NJ NJ - Wendy Wolin, 7, Elizabeth, 8 March 1966

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Satch said:
Good points,

Additionally, why is LE not releasing the suspect's name? He is now deceased. For that reason, there would be no consequences in doing that. Unless, the suspect's living relatives have requested that his name be withheld. What do you think?

Satch
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It makes no sense to me unless they're pretty sure the guy was innocent.
 
Satch said:
There's so much random stuff here, but some patterns as well:

It's been awhile since I listened to the radio show link above with the police Captain who has an on-going investigation into Wendy's case. One striking bit of information was he said a little over a year before Wendy was killed, an elderly couple named "Rubinstein" was stabbed to death coming home from grocery shopping by an intruder in their home.

About a year before Wendy was killed she lived with her grandparents something like a few blocks away or something like that from where this elderly couple had been killed. The name of the grandfather's family was "Rubinstein!" The detective has always had some kind of suspicion that Wendy's death by this unknown suspect could have been linked to a mafia hit gone bad. He says in the interview that "The Italian mafia would never kill children with families." The Russian mafia he says, "would not care about Children in families, he says that they would kill if you crossed them. I may not have the time-frame above exact, I heard the interview like a year ago, so it is hard to remember. If the suspicions are true, it would seemingly make this part of the case less "random."

I personally think this attacker was someone who had a pass to be off the grounds that day from a mental-health facility. (Called a mental institution back in those days.) He was probably not from the area. Remember that a bus driver swears that he saw this guy in the early morning hours of March 8th, 1966. The witness to Wendy being stabbed claims that this unknown assailant asked, "How do I get downtown?" than moments later this poor little girl is stabbed and the assailant walks away like nothing had happened.

Even to this day, as I understand, a set-up for this kind of assault has never been reported anywhere else in the USA or Canada where you have someone alone on a street corner, someone just walks up, bends down, and walks away without saying a thing. This case made national news and even expanded to Canada, maybe other countries as well. This was a huge case at the time.

One also has to wonder if Wendy's life could have been saved had she said, "He stabbed me.", which is what really happened, not "he punched me." There is no doubt in my mind that the other young girls he assaulted, tried to, or any other reports that day of girls being hurt in that area were committed by this same person. This suspect hated women, and today, probably would have been followed, arrested, and successfully prosecuted for his crimes. The other thing was that Wendy's Mother Shirley, was very protective of her daughter, and this had been the first time she was allowed to go to the corner by herself. The investigator at the above link remembers that Wendy had to "beg" her to allow this. He says that "Shirley never let Wendy out of her sight."

Satch
Click to expand...

According to the article below, another girl and her mother were murdered a few blocks from where Wendy and her family lived in Highland Park NJ. It could be that Wendy's family was the target by the mob and that the other murder was mistaken identity

Social Media Raises New Questions about Unsolved Child Murders in New Jersey - By Sarah Wallace

Mooney also posted a composite sketch of Wendy’s suspected killer, hoping it might spark a lead. Someone did recognize that face, but not in connection with Wendy’s murder. It involved the murder of another little girl in neighboring Highland Park, the year before.

Neighbor BM told the I-team she is certain she saw Wendy’s killer on her block the same day that her friend, 11-year-old Mae Rubenstein, was savagely stabbed more than a dozen times inside the family home on S. 3rd Avenue, in February of 1965. Mae’s mother was also murdered by the unknown intruder.
Click to expand...

FB group Who Killed Wendy Sue Wolin?

Satch said:
Good points,

Additionally, why is LE not releasing the suspect's name? He is now deceased. For that reason, there would be no consequences in doing that. Unless, the suspect's living relatives have requested that his name be withheld. What do you think?

Satch
Click to expand...

It could be their policy. Do we have anyone here that does FOIA requests? I doubt they will give anything because it's an open murder investigation but may be worth trying.
 
When has the mob ever killed a child to get back at an adult?
 
