It was the first day of June 1981, and politics in Washington D.C. was chugging along in its usual way, until a grisly find in an apartment near Catholic University would set tongues wagging in the capitol.
Raymond Nels Nelson was the son of Swedish immigrants, a fiercely intelligent and irreverent figure who had served in the Navy before working his way up the ranks at The Providence Journal and Evening Bulletin in Rhode Island. He later parlayed his talents as a reporter into a political career, managing the Senatorial campaign of Claiborne Pell, who would be elected against all odds and would go on to help create the well-known Pell Grant, which provided tuition aid to lower-income college students. After leaving Pell’s service, Raymond Nelson would go on to join the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration.
Raymond was well-regarded professionally, though his personal life was a bit more complicated. He was an alcoholic, and could sometimes be difficult to get along with. He was married and had three children, but in 1976 came out as gay, after which he left the Rhode Island home he had shared with his family and moved to Washington D.C. However, he maintained a close relationship with his children, and remained legally married to his wife.
On June 1st, though, it became apparent that someone was keen to silence Raymond Nels Nelson, for whatever reason. Police were summoned to his Quincy Street abode on that day, only to find that the erstwhile reporter and Senate staffer had been beaten to death with his own typewriter. The floor surrounding the remains was strewn with old magazines and newspapers.
Suspiciously, authorities allowed a Senate staffer into the apartment to claim some so-called “sensitive” documents from amid Raymond’s belongings, though it is still unknown what these documents contained. Further, Raymond’s children, who had been with their father the night before his murder, were never interviewed by police, and worse still, investigators themselves later admitted that the entire crime scene had been staged, though they did not elaborate as to why, or to whose benefit the ruse was undertaken.
The murder seems to have fallen into a shadowy obscurity since that time, and no new leads have been forthcoming. Whether the death of Raymond Nels Nelson was related to his political connections, his homosexuality, or some other cause is still a frustrating enigma, and his family have been left with no sense of closure or justice for the past four decades and counting.
Crime Immemorial 