Cathy Woods

Woods confessed to killing Mitchell while being treated as a mental patient at the Louisiana State
University Medical Center. Her public defender believes she only confessed in order to be
deemed dangerous, and get a single bedroom at the mental hospital.

Cathy Woods

Cathy Woods September 2014.
(Photo: Andy Barron/RGJ.com)

Scene: Above, the house in Reno where Michell's body was found in 1976. The 19-year-old's throat was
 slashed shortly after her car broke down near the University of Nevada campus.

Halbower was sent to prison not long after Mitchell's murder, the the rape of a blackjack dealer just a few
blocks from where the nursing student's body was found.

Rodney L Halbower, an inmate in an Oregon penitentiary, recently submitted DNA evidence
which now connects him to a cigarette butt found on Mitchell's dead body.

The victim

Michelle Mitchell, 19.

Cathy Woods biography