The Unsolved Murder of Betty Lou Zukowski, Part 1

On May 31, 1966, a father and son were fishing on the bank of the Westfield River in West Springfield when they hooked their lines on something large just below the surface of the water. It wasn’t just the usual snag on a log or branch. A body surfaced: 10-year-old Betty Lou Zukowski of Chicopee.

The gruesome Memorial Day discovery solved the question of where the missing child was—she had been gone for five days. But now a new mystery was unfolding. Who killed her? She suffered “multiple blunt force injuries to her head and a skull fracture”  before drowning, according to Medical Examiner William Mosig. But she was not dead when she went into the water. He declined to say whether she was sexually assaulted.

The day before, the Springfield Union newspaper reported her missing in a story, but Lt. Armand Morgan of the Juvenile Bureau and Det. Paul Balthazar had no leads after interviewing 15 of her friends.

Her father, Stanley, who identified her body, and her mother Mildred, said their daughter left the house at 293 Front St. at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, May 26 with $2.00 shortly after receiving a telephone call. Betty Lou was supposed to go “to a girl friend’s to treat her to an ice cream.” Her parents called the cops at 11:15 p.m. when she didn’t return. “Police later learned the girl friend’s name was fictitious,” according to a June 1 UPI story.

The same UPI story indicated that police were attempting to locate a man seen with Betty Lou shortly before she was killed. Pathologists believe she was murdered on the day she went missing.

On June 2, Betty Lou Zukowski was buried on what would have been her 11th birthday. How did she get to West Springfield? Where did witnesses see this man who had been with her? There was nothing more written in the newspapers about this mysterious figure. However, a person of interest emerged—a teenage boy.

Another UPI story described police seeking a teen named Ralph for questioning. Ralph was described as being 17, five-foot-five, and weighing between 125 and 135 pounds, had black hair, brown eyes, and wore black-framed glasses. Captain Harold O’Connor, chief of the Chicopee Detective Bureau, said he wasn’t sure if the boy existed, or what part he may have played—if any—in the homicide. “The youth’s name had been mentioned several times by friends of Betty Lou,” according to the story.

There was no more mention of the killing in the Springfield newspapers until November 7, 1966, when the gruesome slaying of 10-year-old Anna Marie Townsend in Shelburne Falls, MA made the news. Two 10-year-old girls murdered in western Massachusetts within five months? Was there some kind of serial killer or pedophile predator working the I-91 corridor? 

Unlikely, said State Police Lieutenant-Detective Raymond Mahoney of the State Police. Mahoney, the lead investigator in the Townsend murder, stressed that the cases have “little resemblance,” adding that his jurisdiction didn’t extend into Hampden County.

Anna Marie Townsend is pictured at five years old.

The Townsend girl was found in a gravel pit dead of seven stab wounds with a screwdriver-like object. One puncture was in her back and the other stab wounds were in her rectum. Lab reports found sperm cells in both rectal and vaginal smears. This was nothing like the Zukowski murder. The West Springfield medical examiner, who had originally been silent about the possibility of sexual assault on Zukowski, insisted that Betty Lou hadn’t been raped.

On May 15, 1967, police charged 25-year-old Wendell E. Greenman with the Townsend murder. In November 1968, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison. It’s not publicly known if Greenman was asked about the Zukowski homicide. Incredibly, Greenman was furloughed several times after his conviction—in the same controversial furlough program that helped cost Governor Michael Dukakis the 1988 presidential election—and during one furlough in 1974 Greenman married MCI-Framingham woman inmate Hattie M. Whigham, another convicted murderer who was also on furlough. As of 1995, Greenman had been denied parole nine times, and the controversial furlough program for lifers was ended, so as far as I know he’s still in jail.

In 1972, when 13-year-old Danny Croteau was found in the Chicopee River with his head bashed in, Chicopee homicide detectives must have given thought to the Zukowski murder six years earlier: another young person found in a river with head injuries. And they might have come to the same conclusion: these were likely not random murders—the victims probably knew—or were acquainted with—their killers.

Another possibility: Chicopee Homicide Captain Harold F. O’Connor thought it might have been a hit-and-run case, which is still murder. West Springfield Police Captain Thomas P. McNamara “leaned away from this theory,” according to the Springfield Union newspaper. Indeed, someone hit by a car would have more injuries than a fractured skull. How does someone get hit in the head by a car and knocked into a river? Someone gave her a ride there—far from her home—and that same person likely killed her.

