Miss Vieweg was a popular teacher at Spaulding Memorial School in Townsend, where she taught art to fourth-graders. She also created original artwork that was displayed at the Fitchburg Art Museum.
Ernest Vieweg does not have any photographs of his sister on display in the home he shares with his wife, Diane, but many of her watercolor paintings are prominently featured. Seascapes, still-life compositions and a large painting of an old mill that she visited are among the peaceful, colorful scenes her brother sees each day.
“That was her passion. That was her soul,” Mr. Vieweg said. “To me, she’s always here.”
On Sept. 9, 1973, Miss Vieweg’s neighbors called her brother to report that her dog, Emma, was outside and barking. The door to the house, on Route 119 in West Townsend, was open.
Mr. Vieweg went to the house while neighbors searched the nearby woods, where she often went for walks. The neighbors discovered her body, stabbed numerous times in the chest.
“It’s beyond any reality,” Mr. Vieweg recalled. “You can’t fathom it. She was so loved. She had no enemies. She was devoted to her teaching and her children and her art.”
Townsend Police Chief Erving Marshall Jr. remembers the case vividly. He sees the case file in his office every day, next to another unsolved mystery, the 1977 disappearance of Deborah A. Quimby.
“I look at them every day,” he said. “I guess they’re always there at the back of your mind.”
Chief Marshall’s father was the chief of police when Miss Vieweg was killed.
A day after the body was found, Miss Vieweg’s car was located in a landfill, where the driver had apparently tried to dump it in a pool of septic sludge.
“Somebody must have known the area,” Chief Marshall said, gesturing to an aerial photograph that shows Miss Vieweg’s home and the spot where the car was found.
The unsolved cases stick with investigators, Chief Marshall added.
“You wish you could at least close those cases out,” he said. “It’s difficult to deal with.”
Had the crime occurred today, the chief said, a resolution to the case would be more likely.
“It’s a whole different world now,” he said. “The tools we have today are so different than what we had back then.”
Mr. Vieweg said he knows investigators worked hard to solve the case. He has no idea who was responsible, but assumes it was a drifter who came upon her by surprise.
“I pretty much assumed it was a random act,” he said.
Miss Vieweg was the second of five children, separated by many years. Mr. Vieweg said his siblings are not particularly close, and added that his father’s stoicism likely kept much of the emotion surrounding the tragedy bottled up.
For Mr. Vieweg, it was a conscious choice not to let what happened eat away at him.
“I decided early on to go as positive as possible as we could, without anger,” he said. “She was not an angry person. She was not a vindictive person. She would want everyone to go on. I look at her life and the way she gave to everybody. She wouldn’t want anybody to be vindictive.”...
Her murder is believed by some to be connected with four other murders of young women.
Worcester Police investigators then and now do not believe that these crimes, committed over four months in fall 1973 and January 1974, were related. But they are united by haunting similarity: each of these women had her life cut short by a murderer’s knife. No one was ever charged in any of their deaths.
The string of gruesome slayings left the victims’ communities terrorized, forever changing the lives of family members left behind. Some of those family members believe they know who is responsible for killing their loved ones, but have had to watch the decades pass without seeing justice meted out in a courtroom.
Worcester District Attorney John J. Conte said the investigations remain open, including DNA analysis...
... The women are Judith Vieweg, 31, of Townsend; Jo-Anne Muldoon, 20, and Debra Ann Johnson, 20, of Fitchburg; Marcia Tyman, 18, of Auburndale; and Clara J. Provost, 23, of Fitchburg.
LINK:
Five slayings still haunt investigators
