HUNTERDON COUNTY – Forty-four years ago, 16-year-old Sandra Wood's beaten and strangled body was found propped up against a barbed-wire fence by a man walking his dog in a wooded area off Baptist Church Road in Union Township.

She was wearing only red bikini panties, a white bra, a sweater pulled over her head and blue socks. Detectives at the time believed her death was sex related, although it was later determined she had not been raped, but there were signs of a sexual attack.

Police also determined she may have been killed somewhere else before her body was dumped along the roadway because there was no sign of a struggle at the site. It is believed she had been dead for at least two days.

"The act of killing her was extremely personal. She had massive internal injuries. She was strangled by hand," said Wood's cousin, Dori Fritzinger, 60, of North Carolina who along with other family members still mourn Wood, who she was very close to.

Newspaper reports indicate marks made by a blunt instrument were found all over Wood's body.

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"She was thrown away on the side of the road and into a barbed-wire fence," said Fritzinger, adding the man who found her body initially thought it was a mannequin. A Sept. 23, 1975 Home News report indicated it seemed as if her body had been flung by a passing vehicle and her face was unrecognizable. "She was just thrown away."

No one has ever been charged in Wood's death.

Kim Uanis of Berkeley Heights also still thinks about her childhood friend who lived a few blocks away there before Wood moved to Basking Ridge to live with Fritzinger's parents following the 1974 cancer death of Wood's mother.

And it pains Uanis that her friend wound up dead and someone got away with it.

"I've always been curious that no one was charged," Uanis said.

Fritzinger, meanwhile, said the death of her cousin weighed on her father, Joseph Herbst, brother of Wood's mother, constantly until the day he died in 2011.

She said the person responsible for Wood's death will be held accountable in the end, but she would like some closure now.

"There are too many people still hurting," she said, adding that while an arrest would be good, a conviction would be even better.

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"Will it get to that point? I don't know," said Fritzinger, who questions whether a jury could be convinced of someone's guilt 44 years later. She's also unsure if any evidence of the case remains and what condition it might be in.

She recalled John List, the Westfield father who killed his wife, mother and children in their home in 1971, hid for decades and was an old man when law enforcement caught up with him and made him pay for his crimes. List, 82, died in 2008 while serving a life sentence in a New Jersey state prison.

She said the people who knew Wood and are still around should get answers.

"She (Sandra) deserves that. She never deserved what happened to her, nobody does, nobody does," Fritzinger said.

New Jersey State Police Lt. Theodore Schafer said homicide cases are never closed.

Ties to Berkeley Heights, Basking Ridge

Uanis remembers Woods living in Berkeley Heights for most of her life. The two friends went to school together, although Wood was a year behind Uanis.

Fritzinger's father, Wood's mother and their siblings all grew up in Berkeley Heights. She said her father knew everyone in town and everyone knew her father's large family.

Once relocating to the Basking Ridge section of Bernards to live with the Herbst family, Wood was enrolled at Ridge High School, where she was a senior in the cooperative industrial education program and a member of the school's ski club, while also working afternoons at a pizzeria in Berkeley Heights, according to news reports. Fritzinger's mother often drove her back and forth between the two towns.

Wood broke up with a boyfriend in Berkeley Heights after he became involved with another girl, relatives and friends said.

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Newspaper articles described Wood as an outgoing girl who rode horses and who sometimes hitchhiked to meet with friends. Fritzinger's mother described her niece as "too trusting," according to a 1975 newspaper article.

Wood was believed to have been hitchhiking after she was seen walking from a friend's home on Washington Valley Road in Warren on Sept. 16, 1975. Her home on Mountain Road in Bernards was several miles away.

44 years of remembering

Fritzinger said she remembers "everything" that happened.

She said Wood's mother died in January 1974 and her cousin stayed with a friend in Berkeley Heights to finish out the school year at Governor Livingston High School before moving in with Fritzinger's family. Fritzinger said Wood had previously stayed with her family during summers.

"We were extremely close. She was extremely outgoing and busy, going, going, going," she said, adding they would play hockey with the neighborhood kids and went to fireworks during a local festival.

Wood had finished her junior year at Ridge High School and was beginning her senior year in the fall of 1975.

Fritzinger said she and Wood were both 16 years old in September 1975, but they were a year apart in school because Wood's birthday was in December and she had started school early.

