MARYVILLE, MO — The trail that investigators hoped for decades would lend them to the killer who committed one of Maryville’s most sensational homicides has long since grown cold.
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Teresa Sue “Tess” Hilt has been dead for so long that most people in Nodaway County may never even have heard of the young NWMSU graduate student found brutally murdered in her Maryville apartment. Hilt’s body was found on Saturday, Aug. 4, 1973. The petite, blonde 22-year-old music student from Chillicothe had been stabbed multiple times, but apparently died from strangulation. Her mother says that Tess’ thesis for her Master’s degree was on alcohol and mental health, and that she often stayed out late doing real-world research for such.
A blood-stained pairing knife was found near the body, and a nylon stocking was tied around the victim’s throat.
The killing made headlines in the long-defunct Kansas City Times and other newspapers across the state, but the killer vanished. To this day authorities are unsure if the murderer was a man or a woman.
A former NWMSU classmate, Michael Holmes of Kansas City, has attempted to refocus on the case as an amateur sleuth. He created a Facebook site and invites anyone with information about the murder to tell it to him. The site, which claims thousands of hits, also advertises a $5,000 reward. Holmes was on campus at Northwest in 1970 and was among those who found Tess friendly.
Maryville Director of Public Safety Keith Wood says the case was long cold when he arrived in Maryville in 1989. Still local authorities continue an interest to solve the case. Wood and former investigator Randy Strong even traveled to the FBI training facility in Quantico, Va., to study profiling techniques and personality clues they hoped might lead them to the killer. That effort, like dozens of others over the decades, proved fruitless.