Christine Ruth “Chris” Thornton was a 28-year-old white female who left her San Antonio, Texas home in 1977, newly pregnant and chasing a summer-road-trip dream.
She and her boyfriend drifted north with plans of reaching Montana; by early summer they argued and split in Biloxi, Mississippi.
The 28-year-old Christine kept moving, the kind of traveler who trusted the open road and the kindness of strangers, until the desert silence swallowed her trail.
On April 6, 1982, a rancher working the empty country northeast of Granger in Sweetwater County, Wyoming, found skeletal remains.
For decades she was known only by a nickname—“Granger Greta”—an unidentified 28-year-old white female whose belongings and bones told investigators what they could: she had been a victim of homicide, and she had been six months pregnant.
In 2010, police released a cache of photographs taken by a convicted serial killer; one image showed a young woman on a motorcycle in terrain hauntingly similar to where the remains lay.
In 2013, family recognized the face, and in July 2015 DNA from siblings matched tissue saved from the Wyoming scene, finally saying her name again: Christine Ruth “Chris” Thornton, a 28-year-old white female.
Detectives followed the photograph's thread to Rodney James Alcala, the so-called “Dating Game Killer.”
Prosecutors in Sweetwater County charged Alcala with first-degree murder in September 2016, alleging that during the summer of 1977 he met the 28-year-old white female in San Antonio, drove her toward Wyoming, and left her in the high desert outside Granger; authorities said Christine Ruth 'Chris' Thornton had been strangled.
The image of Christine on the motorcycle, taken near the very spot her remains were found, became a grim postcard linking killer to victim.
No Wyoming arrest followed.
The accused killer was already a condemned inmate in California and—according to officials—too ill to be extradited, so the Sweetwater County case against him never reached a courtroom.
After Alcala died in 2021, the county attorney indicated the first-degree murder charges tied to the 28-year-old, Christine Ruth 'Chris' Thornton would be dismissed, leaving the file to close without a trial, an ending measured not by a verdict but by identification, a name restored, and a family's certainty about what happened to Christine Ruth 'Chris' Thornton who vanished in the summer of 1977.
