Vanderbilt Avenue

Published Apr 10, 2024, 9:00 AM

On a chilly night in September, 1958, an intruder breaks into a two-bedroom home and fatally stabs the mother and father living there, leaving three children alive. Days later, the homicides will cause mass hysteria across the country as attention focuses on a suspect that no one could have imagined – their eight-year-old son.

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Hello, Hello, Hello, I've been stabbed.

My husband's been stabbed too.

Hello, my mother is leading The police are.

On their way.

September second, nineteen fifty eight was an unusually chilly night in Clifton, Staten Island. It was a quiet suburban community and stan Island back in those days, felt remote from New York City. The Verizona Bridge had yet to be built, and the reports attended almost rural fuel. Clifton had one major thoroughfare at the time, Vanderbilt Avenue, that led past neatly kept rows of two family brick homes and a sidewalk line with maple trees. Not too far away the dilapidated of an old army base at Fox Hill. If a siren was ever heard in Clifton, it was usually a fire truck headed to the old base to put out some fire. Some squatter started in the remnants of an old wooden dormitory on Vanderbilt Avenue. All the families knew each other. The kids played together in backyards all summer long. The adults were on a first dame basis, and everyone knew the latest gossip. A family named Nymers had just moved into two forty two Vanderbilt Avenue, renting it out from a doctor. The summer of nineteen fifty eight was perfectly ordinary in Clifton, but on September second, at two in the morning, the usual silence was shattered by a siren as a police car raced down the avenue and came to a shrieking stop outside two fort two Vanderbilt, where a young mother had just made an emergency call and lay dying in an upstairs bedroom. Her husband lay mortally wounded in the kitchen. The two patrolmen pounded on the door and were just about to break in when the screen door was unlocked by an eight year old boy with a shock blonde hair, wearing pajamas. This is Murder Holmes on Matt Marinovitch. The Nimer's squat red brick bunker of a home with its flimsy metal railing and seven concrete steps, sat on top of a grassy hill that was once known as witches Field, but that haunted ground was now a safe suburb, a bedroom community for many of the doctors who worked at the nearby hospital, Waiting for more plumb assignments. The Nimers fit in for the most part, there were Mormons who originally hailed from Utah. Lou Gi Nymer was friendly and soon found herself enjoying refreshments with the other woman on the block, although because she was Mormon, she stuck to drinking pustum, a non alcoholic drink made with wheat bran and molasses. Doctor Melvin Nymer thirty one years old. Her husband was less outgoing, but that could be blamed more on shyness than indifference. He had a demanding job as a surgeon at the nearby hospital, a sprawling facility within a few minutes walking distance, and he was helping raise three kids, Jennifer just five months old, Gregory aged two, and Dean, who was eight years old. Dean was a friendly kid and soon found himself invited to play with toy trucks in the backyard of the Letties, the neighbors who lived two houses down. Daniel Letty, who was just a little older than Dean at the time, remembers the Nymers well. A day before, on September one, doctor Melvin Nimer had walked across their front yard in search of his son, Gregory, who sometimes to come to his curiosity about the neighborhood and occasionally wandered off. Daniel Letty also knew Dean well. His sister used to play with him.

We lived at two fifty Vandible Day Avenue, and we knew him as Dean Nimer in those days. I mean everyone in the neighborhod knew him as Dean or those who knew him new him as Dean. He went by his middle name back then. Maureen played with him and this other kid who lived on the other side of the house, guy named Freddie hizself. They used to go into his backyard. My sister remembers playing with little mechanical like trucks and cars, and they would make little ruts in the backyard and like pathways for the trucks and cars to go. And my sister said that Moujine would come out and serve them cookies and milk, and she was very very nice to them. And Dean also would speak a lot about religion, and sometimes he would even speak in biblical terms. He would he would use the word thou and thy as much as you know, often instead of you, and deeply religious.

