Slaying, Arrest of Suspect Stuns Neighborhood
The four teenagers were singing “Teach Me Tonight” when the car pulled up in front of Geraldine Annese’s home in “the flats” in South Norwood. She waved a cheery “goodnight” and hummed a bar of a son? as she walked out of sight in the darkness alongside the “three-decker dwelling. “Gerry,” carefree Junior high school student, was only 15 years old and was observing carefully the 10 p.m. curfew her parents had imposed.
But she never reached her home that night, Thursday, Nov. 4, 1954. Within minutes after she waved farewell to her chums two boys and a girl she met death at the hands of a strangler.
SHE WAS CHOKED to death so violently her gold necklace was embedded into the flesh. She was stripped of her clothing and sexually attacked.
Her nude body was found the next morning in a two-car garage adjacent to the three-story building where the Annese family lived on the second floor. News of the murder shocked the neighborhood. Another blow came with the arrest and confession of Peter Makarewicz, Jr. Peter, also 15, blond, 6 feet, 2 Inches tall, was known as a “good boy a boy ‘”so quiet he never said a bad word about anybody.” Gerry and Peter were next-door neighbors. They grew up together.
They were in the same classes in grade school. And so enamored was Peter of petite and attractive Gerry that he took a cooking course in the ninth grade with her last year, just to be near her, withstanding the jibes of other fellows because he was the only boy in the girls’ cooking class.
BUT THE STATE charges that Peter, former Boy Scout and former altar boy at St. Peter’s Polish church, strangled Gerry with his bare hands, left her nude body on the dirt floor of the garage between two cars, and went home that night as if nothing had happened. Peter Is being held without bail in Dedham Jail, charged with murder, awaiting action by the grand Jury this month. Neighborhood gossip, a set of fingerprints on the left front fender of a car parked in a two-car garage, and a scratch on the cheek led to the arrest of Peter.
It was known that Peter was a great, though usually silent, admirer of Geraldine. It also was known he resented his rejection by the girl in favor of “dates” with boyfriends in the adjoining town of Walpole. Police traced young Pe ter’s movements on the fateful Thursday evening this way: “He left his second-floor apartment over the tailor shop and went down the rear stairs into the cellar, leaving the house by a door that opens out toward the Annese home. “He walked along the rear of a garage adjacent to his own home, then past a hedgerow of bramble bushes to the street He made his way to the garage next to the Annese dwelling, found a door open, and went in.
He waited there. “Just before 10 p.m. Geraldine came up the sidewalk to the rear of her home. Makarewicz called to her. He identified himself. She went to the garage. “HE STRANGLED her with his hands.” Police said Peter slept well the night of the murder.
His mother, Mrs. Adrienne Makarewicz, 33, woke him Friday morning with the news of Gerry’s death. “Is that so? That’s awful” he was quoted as saying. He spent most of the day on the rear porch of the Makarewicz $25-a-month, cold-water apartment He looked on as police, less than 100 yards away, gathered at the Annese garage, and the neighbors spoke angrily of vengeance. Then Peter descended the rear stairs and stood quietly among the spectators.
No one paid special attention to him An ambulance came up, and the body of Geraldine was placed in it Peter stood on the sidewalk outside her home and watched. That night he went to a movie.
WHEN POLICE came later to take Peter to headquarters, his father accompanied him. Later his brother, Richard, 14, came to the station, too. They waited in the slowly fading hope that things would turn out all right Peter refused to take a lie detector test Police said it didn’t matter.
They said they had enough evidence. One source said a chemical test to determine the presence of blood revealed blood stains on parts of Peter’s body and on the dungarees he wore that Thursday night Strung over his bed, in a room hardly bigger than an old-fashioned closet and entirely separate from the rest of the apartment, police found a piece of string. The string held 10 or 12 postcard-size photos of nude pinups. The room contained a single electric light bulb, a cot and a small dresser. In a little red book belonging to Peter, police found the names and telephone numbers of girls in Dedham, Norwood, Westwood and West Roxbury.
“I liked him,” one of the teenage girls related. “I began to like him a lot about eight months ago. We used to sit on the steps and talk. I wasnn’t allowed to go out with boys.” So in spite of Peter’s seeming Infatuation for Geraldine, he was two-timing her. Peter, apparently, just liked girls.
After his first visit to Peter at Dedham Jail, his father made the sad pronouncement: “My son should be dead. It would be better If he were lying alongside Geraldine in death. It would be better than visiting him in Jail. We would go to his grave and kneel beside him and pray for him.”
(All articles originally published in the Norwood Messenger)