Arlis Perry had been married for eight weeks. She was nineteen years old, a Sunday school teacher from Bismarck, North Dakota, who had recently moved across the country so her husband Bruce could finish his studies at Stanford University. On the night of October 12, 1974, she walked alone to Stanford Memorial Church to pray. She never came home.
The man who reported finding her body the next morning was a campus security guard named Steven Blake Crawford. He told police he discovered her in the east aisle near the altar. Investigators placed his name on the list of suspects almost immediately. That was October 1974.
By the time police reached Crawford’s apartment with the DNA evidence to prove it, forty-four years had passed. Instead of standing trial, Crawford put a gun to his head. The case was closed the same day it was solved. Arlis K.
Dykema was born on February 22, 1955, in Linton, North Dakota, and grew up in Bismarck, the youngest of three children. Her parents, Marvin and June Dykema, owned a car dealership and helped found the Bismarck Community Church after the family moved there in 1963. Faith was not a weekend ritual for the Dykemas; it was the foundation their entire family was built on. Everyone who knew Arlis agreed she was warm-hearted, kind, and joyful in a way that was genuine.
She was a cheerleader at Bismarck High School, a Sunday school teacher, and a volunteer with Young Life and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Her father described her as a homebody who rarely left Bismarck before age nineteen, and she was eager to see the bright side in everyone she met. In a small town where doors were left unlocked and neighbors looked out for one another, that kind of trust was not naivety; it was simply how life was supposed to work. She met Bruce Perry at Bismarck High School.
He was a standout track athlete and a top student, the kind who could attend any university. He chose Stanford, more than fifteen hundred miles from North Dakota. The two maintained a long-distance relationship for about a year while Arlis studied at Bismarck Junior College and worked in the dental office of Bruce’s father. Bruce proposed in May 1974, and they married on August 17 that year at the Bismarck Reformed Church.
About six weeks later, the couple packed up and moved into Quillen Hall in Escondido Village, the student housing complex on the Stanford campus. Bruce resumed his sophomore year as a pre-med student studying human biology. Arlis worked as a receptionist at a Palo Alto law firm to help support the family. California was nothing like Bismarck.
The Stanford campus in 1974 was a world of counterculture energy, political activism, and social openness that would have startled someone raised in conservative North Dakota. Arlis struggled. Making friends was harder than she expected. The social rhythms of the California campus felt alien.
She wrote letters home to Bismarck constantly, sometimes daily, filling pages with news of her new life and questions about her old one. Those letters were her lifeline. But there was one place on campus where she felt settled. Stanford Memorial Church, that massive stone building at the heart of the campus, became her refuge.
She went there to think, to pray, and to find the peace she had always found within church walls. In Bismarck, church was the safest place in the world. There was no reason to believe California would be different. A strange detail surfaced in those first weeks at Stanford.
Someone in the campus directory had a phone number listed under the name Bruce D. Perry, though it was not his. When a close friend of Arlis called, and when Bruce’s mother tried to reach them, the calls went to the wrong number. Arlis mentioned the mix-up in a letter to a friend dated September 27, 1974, and laughed it off.
Years later, investigative journalist Maury Terry would use this detail as evidence that Arlis was being stalked. Investigators never endorsed that explanation. It was most likely an administrative error. But it remains in the records like a shard of glass, impossible to ignore and impossible to fully explain.
The evening of October 12, 1974, began with something so ordinary it barely merits mention. Around 11:30 p. m. , Arlis and Bruce walked together across the Stanford campus toward a mailbox.
Arlis wanted to send letters to her family in North Dakota. On the way, a minor argument broke out between them, nothing serious, just a small dispute about responsibility for checking the air pressure in one of their car tires. Arlis told Bruce she wanted to go to Stanford Memorial Church to pray and spend some time alone. Bruce returned to their apartment.
Arlis headed toward the church by herself. She arrived at Stanford Memorial Church around 11:35. The massive stone building was still open, with a few people inside. The security guard on duty that night, Steven Blake Crawford, told the remaining visitors the church would close in about fifteen minutes.
