The Restless Sleep:

1941 Cold Case

This is a crime scene photo from either the “suicide” or murder of mob hitman, Abe Reles, taken in front of the Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island in 1941.

I found the case files for Abe Reles in a warehouse in Brooklyn maintained by the Central Records Division. I've posted this before, but normally case records for unsolved homicides are supposed to stay in the precinct where the homicides occurred. Anything older than the 1980’s is often missing, however. They were lost in a move, the people at the precinct usually explain, or destroyed in a flooded basement. But 187 boxes of homicide records both solved and unsolved, and spanning the years 1921 to 1973, sit largely forgotten in an aisle at the very back of the Central Records warehouse. Some boxes have a few cases, some have thirty or more. They may be falling apart from age, but there are probably 4,000 to 7,000 case files there.

I thought of writing about Reles, but for various reasons decided not to. It’s a gruesome and interesting story though. He killed people by jamming an ice pick through their ear into their brain. He was eventually caught and was going to be convicted most likely, but instead he became a government witness. Hence the quotes around the word suicide.

Looking for Sylvia Krumholz

One of the unsolved murders I wrote about was Jean Sanseverino, who was murdered in Brooklyn on State Street in 1951. This is a picture of her estranged husband Raymond, who was one of the people police suspected at the time. It was taken when he was 17. (I don't think it was Raymond, myself.)

While writing the book I tried to track down everyone the police talked to at the time. The person I wanted to find the most I never did. That was her roommate Sylvia Krumholz.

I thought I'd post what I know about her here. You never know. Maybe someone out there can find her for me. I don't know if she knows who murdered Jean, but perhaps she knew more than she told the police at the time.

Here's everything I know about Sylvia.

Name: Sylvia Krumholz, aka Sylvia Brooks
DOB: Aprox. 1929, 22 years old (may have been older, or younger)
Last Addr: 366 State Street, Brooklyn, NY in 1951
Occupation: Waitress

At one point she said her name was Sylvia Brooks and that she was married, but that may have been an alias. She also said she was 22, but I discovered that a couple of the women questioned lied about their ages in both directions, so maybe she did too. This is not a lot to go on, I know.

Places I've Already Tried:

- Called all the Krumholz's in the New York, New Jersey, Florida phone books.
- The 1930 Census records, (found two, one in New York and one in New Jersey but this hasn't helped me find her yet).
- The New York Times (Proquest).
- The Daily News and the Brooklyn Eagle for Feb, March, April, 1951 only.
- Searches on Autotrack and Accurint.
- New York City and State prison records.
- Various church records all around Brooklyn.
- Checked the Social Security Death Index.
- Checked libraries in New Jersey for death notices.
- Checked various cemetery records in New York.

I've been looking for a while, and I may be forgetting things I've tried.

Oldest Unsolved Murders

When my book went to press, 25,062 murders had been committed since 1985. Roughly a third of those murders are still unsolved. (I say roughly, because that figure is a moving target.)

For better or worse, I’m curious about the oldest unsolved murders.

The NYPD’s Central Records Division has a warehouse in Brooklyn where they store, among other things, 187 boxes full of case records for unsolved homicides spanning the years 1921 to 1973. Some boxes have a few cases, some have thirty or more. They may be falling apart from age, but there are probably 4,000 to 7,000 case files there. The box marked "1921" has several cases from the early twenties including the following four cold cases: Cecil E. Landon, a 19 year old from Portland who was murdered just after returning from military service in France, 12-year-old Virginia Walker who was murdered on her way to buy cream, 17-year-old Ream Constance Hoxsie who was hit in the head with a hammer eight times, then posed on a bed, and the severed head of an unknown Italian man that was found in Bronx Zoological Park by two boys looking for fresh water crabs. Several days later, two women searching the same area for mushrooms found the torso.

Ream Constance Hoxsie was murdered on February 2, 1920. The last mention I can find of her was on August 4th that year, in a New York Times article about all the unsolved murders in New York. They say that there’s been a murder in Manhattan every four days for the last seven months, most unsolved. Topping the list are Ream Constance Hoxsie’s murder, and the murder or a gambler/bridge player named Joseph B. Elwood. As far as I can tell, his murder was never solved either, although they got a number of false confessions.

