The 1980 killing of 17-year-old Sandra Jo Pittman remains one of Iowa’s enduring unsolved homicide cases, a tragedy that began with the discovery of a young woman’s body at a roadside park near Clarence and ended with investigators searching for answers that never came.
On the morning of Sept. 17, 1980, authorities were called to a Highway 30 roadside rest area east of Clarence in Cedar County after the body of a teenage girl was discovered. She was later identified as Sandra “Sandy” Pittman of Bettendorf.
Investigators determined Pittman had been strangled and suffered a fatal blow to the head, likely inflicted with a tire iron or metal pipe. Officials believed she had been killed elsewhere and her body later abandoned at the roadside park…