A Mom Interrupted a Burglary on St. Patrick's Day 1981—Her Killer Remains Unknown

On March 17, 1981, Marlene Hayes wasn’t feeling well. The 38-year-old mother of two, who neighbors described as “wonderful” and “happy-go-lucky,” left work from her family-owned car dealership around 11 a.m. She pulled into her home’s driveway, walked in through the kitchen door and approached a set of stairs leading to the second floor.

When she stumbled upon what investigators believe was a home burglary in progress, she paid with her life. 

The Hayes family moved into a newly developed affluent neighborhood in Bel Air, Md., in the late ‘70s, choosing the area because the house was on a cul-de-sac and they figured a dead end street was less likely to be robbed. They were wrong.

Police believe Hayes was assaulted on the stairs. Andrew Lane, Captain of the Hartford County Sheriff’s Department, said in the podcast The Sheriff’s Spotlight, “She probably surprised them in the act of the burglary.” 

Hayes was struck in the head by a home object that became “a weapon of opportunity,” Lane said. “She was attacked by at least one person. She was restrained and stabbed multiple times.” 

The medical examiner determined she died from stab wounds to the chest, according to a March 1981 article in The Sun.

Thomas Hayes Jr., 15, came home from school around 3 p.m. to find his mother lying face down on the kitchen floor, bound by her hands and ankles. He tried speaking to her and lifted her. That’s when he noticed blood on her face. Per The Sun, Thomas ran to a friend's house nearby and shouted, “My mother is dead! My mother is dead!”

The assailant—or assailants—ransacked the house and made off with some jewelry and her car. A man abandoned the Toyota Tercel at the William James Elementary School parking lot in Abingdon. “That’s most likely our suspect,” Lane said on WMAR-2 News. 

Hartford Sheriff’s investigators circulated three composite sketches of men wanted for questioning. One was of a man seen driving a car similar to the one belonging to Hayes. The two other sketches were based on witness accounts of a man hitchhiking near the elementary school.

Lacking new leads, the case has been cold for decades. Today, investigators are checking evidence collected before DNA sampling was a thing with the hope that today’s technology will help solve the case.

“We obviously did a pretty extensive neighborhood canvas back then,” Sergeant Chris Maddox said on The Sheriff’s Spotlight. “They were able to identify several pieces of jewelry that were missing from the home. We ultimately became aware of a potential suspect that was in the area at the time … We’re using the DNA aspect of it, trying to further that case.”

Lane added that the detective who responded to the scene “did an excellent job seizing all the evidence that is now coming into play.”

Investigators were able to recover a couple jewelry items from the unnamed suspect. 

“We did recover some items that weren’t necessarily tested back then because we didn’t have the technology for it,” Maddox admitted.

Alex Baber, a cold case consultant and director of the Cold Case Consultants of America, concedes to A&E Crime + Investigation that “DNA is king, but people tend to forget that cases were being solved for many years before DNA testing existed. There’s still other means. You still have fingerprint analysis, crime scenes, you have overwhelming circumstantial evidence that connects an individual to a crime.”

Smaller police departments don’t have cold case teams that can dig into these types of investigations. “They may have one detective assigned to multiple cases, but then you have these other cases that are happening in real time,” Baber acknowledges. “You may have had a homicide last week that takes precedence over the cold cases. It’s not that they don’t want to work the cold cases, it’s just the fact they don’t have the manpower or the allocated funds annually to support a unit.” 

Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler, host of The Sheriff’s Spotlight, said that the department needs a person dedicated to handling cold cases. For several years in a row, he has asked the county for additional funding in his annual budget. While the county has increased funding each of the last few years, it has not provided more money to create a cold case team.

Baber suggests “a cut-off point for cold cases” could assist investigators nationwide, whether that’s after 40, 50 or even 60 years.“The documents should be made public or third parties should be allowed to access them,” he says. “If not, these cases are just going to die on the vine.”

Gahler warned that the department hasn’t given up on solving the case of how Holmes died in 1981: “If you committed a crime, a murder in Hartford County, we haven’t forgotten about you,” he says. “And we’re gonna keep going back at these cases and we’re not going to stop until we're able to clear these cases.”