Do you know who murdered Audrey Hamilton? On a late Saturday night in August of 1993, 18-year-old Audrey Hamilton finished her shift at a McDonald's in southeast Washington, D.C. An aspiring model and beautician, she was working to make ends meet. Feeling tired, she told her friends at work that she was heading home around midnight. Aware of the dangers of walking alone through the Congress Heights neighborhood, a journey of several blocks, she carried an empty glass bottle for protection as she made her way from the restaurant on
Martin Luther King Avenue towards her home on Mississippi Avenue.
Tragically, Audrey never made it home. The next morning, on Sunday, August 29, 1993, her body was discovered by a maintenance man behind a decrepit apartment building in the 600 block of Savannah Street, SE, near Ballou High School. She had been raped and murdered. An autopsy would later confirm that she had been strangled. The discovery of the young woman sent a chill through the community and launched a homicide investigation by the Metropolitan Police Department.
Witnesses reported seeing a man, described as being about five feet six inches tall and weighing around 120 pounds, approach Audrey, put his arm around her, and walk away with her. Moments later, a second man was seen in the vicinity, leading police to believe that at least two people may have been involved in the assault. Despite these initial leads, the case grew cold over the years, becoming one of the city's many unsolved homicides. Police have long believed that someone in the neighborhood holds information that could be crucial to solving the case and have periodically appealed to the public for assistance.
Two months after Audrey's murder, the body of another woman, Deborah McManus, was found beaten and strangled behind the same high school. The similarities in the cases led investigators to consider the possibility of a connection. Decades later, in 2022, an arrest was made in the McManus case, charging a Southeast D.C. man with her murder. However, it has not been publicly confirmed if this individual is considered a suspect in Audrey Hamilton's death. Audrey's case officially remains unsolved, a painful and lingering mystery for her family and the community.
