The Stamford Bra Murders

Morbid

The Stamford Bra Murders podcast episode explores a series of strangling murders targeting women in Stamford, Connecticut during the late 1960s and early

Key takeaways

• The case remains officially unsolved despite the arrest and conviction of Benjamin Miller.
• Miller's confession was later recanted, raising questions about police coercion and manipulation.

Main topics

• Stamford Bra Murders
• Serial killer investigation in Connecticut

Notable quotes

Justice doesn't seem to have been done here, in my opinion.

It's like. where did those go? No, I don't. Can we retest them?

Conclusion

The Stamford Bra Murders case remains officially unsolved, with lingering doubts

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hey weirdos, I'm Elena. You are? Yeah. I'm Ash. What? This is morbid. Speaker 2 (0:21) There you go. Speaker 1 (0:23) I was like, are you going to say it? I don't know. Are you going to say Speaker 2 (0:26) it? Speaker 1 (0:26) I was going to hang us all out here. That's okay. What Speaker 2 (0:28) if we just did an episode once where we just never said, and this is morbid, and we just like Speaker 1 (0:32) kept talking? No one would know where they were. And then we were like, oh, and it's morbid. By the way. Like at the end, we said it. I think everyone would be like, I know. Yeah, probably. Speaker 2 (0:42) Yeah, probably. I'm like, it's like a Sunday morning right now. The rain is not falling. Speaker 1 (0:48) But I Speaker 2 (0:48) feel so tie-tie. I am also tired. Yeah. So. You didn't sleep last night. I slept last night. I Speaker 1 (0:55) did not. Speaker 2 (0:56) I'm ready for it to be. It's like almost September and it doesn't feel like it even in the slightest bit. I Speaker 1 (1:03) need it. Speaker 2 (1:05) One thing though, I'm going to make Drew get my boxes of all my decorations up and in my living room. It's about to be Halloween up in here. A bitch is going to put on Speaker 1 (1:14) maybe practical magic, maybe hocus pocus, perhaps the corpse bride. I suggested Coraline, but she said no. Speaker 2 (1:22) Here's the thing. I like Coraline, but it's not my go-to Halloween movie. I feel that. It's sad. And I feel bad that she got dealt such shitty parents. It's true. You know? She learns a lot about herself, though. She does. And like I was saying earlier, we were talking about it earlier. I was like, her mom's nice in the end, but you shouldn't have to lose your daughter almost to an evil entity to decide like, hey, I think I like you. That's valid. Speaker 1 (1:43) I thought Speaker 2 (1:43) I should maybe spend some time with you. Speaker 1 (1:45) That's very valid. Yeah, I think Speaker 2 (1:46) her parents just pissed me off. Speaker 1 (1:47) Yeah. Speaker 2 (1:48) They definitely suck. Her mom's a bitch. Her mom is a bitch. And her dad's just kind of dumb. And her dad is an idiot and doesn't do anything. See, there's nothing fun about that for me, really. I love Speaker 1 (1:57) Coraline, though. Speaker 2 (1:57) I love the soundtrack, though. God, the soundtrack. It's so... I listen to it to write sometimes. I believe it. Yeah. You know, there's no words in it because it's supposed to make you feel like a little woozy. And it does. Speaker 1 (2:08) Also, Mr. Babinski. Speaker 2 (2:10) Mr. Babinski. The amazing Babinski. Forever. And then who are the Speaker 1 (2:13) two ladies? Oh, my God. I love them. Oh, what are their fucking names? Speaker 2 (2:17) Miss Spink and Miss Forcible. There it is. Yeah, I like them. Yeah, they're wild. They're her eccentric retired actress neighbors. I love them. I love it. Yeah, it's Speaker 1 (2:26) a Speaker 2 (2:26) cute movie, but I don't put it on for decorating. Speaker 1 (2:28) Yeah, decorating. Speaker 2 (2:29) Decorating. What Speaker 1 (2:30) do you guys put on to decor? Let us know. Speaker 2 (2:32) Have you guys decorated? Yeah, it's time. Everyone's like, don't September my August. And I'm like, shut Speaker 1 (2:37) up. Speaker 2 (2:37) I Speaker 1 (2:38) saw somebody be like, I'll fucking December your August. I saw that same thing last night. She was like. I will fucking Speaker 2 (2:45) holly jolly your ass. Yeah. Speaker 1 (2:47) Don't come at me. And also, I'm not doing shit to your August. You can have your shitty ass weather. Take it. You can have your butt sweat and your... She just said you guys have Speaker 2 (3:01) swamp ass. Speaker 1 (3:02) And you can have your mosquitoes and your hornets. Hornlets. And your hornlets. Speaker 2 (3:08) Elena's kids call hornets