Crawford later told investigators he locked the church doors around midnight, saying everyone had left by then and the building was empty. What happened inside Stanford Memorial Church between midnight and 5:40 a. m. was known only to two people.
One died with the sunrise. The other never told the truth. Bruce waited in their apartment, expecting Arlis to be gone for twenty or thirty minutes. Midnight passed, then 1 a.
m. , then 2 a. m. He paced, watching the clock.
By 3 a. m. , he was frightened enough to call Stanford police. Officers drove across the darkened campus to the church, checked its exterior, and tried the doors.
They were locked. The building was sealed tight. Nothing looked suspicious from the outside. No broken windows, no signs of forced entry, no sounds from within.
They filed a report and left. Somewhere inside that massive stone building, behind those locked doors, Arlis Perry was already dead or dying. The officers had been standing a few feet from the crime scene without knowing it. At 5:40 a.
m. on October 13, Crawford radioed in that he had gone to open the church for the day and found a door on the west side open, apparently forced from the inside. He said he entered and discovered the body of a young woman in the east wing near the altar. His words over the radio were chilling in their coldness.
“We have a dead body here. ” That is how Steven Blake Crawford reported finding the body of a nineteen-year-old bride lying on the floor of the church he had been hired to protect. He did not say there had been an accident. He did not say he needed help, that there was an injured woman.
Investigators were shocked by the crime scene inside Stanford Memorial Church. Arlis had been strangled and beaten. An ice axe had been driven into the back of her skull with enough force to break the handle, and the handle itself was completely missing from the scene. Her body had been deliberately placed near the altar, with candles arranged in a way that made anyone who saw it immediately understand it was staged.
The dean of the church, Reverend Robert Hamilton Kelley, was among the first to view the scene. He publicly described it as ritualistic and satanic. The Associated Press picked up that description and published it. Those two words, ritualistic and satanic, would define this case in the public imagination for the next four decades.
A respected clergyman’s reaction to a crime scene, given to journalists in a moment of shock, essentially wrote the narrative of the case before the investigation even began. That single quote would generate bestselling books, conspiracy theories, and an entire mythology that buried the real evidence under years of noise. Stanford University offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction. On October 15, a memorial service was held in the same church where Arlis had been killed.
More than 180 people attended. Reverend Kelley presided. Bruce Perry sat in the front row. He was twenty years old, married for eight weeks, now sitting in the building where his wife had been murdered, surrounded by people he barely knew, more than fifteen hundred miles from everyone he loved.
At the end of the service, he broke down sobbing. The investigation began with what investigators could gather from the crime scene. Semen was found on a kneeling cushion near the body. A partial palm print was found on one of the candles used in the staging.
Both pieces of evidence were extremely important. In a modern investigation, either could have led to an arrest within days. But this was 1974. DNA testing for criminal cases would not become available for more than a decade.
The palm print could be compared to known prints, but only if investigators had a suspect’s prints on file. Without a match, the evidence was a locked box with no key. Investigators did what they always do in such cases. They started with the husband.
Bruce Perry was the last known person to see Arlis alive and the first to report her missing. He cooperated fully from the beginning. He voluntarily provided biological samples, took a polygraph test, and allowed investigators to compare his fingerprints and blood type to the evidence found at the crime scene. Nothing matched.
His polygraph came back negative. His fingerprints did not match the palm print on the candle. His blood type did not match the semen. Bruce Perry was cleared.
Crawford’s story was different. As the security guard on duty the night of the murder, Crawford was an obvious suspect. He was the last known person in contact with the church before it closed for the night. He claimed the building was locked around midnight, and he was the first to enter the building the next morning.
When investigators asked other potential witnesses and suspects to take polygraph tests, most agreed. Crawford refused. His account of what happened that night shifted over several interviews, and there was one detail that troubled investigators. When Bruce Perry called campus police at 3 a.
m. to report Arlis missing, Crawford, the guard responsible for the church, told police he would check on it. But he never entered the church. Not at 3 a.
m. , not at 4 a. m. , not at 5 a.
m. He waited until 5:40 a. m. to enter, and only then because he said he was opening the building for the day.
