When Jaws came out in 1975, it changed the film landscape forever.

The Steven Spielberg-directed movie remains a favourite to this day, but Joe Hill – the pseudonym used by Joe Hillstrom King, son of Stephen King – believes it might also hold a clue to an unsolved murder mystery.

Back in 2015, Joe was rewatching the classic at a cinema in New Hampshire when he saw something that gave him the goosies.

That’s short for goosebumps – we’re all about efficiency here at 2OV.

The Washington Post below:

It wasn’t the marauding of the marine antagonist that stupefied him, but rather the fleeting appearance of an extra cast in a crowd scene approximately 54 minutes and 2 seconds into the film. The young woman seemed to have the same visage he had recently seen in a composite sketch of the victim of a grisly murder that has stumped police on the far reaches of Cape Cod for 44 years.

Here’s a snapshot of the extra in question:

Hill realises that it’s all a bit “tinfoil hat” crazy, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

The grisly murder took place in July 1974, with the body found by a teenage girl who was walking her dog along the sandy dunes of Provincetown, Massachusetts:

In a clearing lay the naked body of a woman, already badly decomposed in the summer heat. She had been between 20 and 40 years old, police estimate, when she was killed by a blow to the left side of her skull…

Her head rested on a pair of Wrangler jeans and a blue bandana, according to police information and press reports at the time. Her hands had been cut off and were missing…

A clue lay in seven gold crowns found on her teeth that revealed what police described as “the New York style” of dentistry, but authorities have never been able to figure out her identity, much less that of her killer.

The murder victim has come to be known as ‘Lady in the Dunes’, and is a bit like the Holy Grail for amateur sleuths looking to crack unsolved cases.

Hill (below) certainly considers himself an amateur sleuth, and he thinks he might be on to something:

“I felt I had seen ‘Lady of the Dunes,’ that her face had come up out of the crowd at me,” Hill said, a boyish lilt rising in his voice. “It came and went in a moment, and there was no rewind button.”

He wondered: Had an extra in “Jaws” been brutally murdered 100 miles away from the site where the movie was filmed? The woman’s build looked similar. There was the blue bandana. “I don’t believe she’s wearing Wrangler jeans, but presumably a girl owns more than one pair of jeans,” Hill said.

When he mentioned the potential lead to the FBI, he expected ridicule. Instead, the agent told him to post about it online, and one of the Provincetown Police Department detectives still working the case told him ‘you don’t know, odds are long’.

Unfortunately movies back then didn’t keep a comprehensive list of extras that appeared in them, but Hill hopes that his theory can, at the very least, draw attention to the case:

“Two astonishing things happened on Cape Cod in the summer of 1974,” he said. “One is that Steven Spielberg filmed ‘Jaws,’ and other is that someone murdered this woman in the dunes outside Provincetown and got away with it. Anything that stirs people’s memories could potentially be productive.”

I suppose when your father is Stephen King, you tend to believe anything is possible.

Oh, and you also grow up terrified of clowns.

One can be excused for thinking his theory is a load of bollocks, and it probably is, but never forget that weirder things have happened.

Get a load of this stranger than fiction true story:

[source:washingtonpost]