Unsolved Mysteries Volume 4 episode 4: Murder, Center Stage case explored

Episode 4 of Volume 4 of Unsolved Mysteries, released on July 31, packed a gruesome murder of a college girl, Sigrid Stevenson. A student at Trenton State College, Sigrid used to practice the piano at the college auditorium in the wee hours of the evening often.

However, on the weekend after Labor Day, on September 4, 1977, Sigrid's body was found at the center of the stage in the same auditorium, at 11:30 pm. All signs pointed toward s****l assault and murder, which started the quest to find the murderer.

Several suspects, polygraph tests, and investigations later, Sigrid's murderer couldn't be brought to justice because he remained unidentified. And Sigrid's murder was placed among Unsolved Mysteries.

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How did Sigrid Stevanson's murder case unravel in Unsolved Mysteries Volume 4 episode 4?

The episode of Unsolved Mysteries opened with Scott Napolitano, a Trenton State College writer and researcher reminiscing on the days when he came across Sigrid's murder story. He said when he was just a student in 2002, he came across the case when he was looking for a ghost story from his college to make a film on.

Sigrid was killed in 1977. Her body was found at the center of the stage in an empty auditorium at 11:30 pm. Thomas Kokotajlo, the officer who found her body, said he came across a bicycle parked outside the auditorium gate. It made him think someone had trespassed into the auditorium. When he went in to check, he discovered Sigrid's dead body.

Her body was partially nude, partially covered with the piano blanket. Her clothes shoes and other belongings were away from her. When the forensics expert Dr. Raafat Ahmad came to examine the scene, she noticed that there was a lot of blood loss and that her panties and her blouse were off.

During the autopsy, the doctor found that she had lacerations on the back and the front of the head, and the cause of the death was determined to be cerebral trauma to the head. She also determined that Sigrid was s****lly assaulted before the murder after her vaginal swabs tested positive for dead sperm.

According to what Scott told Unsolved Mysteries, Sigrid was sleeping in the auditorium Green Room over the weekend because she was waiting to move into a new place after. A bunch of people in the acting department had walked in on her sleeping in the green room, one of whom got acquainted with her.

The acting student later revealed that Sigrid seemed fun at the time, but later in the day when she ran into her again, Sigrid seemed "down" and told her she had an altercation with "a man".

The symmetrical ligature marks on her wrists signaled the use of handcuffs to restrain her, which made investigators believe that the perpetrator was a campus police officer. All the campus police officers were taken in for a polygraph test, but they all cleared it.

The investigators then came to Chuck, a student at Trenton College who had woken up a sleeping Sigrid by walking into the Green Room, earlier in the evening. He also bought her a beer, which told the officers that he had been in contact with her on the day of her murder.

40 years after the murder, when DNA technology was discovered, the investigators took swabs of DNA from the collected evidence and tried to match it with Chuck's. But they found that Chuck had passed away, so they tried matching it with his brother's and it came negative, eliminating Chuck as the victim.

Detective Julia Caldwell narrowed the case down and came to two possible suspects on Unsolved Mysteries. One was a janitor who was fired soon after for substance abuse, and the other was a man who worked for the lighting department at the production. The former passed the polygraph test and was cleared while the other wasn't taken seriously. The case has remained unsolved ever since.

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Volume 4 of Unsolved Mysteries is available to stream on Netflix.