On a spring day, April 22, 1984, the life of 14-year-old White female Leslie Shelley was tragically cut short. Shelley, a resident of Griswold, Connecticut, was in the company of her friend, April Brunais, also 14, as they walked home from the movies. Their journey was violently interrupted when they were abducted.
The two teenagers were taken by Michael Bruce Ross, a serial killer who was active in the area during the early 1980s. Ross drove them to Beach Pond in Rhode Island.
There, he bound both girls. After sexually assaulting Brunais, he strangled both Shelley and her friend. Ross then concealed their bodies in the trunk of his car and drove back to Connecticut, where he left them in a culvert in Preston.
The investigation into the disappearance of the two girls eventually led to Michael Ross. Witness descriptions of a man and his vehicle seen near the abduction of another victim, Wendy Baribeault, in June 1984, were crucial in identifying Ross as a suspect. He would later confess to the murders of eight young women, including Leslie Shelley and April Brunais. Ross was convicted for the murders of Shelley, Brunais, and two other victims on June 26, 1987, and was subsequently sentenced to death. After numerous appeals, Michael Bruce Ross was executed by lethal injection on May 13, 2005. For two decades, Leslie's parents, Edwin and Lera Shelley, waited for justice for their daughter.
