THE MURDER OF SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD REAN HOXIE IN NEW YORK CITY ON FEBRUARY 2, 1920
(Do not quote without attribution to Alvin Esau)
Picture from New York Daily News
After Earle Nelson was arrested in Winnipeg, a New York City police detective wrote to the police in Winnipeg noting that a picture of Nelson had been positively identified by a New York pawn shop clerk as portraying the man who had pawned a watch in New York on April 28, 1927. That watch, with distinctive engravings, undoubtedly had come from the murder scene of Mrs. McConnell, strangled in Philadelphia on April 27, 1927. The murder of McConnell in Philadelphia was strongly linked to Earle Nelson as the perpetrator. However, the purpose of Detective Lahey’s letter was not to inform the Winnipeg police about this identification, but rather to request that the Winnipeg police ask their prisoner, Nelson, whether he had been in New York seven years earlier, specifically in February of 1920. As Detective Lahey stated:
On Feb. 2, 1920, a young girl who was alone in her parent’s apartment was beaten over the head with a blunt instrument and then an indecent assault was committed upon her. She was dead when found. We believe that the perpetrator came to the house in answer to an advertisement and was shown the room and, finding the girl alone, attacked her. [1]
Why would Detective Lahey be interested in Earle Nelson as a suspect in this seven-year-old cold case in New York? Well, even though this was not apparently a strangulation murder, responding to a “Room for Rent” advertisement was Nelson’s classic modus operandi, as was a post-mortem sexual assault. Furthermore, as we will note below, a description of a potential suspect featured prominently the “swarthy” or “very dark” complexion of the man. This was also a classic circumstantial factor in the murders attributed to Earle Nelson.
While we have no evidence that Nelson was in fact in New York in this period, this murder took place shortly after Nelson had furiously departed from his wife in Palo Alto and during a time when Nelson was not confined in an institution. We also know that “the dark strangler” frequently travelled from one end of the country to the other, but was he already on the move in this period? We can make no conclusions in these cold cases other than to suggest that the case has enough circumstantial elements to at least take a closer look.
The Hoxie family, Robert and Jeanette, with daughter Rean (or Ream), and son Ralph, had moved to New York after the father, Robert, a mechanic, had lost his “war work” in New Haven, Connecticut.[2] The mother, Jeanette, died in 1916 in the Bronx, and so in 1918 Robert married Marie Ridgeway who sang in cabarets under the name Marie Montrose.[3] She became the stepmother to daughter, Rean, a budding singer and actress in her own right, and to son, Ralph. In June of 1919, a court had apparently placed the ten-year-old Ralph into the care of the Children’s Society, due to lack of proper guardianship and possible abuse by his father Robert and stepmother Marie.[4]
Eventually the family moved from the Bronx to an apartment near Central Park at 72 West 89th St, on the third floor of a six-story apartment building. To cover the cost of the rent, the Hoxie family sublet some of the rooms in their own six room apartment. In an enumeration for the Census of 1920 taken on January 19, 1920, just a few weeks before the murder of 17-year-old Rean, we find that a Mr. Jack Kemper, 45, and a Mr. George Waldeman, 26, and a Miss Sarah Reeves, 36, milliner in a store, rented rooms in the Hoxie apartment.[5] After the enumeration, one of the male renters left, and his room was taken for a week by a number of Spaniards, who were asked to leave because they were out all night and slept all day and made too much noise.[6] Thus, Robert Hoxie placed an advertisement in a newspaper that appeared on Sunday, February 1, 1920:
89TH ST. 72 WEST- Beautiful front suite: telephone, piano, steam: refined surroundings. Hoxie[7]
Marie Montrose, stepmother to Rean, was away in New Orleans, while son Ralph had been removed from the family and was in Fairfield, Maine, in the Good Will Home for orphans and needy children, and so on Monday, February 2, Robert Hoxie, a car mechanic, went to work, leaving his daughter Rean at home alone to practice her piano playing and singing and in charge of showing the apartment to potential renters. Both Sara Reeves and the remaining male renter, either Kemper or Waldeman, were away at work for the day, so Rean was alone.
The female sub-renter, Sarah Reeves, returned to the Hoxie apartment some time after three in the afternoon. The dead body of Rean was found in Sarah’s own bedroom. Reeves already knew something was wrong when she discovered blood on the floor of the hallway before she even went to her room where she found the dead girl.[8] The narrative in the New York World was written with typical tabloid flair:
The door of her room was open, and she hurried toward it. The shades were drawn, but in the semi-darkness she made out the form of Miss Hoxie in a kneeling position at her bed. Thinking the girl was asleep, Miss Reeves shook her. Something damp touched her hand, and she drew away to the window to ascertain what it was. Raising the shade, the woman saw the half-naked form of the girl covered with blood. Without stopping to investigate further, she ran from the apartment screaming.[9]
The police were quickly on the scene. The body of the girl was found posed in a kneeling position over the Reeve’s bed, hands folded as if in prayer. There was no evidence of robbery, and the police believed that the killer had struck the girl down from behind and then the murderer had dragged or carried her down the hall into the bedroom where she was sexually assaulted. The blunt instrument that had been used to kill the girl was not found, the killer evidently taking it with him.
The following day the Times reported that the results of the autopsy revealed that the girl had been clobbered over the head seven times with what was likely a hammer and that a “degenerate” was responsible. She never had a chance. “The physicians said the girl’s fingernails were clear and pink, as though just manicured, and said that, had she been able to fight to protect herself, the nails would have furnished evidence of it.[10] Direct news of the sexual assault after death was not printed in the Times other than the code word “degenerate.” However, the World was more forthcoming, stating that the murderer was a “moral pervert” and “the killing had been of the most brutal sort, as also was the treatment of the girl’s body after life was extinct.”[11] The Tribune noted that the girl had been “mistreated.”[12] The Sun-Herald was the most forthcoming as to necrophilia, noting that the victim was “criminally attacked after death.”[13]
The investigation of the murder proceeded immediately within the apartment building itself. Several electricians working in an apartment directly below the Hoxie apartment heard Rean playing the piano and singing intermittently in the afternoon till around 2:30. They apparently found her music so enchanting that they stopped work for a time to listen to her. At around one in the afternoon,[14] or perhaps closer to 1:30,[15] Mr. Ernest Knoch, an opera conductor living temporarily in a hotel, came to the Hoxie apartment to look at the room for rent. He was attracted to the idea of renting a room with a piano and later described Rean Hoxie, who showed him around the place, as a “very attractive and cultured” young lady. Knoch told Rean that he liked the room but would think it over and phone at around four in the afternoon as to his decision. Indeed, at around four he phoned back to say he wanted to rent the room, but instead of getting the young lady on the phone, he found himself speaking to a police detective.[16] Knoch had a good reputation, was fully cooperative with the police, and was never a suspect.
