In the late summer of 1973, a shadow fell over the sun-drenched communities of Broward County, Florida, as a serial killer began a brief but terrifying spree. The final victim of the man the press would dub the "Gold Sock Killer" was Marisue Curtis, a 16-year-old female high school student who had recently moved with her family to Hollywood from New York.
Her life, full of the promise of youth, was stolen on a warm August evening, leaving her family and the community grappling with a crime that remains unsolved decades later.
On the evening of Tuesday, August 28, 1973, Marisue was at her family’s apartment building at 901 South Surf Road. Around 8:00 p.m., wearing a swimsuit and a jacket, she went downstairs from her parents' apartment. She met up with friends, and after about thirty minutes, at 8:30 p.m., she told a friend she was heading back upstairs. It was the last time she was seen alive. She vanished in the short distance between the ground floor and her family's front door, a disappearance that happened in a window of mere minutes.
The next morning, the search for Marisue came to a devastating end. At approximately 7:00 a.m. on August 29, a construction worker at a site about six miles from her home made a grim discovery in the Intracoastal Waterway. Marisue’s nude body was submerged in the water, held down by two heavy concrete blocks. Around her neck was the killer's signature: a knotted black men's knee sock, the instrument of her strangulation. Her clothes were found nearby. An autopsy would later confirm she had been sexually assaulted.
Marisue was the third and final proven victim of a killer who terrorized Broward County for six weeks. His method was consistent and brutal: strangulation with a man's sock. The first victim, 42-year-old Jonina Gudjonsdottir Kelpein, was found on July 15, strangled with a gold-colored sock, which gave the killer his moniker. The second, 17-year-old Teresa Ann Williams, was found on August 8, a maroon sock tied around her neck. A 25-year-old woman also survived an attack on July 25, fighting off an intruder who tried to strangle her with a gold sock.
The investigation into the "Sock Strangler" killings involved a massive mobilization of law enforcement. Over 200 people were questioned, and dozens of polygraph tests were administered, but no definitive suspect emerged. The survivor of the July attack described her assailant as a slim, blonde-haired white man in his late teens or early twenties. Police did have a strong suspect at one point: a man convicted of strangling another woman with a scarf in February 1974. Investigators noted similarities, and he was questioned about the sock murders, but he was never charged in connection with them. One theory suggested a construction worker named Gary Jay Matus, who was employed at the site where Marisue's body was found, might be responsible, but not enough evidence existed to charge him.
The murder shattered the Curtis family. Her sister, Debbie Cantwell, expressed the family’s profound shock and grief to a reporter. "How does something like this happen?" she asked. "She wasn't a tramp. I can't understand it—something like this doesn't happen to good kids." The sentiment captured the horror of a family confronting an incomprehensible act of violence that had struck a "good kid" who was simply heading home.
Decades have passed, but the murder of Marisue Curtis remains officially unsolved, a cold case that stands as one of Broward County's most disturbing. The Gold Sock Killer was never caught, and the identity of the person who so brutally ended three lives in the summer of 1973 is still unknown. For the family of Marisue Curtis, there has been no justice and no closure, only the enduring pain of a life cut short and the haunting question of who was responsible.