Satch said:
There's so much random stuff here, but some patterns as well:

It's been awhile since I listened to the radio show link above with the police Captain who has an on-going investigation into Wendy's case. One striking bit of information was he said a little over a year before Wendy was killed, an elderly couple named "Rubinstein" was stabbed to death coming home from grocery shopping by an intruder in their home.

About a year before Wendy was killed she lived with her grandparents something like a few blocks away or something like that from where this elderly couple had been killed. The name of the grandfather's family was "Rubinstein!" The detective has always had some kind of suspicion that Wendy's death by this unknown suspect could have been linked to a mafia hit gone bad. He says in the interview that "The Italian mafia would never kill children with families." The Russian mafia he says, "would not care about Children in families, he says that they would kill if you crossed them. I may not have the time-frame above exact, I heard the interview like a year ago, so it is hard to remember. If the suspicions are true, it would seemingly make this part of the case less "random."

I personally think this attacker was someone who had a pass to be off the grounds that day from a mental-health facility. (Called a mental institution back in those days.) He was probably not from the area. Remember that a bus driver swears that he saw this guy in the early morning hours of March 8th, 1966. The witness to Wendy being stabbed claims that this unknown assailant asked, "How do I get downtown?" than moments later this poor little girl is stabbed and the assailant walks away like nothing had happened.

Even to this day, as I understand, a set-up for this kind of assault has never been reported anywhere else in the USA or Canada where you have someone alone on a street corner, someone just walks up, bends down, and walks away without saying a thing. This case made national news and even expanded to Canada, maybe other countries as well. This was a huge case at the time.

One also has to wonder if Wendy's life could have been saved had she said, "He stabbed me.", which is what really happened, not "he punched me." There is no doubt in my mind that the other young girls he assaulted, tried to, or any other reports that day of girls being hurt in that area were committed by this same person. This suspect hated women, and today, probably would have been followed, arrested, and successfully prosecuted for his crimes. The other thing was that Wendy's Mother Shirley, was very protective of her daughter, and this had been the first time she was allowed to go to the corner by herself. The investigator at the above link remembers that Wendy had to "beg" her to allow this. He says that "Shirley never let Wendy out of her sight."

Satch
Click to expand...

Correction, (from above.)

The "Rubenstein Case" was not an elderly couple, it was an 11-year old daughter and her Mother who were killed in February of 1965. A witness swears that the drawings of Wendy Wolin's suspected killer jogged her memory where she insists the same main who killed the Rubenstein's is the same man who killed Wendy Wolin. (She claimed to remember seeing him on the street.)

Questions for study:

1.) How did this suspect (in both cases) even if it's the same man, get away so quickly never to be found again?

2.) In Wendy's case, do we have a time frame of where and how far the suspect walked between the assaults on the other girls and Wendy's murder? Estimates seem to be between 4:00 and 4:30PM on March 8, 1966. I am looking for specifics on the street routes that he may have traveled. How are those areas different today?

3.) Where do you think this guy went after leaving the Woolworth's story, where he was chased by police and than vanished? I wonder if he used public transportation, a car, or just got away on foot? If he fled on foot, it is really shocking that he was never found again!

Satch
 
Satch said:
Correction, (from above.)

The "Rubenstein Case" was not an elderly couple, it was an 11-year old daughter and her Mother who were killed in February of 1965. A witness swears that the drawings of Wendy Wolin's suspected killer jogged her memory where she insists the same main who killed the Rubenstein's is the same man who killed Wendy Wolin. (She claimed to remember seeing him on the street.)

Questions for study:

1.) How did this suspect (in both cases) even if it's the same man, get away so quickly never to be found again?

2.) In Wendy's case, do we have a time frame of where and how far the suspect walked between the assaults on the other girls and Wendy's murder? Estimates seem to be between 4:00 and 4:30PM on March 8, 1966. I am looking for specifics on the street routes that he may have traveled. How are those areas different today?

3.) Where do you think this guy went after leaving the Woolworth's story, where he was chased by police and than vanished? I wonder if he used public transportation, a car, or just got away on foot? If he fled on foot, it is really shocking that he was never found again!