Returning from work at around 6 in the evening, Robert Hoxie understandably collapsed when he came upon the scene of his daughter’s murder. He noted that his daughter had no boyfriends and worked diligently at her music. “There was no reason, utterly no reason,” he said, “why anybody should want to kill her.”[17] Within the next hellish days, as he waited for his wife to return from New Orleans and have a funeral for his beloved daughter, Robert was so sick that he was under the care of a physician.[18] When the stepmother arrived back in New York after an exhausting fifty hour trip from New Orleans, she apparently could provide the police with no new information that would supply some clue as to the murderer.[19] The funeral for Rean was held at the Universal Chapel on Lexington Avenue on Saturday, February 7, and then the body of the girl was taken to New Haven for burial beside her birth mother in Evergreen Cemetery.[20]
The most important clue was the fleeting description of a man who might have been responsible for the murder. The first person to give a description was Mrs. O’Brian who lived in an apartment on the main floor with her husband and three children. Mrs. O’Brian stated that a young man rang her doorbell and asked for the Hoxie apartment. She directed him to the third floor, “up two flights and to the left.”[21] Her later descriptions of the man were variously reported as “a dark-complexioned man, wearing dark clothes,”[22] and “his appearance and speech stamped him as Italian.”[23] What time was it when this man was seen by Mrs. O’Brian? One report said about 1:30,[24] another about 2,[25] another 2:30,[26] another closer to 3,[27] which would not be long before the body was found by Reeves.
The second description was provided by a Mrs. Flynn[28] who was doing laundry in the Sidney Burger apartment directly across the hall from the Hoxie apartment on the third floor. She identified the time as being around three in the afternoon, and she was waiting for ten-year-old Jay Burger to arrive back from school. Mrs. Burger, the mother of Jay, was evidently not in the apartment during this period. The most logical story was that the laundry lady opened the door in the Burger apartment after the doorbell was rung by Jay. When she opened the door, she saw a dark foreign looking man standing outside the Hoxie door with one hand in his pocket apparently waiting at the Hoxie door after ringing the bell. She described the man, “as about five feet seven or eight inches tall, of slight build and a bristling black moustache.”[29] If this was the correct narrative,[30] and the “dark man” was indeed the murderer, it would make sense to assume that the man might have already murdered Rean, and as he left the apartment he was surprised by the sight of Mrs. Flynn and the boy, so he pretended that he was not getting a response to his ringing of the doorbell. In this scenario, he had been seen by O’Brian upon arrival, and by Flynn upon leaving. However the police apparently continued to believe that Mrs. Flynn saw the man before the murder took place, even though the medical examiner had suggested the time of death as a few minutes before 3 in the afternoon,[31] and it is very unlikely that the suspect would have had the time to commit the murder after 3, if the murder was discovered by Sarah Reeve at around 3:15 to 3:30.
However, in a confusing alternative scenario, the dark-complexioned man rang the Burger door after being unable to get a response from ringing the Hoxie door. The Times story quoted Mrs. Flynn as stating:
“A tall, thin fellow, who might have been an Italian or something like that, was standing in the hallway of the Hoxie house. He was very dark, and I guess maybe he was 35 years old. He’d rung the Burgers’ bell and as I opened the door a little bit he said with a foreign accent: “Mrs. Hoxie in? She don’t answer the bell.” I told him I didn’t know anything about the people across the hall. It was pretty dim-like in the hall and I’m not sure just how the man was dressed- he had a dark slouch hat on, and it was pulled down on one side and he wasn’t carrying anything."[32]
One may well doubt that a murderer would ring the bell across the hall after the fact. If this was the correct scenario, we may conclude that the man was just an innocent person responding to the advertisement and, not getting a response from the Hoxie apartment, he rang the bell across the hall. However, it could be that the report misquotes Mrs. Flynn as saying, “He’d rung the Burger’s bell,” when she really meant or said the Hoxie bell?
Eventually, Assistant District Attorney John Joyce, acknowledged that the man who had talked briefly with Mrs. O’Brian and Mrs. Flynn (assuming they were the same man) might not be the murderer, but rather a man who came to the apartment in response to the advertisement and arrived after the murder had been completed already.[33] However, if Joyce hoped the man might come forward, he did not aid that possibility by telling the press, "This murder… is the most brutal thing I have ever come across… it does seem as though the death chair never should be abolished, not while such maniacal degenerates are free to attack persons. I don’t think that the murderer ever lived in the house, or even in the neighbourhood…[34] Who would voluntarily come forward, even if innocent, in a situation where the crime was so horrible that officials were relishing the thought of pulling the switch or dropping the rope?
The third description of the man was given by the young Jay Burger. He later recalled that the man wore a suit of dark blue, a black slouch hat pulled over his eyes, brown shoes and a black overcoat. He rang the Hoxie bell and turned to the boy and said, “What’s the matter? Is Miss Hoxie out?”[35] The police noted that the boy insisted that the man had asked for Miss Hoxie rather than Mrs. Hoxie as reported by Mrs. Flynn. If the boy was right, the man probably was the murderer, because why would he mention Miss Hoxie when the advertisement had only said Hoxie?[36]
The descriptions of O’Brian and Flynn were compared and considered to be of the same man, and supposedly the two witnesses both agreed that the man kept one hand in his pocket, implying that maybe he had the murder weapon with him. At the end of the day, the newspapers in other cities were reporting that the police were looking for a man “age 35 years, medium build, brown hair and mustache and swarthy and believed to be a foreigner”[37] Eyewitness testimony can be highly unreliable, and the descriptions of the man, aside from the dark complexion, do not easily match Earle Nelson who was only 22 at the time and was not tall and thin. While any identification after seven years would have been highly suspect, we have no evidence that pictures of Nelson, like the ones taken by Los Angeles police in 1918 when Nelson was 21, were ever presented to Mrs. O’Brian or Mrs. Flynn or to the Burger boy by the New York police.
