The Murder of Beverly Jarosz

By Pete Dove

"We're no nearer to a solution now than we were when the body was found. For all I know, we're farther away from one."
Can any words be harder for a loved one to receive? 
No parent can conceive of finding that their sixteen year old daughter has been murdered. For two days Beverly Jarosz's parents, Thaddeus and Eleanor, along with her sister Carol, held out hope that there would be a quick solution to the crime. Those forty-eight hours must have flashed around them; a whirl of anger, guilt, fear and horror. Each minute simultaneously lasting hours but disappearing as soon as it arrived. Then it became apparent, the trail was already going cold. It would reach freezing point in the coming weeks and has rarely given even a hint of a thaw in the fifty-six years that have since passed.  

And the question still remains. Who killed Beverly Jarosz?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trellis Publishing
• Release date: Jul 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201428365

Book preview

BEVERLY JAROSZ

APRIL PITZER

MAURA MURRAY

BETHANY DECKER

MISSING JOYCE

FINDING JODI

PATRICIA MEEHAN

KELSIE SCHELLING

NATALEE HOLLOWAY

JENNIFER KESSE

Still Searching After All These Years

‘We’re no nearer to a solution now than we were when the body was found.  For all I know, we’re farther away from one.’ Can any words be harder for a loved one to receive? No parent can conceive of finding that their daughter has been murdered.  For two days Beverly Jarosz’s parents, Thaddeus and Eleanor, along with her sister Carol, held out hope that there would be a quick solution to the crime.

Those forty-eight hours must have flashed around them; a whirl of anger, guilt, fear and horror.  Each minute simultaneously lasting hours but disappearing as soon as it arrived.  Then it became apparent, the trail was already going cold.  It would reach freezing point in the coming weeks and has rarely given even a hint of a thaw in the fifty-six years that have since passed. 

Those words, spoken by Detective Captain William C Horrigan of the Garfield Heights Police Department, hold as much water today as when he uttered them well over half a century ago.  Shortly after that, a local reporter recorded the effect of the efforts of the police.  The various leads, he said, ‘led police down paths paved with hope that turn into labyrinths of frustration.’

These two quotes seem to sum up the case of Beverly Jarosz.  So often, when crimes fail to be solved, it is easy to point the finger at police inaction or shoddy work.  It is easy to look at the local community and shake a head; to inwardly groan at the mendacity of the local media as they seek headlines rather than to do their job and report the facts.  None of these seem to apply where Beverly’s death is concerned. 

The Jarosz family was upwardly mobile.  Carol herself has moved on into a professional world; her own offspring have taken this further.  Thaddeus and Eleanor were good people.  They did not have a lot of money, but they enjoyed the post war boom that extended as far as Cleveland and to its suburbs.  They had ambitions for their children and brought them up properly to achieve their goals.

Garfield Heights is not brimming with wealth, but it is a pleasant enough, lower middle-class suburb of a large city.  Thaddeus and Eleanor typified the good people of America, enjoying the boom years which followed the privations of war.  The dangers of war too, as far as Thaddeus was concerned.

Loving parents, with good children, well brought up, respectful.  Suddenly, their quiet lower middle-class existence – a phrase used with the intention of a compliment, not a suggestion that they were out of touch with ‘real life’ – was shattered in the most unspeakable, vile way.  They sailed on, but their ship was holed, and unrepairable.  It would never quite be the same as it was before.  Whoever committed this crime should know that he or she not only killed a young person, took away all their dreams and hopes and ambitions, but destroyed a family as well. 

Bev – that was the form of her name that she preferred – was a popular High School student.  She was in the eleventh grade of Marymount High School in Garfield Heights.  Back in her day, the school was a Catholic girls’ institution, but now it is renamed and reborn as Trinity High, a co-educational establishment.  Rebirth is a right of buildings and institutions; something that is achieved with relative ease.  It is a liberty not extended to the victims of the worst of crimes. 

The point cannot be stressed enough; Bev was a good girl.  The ideal daughter in so many ways.  She was well respected by her teachers.  A creative girl, her interests lay in these areas of academic life.  She talked of becoming a teacher.  Upward mobility.  Ambition.  Bev liked to read and write poetry; she listened to classical music.  The Elvis infused emergence of that strange breed known as ‘the teenager’ seems in many ways to have passed her by.  Her musical tastes did not seem to stretch into the world of rock and roll – a little jazz was as close to being up to date in this field as she came.  She loved to visit the Cleveland Museum of Art, where she would wander, often by herself, absorbing the ambience and the artworks. 

Bev also dedicated herself to good work.  She volunteered as a typist at the Marymount Hospital, where her help was widely appreciated.

Garfield Heights is slowly shrinking these days.  It borders Cleveland, in Ohio, but when Beverly lived there it experienced a period of huge growth.  It almost doubled in size during her short life time.  So, the post war bungalow in which she was brought up was typical of many.  Smallish, by US standards – so much so that she needed to share a bedroom with her younger sister.  But comfortable.  Set back from the road, the long front yards of these houses are dissected by a footpath.  They are still largely unchanged from the days they were built to cope with the expansion happening in Garfield Heights.  Perhaps an extension added here or there.  Not much else.  The Jarosz family lived in the neat and tidy Thornton Road, just off the busier Turney Road.  Today, on the real estate market, these houses sell for between $100,000 and $150,000.  Still lower middle class. Still a useful first step for an upwardly mobile young couple starting a family, looking to climb – quietly and kindly – the social ladder.  Thornton Avenue still looks similar to how it did in the early 1960s;  it too, like Bev, has remained frozen in these times.  Something over which, of course, Bev had no say.

