Post by Joanna on Dec 31, 2014 19:38:18 GMT -5
Unsolved: 1976 Murder of 13-Year-Old Beth Ann Sweeney
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. – It is every family's nightmare: a young child on her way home disappears. But this is what happened to the Sweeney family 38 years ago this week.
On Thursday, December 30, 1976, 13-year-old Beth Ann Sweeney, a freckle-faced 8th-grader on holiday break from Barnes Intermediate School in Great Kills, was on her way home from the Rossville residence of her aunt, Mildred Popovits, where she often spent time with her cousins. She left to catch the Prince's Bay train station (above) at 4:45 p.m., a mile walk to the Seguine Avenue station and vanished.
The family reported Beth Ann missing at 12:30 a.m. New Year's Eve after a search yielded no results, but at that time, Beth Ann had not been missing long enough for the police to inititate a search.
The family continued its search and starting at the train station, they checked for footprints in the snow and discovered a pair of large tracks heading into the woods and discovered the girl’s brutally murdered body in Wolfe’s Pond Park.
The medical examiner's report indicated the young teenager had been beaten, strangled and stabbed and listed suffocation as the cause of deaths. Later reports, however, indicated she most likely died of stab wounds. Her killer was never found.
Twenty years later, in 1997, the Cold Case Squad of Brooklyn/Staten Island reinvestigated the case in hopes of finding the killer and bringing the teen's family, who had relocated to Florida, some peace. Investigators were able to shed some light on the mystery, saying the teen might have been abducted and transported to the location where she was found in an automobile because there were tire tracks near the scene, as opposed to having been abducted at the train station. Multiple witnesses were interviewed and there were countless tips, but all to no avail. It seemed all hope of solving the case melted with the snow.
To date, the now 38-year-old murder remains unsolved.
“You'll never forget what happened, but you don't think about it every day, at least not now,'' her father, Richard Sweeney, said in a 1997 interview. ''But when it’s brought up ... it's an old wound that you open and you get upset."
Recent attempts to reach the Sweeney family were unsuccessful.
Source: Matea Kulusic, StatenIslandLive, December 30, 2014.
