Tracy Kirkpatrick

Tracy Lynn Kirkpatrick was a funny, smart, and feisty 17-year-old with a quiet and compassionate side. Born on June 9, 1971, to Bill and Diane Kirkpatrick, she was the third of four siblings and grew up in Point of Rocks, Maryland, after the family relocated from Ohio. Tracy, a female honors student in her final year at Brunswick High School, maintained a GPA between 3.5 and 4.0 and had her future meticulously planned. She expressed her introspective nature through writing poetry, with one of her pieces about loneliness being published in the New American Poetry Anthology. Determined to be independent, she used her own money to buy a 10-year-old Pontiac Grand Prix and worked two part-time jobs to save for college. Her dream was to attend St. Mary’s University to study accounting and then go to law school, hoping to one day become a lawyer for those who couldn't afford one.

On the evening of Wednesday, March 15, 1989, Tracy was working her first solo closing shift at Aileen's Ladies Sportswear in the Westridge Shopping Center in Frederick, Maryland. Her mother, Diane, stopped by around 6:00 p.m. to bring her dinner and found her daughter alone, reading a book. Tracy’s manager visited the store around 8:00 p.m., and sales records showed no transactions after that time. At 9:00 p.m., a security guard noticed the store's lights were still on but thought little of it. By 10:30 p.m., however, the lights remained on and the front door was unlocked. The guard, Don Barnes Jr., entered the store to investigate. He called out but received no answer. In the back storeroom, he discovered Tracy's lifeless body. She had been stabbed multiple times in the chest and back.

When Tracy didn't come home, her parents drove to the shopping center, fearing she had car trouble. They arrived around 11:15 p.m. to a scene filled with police cars and soon learned their daughter had been killed. The Frederick Police Department investigation found no signs of forced entry, robbery, or sexual assault. Cash was still in the register and on the counter, though Tracy's purse was missing. Investigators believed the killer was likely someone Tracy knew, as she had no defensive wounds, but they couldn't rule out a transient. The initial investigation was hampered by several missteps, including a failure to immediately seize the back doors through which the killer may have fled and not subpoenaing the store's phone records before they were erased.

The case went cold for three months until a bizarre phone call recharged the investigation. A man identifying himself as "Don" called a nationwide confession hotline in Las Vegas. In the recorded message, he claimed to be from Frederick, Maryland, and confessed to the murder. "The girl I killed was working in a ladies sportswear store," the voice said. "I often came by and talked to her when she was working alone, and one night when she was in the storeroom and we were talking, our conversation turned into an argument. And so I took out a knife I have with me at all times, and I killed her." The caller expressed remorse but said he would not turn himself in because of Maryland's death penalty.

Police traced the call to a supermarket in Walkersville, Maryland, just eight miles from the crime scene. Two weeks later, a psychic from Massachusetts, Martha Woodworth, contacted police. She reported that a young man calling himself "Sean" had been obsessively contacting her about Tracy's murder. He sent her newspaper clippings about the case, and the return address was in Walkersville. When police played the "Don" confession tape for the psychic, she identified the voice as "Sean." The man, who was not named Don or Sean, was identified and questioned after several people recognized his voice from a local radio broadcast of the tape. However, a search of his home yielded no conclusive evidence linking him to the crime scene, and he was eventually cleared as a suspect.

Over the decades, Tracy's family has never stopped seeking justice. Her mother, Diane, has expressed her enduring pain and hope. "Did someone have it against her so much that they would do something like that to her?" she once asked. "She never did anything to hurt anybody." Tracy was laid to rest in Oak Grove Cemetery in Pennsylvania. Her family has held vigils to keep her memory alive in a community that has grown and changed significantly since the shocking crime occurred.

As of February 2023, more than three decades after her death, no arrests have been made in the murder of Tracy Kirkpatrick. The case remains an open, unsolved cold case with the Frederick Police Department. "There has to be someone who’s seen something," her mother has pleaded, "someone coming from that store, running from that store or leaving that store or who heard something." Anyone with information about the murder of Tracy Kirkpatrick is asked to call the Frederick Police Department at 301-600-2102.