hornlets. It's so cute. Speaker 1 (3:11) It's really Speaker 2 (3:11) funny. Speaker 1 (3:11) You can have all that stuff. You can have your not being able to turn on the oven to cook because it's too hot too. I actually, I like it. I don't know the last time Speaker 2 (3:20) I turned Speaker 1 (3:20) on my oven. You can have your lack of crockpot meals because it's not even the vibe of that. Shut your pie Speaker 2 (3:26) hole. Speaker 1 (3:26) You can absolutely enjoy all that. Shut your pie hole. Speaker 2 (3:28) I want to make a Speaker 1 (3:29) crockpot. Speaker 2 (3:30) Enjoy the smell of sunscreen all day, every day. I had to put sunscreen on yesterday and I used a spray and I inhaled it and I think I lost years off my life. It was so gross. I probably did. But that's the thing. Like when people are like, don't do that. Don't rush it. I'm not rushing it for anyone else. You do what you Speaker 1 (3:45) want. You're rushing Speaker 2 (3:45) it for me because I hate it. Speaker 1 (3:48) And there's nothing for me in summer. One thing about Speaker 2 (3:49) me is I'm going to drink my pumpkin chai. Hell yeah, I'm doing it right Speaker 1 (3:52) now. Put me to it. I'm going to put on my movies and I'm going to decorate the shit out of my Speaker 2 (3:57) goddamn living room. Everybody's got to let everyone else live, period. And Speaker 1 (4:02) my couch is orange all year round anyway. So I'm always Speaker 2 (4:05) in a place of this is Halloween. It's true. Speaker 1 (4:08) It is. Speaker 2 (4:08) All right. That's our PSA. The funny thing is, is that like mostly like I would say 98.2 % of people listening are like, I feel exactly the same. Or like, Speaker 1 (4:16) why are you talking to me like that? Speaker 2 (4:17) I'm doing the same thing. Whatever 100 minus that is, Speaker 1 (4:20) that's the amount of people that are like, Speaker 2 (4:22) no, don't yuck my yum in August. And Speaker 1 (4:25) I'm not. You can absolutely yum August all you want. Speaker 2 (4:29) Yeah. I'm out of August though. I've left. I've left the building. Speaker 1 (4:32) I mean, August has almost left the building. I left summer in June. Speaker 2 (4:36) I said, fuck you guys. I didn't leave it that early. But this year, I didn't love summer as much as I have in the past. Summer blew ass this year. And Speaker 1 (4:43) I think it can go fuck itself. Summer was a lot. It was not a good summer. I Speaker 2 (4:47) think we had this exact conversation like pretty recently. Yeah, Speaker 1 (4:49) we did. Speaker 2 (4:50) So sorry that you had to hear it again. Sorry, guys. Speaker 1 (4:52) All right, Guilford. Speaker 2 (4:53) Mark your time. Guilford. I don't know. I said something crazy last time and I just decided to roll with it. Speaker 1 (4:59) Guilford just came to me. Hit that minute, Mark. Guilford. Yeah. Speaker 1 (5:04) I thought you Speaker 2 (5:04) were trying to tell me to say Mark instead of Guilford. And I was like, why would I do that? Say Mark. All right. There's no good way to transition into this because this is a very serious, very sad case. Speaker 2 (5:18) Uh, it's, I would say unsolved, but you'll see why it's like tough to say that. Hmm. Justice doesn't seem to have been done here, in my opinion. Ruh-roh. So we're going to be talking about the Stamford bra murders. This is Stamford, Connecticut, which is, I only recently realized, Stam-ford and not Stan-ford. Speaker 1 (5:43) Honestly. I also learned that recently, so. Did you learn it on the train to New York? Yes. Me too. Yeah. Yep. They Speaker 2 (5:50) called it out and I said, what the fuck? And then I saw the train station and I said, Speaker 1 (5:53) oh, I thought it was Stanford. Speaker 2 (5:55) So our story starts today with a woman named Rosellen Pazda. Unfortunately, life had not been very easy for her at all. By 1967, she was mostly supporting herself through sex work, and she was also struggling with addiction in a time where there was not many options for treatment or help. Speaker 1 (6:12) Oh, man. Which Speaker 2 (6:13) is really sad. Yeah. Now, Rosellen's disappearance was reported to police in early August, and Stanford, Connecticut police investigated, but they weren't really able to find her after hitting a dead end, and the case was shelved pretty quickly. It Speaker 1 (6:27) was very sad. Speaker 2 (6:28) Yeah. So just 30 or so miles outside of New York City, Stanford residents had become pretty accustomed to experiencing kind of like a spillover effect from their proximity to New York, obviously including the crime