For a security guard whose only job was to protect that building, the inconsistency made no sense. A behavioral analyst from the FBI reviewed the case and drew a psychological profile of the likely killer. The profile described a young man, possibly with a military background, introverted and socially isolated, likely keeping detailed journals or personal records. The analyst believed the killer would have taken a souvenir from the crime scene, something personal belonging to the victim to keep as a memento.
Investigators noted this detail because Arlis’s glasses were never found in the church. They had simply disappeared. The most important conclusion in the profile concerned access. Investigators estimated that staging the crime scene would have taken at least thirty minutes.
Whoever did this was not in a hurry. He was intimately familiar with the building’s layout, its schedule, its pedestrian patterns, and its lockdown procedures, confident that he would not be interrupted for at least half an hour in the middle of the night. These facts pointed to an insider, someone who worked in the building, someone who had the keys, someone who knew exactly when the church would be empty and how much time he would have before anyone came looking. Investigators knew all this in 1974.
They knew Crawford fit the profile. But knowing and proving are very different things, and the gap between them can span decades. Without DNA technology, without a confession, and without a single witness who saw anything after midnight, the investigation had no way forward. Investigators expanded the search, checking the alibis of known serial killers active in California during that period, including Ted Bundy.
He was out of the area that night. Every lead dead-ended. Meanwhile, Arlis Perry was not the only person killed near Stanford in the early 1970s. Leslie Perlov had been murdered in February 1973, physics student David Levine in September of that year, and Janet Taylor in March 1974, just seven months before Arlis.
The cluster of deaths sparked widespread speculation about a serial killer in the area. Investigators ultimately concluded that Perry’s murder was separate from the others. They believed her killer was someone else entirely, someone closer to the church. They were right, but it would take more than forty years to prove it.
The case went cold, and into the vacuum left by an unsolved murder, something else rushed in. The staged crime scene, its location in a church, and America’s growing fascination with occult crimes in the 1970s created the perfect conditions for a conspiracy theory. Within months, rumors were spreading through the Bay Area. A young woman killed inside a church, candles arranged around her body, an ice axe driven into her skull.
It sounded like a scene from a horror novel, and people treated it as such. In 1987, journalist Maury Terry published a book that turned the case upside down. Titled The Ultimate Evil, its central argument was astonishing in scope. Terry claimed that David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam killer who terrorized New York City in the summer of 1976 and 1977, had not acted alone.
According to Terry, Berkowitz was merely an instrument of a nationwide Satanic network linked to an organization called the Process Church of the Final Judgment. One of those links led directly to Stanford Memorial Church. Terry argued that Arlis Perry had been targeted by this network, followed from North Dakota to California, and that her murder was a planned ritual execution. To support the claim, Terry pointed to something genuinely disturbing.
In 1979, David Berkowitz sent a copy of a book titled Anatomy of Witchcraft to a North Dakota police department from his prison cell in New York. Berkowitz had underlined a passage and written on it: “Arlis Perry was stalked, followed, killed, traced to California, Stanford University. ” Investigators took the lead seriously and traveled to New York to interview Berkowitz in prison. Their conclusion after sitting with him was clear: Berkowitz had nothing of value, no real inside information about the crime.
He was doing what serial killers often do, inserting himself into a prominent case to maintain his notoriety from behind bars. The book became a bestseller, published at precisely the wrong time. The 1980s and 1990s were the peak of what historians now call the Satanic Panic, a period of widespread moral hysteria in the United States. The Satanic dimension became permanently fused to the Arlis Perry case, like scar tissue.
For the next three decades, forums, true crime communities, and conspiracy theorists treated the Stanford church murder as proof of a secret network operating across America. Every few years, someone would write a new blog post or record a new podcast episode recycling the same theory. The ritualized scene, the Son of Sam connection, the candles, the ice axe, the church; it all seemed too deliberate, too theatrical, to be the work of one man. But that is exactly what it was.