If the described man was the murderer, it was likely that he was a stranger to the apartment building. Why would he have asked directions from Mrs. O’Brian if he was familiar with the place? However, the first group of people that the police pursued were the Spaniards, followed by all the other people who were residing, or had once roomed, in the apartment building, either in the Hoxie apartment or neighbouring suites. The man who had left a few weeks ago, either Kemper or Waldeman, was arrested by the police until he proved his innocence.[38] The Spaniards and the present and past roomers were eliminated as suspects after police concluded that they all had provided good accounts of their whereabouts on the day in question.[39] Sometimes Mrs. O’Brian and Mrs. Flynn were asked by the police whether they could identify a particular suspect or not.[40]
The next round of the investigation focused on suspicious persons who were renting rooms, or had sought to rent rooms, especially if they met the description given by O’Brian and Flynn.[41] As pointed out by the Times:
During the day scores of men and women called on Captain Walsh at the station, each to tell him that on Monday, the day of the murder, a swarthy-skinned man called on him or her in answer to an advertisement and inspected rooms. Others who called or telephoned said that on that day dark-complexioned men who had occupied rooms in their homes had disappeared. In every instance detectives were hurried to the addresses given, but in no case was cause for suspicion found.[42]
For example, an Italian shoemaker, black-haired and swarthy, was arrested in Brooklyn as a Hoxie murder suspect after he had responded to an advertisement for a furnished room and the panic-stricken landlady, with the Hoxie case in mind, alleged that he had tried to kiss and hug her. Turns out that he had simply kissed her hand in “old country” fashion.[43] The police also exhaustively searched clothing shops and cleaning establishments given the theory that the killer must have had blood on his clothes and might have bought new clothes or had the bloody ones cleaned.[44]
At some point the investigation shifted from seeking suspicious renters to seeking suspicious men in cabarets. As the World explained:
Miss Hoxie, a singer of considerable ability and possessed of a slender, girlish figure and rather a pretty face, was ambitious to follow the career of her stepmother, who was a concert and stage singer. To further her ambition, she received permission some months ago to have a “try-out” at two cabarets. She sang at these places, it is said, and was fairly successful. It is possible, therefore, that some man might have been attracted to her at one of these public performances and learned her address.[45]
This was also the theory that was taken up several years later by Sir Basil Thompson, ex-Director of Criminal Investigations in Scotland Yard.[46] Thompson, simplistically dismissing the sex maniac theory, opted instead for a jealous jilted lover theory. Someone had probably seen the young “Renee” singing at a cabaret, became infatuated with her, and then seeing the opportunity afforded by the “room for rent” scenario, went to the apartment and killed the beautiful young girl when his advances were spurned.
When the detectives, despite diligent work, made no progress, District Attorney Edward Swann made a request to the city for a $5,000 reward for the capture of the fiend.[47] This was no insubstantial sum in 1920 dollars. However, when the issue of the reward came before the Board of Estimates, Deputy Police Commissioner, William Lahey, in answer to a question by the mayor, declared that the experience of the police was that “a reward does no good.”[48] The reward request was turned down, much to the disappointment of Mr. Swann. The case was never solved. Commenting on the worrisome trend of having a growing number of unsolved murder cases, the Times pointed out that the police had no motive or clue left to work with in the Hoxie murder case.[49]
There seems to have been only a few individuals who subsequently became serious suspects. About a year after the murder, James Brown, a 24-year-old black man was arrested on a charge of burglary. He then apparently admitted that he had attacked a woman in the course of a robbery some weeks previously, which prompted the detectives to ask him about the Hoxie murder. Brown then immediately confessed that he had killed Hoxie. According to the Times, “The confession was so readily made, and Brown’s story embodied some discrepancies so obvious that the police were not sure he was telling the truth.”[50] The police soon discovered that Brown knew nothing about the case and his confession was false, as he himself subsequently admitted.[51]
When a widow in Long Island was murdered by a man posing as a potential purchaser of her property the police obviously sought possible links with the Hoxie murder. However, the murderer, a Polish farm laborer by the name of Lawrence Kubal, had nothing to do with the Hoxie murder. He was electrocuted in Sing Sing after his pleas of insanity were rejected.[52] About three years after the Hoxie murder, a Mr. Frank Benner, 26 years of age, became a suspect when he confessed to strangling and then “mutilating” a young woman who lived across from him in a New York rooming house in October of 1922, as well as attacking a woman in Philadelphia in December 1923. However, he denied having anything to do with the Hoxie murder.[53] Given his mental instability, he was allowed to plead guilty to second degree murder and sentenced from twenty years to life in Sing Sing prison.[54] Stacy Horn in a book dealing with the New York Police Department’s Cold Case Squad mentions that the Hoxie murder in 1920 remains on the cold case list, with a file on the case yellowing in a warehouse in Brooklyn.[55] The case is now over a century old.
Robert, the father of Rean Hoxie, continued to live in New York and died on January 4, 1936.[56] Stepmother, Marie (Ridgeway) Hoxie, continued to have a career as a vaudeville singer under the name Marie Montrose through much of the 1920 period, till the end of 1926, by which time vaudeville had pretty much come to an end, overtaken by film and radio.[57] If we have the right person as the vaudeville singer, it would appear that Robert and Marie did not spend much time together as she travelled the country on the vaudeville circuit. We do not know what happened subsequently, but by 1950 Marie Hoxie was an inmate in a mental asylum in Louisiana where she died at age of 74 in 1955.[58] Ralph Hoxie, the brother of Rean, spent his life in New Haven, Connecticut working in a brass factory.[59] He enlisted in the army from 1941 through 1945.[60] He was married in 1943[61] and the couple had several children.[62] He continued to work in the brass factory, and died at age 65 in 1973.[63]
Should we still consider Earle Nelson as a possible suspect in the Hoxie murder? Obviously, as noted earlier, the circumstance of gaining access to a house or apartment by way of a for rent advertisement, the post-mortem sexual activity, and the “dark complexion” of the possible suspect, all point to at least a suspicion that Nelson might have been the murderer. On the other hand, as noted, the description of the suspect, assuming he was not just an innocent person coming to the scene after the murderer had already left, does not easily fit Nelson. We also do not know the exact date in early 1920 when Nelson left his wife in Palo Alto. We do not know if he was already going on cross-country trips. The subsequent assault on the Summers (or Sommers) girl in San Francisco in May of 1921, when Nelson was posing as a plumber, and where he attacked the girl even though the brother of the girl was upstairs in the house, strikes me as a rather opportunistic, poorly planned, attempted precursor to the more adept murders to follow. We may well doubt that Nelson’s serial killer career started before he escaped from the asylum for good on November 2, 1923. Even then, the “conventional” list starts in 1926, while the “expanded” list starts in the second half of 1925, implying that there was at least a year and a half after his escape from the asylum in which Nelson was probably cultivating his angry fantasies against women, before acting out the fantasy for the first time.
