THE JELLISON ROAD MYSTERY:

THE UNSOLVED KILLING OF RUTH LORI BALLEW

A COLD DISCOVERY

On the evening of February 5, 1977, a Saturday, a couple walking the isolated dirt roads on the rural south edge of Billings, Montana, came upon the body of a young woman lying in the mud near the city landfill. The couple went to the nearest structure they could find, the office of a local helicopter company, and asked its owner to summon help. At roughly 5:45 p.m., that owner placed a frantic call to the Yellowstone County Sheriff’s Office. Deputies arriving at the scene on Jellison Road, a remote industrial route running parallel to the Yellowstone River, found a woman who had been dead for what investigators estimated was one to two days before being found by area residents out on their regular walk. She had been fully clothed, showed no obvious sign of a struggle, and, notably, no indication of sexual assault. She had been shot. The victim was soon identified as twenty-one-year-old Ruth Lori Ballew of Billings, a young woman known to police through a handful of prostitution arrests and recognized around the Empire Bar district of downtown Billings.

Almost fifty years later, her killing remains Yellowstone County’s oldest unsolved homicide, a case that has resisted resolution despite the department’s periodic efforts to revive public interest in it.

A LIFE BEFORE THE HEADLINES

Ruth Ballew was born on September 19, 1955, the only daughter among three sons born to William and Fern Ballew, and she and her family made their home in a mobile home community known locally as Trailer Village before later residing on South Billings Boulevard. According to an account compiled from court and investigative records, she attended Newman Elementary School and Riverside Junior High, and was remembered as a quiet, unremarkable student who kept to herself and maintained an average academic record. She lived with cerebral palsy, which left her right arm partially paralyzed, and she was diagnosed as diabetic at the age of seven. One source places her high school graduation at Billings West High School in 1974, a detail that appears nowhere else in the available record and should be treated as reported by a single outlet rather than independently confirmed.

By multiple accounts, Ruth was, for a time, employed as a nurse’s aide, a detail recorded both in her official death certificate through the Montana Department of Health and Environmental Sciences and repeated in later journalistic accounts of the case. Whether this employment continued up to the time of her death, or had already given way to other means of support, is not clear from the surviving record.

In her senior year of high school Ruth became engaged to a young man she had met while the two of them taught Sunday school together at Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Billings. That engagement did not last. What followed, according to the fullest reconstruction of her final years available, was a period in which her health noticeably declined, her insulin needs increased, and her circle of associations shifted. She began a relationship with a man some twelve years her senior, a guitarist in a local country-western band who was also known in the community as a convicted burglar with a 1962 conviction tied to a break-in at a Veterans of Foreign Wars post. That same man was widely believed by people who knew Ruth to be managing her and another woman’s earnings from prostitution, an arrangement he publicly denied being a “pimp” while, in the same breath, acknowledging that he regularly took money the two women handed him. This detailed account of Ruth’s boyfriend, including his name and his public remarks to the press, rests on a single available source and has not been independently corroborated by contemporaneous newspaper coverage located for this article.

By March 1976, Ruth had been arrested for solicitation, a charge to which she did not personally appear in court, instead paying a bondsman a reported three hundred dollars to forfeit her bond on her behalf. It was, by most accounts, one of two prostitution-related arrests on her record. Those who knew her in this period, including another woman who worked alongside her, later told reporters that Ruth had kept this part of her life hidden from her parents.

THE INVESTIGATION

In the days following the discovery of her body, investigators worked to reconstruct Ruth’s final thirty hours, tracing where she had eaten and what she had ordered, building what detectives at the time described as a “fairly solid” timeline up to a certain point, after which the trail went cold. Detectives at the scene declined to disclose whether she had been killed where she was found or killed elsewhere and moved, and they withheld the number of gunshot wounds and the caliber of the weapon used, reasoning publicly that such details were best known only to the killer. No weapon and no shell casings were recovered at the scene. One account describes wounds to Ruth’s face and attributes to an unnamed contemporary media source the characterization of the killing as resembling “a gangland execution”; this specific detail could not be verified in a second, independent account and should be read with appropriate caution.

An autopsy was performed the Monday following the discovery, with the death formally ruled a homicide caused by gunshot wounds, a finding recorded on her official death certificate and confirmed across the available sources. Investigators canvassed a nearby trailer park roughly a quarter mile from the scene but found no one who reported seeing or hearing anything unusual. Weeks later, the sheriff’s office received an anonymous letter reportedly containing information relevant to the case; investigators used the pages of the Billings Gazette to ask the letter’s author to come forward, but no further contact was made, and within a month the flow of tips from the public had largely dried up.

