Cold case of Cheryl Lyn Strother's murder

Cheryl Lynn Strother was tied to a tree, stabbed 47 times, dismembered and supposed to be pregnant. This gruesome murder is still unsolved after almost 50 years.

There is an application made by Cheryl’s cousin in a try to get DNA tested to discover her killer. 

Cheryl Lynn was discovered dead near a lake on Fort Knox a month after disappearing. She was born on 2nd May 1957 and killed on 24th July 1974 at the age of 17.

« FBI agent followed suspect 10 years 

The former wife of an FBI agent investigating a 1974 murder case of a Radcliff teenage girl tells her husband gave the case a lot of idea and effort, following a suspect for about 10 years, incapable to correlate the person of interest to the murder of Cheryl Lynn Strother.

Mary Becker said her late ex-husband, Tom Becker, followed a soldier, who once was stationed at Fort Knox, all the way to Texas where he was assigned. She told he discovered blood on the front seat of the soldier’s vehicle.

“That was before DNA, of course,” she said.

Becker said she and her sons never heard him say the suspect’s name, but said he had said two of their sons the suspect was the father of children Cheryl Lynn at one time babysat for.

“He did say that to the boys they said,” Mary Becker said. “He worked on the case up until 1984.”

Strother, 17, was last noticed alive July 24, 1974, leaving a summer school class at North Hardin High School. She was discovered tied to a tree at Tobacco Leaf Lake on Fort Knox property. She had been stabbed 47 times, her brother, Ken Strother said.

Mary Becker said a squirrel hunter discovered her body and said she had been tied to a tree by shoelaces from her shoes.

She said the case wore on her as well.

Although she and Tom Becker divorced in 1976, she said when Strother’s stepfather would call her husband investigating about the case, often she would answer and listened to the misery and hurt he was feeling in his voice.

“It troubled me more to hear Mr Arthur Milks when he would call and ask for Tom,” she said. “He wasn’t always there to take the call.” Milk died in 2017.

In addition to being the lead FBI agent in the Strother case, less than six months later he was appointed to lead the inquiry into Jan. 13, 1975, killing of Peggy Rhodes, 57, the wife of well-known local car dealer Paul “Dusty” Rhodes, Mary Becker said.

Tom Becker perished May 8, 2010, following his retirement to Eugene, Oregon.

Melissa McGrew of Elizabethtown, a third cousin of Cheryl Lynn Strother, told she may hire a private detective to look into the murder. There never has been an arrest correlated with Strother’s death.

“I feel determined about her,” she said recently. “I only knew her for five years, but she made such a consequence to me. I love her.”

McGrew said she frequently has driven in the region where Strother’s body was discovered and said she can feel her cousin’s presence there.

“It’s like she’s saying me to not give up,” she said. “I will not give up.”