Retired FBI behavioral science agent Kenneth Lanning, one of the foremost experts on ritual crime in the United States, reviewed cases like the Perry murder and reached a conclusion that demolished decades of mythology. The Satanic appearance of crime scenes like the one inside Stanford Memorial Church was most often deliberate misdirection. Killers who arranged their victims in ritual patterns were not performing genuine rituals; they were fabricating a false narrative, steering investigators toward imaginary cults and away from the real perpetrator. In the Perry case, that smokescreen lasted forty-four years.
Steven Blake Crawford was born in 1946 in Los Angeles. He served in the United States Air Force, and after his discharge, he joined Stanford University in 1971 as a police officer in the Department of Public Safety. His position required carrying a firearm and came with real authority on campus. In 1972, a new police chief took over and initiated a reorganization that required every officer to reapply for their job.
Roughly three-quarters of the force did not get the position and were offered demotions to unarmed security guards. Crawford was one of them. He went from carrying a gun and a badge to patrolling campus buildings unarmed. According to journalist Scott Herhold, who covered this case for forty years, Crawford bitterly complained about his demotion.
He told friends he was intensely resentful of what the university had done to him. He remained at Stanford until 1976, two years after the murder, then left. But the resentment never faded. Over the following decades, Crawford slowly and methodically took revenge on Stanford.
He stole rare books from the university, between 200 and 300 volumes by different accounts. He took indigenous art and bronze statues. He took a human skull. He took a walking stick that had belonged to Leland Stanford himself, the university’s founder.
Most tellingly, Crawford obtained a blank Stanford diploma and had a print shop forge it in his name. The man told he was unfit to be a Stanford police officer decided to make himself a Stanford graduate. He was not stealing for profit. He was stealing pieces of the institution that had rejected him, collecting souvenirs from the place that had stripped him of his badge and gun.
In 1992, police finally linked Crawford to the stolen property and arrested him for possession of stolen goods. During the arrest, he told officers something that would stay with the Perry investigators for years. He said he stole from Stanford because he was angry, angry at the university for demoting him, and angry at investigators for treating him as a suspect in the murder. He portrayed himself as the victim.
He received a six-month suspended sentence, and that was the end of it. He returned to his apartment in San Jose and resumed his quiet, ordinary life. Those who knew Crawford through a folk dance group, one of his few social outlets, had a nickname for him: “the Trickster. ” He constantly told invented stories, including one about his parents dying together in a car crash when he was young.
It never happened; they died separately of natural causes when Crawford was in his early twenties. Crawford lived alone for decades in the Del Coronado apartments on Camden Avenue in San Jose. He never married and had no children. He lived on Social Security and retirement savings.
Neighbors described him as ordinary, if intensely private. He did not cause trouble. He kept his apartment clean. The investigator who finally broke the case was a man named Rick Atlas, who held the rank of sergeant and was later promoted to lieutenant.
Atlas took on the Perry case with a focus that went beyond professional duty. He kept a photo of Arlis Perry on his desk, where he could see it every day. He later said the photo was a constant reminder that her life mattered in this case. Atlas did what cold case investigators do.
He started over, not from theories, not from conspiracy angles, not from suspect files, but from the physical evidence itself. He reviewed every item in the case file. He looked at the evidence bags. He read the original processing notes.
He compared the inventory against the samples sent to the lab, and there he found it. The error that had obscured this case for more than four decades. The pants. The pants labeled as Arlis Perry’s clothing, which had been sent for DNA testing again and again over the years.
The pants every lab had analyzed, on which every investigator had pinned their hopes, were too large. They were not the pants of a nineteen-year-old woman. They were her husband’s pants, Bruce’s. Somewhere in the chain of custody, most likely in the chaos of processing the crime scene in October 1974, the couple’s pants had been mixed up, mislabeled, and logged under the wrong name.
