A young mother is assaulted and killed by a potentially known assailant In the quiet community of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, the morning of January 8, 1992, began like any other for 29-year-old Elena Sanchez Hawkins, a mother of two young boys. Her husband, Michael, had left for his job at a local convenience store, leaving Elena to get their oldest son ready for the school bus. The normalcy of the day was shattered when Michael's attempts to reach his wife by phone went unanswered. A second call around 10 a.m.
was answered by his three-year-old son, who uttered the chilling words, 'mommy's bleeding.'
Rushing home, Michael discovered a horrific scene in their living room. Elena had been brutally murdered. She had been sexually assaulted, her hands were bound, and her throat had been slit. Her cause of death was determined to be extreme blood loss. Miraculously, her young son who had been in the house at the time was physically unharmed. Investigators found no signs of forced entry, leading them to believe that Elena may have known her attacker. Her husband was quickly ruled out as a suspect.
The investigation into Elena’s murder uncovered a few leads, but the case grew cold. A neighbor reported seeing an older model black Datsun pickup truck with a distinctive metal topper and tie-down hooks leaving the Hawkins' residence around 7:30 a.m. that morning, but the vehicle and its driver were never located. Before her death, Elena had told her husband about a man at the gas station where she worked who had made her feel uncomfortable with his strange looks.
Years later, in 2008, a glimmer of hope emerged in the cold case. In a neighboring county, a woman survived a strikingly similar attack; she had been sexually assaulted and her throat was cut. She identified her attacker as her neighbor, Ernest D. Pine, a retired military man with no prior criminal record. It was discovered that Pine had been living in Elizabethtown at the time of Elena's murder. Despite the chilling similarities between the two crimes, and being named a person of interest, it is unclear if Pine was ever formally questioned or charged in connection with Elena Sanchez Hawkins' murder. Her case remains unsolved.
