The Lost Victim of the Boston Strangler
Written by Cat Griffin
It’s an abnormally warm spring morning in the growing Boston suburb of Norwood, Massachusetts. The year is 1964. The town, a mix of old New England charm and mid-century optimism, smells like the scent of the budding flowers drifting from the edges of the Neponset River.
It’s 8 a.m., but downtown Washington Street is already stirring. The local hardware store and neighborhood bakeries prepare for the day, their doors propped open to let in the fresh morning air. The early trains from Boston are coming in, depositing handfuls of commuters in blazers and skirts. The hum of industry rises from the Plimpton Press. The smell of ink lingers in the air.
The neon sign of Furlong's Candies & Ice Cream flickers off as the diner next door starts filling with men in short-sleeved white shirts and ties, reading The Boston Globe over coffee. The headline today: Police finally believe they are on the trail of an elusive serial killer who has been terrorizing Boston for two years.
A call from the operator interrupts the optimism. On the other end of the line, a man is describing a startling, yet familiar, scene. A woman lies dead across the end of her bed. Around her neck is one of her own stockings, tied into a ligature.
Her name, he tells them, is Goldie Fine.
Before long, police descend on the home at 16 Lewis Avenue, securing the scene while neighbors look on, asking questions amongst themselves, speculating about what might have happened inside that first-floor bedroom.
Yet, more than 60 years later, her last moments remain diminished — her death certificate lacking answers. As her grandson David puts it, she deserves to be acknowledged for who she really was: A lost victim of the infamous Boston Strangler.
Augusta "Goldie" Fine / Norwood Historical Society
Augusta Bloomberg, or Goldie as she becomes known in later life, is born in 1902 under circumstances that I am sure are not included in any expectant mother’s birth plans. She came into the world aboard an ocean liner as her Russian-Jewish parents emigrated to America. A new country, a new baby, a fresh start in the New World. In the 1905 New York City census, she is listed as Gussie. I am sure she was thankful that nickname did not stick. She’s a Goldie, not a Gussie.
Very little is known about her earliest years, or even how she met her husband. The next public recording of her life is her marriage certificate, which says that she wed Mr. Hyman Fine in Chelsea, Massachusetts, on July 17, 1921. Hyman is working as a meter reader while Goldie is employed as a bookkeeper. They go on to live, for a time, in Sharon, Massachusetts and have four children: Their son, Melvin, arrives in 1924; daughter, Shirley, in 1931; and twin girls, named Ruth and Jean, round out the family in 1933. When Shirley dies on May 24, 1940, from complications of a two-year battle with rheumatic fever, the Fines are left to raise their three remaining children alongside their growing laundry business, Lourde Cleaners. As the children grow up and start families of their own, Goldie joins Hyman in working at the shop. The couple later moves into a first-floor apartment in a home owned by the Martowska family in Norwood. Lillian Martowska, the adult daughter of the homeowners, has already been working at Lourde Cleaners for several years. Their shared home sits at the end of Lewis Avenue, a quiet dead-end street that opens into a broad, peaceful meadow.
The morning of April 13, 1964, starts off perfectly normal.
Hyman leaves for Lourde Cleaners in Canton around 6 a.m. He later reports that his wife is awake when he leaves and getting ready for her day. Around 7:30 a.m., Hyman sends his employee, James Rhoden — inaccurately identified later by newspapers as James Rhodes — to pick up his wife and Lillian for their work day. For this trip, Hyman loans James his car.
But when James gets there, he finds that, while Lillian is dressed and ready, Goldie is not answering her door. Lillian says that Goldie didn’t come upstairs that morning for their usual coffee together. She thinks maybe Goldier isn’t going to work that morning. Or, perhaps, she has already left for the day with Hyman. After a few knocks on the door, Lillian decides to go upstairs to phone Hyman. He tells Lillian that Goldie was fine when he left. “Maybe she’s in the bathroom,” he says.
Lillian checks the front and back doors, finding them both locked. She goes out to the car and James gives her the apartment key off the ring. Lillian returns to the door, unlocks it and calls out. She does not get a reply. She enters the apartment and makes the gruesome discovery.
