The Garden State Parkway Murders

Book excerpt: Attorney and true crime writer examines the unsolved 1969 murders of two female college students whose bodies were left off the Garden State Parkway. In the early hours of May 30, 1969, the brutally stabbed bodies of two nineteen-year-old friends, Elizbeth Perry and Susan Davis, were dumped near Ocean City, New Jersey. This is the story of their case. Among the numerous suspects author and attorney Christian Barth identifies are infamous serial killers Ted Bundy and Gerald Eugene Stano, who were living within an hour’s drive from the murder scene. The killers also resided next to one another on Florida’s Death Row, and indirectly confessed to the double homicide. A culmination of more than nine years of research, Barth’s book is compiled from multiple sources, including interviews with retired New Jersey State Police detectives, law enforcement officials from other jurisdictions, federal agents, possible witnesses, victim family members, as well as information gathered from FBI case files, letters, journals, libraries, newspaper articles, and university archives. In scintillating detail, Barth presents the case, including previously undisclosed information surrounding these brutal murders, as well as an examination of recent technological advancements in crime scene analysis and FBI serial killer profiling that could help identify the killer. When all is said and done, the reader is asked to consider: Why hasn’t this cold case been solved? “The definitive book on the case of the coeds murdered on the Garden State Parkway…Barth has done a remarkable job of gathering all of the information and putting it into a readable narrative.”—William Kelley, Jersey Shore Nightbeat