The Unsolved Murder of Betty Lou Zukowski, Part 4: A Suspect is Charged

I thought that there was absolutely no chance they'd arrest a suspect in the murder of 10-year-old Betty Lou Zukowski. But they did on November 2! 

In all honesty, however, I had considered the possibility that the investigation was ramping up when a Hell’s Acres commenter wrote to me last May: “In 1966, I was the nine-year-old fisherman that hooked this body, and it was a worm rig with a bobber, not a lure as the paper suggested. I had pretty forgotten about this until the police showed up to interview me today 56 years later.”

 

I knew that DA Anthony Gulluni had been taking decades-old unsolved homicides seriously, solving the murders of Lisa Ziegert and Danny Croteau. But this one was 56 years old! How, I asked, could they effectively pursue it? Well, if the commenter was indeed genuine, the cold case squad is certainly being thorough.

 

I had written three previous blog posts on the Zukowski murder, beginning in 2020. “Ralph,” who Zukowski’s friends said she used to meet with, allegedly turned out to be Donald R. Mars, who looked a lot like the police sketch in 1966.

In my last post, I had asked Betty Lou’s best friend to shed some light on the victim’s personality, which she did. “Adventurous” was probably too mild a term, considering she dyed her hair blonde, wore makeup and jewelry, hung out with teenage boys, and certainly got into the wrong car THAT night.

 

But what about Mars and his story? Right now we know that he is a Level 3 sex offender, convicted in 1995 of raping a child with force and indecent assault and battery on a child under 14. His past, according to prosecutor Elizabeth Dunphy Farris, also included an assault and battery in 1970. During the arraignment, it was difficult to determine exactly when, over the past few decades, the guy was incarcerated and when he was a free man. From what I could gather, when he was convicted in May of ’95, he was sentenced to two-and-half years, was released in June of 1997 and given probation. He violated the probation in February of 1999 (two default warrants from 1997 I believe?) and was given a five- to seven-year sentence at Cedar Junction.

 

He eventually ended up as a prisoner at Bridgewater State Hospital for quite some time, before finally landing in a VA hospital in Bedford, MA, where he was living before being arrested and hauled into the arraignment hearing, which was done via Zoom.

 

Farris, in her argument to Mars to be held without bail, also mentioned him violating restraining orders from his family members. He emerged as a suspect in the Zukowski murder in 1997, but we don’t know how they connected him to it. However, we will. Did he blab about it to a fellow inmate at Bridgewater? Did a family member or friend get something off his/her chest? We’ll see.

 

Mars came from a well-known family in Chicopee. His father, Roger Mars, owned Mars Heating and Service, and had five sons. Roger served in Korea, and at least two of his sons was in the military: his older brother, and evidently Donald was as well, or he wouldn’t be treated in the Bedford VA. Donald was in the bowling and chess clubs at Chicopee Comp before graduating in 1967.

In 1980, Donald married a 1975 Chicopee Comp grad—the best man at his wedding was presumably Donald's best friend, Richard Paine—and he was working at the R.E. Phelon plant in East Longmeadow. The couple had three kids together.

Donald has seen his fair share of tragedy and adversity in his life. In 1977, he discovered the murdered body of his friend, Russell Schlatter, in the victim's West Side apartment. The man had been strangled by Richard Rackliffe, a bisexual hustler, after Schlatter and Rackliffe had spent the night drinking heavily at The Arbor, a gay bar in downtown Springfield. Schlatter was found nude with an electrical cord wrapped tightly around his neck and a necktie knotted around his penis. Mars knew Rackliffe by his nickname of "Cherokee" and pointed him out at trial as the man who had been with Schlatter that night.

Was Mars also at The Arbor that evening? Apparently.

 

To be sure, things really soured for Donald after his 1995 conviction. In May of that year, the same month he was convicted, he forked over his Chicopee house to his wife, who divorced him. One of his two sons was killed when he was hit by a car in 2000 at the age of 14, and Donald is mentioned in the obituary as “residence unknown (FYI)”—I shit you not. His wife by then had remarried and he was estranged from the family. I guess he didn’t go to his son's funeral (?). Was he estranged from his parents as well? In 2010 they sent in an item to The Republican newspaper announcing they had renewed their vows and listed the names of four of their sons—but, strangely, not Donald. In 2020, Donald's brother died of COVID. I wonder if he attended that funeral.

 

Where was Donald living when he wasn’t in jail? There are addresses listed in Dorchester, Lynn, Chicopee, Springfield, and Boston (17 Court Street, the address for the New England Center and Home for Veterans). His Bridgewater address is from 2011 to 2016, so is 2016 when he finally got released from MCI-Bridgewater? I guess it will all come out at or before his trial in November of 2023.

