MICHAEL O. ALLEN | Saturday, June 8, 1991
The Record (New Jersey) | All Editions | NEWS | Page A02
The blinds were drawn on the carefully locked house at 221 Union St. in Lodi. Inside the gas-filled home of Mary Moll was her hatchet-hacked body.
Even after 58 years, Moll’s murder is one of North Jersey’s most bizarre unsolved crimes.
Moll, 69, had been a recluse for several years after her husband, Gottfried, died. Two daughters-in-law coming to look in on her about 5:30 p.m. on May 15, 1933, peered through the window of the house when she didn’t answer the knock on the door. Blood stains on the floor clued them to call police.
Moll’s body was found slumped in the kitchen of her home. She had been dead several hours, said Dr. Raphael Gilady, county physician.
Investigators said it was murder but considered the possibility she may have committed suicide, according to contemporary reports.
But an ax wound in the back of Moll’s skull indicated little possibility that it could have been self-inflicted. Detectives said the murderer probably struck Moll with the ax and turned on the gas jets while leaving to insure her death if she regained consciousness.
The locked house, signs of struggle on the main floor, and absence of any evidence of robbery presented tangled clues for detectives to unravel. A blood-covered ax with bits of bone clinging to it was some of the gruesome evidence scanned by detectives who sought to reconstruct the murder.
But Mary Moll’s killer eluded them.
Today, virtually no one remembers Moll. Not Lodi’s acting police chief, John Pizzuro, who searched unsuccessfully for several days for files on the case. Not Sharyn Peiffer, Bergen County assistant prosecutor in charge of homicide.
“We do have files from the 1930s, but not that one,” Peiffer said. “An ax is generally, at least in my experience, an odd method to commit suicide. . . . This is an awfully violent way to commit suicide, even murder.”
Not even the cause of Moll’s death is certain. An autopsy was performed at noon on May 16, 1933, but the Bergen County medical examiner’s records before 1946 were destroyed in a fire.
Keywords: LODI; MURDER
ID: 17345864 | Copyright © 1991, The Record (New Jersey)
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