Margaret Mary Warburton

In the late summer of 1969, Margaret Mary Warburton, a 20-year-old woman from Pierrefonds, Quebec, in Canada, was enjoying a visit with relatives in New York City. She was staying with her uncle, John Flynn, at his home at 63-09 71st Street in the Middle Village neighborhood of Queens. On the morning of Thursday, September 18, she told her family she was heading into Manhattan for a day of shopping. She walked out of her uncle's home and was never seen alive by her loved ones again.

Five days later, on September 23, a horrific discovery was made about 35 miles away at the bustling Penn Central train station in Stamford, Connecticut. Inside a rented locker, authorities found a suitcase. It contained a woman's torso, wrapped carefully in plastic. The gruesome finding prompted a wider search of the station. The following day, investigators found more plastic-wrapped bundles, these containing human arms and legs, discarded in a trash receptacle inside the men's washroom. The victim's head was missing and has never been recovered.

Through fingerprints, police were able to identify the remains as those of the missing Canadian tourist, Margaret Warburton. The case was immediately classified as a homicide, and the investigation fell to the Stamford Police Department. A medical examiner was able to determine from bruising found on the tissue of her neck that Margaret had been strangled to death. It was estimated that she was likely killed within 24 hours of her disappearance on September 18, long before her dismembered body was placed in the Stamford station.

The investigation into who killed Margaret Warburton and why has spanned more than five decades without a resolution. The killer went to great lengths to conceal the crime, dismembering the body and scattering the parts in a public transit hub in another state, likely to delay identification and confuse jurisdictional authority. The absence of the victim's head further hampered the investigation, robbing investigators of crucial evidence. Police in both New York and Connecticut worked the case, but no suspects have ever been publicly named or charged in connection with the murder.

Over the years, Margaret's case has been reviewed as a cold case, but the passage of time has made solving it increasingly difficult. The crime took place in an era before the widespread use of DNA technology and video surveillance, leaving detectives with little physical evidence to work with from the crime scene. The case has been noted by some crime historians for its brutality and for its placement within a string of unsolved female homicides in the New York metropolitan area during that period, though no definitive link has ever been established by law enforcement.

The murder of Margaret Mary Warburton remains an open and active cold case with the Stamford Police Department. Decades have passed, but the search for answers continues for a young woman who traveled to New York for a happy family visit and met a devastatingly violent end. As of December 2022, her killer has never been brought to justice.