Satch
Click to expand...

Actually the article says that the suspect was chased into the Woolworth's store AFTER he had punched another girl, but the chasers lost track of him. Than the suspect attacked Wendy, and was followed by a cop on a motorcycle, but he too lost track of him. From what I have read on the different accounts of the case, the time frame's vary slightly.

It is possible that the passage of time and eyewitness accounts may have been slightly distorted. However, it seems that if you lived anywhere in or near the area, you remembered exactly what you were doing and where you were on that tragic day. It seemed that everything happened so fast that people were in a state of shock and disbelief.

This case needs closure!

Satch
 
Cold-case murder victim remembered, 50 years later

http://www.nj.com/union/index.ssf/2016/10/memorial_marks_spot_of_50-year-old_unsolved_child.html

The case of Wendy Sue Wolin's 1966 murder should have closed the same year, when authorities questioned more than 1,500 men, searched prisons and mental institutions in 13 states, and scoured a military ship docked in Port Elizabeth before it left for Vietnam.

Instead, no arrests were ever made.

Wendy's family still have no answers about who fatally stabbed Wendy, then 7, as she walked down the street in broad daylight. But they do have a garden.

A small display of rocks and flowers, funded and built by Elizabeth, now marks the spot of the murder near Prince Street and Irvington Avenue. Wendy's sister and stepbrother gathered there Thursday to dedicate the site.
Click to expand...

Wolin said she was encouraged by the support she had received from people throughout Elizabeth and across the country. She had seen the way Wendy's death crushed their family, but she hadn't known its effects had been so widespread.

Although Elizabeth police Capt. Todd Mooney has been unofficially investigating the cold case for a few years, Jodi Wolin knows she may never learn who killed her sister and turned her family upside down 50 years ago. So, she said, she just moves forward.

"You live with it," she said. "You don't get over it, ever."
Click to expand...


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the man was described as stocky, has police ever consider robert zarinsky has a suspect
 
Good composite of theories about Wendy's case from Reddit. If I had to take an educated guess, I have a feeling that the 1995 suspect who was able to describe what he wore the day Wendy was killed, and who had a history of mental health issues against girls and woman was the guy who killed Wendy. A while back, I think I posted it was a 50/50 shot, but now, I am about 75% convinced. He died in 1998.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Unresolved..._killed_wendy_sue_wolin_public_stabbing_of_a/

Satch
 
Wendy Wollin Murder Case-New Suspect

In late 2013, Capt. Mooney, the cop who’s re-investigating the case reported that he’d discovered the most promising suspect yet: https://www.facebook.com/groups/who.killed.wendy.wolin/permalink/676646225692822/
“Since we are all in this together I have decided to tell you what I have, however I will not release any names.

“1) within 24 hours of Wendy's murder a very dedicated community leader supplied the Elizabeth Police with the following information:

a) a man visited Elizabeth the day Wendy was killed and stayed on DeHart Place. The man was from another state and had sexually abused young girls there.

b) the EPD followed up the tip at that time but it was unsubstantiated.

“2) a month ago a member of this group contacted me with information on a suspect, a family member, and they mentioned the same suspect by name. I have never made that name public.

“3) the suspect was also a suspect in several killings in another state around 1973 and EPD spoke with him and was unable to prove he was involved in Wendy's murder.

“4) the suspect had been released from a mental hospital shortly before Wendy was killed.

“5) the family member provided information and documents showing the suspect was deemed " criminally insane" and he was in and out of mental institutions his whole life.

“6) this suspect liked to travel by bus and would of had to come through NYC to get to Elizabeth from where he lived.
“If all this is true, and I believe it is, it would explain the man on the bus, the assault of all the girls, and the suspects very white colored skin, as he had been in a mental institute for years.

“Additional it would explain the man in the bank lot smoking and being calm as he was insane, additionally it would explain why the man wanted to get on a bus to go downtown. As he was in Elizabeth for the first time and may have thought Broad Street was downtown. Remember he got off the bus at South Broad Street and Route 1.

