Lisa Au

Case background and investigation

Lisa Uhiwaiomana Au was a 19-year-old hairdresser at the Susan Beers Salon in Kailua, on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, described by those who knew her as bright and independent. On the rainy night of January 20-21, 1982, she finished her shift and set out to visit her boyfriend, Doug Holmes, at his sister's apartment in the Makiki district of Honolulu. She never arrived. When she failed to turn up and did not come home, her worried family and boyfriend reported her missing, and an alarmed search quickly began across the island. Lisa was known as a careful, responsible young woman who kept in close touch with her parents, so her sudden silence immediately signaled that something was badly wrong.

On January 21, 1982, Lisa's 1976 Toyota was found abandoned along Kalanianaole Highway near Maunawili, on the windward side of Oahu. The scene raised immediate suspicions: the driver's window was partly rolled down and rainwater had pooled inside, yet her purse sat dry on the seat, and technicians concluded the car appeared to have been wiped clean. For ten days, thousands of volunteers scoured Oahu for the missing hairdresser. Then, on January 31, 1982, a man jogging with his dog on Tantalus Drive, above Honolulu, discovered Lisa's nude, badly decomposed body roughly forty feet down an embankment, as though it had been dumped from the roadside.

By the time she was found, decomposition was so advanced that the medical examiner could not determine a cause of death, a gap that has hampered the case ever since. The Honolulu Police Department's investigation quickly, and controversially, centered on the theory that a police officer might have been involved. One witness reported that on the night Lisa vanished she had seen a car with blue lights in its grille following another vehicle, fueling public fear that someone impersonating or serving as an officer had abducted her. The panic grew so intense that the department banned hidden blue lights on personal cars. A grand jury, however, declined to indict the officer who had been suspected.

Critics and later reviewers, including a retired homicide lieutenant who reexamined the file, concluded the investigation had gone astray from the start. Witnesses were overlooked, evidence such as Lisa's temporary driver's license (found at a store where she had written a check, not seized in a traffic stop) was misinterpreted, and the autopsy was incomplete. No one has ever been arrested or charged. Lisa's parents both died without learning who killed their daughter or how. More than four decades later, the murder of Lisa Au endures as one of Hawaii's most infamous and painful unsolved cases, periodically revisited by local media and investigators but never resolved. As of 2026 the case remains open, its central questions, who took Lisa Au and how she died, still unanswered.