Family hopeful after FBI exhumes body from unsolved 1969 killing featured in Netflix’s ‘The Keepers’

The family of a woman who disappeared in 1969 after going Christmas shopping at a suburban Baltimore mall is receiving a spark of hope this week when FBI investigators exhumed Joyce Malecki’s body as they continue working to identify her killer

CENTREVILLE, Md. -- Darryl Malecki’s last memory of his older sister is a routine interaction between siblings: A teenager at the time, he was working at a fast food restaurant outside Baltimore when she stopped by to switch cars before heading to the mall.

Joyce Malecki, 20, never returned home. Her body was found on a nearby military base with signs of severe trauma. An autopsy determined she had been strangled to death.

More than a half-century later, the case remains unsolved. But the Malecki family received a spark of hope this week when FBI investigators exhumed Joyce Malecki’s body as they continue working to identify her killer.

The case has been a subject of widespread speculation, especially since Netflix’s documentary series “The Keepers” examined the slaying of a Baltimore nun that unfolded days earlier under eerily similar circumstances.

“We’re hoping and praying that the FBI does have something,” Darryl Malecki said at a news conference Friday morning near his home on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. “Lord knows, time just keeps clicking on.”