Lillian immediately calls out to her brother, Walter, who is sitting on the front porch waiting for his ride to work. Walter checks Goldie for a pulse, but there isn’t one. Walter calls for the police before leaving for work. Lillian goes back inside to call Hyman and tell him to return home. It is then that she notices the stocking around Goldie’s neck.
Goldie’s body is in the bedroom. She is lying diagonally across the end of the bed. Her feet are resting flat on the floor, as if she had been sitting on the bed and fallen backward. Two of Goldie’s own stockings are tied tightly into a ligature around her neck.
Goldie Fine’s life ends sometime between 5:45 a.m. and 7:45 a.m. that morning. She will now become a headline and, for a brief 20 hours, a suspected victim of the Boston Strangler.
News reporters flock to the quiet, dead-end street almost immediately. Hyman returns home to speak to the police. It is the beginning of a nightmare that will haunt him until his own death 17 years later.
The headline of The Boston Globe that evening: Mystery Cloaks Woman’s Death. Above that is a line reading, Stockings Around Neck. This detail — one of the Strangler’s signatures — immediately sparks fears that the area’s serial killer has struck again. The story notes the position of her body, and that she is clothed; however, James (or possibly Lillian) would report later to Hyman that she was either nude or partially undressed when police made entry.
The article says that all the windows were locked from the inside, but it does not say if the door could be locked from the inside or if it needed a key to be locked from the outside. The article ends with what would become the running theme for the next story: Goldie was a frail, old lady in poor health.
The Boston Globe
I learn all of this one day while sitting at my desk, at my job as a social worker. It’s a pretty boring Wednesday, and I am plugging away at filling reports, when a long-time resident walks in. This man is a gem of a human — a bit quirky, in the best kind of way. He wants to know the answers to things around him. He’s thoroughly inquisitive, and a truth seeker.
He always comes by around the same time of day — mid-afternoon, around 2:15 p.m. Always on a Wednesday, too. He knows that I make a habit of listening to true crime podcasts while typing up my notes. We chat about conspiracy theories and aliens, all the intriguing ins and outs of the universe and social media.
He’s made friends with my office jumping spider, whom I named August. He wants to know all about jumping spiders and watches with curiosity as August eats his tiny fly. I wonder now, looking back on it, if meeting my spider named August triggered him to tell me about his grandmother, Augusta “Goldie” Fine.
For Goldie’s grandson, David, the day his family shattered is still clear in his mind. After returning home from school, 9-year-old David is sent across the yard to his cousin’s home for the afternoon so his parents and extended family can gather and make calls, speak to the police. When he is allowed to come home for dinner, his parents attempt to gently tell him that his grandmother has died, without telling him the details. But the TV is on in the background. At that very moment, reports that Goldie might have been killed by the Boston Strangler broadcast across the airwaves.
“My father was in tears as he started to fully communicate to me what happened,” David later tells me. “He was under enormous psychological pressure merely to function, while trying to comprehend his own mother’s devastatingly shocking murder.”
The family has weathered heartbreak before. They were instantly pulled back to 1940, the year Hyman and Goldie lost their 9-year-old daughter, Shirley, to rheumatic fever.
Goldie struggled immensely after her death. And one day, she drank enough iodine to require her stomach to be pumped. She was sent to a facility for several months.
On the morning of Goldie’s death, Hyman, surrounded by investigators, recounts this painful memory to authorities. He explains how Goldie recently seemed to fall back into another dark spell — this time, growing impatient as she waited for a surgery date to restore the vision in her cataract-blinded eye. A similar procedure on her other eye had been a success, but the delay was wearing on her.
This all makes police begin to doubt the Strangler theory. They say it’s puzzling that there are no obvious routes of escape from the house because all of the Fine’s doors were locked. They say that, unlike other victims, none of the bones in her neck were broken. They point out that she was married, when most of the other suspected victims were single. And finally, they say she was clothed, with no signs of sexual assault — something her family later refuted.
Bolstering the new theory are the two friends who found her — Lillian Martowska and James Rhoden. Both, when asked if they think that Goldie may have killed herself, tell police that it’s a possibility, as her health had been weighing on her.