When Leujene Nimer made the emergency call, from two four to two Vanderbilt. She was so badly injured she slipped off the bed, clutching her bleeding stomach. Dean gently took the phone from her hand and stayed on the line. Six minutes later, at two or eight am, the silence of Vanderbilt Avenue was filled with the chaotic sound of police and ambulance sirens, all converging on the Nimer's home. Daniel Letty was woken by the sounds. I asked him if he remembers what happened that night.

Here's what happens. Well, we went to bed, obviously having no idea that it was going to happen. But my father normally got up at twenty minutes after six every morning. It was like clockwork to go to work. But this particular morning, I was asleep and I got a knock on the door and I knew, I mean, we were still dark out, and I woke up and I said, I said, what's the matter. You know what's going on? And I love this to get My father said me, I think there's been a murder. And as I'm saying this to you, right and I'm getting chills. So it's bizarre. I said, a murder, and he said, I think there's been a murder. So I got up. I went with him into his bedroom. When my mother was in the bedroom, I looked out over Vanderbilt Avenue and now Vanible Day Avenue was a main thoroughfare, but main thoroughfare in those days and stat it was still not very well traveled. Let me tell you, Vandible To Avenue looked like forty second Street. I'm going to see anything like in my life. It was surreal to look at it. It was bizarre to see this quiet little neighborhood suddenly lit up like this. And what we heard at that time was that doctor Nimer and his wife had been stabbed, that doctor Meimer was dead, and that missus Nimo may die as well, or was incredible perdition or something like that, And so it was horrifying. It was absolutely terrible.

The first patrolman on the scene at two four two Vanderbilt found the dying parents in separate rooms, blood soaking through the knee length white gowns. They were wearing. Mormon's call these temple gowns and are encouraged to wear them to show their commitment to the Lord. The mother was upstairs in the bedroom, slumped against the bed next to the phone. The three children, apparently unhurt. Leujene Nimer was carried out on a stretcher. She was still conscious as she was lifted into the ambulance. She said, please feed the baby, plain milk, no formula. She was taken to nearby marine hospital just up the street where her husband worked. Doctor Melvin Nimer was choking on his own blood in the kitchen, but as a doctor, he had the presence of mind to ask police not to move him or raise his head until the second ambulance crew arrived. He would die shortly after arriving at the nearby hospital. Meanwhile, at the hospital, two detectives leaned close to lou Jean as a doctor prepared her for emergency surgery and asked her what she could remember.

Can you tell us anything? A mask?

A mask?

Can you tell us anything else?

Oh? Hood?

No? Hood? What kind? Wait?

Slits in the eyes?

Yes?

Covered? Tell how tall?

Pause? My husband?

Him down?

How did you get stabbed?

Up or down? I don't know.

Why did you get up?

Her boy scream?

Where did you see the man?

Alway? Yes? What did you do?

Put on the life Lujiene didn't answer the detective's final question. She was being put under heavy sedation and was then wheeled into the surgical suite, where a doctor would attempt to stance the profuse bleeding in her abdomen. At five point thirty in the morning, her pulse barely discernible and her oxygen level critical, she died. But the police had one thing going for them. They had ny witness Dean Nimer, eight years old. Dean told him that the intruder was wearing a white hood with slits cut out for the eyes. He remembered how the man was dressed. Police sent out a thirteen state alarm with a description of the intruder.

Unknown male, white, wearing blue dungarees and blue striped shirt, may have blood on his clothing.