rate. Speaker 1 (6:39) Yeah. Speaker 2 (6:40) And because of that, When sex workers from Stanford started going missing in the late 60s, people kind of just assumed that maybe they drifted down to New York, rather than suspecting for even a minute that these women were victims of foul play. Yeah, because that's never Speaker 1 (6:54) happened. Speaker 2 (6:54) No, never in a million years. We've never told a story like that. Nope. There were times, though, when violence against the sex workers in and around Stanford was undeniable. And this period of time we're going to talk about, it is truly undeniable. Speaker 1 (7:07) But Speaker 2 (7:08) people... It's really sad to see people's response to this case, especially back when it was ongoing. So on the evening of May 3rd, 1968, Stanford patrolman David Hughes was doing his usual check of the wooded area around Merritt Parkway. It was a very popular location for sex workers and their clients. And he spotted what he thought was a mannequin laying in a wooded area a few yards from the road. As we know, it is 9 out of 10 times not going to be a mannequin. It was only upon closer inspection that he realized it was a body, not a mannequin. And it ended up being the body of 22-year-old Donna Roberts. As far as he could tell, Donna very much appeared to be dead. And her bra was wrapped tightly around her neck. And she'd also been severely beaten in the face and the head. The scene really only had few clues, though, as to how Donna ended up there. Investigators found drag marks in the dirt that led back to the road, indicating, though, that she had likely been killed somewhere else and was just later dumped in that swamp. According to the autopsy, her cause of death was strangulation, and she'd been dead for several hours by the time her body was discovered by Hughes. Which is actually kind of crazy when you think about it. Yeah. Just hours. Wow. In addition to the injuries to her face and head, though, her ankle was broken. But it did appear that her ankle was broken post-mortem since there wasn't any swelling. Oh, interesting. So it may have happened like during transportation or something like that. Okay. Investigators spoke to her friends and relatives, hoping that they might know who she was with before she died. But everyone they spoke to was a bit reluctant to speak with the police for various reasons. And Captain Thomas O'Connor told the reporters. No one in the area knows anything. As of the present time, we have learned nothing about the last person she was with. Speaker 1 (8:58) Just not great. No, definitely not. You need a little something to go on. Speaker 2 (9:02) Despite a thorough canvas of the area and interviews with dozens of visitors to the park, nobody came forward with any information about Donna's death. Speaker 1 (9:11) Damn. And Speaker 2 (9:12) the case ended up going cold within a few weeks. Wow. Yeah. But then, in early September, another body was discovered by the side of Merritt Parkway under remarkably similar circumstances. On September 8th, a driver on the parkway spotted what looked to be a pair of women's legs sticking out of the bushes about 200 feet from the road. And so obviously they were like, 911, Speaker 1 (9:34) emergency. Speaker 2 (9:36) When the officers arrived, they discovered the body of a young black woman believed to be in her 20s lying in the bushes. Her Speaker 1 (9:42) bra was also wrapped tightly around her neck. Speaker 2 (9:45) According to the medical examiner, Dr. Coleman Kelly, this victim's cause of death was basically the exact same as Donna Roberts. It was strangulation. Her body was discovered 50 feet from where Donna Roberts had been found just months earlier. Yeah, that close. Now, a search of the area really didn't turn up anything, and the victim didn't have any identification on her, so at that point, her identity was a mystery. After the news about the second body was published in the papers, though, friends and family of missing people started contacting the state police, hoping that maybe they would have answers in the case of their loved one's disappearance. But when they were shown the body, nobody recognized her. Finally, about 24 hours after the body was discovered, though, somebody thought that they recognized the young woman, but they only knew her by a nickname. So they gave the contact information for somebody who maybe would know her real name. That information led detectives to a man named Oscar Kahn, who viewed the body and unfortunately had to identify the victim as his niece, 