The press takes the lead. The subsequent two stories in the Boston Globe, published the day after her death, go on to paint a picture of the scene. They both state that there are no signs of forced entry to the apartment — not through a window, not through a door. There are no signs of anyone struggling — either with Goldie or anywhere in the home. Everything is in order, nothing is out of place or missing. And, again, Goldie is portrayed as a frail, old lady. Another local newspaper calls her “nearly blind.” Deep in the Globe, on page 32, Goldie’s death notice can be found. She will be buried that same day, April 14, 1964, with the religious memorial week of Shiva taking place at the home of her daughter Jean.
Despite what the stories imply, Goldie actually was a vibrant 62-year-old, more accurately portrayed by the photograph that accompanied the story than by the words within it. Her autopsy determines her cause of death to be “strangulation by ligature,” noting that there are “no broken bones in her neck.”
It details her psoriasis and her upcoming eye surgery for cataracts. It details her weight as being 90 lbs without mention of her height for reference. Goldie was a woman of shorter stature and her weight wouldn’t have been very shocking for the time.
The article strongly alludes to the possibility that she decided to take her life due to her fragile medical condition, while at the same time making note that there is no explanation for the stockings around her neck.
But the police haven’t completely ruled out a homicide. In fact, they have a different suspect in mind.
Her husband.
At 9:11 a.m., while sitting in his living room, with Goldie’s body still in their bedroom, Hyman is interviewed by Norwood Police Chief James Murphy. After Hyman recounts the 1940 suicide attempt, he tells detectives the details of the last day of Goldie’s life.
He says that he and Goldie watched some TV the day before, and then took a mid-afternoon nap together. The two ate meat sandwiches for supper and watched The Ed Sullivan Show before Goldie turned in for the night at 9 p.m. Hyman stayed awake another hour and watched Bonanza before going to bed at 10 p.m.
At 9:40 a.m., Murphy asks Hyman if he has done anything to his wife, explaining that the circumstances could lead to him to be a suspect in Goldie’s death. Hyman responds that he is aware of that, and goes on to say he didn't even know where she kept her stockings in their home. She stopped wearing them long ago because of her skin condition. Hyman agrees to a lie detector test if it will help clear things up.
Goldie’s husband, Hyman Fine, visiting with family / David Fine
At 11:50 a.m., Goldie and Hyman’s son, Melvin — who is also David’s dad — is asked to identify Goldie’s body. The sheet covering her is pulled down, just to her chin, and Melvin makes the positive identification. Goldie’s body is removed from her home under police escort. She is taken to the funeral home for autopsy.
The record of her autopsy is sealed but we have a clear description of the scene from an investigator who took pictures of it. To the left of her body, there are two more stockings and a matchbook. She is dressed in a housecoat, apron and white panties. All three garments have small spots of blood on them. Goldie has a trail of blood exiting her left ear, which trails down onto the pillow. The striped sheet she is laying on has smears of blood underneath her body. The matchbook strikes investigators as odd or out of place and it is taken to the lab for fingerprinting. The matchbook is not mentioned anywhere else in the files nor is there a statement on whom, if anyone, is identified by the fingerprints.
Goldie and Hyman’s twin daughters, Ruth Fast and Jean Rubenstein both say that they do not believe their mother killed herself. They both say she was anxious about the upcoming surgery but anxious to have it over with, not anxious about having it done.
But neither the twins, nor the friends, Lillian and James, believe Hyman is capable of harming Goldie, either.
Then Melvin talks to the police. He talks about the shock of getting a call asking him to leave the shop immediately and drive his father home. He talks about his mother’s health and how she did not like to be alone now that her vision was reduced to shadows. He says she found comfort in being with Hyman all day at the shop.
Police ask Melvin if his father had another woman on the side. The question comes seemingly out of nowhere. And Melvin replies, surprisingly, that his father does. Not only is there another woman, but she has a child. They live in Roxbury. Melvin isn’t sure if the boy is his half-brother or not.
He tells police that he didn’t always get along with his father, especially when he was younger. But in the end, he tells police that he does not believe his father would harm his mom.
Still, Hyman becomes the prime suspect.
And then, on April 22nd, Hyman takes a polygraph test. He passes with flying colors.
The prosecutors decide there is only one option left. The case goes to a formal inquest.
Source: Norwood Police Department.
