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Lori zimmerman

Lori Zimmerman

Real Name: Lorraine Zimmerman
Nicknames: Lori, Blondie
Location: Hagerstown, Maryland
Date: April 6, 1984

Case[]

Details: Fifteen-year-old Lori Zimmerman was a freshman at South Hagerstown High School in Hagerstown, Maryland. After her parents divorced, she spent most of her time with her mother, Sandra Long Volneck. Sandra described her as somewhat slow and immature for her age. She had no boyfriends and always stayed close to home.
On Thursday, April 5, 1984, Lori and her family moved into a new house at 820 Concord Street in Hagerstown. The next afternoon, Friday, April 6, Lori took a bus from school to her aunt's house near Washington Square in downtown Hagerstown. After visiting for about ten minutes, she left to head home. Shortly after 4pm, she was seen walking on West Washington Street. When she did not arrive home for dinner, Sandra contacted her friends. No one reported seeing her.
That night, Sandra and her husband filed a missing person's report with the Hagerstown Police Department. According to Sandra, the police did not take the case seriously. They believed Lori was a runaway. They did not file a complete report or start an active search for her until twenty-four hours had passed. Sandra told them that Lori had no reason to run away and had never done it before. Lori's relatives and friends conducted an extensive search for her.
Eight days later, at around 9am on Saturday, April 14, two hikers went on a walk in a wooded area about seventy yards off Reno Monument Road, three miles south of Boonsboro and fifteen miles south of Hagerstown. While there, they noticed some pieces of cardboard with rocks on top. When they looked underneath the cardboard, they discovered Lori's body.
Lori was lying in a fetal position. She was wearing the same clothes she had on when she disappeared. Her bra and shirt were above her shoulders. Her jacket was inside out, and only her arms were still in it. Her jewelry was smashed. She had been sexually assaulted, beaten about the head and face, and suffocated. Her jaw had been fractured. The coroner found a plastic bag lodged in her throat. The police believe she was killed somewhere else.
For years, the police have been unable to solve Lori's case. In March 1988, they agreed to have psychic Dorothy Allison look into it. They gave her no information. She did not know Lori's name or the state where it happened. She did not even know it was a murder case.
Dorothy was contacted by Sergeant Keith Wattenschaidt of the Maryland State Police, who is in charge of the ongoing investigation. Knowing absolutely nothing about the case, Dorothy drew up a list of clues the night before Sgt. Wattenschaidt's call and then dictated the list in several conversations the next day. The clues were random images that might relate to Lori, her murder, her friends, or even the police.
Dorothy told Sgt. Wattenschaidt that the police should look at someone who worked in a school as a janitor. She felt the crime was an abduction of some kind. She also felt that she was dealing with a suspect who had suicidal tendencies and something wrong with his feet. The numbers 1 and 7 were important; it may be 71 or 17, but she did not know for sure. She felt that the person wore glasses and, sometimes, a wig to look different.
When Sgt. Wattenschaidt was talking to Dorothy on the phone, she mentioned a police officer, possibly in disguise, wearing a beard (that he now does not have) and a wig or hairpiece. He believed that Dorothy was "keying in" on himself. He does not wear a disguise, but he is in plain clothes. He wears a hairpiece and took a beard off two days earlier while on vacation.
Dorothy and her husband, Bob, flew to Hagerstown to meet with Sgt. Wattenschaidt. Immediately after they landed, she had a name for the authorities. The man's nickname was Chuck, and his last name was either Bernstein or Goldstein. Generally, Sgt. Wattenschaidt thinks psychics are baloney. However, with Dorothy, he has decided to keep an open mind because he wants to solve the case.
Within minutes of leaving the airport, more thoughts and images flooded Dorothy's mind. She had a vision of Lori in front of a library, where she met two brothers, two cousins, or twin friends of hers from her neighborhood. Dorothy mentioned the name of a person she met there, but it could not be released due to the ongoing investigation.
Dorothy felt that Lori had been raped and then murdered. She felt that someone had hit Lori with something near or on her head. Sgt. Wattenschaidt told Dorothy that Lori's jaw had been broken in two places. However, he noted that that was not the cause of death. Dorothy responded by saying she was getting a "suffocating" feeling like she could not breathe. She also felt a lot of heat around Lori. She felt that Lori was choking on something in her throat.
Dorothy said that it did not seem like someone was choking Lori with their hands but that Lori was choking on some type of object in her throat. According to Sgt. Wattenschaidt, there was no way that Dorothy could have known about an object being in Lori's throat. He was surprised she keyed in on that, as that information had not been made public.
While driving down a street, Dorothy noted that Lori had walked down it to the library. She said Lori was picked up in an old yellow car.
After twenty-four hours in Hagerstown, Dorothy had come up with dozens of possible clues. Many seemed unrelated to the case. Others would seem misdirected – Sgt. Wattenschaidt's hairpiece, for instance. And the janitor Dorothy mentioned may have been Lori's stepfather, who is not a suspect. The individual Dorothy named at the airport – Chuck Goldstein or Bernstein – is also not a suspect, though, according to Dorothy, he may have some information.
But some of Dorothy's clues did seem connected to the case. For example, she had seen the numbers 1 and 7. Lori had been laid to rest at Rose Hill Cemetery in plot 17. Dorothy had mentioned the name Cleveland. The last street sign before the crime scene was at a turnoff called Clevelandtown Road. Dorothy had also talked about an old church. Half a mile from where the body was found, there was, indeed, an old church.
All these clues might be coincidences, but they might also be part of a mosaic that, once assembled, will create a picture of what happened to Lori. At the crime scene, Dorothy experienced the strongest sensation that she had felt during the entire investigation.
Dorothy felt the suspect's name stronger than any other name when they were at the scene. She felt that he was the one who took Lori there. She believed that he murdered Lori because she was reluctant to let him do whatever he wanted to do to her. Lori screamed out loud, and he panicked. He then hit her on the head and killed her.
Sgt. Wattenschaidt has run the name that Dorothy mentioned through the police computers. But there are no known suspects by that name. In total, she came up with fifty different clues. Only when the crime is solved will it be known how many of them are connected to Lori's murder.
Suspects: The police believe that Lori's killer lived in the Hagerstown area and may have known her. However, no suspects have been identified.
The police looked into the possibility that Lori's case was connected to the murder of Diane Reed. In April 1984, Diane was beaten and strangled to death in nearby Fayetteville, Pennsylvania. Randy Carbaugh later pleaded no contest to Diane's murder. However, it is not known if he is considered a suspect in Lori's case.
Extra Notes:

