It was 43 years ago, Easter Monday, that Myrtle Rupp was discovered raped and murdered. The 51-year-old widowed nurse was found in her bed, bound in the sash cord of her living room drapes. The killer left behind at most one half of a fingerprint. This was long before the testing and data-basing of crime-scene DNA.
Mrs. Rupp had been convalescing from foot surgery in her rambler home in South Temple, Pa., what journalists call a “tidy suburb” of the rust-belt city of Reading. Mrs. Rupp’s block was lined with modest post-war houses and generally free of crime. The gruesome killing, needless to say, was a shock for the neighbors, especially the one who discovered her body. He lived next door and entered her house, as he had been during her recovery, to take out her trash. I will call him Mr. N.
Reading, incredible as it nowadays seems, was then a two-newspaper town. The crime was discovered on the afternoon paper’s cycle. I worked for the morning paper, newly assigned in my second year as a reporter to the police beat. I was 23.
My job Tuesday afternoon was what we call a “second-day story” — to canvass the neighborhood for information, yes, but mainly boilerplate expressions of horror to accompany the thin details of the police investigation. My first stop, naturally, was Mr. N. He opened his door for me and with some gusto answered my obvious questions. Indeed, he was the focus of my story, because he was most animated, voicing his fear and vowing to install security lights for his own protection. As if there were some sort of deranged serial killer on the loose. And why not? His poor neighbor was dead and the cops had absolutely nothing.
The chief of police was a nice fellow named Harley Smith. I asked him, by the by, if the neighbors all had alibis. The answer was yes. And so went the routine second-day story, 20 column inches stuffed with lots of words and no insight. About a month later, I got a call from Chief Smith. He wanted to know why I asked about alibis.
“I dunno,” I said, “the next-door neighbor, Mr. N, was so voluble, it was almost as if he were playacting.”
“That’s interesting,” Harley said. “His alibi has fallen apart. He told us he was at work, but we saw his time cards and he was off when the murder went down.”
It was more than that. Harley had brought in the Pennsylvania State Police, who had given the case to a profiler and propounded a theory of the crime. As they saw it, Mr. N wasn’t just a neighbor who cheerfully helped the victim during her recuperation; he was an ardent secret admirer whose fantasies finally got the better of him. On Easter Monday, they surmised, he entered the house with the key that Rupp had given him. There, imagining romance, he surprised her, made sexual advances, was spurned and — in his lust and humiliation — committed the ghastly crime. Unfortunately, the only physical evidence they had to work with was that half-fingerprint, which may or may not belong to the killer, but Mr. N, through a lawyer, had flatly refused to supply his own for comparison. Which was suspicious in itself.
“Have you gone through his trash?” I asked the chief.
“Yeah,” Harley said. “Nothin’.”
A reporter’s duty in such a circumstance is either to write a story about how the police investigation has focused on the neighborhood itself, or even a specific unnamed person of interest, or to write nothing at all. But I was very green, had studied not journalism but English in college, and had a boss who himself was a corrupt character with all sorts of unsavory connections, including a highly sketchy police lieutenant. In short, I had no idea what I was doing. What I did have was a plan.