David begins researching his grandmother’s case in his teens, reading and rereading the clipped news articles his mother has saved. “I tried to put the few, puzzling pieces together that I personally had in regard to her death,” he says. “Things I had personally witnessed or been aware of. What was always in my mind's eye, when remembering my grandmother's terrifying murder and its painful aftermath, was the indelible sight of my father, with his head down on the kitchen table, crying, literally for days and weeks on end. It was so shattering to him that it literally left him without words to express himself.”
In his need to make sense of what happened, David begins to pick apart the memories of his childhood. One is of a loan shark his family borrowed money from. “I had seen this person and his associate come into the store every so often when I was there – usually drawing pictures or alerting an employee to come to the front counter to help customers – after school or during school vacations,” he says.
He remembers the constant worry his parents had about how they would repay these loans. It makes David wonder if criminals could have been responsible for his grandmother’s death. David and his mother discuss this as a possibility.
When he thinks about the suicide theory, David gets stuck on the method. There is a whole cupboard of cleaning chemicals under the sink that Goldie could have used. Or she could have gone to the pharmacy around the corner and gotten any number of pills to end her life. Why would she pick this? Why would she want to bring so much attention to her death — and in turn, to her grieving family?
David doesn’t believe that it’s possible she ended her life over itchy skin and anxiety about a cataract surgery she’d already successfully gone through. But if she wanted to, he doesn’t think she would have tried to make it look like it was the Boston Strangler.
David wonders, did police even examine the possibility of James Rhoden as the killer? During a car ride years later, David asks his grandfather if he ever suspected Rhoden. Hyman responds that he doesn’t believe that’s possible. The Fines and the Rhodens remained friends, having dinner with each other occasionally in the years after Goldie’s death.
Melvin never figures out how to grapple with all of this. He has a complete nervous breakdown in the years following his mother’s death and suffers from depression the rest of his life. The loss causes his large, extended family to gradually become more isolated and insulated. The big family gatherings they used to have vanish. David rarely sees his cousins. It becomes obvious that Goldie was the glue that held the Fine family together, and without her, they are crumbling.
Goldie and Hyman’s son Melvin at the kitchen table 1979. / David Fine
The original case files for Goldie’s death were lost for decades. A flood destroyed the basement of the storage facility where they were being kept. When I first started digging — alongside David — for answers, I thought it an unfortunate hopeless loss.
But then one day, they showed up on the virtual doorstep of my email inbox. At least some of them had been kept in the archives of the Norfolk District Attorney's office. From the pages I got, I found that 15 witnesses — family included — testified at the coroner’s inquest into Goldie’s death. The judge was also presented with several weeks of evidence.
What is said exactly, we don’t know. But the judge rules that Goldie Fine has, in fact, caused her own death.
It is a conclusion that Norwood police repeat even today.
“While it is not a common manner of suicide, it is seen by investigators from time to time,” Norwood police lieutenant Brian Murphey said in a retelling of the story in 2020. “Norwood was not visited by the Boston Strangler after all.”
Source: Norwood Police Department
But David can’t accept that answer. And reading all of this in the present day, it doesn’t seem so clear-cut to me, either. It seems like the police discounted the Strangler very early. Almost like they really wanted for this not to be him. I wondered why?
The Strangler certainly still seems to be more likely than a 62-year-old woman committing suicide in a way that would look like a serial killer did it. A frail old woman in bad health — as they themselves put it — with enough strength to tie two stockings into a ligature around her neck, stopping her own ability to breathe? Leaving no note, and knowing that a friend or loved one would likely find her?
The Strangler left no signs of forced entry at his other crime scenes, either. Plus, Goldie had been to the hospital recently to be evaluated before her surgery. Most of his victims either worked in healthcare, had recently been to a hospital, or lived close to a hospital.
I decided to dig into the days, weeks and months of news articles related to the Boston Strangler to try to figure out the reason why police discounted Goldie as one of his victims. Sifting through the newspapers of the time paints a vivid picture. By the time of Goldie’s death, the serial killer — first known as the phantom killer, but later dubbed the Strangler by local press — had been suspected in at least 11 murders in the area. The killings started in Boston’s Back Bay, but were moving into the suburbs.
Credit: Norwood Police Department
All of them had a similar set of facts, but they were not all exactly the same, leading investigators to wonder if there was more than one killer. Some were killed with stockings, others with belts. Usually it was their own clothing, but not always. Many were found posed in provocative positions, introducing an element of psychological control and sexual gratification. Since some of them were sexually assaulted and some were not.