From that moment on, every DNA test, every sample sent to the lab, every round of analysis by the cold case unit over the decades, had been performed on Bruce Perry’s clothing, not Arlis’s. The evidence that could have solved the case had been sitting in the evidence room the entire time. All it needed was the wrong label, nothing more. An administrative error from 1974 had cost a family forty-four years of searching for answers.
When Atlas sent Arlis’s actual clothing, the correct pants, for DNA analysis in 2016, using the most sensitive testing methods that had become available over the years, the results finally yielded useful information. The semen found on her clothing matched the DNA of Steven Blake Crawford. To be completely certain, and to rule out any possibility of contamination or coincidence, investigators collected DNA samples from other individuals who had been inside the church that night. All were excluded.
They also obtained Crawford’s DNA independently from a discarded item he had thrown away, confirming the match without relying on any samples already in the system. There was no ambiguity. After forty-two years of painstaking investigation, dead ends, failed tests, and conspiracy theories that sent the public chasing illusions, one investigator’s decision to reexamine the evidence with fresh eyes cracked the case wide open. Rick Atlas had done what forty-four years of investigation could not.
He had found the right pants, and they told a story that had been waiting to be told since 1974. The DNA on Arlis Perry’s clothing belonged to the man who claimed he found her body. The security guard. The one who refused the polygraph.
The one whose story changed every time he told it. The one who held the keys to every door in that church and knew exactly when it would be empty. By the spring of 2018, the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office had what they needed. The DNA match was conclusive.
The case against Steven Blake Crawford was strong enough to support his arrest and, according to Sheriff Laurie Smith, his conviction. On the morning of June 28, 2018, deputies from the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office went to the Del Coronado apartments on Camden Avenue in San Jose. Crawford was seventy-two years old. He had lived in the same apartment alone for decades.
Police were there to execute a search warrant. They approached Crawford’s apartment and knocked on the door. According to the official account from the San Jose Police Department, officers made verbal contact with a resident through the closed front door. When they attempted to enter, they saw Crawford inside holding a gun.
The officers immediately backed away. Shortly afterward, a single gunshot rang through the apartment complex. None of the officers fired. When they finally entered the apartment, they found Crawford dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
He was pronounced dead at the scene. Inside the apartment, investigators found two items that told their own story. The first was a suicide note placed on a computer table about a foot from Crawford’s bed. It was dated 2016, not 2018, two years earlier.
It was around the same time that investigator Atlas had been intensively re-interviewing Crawford and sending Arlis’s original clothing for DNA testing. Crawford had written the note, then lived with it for two more years, sleeping within a foot of it every night. The second item was found in a file containing financial papers. It was the cover of Maury Terry’s book, The Ultimate Evil, the bestselling book that had transformed the case into a decades-long conspiracy theory.
The real killer had kept the book’s cover in his apartment for years, possibly decades, tucked among bank statements and bills. Crawford died taking whatever remained of the truth about that October night in 1974 with him. There would be no interrogation, no trial, no testimony under oath, no chance for Arlis Perry’s family to sit in a courtroom and watch her killer face the consequences. That evening, Sheriff Laurie Smith held a press conference at the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office.
Standing before cameras and microphones, for the first time in forty-four years, she publicly named the killer. She described the crime as brutal and bloody. She said the DNA evidence was strong enough to issue an arrest warrant and that she believed Crawford would have been convicted had he lived to stand trial. She spoke about the investigation with a gravity that suggested this case was more than just work to her.
She talked about investigator Atlas and the photo of Arlis on his desk. Then she spoke the words that ended a forty-four-year chapter. “We finally reached the end of this investigation. The mystery of Arlis Perry’s murder has been solved.
The killer is the security guard. The man who was at the door of the church on October 13, 1974. The one who radioed in the body. The one who refused the polygraph.
The one who stole books and forged diplomas and lived quietly in San Jose for nearly half a century. He was the answer all along. ”
But resolution does not mean closure, not for a family that waited more than four decades for this moment. When the news broke, Arlis’s sister, Karen Barnes, spoke to journalists by phone from Bismarck.
