Dora Ferguson, 22, was last seen alive on August 22, 1979, walking along the Trans-Canada Highway in Island View, New Brunswick, in the Fredericton area. After that sighting, she disappeared without explanation. Although some later summaries associate her case with Hanwell, available online accounts consistently identify Island View as the place where she was last seen.
The available sources do not establish October 2, 1979, as the date of her death; the precise date on which she was killed has not been publicly determined.
For nearly seventeen years, there was no publicly reported resolution to Ferguson's disappearance. The case changed dramatically on April 21, 1996, when a man walking along the Valley Trail just outside Fredericton discovered skeletal human remains inside a garbage bag. Investigators subsequently identified the remains as Ferguson's and determined that she had been murdered. The condition and location of the remains indicated that her disappearance had been a homicide investigation rather than a case in which she had simply left the area voluntarily.
Publicly available case information provides few details about how Ferguson was killed, where the killing itself occurred, or how long her remains had been at the location where they were eventually discovered. No publicly available source located identifies a specific cause of death, murder weapon, or circumstances immediately preceding her killing beyond the fact that she was last observed walking along the Trans-Canada Highway. The long interval between her disappearance in 1979 and the discovery of her remains in 1996 left investigators dealing with a case in which many years had already passed before her fate was conclusively established.
No named suspect has been publicly identified in the sources located, and there is no indication that anyone has been arrested, charged, tried, or convicted for Ferguson's murder. The case continues to be described as unsolved, with the New Brunswick RCMP Major Crime Unit seeking information that could help investigators identify the person responsible.
Ferguson's case therefore remains an unresolved New Brunswick homicide: she vanished while walking beside a major highway in August 1979, her whereabouts remained unknown for almost seventeen years, and her remains were eventually recovered concealed in a garbage bag along a trail near Fredericton. Identification of those remains finally answered what had happened to Ferguson in the broadest sense—she had been murdered—but publicly available information has yet to reveal who killed her or bring about an arrest or conviction.
