Cape Cod Murders - Real and Imagined

Murders on Old Cape Cod - Real and Imagined

Real.

Status: Awaiting Solution.

The year 1974. The Location: The dunes of Race Point Beach in Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod.

In late July, a 13 year old girl walking her beagle, makes a grim discovery. Among the sandy dunes near the water, she sees the nude body of a woman lying on one side of a large beach towel. The lady’s head, resting on a pair of jeans, has been nearly severed.

The teenager who made the discovery is spared the grisly details that are uncovered a short time later by the authorities: Cause of death - a blow to the head.

Both hands of the victim had been meticulously cut off, apparently to prevent identification by fingerprints. The woman was almost decapitated, seemingly by an item such as a military entrenching tool. The left side of the skull had been crushed. No weapon was found at the scene. The missing hands were never found.

The lady was lying on half the towel as if she had been sharing it. Police say that there was no sign of a struggle. No items of clothing were found other than the jeans her head was placed upon and a bandana.

It is estimated that the victim had been murdered two to three weeks before her corpse was discovered. Police believe that she was between 25 and 40 years old. She had long red or auburn hair. Her jeans were waist size 34 and inseam 31. She was said to be about 5’6’’ tall with a body weight of 140 pounds. Her toenails were painted pink.

The one remarkable feature that has confounded the authorities for years is the woman’s teeth. She had extensive dental work. It is estimated that the gold crowns she had, probably cost five to ten thousand dollars when done almost forty years ago. It would seem that the number of women who had this kind of work done would be small and that a dental trail could be established. Police have sniffed for this path for decades and have not found a single lead.

Some people theorize that the reason for this is that the woman was a criminal and her dental work was done through contacts in the underworld. They add fuel to this fire by speculating that the hands were removed because she had a criminal record and was fingerprinted by police.

The theory gained further momentum when it was suspected that the dead woman was named Rory Gene Kesinger. Kesinger was serving time in Massachusetts as a convicted murderer and bank robber. She escaped jail a short time before the discovery of the body of the Lady in the Dunes.

It was speculated that Kesinger’s associates helped to spring her from the pen and then rubbed her out to guarantee she would never talk.

Kesinger fits the description of the murdered woman and she has never been sighted since her escape from prison.

A few years ago the authorities exhumed the remains of the Lady in the Dunes and extracted a DNA sample. They located Kesinger’s Mother somewhere in the Midwest and they tried to match up the two samples. The police were pretty sure they would have a match………but the results said that the dead woman was NOT Rory Gene Kesinger.

One year ago, P-town Police Chief Jeff Jaran released a new composite image of the woman. He hopes the photo will generate some fresh leads.

Compounding the problems of a 37 year old cold case, is the seasonal nature of Cape Cod in general and Provincetown in particular.

Provincetown has a winter population of about 2,000 people and if the killing had happened on January 26 instead of July 26, the crime would have been solved in 26 minutes.

In Summer the village explodes. On a given Sunday there might be 100,000 visitors and seasonal residents in town. Imagine if New York city’s July population expanded like Cape Cod’s…if it did, there would be about one half of a billion people in the Big Apple.

Further hampering the investigation is the fact that the visitors come from all around the world. The murdered woman could have as easily been from Paris as from Boston or Toronto or Atlanta or anywhere.

Imagined.

Status: Solved -  by Ricardo Montalban

The Location: Scollay Square in Boston and Hyannis in Cape Cod.

The time is 1950 - 24 years before the discovery of the Lady in the Dunes.

Leonard Spiglegass has written a story called Mystery Street. A young girl discovers the skeleton of a woman brutally murdered near a beach in Hyannis village - part of the town of Barnstable.

No clothing is found. No identification of the woman is possible. Barnstable police officer Peter Moralas (Ricardo Montalban) teams up with Harvard University using amazing (for the time period) facial reconstruction techniques to establish the identity of the murdered woman.

The film shows Harvard professors skillfully putting photos of faces on the dead woman’s skull, long before computer imaging and such made the technique relatively easy. Montalban fights racism and a bad guy and manages to solve the crime in this movie, which was the first film to be shot on location in Boston and on Cape Cod.

John Sturges took Spiglegass’s story and directed the low budget MGM entry so masterfully that it transcended its pauper budget and earned high praise from such institutions as Time Magazine and the New York Times.

Also featured are Elsa Lanchester, Jan Sterling, Marshall Thompson, Sally Forrest and Bruce Bennett. Willard Waterman pleases in a cameo appearance as an undertaker. He played the Great Gildersleeve on television and on radio from about 1950 to 1957.

This film noir merits a look. It was put out on DVD in 2007 paired with another great dark film: ‘Act of Violence’ with Van Heflin and Robert Ryan as two WW2 vets who meet violently in peacetime. I checked Ebay and saw that a copy of the DVD is available for less than six dollars. The double feature is definitely worth the price and then some.