On a chilly November day, memories of a murder and shattered hope rush back

It is a cold late morning as they trudged along the leaf-strewn state forest path, not unlike that Veterans Day 47 years ago.

The two retired Raynham police investigators are solemn as they point out where the girl was found, remembering a life cut short just days after her fifteenth birthday.

"She was a great kid," Louis Pacheco, who was a sergeant in 1978. "I never heard one word against her. She didn't deserve this. She did not deserve this."

It was on this day, when restaurants offer discounted meals for veterans and small flags line the lawns of buildings, that a teen-aged cheerleader was found dead in the Freetown State Forest, two months after being abducted not far from her home.

Mary-Lou Arruda was riding her bike home from a friend's house when she went missing on September 8, 1978, just days after her birthday. From the start, no one considered her a runaway. Not her parents. Not her neighbors. Not her friends. Not the police. It was an abduction, even if no one saw her taken. There was never a doubt.

There were searches and hope, that undying-prayer-filled-hope that fills then shatters hearts. There were the two months of waiting in limbo until she was found tied to a tree by boys on motorbikes in the dark woods, miles from home. Dead.

It was a horror that gripped the town she grew up in. It is a pain that still lingers today beneath the surface.

On this day, 47 years after Mary-Lou was found, retired Raynham investigators Louis Pacheco and Paul Jordan walk through the woods where hope for her safe return finally ended. They are a bit older but the memory of the day she went missing and all the days that followed are still fresh. The days of searching. The days of tracking suspects. The days of gathering evidence. The grim day they learned she was found in another town in a sprawling state forest.

Paul Jordan was working the desk at the police station when he heard chatter on the Freetown Police Department frequency that a girl's body was found in that town. Louis Pacheco was in his cruiser when Jordan radioed him with the news.

There were other homicides in town in the years that followed but none touched their souls, and the souls of the other investigators, as the one that stole the innocence of their community.

"It changed the town of Raynham," Pacheco is saying, glancing toward the spot where Mary-Lou was found.

And no one forgot.

"People still commemorate her 47 years later."