One may conclude that Earle Nelson probably did not kill the songbird in New York in 1920. However, given that the circumstances of the crime were so closely related to Nelson’s subsequent murders, we cannot be sure.
..............................................................................
[1] Letter from Detective Lahey to Chief of Police, Chris Newton, October 13, 1927, Winnipeg Police File on Earle Nelson.
[2] “Girl Found Slain Kneeling at Bed,” N. Y. Times, Feb. 3, 1920, at 1 and 3.
[3] Information on the Hoxie family taken from Ancestry.com.
[4] “Find a New Clue to Hoxie Murder,” N. Y. Times, Feb. 6, 1920, at 8.
[5] U.S. Census of 1920.
[6] Supra note 2.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] “17-Year-Old Girl Brutally Beaten to Death,” N. Y. World, Feb. 3, 1920, at 1.
[10] “Seek Caller Seen at Hoxie Home,” N. Y. Times, Feb. 4, 1920, at 1 and 2.
[11] “Police Baffled,” N. Y. World, Feb. 4, 1920, at 32.
[12] “Spaniard Hunted in Brutal Murder,” N. Y. Tribune, Feb. 4, 1920, at 10.
[13] “Police Baffled,” N. Y. Sun and Herald, Feb. 4, 1920, at 24.
[14] “Police Search in Vain,” N. Y. Evening World, Feb. 3, 1920, at 1.
[15] Supra note 2.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Supra note 10.
[18] “Proposes $5,000 Murder Reward,” N. Y. Times, Feb. 5, 1920, at 17.
[19] Supra note 4.
[20] “Search Cabarets Now,” N. Y. World, Feb. 8, 1920, at 16.
[21] “Girl Murdered by Stranger,” N.Y. Sun and Herald, Feb. 3, 1920, at 1.
[22] “Girl Slain,” N. Y. Daily News, Feb. 3, 1920, at 2.
[23] Supra note 9.
[24] ‘Who Killed Hoxie,” N. Y. News, Feb. 4, 1920, at 2 and 3.
[25] “Girl, 17, Slain,” N. Y. Tribune, Feb. 3, 1920, at 1.
[26] “Brutally Beaten to Death,” N. Y. World, Feb. 3, 1920, at 1
[27] “Hoxie Girl.” N. Y. Tribune, Feb. 6, 1920, at 7; “Girl Killed by Guest,” N. Y. Post, Feb. 6, 1920, at 9.
[28] Some early reports state that it was Mrs. Burger, rather than the laundry lady, who saw the suspect.
[29] “Police Search in Vain,” N. Y. Evening World, Feb. 3, 1920, at 1.
[30] Also found in supra note 13.
[31] For example, supra note 10.
[32] Supra note 10.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Supra note 14. Same scenario in supra note 24.
[36] Supra note 10.
[37] For example, “Brutal Murder in New York,” Nevada Daily Mail, Feb. 3, 1920, at 1.
[38] “Former Lodger is Taken in Custody,” N. Y. Evening World, Feb. 4, 1920, at 3.
[39] “Seek Caller Seen at Hoxie Home,” N. Y. Times, Feb. 4, 1920, at 1 and 2; “Hoxie Murder Suspect Freed,” N. Y. Daily News, Feb. 6, 1920, at 7.
[40] “Lodger Held,” N. Y. News, Feb. 5, 1920, at 3.
[41] “Police on Trail,” N. Y. World, Feb 6, 1920, at 3.
[42] Supra note 4.
[43] “Rearrest Alleged Woman Annoyer,” Brooklyn Standard Union, Feb. 11, 1920, at 7; “Take Brooklyn Man,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Feb. 11, 1920, at 2.
[44] “Swann Asks City to Offer $5,000,” N. Y. World, Feb. 5, 1920, at 7.
[45] Ibid.
[46] “Strange Mystery of Renee Hoxie is Still Unsolved,” Buffalo Courier, December 9, 1923, at 82.
[47] Supra note 18.
[48] “Hoxie Slayer Fund Appeal is Rejected,” N. Y. Times, Feb. 7, 1920, at 5.
[49] “Unsolved Murder Mysteries,” N. Y. Times, April 8, 1923, at XX3.
[50] “Negro Burglar Says He Killed Miss Hoxie,” N. Y. Times, Jan. 28, 1921, at 4.
[51] “Confession False,” N.Y. Evening World, Jan. 28, 1921, at 5; “Negro Confession False,” N.Y. Tribune, Jan. 29, 1921, at 3; “Negro Absolved,” N. Y. News, Jan. 29, 1921, at 6.
[52] “Slayer Kubal Dies in Chair,” Brooklyn Times Union, March 22, 1922, at 9.
[53] “Held as Murderer of Woman, Admits Attack on Another,” Washington Post, Dec. 29, 1923, at 3; “Strangler Tells of Girl’s Murder,” N. Y. Times, Dec. 28, 1923, at 12.
[54] “Brutal Slayer Pleads Guilty,” L.A. Times, March 21, 1924, at 8.
[55] Stacy Horn, The Restless Sleep: Inside New York City’s Cold Case Squad (New York: Penguin, 2005) at 121.
[56] findagrave.com
[57] Numerous newspaper reports from 1921 to the end of 1926 mention “Marie Montrose” as part of some vaudeville show in cities in the United States. Included are shows in Canada. See, for example, “Pantages Returns,” Regina Leader-Post, Dec. 27, 1921, at 7; “Tuneful Comedy,” Vancouver Daily World, Jan. 31, 1922, at 12.
[58] U.S.A. Census of 1950; Louisiana Death Index, 1819-1964.
[59] U. S. A. Census of 1930 and 1940.
[60] WWII Draft Cards 1940-1947; Department of Veteran’s Affairs Death Files, 1880-2010.
[61] Connecticut Marriage Records, 1892-1968.
[62] U.S.A. Census of 1950.