This is from the movie, "The Murder of Marie Roget," which was based on a Edgar Allan Poe story, which was based on the real murder of Mary Cecilia Roger. Her 1841 murder has never been solved. She was very beautiful and the case got enormous attention. (That reminds me, the Municipal Archives has notebooks of photographs made from glass plate negatives of crime scenes taken around 1905. There's one picture of a man so horribly deformed he doesn't even look human. He looks more like a monkey. I am haunted by that photograph. He was so awful looking, and he lived in a shack with a dirt floor -- you have to see it. It was one of the most miserable existences I have ever seen in a photograph. And then, the final insult to life and humanity, he was murdered. It's a sad, sad, picture and I wish I had never seen it.)

Bill Miller - Person of Interest

This is Bill Miller, the last person to see Jean Sanseverino alive in 1951. (I wrote about Jean in the book.) For the longest time I didn't know who this was. The picture was in the case files without a caption or explanation. Then, a year into my research I read a witness statement that described Bill Miller as missing three teeth and part of his thumb.

The 1951 detectives narrowed their search down to four persons of interest (these are people detectives are not ready to call suspects). Bill Miller was one of their favorites.

The Sheik - A 1936 Cold Case

In 1936, a young Syrian boxer named George Abdinoor (aka The Sheik) was murdered in Brooklyn, then buried in a basement in Lawrence, MA.

He was unearthed 18 months later, and buried in the United Syrian Cemetery in Lawrence, MA. His case was never solved. 145 of the 365 homicide cases that year went cold.

The year with the largest number of unsolved homicides in New York was, not surprisingly, the year with the most murders. In 1990, 791 of the 2,245 murders that year are still unsolved. That's 35%, and that's typical. The most recent figures I have are for 2003. As of 2004, 294 of the 596 murders that year were not yet solved. That's almost 50%. However, I did discover that a cold case has up to a 5% to 10% chance of being cleared within one year after it went cold. After two years it's less than 1%. That means the percentage of unsolved murders in New York is around 40%.

Jean Sanseverino Murdered March 8, 1951

The case that affected me the most was the March 8, 1951 murder of Jean Sanseverino. She came to New York from Alabama to be with the husband who had left her a year before and had returned to New York, where he was from. It didn’t go well. He wanted to send her back to Alabama, but she said, “No. I’m going to stay in New York and have fun.” A month later she was dead.

She was only 26. Before she was murdered she spent the last month of her life making the same stupid mistakes young women everywhere make in their twenties, especially at the end of a marriage that wasn’t everything a young girl dreams. Jean never got the chance to stop, grow up, and pull her life together. She wasn’t around long enough to discover there are a lot worse things than loneliness.

In 1951, they couldn’t measure alcohol levels as exactly as they can now. They used a scale of 1 to 4. Jean measured at 3+. She must have been plastered the night she died, but she probably sobered up quickly. “Being strangled—having your neck grasped and crushed until the blood stops flowing, and the air gets trapped in your throat and the small blood vessels in your face and eyes start to pop—hurts,” Dr. Jonathan Hayes, a Senior Medical Examiner at the OCME explains. “Eventually, the victim will lose consciousness, but her struggling can prolong her own suffering, as she repeatedly pushes away the killer's hands, briefly letting the breath flow and the blood circulate again, before they are abruptly cut off as the hands go back around her neck and the choking continues.”

The medical examiner estimated that Jean died at roughly 5:30 that morning. A little while later, the sun rose. It was chilly that morning, 38 degrees, and it felt like it was going to rain.

When I found her case sitting in a closet, no one had so much as even looked at it in decades. And why should they? The killer is likely dead. The detectives want to save lives, they want to catch killers who might kill again. Still, I thought, maybe somewhere in Alabama she has family who are still alive and who think of her and wonder from time to time, ‘you send your daughter up to New York, she comes back in a box and nothing happens? Nobody pays?’