HAUNTED BY A COLD CASE

My Ex-Husband’s Grandparents Were Murdered in Their Home

And it remains unsolved forty years later

We had just returned from grocery shopping. It was a chilly evening, and I was trying to crank up the thermostat behind my husband’s back. I liked it toasty warm, but he preferred it a bit cooler. “Put on a sweater,” he’d say with annoyance. “The heating bills are sky high.”

As he put items into the pantry the yellow telephone on the kitchen wall of our apartment rang shrilly. On a Sunday evening, it was probably one of his parents or my mother.

I was half listening as I removed my jacket and returned to the kitchen to think about what I should prepare for dinner.

The look on his face stopped me cold.

He hung up the phone and stumbled toward the back door as if in a trance.

“What’s wrong, Jason? Where are you going? Is it Rose?” Rose was his mother. She’d recently recovered from a bout of pneumonia and I thought maybe she’d had a relapse.

“My grandparents are dead,” he said flatly as he picked up his keys. “Murdered. They want to talk to me at the precinct. Alone.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. We’d been married for four years and I had never met his mother’s parents — the only living grandparents Jason had.

Rose’s relationship with her parents was chilly and distant. She rarely visited the couple even though they lived less than fifteen minutes away. In the 25 years she was married to Jason’s father, her parents had never been inside their home.

I learned while dating Jason his wealthy grandparents disapproved of his father Charles. He hadn’t finished college, and throughout their marriage he held and lost a string of sales jobs. He dabbled in real estate for a while but mostly worked as a manufacturer’s sales rep.

Rose had attended a private Catholic high school and finished a degree in psychology at a women’s college. Her intensely religious and protective parents were dismayed that she’d married “beneath herself.”

But theirs was a happy, close marriage. Charles was a caring father and an affectionate husband. Their small, crowded house was always filled with the smell of Rose’s cooking and sound of opera on the radio.

Jason was the oldest of five siblings, and had had little contact with his grandparents. He didn’t call them “Pawpaw,” “Nana” or other traditional names. They preferred to be addressed formally as Grandfather and Grandmother.

In his first few semesters at university — when Charles was between jobs — they paid Jason’s $150 tuition.

In exchange, he put in week-ends of work at their large Victorian house in a leafy midtown neighborhood. He tore down and rebuilt an outdoor tool shed, trimmed trees and hedges, and painted the interior — labor that would have cost many thousands of dollars.

It was close to midnight when Jason returned. He’d been grilled by two homicide detectives who tried to discover any links he might have to the crime — or motive he might have had to have them killed.

At that time Jason hadn’t seen or spoken to them in several years. He had completed his degree and we were currently making arrangements to move to another city for him to pursue his graduate studies.

Don’t go anywhere anytime soon, he’d been advised.

The murder had been gruesome. Whoever killed them was let in the front door. There was no evidence of a break-in and nothing seemed to have been taken from the house.

What followed remains a mystery because only one person knows — and that’s the one who beat the elderly couple to death with the black metal fire iron grabbed from one of the two living room fireplaces.

We eventually learned the crime scene was bloodied from the living room to the dining room to the kitchen. The grandparents had put up a fight.

The only clue we knew of was bloody fingerprints smeared on the white refrigerator door. The killer may have been checking to see if there was anything to eat or drink after he’d bludgeoned them to death.

Everyone in Jason’s family was questioned — as well as Charles’s two brothers. For a short time his brother Mack was a potential suspect for reasons we never learned.

Although I didn’t meet with the detectives in person, I received a call while Jason was at the precinct. A woman officer asked me to recount everything we’d done the previous day and evening.

That was easy. Saturday morning we’d schlepped laundry to the laundromat. We picked up coffee and donuts to eat while we sat watching the clothes spin.

After dropping off the clothes we visited a friend who’d bought a pair of boxer puppies. We hung out for a while then returned home to get ready to meet friends for pizza and a movie.

Which movie, she wanted to know. A bit embarrassed I said it was the new Brooke Shields film, Pretty Baby — the controversial tale of a young girl raised in a brothel.

From there we just went home I told her. I didn’t mention we stopped briefly at Ray’s apartment to smoke a joint.

Are you sure you went straight home? “Oh wait, I’m sorry. I forgot to say…,” I stumbled guiltily. “We stopped by a friend’s house — Ray J. — and we had a rum and coke. I almost forgot. Sorry. Then we came on home.”

Damn. I sounded so guilty she probably thinks I did it.

I wondered if my story was anywhere close to Jason’s. All I know is that we did not go by his grandparents house and kill them.

What time did you get home, she asked. Around eleven. What did you do then? Just went to bed. Did he go out for any reason that evening? No, we just watched TV and went to bed.

I thought you said you went straight to bed when you got home?

Fuck! Well, we did. But we turned on the TV in the bedroom. By then I was sweating. I longed to go turn down the heat but the phone cord wouldn’t reach that far.

Jesus — if she comes over here she’ll see we don’t even have a TV in the bedroom.

Finally, she wrapped it up. She thanked me for my time and asked me to give her a call if I remembered anything important or came across any information. I told her I would sure do that.

The murder was splashed across the newspaper and television for the next few days. “A Crime of Passion!” screamed one headline. “Beloved Grandparents Beaten to Death By Unknown Assailant,” screamed another. And, “Midtown Residents in Fear of Murderer on the Loose.”

As the days, weeks, then months passed, not a single person was brought into custody. We heard there were hundreds of tips but none panned out.

Someone told authorities they’d seen Jason bicycling on their street the week of the murder, and he was brought back in for questioning. He was quickly dismissed — Jason didn’t even own a bicycle at that time.

Forty-three years later and we still don’t know who violently killed his grandparents, or why. It must have been someone they knew, and they must have done something pretty awful to have incurred such murderous wrath.

Is the killer still alive and walking among us? That too, we will never know.