Fifty-year-old widow Ada Bean had previously worked as a research secretary at Harvard, though in 1969 she was employed at the Associated Business Machine Company. She lived alone in a Harvard-owned apartment on Linnaean Street.
On Wednesday, February 5th, 1969, Ada’s employer became concerned when she didn’t show up for work, and his concern only grew when she likewise failed to turn up on Thursday. At a little past ten a.m. on February 6th, he went to her apartment building and recruited maintenance man James Edwards to open her front door with his passkey.
Inside the third-floor flat, the two men discovered the remains of Ada Bean, who it appeared had been dead since Tuesday night. Like a previous area murder victim named Jane Britton, who had been killed on January 7th and only lived a fifteen-minute walk away from Ada’s apartment building, Ada had been bludgeoned repeatedly in the head with an unidentified blunt object, had her nightgown pushed up to her shoulders, and her upper body covered with a blanket.
Authorities found the bedroom liberally splattered with blood, but the residence was otherwise undisturbed, though there was evidence that the killer had broken in through the back door. Nothing appeared to have been stolen, leaving police baffled as to the motive.
Though the slaying of Ada Bean lacked the possibly ritualistic touches of the earlier murder of Jane Britton, the homicides were otherwise extremely similar, and detectives attempted to establish a link between the crimes, though they were ultimately unsuccessful. In fact, it appeared that authorities had even less to go on in the Ada Bean case than they had in the murder of Jane Britton, and the crime soon faded into relative obscurity.
Several researchers in 2017 attempted to obtain updated information about the two cases, but claim they have been stonewalled by the Middlesex District Attorney’s office.
Crime Immemorial 