It was Sunday, February 27th, 1978, and twenty-three-year-old Julie Campbell, a medical records clerk at the Lahey Clinic in Boston, had been spending the evening with two friends at a bar called the Plough and Stars in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After parting from her friends at around one a.m. on the morning of February 28th, Julie began walking toward her home on Ellery Street, only about a mile away from the tavern.
Approximately twelve minutes after she left the bar, a woman phoned police and told them that she had heard someone screaming on Ellery Street. Officers hurried to the scene, where they found Julie Campbell lying prone between two snow banks, blood pouring from her throat and chest. Though she was immediately rushed to the hospital, she died shortly afterward, the victim of several stab wounds, one of which had penetrated her heart.
Investigators and locals were baffled at the randomness of the crime; Julie had not been sexually assaulted or robbed. It appeared that the assailant had simply seen her walking home and attacked her without any reason or provocation. Though there had been two other separate stabbing deaths in the area three years before—twenty-five-year-old Paul Pschick and forty-eight-year-old Carol Peterson, killed within a week of each other in March of 1975—both of those cases had occurred at the victims’ residences during the course of a robbery. It is unclear whether the Julie Campbell slaying was related in any way to the previous homicides, though the weapon used in each case—a large hunting knife—was similar enough for police to look into a connection.
The case has sadly sat idle for forty years, and Julie’s siblings are still hoping that someone will come forward with information about who viciously stabbed their beloved sister to death on that cold Cambridge street in 1978.
Crime Immemorial 