Murder of Arlis Perry

The case was covered in detail, along with the John Getreu murders, in a February 2020 episode of Casefile True Crime Podcast.

Terry interviewed Perry's friends in Bismarck, discovering that someone on the Stanford campus had taken a telephone listing under Bruce Perry's name. The resultant confusion when Perry’s best friend and Bruce Perry's mother attempted to reach the Perrys at the fraudulent phone number apparently led Perry to call the number herself and speak to someone in residence there.

The case remained open and active for many years and was never officially closed nor treated as a cold case, according to the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Department. In 2018, however, Crawford was definitively linked to the murder following a more advanced DNA test. On June 28, as police arrived at Crawford's residence with a search warrant, Crawford locked his door and committed suicide with a pistol before he could be arrested.

Serial killer David Berkowitz mentioned the Perry murder in a few letters, suggesting that he heard details of the crime from "Manson II", the alleged culprit. In the San Jose Mercury News, Jessie Seyfer noted that "investigators interviewed Berkowitz in prison and now believe he has nothing of value to offer" regarding the Perry case. However, investigative reporter Maury Terry noted that Berkowitz had volunteered information about the case without being prompted, writing in 1979: "ARLISS [sic] PERRY, HUNTED, STALKED AND SLAIN. FOLLOWED TO CALIFORNIA. STANFORD UNIV."

Arlis Kay Dykema grew up in Bismarck, North Dakota, where she and Bruce D. Perry were high-school sweethearts. The pair married six weeks before her death, in August 1974, and Perry moved to Stanford University with her husband, who was a sophomore pre-med student. At the time of her murder, she had been working as a receptionist at a local law firm and the couple had been living on campus in Quillen House in Escondido Village.

Around 11:30 p.m. the night of October 12, 1974, the Perrys had an argument about their car's tire pressure. Perry told her husband that she wanted to pray alone inside the church, and they parted. Bruce Perry became concerned when his wife hadn't returned home by 3 a.m and called the Stanford Police and reported her missing. Officers, however, from the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office went to the church and reported all the outer doors were locked.

In a September 27, 1974 letter to her friend, Perry wrote:

Investigators found semen on a kneeling pillow near Perry's body. They also found a partial palm print on one of the candles. Neither the semen nor the print matched Bruce Perry nor Crawford. The Santa Clara County Sheriff also ruled out any links between the murder and three previous killings in the area dating back to February 1973. Perry’s husband was an initial suspect, but was eventually ruled out.

Arlis Kay Perry (February 22, 1955 – October 12, 1974) was a 19-year-old newlywed who was murdered inside Stanford Memorial Church in Stanford, California (within the grounds of Stanford University) on October 12, 1974. The murder went unsolved for more than 40 years. However, police named Stephen Blake Crawford as the perpetrator following DNA testing in 2018. Crawford, a security guard at Stanford who purportedly discovered the body, committed suicide before he could be arrested.