The disappearance and death of 23-year-old Texas Christian University graduate Cindy Heller remains one of Fort Worth’s most haunting unsolved murders, 41 years after she vanished from the city’s southwest side.
On October 23, 1984, Heller left a dance studio and went to a restaurant. She never returned home.
Police would later find her car abandoned and scorched at the Hunter’s Ridge Apartments (now called The Retreat at River Ranch) on River Ranch Road; its door handle smeared with blood.
More than two months later, on January 5, 1985, children playing near the TCU Physical Maintenance Plant discovered partial remains of the beauty pageant contestant in a nearby ravine. Medical examiners later identified the body as Heller’s.
She had been strangled, and, according to reports, appeared to have been tortured.
Cindy Heller
Her murder was one of several that terrorized Fort Worth between the fall of 1984 and early 1985, in a string of killings that drew national attention and left police struggling to determine whether the city was being stalked by a single killer or several.
Authorities at the time linked Heller’s case to a broader pattern of disappearances of young women, many of them blonde, in their twenties, and last seen in the Wedgwood and southwest Fort Worth areas.
In the weeks surrounding the discovery of Heller’s body, police formed a 30-to-40-member task force to investigate what one Associated Press report called a “frenzy” gripping the city. Officers combed fields, ravines, and creeks while the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office worked to identify skeletal remains found by construction crews and children near the TCU campus.
Fort Worth residents, particularly women, were reportedly gripped by fear.
A New York Times account from January 1985 described how more than 3,000 people—most of them women—crowded into a police-sponsored self-defense seminar. “The women in this town are really scared,” said Officer Ray Dunaway, one of the instructors.
Heller, a native of Glencoe, Illinois, had graduated from TCU in 1983 and was remembered by friends as vivacious and kind, a former Miss Fort Worth pageant competitor who “had the face and figure of a model,” according to a contemporary Associated Press report.
Her parents, Mark and Peggy Heller, offered a $50,000 reward for information leading to an arrest—a large sum at the time that brought the total reward pool for the related cases near $60,000. Adjusted for inflation, this sum would be worth $180,655.76 today.
Police never charged anyone in Heller’s murder. As of 2025, the case remains open under the Tarrant County Cold Case program.
The spate of killings in southwest Fort Worth during that period remains one of the city’s darkest chapters. Victims included Catherine Davis, whose burned apartment drew attention months before her body was discovered; Angela Ewert, a radio employee who vanished while driving home; and Lisa Griffin, a waitress found shot to death near railroad tracks.
Authorities at the time debated whether the women were targeted by a serial killer or whether their deaths were part of several separate crimes.
“We’re trying to piece this puzzle together and look for common denominators,” said Sgt. Jim Rutledge, one of the lead homicide investigators, per the AP. “All we know now is that they were young, female, single, model types and all apparently were abducted from the same part of town.”
Despite several arrests in the other cases, none unraveled the mystery of Heller’s death.
By early 1985, Fort Worth police had reviewed more than 30 unsolved killings dating back to the 1960s for possible connections. The TCU area, once known for its tranquility, became the center of the investigation, and for months afterward, students and residents reportedly carried tear gas and stun guns for protection, per a report from UPI.
More than four decades later, Heller’s case continues to stand out—not only for its brutality, but for the fear it spread through a city unaccustomed to serial violence.
As the anniversary of her disappearance approaches on October 23, Fort Worth police still list Cindy Heller’s murder as unsolved. Her name endures on the Fort Worth Police Cold Case website, where investigators continue to appeal for new information that could finally bring justice to her family.
Anyone with information about the murder of Cindy Heller is urged to contact the Fort Worth Police Cold Case Unit’s Detective Jed Miller at 817-392-4199 or Detective Jeff Bennett at 817-392-4308.
Articles cited in this story were recovered from the Lexis Nexis archive.