From Yankee Magazine January 1978
Like the Old Harbor town itself, some of us in Marblehead, Massachusetts, have for twenty-eight years had a grisly horror on our hands. Saturday night of Thanksgiving weekend in 1950, as a savage nor’easter battered the Massachusetts coast, spinster Beryl Atherton was strangled to death in her own kitchen, her throat then slashed open in the sign of the cross. From the first, police were without a trace of murderer or motive. I was a newcomer at the time — and among the earliest of suspects.
The victim had lived alone in a rundown clapboard cottage at 57 Sewell Street, in the Old Town. She was forty-seven, tall, painfully thin, and with no close friends, known enemies, or near relatives, her only companion a timid white Spitz. Her clergyman father, who once shared the small house with her, was now several years dead. She entertained no one, corresponded with no one, and spent much of her meager salary at beauty parlors and movies. For twenty-five years she had taught in Marblehead’s elementary schools.
As winds grew to storm force on the afternoon of Saturday, November 25, Miss Atherton drove in her secondhand car to the adjacent town of Salem and took her fur coat out of storage. Back in Marblehead and wearing the coat, she stopped for a Boston Traveler and several food purchases, then returned through lashing rain to the little house perched where Sewell Street, mounting a rocky hillside, bends almost back upon itself. She left her handbag in the dining room, and food packages and Traveler in the kitchen, and took the dog Esky for a quick airing. At about six, a boy delivering papers in the neighborhood saw her, still in the fur coat, emptying trash at the back door. Minutes later, in a change of clothing and seemingly alone, she took a long carving knife and began to cut up chunks of meat for Esky’s supper.
Suddenly another presence materialized, and terror struck. Esky was driven from the kitchen with a vicious kick, and his frail owner was locked in a death grip that crushed three of her ribs and forced the feebly raised knife down across her shoulder and chest. As strong hands tightened round the thin neck, the body slumped to the floor. Then, with a second, smaller knife, the killer slashed, criss-cross, at the now lifeless throat. He wiped both blades clean, snapped the first into pieces, returned the second knife and handle of the first to their proper drawer, and vanished....