Betty Lou’s parents died without knowing what exactly happened to their only child. Mildred died at 61 in 1980 and Stanley the following year at 64. There was no description of the victim in the newspapers when she was missing, other than the fact that she was a fifth-grader at the Valentine School near her home. No height, weight, eye color, hair color or photo—so you’re going to have to imagine simply a 10-year-old girl who ended up in the Westfield River.

The next time Betty Lou Zukowski made the newspaper was on August 6, 1995 in a Springfield Union-News story on a multitude of unsolved murder cases in the Springfield area. “Witnesses die, evidence gets lost, trails dry up,” begins the story. “As time goes by, a homicide gets tougher and tougher to solve.” The author offered no new developments in the Zukowski case. 

Hell’s Acres readers know my interest in unsolved murder cases, whether it be Danny Croteau or Tammy Lynds. Those homicides have received a lot of publicity, but I just happened to stumble upon the killing of Zukowski because the slaying has been pretty much lost in the dustbin of history. Possibly even the murderer has died. However, I’ll still ask now what they were asking back in ’66: who killed Betty Lou Zukowski?

Read part 2.

Read part 3.

Miscellaneous Shit, Part 8

Remember those youth baseball black T-shirts back in the day? I’m not sure how old the “Small Fry” age was, but it was before kids were old enough to have the real uniforms. I recall they weren’t too politically correct in naming the age divisions back then—one division was called “Midget.” Below is Kevin Brown from Maebeth Street, circa 1966.

Yep, playing in jeans. Boy did I hate those lame-ass baserunner helmets.

I want one of these:

Bumper sliding, in which you grabbed someone’s bumper and went for a ride on a street’s packed-down snow or ice, is an Acres thing. It’s hard for people from outside Sixteen Acres to comprehend—although I heard it was done in Haverhill, Massachusetts as well. 

Another Acres thing: raiding gardens at night. “Why the hell would you want to do that?” someone asked me once. I don’t know. It was just something to do. One of my friends even brought a salt shaker once to season the raw vegetables we pilfered.

Here are a couple of Morganetta photos I never ran before. Moganetta was immortalized in fiction in a 2014 novel entitled Leaving Time. She wrote that Morganetta had only one eye. From what I remember, she had two. Picoult was probably using the story of Snowball the polar bear (who lost an eye to a police bullet) to make her story more compelling.

Here is an excerpt from Leaving Time:

My mother was stunned by her condition, too. She flagged down a zookeeper, who said that Morganetta had once been in local parades, and had done stunts like competing against undergrads in a tug-o’-war at a nearby school, but that she had gotten unpredictable and violent in her old age. She’d lashed out at visitors with her trunk if they came too close to her cage. She had broken a caregiver’s wrist.

I started to cry.  

My mother bundled me back to the car for the four-hour drive home, although we had only been at the zoo for ten minutes. 

“Can’t we help her?” I asked.

This is how, at age nine, I became an elephant advocate. After a trip to the library, I sat down at my kitchen table, and I wrote to the mayor of Springfield, Massachusetts, asking him to give Morganetta more space, and more freedom. 

He didn’t just write me back. He sent his response to The Boston Globe, which published it, and then a reporter called to do a story on the nine-year-old who had convinced the mayor to move Morganetta into the much larger buffalo enclosure at the zoo. I was given a special Concerned Citizen award at my elementary school assembly. I was invited back to the zoo for the grand opening to cut the red ribbon with the mayor. Flashbulbs went off in my face, blinding me, as Morganetta roamed behind us. This time, she looked at me with her good eye. And I knew, I just knew, she was still miserable. The things that had happened to her—the chains and the shackles, the cage and the beatings, maybe even the memory of the moment she was taken out of Africa—all that was still with her in that buffalo enclosure, and it took up all the extra space. 

For the record, Mayor Dimauro did continue to try to make life better for Morganetta. In 1979, after the demise of Forest Park’s resident polar bear, the facility closed and Morganetta was moved to the Los Angeles Zoo. Her home there was much bigger. It had a pool, and toys, and two older elephants. 

If I knew back then what I know now, I could have told the mayor that just sticking elephants in proximity with others does not mean they will form friendships. Elephants are as unique in their personalities as humans are, and just as you would not assume that two random humans would become close friends, you should not assume that two elephants will bond simply because they are both elephants. Morganetta continued to spiral deeper into depression, losing weight and deteriorating. Approximately one year after she arrived in L.A., she was found dead in the bottom of the enclosure’s pool. 

