Do you know who murdered Cathryn Tighe? In the winter of 1983, a sense of unease settled over Las Vegas as the community grappled with the mysterious disappearance of a young woman. On the afternoon of February 7th, 17-year-old Caucasian female Cathryn Tighe, a junior at Chaparral High School, vanished after her classes ended for the day. She had made plans with a friend for a ride home, but she never appeared at their designated meeting spot.
As hours turned into a day and then weeks, her family's worry grew into a heart-wrenching certainty that something terrible had happened to the quiet and polite teenager.
Nearly a month after she was last seen, the search for Cathryn came to a grim conclusion. On the morning of March 2, 1983, a man collecting cans in a desert lot near Boulder Highway discovered her partially clothed body hidden under a bush. The Clark County Coroner's Office would later determine that she had been sexually assaulted and her life taken by manual strangulation. Investigators believed she was likely killed within a couple of hours of her abduction. The tragic discovery confirmed the community's worst fears and left a family devastated by the loss of their daughter.
The investigation into Cathryn's murder was fraught with challenges from the very beginning. Detectives had very little evidence to work with, and no witnesses had seen anything suspicious on the day she disappeared. One of the homicide detectives on the case, Dave Hatch, would later recall the frustration of having a crime that seemed to begin and end at the scene itself. He lamented that Cathryn was just a kid walking home from school who never made it. Despite their efforts, the case went cold, and for years, there were no significant leads or arrests.
Over the years, a couple of names surfaced as potential persons of interest, though nothing definitive ever materialized. One was Herbert James Coddington, who was arrested in 1987 for other murders and had lived in Las Vegas during the time of Cathryn's death. However, detectives did not believe he was responsible. Another individual, Johnny Blake Peterson, was later identified through DNA evidence as the killer of another young woman, Kim Bryant, in a strikingly similar case from 1979. Police considered Peterson's possible involvement in several other unsolved murders in the area, but a direct link to Cathryn's case was never established. To this day, the murder of Cathryn Tighe remains unsolved, a lingering shadow in the history of Las Vegas, and no one has ever been charged with her death.
