The Parkway Murders - A Cold Case Mystery

The Parkway Murders – A Cold Case Mystery by Christian Barth (2020 WildBlue Press, Colorado)

Seldom is a book published that can really make a difference and this one can, if people will read it, someone makes a documentary film of it, and those responsible officials review the case with the latest information Christian Barth has assembled here in the definitive book on the case of the coeds murdered on the Garden State Parkway.

As I mentioned in a luncheon talk to the Atlantic County Historical Society, there are a number of unsolved cold case homicides that can and should be legally resolved – specifically mentioning the 1964 Labor Day murder of Ocean City businessman Harry Anglemeyer, and the Memorial Day 1969 Garden State Parkway murders. To them I add the mob murder of former Atlantic County judge Helfant. These murders can be legally resolved because the killers are known, some well-known, like mass murderer Ted Bundy, a chief suspect in the Parkway case.

When Christian Barth wrote a fictional novelized version of the Parkway murders some years ago, I told him to write the true story, as it is much more interesting than anything you can make up or imagine, and now he has done that.

No one who was at the Jersey Shore that summer of ’69 will forget the Memorial Day disappearance of college coeds Elizabeth Perry and Susan Davis, who were last seen driving their blue Chevy convertible towards the Parkway north after leaving the Point Diner in Somers Point early that morning.

As I just ate breakfast there last Saturday, you can’t help but think back to those days. I had just graduated from high school, Class of ’69, and was working at Mack and Manco Pizza on the Ocean City boardwalk, getting ready to go to college. After work at midnight, we’d often cross over the bay to go to the Point Diner, that was then open all night. We'd have breakfast with the predominately young crowd that were kicked out of the Bay Shores, Tony Marts and the Bay Avenue bars that closed at 2 a.m. There were juke boxes in the booths back then, and it was easy to mingle with the crowd, as the girls did, offering seats at their table to some other young college kids who bought them breakfast.

An off duty police officer, exiting the Jolly Roger bar across the street, saw the girls in the blue convertible stop and give a lift to a clean cut young man – not a hippie, who had his arm in a sling - Bundy's MO. 

A few hours later a N.J. State Trooper saw the car parked on the side of the road as he drove north on the Parkway from his Avalon barracks. He checked with a national stolen car database and determined the car wasn’t reported stolen, then he considered it abandoned and had it towed to Blazer’s auto on Tilton Road, a few miles up the highway. Then the Trooper took the weekend off and Blazer went fishing, neither learning that two girls had gone missing along with their blue Chevy convertible, until after they returned to work from the holiday weekend.

When the girls failed to return home from the Shore their fathers leased an air plane and were following the path the girls would have gone, looking for the car in the brush off the side of the road if they had an accident.

A few days later, when Blitzer and the Trooper returned to duty, and put two and two together, they realized the girl’s car was the one they towed from mile marker 31.9, just off the Ocean City-Somers Point exit where they got on. Their bodies were found near one another, covered with leaves two hundred feet from the highway in the thick underbrush, having been stabbed to death. But whoever committed this crime had a three day getaway before the investigation actually began.

Unlike Barth’s fictionalized account, this story does not blame Ted Bundy for the Parkway murders, though he was here at the time, it’s his MO – Modus Operandi, and he confessed to the killings. Barth has even discovered that Bundy’s Philadelphia based family owned property in Ocean City and he visited there often as a kid. Barth has also discovered dozens of new witnesses and leads that official investigators should be following, where ever they go.

But the official investigators understandably don’t want Bundy to be the killer, because if he did it, and they hadn’t screwed up the investigation from the beginning, Bundy wouldn’t have gone on to kill fifty other, beautiful young women, with their hair parted down the middle.

After Bundy was executed in Florida, the New Jersey State Police didn’t even bother to send a representative to the Bundy Conference of law enforcement investigators at Quantico, Virginia to see what other crimes could be attributed to him.

Once Bundy was dead however, his prison psychiatrist Dr. Arthur Norman, an Oregon clinical forensic psychologist was free to discuss what Bundy had told him, including the fact that he took two girls out at the Jersey Shore, and it was the first time he did it. “You know,” Bundy told Norman, “it’s like an overwhelming kind of vision, eventually found himself tearing around that place for a couple of days. And eventually, without really planning anything, he picked up a couple of young girls. And ended up with the first time he had ever done it. So when he left for the coast, it was not just getting away, it was more like an escape.”

As a chronology of the crime, compilation of media reports and what is known about the official investigations, Barth has done a remarkable job of gathering all of the information on the case that’s in the public domain, putting it into a readable narrative, and with holding any definitive conclusions.

When Barth asked the NJ State Police access to their case file, they refused, saying the investigation remains “open,” though it’s no longer active.

Even from just the public record, and what information he has gathered from those living who were involved, Bundy stands out like a sore thumb, and you would think it pretty simple to match Bundy’s fingerprints to those found on the car, or match his DNA to their clothing, but there’s a peculiar and understandable reluctance for them to do so.

As it’s been over fifty years – a half century, there’s no chance justice will ever be served, though determining the truth is another matter, not only for the victims and their families, but for the community and the public, who really do want to know that a homicidal maniac and mass murderer isn’t still out there.

When the federal Justice Department refused to investigate the civil rights murders of the fifties, sixties and seventies, even after Congress under the Emmitt Till Bill ordered them to do so, Stu Wexler's New Jersey High School students wrote and got Congress to pass a new law releasing to the public the investigative files of the unsolved cold case civil rights murders. While the Parkway murders were not racially motivated, the civil rights of the two murdered girls were certainly violated, and the Parkway murders case files could fall through the legal cracks under this law, as it does just what Barth wants – a public review of the case files.

In addition, the Atlantic County and Cape May County Prosecutors Offices, Ocean City and Somers Point Police Departments, New Jersey State Police and the FBI should what they normally do when confronted with complicated, unresolved investigations, especially homicides – and that’s to form a Cold Case Task Force and assign manpower to investigate the many outstanding leads Barth has come up with. Barth, an attorney, should be included in any such Task Force.

The New Jersey Attorney General has threatened to create a state wide cold case task force dedicated to resolving such crimes.

One thing in favor of a new investigation is the fact that the current detectives responsible for investigating such major crimes were not around in 1969, and so they aren’t responsible for the early screw ups, and could begin a serious review of the case with new eyes.

For that to happen however, Barth’s book has to be widely read by the public as well as the official investigators, and the public must put pressure on them to reopen the case. Perhaps a paperback version of this book can be published for easy beach reading this summer.

In addition, since the post-literate society doesn’t really read books anymore, someone with the wherewithall to make a documentary film of this book could put the public and media pressure over the top, and force the authorities to properly re-investigate this crime, and determine who was responsible to a legal and moral certainty. 

While this may be a good read during the current crisis, and you can get it on line, hopefully you will soon be able to walk into the SunRose Bookshop on Asbury Avenue in Ocean City and pick up a copy, and if you do say hello to the girls there who helped sell out three printings of my book 300 Years at the Point.  

Bill Kelly is the author of 300 Years at the Point – A History of Somers Point, N.J.; Birth of the Birdie – a 100 Years of Golf at Atlantic City Country Club; and Waiting on the Angles – the Long Cool Summer of ’65 Revisited. He can be reached at Billkelly3@gmail.com