Her reaction was a mixture of exhaustion and relief. “It’s about time,” she said. She added that she was not surprised by the killer’s identity because Crawford’s story had kept changing over the years. Their mother, June Dykema, was eighty-eight years old when the case was closed.
She told reporters she was heartbroken that the killer had not been caught earlier, that the investigation had dragged on while the perpetrator lived freely in his quiet San Jose apartment. Then there is a detail that makes this story almost unbearable. Arlis’s father, Marvin Dykema, spent decades carrying the burden of his youngest daughter’s unsolved murder. His final wish, the thing he wanted most at the end of his life, was to know who killed Arlis and why.
Marvin Dykema died in early 2018, about three months before the case was solved. He missed the answer by roughly ninety days. A man who waited forty-four years for justice for his daughter nearly lived to hear her killer’s name, but did not survive to see it. Bruce Perry’s path after the murder took an unexpected turn.
In the years following Arlis’s death, the young pre-med student from Bismarck threw himself into his studies with a focus that seemed born directly from his trauma. He earned both an M. D. and a Ph.
D. from Northwestern University. He became one of the world’s most respected child psychiatrists, specializing in the neuroscience of childhood trauma. He founded the Child Trauma Academy in Houston, Texas, and devoted his career to working with children who had survived some of the worst things the world can do.
He was called in after the Waco siege, after the Oklahoma City bombing, after the Columbine shooting. He wrote The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, a book about how trauma reshapes the developing brain, and partially dedicated it to Arlis’s memory. Years later, he co-authored a book with Oprah Winfrey titled What Happened to You? The man whose wife was murdered inside a church when he was nineteen spent his entire career trying to understand the impact of trauma on the human mind and help others overcome it.
In an interview years before the case was solved, Bruce reflected on the murder’s impact. He said: “I had to control what happened instead of letting it control me. ” He also said something that still resonates decades later, that once he finally accepted that death was part of life, the identity or nature of his wife’s killer mattered less. Bruce Perry never publicly spoke about the resolution of the case when the sheriff held her press conference in June 2018.
After forty-four years, he let the silence speak for itself. Questions remain. Crawford never confessed. His suicide note did not mention the murder.
Some of the original investigators reportedly doubted, even after the DNA match was confirmed, that Crawford was capable of such a violent and complex crime. The motive for the murder will likely remain uncertain forever. But the best theory comes from Scott Herhold, the journalist who covered the case for four decades. Herhold believed Arlis was not the intended target.
She was a victim of opportunity, killed by a man whose real grievance was with Stanford University itself. Crawford’s grievance was deep, from his demotion, to the stolen books, to the forged diploma, to the walking stick taken from the university’s founder. Every detail of Crawford’s biography points to a man consumed by resentment toward the place that had humiliated him. Herhold said he had always believed the crime was committed by an insider, because the staging took so long.
He said such a person would not be interrupted, and was confident he would not be. Crawford’s revenge against Stanford had taken many forms over the years: theft, fraud, deception. On one October night in 1974, inside a building he held the keys to, that revenge took a far worse shape. No Satanic cult.
No nationwide conspiracy. No Son of Sam connection. Just a bitter, dishonest man with a set of keys, a grudge against a university, and the certainty that no one would interrupt him inside the building he was supposed to be guarding. For forty-four years, Arlis Perry was a case number, a conspiracy theory, a chapter in someone else’s book about cults and serial killers.
She deserved better. She was a nineteen-year-old girl from Bismarck, North Dakota, a Sunday school teacher who wrote letters to her parents and walked into a church to pray on a Saturday night because she felt closer to God there. The building where she felt safe became the place where her life ended. The man paid to protect that building was the one who took it from her.
And her loved ones waited forty-four years for the world to speak his name. Arlis Perry. Born February 22, 1955, in Linton, North Dakota. Killed October 12, 1974, in Stanford, California.
Justice came on June 28, 2018.