The moral of this story is that sometimes, you can attempt to make all the difference in the world, and it still is like trying to stem the tide with a sieve.The moral of this story is that no matter how much we try, no matter how much we want it . . . some stories just don’t have a happy ending.”

What’s interesting is that the facts of much of this fictional narrative are described in a 2012 Hell’s Acres blog post about Morganetta: the parade, the tug-o-war, breaking a caregiver’s wrist, and ultimately being moved to the Los Angeles Zoo, losing weight in her new home, and dying there. I don’t think the elephant was moved because of a child’s letter to the mayor, but there WAS public outcry about her living conditions. Morganetta got cantankerous when she reached adolescence, not old age. And she wasn’t moved to a buffalo enclosure—they had built her an outdoor cage. But that’s what fiction does—modify facts. Every novelist does this.

Morganetta’s departure and Snowball’s death, both in 1979, help set the stage for the old zoo’s demise:

Another photo I ripped off of a page on Facebook: someone has the old Nora’s Variety sign! For some reason, Nora’s seemed to be the first store to sell baseball cards in the spring, prompting us to bug our parents to take us there. After all, it was a long bike ride to Nora’s Pine Point location at 171 Boston Road, opposite the original Friendly’s.

Speaking of Pine Point, here is a Mutual Ford Giant pic I never published. Read about his roots at a pizza shop giant in Framingham. He was Chicopee’s Plantation Inn man from 1999 to 2013 but then was sold at auction.

Then he was on the south side of Springfield Street in Agawam, set back from the road in a little strip mall across from American Legion Park, but he was reported missing in 2017. WHERE HIS HE????

Yes, there was a Steiger’s in Westfield—in the “Friendly Shops”  AKA the “Westfield Shops” on East Main Street, from 1965 until the Steiger’s chain bit the dust in 1994. Why the whip in the ad? Because it had a bondage and discipline accessories section? NO. Because Westfield is the “whip city,” of course!

The Seven Gables on Boston Road was built in 1963 and by 1968 it was offering “weekly rates,” and the rest is history, including a murder in 1996 when it was the Rodeway Inn. What was that dive bar there called? The Gables Bar, of course.

I had been to Niagara Falls a couple of times as a kid, but I hadn’t heard that a Springfield man went over the falls in a giant rubber ball that contained oxygen tubes to provide him air for 40 hours in case the contraption got trapped under the torrent of water.

After he did this, he moved to Niagara Falls and sold pieces of the ball to tourists. After he ran out, he sold them pieces of tires. When he was 61, he wanted to go over the American side of the falls in a rubber ball—which would have made him the only person to go over BOTH falls, but he never completed the stunt.

See you in Rocktober, folks!

Miscellaneous Shit, Part 7

I miss Wilbraham 10 Pin. One time my brother, Rick Riccardi, and I bowled there when we were kids and when we went to pig out at the snack bar some asshole secretly bowled a game in our alley. The guy at the counter insisted that we pay for it, but we didn’t have enough money!

Finally, when my father picked us up, he said he knew Wilbraham selectmen and he would mention this to them—ripping off kids—and the dude finally relented.

Whip’s Sporting Goods was named after Jim Whipple. That’s right, Mr. Whipple.

Wow, did anyone think back then that TV’s Mr. Whipple was kind of pervy? I did.

Whip’s is on Page Boulevard now.

Lift the Latch went from a bar to a church. So…Springfield.

Wow, I haven’t seen this pic before: the sign for the old Sundown “Rundown” Drive-In Theatre in Westfield.

And I also found a photo of not only the screen, but a speaker, and a T-shirt they’re making these days! Read all about the Rundown and the other local drive-ins.

Here is an interesting comment from someone who lived next to the place and enjoyed free movies:

“When I was in High School back in the mid-‘70’s a couple of my brothers and I worked on a farm that had one field that bordered on the Sundown , the owner of the drive-in and the farmer we worked for were friends and they set up a bench with speakers where we could go watch movies any time we wanted. It was placed outside the regular area so we were allowed to have some beers and get kinda crazy without bothering anyone. My older brother Steve who is also on this forum somewhere, was attacked by a crazy lady while he lived in an A-frame on the farm property…..good times. The Sundown was torn down and is now a defunct mini-mall….it only has a bad Chinese restaurant open, everything else is out of business, what a waste of a drive-in.”

There’s been a proposal to tear down the inoperable Putnam’s Puddle dam, which held in our beloved man-made pond from 1938 until the winter of 1982, when the spillways at the top of the dam clogged with ice. This blockage forced the water flow to push through the bottom of the structure, emptying the pond forever.

