t a random act.
Some investigators quietly suspected the occult. It was the ‘70s — the dawn of America’s Satanic Panic — and rumors flew about cults in Northern California, about rituals and sacrifices, about groups that knew how to kill and vanish. Arlis had once written to a friend about trying to “bring Christ to people involved in the occult.” Some thought she may have tried to confront the wrong person. Still, the case stalled. For decades.
The Guard, the DNA, and the Gunshot
In the years that followed, the name Arlis Perry faded from headlines. Her husband went on to become a psychiatrist. The case file grew cold. But one person remained oddly close to the center of it all: Stephen Crawford, the security guard who’d locked the chapel that night.
He was the one who’d found the body. He was the first on the scene. And according to police, he was never fully ruled out — but they had no evidence. So he kept working. Stayed in the area. Lived a mostly quiet life. Until 2018. Using new DNA technology, investigators re-examined evidence from the crime scene. And this time, they got a hit. The DNA matched Crawford. When police arrived at his apartment to confront him, he pulled out a gun and shot himself. Just like that, the case was closed.
Or was it?
To this day, many don’t believe it’s that simple.
Why stage the body in such an elaborate, symbolic way? Why the candles? Why the religious overtones? Was it really the work of one man — or part of something larger? There are whispers that Crawford may have had ties to darker groups, or that he wasn’t acting alone. Some believe the case was closed too quickly — a suicide taken as a confession, with no deeper answers sought. The staging of the body still haunts criminologists. It wasn’t rage. It was ritual. And perhaps most disturbing of all: why Arlis? She wasn’t random. She’d just arrived in California. She went to pray. Someone knew she’d be alone.
Four decades later, her murder remains a rare blend of horror, religion, and secrecy. And though a suspect has been named, the truth still feels out of reach — locked behind chapel doors no one’s quite dared to open all the way.
