Eugenia Borda was a 90-year-old resident of Philadelphia’s Kearsley Home who died on July 19, 1983, inside the nursing facility. What at first might have looked like another quiet death among frail residents was reclassified after a medical examiner determined Borda had been sexually assaulted and strangled. Another resident, Mildred Alston, was found dead the same day and ruled to have been sexually assaulted and suffocated, which shifted the inquiry into a criminal investigation.

Court-ordered exhumations followed, and investigators later treated at least four additional nursing home deaths as homicides after autopsies. A former Kearsley Home kitchen worker, Anthony Joyner, was arrested and charged in the deaths of Borda and Alston; prosecutors ultimately linked him to six resident killings and to an earlier 1982 rape. Joyner was convicted at trial of rapes and murders of the residents and received six consecutive life terms in 1985 after jurors deadlocked on the death penalty.

Does anyone have memories of the Kearsley Home from that period or information about how the facility responded as the pattern emerged?