In the winter of 1938, in Kingston, Pennsylvania, a recent graduate of Wilkes-Barre Business College headed out to a job interview that would turn out to be a literal dead end.
Margaret Martin was nineteen years old, by all accounts a quiet, intelligent, and pious young woman with many friends. She had been training to become a secretary, and had only just finished her classes in early December of 1938.
About two weeks after graduating, on the 17th, Margaret received a lead on a job; a man claimed he had gotten her name through the business college, was setting up an insurance company, and needed a secretary. Margaret agreed to meet him for an interview at Kingston Corners, which wasn’t far from her home.
Margaret’s parents became alarmed when evening came and she had not returned from her appointment, and they immediately called the police to report her missing. A search was duly conducted, though the case was unfortunately not publicized to any great extent because of an ongoing newspaper strike.
The only information investigators could uncover was that several witnesses had seen a woman matching Margaret’s description getting into a sedan, variously described as brown or black. The driver of the car was a man between the ages of twenty-five and thirty, who had sandy blond hair, was neatly dressed, and slightly overweight. None of the witnesses could identify the man, and none had had any cause to remember the car’s license plate. There the investigation stagnated for the next few days.
Then, on December 21st, two nineteen-year-old men, Anthony Rezykowski and Stanley Shalkoski, were out hunting muskrat in the woods about twenty-five miles from Kingston. As they were crossing a stream, they noticed a misshapen burlap sack protruding from the water underneath the bridge. Curious, they poked at the bag with a stick before pulling it open to reveal the battered, naked corpse of a young woman.
An autopsy quickly determined that the body was that of Margaret Martin. She had been raped, possibly tortured, beaten with a rock, stabbed in the stomach and leg, and finally strangled to death. The coroner established that she had likely been dead for at least twenty-four hours before her remains were discovered.
In the wake of this horrific find, police pulled out all the stops, combing the wilderness area around the creek searching for clues, inspecting the burlap bag in which the body had been found, and trying to track down the mysterious sandy-haired man in the brown or black sedan. Despite their best efforts, however, they turned up nothing that would help them to bring the young woman’s killer to justice.
A few days after the body was found, one local paper reported that burned clothing matching the description of what Margaret was wearing when she was last seen alive had turned up in the firebox at a sawmill in Forkston. The owner of this mill, James Kedd, apparently claimed to have seen a trespasser hanging around the mill a few days previously; Kedd had shot at the man and frightened him away, unaware that he might have been up to something far more nefarious than simple trespassing. This led police to concoct a theory that the killer had actually attempted to dispose of Margaret’s body in the firebox before being interrupted, at which point he had simply run off and dumped the bag in the nearby creek.
Though several suspects were questioned, including a teacher at Wilkes-Barre Business College and a teenage boy who was carrying a torch for Margaret, no definitive evidence could be found linking any of them to the crime, and the case very quickly went cold. Despite a few minor later developments, it is still unknown whether the man who killed Margaret Martin was a local who knew her, the man who had contacted her for the interview, or perhaps a wandering serial killer.
Margaret was buried at St. Ignatius Church in Kingston, Pennsylvania on Christmas Eve of 1938.
Crime Immemorial 