The murder home had been taped off by police, but the three Nimer children slept in it that night. The home was put under a twenty four hour police watch. A policeman sat in the kitchen trying not to look at the congealed blood stands of the linoleum floor as the sun slowly rose. Streaks of blood near the light switch that doctor Melvin Nimer had fumbled for in vain before collapsing two homes away. Daniel, Letty and every other child in parent and Clifton were terrified. An intruder who brutally murdered two innocent neighbors was on the loose, most likely waiting for an opportunity to strike again. We'll be back after a short break. We're back with murder homes. I drove out to Clifton recently with my girlfriend and walked by the murder home at two four two Vanderbilt. The seven steps that lead up to the home, the rusted railing, the brick exterior are all the same. It's just in worse shape. Dirty white blinds, pulled over windows, a pane of broken glass in the front door. It was the front entry that changed everything about the Nymer murders, specifically when the first patrolman on the scene discovered that although the front door was opened, the screen door was locked from the inside. When they arrived at two to eight in the morning, they announced themselves and saw a shadowy figure approach them. It was little Dean Nymer who unlocked the screen door and let them in. We're on Vanderbilt Avenue and we're walking by two forty two Vanderbilt, where the the Nymer murders happened at nineteen fifty eight. And it's a snowy day and people are shoveling, So would you say silka's like brick brick houses. This is two forty six, two forty six, it should have it's two forty two. Actually this is the house. So it's seven steps as you see leading up to it, and then three steps in the house. Is it used to be all brick and then now it has uh some vinyl, some vinyl siding on the on the second store, we're looking inside the door that the the screen door was supposed to lock from the inside and the out the outside door was partially open, and this is where the Nymer murders happened.

There's part of the glass door on the same.

And it looks like it's not in very good shape. It's smaller than I thought it would be, and it's it's it's it of a creepy. We're going to continue on down to US Marine Hospital, where the doctor Nimer worked and where both parents were taken after they were stabbed. A week after the murderers, Daniel Letti remembered another night that was just as shocking. Shortly after dinnertime, he saw neighbors crowded around a squad car. He soon learned that the main suspect of the Nymer murderers had been taken inside two four to two Vanderbilt to walk detectives through the bloody crime scene and re enact the horrific murders. Words spread through Clifton fast, and soon a crowd and reporter as had formed behind the police tape, ringing two four to two Vanderbilt, breathlessly waiting to see who would be led out of the murder home. A floodlight was trained on the door, turning the entrance to the red brick home a chalky, eerie shade of white. The door open, and little Dean Melvin Nimer emerged, blinking into the flood light. He was holding a Teddy bear. Here's Leddy again.

One day, the detectives came to us and said, relaxed, don't worry, resolved the case. The case has been solved. And in fact, the detective said, the suspect of the perpetrator is re enacting the crime right now, or we'll be reacting the crime imminently, something like that. Along those lines. And I remember we went outside. It was dark. I'd be like eight o'clock at night, nine o'clock, and I remember we had a perfect vision of it because from our front stoop, I could look directly at the Naymer house because it was right there. And they said the murderers in there reenacting the crime. And my mother and father and the sisters and I were there on the front stoop, and people were all over the place but kept back from the house. But we had this perfect view. And all of a sudden, these flashlights went up on the front door, and the door opened up and outcomes little Dean nim are carrying some kind of the stuff, either a dollar, an animal or something. And I they couldn't compute what was going on.

What was going on?

I mean, are they saying he's the murderer, Like, oh, my god, a buff here was a little kid some other thing? He was even little for eight years old.

News that an eight year old boy named Dean Nimer was the prime suspect and the brutal murders of his mother and father spread across the city. Then the nation. Reporters scrambled up steps and pounded on doors and Clifton, holding no pads and recording devices and sixteen millimeter cameras. They invited themselves into every home on the block or accosted children on the street. They wanted to know if there was a secret club that had been formed in the quiet suburb. The chase kids up the block as they walked to school. Hey, they yell, is there a kill mom and dad club? Are you part of it too? A recent wave of juvenile crime already had the city and the nation on edge. A Time magazine reporter wrote that all the adults and Clifton were sleeping with one eye open. Other rumors began to fly in the press. The Nymers were too strict. The boy had a secret grudge. If a toe headed boy as innocent looking as Dean Nymer could stab his parents to death, what limits were there to youthful depravity? District Attorney John Brastad did nothing to dispel the rumors. As little Dean Niymer was interviewed at a Staten Island psychiatric hospital across the city. Across the nation, parents discussed the unthinkable. What if other innocent looking children across the country started getting ideas slipping a knife out of the butcher block on their way to get a cold glass of milk. It was hard not to think of Dean Nymer wearing a hood with slits cut out for the eyes, stabbing his mother and father in their white gowns as they slept. It was District Attorney Bracedead's opinion that a child was capable of murdering two adults as they slept, simply by raising the knife and plunging it into their abdomens, then scurrying away before they knew what had even happened, leaving them choking on their own blood. So why had detectives turned their attention to a slightly built, well behaved eight year old boy so quickly, a boy who had been observed running joyfully into his father's arms when he returned from his work at Marine Hospital. The first reason was that when they opened the front door to the Nimer home, the screen door was locked from the inside. What murderous home invader would ever take the time to do that or have a reason to do it. There were no other signs of forth entry in the home except for a partly open window in the basement, but there was dust in the casement there that would have been disturbed by an intruder, and it wasn't even The description Dean gave them of a man wearing a white hood with slits cut out for the eyes could have been something he told his parents after he stabbed them in their sleep one by one. He could have been wearing that hood as he stabbed them, or concocted the description after stabbing them, freezing it in their minds. The initial autopsies showed that the Nimers were lying in a prone position when attacked, and an initial psychiatric evaluation had concluded the following.

