Some people seem to carry an uncommon certainty about what their lives are meant to serve.
They are not drawn to the safest road or the most comfortable future. They move toward the places where they believe they are needed, even when others struggle to understand the choice.
Michele Dinwiddie was one of those people.
Her compassion led her into a life very different from the one others had imagined for her—and into a story that would leave her family grieving, investigators searching, and a city confronting questions that extended far beyond a single crime.
“SHE WAS THE BEST OF US”
Michele Dinwiddie decided to volunteer with an agency called Volunteers in Service for America, or VISTA. It was a newly launched government organization, a domestic version of the Peace Corps. VISTA focused on volunteers fighting poverty in some of the nation’s poorest communities.
Michele was assigned to St. Louis, where urban decay and violent crime was growing by the day. Her parents did their best to talk her out of it. Grad school was waiting, they lobbied, a very good job would surely follow, VISTA did not pay anything besides bare expenses, and she was heading into an unknown and possibly very dangerous environment. Surely, she was capable of much more.
Michele would have none of it. VISTA provided her with $200 a month for living expenses. It was not much, but Michele did not care. She found used furniture. She refused financial help from her parents and friends. Her sister Pam remembered hearing Michele’s voice when she called home.
“She was so very proud of what she was doing,” Pam recalled. “She was making a real difference in people’s lives. People who really needed her help. She was thrilled.”
It was a brutally cold March, 1975 day. The temperature dipped to 17 degrees, with the wind whipping off the Mississippi River. When Michele did not report to work that morning, a worried co-worker went looking for her, and headed to her apartment at 3933 North 21st street, Apartment A, second floor. Inside was her body, dressed only with socks. Her throat was slashed and she had been stabbed twice in the chest and once in the abdomen. There was no forced entry, and nothing of significance was missing.
Soon, police had a suspect. An eighth grade boy named Danny Williams, who eventually admitted that he was there the night Michele was killed, but denied that he was the killer. Charges never came. But this story does not end here. Sadly, it only begins. As the years unfolded, Williams would come to be the prime suspect in numerous other St. Louis area murders.
Read Michele’s full story and discover the other unforgettable cases in 25 Frozen, 1 Thawed, available now from Genius Books.
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