“The person who supplied the information in 1966 has unfortunately passed away. However their children are still alive. The suspect is also dead but his relatives are still alive. “The person who supplied the information in 1966 has unfortunately passed away. However their children are still alive. The suspect is also dead but his relatives are still alive.
“So this is a viable suspect, again. This info is not subject to debate, but simply letting others know where the investigation is at.


Satch
“
 
Cleaned Up Formatting. No Question in my Mind that this New Suspect is Wendy's Killer

In late 2013, Police Captain Mooney, the cop who is re-investigating the case, reported that he discovered the most promising suspect yet. This is the information that he has released. I will not disclose any names:

Within 24 hours of Wendy's murder a very dedicated community leader supplied the Elizabeth Police with the following information:

1.) A man visited Elizabeth the day Wendy was killed and stayed on DeHart Place. The man was from another state and had sexually abused young girls there.

2.) ) The EPD followed up the tip at that time but it was unsubstantiated.

3.) A month ago a member of this group contacted me with information on a suspect, a family member, and they mentioned the same suspect by name. I have never made that name public.

4.) The suspect was also a suspect in several killings in another state around 1973 and EPD spoke with him and was unable to prove he was involved in Wendy's murder.

5.) The suspect had been released from a mental hospital shortly before Wendy was killed.

6.) The family member provided information and documents showing the suspect was deemed " criminally insane" and he was in and out of mental institutions his whole life.

7.) This suspect liked to travel by bus and would of had to come through NYC to get to Elizabeth from where he lived. If all this is true, and I believe it is, it would explain the man on the bus, the assault of all the girls, and the suspects very white colored skin, as he had been in a mental institute for years.

8.) Additionally, it would explain the man in the bank lot smoking and being calm as he was insane, additionally it would explain why the man wanted to get on a bus to go downtown. As he was in Elizabeth for the first time and may have thought Broad Street was downtown. Remember he got off the bus at South Broad Street and Route 1.

9.) The person who supplied the information in 1966 has unfortunately passed away. However their children are still alive. The person who supplied the information in 1966 has unfortunately passed away. However their children are still alive. The suspect is also dead but his relatives are still alive.

10.) So is a viable suspect, again. This info is not subject to debate, but simply letting others know where the investigation is at this time.


Satch
 
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When police officer Charles A. Williams reported to work in Elizabeth, New Jersey, on the afternoon of March 8, 1966, and was assigned to a patrol car instead of his usual beat, he had no sense of foreboding.

“I was a walking cop at the time,” he said. “But when somebody calls in sick, they fill you in. It was just a quirk of fate that I was working in a car that day. Not only in a car, but that particular car. Car 12.”

About an hour and a half into Williams’s shift, as he and Officer Peter Melchione cruised the quiet streets of the city, they were dispatched to the firehouse on Prince Street, in Elizabeth’s affluent Westminster neighborhood, to look into a report of a young girl who had been punched in the stomach.

Car 12 was the first to arrive on the scene. Williams and Melchione found Wendy Sue Wolin, just 7 years old, quietly bleeding to death on a desk in the fire chief’s office. “A man punched me,” she had told the chief before she went into shock. It wasn’t until they opened her coat that they realized she’d been stabbed.

An ambulance was called, but Wendy was going downhill so quickly that the police decided not to wait.

“Pete picks up the little girl,” said Williams, “and they put her in the car. Headquarters notified the hospital that we were on our way with someone in bad shape. And when we got there, the doctor came over and opened the door of the police car and he saw Pete, blood all over. And this part I will never forget. The doctor looked at me, and he put his head down. He knew. She wasn’t dead at that time, but he knew. And I was just—it was just the hardest thing.”

A team of six doctors at Elizabeth General Hospital did everything they could to save Wendy’s life, but the single blow she had sustained was so savage that it punctured her right lung and her liver, nicking two of her ribs. She was pronounced dead at 5:15 p.m., less than an hour after the attack. An autopsy listed the cause of death as shock and hemorrhage.