Dean Nimer suffers from a parent type of schizophrenia, and this boy's illness and basic personality are compatible with the commission of a crime of violence.

And the murder weapon detectives had found it a boy scout knife, neatly hidden between the covers of the Mormon magazine era. There were no traces of blood, but these could easily have been wiped off by the boy before Dean Nymer was walked through his own bloody home to reenact his murder of his mother and father. He was interrogated by detectives for hours, and his story gradually and sickeningly began to change. He told them that he'd heard a voice, and the voice had ordered him to murder his parents. He told them that he had viciously stabbed his loving parents to death. The only problem was how detectives had obtained the confession. They had discounted his description of an attacker, even when he tried to point to the marks on his neck where he said he'd been choked. Then he was told a profoundly disturbing lie by the detectives hoping to get a confession. He was told incorrectly, of course, that both parents had identified him as a suspect. They told him he'd never go home again until he started telling them the truth about the demon like rampage he'd gone on that night. Gradually, Dean Nymer, surrounded by burley chainsmoking gravel, voiced lawmen twice his size, began to cave in. Dean was whisked away to Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, while district attorney braced dead, prepared to foul charges against him. He was put under constant observation. A reporter wrote, the boy, still excited by the events of the last ten days, was not able to join the other children on the ward at lunchtime, but he had beef stew, ice cream and milk. A psychiatrist to Bellevue Hospital diagnosed him as having paranoid schizophrenic tendencies, which fed into the DA's hypothesis that voices in his head had instructed him to butcher his mother and father. In Clifton, Daniel Letty thought that something wasn't adding up when he saw a stranger standing in the driveway of two four to two Vanderbilt and reported it to police. They hauled him into the back seat of a squad car and spent hours in search of the man, even traveling as far as the ruined army base buildings in fox Hill. If cops thought they had the suspect, why were they still on edge keeping an eye on the neighborhood around the clock. And not all the media was convinced that Dan Nymer had murdered his parents or that a kill Mom and Dad club was going to be the next big sensation in the US. The Nation magazine in particular, felt that DA Brastead was withholding tragic and pertinent information, specifically the descriptions of the suspect that Leu Gene Nymer and doctor Melvin Nimer had given before they died. Lujan told police that the attacker was as tall as her husband. Doctor Nimer was five foot six, more than a foot toll than his son. Da Brastead attempted to explain away the description of the intruder given by lu Jan as tainted by the fact she was under heavy sedation, and perhaps both parents had even made a dying pack to save their guilty son by concocting the intruder's story. As more newspapermen pressed the Da, the details and inconsistencies he kept trying to in a way came back to haunt him. Number one, a neighbor who happened to be a physician, was one of the first on the scene, and police there asked him to conduct a physical examination of Dean Nymer. Fixing a sun lamp over the young boy's head, he noted four fingerprints on the right side of the boy's neck and on the left side another thumbprint, and the curvature of a thumbnail mark Number two. The only person who had gotten a good look at the knife wounds in lu Jean's body was the surgeon a marine hospital. He knew that the surgery he was about to perform would alter the disposition of her wounds, so he was careful to note them. The blade had been plunged through the rib cage and muscles with terrific force, slashing through the diaphragm and severing the major blood vessel, going into the venicava, and leaving a deep cut in the liver. The surgeon felt confident that the knife thrust that had mortally wounded her had gone in at an angle slanting downwards. This would mean that leu Jean was standing up one stab, not lying down asleep in bed. Number three. Why would a dying mother protect a murderous son if she had a three month old baby in the home. Number four There were six pieces of white cloth, the type used in bedding found on Dean's bed, faded odd colored cotton ticking. Police couldn't find a match for it in the home. The strips were strong enough to have been used for gags or