[63] findagrave.com; Connecticut Death Index, 1949-2012.
(Do not quote without attribution to Alvin Esau)
Picture from New York Daily News
After Earle Nelson was arrested in Winnipeg, a New York City police detective wrote to the police in Winnipeg noting that a picture of Nelson had been positively identified by a New York pawn shop clerk as portraying the man who had pawned a watch in New York on April 28, 1927. That watch, with distinctive engravings, undoubtedly had come from the murder scene of Mrs. McConnell, strangled in Philadelphia on April 27, 1927. The murder of McConnell in Philadelphia was strongly linked to Earle Nelson as the perpetrator. However, the purpose of Detective Lahey’s letter was not to inform the Winnipeg police about this identification, but rather to request that the Winnipeg police ask their prisoner, Nelson, whether he had been in New York seven years earlier, specifically in February of 1920. As Detective Lahey stated:
On Feb. 2, 1920, a young girl who was alone in her parent’s apartment was beaten over the head with a blunt instrument and then an indecent assault was committed upon her. She was dead when found. We believe that the perpetrator came to the house in answer to an advertisement and was shown the room and, finding the girl alone, attacked her. [1]
Why would Detective Lahey be interested in Earle Nelson as a suspect in this seven-year-old cold case in New York? Well, even though this was not apparently a strangulation murder, responding to a “Room for Rent” advertisement was Nelson’s classic modus operandi, as was a post-mortem sexual assault. Furthermore, as we will note below, a description of a potential suspect featured prominently the “swarthy” or “very dark” complexion of the man. This was also a classic circumstantial factor in the murders attributed to Earle Nelson.
While we have no evidence that Nelson was in fact in New York in this period, this murder took place shortly after Nelson had furiously departed from his wife in Palo Alto and during a time when Nelson was not confined in an institution. We also know that “the dark strangler” frequently travelled from one end of the country to the other, but was he already on the move in this period? We can make no conclusions in these cold cases other than to suggest that the case has enough circumstantial elements to at least take a closer look.
The Hoxie family, Robert and Jeanette, with daughter Rean (or Ream), and son Ralph, had moved to New York after the father, Robert, a mechanic, had lost his “war work” in New Haven, Connecticut.[2] The mother, Jeanette, died in 1916 in the Bronx, and so in 1918 Robert married Marie Ridgeway who sang in cabarets under the name Marie Montrose.[3] She became the stepmother to daughter, Rean, a budding singer and actress in her own right, and to son, Ralph. In June of 1919, a court had apparently placed the ten-year-old Ralph into the care of the Children’s Society, due to lack of proper guardianship and possible abuse by his father Robert and stepmother Marie.[4]
Eventually the family moved from the Bronx to an apartment near Central Park at 72 West 89th St, on the third floor of a six-story apartment building. To cover the cost of the rent, the Hoxie family sublet some of the rooms in their own six room apartment. In an enumeration for the Census of 1920 taken on January 19, 1920, just a few weeks before the murder of 17-year-old Rean, we find that a Mr. Jack Kemper, 45, and a Mr. George Waldeman, 26, and a Miss Sarah Reeves, 36, milliner in a store, rented rooms in the Hoxie apartment.[5] After the enumeration, one of the male renters left, and his room was taken for a week by a number of Spaniards, who were asked to leave because they were out all night and slept all day and made too much noise.[6] Thus, Robert Hoxie placed an advertisement in a newspaper that appeared on Sunday, February 1, 1920:
89TH ST. 72 WEST- Beautiful front suite: telephone, piano, steam: refined surroundings. Hoxie[7]
Marie Montrose, stepmother to Rean, was away in New Orleans, while son Ralph had been removed from the family and was in Fairfield, Maine, in the Good Will Home for orphans and needy children, and so on Monday, February 2, Robert Hoxie, a car mechanic, went to work, leaving his daughter Rean at home alone to practice her piano playing and singing and in charge of showing the apartment to potential renters. Both Sara Reeves and the remaining male renter, either Kemper or Waldeman, were away at work for the day, so Rean was alone.
The female sub-renter, Sarah Reeves, returned to the Hoxie apartment some time after three in the afternoon. The dead body of Rean was found in Sarah’s own bedroom. Reeves already knew something was wrong when she discovered blood on the floor of the hallway before she even went to her room where she found the dead girl.[8] The narrative in the New York World was written with typical tabloid flair:
The door of her room was open, and she hurried toward it. The shades were drawn, but in the semi-darkness she made out the form of Miss Hoxie in a kneeling position at her bed. Thinking the girl was asleep, Miss Reeves shook her. Something damp touched her hand, and she drew away to the window to ascertain what it was. Raising the shade, the woman saw the half-naked form of the girl covered with blood. Without stopping to investigate further, she ran from the apartment screaming.[9]
The police were quickly on the scene. The body of the girl was found posed in a kneeling position over the Reeve’s bed, hands folded as if in prayer. There was no evidence of robbery, and the police believed that the killer had struck the girl down from behind and then the murderer had dragged or carried her down the hall into the bedroom where she was sexually assaulted. The blunt instrument that had been used to kill the girl was not found, the killer evidently taking it with him.
The following day the Times reported that the results of the autopsy revealed that the girl had been clobbered over the head seven times with what was likely a hammer and that a “degenerate” was responsible. She never had a chance. “The physicians said the girl’s fingernails were clear and pink, as though just manicured, and said that, had she been able to fight to protect herself, the nails would have furnished evidence of it.[10] Direct news of the sexual assault after death was not printed in the Times other than the code word “degenerate.” However, the World was more forthcoming, stating that the murderer was a “moral pervert” and “the killing had been of the most brutal sort, as also was the treatment of the girl’s body after life was extinct.”[11] The Tribune noted that the girl had been “mistreated.”[12] The Sun-Herald was the most forthcoming as to necrophilia, noting that the victim was “criminally attacked after death.”[13]
The investigation of the murder proceeded immediately within the apartment building itself. Several electricians working in an apartment directly below the Hoxie apartment heard Rean playing the piano and singing intermittently in the afternoon till around 2:30. They apparently found her music so enchanting that they stopped work for a time to listen to her. At around one in the afternoon,[14] or perhaps closer to 1:30,[15] Mr. Ernest Knoch, an opera conductor living temporarily in a hotel, came to the Hoxie apartment to look at the room for rent. He was attracted to the idea of renting a room with a piano and later described Rean Hoxie, who showed him around the place, as a “very attractive and cultured” young lady. Knoch told Rean that he liked the room but would think it over and phone at around four in the afternoon as to his decision. Indeed, at around four he phoned back to say he wanted to rent the room, but instead of getting the young lady on the phone, he found himself speaking to a police detective.[16] Knoch had a good reputation, was fully cooperative with the police, and was never a suspect.