The brutal, senseless killing shook Elizabeth to its core, and led to the biggest manhunt in the history of the state of New Jersey. More than 1,500 people were questioned by police and prosecutors. Trains and buses were boarded and searched. A special phone line was installed to deal with the thousands of tips that poured in from eyewitnesses and concerned citizens. Wanted posters blanketed the city and copies were sent to every police department in the nation.

“There were so many people brought in for questioning,” said retired Detective Lt. John McGuire of the Elizabeth Police Department. “If you looked like a mope on the street, you were brought in, because we tried to do everything. It was like a parade going up to the third floor” of police headquarters.

“They must have rousted every bum out of every rooming house in town. They even went so far as to stop ships from going out of Port Elizabeth, to make sure that the guy who did this wasn’t among those crews over there,” said Edward Johnson, former Deputy Chief of Detectives at the Union County Prosecutor’s Office. “There was literally no stone left unturned in that case.”

But Wendy’s killer has never been found. Today, 50 years later, the investigation remains open, although the chances of solving the case grow smaller every day...


LINK:
Who Murdered Wendy Wolin? The 50-Year-Old Murder That Still Haunts This Town
 
54 years ago...

... On the cold, sunny afternoon of March 8, 1966, Wendy was waiting obediently next to the driveway of her apartment house while her mother fetched the car from the parking lot behind the building. They had planned to go shopping before picking up Wendy’s older sister, Jodi, from Hebrew School, and Wendy was clutching her little change purse, which contained one 1959 quarter—more than enough, in those days, to buy a Hershey bar and a bottle of Coke, or a greeting card along with the stamp to mail it.

Shortly after 4 p.m., a tall, burly, middle-aged man, neatly dressed in a gray fedora, green corduroy coat, and dark trousers walked rapidly away from the center of Elizabeth and toward Wendy’s neighborhood. Minutes earlier, with no provocation, he had hauled off and punched seventh-grade Catholic schoolgirl Diane DeNicola in the eye, knocking her onto the sidewalk of a busy shopping street full of shocked eyewitnesses. Without so much as breaking stride, the man continued into a nearby five-and-ten.

Joseph Cusmano, 50, had been waiting for a bus on Broad Street when he heard Diane’s scream. He and another bystander chased the attacker into Woolworth’s, but, as he said later, by the time he got there, the man “was nowhere in sight. He had a good start.”

At around 4:15, about half a mile from where he had struck Diane, the man in the fedora approached Alisa Pasternak and her mother, Gina, to ask directions to a restaurant. “I looked at his face,” said Mrs. Pasternak in a statement to the police, “and it was pale and lifeless.” The man put his hand on Alisa’s shoulder. “I said to Alisa, ‘Walk, don’t talk,’ and I pushed her ahead. We continued walking and I heard his footsteps behind us, but I didn’t look back.”

The man, gray-faced and mumbling, went on to spook some high school girls on that street and then to accost 18-year-old Clare Moran, asking her how to get to the center of town.

Moments later, the girls watched uncomprehendingly as he attacked Wendy.

“I saw the man move his hand like he was hitting something,” 14-year-old Lynn Norman later told police, “but I didn’t see what it was. Then I saw the man run down Prince Street.”

It was all over in an instant, before anybody seemed to grasp what was happening. Without stopping or saying a word, the man approached Wendy, pulled his arm back and thrust his fist ferociously into her abdomen. She doubled over in pain and shock as the man—not even pausing to glance at her—hurried away, unobtrusively dropping a sheathed hunting knife into the gutter as he fled the scene. In the ensuing chaos, just before police sealed off the area, a delivery truck would park on top of the knife, and it would lie undiscovered under the wheel of the truck until the following day.

Clare Moran ran into fire headquarters for help. Fire Director Edward F. Deignan, 59, immediately called the police to report the attack, which he did not at first think was life-threatening. Wendy was polite and coherent, providing her name and address when he asked for them.