binding. Number five, September second, was an exceptionally chilly night. There were no knife holes in the bedspread that the parents would have covered themselves with as they slept if their son had stabbed them while they slept, There would have been some kind of slits in the blankets, And finally it surfaced that the Nimers had only been renting the home from a man named doctor John Glotfelty for three months. Back in June, Glotfelty had left a full set of keys with a hospital switchboard operator. They were in an envelope marked doctor Glotfelty to be picked up by doctor Nimer, but they never were. Doctor Nimer at the time of the murder, only had the keys to the rear door of the house and one to the side door of the garage. Detectives learning of the keys in the envelope speculated that they could easily have been copied by a patient or employee of the hospital. The white mask that Leujin had first described hours before she died could have been a surgical mask the murderer was wearing. He could have been looking for narcotics, valuables, or been a sexual deviant who noticed Dean playing near his home as he walked to Marine Hospital. Since it was only an eight minute walk away, any employee or doctor or patient would have walked right by two four two Vanderbilt on their way to the hospital. As the case against Dean Nimer fell apart. Psychiatrists continued to watch him carefully at Bellevue, taking copious notes. The initial diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia had been refined to a general mental disorder, and then, without further explanation, he was released and allowed to travel back to Utah, where he was allowed to attend school just like any other eight year old. No criminal charges were ever fouled against him. But what about the intruder in the white mask with the slits cut out for eyes. Police did find a set of footprints outside the home. When the days following the murder they made a plaster cast, they could not find a match. They found a knife one thousand feet away in a hedge, and there was even a little bit of dried blood on the five inch blade, but in the days before DNA, there was no way to obtain evidence from it. And what about those strips of white cloth. Detectives thought that the intruder might have planned to bind and gag Dean with them. They thought they might have come from nearby Marine hospital, but there was no match in the bedding used for patients there. In my mind, I keep coming back to Marine Hospital that set of copied keys left by the owner of two four to two Vanderbilt for his new renters, the Nymers. Is it a patient who makes a copy of them? Is it a fellow doctor? The keys sit there for three months, with doctor Nimer's name plainly written on the envelope. In a suburb as small as Clifton, it wouldn't have taken a lot of effort for a predator to locate exactly where the Nimers lived. Perhaps it was someone who was on a first name basis with doctor Nimer every day at work, or who had even walked down Vanderbilt Avenue with him after work and watched the boy jump into his father's arms. I keep coming back to Fox Hills, the rundown buildings of the army base there, where police drove Daniel Letty around in search of a man he'd seen in the Nimer's driveway after the murders. A drifter, a patient, even another doctor who had lost his mind, could have taken refuge there, easily hiding in one of the crumbling empty barracks after the murders, A man in muddy dungarees, skulking from building to building in waste time mists that cover the gently undulating grass of the old golf course as the weather grew colder. He must have known the layout of the home before he entered it, the family before he butchered them, watched them from afar, interacted with them in some way. Because he comes prepared to either assault or kidnap the boy before he's interrupted. It's the question of what kind of life he returns to after the murders that haunts me. It's a multiple choice box of distressing options. Fellow doctor at Marine Hospital patient drifter neighbor. But some officials remained convinced long after they were retired, that Dean Nimer was the murderer. The first police officer on the scene, Vincent mel had this to say, back then, I knew he did it. The door was locked. The bad guy didn't lock the door on the way out. Daniel Letty ended up being a lawyer in stan Island and says the DA bracedad to his dying day, believed that little Dean Nymer was responsible for the deaths of his parents, and so did his bulldog of an assistant, DA Tom Sullivan. One afternoon, Daniel Letty ended up alone with the DA who had nearly charged Dean.

