Mared Malarik & Karen Ferrell (WVU Coed Murders)

Case background and investigation

On the evening of January 18, 1970, Mared Ellen Malarik, a 19-year-old freshman from Kinnelon, New Jersey, and Karen Lynn Ferrell, an 18-year-old freshman from Quinwood, West Virginia, attended a showing of the film Oliver! at the Metropolitan Theater in downtown Morgantown, West Virginia. The two West Virginia University students, roommates at Westchester Hall, set out to hitchhike back toward their dormitory afterward — a common practice among students at the time. Witnesses reported seeing them get into a cream-colored sedan driven by a white man with dark hair. They were never seen alive again. According to later case accounts, authorities initially entertained the possibility that the young women had run away, which slowed the early search.

In the weeks that followed, anonymous letters arrived from someone claiming to know where the women could be found, containing directions that later proved accurate. On April 16, 1970 — 88 days after the disappearance — National Guard members searching a wooded area off Goshen Road, roughly 10 miles south of Morgantown, discovered the students' decapitated bodies concealed under brush in makeshift graves. Their heads were not with the remains and have never been recovered despite repeated searches over the following decades.

The case sat without an arrest until 1976, when Eugene Paul Clawson, then an inmate in New Jersey, confessed to the murders. Clawson was tried in West Virginia and convicted of the killings in 1976, receiving a sentence of life without parole. That conviction was overturned — reporting by Oxygen cites inadequate legal representation and improperly admitted crime scene photographs — and Clawson was retried and convicted a second time in 1981. He recanted his confession and maintained his innocence for the rest of his life; he died in custody in 2009.

Doubts about Clawson's guilt have persisted and grown. Authors Geoffrey C. Fuller and S. James McLaughlin, whose 2021 book The WVU Coed Murders examined the case, concluded that Clawson's confession contained dozens of details that matched contemporary newspaper coverage but conflicted with the actual facts of the crime, and they argue someone else killed the two students. Dateline NBC's 2025 coverage described the murders as effectively remaining unsolved 55 years later despite the standing conviction.

The investigation has seen renewed activity in recent years. In May 2022, West Virginia State Police oversaw new excavations near the original discovery site after Albert 'Rod' Everly — a member of the National Guard unit that found the bodies in 1970 — brought forward an analysis of the anonymous letters, which he regards as an overlooked confession by the true killer. Everly has pointed to Richard Warren Hoover, the late leader of a Psychic Science Church in Cumberland, Maryland, as a person who he believes committed the murders or had direct knowledge of them; that theory has not been confirmed by authorities and no one else has been charged. Cadaver dog searches and, later, ground-penetrating radar acquired by the state police have so far failed to locate the victims' skulls, which investigators continue to seek as potential physical evidence.