Given her occupation, investigators focused early suspicion on the men who moved through that world with her, customers and the man believed to be managing her earnings among them. Decades later, a sheriff’s office cold case investigator characterized this as a persistent line of inquiry, noting that suspicion in such cases naturally turns toward those “managing the working girls.”

A FAMILY DRAWN INTO THE CASE

Roughly five weeks after the killing, the investigation took an unusual turn. According to sworn statements filed in Yellowstone County Justice Court, one of Ruth’s brothers, who had reportedly offered investigators inconsistent accounts when first questioned, told a local psychiatrist that he had killed his sister with a .22 caliber rifle. This statement was made while the brother was under the influence of sodium amytal, a barbiturate historically used by some interrogators and clinicians in the hope of loosening a subject’s tongue, a practice sometimes colloquially labeled “truth serum.” The label is misleading. Subjects under such sedation can still lie, confabulate, or simply say what they believe an interrogator wants to hear, which is part of why the United States Supreme Court’s 1963 ruling in Townsend v. Sain held that confessions obtained under such conditions could not be considered voluntary and were therefore inadmissible.

A subsequent search of the brother’s vehicle turned up nothing beyond a soft drink can and a pack of cigarettes. No weapon, no ammunition, and no physical evidence tying him to the crime was found. He later recanted the statement, and investigators, weighing the unreliability of a drug-assisted confession against the total absence of corroborating evidence, discounted it. He was never charged. This episode, including the name of the brother and the treating psychiatrist, is documented in only one of the sources consulted for this article, though the general fact that a brother confessed under the influence of sodium amytal before recanting is corroborated by a second, independent account.

A CASE THAT DID NOT CLOSE

Investigators over the years say they interviewed Ruth’s parents, her surviving family, her friends, her boyfriend, and, so far as they were able, her customers. They developed several persons of interest but never assembled sufficient evidence to bring charges against anyone, nor did they settle on a confirmed motive. As of recent years, the sheriff’s office cold case unit has reported that it no longer maintains contact with any of Ruth’s family members. A current investigator with the unit has said publicly that he believes someone still holds relevant information, suggesting that a person once loyal to a suspect, or fearful of one, might now be more willing to come forward.

One further, more speculative thread appears in the record: an account describing Ruth’s case as one of three killings of vulnerable young Billings women within a roughly two-year span in the late 1970s, alongside the unsolved deaths of Corina Contreraz and Marsha Helgesen. No evidence has been offered publicly connecting the three cases, and this claim of a pattern rests on a single source; it is presented here only as a documented point of local speculation, not as an established fact.

CONCLUSION

Ruth Lori Ballew was buried on February 9, 1977, at Sunset Memorial Gardens in Billings, with services held at the same Bethlehem Lutheran Church where she had once taught Sunday school. Her case file remains open under the Yellowstone County Sheriff’s Office Cold Case Unit, one of the department’s oldest unresolved homicides. What the surviving record shows clearly is a short, difficult life cut still shorter by violence, and an investigation that, despite genuine effort, was undone by the same circumstances, an itinerant, precarious existence on the margins of a small city, that likely made her vulnerable in the first place. What remains uncertain is nearly everything else: who was with her in her final hours, why she was killed, and whether anyone now living still knows the answer.

WORKS CITED

Billings Gazette. “Sheriff Identifies Ballantine Homicide Victim.” Billings Gazette, billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/crime-and-courts/article_1c3233a4-0b54-5d87-ba69-52573af81d85.html. Accessed 5 Aug. 2026.

“Ruth Lori Ballew (1955-1977).” Find a Grave, www.findagrave.com/memorial/143775056/ruth-lori-ballew. Accessed 5 Aug. 2026.

“The Unsolved Shooting Death of Billings Prostitute Ruth Lori Ballew.” Montana Right Now, 13 Nov. 2023, www.montanarightnow.com/montana/the-unsolved-shooting-death-of-billings-prostitute-ruth-lori-ballew/article_079b2628-435a-11ed-9238-f3fd0aac4ff9.html. Accessed 5 Aug. 2026.

space_dinos. “MT - Ruth Lori Ballew, 21, Billings, 5 February 1977.” Websleuths, 6 June 2026, websleuths.com/threads/mt-ruth-lori-ballew-21-billings-5-february-1977.774532/. Accessed 5 Aug. 2026.

Taylor, Traci. “Montana Mystery: The Unsolved 1977 Murder of Ruth Lori Ballew.” Mix 97.1, Townsquare Media, 23 Jan. 2026, billingsmix.com/ixp/1152/p/who-killed-ruth-lori-ballew/. Accessed 5 Aug. 2026.

Yellowstone County Sheriff’s Office. “C&O# 77-70266 Ruth Lori Ballew.” Yellowstone County Cold Case Unit, yellowstonecoldcase.com/Ballew.html. Accessed 5 Aug. 2026.