A woman goes missing, her body is found 4 days later On Christmas Eve of 1979, 20-year-old Brenda Joi Bancroft, a white female, left her parents' home on Thalia Drive in Virginia Beach, Virginia, to attend a holiday party. Her father's last words to her were a caution to 'be careful.' She was driving her bright orange 1978 Datsun B-210 and was expected to return later that evening. The party was held at Admiral Nick's Restaurant on Shore Drive in Norfolk.
When she didn't come home, her family grew worried and filed a missing persons report.
Four days later, on December 28, 1979, Brenda's car mysteriously reappeared at her apartment complex in the 500 block of Spring Lake Crescent. Her mother and a family friend made the grim discovery of her body inside the vehicle. She was found stuffed upside down on the passenger side of her car. The state medical examiner determined that the cause of death was suffocation, and her death was officially ruled a homicide. Brenda was a graduate of Princess Anne High School and worked as an assistant director of personnel at First Virginia Bank in Norfolk, while also holding a part-time job at a Domino's Pizza in Virginia Beach.
Despite the passage of many years, Brenda's murder remains one of Virginia Beach's 62 unresolved cold case homicides. In a Virginian-Pilot article from December 1980, police stated they believed they knew who was responsible for her death but lacked the evidence to make an arrest. The person of interest was a college student who knew Brenda from her job at Domino's and had also been at the Christmas Eve party. This individual hired a prominent defense attorney and, on his counsel, refused to take a polygraph test. The attorney claimed his client had been so intoxicated that he couldn't remember anything from the night of the party after 10 p.m.
No arrests have ever been made in connection with the murder of Brenda Joi Bancroft, and her family continues to await justice. In 2019, her family provided DNA samples in the hope that forensic genetic genealogy could help identify a suspect, but so far, there have been no new developments in the case.
