In the days before her death, Miriam “Angela” Chapman talked a lot about going home.
She had arrived in Miami a few months earlier, moving into a motel in a shoddy part of town. Right away, the manager noticed her laugh. It would kick up out of nowhere, even when things weren’t funny.
Like some other young women in the area, she worked the bars as a sex worker. But as the winter of 1976 brightened into spring, she dreamed of getting out. Of climbing on a bus and heading home to Indiana.
“She said she was going to start saving a little money and go home (to her family),” the manager told the Miami News in 1976. “And I don’t think it was just talk, either. She sounded like she meant it.”