A woman whose death was feared to be connected to the Manson family slayings was identified late past year as a Canadian teenager, but Los Angeles police detectives still have no concrete evidence linking the vicious stabbing death to the series of slayings carried out by Charles Manson and his followers in 1969, LAPD investigators said Wednesday.
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The woman has been identified as Reet Jurvetson, a 19-year-old Swedish woman who moved from Montreal to Los Angeles the same year she was killed, CBS News reported.
On the afternoon of November 16, 1969, a birdwatcher spotted the body of a young woman tangled in dense brush off of Los Angeles’ scenic Mulholland Drive.
Detective Luis Rivera, who interviewed Manson about the Jurvetson killing, said: “We can’t rule out that the Manson Family was involved”.
The break in the case came last June when a friend of Reet searching crime websites saw her post-mortem photograph and called Reet’s sister, who then contacted law enforcement.
Manson, 81, became notorious in 1969 as the leader of a “family” of young killers that terrified Los Angeles.
Anne said Reet was “free-spirited” and “happy”, heading to Los Angeles to meet up with “John”, and says she sent a postcard about finding an apartment, but was never heard from again, according to People.
Jurvetson was actually from Montreal and had traveled to Los Angeles to meet up with an acquaintance of hers.
Tate was killed in her home, along with four other people three months before Jurvetson’s death.
Her parents never reported her missing because “they thought that she was just living her life somewhere”, Anne Jurvetson said.
Due to the location and timing of Jurvetson’s death, investigators early on honed in on another potential culprit in the case: the Manson Family. Ms Jurvetson met the man in Toronto before flying to Los Angeles to see him the summer of 1969, he said. “My little sister was savagely killed”, Anne told People.
Though detectives haven’t found any concrete link between Jurvetson’s murder and the Manson family killings, they can’t rule it out either, Rivera said.
Cold case LAPD detective Luis Rivera told People magazine that they can not rule out that the Manson family were involved.
People magazine also reported Wednesday that the woman found stabbed to death in 1969 and thought to be a possible victim of followers of mass murderer Charles Manson has been identified after almost 50 years.
She added they thought “eventually news from her would turn up”.
“It is such a sad, helpless kind of feeling to always question, to never know”.
“She was deeply loved by both family and friends”, her sister wrote.
She described Ms Jurvetson as intelligent and vivacious, and said she was distraught to finally learn how her friend had died. “Now that we know who she is, we go back and try to track her steps”. All but one of the victims had been stabbed to death.
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Police are now working to solve the murder, with Rivera saying: “No one deserves what happened to her”.