The lack of evidence at crime scenes frustrated investigators and it ignited paranoia amongst women, who became equally nervous to leave their homes but also to be left alone. Some started double-locking their doors and carrying makeshift weapons. Sales of deadbolts, guard dogs, tear gas and firearms skyrocketed.
News reporters and police speculated that the Strangler, or perhaps Stranglers, were using the guise of a handyman sent over by a landlord or even the meter readers working for the city. For that reason, in May of 1964, meter readers employed by the public works department were made to wear identifying uniforms. The city’s police force, unprepared for a serial killer, scrambled for leads while the public's frustration mounted. Boston, once a city of tight-knit communities, was undergoing a lot of change. In the early 1960s, the city was straddling its old-world traditions and the rapid modernization of post-war America. Like the rest of America, Bay Staters were still healing from the shocking assassination of JFK. The fear of Soviet war lingered. Now women were being hunted in their own bedrooms. It was nothing short of terrorizing.
I started my search vowing to sift through all 16 months, back to the first murder in 1962, in order to find some answers. But I didn’t have to dig deeper than a week back in time from Goldie’s death to uncover a hypothesis. It was plainly clear why police wanted this to be a suicide.
On April 8, 1964 — five days before Goldie’s death — a Boston area theater hosted the premiere of the Hollywood feature film, The Strangler. The clearly exploitative movie utilizes elements from the Boston Strangler killings, portraying the killer as appearing slovenly and disgruntled by his lab tech job in a hospital. The movie character, named Leo Kroll and played by Victor Buono, is a heavyset man with slicked-back dark hair and cold calculation in his eyes. His expressions are often that of chilling detachment. Leo has just been released by police after questioning in a string of eight murders by strangulation. He is targeting female nurses in the hospital where his super-controlling mother is undergoing care for a recent heart attack.
He kills a couple nurses, goes out with the carny girl, then kills his mother’s nurse. He then confesses to his mother, which then causes his mother to die of a heart attack. In the movie, the police catch on and, with the help of the carny girl, catch the Strangler mid-killing where he dramatically falls through a window, meeting his death.
It’s not one of Hollywood’s finest features.
However, it seems to be a hit in Boston that week, showing in more than 14 theaters throughout the area and drawing even bigger crowds the following weekend.
On April 12, the Boston Globe publishes an article titled: 6 Main Suspects In Stranglings, in which the reporter details the findings of the state attorney general’s “Strangler Division” — created to focus solely on the Boston Strangler.
Attorney General John S. Bottomly states the following:
They believe they know who is responsible for 9, possibly 10, of the 11 killings attributed to the Boston Strangler.
They have six prime suspects.
Three are in custody on other charges.
The three suspects not in custody — freely walking the streets — are under surveillance by police and other authorities.
The psychologists hired by the division to help believe that the murders that happened in Boston’s North Shore are slightly more brutal and are likely the work of a different suspect than the ones in Boston proper.
However, in contrast to the findings of the psychologists, Bottomly believes it is one suspect who is responsible for 8 of the 10 identified murders.
The police are working with professors and students from MIT on a computer program with the hope that they can find connections between victims, thus finding the suspect. This computer is on loan from Concord Computer Services and, apparently, will crack the case.
I couldn’t help but laugh at that last point. This must be a magical computer, because Bottomly states that it is going to “compare neighborhoods of the victims and see if there is any duplication in that area. It can also find duplications in hobbies. In the case of the Strangler, most of the victims showed a strong interest in music.”
The article, for all its faults, seems to speak directly to the Strangler.
In it, Bottomly says that investigators will catch the killer and that his days of strangling are coming to a quick end. The tone is clear: they are onto him. He is being watched, just like at the end of the film The Strangler.
Could all of this boasting have provoked the Strangler to kill again? Perhaps he wanted to call Bottomly’s bluff? Or show that police are chasing the wrong suspects?
I don’t believe it is a coincidence that Goldie is found dead the next day.
Goldie’s murder, and yes, I am now declaring it a murder, causes a problem for investigators. Just 24 hours earlier, Bottomly and the Strangler Division declared they had the three prime suspects who were not already in custody under tight surveillance.