I became friendly with braced later on when I became a lawyer and a judge, and Bracedon, as they said, he's impeccable integrity, and to the day he died, he insisted that Dean committed the murder. But the bad guy here, I think, the guy that I think is responsible for I think was a trouble, miscarriage of justice defaming Dean on the basis of no evidence, no real evidence at all, was Tom Sullivan. Tom Sullivan was his chief assistant district attorney who didn't died, know a lot about criminal law, and Sullivan was one tough customer. The worry about Sullivan wasn't I knew him very broad. I was friendly with him, went to the same high school as him. Sullivan would put his own mother in jail. He was a ruthless not ruthless in the sense of where he disregard the truth. But if he believed in something, he was really really intransitive. You couldn't move him off it. And Sullivan told me again he was a guy told me almost a week before he died, I mean literally, that he was certain. He said, there's no doubt about it zero doubt about the fact that Dean committed the murder.

Dean Nimer was released to the custody of his aunt and quickly moved with him out of state, never returning to the home on Vanderbilt Avenue again. On a gloomy Monday afternoon this week, I managed to track Dean Nimer down and speak to him. Sixty five years have passed since then Truder attacked him and killed his parents. He goes by Melvin now his middle name, not Dean.

Hello, I'm sorry. I guess it's best to be direct. We're working on a story at some homicit that took place in that island nineteen fifty eight, and I'm reaching out to you because I in case you're the right mister Nimer, who was the who is the boy?

And most likely you have the right person? What are you looking for?

I was stunned for a moment that I was talking to the man who had been accused of murdering his parents in nineteen fifty eight. I reached for the questions I had scribbled down in case I had any luck in reaching him.

I'm so curious how you feel after all these years.

Let me put it to you know I lost my parents. I watched them get murdered right in front of me, but that was almost sixty five years ago.

Those are kind of.

Things you put in the back of your mind. It's there. If I need to pick it up, I can see it in my head. But no one wants to dwell on those kinds of things. And the sad part is no one because of the saturnine and police department's lack of good and investigation, they never did find anyone or couldn't find anyone, so they shirt around and tried to blame me for the murders. So I went through the court poll thing of trying to prove an eight year old kid to do this. Really, uh huh, it's just a stupidity feature of that whole scenario. So we never got any closing, We got nothing out of it.

It seemed like a district attorney at the time, he made some decisions that seemed very strange. I think he was blaming you at one point and he wasn't blaming you, And then a lot of it was leak to the press. Do you have any feelings about him after all these years?

Well, being an eight year old, I wasn't in the middle of all of that, I was kind of on the outside. I didn't understand any of those kind of things. You know, I could tell you stories about the interrogation that I went through, which then basically caused him to think, oh, well, maybe we can blame him because we can't find anybody else scenario, and it's what kind of people are you? They basically took this eight year old boy into a room at the police station with two detectives and for two and a half hours basically kept telling me that we can't find any evidence. We can't find any proof. You were the one that opened the doors for the police. You were the only one in the house. There was no weapon that we can find. There's no fingerprints. We can find that your fingerprints and your family's fingerprints in the house. There's nothing we can show anywhere that anybody else was there. So now you want to tell us the truth? Are you're just going to lie to us forever and never go back home?

Mel But did they lead you that some of these facts that come out, not facts, but some of the articles from long long ago. There's one particularly striking visual thing of you being led back into the house by detectives after the murders to show them around. Do you have any recollection of that that sounds horrifying?

Little recollection specifically.

Do you have any recollection of the intruder after all these years? I know you did at the time.

