LA Forensics: Mysterious Confession

Libby hung out at Tommy's Yacht Club, which had no yachts and wasn't really a club. Libby told the cops that she had recently seen Lois dancing with a man at Tommy's, but she couldn't provide them with his description.

"The victim was known to hang out in the bars, so she could have been dancing with any number of people at that time," Bengtson says.

Another lead that didn't pan out concerned a family friend named Joseph, who had recently gotten into some kind of financial beef with Lois over a truck he intended to buy from her. Joseph kept trying to beat the recently-widowed Lois down on the price she was asking for the truck, but his haggling finally killed the deal. Bad feelings lingered. There was some suggestion that Joseph may have felt Lois owed him money. Perhaps he had put down a deposit or had paid for some repairs.

"We looked into him, also, as a suspect, and it appears that he had nothing to do with this," Bengtson says. "It was just a business deal that didn't work out between the two of them."

Edith and Mike Swanson had been dead ends. Now Libby and Joseph were too. That left the cops with next to nothing.

"At that point the case kind of stops," Bengtson says. "We didn't have any witnesses. We didn't have any evidence at the crime scene to show who could have done this. We didn't know who she was last seen with or who took her home that night. So the case just kind of fizzled out. We had no place to go. It's heartbreaking."