 

What I’m really dying to see is what finally linked him to the murder. Gulluni did say during the press conference that “significant statements were made” (I guess by Donald?) regarding the homicide.

 

It remains to be seen if Donald will even survive long enough to stand trial. He looked really feeble at the arraignment, with a walker next to him and what I assume is a feeding tube attached to him. He seemed befuddled by what was happening, with a confused yet concerned face, which led me to believe he knew what was going on, despite his gaping mouth. He was able to bleat out a weak. high-pitched “not guilty” plea—the only thing he had to say, other than protesting with a mumbling moan at one point when Farris read off his criminal history. He seemed to want to dispute or correct the record on something in particular, but Farris ignored him and kept talking.

 

It’s interesting to see his slack-jawed sex offender mug shots over the years. He has really aged since his last one in 2018.

 

With the "air scoop" mouth look at the arraignment, I thought he was going for the insanity defense like bathrobe-wearing mafioso Vincent "The Chin" Gigante (below), but it turns out he's been photographed with that hanging jaw since 2015.

At the time of the murder, Donald was somewhat familiar with the area where Zukowski’s body was found. A quick newspaper archive search reveals that his family used to visit his grandparents' house at 102 Woodmont Street in West Springfield. This was an era in newspapers when people sent in little chit-chat items to be printed—where they went on vacation, hospital stays, dinner parties, and day visits—social “news” long before social media. It was reported that the Mars family went to their home for Thanksgiving, Christmas and other occasions. This address is two miles (a four-minute drive) from the murder scene at the end of Dewey Street. On May 26, 1966, did Donald recall a remote fishing spot off Route 20 where he could do his dirty work unseen by motorists?

But enough of my amateurish internet sleuthing. I’m sure the DA’s office has much more compelling evidence than Mars visiting this neighborhood as a kid and teen.

The reaction to Mars’ arrest has been, understandably, shock among anyone who has been following the case—and that’s not many people, because the murder had been largely forgotten. Still, it was very much alive to Gulluni, and to Betty Lou’s contemporaries and friends.

 

Lisa, who was Betty Lou’s best friend at the time of the murder, was on a pond nature trail when she was notified of Mars’ arrest. “I was watching the water ripple in the slight breeze, and I was actually thinking about Betty Lou having been in the Westfield River, when my cell phone notified me of an incoming message,” she said.  “It was a good friend of mine telling me, ‘Your friend Betty Lou’s case was on the news! Her [alleged] murderer has been found!’ I started crying and handed my husband my phone to read the message. It feels so surreal. I have lived this nightmare for 56 years, and this month in 2022 my dream came true. I hope to be in that courtroom in 2023. I would love to present a victim impact statement directly spoken to that [alleged] murderer. I hope Mars and I both live long enough for that possibility, and I hope the judge will allow it.”

Read Part 1.

Read Part 2.

Read Part 3.

Random Stuff, Part 5

I’ve taken several photos of what I’ve always referred to as the “hillbilly bridge” behind Gate of Heaven Cemetery on Tinkham Road. The bridge connects two nature reservations—the Tamarack Woods and the woods that follow the South Branch of the Mill River into the Mill River. It also allows people to cross the South Branch in a short cut between the Hanson Drive and Tinkham Road neighborhoods. 

I wondered for a long time who built and maintained the bridge, I finally got my answer in a Facebook post: the man behind this structure was Michael Forgette, who died this year:

 

The bridge was his labor of love before he started having health issues, and it has been deteriorating as of late, its decay documented by these Facebook photos taken by a friend of his:

 

It was much sturdier in 2013, when I took the photos below during one of my mountain bike runs. If you look closely, there is a “bench” on the left. As you can see from the layers under the surface, it was pretty much fortified every once in a while by adding scrap wood on top. You can argue that it’s somewhat crude, but the sheer weight of all the additional wood on it guarantees that it won’t break up when the stream swells in the spring:

 

A memorial was made by a relative near the base of the bridge:

 

It would be great if people kept this bridge in shape, but who knows? Kids these days don’t hike or bike the pathways, so its future is uncertain.

 

 

Did you call it the “one-ninety” (it’s real name) or the “eye-ninety” (what most Massachusetts people called it?

 

This was a curious hole-in-the-wall, tucked into the doomed Enfield Outlet Mall. Remember this “mall”? I used to go to its flea markets on Sundays. At one point, the 190 East had a “juice bar” for the underage crowd. Wasn’t Crazy Joyce’s, the head shop, here once in the mid-1980s? My memory fails me. It’s the same building where Barnes & Noble is now.