21-year-old. Gloria Kahn. Oh, Speaker 1 (10:50) man. Speaker 2 (10:50) And she was actually from Mount Vernon, New York. So it was interesting that she was found at Stanford. Yeah. When it came to the scene where Gloria had been discovered, again, there really wasn't a lot of evidence discovered. And since she appeared to have come up to Stanford from New York, like I said, nobody knew her. Nobody really had any idea who she might have been with or what she was doing on the day she was killed. A check with the Mount Vernon police revealed that she did have a history of arrests. But given her history, investigators made the assumption that she traveled to Connecticut to make some money through sex work. But that wasn't really much help in finding her killer at that point. Yeah. So seven months passed and the Bra murders sadly kind of faded into the background, replaced by other news stories and criminal cases. But then on April 5th, an anonymous phone call to the Stanford police revived the case for both the police and the press. That morning, the desk sergeant received an anonymous call from a man who just said, another body's up there. Speaker 1 (11:55) Oh. That's it. That's terrifying. Yup. Another body's up there. Like, bye. That's chilling, right? Ugh. Speaker 2 (12:03) And obviously Speaker 1 (12:04) they were Speaker 2 (12:04) referring to the Merritt Parkway. Yeah. He gave... literally no additional information and then just hung up the phone. I Speaker 1 (12:10) hate it. Speaker 2 (12:11) So an officer was dispatched to the area where Donna Roberts and Gloria Kahn had been discovered the previous year. And while searching a rocky area about 50 yards from the north side of the parkway, the detective or the officer discovered a human skull. Speaker 1 (12:25) Oh my God. Yeah. Speaker 2 (12:26) A more thorough search later that week turned up additional bones. And based on his cursory examination, the medical examiner, Dr. Saul Feierstein, confirmed that the skull appeared to be that of a young woman. Given the remains had been in that location and exposed to the elements for so long, like what appeared to be months at that point, if not years, the doctor wasn't able to give much more information until after he could do a full autopsy. Speaker 1 (12:51) Damn. Speaker 2 (12:51) So it took nearly a week, but on April 11th, investigators announced that the skeletal remains that Emma discovered were those of 31-year-old Rosellen Pasta, who Speaker 1 (13:01) was known to her friends as Sissy Rush. Aw. Which is like... Speaker 2 (13:04) I thought that was such a sweet nickname. That is. One thing, I should have said this at the top of the episode. I'm sure it seems like I'm really not giving a lot of information about these women. Unfortunately, there's not a lot available. I found what I could. Speaker 1 (13:17) Yeah. Speaker 2 (13:18) But obviously, that was the body of Rosellen who had gone missing in August 1967. Yeah. There had been too much time between her death and the autopsy to make really any definitive statements about her cause of death. But investigators did believe that she was actually the first victim in the Bra murders. Oh, wow. In a statement to the press, State Police Captain Louis Marchese noted that all three women had quote-unquote similar associates and possibly could have known each other. He continued, they will be checking the background and all known associations in an effort to determine the possible facts leading to her demise. Now... Because it was the 60s, and as we know, sex workers and Black women in these cases are often considered less dead. Yep. It's really not clear how vigorously any of these murders were investigated at the time. Speaker 1 (14:05) Damn. And Speaker 2 (14:06) shockingly, within just days, this most recent discovery, which was the third discovery of a woman strangled by her own bra, like, presumably, the bra murders just disappeared from the papers again. That's incredible. It's Speaker 1 (14:21) like, how does that? Like, that is incredible. How is that not Speaker 2 (14:24) front page news? And like, how is everybody in the community not just like banging down the doors of officers trying to figure this out? Speaker 1 (14:31) No, Speaker 2 (14:31) that's insane. This was an area that was predominantly white and, you know, middle to upper class. So I think people just weren't concerned because they didn't think anything was going to happen to them. That's wild. Which is so fucked up. Because even if I don't think something is going to happen