Do you know who killed Teresa Angela Cash in 1987? Teresa Angela Cash, a 23-year-old African-American woman from Washington, DC, was killed on Tuesday, October 13, 1987, when she was stabbed to death inside a house in the 3400 block of 23rd Street SE. Police and later public records place her death firmly on that date and at that address, describing the case as a homicide and noting that she was attacked inside the home rather than on the street.
Genealogical records list her birth as September 16, 1964, and confirm that she died in October 1987 at the age of twenty-three, aligning with the law-enforcement timeline of her killing.
The official description of the crime is stark and spare. It notes only that on that Tuesday, Teresa was stabbed to death in a house on 23rd Street SE, a residential stretch in Southeast Washington, and that detectives from the Metropolitan Police Department's Homicide Branch took up the investigation. Later summaries of the case refer to the address as her Washington, DC home, but provide no public details about who else, if anyone, was present, how the assailant entered the residence, or what kind of confrontation preceded the attack. The violence is captured in a single line on the police flyer and on online case write-ups, leaving the circumstances inside that house largely to the silence of the record.
Her death unfolded during a period when Washington, DC was struggling with a sharp rise in lethal violence. A comprehensive study of homicides in the District covering January 1985 through mid-1988 describes a city where killings were climbing, where most victims were young and disproportionately Black, and where many homicides involved weapons and disputes that escalated quickly. In those years, stabbings accounted for a significant share of the killings, even as shootings remained the most common method, and officials spoke openly of homicide as both a criminal-justice crisis and a public-health emergency that threatened families and neighborhoods across the city. Against that backdrop, Teresa's killing became one more name in a long list of victims, her story briefly summarized in official documents even as the personal details of her life went largely unrecorded in the public file.
The Metropolitan Police Department classified the case as a major unsolved homicide and added her name to its “Major Case/Unsolved Homicides – 1971–1990” list, where she appears with the notation “October 13, 1987; 3400 block of 23rd St., SE.” From there, her case was also featured on a dedicated MPD homicide-victim page, a standing appeal for information that reiterates that she was stabbed to death in the house on that block and asks anyone with knowledge to contact investigators. A reward poster, reproduced online, offers up to $25,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of whoever is responsible, listing the police Synchronized Operations Command Center phone number and an email address for unsolved murders. The continuing presence of her name and photograph on these official platforms decades later underscores that, for the department, her killing remains an open investigation.
Public memorialization has preserved her memory in a different way. A cemetery record on a national gravesite database shows a memorial for Teresa Angela Cash at National Harmony Memorial Park in Hyattsville, Maryland, a suburban cemetery just outside the District line. That entry, created many years after her death, situates her among thousands of other graves but singles her out with her full name, years of birth and death, and a dedicated page where visitors can leave virtual flowers and remembrances. Together with the police flyers, it forms a kind of split legacy: one part an appeal for justice, the other a marker of a young life cut short.
Despite the passage of time, there is no public indication that the investigation has ever produced an arrest. Law-enforcement materials continue to describe the case as unsolved, and major true-crime and cold-case databases that track Teresa's homicide likewise state that her killer has never been identified. None of the official MPD pages, the reward flyer, or the independent case summaries name a suspect, discuss a motive, or mention charges being filed. Instead, they repeat the same essential plea: that anyone who knows what happened in that house on 23rd Street SE on October 13, 1987, come forward and share what they know, so that the unanswered questions surrounding Teresa Angela Cash's death might finally be resolved.
