What I’ve previously written about the 1966 murder of 10-year-old Betty Lou Zukowski—who suffered head injuries and was thrown into the Westfield River in West Springfield to drown—had lacked several important elements, including, obviously, an identified suspect.
However, now I have a better description—and the above police sketch—of "Ralph," a suspect in the case: in 1966 he was a male, age 17 or 18, with black hair, brown eyes, medium complexion, and wore black-framed glasses. He was five-foot-five, and weighed between 125 and 135 pounds, and drove either a Chevrolet that had a dark blue bottom with either a white or light blue top—or a dark green Chevrolet sedan.
And, when I wrote the last post, I also had no clue about what Betty Lou was really like—until I recently connected with a woman who was her best friend at the time of her homicide. She gave me a glimpse of what I was looking for: Betty Lou’s personality, which gave insights into not only who she was, but also a look into her adventurous side, and why she might have trusted an older person that she shouldn’t have.
Betty Lou was “smart, kind, funny, adventurous, energetic, and very spunky,” according to Lisa (not her real name).
In fact, in the “it’s a small world” department, both Lisa and Betty Lou attended my old grammar school, albeit four years earlier than I had.
“Betty Lou and I met while in the same classrooms at Ursuline Academy on Madison Avenue in Springfield,” said Lisa. “We were both chatterboxes. We were both humorous, and although we were not sarcastic, our humor would sometimes be mistaken as sarcasm.”
Lisa can picture the rows of desks in the final classroom they shared in the fourth grade. She can visualize her own desk, Betty Lou’s desk in the next row, one or two seats behind her, and the fireplace—never lit of course, behind Betty Lou’s row of desks.
“Whenever we got ‘in trouble,’ it was because we were both very free-spirited,” she said,” and we thought ‘outside the box.’ We were critical thinkers who sometimes questioned the validity of certain aspects of Catholic teaching as actually ‘the word of God.’ These were attributes that nuns did not appreciate in young children. Betty Lou had an additional kind of energized spunkiness that the nuns probably wished could be tamed. It could not be.”
On their school bus’s daily journey home, Betty Lou and Lisa would stop in front of the Ursuline Academy high school on Plumtree Road in Sixteen Acres (pictured below). “On Fridays only, we were allowed to go inside briefly and purchase one thing from the school’s store,” according to Lisa. “Betty Lou liked being around the ‘big kids’ as we dashed through their school and I think exploring the larger world of ‘teenagers’ ignited a spark inside her.”
Before anyone jumps to any conclusions, the Ursuline Academy high school on Plumtree was a girls school until it closed for good in the spring of 1972, so Betty Lou would have not been exposed to any teenage boys on her Fridays there.
Betty Lou, who lived in Chicopee, often came to Lisa’s Springfield home, which bordered the Carlisle Woods on Carlisle Street near Watershops Pond. Also known as “Wesson Park,” this small urban forest, at the corner of Wilbraham Road and Roosevelt Avenue (the other side of the woods border Alden Street), which they explored often, is dark and creepy. The homeless sometimes sleep there, and at the bottom of this steep gully was the abandoned indoor firing range of the Springfield Revolver Club:
Wesson Park was the scene of an unsolved 2001 murder of William A. Garrison, Jr., whose head was bashed in and his throat cut. He was found on April that year in a stream down there.
This park’s notoriety as an unsafe place dates back to the 1960s. “When we were 10 years old, a member of the Springfield Police Department informed my parents to stop allowing children into those woods because a 12-year-old girl had been raped there,” said Lisa. “I remember being told that the rapist was a white man with red hair, probably about 24 years old. I do not remember if he was ever caught. Yet, the name Eric stands out in my mind without any definitive reason why.”
Betty Lou and Lisa also took walks along Watershops Pond, and onto and past Springfield College’s main campus. On their final walk there, a couple of students threw underwear at them through their dorm windows. “The young men were yelling sexually suggestive things at us,” said Lisa. “I had the instinctive urge to get away from there quickly, and we moved on. We were two 10-year-old scrawny girls, and even if it was their attempt at harmless fun, it did not feel safe to me.”
