BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — The case of an Indiana University student found murdered 46 years ago is getting national attention on the anniversary of her disappearance.
Ann Harmeier was a 20-year-old student heading back to college from her home in Cambridge City when her car broke down on SR 37 near Martinsville on Sept. 12, 1977. Her body was found five weeks later in a cornfield seven miles away.
Dateline NBC spoke with Harmeier's second cousin, Scott Burnham, putting a new spotlight on the cold case.
"I think that there's hope that her murder will be solved," he said.
Concern over Harmeier's whereabouts arose when she didn't attend a 10:30 a.m. class in Bloomington. She also hadn't called her mother when she got back to campus and calls to her off-campus apartment went unanswered.
"Ann was so diligent and she attended every class," Burnham told Dateline. "So it was unusual for her, obviously, not to be there."
Harmeier's mother, Marjorie, and a friend retraced her route to Bloomington and found her car locked, with her books and laundry inside. They called police to report something was wrong.
Police later determined Harmeier's car's radiator was out of water and had overheated.
“She actually made a couple of stops to some gas stations to have them look at it. And the last one she visited was only about 10 or so miles from the actual site where her car broke down,” Burnham said. “The police had apparently interviewed the individuals who had contact with Ann that morning and they apparently all checked out.”
Burnham told Dateline he thinks his cousin took a ride with someone willingly in order to get to her class at IU.
"I think if she was taken against her will, the car wouldn’t have been locked," he said.
The case made national headlines, appearing on NBC Nightly News in the weeks after Harmeier disappeared.
After Harmeier's body was found - police determined she had been strangled by a shoelace - Burnham said Marjorie Harmeier "had basically given up on living, much less devoting any energy on tracking down her killer."
His aunt died of brain cancer a couple years after her daughter's death.
Burnham said his family was led to believe a man named Steven Judy killed Harmeier. But Burnham said there's evidence that Judy - who was executed in 1981 for the April 1979 murders of Terry Chasteen and her three young children - was in jail at the time his cousin disappeared.
“It has become apparent to everyone that he knew nothing about Ann or the circumstances surrounding her death," Burnham told Dateline.
Decades later, Burnham decided to take another look into his cousin's murder after DNA evidence led to the arrest of the "Golden State Killer," Joseph DeAngelo.
He reached out to Indiana State Police, but was told since no one was ever charged in Harmeier's murder, the case was still open. Due to that fact, he was unable to gain access to the case files.
Working with colleagues, Burnham has built social media profiles dedicated to finding Harmeier's killer. Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly known as Twitter) accounts titled "Who Killed Ann" are written in Harmeier's voice in hopes of gaining attention for the case.
"She’s rather cheeky,” said Hannah Warren, one of Burnham's colleagues behind the accounts. “It’s rather different, which I think makes us stand out.”
While Burnham said he wants to find closure - and potentially justice - for his cousin, he's also hoping to raise money to fund a dedicated cold case unit to tackle the dozens of cold cases in Indiana.
“This wouldn’t just help Ann, but it would help a lot of people, especially women who were murdered whose crimes have gone unsolved because of who they were -- whether they were people of color, whether they were sex workers, whether they came from marginalized communities,” he said. “I know that’s something Ann would have wanted.”
While police say they can't release much information about an open investigation, they ask anyone with tips about Harmeier's murder to call Indiana State Police's Bloomington post at 812-332-4411.