Crime Immemorial

In the autumn of 1986, fifteen-year-old Chaim Weiss was a student in the yeshiva of Long Beach, New York. He lived in a third-floor dorm room in a building on East Beech Street, and was one of only two students who didn’t have a roommate.

It was Halloween night, and Chaim had been studying with a friend. He was last seen alive only forty-five minutes after the calendar had rolled over to November, when he went up to his room to bed.

The following morning, an administrator became concerned when Chaim didn’t show up for Sabbath prayers. Upon checking the boy’s room, the administrator was horrified by what he saw.

Chaim Weiss had been bludgeoned in the head by a hatchet-like weapon; he was hit so hard that his skull was crushed. There was no sign of struggle in the room, and police surmised that the teenager had likely been murdered in his sleep at some time between one and six a.m. on November 1st, 1986.

Bizarrely, the killer had opened the window of the room, in spite of the chilly temperatures outside; it was believed that he may have done this in accord with Jewish custom, as a way for the soul of the dead to escape from the room. The murderer had also moved the body to the floor, propping the victim’s feet up on the bed, and had left a memorial candle burning in the room. More ominously still, it seemed as though the killer had been in the room for some time before moving the body from the bed to the floor where it was found. There was no sign of forced entry, and the room had only one entrance.

A single strand of hair, perhaps belonging to the killer, was found on the remains, and police preserved it, hoping to eventually have a suspect to compare it to.

Authorities were completely mystified as to the motive behind the crime, and the eerily ritualistic way the scene was laid out afterward. Though a janitor at the school and a local mentally ill man were investigated in conjunction with the crime, both were eventually dismissed as suspects. Investigators also hypothesized that the murder may have been committed by what they called “Halloween thrill-seekers,” but this angle too was eventually ruled out.

The prevailing theory at this juncture is that Chaim was most likely killed by another student or faculty member at the yeshiva. During the course of the investigation, it came to light that a few months prior to his murder, Chaim had attended a private meeting with the principal of the yeshiva at a house in Brooklyn, but later refused to discuss what had occurred at this meeting.

Further, in 2017, WPIX in New York City reported that a former student of the yeshiva had come forward and made accusations of physical abuse that allegedly occurred at the school in the mid-1970s. The same media outlet also reported that another student had hanged himself at the yeshiva several years before the murder of Chaim Weiss.

The case was reopened in 2013, at which point the reward for information was increased to $25,000. It was also featured on a season four episode of Unsolved Mysteries, but as of this writing, the strange crime remains unsolved.