Well, we didn’t think it was forever. Back then, we believed the city would repair the dam and restore the pond. Nope.

In 2016, Jennifer Mackey Burke, a water resources engineer, applied for a grant for a Restoration and Revitalization Projects Nomination for the Massachusetts Fish and Game’s Division of Ecological Restoration. Her “Breckwood Pond Restoration Project” would involve the “removal of partially breached dam, stream channel restoration, and dredging/restoration to affected downstream resource,” according to her proposal.

The dam was in pretty bad shape in the mid-1950s and the pond water level was pretty low, but it was evidently repaired—probably by neighborhood volunteers. In the 1960s, Rich and Ron Lagasse, who lived on the corner of Granger Street and Sunrise Terrace, fixed the dam with cement and the help of neighborhood kids.

I know the dam was fixed in the mid-1970s because that was when my friends and I discovered the wet cement and were putting our initials in it when some older “Other Siders” (folks from the North Brook Road side) caught us and told us to scram. They claimed that they had repaired the dam so they could cross it safely to get to school, and we were “fucking it up.” God did we hate those Other Siders! But they saved the dam.

In 1979, the state declared that the dam needed repairs, but nothing was done. Then came the big hole—30 square feet—in 1983, and the pond was history. I guess I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the dam removal, because nothing ever gets done with this damn dam!

In 1992, hundreds of thousands of dollars were set aside for city dam projects at Mill Pond and Putnam’s Puddle, but nothing was ever accomplished at the latter. In 1996 Springfield was supposed to receive state funding to restore Putnam’s Puddle through a state Open Space Bond Bill. Does anyone have any idea what happened to the money?

The 1980s and 1990s would have been the time to repair or replace the dam and dredge the pond before it became filled with vegetation. That was when there was the biggest neighborhood outcry was to do something. But inaction caused Breckwood Pond to be silted over and become a mud hole—the Putnam’s Puddle dam stopped a lot of sediment and debris from flowing downstream.

In 1992 the Parks Department focused on repairing the Mill Pond dam, but department planners were “not certain what should be done” at Putnam’s Puddle. “We would like to save it before we lose it,” said then-Parks Superintendent Lawrence J. Dowd.

Um…37 years later, I guess you can see we lost it. In 2020, there is no real demand to replace the dam and the pond. On the contrary, the national trend, with many aging dams these days, is to remove them and let the waterways flow freely. But since this proposal is from 2016,  I doubt the City of Springfield will get off its ass and pull down the dam. So it will continue to stand as a reminder of a pond where I spent half my childhood. However, if they do remove it, I WANT A SOUVENIR PIECE!!!

When pre-showcase had only two theaters on Riverdale “Road.” This was 1965.

Haven’t published this one of Snowball in the blog, I believe. Pre-bullet-in-the head wound days. Read all about her.

Don’t remember where I got this pic of this OLSH team. Somewhere on Facebook. Then I posted it on the Hell’s Acres Facebook page. Didn’t know I had a Facebook page? Well here it is. Check it out!

Looks like the North Branch (Mary Lynch) School field? Looks like the bottom of the sledding hill on the right. Recognize anyone? Fran Doyle is the coach to the left. His son Tim is in the second row, third one from the left. I remember Tim Doyle was being scouted by the Yankees in the mid-’80s, and he played some minor league ball for them, right around the time I worked with him for the Longmeadow DPW one autumn sucking up leaves in the streets.

See you next month here, or see you on Facebook!

Skull and Bones, Part 2...and Other Crap

After three months of searching for answers, in March of 1952 the Springfield Police pretty much threw their hands up on finding the identity of a skeleton some boys found the previous November in a wooded area off Methuen Street.

Police in nine states were given the description of the remains, but the quest was “fruitless.”

I wish I had more to give you in this mystery, which I detailed in Skull and Bones, Part 1, but they never found out whose skeleton it was. Maybe it was nothing scandalous—it could have been someone down in their luck and health and had lost contact with his family, so no one missed him. An alcoholic who killed himself or passed out and froze in the woods during the Depression? Could be. With two sets of complete dentures, however, it seems that this person had the means to get dental work done and wasn’t “off the grid,” but who knows?

The bones were found in the North Branch Tributary Park, also called the Grayson Kettle Conservation Area because it is a glacial kettle hole—a depression resulting from a mass of ice left behind by a retreating glacier. I had always thought that those woods had a sinister air to them, but not because of the skeleton story—I had never heard about the boys’ find until recently, and it happened so long ago it’s doubtful there’s even a neighborhood legend about it. (Although I could be wrong: I don’t know many people who live in this area.)

