2 women, in town for a convention, are found murdered in Chesapeake Bay Joan Zwingman, a 26-year-old White woman, was in Virginia Beach in mid-August 1983 on a work-related trip, traveling from New Jersey alongside her friend and colleague Christine Pilczak. By the evening of August 18, the two women were seen alive, and then—suddenly—they vanished into the warm, crowded tide of a resort city that had no reason to expect the night would end in tragedy.
The next day, Friday, August 19, 1983, the Chesapeake Bay gave them back.
After pilot boat operators spotted two bodies floating in the water, the Coast Guard recovered them and brought them to the Coast Guard Station on Ferry Road. The scene was stark and unmistakable: two young women, far from home, found not on a shoreline but adrift—discovered by chance, as though the bay itself had decided the secret could not be held any longer.
Investigators noted details that deepened the mystery. Neither woman was dressed for swimming, and both had injuries that suggested something happened before they died. Their bodies were sent to the State Medical Examiner’s Office for autopsy. The conclusion was grim: both women died by drowning, and the deaths were ruled a homicide.
As detectives tried to reconstruct the final hours, the physical evidence pointed toward the watercraft that crisscross those Hampton Roads waterways. Reporting on the case has described autopsy findings consistent with the women being run over by a boat propeller, and investigators theorized the killer may have been a local boater—someone confident enough to move through the bay at night and disappear back into the dark without drawing attention.
Decades later, the case remains unsolved, with the suspect listed as unknown and no public record of charges or convictions tied to the killings. The Virginia Beach Police Department continues to keep the case among its cold-case homicides, holding onto the hope that what was missed, minimized, or never spoken in 1983 might still be remembered by someone—and finally said out loud.
