MA MA - Beryl Atherton, 47, Marblehead, 27 Nov 1950

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YEars ago I read "Yankee" magazine-in a 1970's issue-cant remember- there was a article on a New England cold case murder-in 1950's an unmarried middle aged school teacher was murdered--no suspect is known.

Just thought I's mention this for the record:twocents:
 
No problem, I really enjoyed reading it actually. My husband's family has lived in that area for many years and most of them are teachers and yet I had never heard that story. What a bizarre story. I think she must have had a secret lover or something.
 
No problem, I really enjoyed reading it actually. My husband's family has lived in that area for many years and most of them are teachers and yet I had never heard that story. What a bizarre story. I think she must have had a secret lover or something.

Very interesting mystery. The secret lover angle was my first thought as well.
 
My thought when I was reading the article was, somebody killed her to keep her from telling something she knew. From the article: "The cross-like cutting of the throat, he was sure, had no significance except as a crazed gesture to make sure the victim, already dead from strangulation, would never rise to talk again. It was no more rational than the breaking and scattering of the single blade."

That wouldn't preclude a secret lover; she might have said she was going to tell his wife about them, for instance.
 
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....
 

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