  • This case first aired on the May 6, 1988 Special #6 episode focusing on psychic Dorothy Allison.
  • Unsolved Mysteries asked the Hagerstown police if they wanted Dorothy to investigate Lori's case. The show filmed Dorothy's investigation as it happened.
  • During her investigation, Dorothy came up with the name of a possible suspect. But for legal reasons, the show chose not to reveal this name.
  • Some sources state: Lori was a "street kid" and had run away before; she was last seen leaving the area of her school at 4:30pm; she was last seen at a friend's or her grandmother's house; she was covered with one piece of cardboard or a cardboard box; the police could not determine if she was sexually assaulted; and her body was found twelve miles from home.

Results: Unsolved - In 1999, the Maryland State Police reopened Lori's case. Detectives conducted more than 100 interviews and developed new leads. The state crime lab reviewed the case's physical evidence with new technology, including DNA testing. At the time, a detective stated that he believed people in Hagerstown had information about the case but had not come forward, either because they were afraid or reluctant to get involved.
In 2010, the police looked into the possibility that Jeffrey Eldon Miles Sr. was responsible for Lori's murder. He was convicted of killing two women in nearby Waynesboro, Pennsylvania: seventeen-year-old Angie Lynn Daley, who was murdered in 1995, and twenty-nine-year-old Kristy Dawn Hoke, who was murdered in 2010. However, no charges have been filed against him for Lori's murder.
Sgt. Wattenschaidt has since retired but continues to think about Lori's case. He said he had his "suspicions" but was never able to find enough evidence to file charges against anyone.
In 2019, investigators stated they were still testing DNA evidence. They also have several possible suspects in the case.
Sadly, Lori's parents and her best friend have since passed away.
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