Joan Graff

Joan Graff was a creative and caring 23-year-old woman building a new life for herself in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1963. A recent graduate of the prestigious Art Institute of Chicago, the young White/Caucasian woman worked as an industrial designer for a local company. She was also a devoted sixth-grade Sunday school teacher at the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, where she had found a welcoming community. Friends remembered her as a kind and gentle person, making the events that unfolded in her small apartment all the more shocking to the quiet mill city just north of Boston.

The nation was already in a state of profound grief on Saturday, November 23, 1963, the day after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. That afternoon, a neighbor who lived in the apartment above Joan’s at 54 Essex Street heard suspicious noises in the hallway. Around 3:25 p.m., the neighbor, an engineering student named Kenneth Rowe, heard a knock on a door across the hall. When he opened his own door to investigate, he saw a man of about 27 with slicked-back hair, dressed in dark green slacks and a dark jacket. The man asked for "Joan Graff," mispronouncing her first name. Rowe directed him to Joan’s apartment on the floor below. A few moments later, he heard her apartment door open and then shut.

Later that afternoon, friends from Joan’s church grew worried. They had arranged to pick her up, but starting at 3:30 p.m., their repeated phone calls to her apartment went unanswered. One friend drove to the building and knocked on her door, but was met with only silence. The concern deepened overnight, and the next day, Sunday, November 24, the grim discovery was made. After gaining entry to her locked apartment, friends and authorities found Joan Graff’s body.

The scene inside was one of brutal violence. The one-room apartment had been ransacked, yet there were no signs of forced entry, suggesting Joan may have known her attacker or was deceived into letting him in. She had been sexually assaulted and bitten. The cause of death was strangulation by ligature. The killer had used two of Joan’s own nylon stockings, intertwined with a leg from her black leotard, to form a rope which was tied tightly around her neck in an elaborate and distinctive bow.

Investigators from the Lawrence Police Department immediately recognized the macabre signature. The specific method of killing linked Joan’s murder to a terrifying series of slayings that had been plaguing the greater Boston area for over a year, all attributed to a shadowy figure the press had dubbed the “Boston Strangler.” The investigation soon focused on Albert DeSalvo, a man who was eventually arrested for a different series of crimes and, while in custody, confessed in stunning detail to being the Boston Strangler. He claimed responsibility for 13 murders, including that of Joan Graff.

Despite the confession, significant doubts persisted in Joan’s case. There was not a single piece of physical evidence connecting DeSalvo to the crime scene at 54 Essex Street. More importantly, when police showed the witness, Kenneth Rowe, a photograph of Albert DeSalvo, he was adamant that DeSalvo was not the man he had spoken to in the hallway just before the murder. This lack of an eyewitness identification created a major contradiction in the case against him for Joan’s death.

Due to his confession being ruled inadmissible in court, Albert DeSalvo was never tried or convicted for any of the Boston Strangler murders. Instead, he was sentenced to life in prison in 1967 for a series of earlier, unrelated sexual assaults and robberies. His story came to a violent end on November 25, 1973, when he was stabbed to death by a fellow inmate at the Walpole maximum-security prison.

For decades, questions lingered over whether DeSalvo was truly responsible for all the killings he claimed. A major development came in July 2013, when investigators exhumed DeSalvo’s body and used modern DNA technology to definitively link him to the 1964 murder of Mary Sullivan, the last of the official Strangler victims. While this breakthrough proved DeSalvo was a killer and was involved in the Strangler series, it did not prove his guilt in every case he confessed to. Because the primary suspect is deceased, the murder of Joan Graff is considered solved, but the conflicting witness testimony means that questions about who was at her door that tragic afternoon remain a part of the case’s complex history.