Lisa’s family moved from Springfield to Connecticut four months before Betty Lou was murdered. “We were best friends and our mothers did their best to keep us connected,” she said. “But, being far apart with long distance phone calls being expensive in the 1960s, we only talked about twice each month. I learned of Betty Lou’s murder about four days after the discovery of her body. My family was visiting in Springfield. Our moms had planned a visit for us, and her parents must have been so overwhelmed by the unbearable unexpected horror and grief that they did not think to inform us of Betty Lou’s disappearance and death.”
Years later, as an adult exploring media coverage of the homicide, Lisa thought about the suspect in Betty Lou’s murder, known only as Ralph. “I read that Ralph was a young white man who might have been a college student. My mind instantly went back to that walk we had taken near Springfield College about six months before her murder. I wondered if her murderer—whoever he was and wherever he was from—had targeted her easily.”
More likely her killer meticulously gained her trust over time—“grooming” her enough to persuade her to get into his car. And that’s all it took.
Again, Ralph was described by police at the time as being 17, five-foot-five, and weighing between 125 and 135 pounds, had black hair, brown eyes, and wore black-framed glasses. The youth’s name had been mentioned several times by friends of Betty Lou, and police from both Chicopee and West Springfield said they received quite a few calls from people who claimed to have seen the young man. A quick look at Chicopee High and Chicopee Comp yearbooks in that era reveals a teen named Ralph with black-framed glasses. He would have been around 18 or 19 at the time of Betty Lou’s murder.
“I don’t know if the rapist that had been in Carlisle Woods ever ventured elsewhere, but surely, once I no longer lived in that area, Betty Lou had no reason to think about my old neighborhood or those woods,” said Lisa.
Betty Lou’s mother died at 61 in 1980, and her father died the following year at 64. “I do not remember anything about her father’s death,” said Lisa. “But I remember reading the newspaper article describing that her mom had accidentally fallen to her death from a high window where she resided. My entire body instantly felt extremely cold, as I just knew Mrs. Zukowski had made a choice that day to join Betty Lou.”
There are several facts about the case I hadn’t reported in parts 1 and 2. When Betty Lou went missing, her Chicopee friends told police she liked exploring the “caves” that were dug into the bank of the Chicopee River behind the Chicopee Electric Light Company, which, incidentally, is next to Chicopee High School. Police checked out these “excavations” along the river and found nothing:
In the first story reporting her murder, detectives “questioned acquaintances and other persons who claimed to have seen the four-foot-nine-inch, 80-pound girl after she left home” for the last time, when she lied about meeting a fictional friend for ice cream following a mysterious phone call:
A report placed Betty Lou “in various cars the night of her disappearance.” Police were gathering car descriptions:
The fact that there was a sketch of the suspect that was based on a description of a male friend of Betty Lou was included in the story below about the November 7, 1966 stabbing murder of 10-year-old Anna Marie Townsend in Shelburne Falls. On May 15, 1967, police charged 25-year-old Wendell E. Greenman with the Townsend rape and murder and he is serving a life sentence. A Springfield Union reporter originally suggested the possibility that the homicides could have been related because they were both were in western Massachusetts and were within six months of one another, but police discounted this theory because the cases “had little resemblance” (bludgeoning vs. stabbing—and Betty Lou wasn’t raped), along with the fact that the murder scenes were 46 miles apart.
Greenman had a parole hearing as recently as May 20, 2021, but the outcome is unknown. He was presumably denied parole because there would have undoubtedly been a bit of an outcry in the media or over the internet. And, if he did kill Betty Lou, he is unlikely to admit to it because he is still trying to get out of prison:
However, an unsolved murder of a 15-year-old girl DID occur in Hampden County two years after Betty Lou was killed. Christine Hurlburt was found nude with a sweater twisted around her neck a week after attending a dance at the Mountain Park ballroom in Holyoke on October 5, 1968. She had left the dance following an argument with her boyfriend and was discovered in underbrush off the Mountain Park Access Road.
One of the most promising leads in that murder was the report of two men—one in his mid-fifties and another in his mid-twenties—who were new to the weekly dances there. The were never seen before or after the night the girl disappeared Those gentlemen had bought tickets to the dance, so they likely had no connection to the band and probably weren’t related to anyone attending the event because band officials or family members usually didn’t pay admission.
