New Haven's Forgotten Murders
Could an Unknown Serial Killer Have Been Stalking the Streets of New, East and West Haven in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s?
In a rat and roach infested motel on Pond Lily Avenue in New Haven, 23-year-old Terry Williams was found naked and shot in the chest and head with a .32 caliber revolver. She was the seventh black woman to be murdered in the city in two years.
Civic and religious groups – frustrated by a lack of progress – accused the New Haven Police Department of not doing enough to solve the crimes - while a group of concerned residents took matters into their own hands and organized nightly patrols to protect local prostitutes and the public. New Haven was on edge.
Then in November of 1978 – a little less than two months after Williams’ murder – the New Haven Police Department announced it had a suspect in her case. No arrest however was ever made.
Eventually interest in the murders began to wane. Nightly patrols to protect local prostitutes became less frequent. More women were found murdered.
By 1990 there were at least a dozen unsolved murders of women in New Haven. Some of the victims were prostitutes. Others had known drug problems. Some were beaten, some stabbed, others shot. The women were found discarded in local parks and cemeteries, by the side of the street or left in dingy motel rooms or grocery store parking lots.
Once the initial stories detailing the discovery of their bodies were printed their names quickly faded. Details of how they were killed remained sketchy, often times contradictory or non-existent. Some of the women were reportedly shot in one article, only to be described as beaten in another. Even the location of where their bodies were found differed in some instances depending on which story you happened to be reading.
A Google search of their names today turns up little or no information about the women or their horrific murders. Still their tragic deaths pose a terrifying unanswered question. Was there an unidentified serial killer at large in New Haven during the 1970s to early 1990s? Could that serial killer still be alive today?
The answer to that question begins in August of 1975. Rainy and overcast, a truck driver pulled into the Bradlees parking lot on Frontage Road in East Haven and made a grisly discovery. There - behind the store, in a two-foot- deep drainage ditch - the driver noticed a woman’s body wrapped in a paint speckled canvas tarpaulin. She had been gagged and bound with black antenna wire around her neck, waist and knees and strangled to death.
Caucasian, approximately 125 pounds, five feet six inches, in her twenties, the woman had hazel eyes and what appeared to be a small mole on her chin. She was wearing small, gold, circular earrings and appeared to have gotten work done on her teeth and her nose. She had no identification and police were unable to determine her identity. They suspected she had been killed elsewhere and dumped in that spot or may have been left upstream in a 30-inch drainage pipe and washed out during the heavy rains.
The unidentified woman appeared to have been dead for about a week and may have been transient. Her killer may have been a painter on account of the canvas tarp. The woman nor her killer have ever been identified.
Three years later another “Jane Doe’” was discovered. Most likely in her twenties the skeletonized remains of the woman were found near the New Haven Water Company property adjacent to Derby Avenue in West Haven. Investigators believe she died sometime between 1971 and 1978. A black colored lace bra was found near her body as well as an alarm clock. Police never officially connected the two cases.
Investigators did however receive a tip regarding the East Haven case from a woman who believed that the Bradlee’s Jane Doe may have been one of her co-workers at Bell telephone in the ‘70s. While the woman provided a name police could never track down the woman’s family. It wasn't long before the lead turned into a dead end.
In 1976 – almost a year to the day after the unidentified woman’s remains had been discovered by the truck driver behind Bradlees – another young woman was found dead – this time in the parking lot of the Ivy Circle apartment complex in West Haven.22-year-old Sharon Liburd had been shot two or three times and was found dead at approximately 5:30 a.m. that August in the parking lot of the apartments where she lived. Her case has never been solved.
For another year the murders appear to have abated. Then on October 2, 1977 20-year-old Helen Montgomery of Waterbury was found dead. Depending on the account Montgomery was found either in a New Haven cemetery or at East Rock Park strangled or bludgeoned to death. An Associated Press report the month of her murder claimed that Montgomery had been struck on the head with a hard object and later found by two bicyclists near a pavilion at East Rock. A pink handbag was reportedly found near her body but did not contain any identification. In 2000 the Hartford Courant reported that she had been strangled.
