Crime Immemorial

Late November of 1976 would see the first in a possibly related series of murders taking place in Washington County, Pennsylvania. Over the course of the ensuing seven months, at least six young women would turn up dead in the area, and police are still baffled as to whether the crimes are connected, though recent DNA evidence has established that at least one of the murders, that of Debbie Capiola from 1977, was perpetrated by a different individual than most of the others.

It was the morning of November 19th, and thirty-year-old Barbara Jean Lewis was at the home in Penn Hills that she shared with her sister Mary Beth. Both women were getting ready for work, but Mary Beth had to leave earlier than Barbara Jean, bidding her sister goodbye at approximately six-fifteen a.m. Barbara Jean would generally leave the house a bit later every workday and walk the few blocks to catch the bus that would take her to her secretarial job in downtown Pittsburgh. However, Barbara Jean likely never made her bus that day.

Her coworkers at Rockwell International became concerned when she didn’t show up for work, and at a little past nine a.m., the reason for her non-appearance would become dreadfully clear. A cleaning woman at the Blackridge Civic Association in Penn Hills found the still-warm body of Barbara Jean Lewis in a dumpster behind the building. The dump site lay only a little more than a mile from Barbara Jean’s home.

The victim had been manually strangled, and her hands had been bound behind her back with one of her stockings. Her killer had also stuffed her mouth and nose full of paper gauze, though it appeared that this had been done post-mortem. Though Barbara Jean’s clothing was found disordered and torn, forensic examination determined that she had not been raped.

It was unclear whether Barbara Jean had been abducted from the bus stop, or whether she had willingly accepted a ride from an acquaintance who turned out to be her killer. Several days after her body was discovered, some of her possessions were found near Woodlawn Cemetery, but it did not seem as though they had been scattered during the course of a struggle; likewise, her body showed no signs of bruising, indicating she had not fought with her attacker.

The murder of Barbara Jean Lewis was a frustrating puzzle, and authorities had only just started attempting to piece it together when another homicide occurred in the same area, only a week later.