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Kenosha's "murder alley" is an unpaved strip of land running south from 64th Street, between 20th and 21st Avenues. Two blocks away, the downtown business district bustles with activity, but residents along the alley live with daily apprehension that is more akin to an excursion through the Twilight Zone. "There's something strange out by that alley," Coroner Thomas Dorff told the press in February 1981. "Sort of a 'Bermuda Triangle of murder,' I'd say. What seems to be going on is unexplainable." Lieutenant Rudy Blotz, of the Kenosha Police Department, was equally direct, branding the alley "a jinx or something." The "happenings" include a string of seven grisly homicides between 1967 and 1981, their savagery baffling locals who remark on Kenosha's relative freedom from violent crime. Three of the cases have been solved, unrelated to one another, but the grim geographical coincidence has authorities shaking their heads in confusion. The first "alley" murder occurred on February 9, 1967, when 17-year-old Mary Kaldenburg left her home, on 64th Street, to purchase a bottle of pop from the corner drugstore. Four days later, officers discovered her corpse in the back of a 1948 hearse, parked at the city auto pound a mile from her house. Fully clothed except for her shoes, which were removed and placed near the body, Mary had been stabbed twelve times in the neck, chest, forehead and back. The case remains unsolved. Eleven years later, on January 30, 1978, Jerald Burnett, 52, was found sprawled in a snowbank near his home, at the mouth of the alley. He had been beaten to death with a tire iron, killed in what police described as a robbery. Suspect Steven Gross has been convicted and imprisoned for the crime. On May 27, 1979, 80-year-old Herman Bosman was found beaten to death in his burning home, on the alley's east side. Authorities speculate that the fire was set to destroy evidence of the murder, which remains unsolved at this writing. A month later, on June 23, Alice Alzner, age 18, was unearthed in a rose garden adjoining the alley. A jury convicted the property owner, 23-year-old Thomas Holt, of raping the victim and strangling her with her own brassiere. Holt was sentenced to die. On January 26, 1981, news of a triple murder rocked the neighborhood's fragile peace. Victims Alice Eaton, John Amann, and Raphael Petrucci were found dead in Eaton's home, adjoining the alley. Her grandson, Robert McRoberts, was arrested and charged with the slayings. Science fiction? Mere coincidence? Whichever, local officers and residents along the alley keep their personal opinions to themselves, agreeing only that "there's something going on out there." |