Yeah. I would guess probably twenty five thirty year old something like that, not an old man and not a child and strong healthy. I don't remember if he had a hat on or something. That'd be more in the stories from the news PA reports, but.

They said there's like a white mat, like a white cloth with holes for the eyes being cut out.

I think, yeah, I can't remember now if you'd had a mask on or something. I don't remember that. But I woke up at about two o'clock in the morning or something with somebody choking me to death. Yes, and I made enough russell in trying to wake up and fight it and breathe and everything else. Then it woke my parents up and they came running into help, and that's when he dropped me, turned around and attack them.

Yes, and that makes sense. And they also found strips of cloth on your bed, I believe, yeah.

And they also found the finger marks in my neck from the choking. Did you to blame it on me? Correctory incorrect.

Nothing was said by the intruder to you verbally, right, no, no, And then you were taken to Bellevue.

Right.

And it's actually a darkly humorous thing. I think you told someone that you would talk the two step there at one point, right.

Yeah.

I spent six weeks in Bellevue's child juvenile mental health area, partly because I went to bed a lot, so they thought that was part of my mental issues and so they wanted to investigate that and everything else. But yes, I made a number of friends. I learned how to play chess in Bellevue. I did learn the two step in Bellevue. There were nice friends, other kids that were there that became friends in that sense for the six weeks. So I have that good side of things, if you can call it that.

But you also were being interrogated at the same time. The question with this came out in one of the age old articles that they diagnosed you as paranoid schizophrenic. Do you have any comments on a.

Well, my daughter and my ex wife are both lcsw's and we've already gone through the whole mental health training and everything with that whole process, and there is no way that a child could have that type of mental illness. That is something that shows up in adults. The fact, then that was their excuse, Well, he's just paranoid skits, he doesn't know what he's doing. It's like, hello, No, I don't think so.

And that was the way of them trying to portray you as hearing voice the time to try to construct some story as to why you you could be responsible.

Right exactly.

Yeah. And the unfortunate thing, and I'm sure you probably know this, we went back to try and get more information at one point, and the Saten Island Police Department had burned down years later, and all of the records from the case were destroyed in that fire.

I just want to thank you because I think people hearing your voice makes a big difference.

Well, I'm more.

Than happy to talk about it. It is painful in some respect, but again, that was sixty five years ago. I know many other people who have lost loved ones. I know the pain that that causes, but it's also one of the things of life that Okay, it happens. We do have to pick ourselves up and keep going.

We'll be back after a short break, we're back with murder homes. That day I visited Clifton. I took one last look at two four two van and continued walking up the snow covered street with my girlfriend. Marine Hospital, where the murdered doctor used to work, still exists. It's just an eight minute walk away. It's a sprawling Mayan Revival style facility, nine stories high, with multiple wings and outbuildings. There's a massive metal cross set right at its pinnacle. On a blustery day in late February, there was something disturbing about it. Perhaps it was the rusted, barely visible words Bailey Seaton across the entranceway. That's what Marine Hospital was renamed the nineteen nineties, when it was home to one of the city's largest psychiatric wards and a rehab wing for acute alcoholics. Half of the hospital was closed in two thousand. Several of its buildings were demolished, but a skeleton staff continues to care for patients on several of its floors. This was what used to be a US Marine hospital and still is. I don't know what part is working for in the news right we're going to walk up to it, but that's the building he used to work in a that's the building that it dies, well, they died, and also where they said that his keys, you know, a copy of his keys were someone who might have murdered them, could have been the patient or work to the hospital. So I guess we can walk up a little bit. It's very eerie. I don't know what's abandon what's not?

The lights on inside.

