CANADA Canada - Adele Komorowski, 26, Hamilton, Ont, 15 May 1973

The map in Robert Garrow's orange Volkswagen had 27 dots on it...

On May 15, 1973 — two months before McCabe discovered that map — the body of 26-year-old McMaster student Adele Komorowski was found in the woods behind Brandon Hall, a Mac residence.

She had been strangled, her body arched back from the tension on a length of half-inch jute rope expertly tied from her wrists and deeply embedded into her neck. Investigators think the killer had used the rope as a handle to drag Komorowski off the wooded path.

When McMaster security guards found her, she was naked from the waist up, her jeans pulled partially down, as though her killer had been interrupted in his crime. That killer was never found despite years of dogged investigation by Hamilton detectives.

Now Jim Tracy, a New York State author and an expert on the Garrow case, thinks Komorowski was one of the serial killer's victims... Tracy has been in touch with Detective Sergeant Dave Beech of the Hamilton-Wentworth Regional Police. Beech is intrigued by the possible Garrow connection...

"Is it more likely that one of the suspects Jim Wills and Clive Paul favoured is responsible? Probably," he says, "but the Garrow information is intriguing, absolutely."

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Several things in Tracy’s book point to Garrow as a suspect in Komorowski’s murder, too. Both she and some of Garrow’s upstate New York victims were bound with expertly-tied knots. Also, a map found in Garrow’s car was marked with 27 red dots including one in Hamilton, Ont...

Detective Dave Oleniuk, of the Hamilton Police Service, said... he doesn’t believe Garrow killed her and that whoever did is no longer alive.

Shortly before she was murdered, Komorowski had an argument with an apparent suitor who didn’t want her to marry her fiance in Germany. Soon after, while walking back to her room late at night, she was pulled into a wooded area and strangled to death...

Oleniuk said Garrow tortured victims before killing them, which wasn’t the case with Komorowski. He said it’s a common attribute for murderers to tie up their victims. “That’s where the similarity ends,” he said. “If it was Garrow, he would have raped her.”

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CastlesBurning said:

Story of McMaster student's unsolved murder premières at AGH Film Festival

The dark echoes of Adele Komorowski’s murder linger 45 years later

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The suspect, originally from Germany, matches the description of the witness, was a misogynist, dated Adele and been rejected by her; he had a confrontation with her a couple of days prior to the murder, and on the day itself — this, after having recently learned of her engagement to the German naval lieutenant.

This suspect told a friend that he walked the trails in the general area of the murder that night, which was perhaps a pre-emptive move to get out in front of witness statements if he had been spotted. And, he told a friend that someone stole rope from his apartment.

In conversation with a professor, he kept referring to Adele as "this girl," which was oddly detached phrasing.

A year after the murder, he returned to his native Germany and never came back to Canada.

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