CastlesBurning
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Death on a Dairy Farm: This Murder Case from 1930 Is Still Unsolved
10 Hudson Valley Mysteries That Remain Unsolved to This Day
On the day before Thanksgiving, 1930, a still-unknown assailant committed what The Poughkeepsie Eagle called “Dutchess County’s most brutal crime.”
“While the Stanfordville countryside slept fitfully in barricaded homes last night, police looked outside Dutchess County for slayer [sic] who sometime Wednesday evening, wiped out the simple farm family of James Husted Germond, father, mother, son and daughter,” The Eagle reported the following Saturday.
Germond, 47, who ran a small milk farm during the Depression, and his family — wife Mabel, 47; daughter, Bernice, 18; and son Raymond, 10 — were stabbed a total of 23 times with a knife. Their bodies were found the next day, Thanksgiving, after a colleague came by to see why Germond had failed to make milk deliveries.
The first suspect was an “unidentified foreigner” named Florentine Chase, a suspicious fellow who had been seen in the area that day but “fled in a hired auto” to catch a train out of New York City that evening. Other suspects were questioned but never charged. The knife was found a day or two later, but any evidence attached to it — blood, fingerprints — had been destroyed. Evidence at the farm had also been compromised by the thousands of curious people who wandered through the house and grounds in the days following the murders.
Rewards of up to $25,000 were offered for information. In 1933, a neighbor, Arthur Curry, who apparently had a beef with Germond over money or land, was charged with the murders. But evidence was lacking, and the charges were dismissed. The case went cold. In a 2013 private investigation into the murders, a forensics analyst named Vincent P. Cookingham concluded that Curry was the most likely culprit. He also claimed, “This was one of the worse handled [sic] cases that I have ever looked into.”
10 Hudson Valley Mysteries That Remain Unsolved to This Day
On the day before Thanksgiving, 1930, a still-unknown assailant committed what The Poughkeepsie Eagle called “Dutchess County’s most brutal crime.”
“While the Stanfordville countryside slept fitfully in barricaded homes last night, police looked outside Dutchess County for slayer [sic] who sometime Wednesday evening, wiped out the simple farm family of James Husted Germond, father, mother, son and daughter,” The Eagle reported the following Saturday.
Germond, 47, who ran a small milk farm during the Depression, and his family — wife Mabel, 47; daughter, Bernice, 18; and son Raymond, 10 — were stabbed a total of 23 times with a knife. Their bodies were found the next day, Thanksgiving, after a colleague came by to see why Germond had failed to make milk deliveries.
The first suspect was an “unidentified foreigner” named Florentine Chase, a suspicious fellow who had been seen in the area that day but “fled in a hired auto” to catch a train out of New York City that evening. Other suspects were questioned but never charged. The knife was found a day or two later, but any evidence attached to it — blood, fingerprints — had been destroyed. Evidence at the farm had also been compromised by the thousands of curious people who wandered through the house and grounds in the days following the murders.
Rewards of up to $25,000 were offered for information. In 1933, a neighbor, Arthur Curry, who apparently had a beef with Germond over money or land, was charged with the murders. But evidence was lacking, and the charges were dismissed. The case went cold. In a 2013 private investigation into the murders, a forensics analyst named Vincent P. Cookingham concluded that Curry was the most likely culprit. He also claimed, “This was one of the worse handled [sic] cases that I have ever looked into.”
