This Famous Nashville Homicide Will Never Be Forgotten

There’s something terribly sad, yet fascinating about an unsolved mystery. Unanswered questions take on a tinge of vibrant mystery, a bit of magic as years pass, and the unknown grows ever larger. In the case of Nashville, we have the horrible loss of tiny Dorothy Distelhurst. Have you heard her story? Well, at the least the beginning of it – as of the time of this article, there has been no end.

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It was September 19, 1934 when little Dorothy Ann left her east Nashville home to walk two blocks to kindergarten. She grasped her pink lunchbox and was lovingly dressed in a blue and white plaid dress, reminiscent of Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz," a movie still four years from production.

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Her and her family attended Belmont Methodist and were involved in a tight-knit southern community.

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She never made it home. Dorothy was officially documented as missing, and more than five hundred people turned up to comb the surrounding woods to search for the little girl. They turned up nothing.

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It wasn't until that November that her decomposed body was found on the Davidson County TB Hospital grounds. She was placed in a shallow grave, and her body was discovered by maintenance workers looking to hem in the flower beds. She was gagged, bearing blunt trauma to both sides of her skull, and acid had been poured on her face. All of her belongings - including her pink lunchbox - were found neatly stacked roughly seven yards away.

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It's a terrible thing, to know such a sweet little child had her life end so quickly, and with such violence. What's even more terrifying? They never found the killer. Her case is one of Nashville's most widely known, gone cold almost as soon as it began.

You can find Dorothy’s grave site at Woodlawn Cemetery to pay your respects, and to wonder about the heartache that came from his unsolved murder in Nashville.