 

I had found myself in the middle of several “disturbances” at the 190. The first I described in another blog post, when I was supposed to give a guy we knew named Dave Moran a ride home, and it ended up in an emergency room visit because he got in a brawl and needed stitches.

 

Another time, my friend Ray Vadnais and I had some words with some guys at the bar, and when we got in my car, there they were, yelling at us, and one of them made a spitting gesture toward us through the open car window. After we drove away, I didn’t think anything of the incident, until I ran my hand through my hair and discovered a wad of spit! I got off at the next exit and roared back to the 190—with Ray begging me not to do it. But I was determined to kick ass. However, the lot was a barren wasteland—no cars or life of any kind—when we got back, and I was partially relieved, because I had some time to calm down on the highway. Thank God no one was there! Boy, was I pissed when I found that phlegm ball in my hair!

 

* * * * * *

 

I recently talked at length about Dave Moran with another guy who hung out with him, and he cleared up a couple of legendary stories about him. I had always heard that Moran was once stabbed in the back with a pair of scissors, and sure enough, this dude witnessed the event in the parking lot of—where else?—the 190. Moran was getting in a beef and someone—I always heard it was the brother of the combatant—sunk a pair of surgical scissors into his back. Another trip to the ER.

 

I asked him about the signature knife scar across Moran’s face, and he said that he received that outside of a dance at the MacDuffie School. He wasn’t with Moran and didn’t know the particulars, but this is one story of several I’ve heard about the incident, and I’m inclined to believe this one.

 

Anyway, the guy insisted that Dave Moran was calming down (as in not getting into a fight every weekend) in the final year of his life. I always had a feeling that if he died young, it would be as a result of a stabbing or shooting by fucking with the wrong dude, but he perished at 23 due to—let’s say it was a death by misadventure. If I were specific, many people would know exactly who I’m writing about (if they don’t know already). He died of a head injury while clowning around, and let’s leave it at that.

 

 

All this writing about the Enfield bars jogged up more memories, when the drinking age was 18 in Connecticut and the Massachusetts folks used to make their way down there to places like the Dial Tone AKA “Dial-a-Fight,” Shaker Park, and Katie's Cafe.

 

 

There were other dive bars like the Hazardvilla (below), which really raked it in because of the lower drinking age. 

The Hazardvilla burned down in 2000 and the owner was charged with arson. I don’t know how the case was ever resolved—the Hazardvilla was facing “financial difficulties” and there was evidence of accelerants at the scene of the fire.

 

 

I had totally forgotten about the Pumpernickel Pub for decades. It was a little more off the beaten path than the 190 (on Elm Street, or Route 220). On Nickel Night (Mondays) you could order a drink and the second one cost five cents. This place went out of business in 2000. It was demolished that year, and the site is now the parking lot of a Kohl’s.

 

I was going to ask if anyone remembers riding up the elevator to the top of the neoclassical City Hall tower. But I’m really guilty of dating myself because this practice stopped—I’m not sure when—after the tower started falling apart. Or when the elevator became unsafe. Or both.

 

What’s officially known as the Campanile Clock Tower was built in 1913 after the old City Hall burned in 1905. At 300 feet, it was the tallest structure in Springfield until Baystate West was built in 1970 (371 feet). In 1911, during its construction, anarchist Ortie McGanigle (below) tried to blow up the tower, but it withstood the blast.

 

The tower has a carillon of twelve bells that used to play sixteen notes of Handel's Messiah. God knows when that broke, and the four clocks haven’t shown the right time in decades.

 

Black mesh bands have prevented the deteriorating corners from dropping limestone chunks on the ground. It’s not incredibly unsightly, but it’s still a black eye on the city skyline: a great work of architecture that was never maintained and can’t seem to get fixed.

 

There was a $20 million capital campaign that was to raise the funding for a restoration of the tower, but that was derailed by the 2014 death of William L. Putnam III, the founder of WWLP TV and the driving force behind the effort.

 

Two years later people were wondering what had become of the plans, and we were told that refurbishing Union Station and building the new senior center at Blunt Park were more important. And this year, with the refurbishment of the Court Square Hotel building—and the city pouring in another $6.5 million to rescue the project—I guess I shouldn’t hold my breath on the stalled Campanile rescue.

 

Unfortunately, I can see this discussion taking a turn for the worse a few years from now, when they announce the tower can’t be saved and has to be torn down. This is what is happening to the 197-foot city hall tower in Pawtucket, RI—a full removal and replacement. And yes, I can see Springfield balking on spending the money on building a replica but ultimately settling for NOTHING in its place and moving the money elsewhere. Because….well, it’s SPRINGFIELD. Prove me wrong, Springfield. Prove me wrong.