Christmas had come and gone, and on the 28th of December the girls were at home from school, while Thaddeus and Eleanor had returned to work.  It was a Monday, and so the family had enjoyed a long Christmas weekend together.  Carol, who was twelve at the time, four years her sister’s junior, and Bev waved them off and prepared for a relatively busy day of their own.  They were planning on walking over to their grandmother’s house later that morning, where they would have lunch.  Bev planned then on coming home before meeting with a couple of friends and spending the afternoon socialising.  That part of her day would never materialise.

The family breakfasted together.  Such an ordinary, mundane activity, eating as a family.  None of them could ever conceive of the possibility that it would be the last time they would ever do so.  That is one of the greatest horrors of murder.  It is so sudden and so final.  But mostly so unexpected.  Like an unexpected heart attack, or a traffic fatality, everybody hears of such awful crimes, nobody considers that it could happen to them.  Certainly not an ordinary family in a lower middle-class suburb of an American city.

Carol and Bev set off on the mile long walk to their Grandmother’s home, further along Turney Avenue.  Marie Vanek was their mother’s mother, and the family were close.  Rather than walk home, the boy next door – an eighteen-year-old lad also on his Christmas break – offered to drive Bev back. She was happy to accept his gracious offer.

It was just before one that Bev arrived back at the Thornton Avenue bungalow.  She entered the house and phoned her mum to let her know that all was well.  But two other happenings occurred in this lunchtime hour, and both were slightly alarming.  First, and least concerning was a call from Grandma Vanek.  Just an anxious granny checking on her daughter’s daughter?  Almost certainly, but it does seem an odd thing to do, given that Bev had just left her home.  Did Marie hold some concerns about her journey home?  Maybe, but far more likely she was simply checking up.  A responsible grandmother, perhaps not quite yet able to recognise that her eldest granddaughter was growing up.  Events were happening in Bev’s life which might have caused such anxiety.

Whatever, the call was brief.  Bev explained that her friend Barbara was expected any moment, and she had to change.

The second event was of more interest to the police in the coming days.  A call for her father.  He would phone back later, said the man, and gave his name.  Only he didn’t.  Later, police came to understand that this man had left a false set of details.  Why would he do that?  In fact, such behaviour might be a part of a pattern that was disturbing the gentle home life of Thaddeus – he liked to be called Ted – and Eleanor.

Anyway, the good daughter scribbled a note to her father, recording the name given to her by this strange man.  Could it have been somebody who was checking if she was home alone?  A burglar carrying out his pre-crime sortie?  Or, more weirdly, a man seeing if the girl he had just witnessed enter her home was there by herself?  A stalker, to use the modern vernacular, or even, the boy who had given her a lift.  Did he have Bev’s number?  If not, it would be easy enough to find it, or perhaps she had even scribbled it down for him on the five-minute drive from Grandma’s house to her own.  If so, and he did not want anybody to know, then that was something he could keep secret.  Later, the boy was investigated, but found to have an alibi and no indication whatsoever that he had done anything but offer a kindly lift.

Bev’s friend Barbara arrived at around 1.25 pm.  About twenty-five minutes after Bev had gotten home.  Barb – they did love to shorten a name in those days – found the side door open.  But the storm door was locked.  Barb rang the bell, awaiting the friend who was after all expecting her to come bounding along and let her in.  But there was no response.  She tried banging on the door.  Barb could hear a radio blaring out loudly in the background, and she considered that her friend had not heard her.

But there was still no response.  It was then that Barb heard a strange noise – a thump coming from the upstairs part of the small house.  The noise was repeated; it sounded like large items of furniture being moved around.  Almost certainly, what Barb was hearing was the attack on her friend.  Most likely the latter stages because there were no screams or shouts for help.  Was that because Bev was already dead, or incapacitated.  Or was she just too scared to give voice to the danger she was facing? 

Of course, Barb could never have suspected what was happening inside her friend’s house in this quiet suburban street.  Murders might happen in the downtrodden centre of nearby Cleveland, but not in the tranquil post war boom areas of Garfield Heights.

It was not at all like her friend, but Barb decided that perhaps a trick was being played on her.  Was Bev carrying out some practical joke to leave her standing on the doorstep?  Was she out, having forgotten about their planned meet up?  Had something better come along, and Bev had decided to stand her up?  Questions, questions, questions.  That is the issue with this homicide.  There are far too many questions and far too few answers.

Anyway, Barb decided to follow a course of action that was, like Grandma Vanek’s phone call, mildly odd.  Not inexplicable by any means.  But strange.  She decided to leave and head off somewhere else.  The thing was, she and Bev were planning to walk together to meet with a third friend, Margie.  But Barb chose not to continue on to this friend alone, or even to phone her