Returning from work at around 6 in the evening, Robert Hoxie understandably collapsed when he came upon the scene of his daughter’s murder. He noted that his daughter had no boyfriends and worked diligently at her music. “There was no reason, utterly no reason,” he said, “why anybody should want to kill her.”[17] Within the next hellish days, as he waited for his wife to return from New Orleans and have a funeral for his beloved daughter, Robert was so sick that he was under the care of a physician.[18] When the stepmother arrived back in New York after an exhausting fifty hour trip from New Orleans, she apparently could provide the police with no new information that would supply some clue as to the murderer.[19] The funeral for Rean was held at the Universal Chapel on Lexington Avenue on Saturday, February 7, and then the body of the girl was taken to New Haven for burial beside her birth mother in Evergreen Cemetery.[20]
The most important clue was the fleeting description of a man who might have been responsible for the murder. The first person to give a description was Mrs. O’Brian who lived in an apartment on the main floor with her husband and three children. Mrs. O’Brian stated that a young man rang her doorbell and asked for the Hoxie apartment. She directed him to the third floor, “up two flights and to the left.”[21] Her later descriptions of the man were variously reported as “a dark-complexioned man, wearing dark clothes,”[22] and “his appearance and speech stamped him as Italian.”[23] What time was it when this man was seen by Mrs. O’Brian? One report said about 1:30,[24] another about 2,[25] another 2:30,[26] another closer to 3,[27] which would not be long before the body was found by Reeves.
The second description was provided by a Mrs. Flynn[28] who was doing laundry in the Sidney Burger apartment directly across the hall from the Hoxie apartment on the third floor. She identified the time as being around three in the afternoon, and she was waiting for ten-year-old Jay Burger to arrive back from school. Mrs. Burger, the mother of Jay, was evidently not in the apartment during this period. The most logical story was that the laundry lady opened the door in the Burger apartment after the doorbell was rung by Jay. When she opened the door, she saw a dark foreign looking man standing outside the Hoxie door with one hand in his pocket apparently waiting at the Hoxie door after ringing the bell. She described the man, “as about five feet seven or eight inches tall, of slight build and a bristling black moustache.”[29] If this was the correct narrative,[30] and the “dark man” was indeed the murderer, it would make sense to assume that the man might have already murdered Rean, and as he left the apartment he was surprised by the sight of Mrs. Flynn and the boy, so he pretended that he was not getting a response to his ringing of the doorbell. In this scenario, he had been seen by O’Brian upon arrival, and by Flynn upon leaving. However the police apparently continued to believe that Mrs. Flynn saw the man before the murder took place, even though the medical examiner had suggested the time of death as a few minutes before 3 in the afternoon,[31] and it is very unlikely that the suspect would have had the time to commit the murder after 3, if the murder was discovered by Sarah Reeve at around 3:15 to 3:30.
However, in a confusing alternative scenario, the dark-complexioned man rang the Burger door after being unable to get a response from ringing the Hoxie door. The Times story quoted Mrs. Flynn as stating:
“A tall, thin fellow, who might have been an Italian or something like that, was standing in the hallway of the Hoxie house. He was very dark, and I guess maybe he was 35 years old. He’d rung the Burgers’ bell and as I opened the door a little bit he said with a foreign accent: “Mrs. Hoxie in? She don’t answer the bell.” I told him I didn’t know anything about the people across the hall. It was pretty dim-like in the hall and I’m not sure just how the man was dressed- he had a dark slouch hat on, and it was pulled down on one side and he wasn’t carrying anything."[32]
One may well doubt that a murderer would ring the bell across the hall after the fact. If this was the correct scenario, we may conclude that the man was just an innocent person responding to the advertisement and, not getting a response from the Hoxie apartment, he rang the bell across the hall. However, it could be that the report misquotes Mrs. Flynn as saying, “He’d rung the Burger’s bell,” when she really meant or said the Hoxie bell?
Eventually, Assistant District Attorney John Joyce, acknowledged that the man who had talked briefly with Mrs. O’Brian and Mrs. Flynn (assuming they were the same man) might not be the murderer, but rather a man who came to the apartment in response to the advertisement and arrived after the murder had been completed already.[33] However, if Joyce hoped the man might come forward, he did not aid that possibility by telling the press, "This murder… is the most brutal thing I have ever come across… it does seem as though the death chair never should be abolished, not while such maniacal degenerates are free to attack persons. I don’t think that the murderer ever lived in the house, or even in the neighbourhood…[34] Who would voluntarily come forward, even if innocent, in a situation where the crime was so horrible that officials were relishing the thought of pulling the switch or dropping the rope?
The third description of the man was given by the young Jay Burger. He later recalled that the man wore a suit of dark blue, a black slouch hat pulled over his eyes, brown shoes and a black overcoat. He rang the Hoxie bell and turned to the boy and said, “What’s the matter? Is Miss Hoxie out?”[35] The police noted that the boy insisted that the man had asked for Miss Hoxie rather than Mrs. Hoxie as reported by Mrs. Flynn. If the boy was right, the man probably was the murderer, because why would he mention Miss Hoxie when the advertisement had only said Hoxie?[36]
The descriptions of O’Brian and Flynn were compared and considered to be of the same man, and supposedly the two witnesses both agreed that the man kept one hand in his pocket, implying that maybe he had the murder weapon with him. At the end of the day, the newspapers in other cities were reporting that the police were looking for a man “age 35 years, medium build, brown hair and mustache and swarthy and believed to be a foreigner”[37] Eyewitness testimony can be highly unreliable, and the descriptions of the man, aside from the dark complexion, do not easily match Earle Nelson who was only 22 at the time and was not tall and thin. While any identification after seven years would have been highly suspect, we have no evidence that pictures of Nelson, like the ones taken by Los Angeles police in 1918 when Nelson was 21, were ever presented to Mrs. O’Brian or Mrs. Flynn or to the Burger boy by the New York police.
