Denise Evans, a 15-year-old white female from Wilmington, Delaware, vanished on the evening of Friday, October 24, 1975, after leaving her north-side neighborhood with a school friend. By the next day, the search ended in tragedy: around midday on Saturday, October 25, hunters in rural Lower Alloways Creek Township in Salem County, New Jersey—roughly 40 miles from Wilmington—found two bodies lying close together in a marshy clearing.
The victims were identified as 15-year-old Denise Evans and her 15-year-old friend, Carolyn Hedgepeth. Both had been shot, their killings described in contemporary accounts as execution-style.
Investigators quickly focused on the interstate nature of the crime—two teenagers disappearing from Wilmington and turning up across the Delaware River in a remote corner of southern New Jersey. The remoteness of Lower Alloways Creek's marshlands complicated the early canvass for witnesses or physical evidence, and no one reported seeing an abduction in Delaware the night the girls disappeared. The bodies were discovered less than 24 hours after the girls were last seen, suggesting a rapid transport out of state and a swift, deliberate attack.
Within days, New Jersey authorities arrested serial offender Robert Reldan in connection with separate New Jersey murders that month. Over time, some reports and true-crime compendiums noted parallels in timing and method and listed Denise Evans and Carolyn Hedgepeth among killings suspected—but never charged—against Reldan. Despite the conjecture, prosecutors did not file charges against him for the Salem County double homicide, and no one has been held accountable in court for Denise's murder. The case remains officially unsolved.
The sparse record that survives in public sources underscores how abruptly the crime unfolded and how little could be reconstructed from that marsh clearing: two 15-year-old friends from Wilmington gone after nightfall on October 24; two bodies recovered in New Jersey by midday October 25; gunshot wounds described as execution-style; and decades without an arrest. For Denise Evans, a 15-year-old white female, the unanswered questions have endured as long as the tidal grasses along Alloway Creek.
