The site where Betty Lou Zukowski’s body was found in the Westfield River. She was five feet from the shore in an area that was filled with brush and hidden from the road in 1966. In the bottom of the photo is a steep path leading down to a narrow strip that was just wide enough for people to fish from.
In October of 2020, when I wrote a blog post on the 1966 cold case homicide of 10-year-old Betty Lou Zukowski, never in my wildest imagination did I think someone would provide me with a possible suspect.
The murder happened so long ago that I thought it had been forgotten by everyone. Betty Lou was an only child, her parents died in the early 1980s, and their siblings have since passed away. Decades have deadened the initial shock that was felt in Chicopee, where Betty Lou was from, and in West Springfield, where she breathed her last breaths.
But a woman living down the street from where the body was found couldn’t get the murder out of her head. Kim, who grew up on Dewey Street in West Springfield, had a suspect in mind for years, and twice brought her concerns to the West Springfield Police with no results.
So in February of 2021 she came to me. Here is her story. It is a recollection from an “incest survivor of horrors” and a theory about who may have badly beaten Betty Lou Zukowski and threw her into the Westfield River at the end of Dewey Street.
Deathbed Revelation
Kim, now 72, believes that her father, who sexually abused her from an early age until she was nine years old, may have killed Betty Lou. “He is a potential suspect, in my mind,” she said. In addition, her mother had known that decades ago that Kim's father had also sexually attacked a girl on Dewey Street: a child who lived across the street.
Indeed, Kim’s mother had affirmed on her deathbed that Kim was molested by her father, and in her final moments she also mentioned the girl across the street.
Kim’s mother, in the final 47 hours of the life, was a “psychological mess,” said Kim. “She was not at peace. She would not give in to death.” It was only after she acknowledged the pain she felt for the girl across the street—and for Kim’s molestation——(and allowed Kim to “take that pain from her”) that she let death come. “My mother was finally at peace,” said Kim. “She was radiantly at peace and died shortly after.”
Betty Lou Zukowski was found by fishermen on Memorial Day of 1966, five days after she was reported missing in Chicopee. Five feet from the shore off Route 20, she was wearing a blue jacket, blue pants, a green checkered blouse, and white sneakers. Her mud-covered face and arms were badly bruised, and her skull was fractured. But she was alive when she went into the river and had drowned. The Westfield River is “slow-moving” and 10 feet deep at that spot, according to the West Springfield Police, so it was unlikely she suffered her injuries on the bottom of the river. Besides, SOMEONE had driven her to that spot all the way from Chicopee, where she was supposed to go to a girl friend’s to treat her to ice cream. This was just after she had answered a phone call from an unknown person: the friend’s name was later revealed to be fictitious.
The path from Route 20 to the river today: it was not paved or cleared of brush in 1966.
The fishing spot where Dewey Street meets Route 20, about 1,000 feet from East Mountain Road, is pretty much known to only West Springfield residents—and especially people in the Dewey Street neighborhood—because in 1966 it was overgrown and hidden with brush. “It was so brush-covered you could hide a car and drag a body across the soft sand and dump the body in the Westfield River,” said Kim, who was 17 at the time of the murder.
“The thing that caught my attention: when my sisters and I told my father of Betty Lou’s murder and that she was found at the end of our street, my father showed no surprise. He had a flat affect on his face with just a little upturn at the right corner of his mouth.”
Sometime later, her now-deceased father, Robert (not his real name) made a “curious statement,” she said. “He said anyone could commit murder and get away with it.”
Robert knew the Route 20 fishing spot well. He went to fishing holes a lot in his spare time, but Kim has no idea if he ever went fishing near Betty Lou Zukowski’s home, which was near the Chicopee Center stretch of the Chicopee River, or if he fished at the Chicopee River’s Cabotville Canal—both a stone’s throw from the Zukowskis’ Front street home and where Betty Lou sometimes went exploring on the banks.
And Kim also has no idea where her father was at 6:00 pm. on Thursday, May 26, 1966, when Betty Lou Zukowski went missing. But Kim knows full well her father’s sexual proclivities and his short temper. “My sisters and I were terrified of him,” she said. “He was a raging, angry man.”
Robert stopped raping Kim when her mother found out what was happening. Kim still gets flashbacks of the attacks. “My sisters were safe from him, thank God,” she said. “Everything was ‘black’ in my brain until these horrible memories started when I was 41 years old. I went on antidepressants and received long-term psychoanalysis treatment for four days a week for years. I would disassociate in my teens sometimes when I had to be alone with my father.”
One of Kim’s sisters has had a nagging fear for years that their father might have been involved in this murder. But Kim never broached the topic with her other two sisters.
For years, Kim had a hunch about her father’s involvement in the murder, but this suspicion took on a life of its own after her mother’s deathbed confirmation: he had attacked a girl OUTSIDE of the family.
It is unknown if there is any specific evidence connecting Robert to the homicide. “My father’s neckties have been saved, in the hope, if needed, that they will help with DNA testing,” said Kim.
Was the Alleged Killer
Imprisoned for Another Crime?
Kim’s first discussion with a West Springfield detective about the case took place at the station decades ago. “He said the killer of Betty Lou was in prison and the West Springfield police were having an issue with the Springfield D.A., who was Matty Ryan,” she said. “I can’t remember if ‘issue’ was his exact word. I am paraphrasing. Then I went down to the West Springfield Police Station maybe two years ago and asked, ‘Who killed Betty Lou Zukowski?’ All I got was, ‘I wasn’t even born yet.’ I asked another officer, ‘‘Don’t you have a file on murders in West Springfield?’ He said he wouldn’t even know where to look for it. Another dead end.”
To recap, these are the “persons of interest” in the Zukowski murder:
- Kim’s late father Robert (not his real name), a Dewey Street resident
- An unidentified inmate, mentioned by the West Springfield Police, who may or may not be still alive
- A 17-year-old named Ralph whom the police wanted to interview right after the murder. In fact, Betty Lou was seen with a “man” shortly before she was killed, and Ralph was described as five-foot-five, and weighing between 125 and 135 pounds. Theoretically, on the night of the murder, a 17-year-old with this build could be mistaken for a man, especially if seen from a distance or in the dark.
- Wendell E. Greenman, who was convicted of raping and stabbing a 10-year-old girl to death in Shelburne Falls about five months after the Zukowski killing. The possibility of the two murders being related was suggested by a Springfield Union reporter because of the victims’ ages and both resided in western Massachusetts, but this was discounted by State Police because the murder methods were not similar. It is unknown if this is the inmate the West Springfield Police were referring to.
- There was also the suggestion by a Chicopee homicide captain that Zukowski may have been a victim of a hit-and-run driver, a theory that was swiftly panned by the West Springfield Police: the river is simply too distant from Route 20 for a car to strike and launch a body that far, even at a high speed.
- When then-priest Richard Lavigne became the prime suspect in the 1972 murder of 13-year-old Danny Croteau, Chicopee and State Police undoubtedly gave at least a moment's thought about his possible role in the unsolved Zukowski murder because both victims were bludgeoned in the head and thrown into rivers and Lavigne, a Level 3 sex offender, is from Chicopee. However, none of the many publicly released Croteau case files over the years ever mentioned the 1966 homicide.
Who killed Betty Lou Zukowski? “I want peace for Betty Lou,” said Kim. But at times she has expressed uneasiness in spilling her guts to me. “I think I am in over my head,” she said at one point. “I’m having a lot of anxiety. I am going way out of my comfort zone.”
But then she tells herself—and me—that she can be silent no longer. “It is time,” she said.