If the described man was the murderer, it was likely that he was a stranger to the apartment building. Why would he have asked directions from Mrs. O’Brian if he was familiar with the place? However, the first group of people that the police pursued were the Spaniards, followed by all the other people who were residing, or had once roomed, in the apartment building, either in the Hoxie apartment or neighbouring suites. The man who had left a few weeks ago, either Kemper or Waldeman, was arrested by the police until he proved his innocence.[38] The Spaniards and the present and past roomers were eliminated as suspects after police concluded that they all had provided good accounts of their whereabouts on the day in question.[39] Sometimes Mrs. O’Brian and Mrs. Flynn were asked by the police whether they could identify a particular suspect or not.[40]
The next round of the investigation focused on suspicious persons who were renting rooms, or had sought to rent rooms, especially if they met the description given by O’Brian and Flynn.[41] As pointed out by the Times:
During the day scores of men and women called on Captain Walsh at the station, each to tell him that on Monday, the day of the murder, a swarthy-skinned man called on him or her in answer to an advertisement and inspected rooms. Others who called or telephoned said that on that day dark-complexioned men who had occupied rooms in their homes had disappeared. In every instance detectives were hurried to the addresses given, but in no case was cause for suspicion found.[42]
For example, an Italian shoemaker, black-haired and swarthy, was arrested in Brooklyn as a Hoxie murder suspect after he had responded to an advertisement for a furnished room and the panic-stricken landlady, with the Hoxie case in mind, alleged that he had tried to kiss and hug her. Turns out that he had simply kissed her hand in “old country” fashion.[43] The police also exhaustively searched clothing shops and cleaning establishments given the theory that the killer must have had blood on his clothes and might have bought new clothes or had the bloody ones cleaned.[44]
At some point the investigation shifted from seeking suspicious renters to seeking suspicious men in cabarets. As the World explained:
Miss Hoxie, a singer of considerable ability and possessed of a slender, girlish figure and rather a pretty face, was ambitious to follow the career of her stepmother, who was a concert and stage singer. To further her ambition, she received permission some months ago to have a “try-out” at two cabarets. She sang at these places, it is said, and was fairly successful. It is possible, therefore, that some man might have been attracted to her at one of these public performances and learned her address.[45]
This was also the theory that was taken up several years later by Sir Basil Thompson, ex-Director of Criminal Investigations in Scotland Yard.[46] Thompson, simplistically dismissing the sex maniac theory, opted instead for a jealous jilted lover theory. Someone had probably seen the young “Renee” singing at a cabaret, became infatuated with her, and then seeing the opportunity afforded by the “room for rent” scenario, went to the apartment and killed the beautiful young girl when his advances were spurned.
When the detectives, despite diligent work, made no progress, District Attorney Edward Swann made a request to the city for a $5,000 reward for the capture of the fiend.[47] This was no insubstantial sum in 1920 dollars. However, when the issue of the reward came before the Board of Estimates, Deputy Police Commissioner, William Lahey, in answer to a question by the mayor, declared that the experience of the police was that “a reward does no good.”[48] The reward request was turned down, much to the disappointment of Mr. Swann. The case was never solved. Commenting on the worrisome trend of having a growing number of unsolved murder cases, the Times pointed out that the police had no motive or clue left to work with in the Hoxie murder case.[49]
There seems to have been only a few individuals who subsequently became serious suspects. About a year after the murder, James Brown, a 24-year-old black man was arrested on a charge of burglary. He then apparently admitted that he had attacked a woman in the course of a robbery some weeks previously, which prompted the detectives to ask him about the Hoxie murder. Brown then immediately confessed that he had killed Hoxie. According to the Times, “The confession was so readily made, and Brown’s story embodied some discrepancies so obvious that the police were not sure he was telling the truth.”[50] The police soon discovered that Brown knew nothing about the case and his confession was false, as he himself subsequently admitted.[51]
When a widow in Long Island was murdered by a man posing as a potential purchaser of her property the police obviously sought possible links with the Hoxie murder. However, the murderer, a Polish farm laborer by the name of Lawrence Kubal, had nothing to do with the Hoxie murder. He was electrocuted in Sing Sing after his pleas of insanity were rejected.[52] About three years after the Hoxie murder, a Mr. Frank Benner, 26 years of age, became a suspect when he confessed to strangling and then “mutilating” a young woman who lived across from him in a New York rooming house in October of 1922, as well as attacking a woman in Philadelphia in December 1923. However, he denied having anything to do with the Hoxie murder.[53] Given his mental instability, he was allowed to plead guilty to second degree murder and sentenced from twenty years to life in Sing Sing prison.[54] Stacy Horn in a book dealing with the New York Police Department’s Cold Case Squad mentions that the Hoxie murder in 1920 remains on the cold case list, with a file on the case yellowing in a warehouse in Brooklyn.[55] The case is now over a century old.
Robert, the father of Rean Hoxie, continued to live in New York and died on January 4, 1936.[56] Stepmother, Marie (Ridgeway) Hoxie, continued to have a career as a vaudeville singer under the name Marie Montrose through much of the 1920 period, till the end of 1926, by which time vaudeville had pretty much come to an end, overtaken by film and radio.[57] If we have the right person as the vaudeville singer, it would appear that Robert and Marie did not spend much time together as she travelled the country on the vaudeville circuit. We do not know what happened subsequently, but by 1950 Marie Hoxie was an inmate in a mental asylum in Louisiana where she died at age of 74 in 1955.[58] Ralph Hoxie, the brother of Rean, spent his life in New Haven, Connecticut working in a brass factory.[59] He enlisted in the army from 1941 through 1945.[60] He was married in 1943[61] and the couple had several children.[62] He continued to work in the brass factory, and died at age 65 in 1973.[63]
Should we still consider Earle Nelson as a possible suspect in the Hoxie murder? Obviously, as noted earlier, the circumstance of gaining access to a house or apartment by way of a for rent advertisement, the post-mortem sexual activity, and the “dark complexion” of the possible suspect, all point to at least a suspicion that Nelson might have been the murderer. On the other hand, as noted, the description of the suspect, assuming he was not just an innocent person coming to the scene after the murderer had already left, does not easily fit Nelson. We also do not know the exact date in early 1920 when Nelson left his wife in Palo Alto. We do not know if he was already going on cross-country trips. The subsequent assault on the Summers (or Sommers) girl in San Francisco in May of 1921, when Nelson was posing as a plumber, and where he attacked the girl even though the brother of the girl was upstairs in the house, strikes me as a rather opportunistic, poorly planned, attempted precursor to the more adept murders to follow. We may well doubt that Nelson’s serial killer career started before he escaped from the asylum for good on November 2, 1923. Even then, the “conventional” list starts in 1926, while the “expanded” list starts in the second half of 1925, implying that there was at least a year and a half after his escape from the asylum in which Nelson was probably cultivating his angry fantasies against women, before acting out the fantasy for the first time.
