On a summer day in 1979, the life of 32-year-old Rulan McGill was tragically cut short. On July 10th, she had driven to Reno, Nevada, from her home in Sparks for a dental appointment and some shopping. When she failed to return home, her family grew worried and reported her missing the following day. A search began, and two days after she was last seen, her car was discovered abandoned behind a warehouse.
The heartbreaking discovery of her body came the next morning, when her stepfather and uncle found her in a nearby ditch. The investigation revealed that Rulan had been kidnapped, robbed, sexually assaulted, and stabbed to death. For years, the case remained cold, a painful mystery for her loved ones and the community, with no suspects identified.
The silence in the case was finally broken nearly two decades later. In 1996, an inmate in a California prison, Terry Childs, began to confess to a string of murders he had committed in the late 1970s. Childs, who was already serving a 41-year sentence for the 1987 murder of a 17-year-old girl, claimed responsibility for eleven other killings across California, Washington, and Nevada. One of these was the murder of Rulan McGill. Childs provided details about the crime that only the perpetrator could have known, corroborating the evidence that investigators had collected from the scene years earlier. His confession was the lead that Nevada authorities had been waiting for, finally bringing a name to the individual responsible for Rulan's death.
Following his confession, the Washoe County grand jury indicted Terry Childs for the first-degree murder of Rulan McGill. He was extradited to Nevada to face trial. The legal proceedings resulted in a conviction, and Childs received an additional life sentence for Rulan's murder. It was revealed that his motive for confessing to this and other crimes was to avoid a transfer to a higher-security prison in California. The resolution of the case, though long-delayed, brought a measure of closure to a community that had been shaken by the brutal crime. The investigation into Rulan McGill's murder is a stark example of how a cold case can be solved years later by a break, in this instance a confession from a serial killer already behind bars for other violent offenses.