We're at the entrance of the old hospital, which is now abandoned. Should I ask him, if you can, how are you? I was surprised to see a security guard mending a desk in what used to be the grand entry of the hospital, the dusty, pink and white marble floors stretching down empty hallways on either side of him. The security guard told us that most of the hospital was abandoned, but that a nursing home and an insurance agency still occupy the third and seventh floors. Walking in a hallway, it's still in use, apparently someone in the hospital. As we walked around the empty marble corridors, we try a locked door, stare at a mound of rubble left on the floor by a caved in dropped ceiling, walk into an empty waiting room, stripped of everything except a poster celebrating the employee of the month and two fabric covered chairs. You could hear voices occasionally, perhaps employees taking the one working elevator up to the nursing home, or the insurance company skipping the remains of the psychiatric ward in the way up. I kept thinking about the Nymers. Doctor Nimer would have started his day by walking right past the circular desk where the security guard sat. It was here that both Lujiin and doctor Nimer were brought and where Lujan uttered her last words to the two detectives before she was wheeled her chest cavity filling with blood into the surgical suite. It was a strange place, a kind of monolithic echo fill castle that should have been demolished years ago, but it's still hanging on. We stepped outside and continued walking around the other buildings in the hospital complex. We were startled when we turned a corner and ran into several rehab patients mumbling to themselves and smoked my cigarettes near one of the old hospital's main buildings. They stared at us vacantly as we walked away, but I could see that my girlfriend was shaken. Up a tiny bit. She told me that a bad feeling had started to come over her just before we left the hospital.

No, it was weird. Suddenly the atmosphere changed like around the corner, because before it was fine.

Before you saw the guy hanging.

No, it was not the guy.

It was just.

Suddenly I felt this like overwhelming feeling of discomfort and it felt not good.

Daniel Letty, the neighbor I spoke with, published an article a few years back about the Nymer murders, and it was contacted by someone who was well acquainted with the case. The man who had rented two four two Vanderbilt to the Nymers in nineteen fifty eight, doctor Glodfelty, the same doctor who left the keys for doctor Niymer at Marine Hospital. Doctor Glotfelty hit something he wanted to get off his chest after all these years. He felt he knew who did it, but doctor Glotfeldty died before he could share this information. It's possible, since doctor Glotfeldti lived at two four two Vanderbilt just before renting it out to the Nymers, that the killings were a case of mistake and identity and the murderer was targeting Glodfelty, who had children the same age as the Nymers. I took one last look at two four two Vanderbilt as I walked by, with its grass overgrown, the blinds pulled down, the snow covered portico. It's the kind of place a recluse might live in, with its broken pane of glass in the front door. I looked up at the narrow concrete steps the dean Nymer walked down sixty five years ago, clutching a teddy bear and squinting into a police car's floodlight as the whole neighborhood watched him in shock. Later at home, I take a look at the cell phone picture of taken of the infamous front door. For a moment, I think I see the shape of someone inside watching me, But it's just my mind playing tricks on me. To this day, no one knows who walked in and out of two four to two Vanderbilt at two in the morning, leaving doctor Nimer and lujen crying out for each other in the dark. Doctor Nimer stumbled down the stairs trying to catch the intruder who had murdered him, and lu Jean made her way back to the bedroom, picked up the phone and stared into her son's eyes as she waited for the switchboard operator to answer. For a minute. She was in such shock that all she could do was.

Breathe Hello, Hello, Hello.

Two four two. Vanderbilt Avenue has a current market value of five hundred and eight thousand dollars. As Dean Niymer pointed out, the cold case files pertaining to the Nymer murder burned up in a mysterious fire at the Staten Island Police Departments one hundred and twentieth Precinct. Efforts to reach them for comment were unsuccessful. The Nymers were the only homicide victims on Stein Island in nineteen fifty eight. The killer has never been found. This is Murder Holmes. I'm Matt Marinovitch. Murder Holmes is created by and executive producer by Matt Marinovich. Executive producers are Jennifer Bassett and Taylor Chakoine. Story editor is Jennifer Bassett. Supervising producer is Carl Ktel. Producer is Evan Tyre. Sound design by Taylor Chakoine, Evan Tyre and Carl Katle. Special thanks to Ali Perry and Nikiyetour murder Holmes is the production of iHeart Podcasts. For more shows from iHeart Podcasts, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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Murder Homes

The real estate market has never been hotter. Houses sell as soon as they’re listed. Bidding wars le 
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