“The child appeared to be in no pain. There was no indication at all of any physical discomfort,” he said in a statement to police. “I immediately asked the young girl who entered my office, who punched the child?”

Life-threatening or not, it was still a brutal attack on a little girl and Chief Deignan was determined to catch the man who did it. After telephoning police headquarters, he ran outside where a cop was writing a parking ticket, and sent him after the man in the fedora, who had disappeared down Prince Street. The policeman pursued him on his motorcycle. But by then the man had vanished.

Leon Yurkus, 42, an Elizabeth bus driver, later reported that a man matching the description of the killer pounded on the doors of the out-of-service bus that he was driving down Prince Street around 4:20 that afternoon. “I could see there was something wrong with this man. He appeared like he was on Cloud 9.” After providing a detailed description, he said, “There is no doubt I would know this man if I saw him again.”

He never saw him again.

A $3,500 reward was posted by the Elizabeth City Council in the Daily Journal. The newly elected mayor, Thomas G. Dunn, made personal appeals for information on television and radio, as well as in a printed flyer which was distributed nationally. Police Director Gustave Brugger announced that any Elizabeth policeman who apprehended the killer would be automatically promoted to detective.

“We had everybody—every detective, every uniformed man. Everybody wanted to do something for no other special reason than it was a girl, 7 years old,” said John McGuire, who was then a detective sergeant actively involved in the investigation. “But everybody was coming in with nothing.”

“It was incredible,” recalled Charlie Williams. “Cops stayed on the job. They didn’t go home for three or four days. Everybody felt so badly for what this poor girl went through. And they didn’t care—quitting time? No no no no no. They stayed out for days.”

Actors from New York were brought in for a lineup in a local hotel, where they were dressed and made up to try and match eyewitness descriptions of the perpetrator. But as Police Chief Michael D. Roy stood on the sidelines watching, one of the witnesses remarked that he looked more like the killer than the actors did. Chief Roy gamely donned a fedora and green corduroy coat and took his place in the lineup. A photograph of him dressed as the suspect was circulated, and for years after that, people would see him on the street and think he was Wendy’s murderer.

Local art teacher Lee Gaskins drew a compelling sketch of the killer which appeared on wanted posters all over the city. Michael Lapolla told me that his mother kept the poster taped to her refrigerator for years. My own grandmother had a copy of it in her kitchen drawer.

“The police may have been unsuccessful,” said Eddie Johnson, who was put in charge of the case when the Prosecutor’s Office reactivated it in 1995, “but it wasn’t for lack of trying.”

Gradually, though, the leads and tips slowed to a trickle, and Wendy’s name dropped out of the headlines, reappearing on anniversaries of her death to remind us all that another year had passed, and her killer was still at large...

LINK:
Who Murdered Wendy Wolin? The 50-Year-Old Murder That Still Haunts This Town
 
wendy%20sue%20wolin.jpg

Wendy Sue Wolin Fleischner, 7
1966 March 8 Irvington and Prince Street, Elizabeth, Union County, NJ

Cause of death: stab to the chest.

Forensic characteristics: 7 year-old child victim. Murdered in street. Single stab wound. Possibly disguised or wearing human mask. Tuesday afternoon murder.

Murdered on a Tuesday at 4:00 p.m. Stabbed once in the chest with a hunting knife while walking on Irvington Street to wait for her mother as she was pulling out her car from the rear of their nearby apartment building. Died an hour later. Children who witnessed the stabbing described a middle-aged white man in his mid-forties, stocky, about 220 lbs, with thick grey hair, “lifeless” pale face, wearing a dark grey or brown felt fedora and olive green three-quarter length corduroy coat and grey pants. Subject walked around to Prince Street dropping the hunting knife about 200 feet away from the scene.

Other adult witnesses report seeing a subject matching a similar description in the vicinity shortly prior to the murder, assaulting and accosting two other girls.

LINK:

Cases New Jersey Girl Murders 1960-1980
 
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