One may conclude that Earle Nelson probably did not kill the songbird in New York in 1920. However, given that the circumstances of the crime were so closely related to Nelson’s subsequent murders, we cannot be sure.
..............................................................................
[1] Letter from Detective Lahey to Chief of Police, Chris Newton, October 13, 1927, Winnipeg Police File on Earle Nelson.
[2] “Girl Found Slain Kneeling at Bed,” N. Y. Times, Feb. 3, 1920, at 1 and 3.
[3] Information on the Hoxie family taken from Ancestry.com.
[4] “Find a New Clue to Hoxie Murder,” N. Y. Times, Feb. 6, 1920, at 8.
[5] U.S. Census of 1920.
[6] Supra note 2.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] “17-Year-Old Girl Brutally Beaten to Death,” N. Y. World, Feb. 3, 1920, at 1.
[10] “Seek Caller Seen at Hoxie Home,” N. Y. Times, Feb. 4, 1920, at 1 and 2.
[11] “Police Baffled,” N. Y. World, Feb. 4, 1920, at 32.
[12] “Spaniard Hunted in Brutal Murder,” N. Y. Tribune, Feb. 4, 1920, at 10.
[13] “Police Baffled,” N. Y. Sun and Herald, Feb. 4, 1920, at 24.
[14] “Police Search in Vain,” N. Y. Evening World, Feb. 3, 1920, at 1.
[15] Supra note 2.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Supra note 10.
[18] “Proposes $5,000 Murder Reward,” N. Y. Times, Feb. 5, 1920, at 17.
[19] Supra note 4.
[20] “Search Cabarets Now,” N. Y. World, Feb. 8, 1920, at 16.
[21] “Girl Murdered by Stranger,” N.Y. Sun and Herald, Feb. 3, 1920, at 1.
[22] “Girl Slain,” N. Y. Daily News, Feb. 3, 1920, at 2.
[23] Supra note 9.
[24] ‘Who Killed Hoxie,” N. Y. News, Feb. 4, 1920, at 2 and 3.
[25] “Girl, 17, Slain,” N. Y. Tribune, Feb. 3, 1920, at 1.
[26] “Brutally Beaten to Death,” N. Y. World, Feb. 3, 1920, at 1
[27] “Hoxie Girl.” N. Y. Tribune, Feb. 6, 1920, at 7; “Girl Killed by Guest,” N. Y. Post, Feb. 6, 1920, at 9.
[28] Some early reports state that it was Mrs. Burger, rather than the laundry lady, who saw the suspect.
[29] “Police Search in Vain,” N. Y. Evening World, Feb. 3, 1920, at 1.
[30] Also found in supra note 13.
[31] For example, supra note 10.
[32] Supra note 10.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Supra note 14. Same scenario in supra note 24.
[36] Supra note 10.
[37] For example, “Brutal Murder in New York,” Nevada Daily Mail, Feb. 3, 1920, at 1.
[38] “Former Lodger is Taken in Custody,” N. Y. Evening World, Feb. 4, 1920, at 3.
[39] “Seek Caller Seen at Hoxie Home,” N. Y. Times, Feb. 4, 1920, at 1 and 2; “Hoxie Murder Suspect Freed,” N. Y. Daily News, Feb. 6, 1920, at 7.
[40] “Lodger Held,” N. Y. News, Feb. 5, 1920, at 3.
[41] “Police on Trail,” N. Y. World, Feb 6, 1920, at 3.
[42] Supra note 4.
[43] “Rearrest Alleged Woman Annoyer,” Brooklyn Standard Union, Feb. 11, 1920, at 7; “Take Brooklyn Man,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Feb. 11, 1920, at 2.
[44] “Swann Asks City to Offer $5,000,” N. Y. World, Feb. 5, 1920, at 7.
[45] Ibid.
[46] “Strange Mystery of Renee Hoxie is Still Unsolved,” Buffalo Courier, December 9, 1923, at 82.
[47] Supra note 18.
[48] “Hoxie Slayer Fund Appeal is Rejected,” N. Y. Times, Feb. 7, 1920, at 5.
[49] “Unsolved Murder Mysteries,” N. Y. Times, April 8, 1923, at XX3.
[50] “Negro Burglar Says He Killed Miss Hoxie,” N. Y. Times, Jan. 28, 1921, at 4.
[51] “Confession False,” N.Y. Evening World, Jan. 28, 1921, at 5; “Negro Confession False,” N.Y. Tribune, Jan. 29, 1921, at 3; “Negro Absolved,” N. Y. News, Jan. 29, 1921, at 6.
[52] “Slayer Kubal Dies in Chair,” Brooklyn Times Union, March 22, 1922, at 9.
[53] “Held as Murderer of Woman, Admits Attack on Another,” Washington Post, Dec. 29, 1923, at 3; “Strangler Tells of Girl’s Murder,” N. Y. Times, Dec. 28, 1923, at 12.
[54] “Brutal Slayer Pleads Guilty,” L.A. Times, March 21, 1924, at 8.
[55] Stacy Horn, The Restless Sleep: Inside New York City’s Cold Case Squad (New York: Penguin, 2005) at 121.
[56] findagrave.com
[57] Numerous newspaper reports from 1921 to the end of 1926 mention “Marie Montrose” as part of some vaudeville show in cities in the United States. Included are shows in Canada. See, for example, “Pantages Returns,” Regina Leader-Post, Dec. 27, 1921, at 7; “Tuneful Comedy,” Vancouver Daily World, Jan. 31, 1922, at 12.
[58] U.S.A. Census of 1950; Louisiana Death Index, 1819-1964.
[59] U. S. A. Census of 1930 and 1940.
[60] WWII Draft Cards 1940-1947; Department of Veteran’s Affairs Death Files, 1880-2010.
[61] Connecticut Marriage Records, 1892-1968.
[62] U.S.A. Census of 1950.
[63] findagrave.com; Connecticut Death Index, 1949-2012.
