More than half a century after 23-year-old Mary Ellen Robinson was beaten and sexually attacked along Galveston’s Seawall, a relative says one stack of official paperwork has jolted the family’s long-quiet search for answers. Alycia Randazzo says she filed an open-records request with the Galveston Police Department and was stunned to receive a 76-page case file that her grandparents had been told was destroyed in a hurricane. The documents, she says, give back a name, a place, and a date to a story her family has carried in fragments for decades, as per FOX 26 Houston.
Randazzo told FOX 26 Houston she was "pleasantly surprised" when the file arrived, especially after earlier family visits to the Galveston police station ended with officials saying evidence had been lost in a storm. She described Mary Ellen as "very nice, very funny, similar to my grandpa," and said the paperwork finally lets relatives remember her as more than a line in an old police file.
Cold-case context
Galveston carries a long shadow of unsolved violent crimes from the 1970s, a history that investigators and journalists have been revisiting in recent years. Those renewed efforts have brought fresh attention to aging police files and the potential for DNA testing on evidence that has sat in storage for decades.
As the Houston Chronicle has documented, several island cases from that era have been pulled back into the light by reporters and detectives, showing how long-dormant leads can be reconsidered when new evidence, technology, or public interest emerges.
What the case file shows
The typed report in the records says Mary Ellen and a roommate had been packing the night before she was attacked, and that seven boxes of packed clothes were later found in her car, ready for the Railway Express office that same day. The file identifies the assault as taking place near 98th Street and Seawall Boulevard and lists May 13, 1970, as the date of the killing.
Those specifics, absent from family lore for years, surfaced in the documents and in Randazzo’s interview with FOX 26 Houston.
Family hopes the file keeps her memory alive
Randazzo says the family’s push today is less about expecting a late-breaking prosecution and more about restoring a full life to a name that had been reduced to a brief case note. Whether or not the documents ever lead to new legal action, relatives say the file gives them a clearer picture of Mary Ellen’s last day and helps ensure her story remains woven into Galveston’s history, rather than fading into a forgotten cold case.
