Crime Immemorial

The Bricca family—twenty-eight-year-old Jerry, his twenty-three-year-old wife Linda, and the couple’s four-year-old daughter Debbie—had moved to the pleasant, middle-class enclave of Green Township near Cincinnati in 1963. Jerry was a chemical engineer for Monsanto, and had been transferred from their Seattle plant. Linda had worked as a flight attendant prior to the move, and once arriving in Green Township, took a part-time job in a veterinary clinic.

The couple was the youngest of all their neighbors, but they seemed well-liked, and Debbie often played with the daughter of another couple up the street, the Caudells. In fact, the Briccas often made appearances at neighborhood block parties and barbecues, and though they were generally described as a little aloof, residents of the Woodhaven subdivision also saw them as a friendly, normal couple who appeared quite happy and content with their lives.

On Monday, September 26th, 1966, though, residents began to suspect that something strange was going on at the Bricca home. No one could recall seeing any member of the family since Jerry came home from work on Sunday evening, and Linda hadn’t brought the trash cans in from the curb on Monday. Neighbors started to notice more ominous signs as well: Linda hadn’t been outside to work in the yard, as she usually did on nice days, and Debbie and the family’s two dogs had never come out to play either. No one picked up the newspaper from the front lawn, and the outside lights remained on all day Monday and into the ensuing night.

By the time Tuesday, September 27th rolled around, neighbors were convinced something was dreadfully wrong. More newspapers were left unread in the grass, and a phone call to the Monsanto facility confirmed that Jerry Bricca had not been to work for two days. At last, at a little past ten p.m., neighbors Dick Meyer and Dick Janszen knocked on the Briccas’ front door to check on them. After receiving no answer, they tried the door and found it unlocked, but the moment they opened it, the telltale smell of death wafted overwhelmingly out toward them. Horrified, the men called police without setting foot inside the home.

Officers responded and walked into a scene that would become burned into their memories forever. Both Jerry and Linda had been bound and stabbed multiple times; Jerry had nine deep stab wounds in his neck and back, and had also been gagged with a sock which had been taped into his mouth. Linda had been stabbed eight times in the chest, plus had several shallow defensive cuts on her face. She did not appear to have been raped.

Four-year-old Debbie was found upstairs in her bedroom, clad in her pajamas. She had been stabbed four times, and the long blade of the carving knife believed to be the murder weapon had penetrated all the way through her small body on every stroke.

From the outset, investigators were convinced that the Bricca family must have known the killer, as there was no sign of forced entry, and no obvious evidence of a struggle. The family’s two dogs had been sedated and locked in a separate room to keep them from alerting the neighbors or getting in the way.

Robbery did not appear to be the motive, for although Jerry’s wallet was missing and a few dresser drawers had been left open, nothing else had been taken or disturbed. In addition, the “overkill” nature of the stabbing seemed to suggest a personal vendetta.

Since the murder weapon was nowhere to be found, investigators theorized that the assailant had retrieved one of the newspapers from the yard and used it to wrap the knife before putting it out in the garbage can on the curb for Monday morning collection. Eerier still, it appeared that the killer had stayed in the house for quite some time after the slayings, cleaning up the scene as well as he was able.

The mass murder terrified the entire community, prompting several of the Briccas’ neighbors to purchase sturdy locks and firearms, petition for more streetlights, and keep their children indoors. Though the nearby downtown areas had recently experienced a rash of murders attributed to a serial killer dubbed the Cincinnati Strangler, Green Township and other outlying suburbs still felt removed from the violence. But the slaughter of the Bricca family changed all that.

Though police were confident from the beginning that the Cincinnati Strangler was not responsible for the Bricca murders—the modus operandi and victim profile was significantly different, after all—they were at something of a loss as to who would want to kill the young family, and why.

Detectives explored the possibility that the killing had something to do with a Mafia hit, or perhaps that it was related to Jerry’s employment with Monsanto. Neither of these avenues, however, seemed particularly compelling.

A more promising line of inquiry held that Linda had perhaps been having an affair with her boss at the Glenway Animal Hospital, Dr. Fred Leininger. Several witnesses came forward and claimed they had seen the pair together on more than one occasion. Dr. Leininger was questioned by police shortly after the murder, and investigators reportedly believed he was being deceitful when he was asked if he had an intimate relationship with Linda. He retained a lawyer immediately after the questioning session, and thereafter refused to cooperate with authorities, who were unable to obtain fingerprints or an alibi from the suspect.

Dr. Leininger was never charged, and while it remains possible he was the culprit, it’s just as possible that he didn’t commit the crime and simply lied to police because he didn’t want his wife or his clients to find out about the affair. He died in 2004, and the knowledge of whatever involvement he might have had with the murders went to the grave with him.

There were a few other intriguing and possibly significant connections regarding the Bricca family slayings, though. According to neighbor Nettie Caudell, who knew Linda Bricca quite well, Linda had been acting oddly nervous for about a month prior to her death, in particular becoming unusually worried about Debbie walking back from the Caudell home by herself.

Nettie believed that Linda’s sudden paranoia was due to a recent case in Seattle, whereby two flight attendants for United Airlines—Lisa Wick and Lonnie Trumbull—had been bludgeoned in their apartment in June of 1966. Linda Bricca evidently told Nettie Caudell that she had worked with the two women when she was a flight attendant, and the crime had made an enormous impact on her. Lisa Wick had survived her injuries, though she was in a coma for several weeks afterward. Lonnie Trumbull did not survive the attack, however, and her death has been attributed to infamous serial killer Ted Bundy, though Bundy denied his involvement.

Another neighbor, Dick Meyer—one of the men who discovered the bodies of the Briccas—recalled to police that Linda had also told him that she was very upset that an old friend of hers had been murdered. Though it’s possible she was again referring to Lonnie Trumbull, Meyer stated that he thought she might have been talking about Valerie Percy, who had been stabbed to death in her home outside of Chicago only days before the Bricca slaying.

Though there is no solid evidence tying the two crimes together, police did find the lead plausible enough to fly to Chicago to investigate further, and some detectives are convinced that Linda Bricca did know Valerie Percy, as their families traveled in the same social circles. It should be noted, further, that the manner in which the killer had dispatched his victims was similar in both cases.

Whatever the motive might have been, though, no appreciable progress has been made in solving the murder of the Bricca family, and the crime retains an air of mystery and notoriety in the Cincinnati area. New detectives were put in charge of the case in 2016, and it is hoped that by analyzing various pieces of cold case evidence collected from the scene in 1966, an answer to the enigma will one day be found.