The day before Valentine’s Day of 1965 was a Saturday, and eleven-year-old Mae Rubenstein was alone in her home on South Third Avenue in Highland Park, New Jersey. Her father and brother were both at work, and her mother Anne had gone to the grocery store to pick up a few things.
At some point on that afternoon, February 13th, Mae’s nine-year-old cousin Maurice Feller dropped by the house for a glass of water, and stumbled across a horrendous scene. Anne Rubenstein was lying in a large pool of blood in the front room, her body surrounded by scattered loaves of bread. Maurice ran to a neighbor’s apartment to get help, and when both of them returned to the Rubenstein home, they also discovered Mae, bloody and prone in the kitchen with her throat slashed. The neighbor called the police.
Investigators determined that Mae Rubenstein had been attacked first, presumably when she was still home alone. She had been stabbed fifteen times with a long-bladed knife, and her jugular vein had been cut. Anne Rubenstein, who was found still wearing her winter coat, was believed to have come home in the middle of the attack on her daughter, at which point she attempted to confront the killer and was subsequently murdered herself. Anne had been stabbed nearly three dozen times.
Neither Mae nor her mother was raped, and robbery was obviously not the motive, as a substantial sum of money was found in the home and nothing else appeared to have been disturbed. The murder weapon, thought to be a kitchen knife, was never recovered.
Authorities were at an absolute loss to establish a motive for the grisly mother-daughter slaying, and it seems that the investigation hit a brick wall very shortly after it occurred. Rumors about mob involvement in the crime would spring up in the wake of the murder of seven-year-old Wendy Wolin in Elizabeth, New Jersey, which took place the following year, but a definitive link between the two cases was never able to be established.
The double homicide was briefly reevaluated in 2005 when authorities believed they might have a lead on a suspect, but ultimately, nothing of note was discovered, and though the investigation remains active, no new leads have emerged.
Crime Immemorial 