On Tuesday, Sept. 16, 1975, Wood told Fritzinger's mother that she was going to visit friends in Warren. She said her mother told Wood, described in newspaper stories as about 5-foot-7, 113 pounds with long brown hair and brown eyes, that she looked pretty. Newspaper reports indicate Wood had gone out wearing a white zippered jacket, jeans with yellow stitching, brown shoes and a navy-blue suede purse with shoulder strap.

Fritzinger said her parents always wanted the teen girls to have a ride back home whenever they went out with their friends.

“She started hitching home because she didn't get a ride. In her travels she got picked up by the wrong person," said Fritzinger.

A Sept. 26, 1975 Home News report indicates two men told police they gave Wood rides shortly before she disappeared on Sept. 16, 1975 and she was safe when they dropped her off. One man said he picked Wood up on Washington Valley Road in Warren and dropped her off about a quarter mile down the road. A second man told police he picked Wood up on Washington Valley Road near Newmans Lane and drove her to Crim Lane where she was last seen, according to the Home News story.

Fritzinger believes her cousin may have been picked up by someone driving a third vehicle.

The morning of Sept. 17, 1975, Fritzinger went to get her cousin up for school and found her bed had not been slept in. When she asked her mother where Wood was, her mother thought she had spent the night at a friend's house.

"I knew something wasn't right," Fritzinger said.

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When living with her mother, Wood had been used to coming and going and having a lot of freedom. Fritzinger, however, said at her house she had a curfew and had to keep her grades up. So, when Wood moved in with her family it was a bit of a culture shock.

"She was terrible about not coming in by curfew and my father would explode," Fritzinger said.

The two teens had devised a plan that Wood would leave her cousin a note in a private place if she was not coming back home. Fritzinger said she checked the secret location after her cousin disappeared, and there was no note.

"If she intended not to come back there would have been a note," she said. "It was very teenage, but very specific."

When Fritzinger got to school, Wood wasn't there. Friends said she had left Warren while it was still light out. Fritzinger said she went to the school office to report something bad had happened to her cousin and then walked across the soccer field to police headquarters to file a missing person's report, but police insisted the report couldn't be filed for 72 hours.

"I knew she didn't run away," Fritzinger said. "Something really wrong had happened. Everyone knew I was looking for her."

Fritzinger said students and parents blitzed police with more than 100 telephone calls about the missing teen.

"Everyone dropped the ball. Nobody was doing anything. No one took it seriously except the kids," she said.

A few days later on Saturday, Sept. 20, Fritzinger and her boyfriend, now her husband, were at dirt track races in Flemington when she heard sirens screaming and police cars and ambulances racing by on a nearby main road that leads to Hunterdon Medical Center.

Fritzinger said her immediate thought was "they found her."

The next day, her family was contacted by Bernards police who asked the family to come in because a body had been found in Hunterdon County that they were looking to identify.

The clothing description on the body matched Wood's. Fritzinger said her father was asked to sign paperwork to obtain dental confirmation of the body. Her father and uncle also were asked to go to a morgue in Newark to identify the body in person which had been exposed to the elements.

Fritzinger said she was sitting at the kitchen table when her father called Wood's father, Richard, who lived in Massachusetts, to tell him his daughter's body had been found.

"It was the first time I'd ever seen my father cry," she said.

Wood's father, who divorced when Wood was very young, died in 1976, a year after his daughter's death.

Fritzinger said the New Jersey State Police took over the case because of the different municipalities involved, and executed a search warrant at her family's home, tossing the house and Wood's bedroom.

While her parents made the funeral arrangements, a friend of the family helped Fritzinger get her cousin's senior picture. When she got back home, she opened the Courier News and found a photo of her cousin and a story about how she had been bludgeoned to death.

A medical examiner's report determined hemorrhages around Wood's neck indicated she had died from strangulation.

The Hunterdon County Board of Freeholders at that time had offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction of the person responsible for Wood's death.

Anyone with information about the killing of Sandra Wood is asked to contact the New Jersey State Police Homicide North Unit at 609-882-2000, ext. 2538.

Suzanne Russell covers crime, courts, and other forms of mayhem from throughout the Central Jersey area for the USA Today Network New Jersey. Contact her at srussell@gannettnj.com.