Police also believed Christine wasn’t murdered where her body was found because a group of Mount Holyoke College students had been enjoying the foliage there four days earlier and they probably would have spotted her.
What is the significance of the Hurlburt murder when examining the Zukowski slaying? Maybe none. But the unsolved murder of two girls from neighboring cities within two years is worth at least a look.
There are other nagging aspects of this case that really bug me. Betty Lou’s hair had been dyed blonde, she wore makeup, had pierced ears (she was found with cross-shaped earrings), and she had been seen at times with teenage boys. Even if she were a “free spirit,” this was odd for 1966. Maybe it’s just me, but that struck me as strange. Lisa thinks the fact that she dyed her hair blonde was weird as well. The first friend she knew to dye her hair was in 1970 at age 15 “and all of us kids were stunned.” The Betty Lou that Lisa knew in the fourth grade had dark brown hair. So I have the feeling that Betty Lou was in a hurry to grow up at age 10. Weren't we all? Still, a 10-year-old wearing makeup and hanging around teenagers?
More food for thought: Betty Lou’s parents waited all Thursday night and all day Friday before giving police the OK on Saturday to go public with their daughter’s disappearance. That is odd. It would take just a few phone calls to determine she was not with a friend or relative. Were they used to her taking off for long periods of time?
Kim, a woman who I interviewed for part 2, thinks a likely suspect was her molester father, who lived on Dewey Street, a street that ends at the intersection of Route 20, which is across the road from where Betty Lou was thrown into the river. A “raging, angry man,” her father had sexually abused not only Kim but also a girl who lived on Dewey Street, and had a peculiar reaction when told of Betty Lou’s murder. Kim said that the murder scene was a fishing spot known to neighborhood residents and very few others—it was hidden by overgrown brush.
I’ve also been told of another man in the Dewey Street neighborhood who was a “pig” that “liked little blonde girls.”
The problem with these revelations is that while they describe pedophiles who lived near the murder site, these accounts don’t link them to Betty Lou or the Front Street neighborhood in Chicopee where she lived.
Also, in later reports in the Boston Record American, police scuba divers found the bottom current so strong where the body was found that the body could have drifted between a half-mile and a mile:
Betty Lou likely knew her killer, based on the phone call before she left her house, and the account in the above story that she was seen talking to a young man in a car some time after 6:00 p.m. She was “adventurous,” yet certainly not naïve after being told about the rapist in Wesson Park and after her experience with Lisa at Springfield College—she knew that older guys could be creepy and even dangerous.
Another bizarre element in the case is the fact in the story above that no blood was found on her clothing despite the terrific bludgeoning, which crushed her skull.
Why am I somewhat fixated now on an unsolved murder that happened when I was three—and that I thought very little of until a few years ago? Maybe it’s because I have a daughter who is now 10. Or because Betty Lou walked the same school hallways and sat in the same classrooms as I did.
At first, the only picture I had of the girl was this one from the Springfield Union newspaper microfilm: darkened and distorted. It was inadequate. Ghoulish. A death mask.
Then I found a couple of photos from the Boston Record American's coverage of the case. They're not great, but they're better:
“I have no photos of Betty Lou,” said Lisa. “I wish so very much that I had even one clear photo of her face. I am 66 years old and I fear losing the slight image of her face and hair that still remains with me.”
Lisa, with the help of her husband, created the “angel” plaque below—a representation of Betty Lou for their home. “It feels like it is a close similarity to Betty Lou’s face,” said Lisa. “But unless I am someday gifted with a clear photo, I cannot be sure.”
Her parents are long gone, but maybe a decent photo of Betty Lou is out there—one of those class photo composites of head shots that were so popular in the 1960s and still are. I wonder if one exists from the Valentine School’s fifth grade class from 1966.
Who knows? A quality photo may prompt someone to come forward with information after all these years. I keep going back to the police reporting that she was possibly seen in “various cars.” Was more than one person involved in this?
“I think anyone and everyone that might care about who Betty Lou Zukowski was also cares about solving her murder,” said Lisa. “Betty Lou mattered, and she still does.”
