Do you know who killed Harry Dick in 1971? On May 19, 1971, Harry Dick, a male resident of Washington, DC, was killed by strangulation inside an establishment located on the 1700 block of 20th Street Northwest, a busy corridor in the city’s Dupont Circle area. Police records describe the crime in stark, minimal terms: he was found dead within that business on that date, and the manner of death was strangulation, leaving little doubt that he was the victim of a deliberate homicide rather than an accident or medical event.
What is publicly known about the immediate aftermath of the killing comes almost entirely from later police summaries and cold-case notices. Those brief accounts indicate that the Metropolitan Police Department’s Homicide Branch took over the investigation, treating the establishment itself and the surrounding block of 20th Street NW as the central crime scene. The sparse wording of these official notices suggests that few details about the circumstances inside the business have ever been released—no description of a struggle, no mention of witnesses, and no indication of a specific weapon beyond the fact of manual or ligature strangulation. Over time, the case slipped away from daily headlines, resurfacing mainly in compilations of unsolved killings from the 1970s.
Decades later, the homicide remains officially open and unresolved. The Metropolitan Police Department continues to list the case as an unsolved homicide and has circulated a public bulletin offering a reward of up to $25,000 for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of whoever was responsible for Harry Dick’s death. The bulletin explicitly appeals to the public for help, directing anyone with information to contact the department’s Command Information Center or submit anonymous tips, underscoring that investigators still lack the crucial evidence needed to bring someone to justice.
No publicly available records indicate that any suspect has ever been arrested, charged, or named in connection with the strangulation inside the 20th Street establishment. The language used in both the official MPD posting and associated cold-case listings—continuing requests for information, placement among other unsolved homicides, and the standing reward—collectively points to a case that has never seen a definitive break. More than half a century after that day in May 1971, Harry Dick’s death endures in the public record not as a closed chapter, but as a lingering question mark in Washington, DC’s long history of unsolved violent crimes, awaiting the fragment of information that might finally reveal who was in that establishment with him when his life was taken and why.
