PIKESVILLE, Md. — Baltimore County police are still searching for answers in the 1980 murder of Ellen Cohen, a 46-year-old mother who was shot and killed steps away from her home in Pikesville on July 25, 1980.
Who killed Ellen Cohen? Cold case murder of Pikesville mom spans 46 years
Cohen lived on Lighttown Court off Old Court Road with her daughter. She worked as a banquet coordinator at a nearby Holiday Inn in Pikesville, police told WMAR-2 News. Her son was out of the area at the time of her death.
On the night of the murder, Cohen and a friend shared a glass of wine at her home. The two women left in separate cars, with Cohen leading her friend out of the neighborhood to a nearby major intersection before heading back home, when the incident occurred.
A child witness told police he heard a man and a woman yelling at each other before the shooting.
"At some point during that interaction, she's shot," Cpl. Dona Carter, an investigator with the Baltimore County Police Department Cold Case Unit, told WMAR-2 News. "She then makes her way onto a neighbor's front porch, and she's just yelling, 'Help me' throughout the neighborhood."
A neighbor called police, but Cohen was pronounced dead at the scene.
"It's unknown if that was just a chance encounter that night, or if it was somebody who actually knew her," Carter added.
Investigators have not ruled out a connection to a string of daytime break-ins that occurred in the area before her murder, though those cases were never formally linked to her death.
"They were daytime breaking-and-enterings," Carter described, "and they were never actually linked to her murder, but that is a possibility of something that, that could be linked. With so little information, it's unknown."
"She had been driving, could it have been road rage? Who knows? Could it have been somebody that she knew? We just have no information whatsoever on who may have done it," Carter added.
The limited technology, lack of surveillance, and scarcity of witness details from 1980 continue to challenge investigators.
Baltimore County Police are asking anyone with information to call 443-862-7331.
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