Do you know who murdered Marquerita Smith? On September 20, 1982, Asian / Pacific Islander, Marquerita Smith, a 40-year-old woman from Anchorage, Alaska, was found dead, her death classified as a homicide by force. Public case listings identify her by the municipal case number 82-12279 and record both her discovery and death on that same date, fixing the timeline to a single day in early fall 1982.
Across the decades since, the file has remained unresolved.
Contemporary case summaries mark the investigation as open and unsolved, and community-facing pages continue to solicit any fragment of information that might clarify how Marquerita Smith died, where exactly she was in her final hours, and who was responsible. Because of its age, the case has long been the kind typically reviewed within Alaska's cold-case framework, which was formalized with a Cold Case Investigative Unit to support work on older homicides.
No arrests have been announced, and no suspect or person of interest has been publicly named in connection with the killing of 40-year-old Marquerita Smith. The surviving public notices about her case are stark and spare—little more than the date, city, and confirmation that investigators have treated her death as homicide—accompanied by periodic reminders asking anyone with knowledge to come forward. The absence of published suspect information underscores how little has been released and how dependent the investigation remains on community tips to break the silence surrounding her death.
