On March 13th, 1966 in Clifton, New Jersey, a man out walking his dog came across the remains of a partially nude woman in a gully off the Garden State Parkway. The victim had been strangled and shot twice in the head, and though she was left naked from the waist down, it was later determined that she had not been raped.
The woman was soon identified as twenty-one-year-old Judith Kavanaugh, who lived with her husband Paul only about one-hundred yards from where her body was found. Police concluded that she had been dead for at least two weeks, and that she had supposedly last been seen by her husband on February 24th when she dropped him off at Matzner Publications, where he worked as a delivery driver.
The burned-out husk of Judith’s car, a 1962 Chevy Corvair, was found a short time afterward; it had been deliberately set on fire with gasoline.
Authorities began the investigation with the assumption that the crime had been a random attack, a botched rape that had ended in murder. However, once the case was placed under the direction of chief investigator Joseph Muccio, the motives started to become ever more labyrinthine and salacious.
Paul Kavanaugh, it was discovered, had been stepping out on his wife, and not only that, but both Judith and Paul had reportedly enjoyed a New Year’s Eve four-way with their downstairs neighbors. From these small seeds of scandal, Investigator Muccio grew a sprawling jungle of rumor and innuendo that saw the Kavanaughs at the center of a wide-ranging swingers’ club that also dabbled in amateur porn.
But the tale wouldn’t really take off until the following October, after the murder of a small-time mobster brought ever more outrageous allegations about Judith Kavanaugh’s death, including a purported criminal plot to silence her forever.
Crime Immemorial 
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