I think the Grayson Kettle’s notoriety (in my mind) came from a 1977 incident in which a teenager raped a five-year-old boy there. One day, two boys were walking a dog in the woods when a 17-year-old from Jennings Street—which intersects with Methuen—surprised them. One of them was able to get away, went to the rape victim’s home, and told his parents. I know the brother of the kid who ran away, and he said the woods never had an ominous aura to him, despite the rape. And he had never heard of the skeleton story until I told him. My friend grew up on Slater Avenue and the Grayson Kettle was simply a path of woods (much of it wetland) to play once in a while and build a log cabin.

The neighborhood behind Jennings Street, however, he thought was “very creepy.” There was a man on one of those streets whose face was disfigured in a fire, a guy who “scared the hell out of us.” The layout of that neighborhood was a bit funky—planned streets that were never built or finished and some of them dead-ending bizarrely like Newfield Road and Andover Road, and some that were paved but end in dirt paths, like Almira Road. Take, for instance, Leopold Street and Patterson Avenue: they both end at Houston Street, but Houston Street, Like Methuen, was never fully completed:

Hell, even Grayson Drive is split into two sections by woods:

In the days before GPS technology and Google Maps it was easy to get lost in the lower Methuen/Jennings/Woodrow/Newfield section—a secluded area in the middle of the city that wasn’t stripped of its woods like our Pine Point Party Paradise to the southwest. There are houses dating back to the 1920s in a neighborhood of mostly post-WWII housing. Some of the older houses are “quaint,” but just look at this one from 1920. This is listed as a two-family house? Wow:

And how about that mysterious “desert” in the woods between Grayson and Jennings? Was there a pond there once or something? Weird:

One of my other friends remembers partying in a car on lower Methuen Street near Jennings because it seemed fairly hidden and he thought the cops wouldn’t see them drinking. “We were next to the woods,” he remembers, “and I said, ‘Let’s not stay here. I didn’t even feel comfortable pissing outside the car there. Felt like we were being watched by someone. I warned my wife about that neighborhood. No bike rides or walks down there.”

Of course, the Methuen and Jennings intersection is a stone’s throw from Fox Road, where another skeleton was found in 1994! But that’s another story.

Okay, let’s move on from that weird neighborhood!

This photo was back from when people were petitioning the Forest Park Zoo to give Snowball a bigger and better cage after she was shot by the cop while chomping on a girl’s arm. Well, she never got a better place to live.

Yes, 16-year-old Jody thought Snowball was cuddly and wanted to pet her. A Hell’s Acres reader commented in my original post, “The girl was drunk and had been egged on by my cousin Beth (no last name) who was also drunk, to pet the bear. Beth didn't suffer and although she was the instigator, my aunt always maintained that Jody had been the one to start the incident.”

This is what the Mountain View sign in on Allen Street in Hampden looked like back in the day. The new one was put up in 2015. This was definitely a stop for us kids riding our bikes from The Acres over to Pine Knoll and then pedaling way out to Somers and beyond for the hell of it. Here is the sign before 2015:

Here it is now:

The place, nicknamed “Snappy’s” by Hampden people, has been in existence for 60 years—amazing since it’s open only April through October. Well, I guess it sometimes opened in March and closed in September, depending on the year.

There’s the mountain in the background (Goat Rock) in the above photo! The place, which now has less of a mountain view, sure has gotten bigger over the years. Actually, the original Mountain View was just around the corner from Somers Road and Main. This is what it looks like today:

Snappy’s was so-nicknamed because guys used to park their cars at the side of the original building and blast their music until “Sully” ran out and snapped on them. Not snapped AT them, but ON them. He completely snapped. He was once rumored to have taken a tire iron out as the “peacemaker” in a fight between two customers. OK, it’s not just a rumor. Also raising his ire: calling him Sully, or even worse—the other S word—Snappy. 

When Snappy—um Sullivan—moved the shebang to Allen Street around 1963, the original shack ended up being a first aid station at the Ski Rattlesnake in Somers. That’s right, there was a ski area with three rope tows off Old Stafford Road from 1965 to 1968.

What a great slice of Massachusetts Americana the Mountain View was and still is. I never really had anything but soft-serve there, but I always heard about the famous pepper burgers back in the seventies.

See you next month, Hell’s Acres readers.