The number of murders in New, East and West Haven began to quickly accelerate. Two months after Montgomery’s body was found 20-year-old Elise McDowell of West Haven – a former Air Force pilot was found stabbed to death on December 11 - though it is unclear where she was discovered. Later that same month another woman was found stabbed to death. 20-year-old Evelyn Kelly was found on Christmas Eve of that year or on December 26 – depending which newspaper story you believe. She was either discovered in East Rock Park or at St. Lawrence Cemetery.
It would take until the following summer for another murdered woman to be discovered.
In August of 1978 – the body of 28-year-old Altee Boykin was found near Marginal Drive in West Haven on a road near St. Lawrence Cemetery. Her body was found partially decomposed by the roadside. Investigators believed it had been there for nearly two months.
Boykin – who had worked as a prostitute – had died from “narcotism” or chronic exposure to a narcotic drug police told reporters at the time.
Investigators believed she had not died as a result of homicide but rather as the result of a substance used to mix heroin. In 2000 however the Courant reported that New Haven Police were considering her death as an unsolved overdose. Reportedly she had been found with the word “love” scrawled in lipstick across one of her legs.
On September 9 of 1978 police had yet another murder on their hands. 22-year-old Brenda Jean Austin was found shot to death or stabbed - depending on which account you believe – in a supermarket parking lot in Orange. Later that same month Terry Williams’ boyfriend found her nude body in a motel room at the Pond Lily Motel.
A run down, beat up, hell hole infested by rodents and roaches, mothers on state assistance with their children rented rooms at the Pond Lily for as little as $35 a day with the state picking up the tab.
Known as “welfare motels” places like the Pond Lily were plagued by prostitution and drug use. The rooms were small, their walls covered in graffiti at times, windows broken, ceilings oftentimes damaged, floors filthy. The furniture was dated and beat up, the rooms had no kitchens and insects were commonplace according to reports at the time. It was here - seven years after Williams’ death - that another woman would be found deceased in one of the Pond Lily’s 52 rooms. Like Williams 33-year-old Ellen Epps was discovered dead on a bed inside the motel. She reportedly died from a hemorrhage in her head believed to have been brought on by excessive drinking.
By the time of Williams’ murder public outrage had grown. The New Haven Police were accused of being unable or even worse unwilling to solve the growing list of murders involving women in the city and surrounding area.
Civic and religious groups protested. A group of frustrated residents – calling themselves the “Soul Patrol” – began to serve as escorts for local prostitutes and the public.
Members of the patrol took it upon themselves to search for clues - going as far as to scribble down the license plate numbers of suspicious vehicles they saw in the area.
Eventually lacking the manpower to keep up, the patrols fizzled out and prostitution began to increase. Before long the patrols stopped all together. After a short break the murders however continued.
In April of 1985 a 27-year-old Waterbury woman named Phyllis Fielding – who two years earlier had been charged with selling either heroin or cocaine – “staggered” into a restaurant on Whaley and Winthrop Avenues in New Haven at 10:30 at night after being stabbed multiple times. She later died.
Then on September 20 of 1986 the body of 28-year-old Virginia Duclos-Bruce was discovered near a dumpster at the Highwood Bar and Grill in Hamden near Morse Street after being stabbed multiple times. According to reports a butcher knife was found near her body.
Duclos-Bruce had visited the bar with friends that night and was last seen walking toward the dance floor. Ginny – as she was known – was discovered the next morning near the dumpster. She reportedly had been beaten so badly the family could not have an open casket at her funeral.
In May of 1990 police were investigating yet another murder. A 33-year-old New Haven woman was found bludgeoned to death in the rear yard of a home on Charles Street. Annette Smith, who reportedly was using heroin or crack around the time of her death, was found partially clothed.
Then, few months later, in October of that same year, 21-year-old Jacqueline Shaw was found shot in the head behind Wilbur Cross High School in New Haven. She was partially naked and was discovered by a custodian along a paved area behind the school.
A Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission complaint indicates that police were approached by an individual claiming to have information regarding her murder. Police reportedly had misgivings at least initially regarding the man’s trustworthiness. No arrests were made in connection to her murder.
As the murders continued and the years passed it appeared these crimes would never be solved. Then a Connecticut cold case task force believed they had a suspect who could potentially be responsible for at least for some of the murders.
Roosevelt Bowden had been convicted of manslaughter after fatally stabbing his one-year -old daughter Tabitha to death on Congress Avenue in New Haven in 1978. Released eight years later according to reports Bowden was accused in April of 1988 of brutally beating his roommate with a piece of metal in Tarpon Springs, Florida. A cellmate of Bowden’s would claim that he admitted in prison to having killed several women in New Haven.
According to the Hartford Courant, the Connecticut Homicide Task Force investigated Bowden and believed he could have met some of the victims while working as a bouncer at a local bar. In 1994 Bowden died of complications associated with AIDS. He was never charged in connection to any of the crimes.
Police in New Haven have never made public whether they believe any of the crimes may have been committed by the same murderer.
Given the similarities in some of the victims, similarities in the manner in which they were killed, the locations where they were found or where they lived however it seems probable that at least some of the murders are connected or were committed by the same killer.
If indeed that is the case then there could have been a serial killer roaming the streets of New Haven and surrounding communities undetected since the 1970s. A serial killer perhaps still at large who has never been brought to justice.
Sources
Record Journal “Rewards Offered” October 11, 1978 UPI
Hartford Courant “Street Patrols Dropping Off” AP October 31, 1978
Hartford Courant “Slaying Probers Report Progress” November 4, 1978 Lawrence B. Rosie
Hartford Courant “Blacks Criticize Police Officials” Lawrence Rosie September 27, 1978
Hartford Courant “Dead Woman Is Identified” AP October 5, 1977
Hartford Courant “A Trail Ends on Death Row” July 23, 2000 Dave Altimari and Colin Poitras
Hartford Courant “Slain Woman Found in Lot” August 8, 1976 AP
Hartford Courant “Slaying Probers Report Progress” November 4, 1978 Lawrence B. Rosie
Hartford Courant “Death Ruled Not Homicide in New Haven” Courant November 7, 1978 no byline
Hartford Courant “Prostitutes said Pawns of Courts” November 17, 1976
Record Journal “Death Laid to Narcotics” UPI November 8, 1978
Hartford Courant “$3,000 Rewards Offered in 6 Slayings” no byline September 21, 1978
Hartford Courant “Murder Victim Found in Motel.” No byline September 29, 1978
Hartford Courant “Residents Seeking Housing Alternative” Jacqueline Cutler March 11, 1986
Hartford Courant “Body Found in New Haven Motel” no byline February 18, 1986
Hartford Courant “Police Link Death to Drinking” UPI February 19, 1986
Hartford Courant “At Welfare Motel State Senator Makes Case Against System” Paul Bradley August 19, 1988
Hartford Courant “Waterbury Woman Dies in Stabbing” April 6, 1985” no byline
Hartford Courant “12 Drug Suspects Arraigned” February 3, 1983 no byline
Hartford Courant “Rewards Authorized in 3 Crime Cases” AP August 5, 1987
NBC CT “1986 Killing of Mother in Hamden Remains Unsolved” Matt Austin September 18, 2020
New Haven Register “Woman Slain Outside Neighborhood Bar 18 Years Ago” Michelle Tuccitto October 3, 2004
Hartford Courant “Investigators Hope Model Helps Identification” April 4, 1992 Andrew Julien, Brant Houston, Gerald Jacobs
CT FOI COMMISSOIN Complaint 2002-114
Hartford Courant “Woman’s Body Found Near School” October 13, 1990
U.S. District Court CT Scott T. Lewis v. Commissioner of Correction February 19, 2013
Self Help Group WTNH story
Hartford Courant “Police Identify Body of Woman” no byline May 14, 1990
Boston Globe “Blacks are Worried After Seven Murders” Gayle Poland October 22, 1978