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.