But if they had their targets in their sights, how could they explain another victim?
If police were to include Goldie in the official victim count, it would be highly embarrassing. It would be a failure — a failure of the Boston Police, the FBI, the Strangler Division and Bottomly himself.
Either the wrong people were being surveilled, or they weren’t being surveilled very well. It was far easier for investigators to spin Goldie’s murder into the case of a frail, old lady, unable to handle her ailments, who decides to take her own life.
But while this story might have saved face for the authorities, it destroyed the Fine and Bloomberg families. Moreover, it may have been the fatal blow to the prosecution of one of the most famous serial killers in American history.
It isn’t until October 27, 1964 — more than six months after Goldie’s death — that police actually take someone into custody under suspicion of committing the crimes of the Boston Strangler.
Boston Police are investigating a series of rapes when they arrest a man named Albert DeSalvo. He had already once served time for crimes that earned him the nickname the “Measuring Man.” Police say he would knock on young women’s doors, pretend to be from a modeling agency, and take their measurements. Just two months after his release from jail, the Boston stranglings began.
But it wasn’t until after Goldie’s death that DeSalvo found himself again before authorities. This time, disguised as a police detective, he had entered the home of a young woman, then restrained her and sexually assaulted her. Before he left, he untied her and apologized. The woman was able to describe her assailant to police and he was identified as DeSalvo.
Credit: Norwood Police Department
True crime experts and enthusiasts — even some family members — have long doubted whether DeSalvo could have been the Boston Strangler. The connection is based mostly on his supposed confession to a fellow inmate named George Nassar. When Nassar tells his attorney, F. Lee Bailey, that DeSalvo has confessed to him, Bailey decides to take him on as a client. DeSalvo then cooperates with police, giving them details of the Strangler murders that had never been made public. That confession leads investigators to add two other murders to the Strangler list. Even still, police are never able to connect DeSalvo to any of the crime scenes through evidence. Bailey arranges for DeSalvo to take a plea bargain for the home invasions and sexual assaults of four women. He is sentenced to life in prison, but never convicted of any murder.
It gets even messier. DeSalvo recants his confession in 1973, and then is murdered in his cell two weeks later. His body is later exhumed for a DNA sample, which in 2013, matches DNA found on the exhumed body of Mary A. Sullivan, who is the official final victim of the Strangler, since Goldie is never added to the list. But that’s the only case stamped “closed” by police. Over the years, there have been many theories; the most recent one is that Nassar is the killer and set DeSalvo up.
Only one thing is certain: The Boston Strangler remains elusive.
Well, maybe there are two things.
Goldie Fine’s death is never revisited. Her official record does not list a manner of death.
But the more I dig, the more I realize that the case of Goldie Fine isn’t just about one unsolved murder. It is about all of them. If police had admitted the truth about Goldie’s murder, might they have found the real Boston Strangler? We will likely never know.
Goldie’s story is hidden in plain sight, buried beneath decades of police narratives designed to pacify the public rather than expose the truth. Her family spends years staring at the same facts, the same contradictions, and the same inexplicable conclusions that I now pore over. And yet, every attempt to make sense of it is met with dead ends and institutional apathy.
For David, this is about more than just getting justice for his grandmother. It is about his father, Melvin, who never recovered from the trauma of that morning. It is about reclaiming a truth that had been stolen from his family, buried under convenient headlines and official denials.
Justice is a funny thing. We tell ourselves it has a beginning, a middle, and an end: A crime, an investigation, a conviction. But that’s the structure of a story, not of reality.
Maybe the Boston Strangler is Albert DeSalvo. Maybe he isn’t. Maybe Goldie is the last of his victims. Maybe she is one of many women whose deaths were ignored, minimized, rewritten for the sake of an easier conclusion.
Finality will never come for any of the women he killed. But acknowledgment, at the very least, is possible. And if it doesn’t come from authorities, then let it come here, etched into the eternity of the internet, not in the form of justice, but in the form of a narrative.
Augusta “Goldie” Fine is not a woman who chose to end her own life. She is a woman whose life was stolen. And she is, whether history records it or not, the Boston Strangler’s lost victim.
Cat Griffin is a social worker who lives a quiet life in New England.
