Rachel Taylor, age 17
Murdered 29 March 1940
On March 29, 1940, the body of 17-year-old Rachel Taylor, a home economics major at the university was discovered near the campus by a school janitor.
Her head was bashed in and her body was “mutilated.”
A New Jersey resident who came to Pennsylvania as one of the 1,000 women on the 6,000-student PSU central campus, Rachel was known as a shy, studious girl who was pleasant, but who generally kept to herself.
She had returned from Asbury Park to State College late on March 28, getting off the bus at 1:21 a.m., according to the driver. Rachel apparently encountered her killer while walking the half-mile from the bus stop to her dormitory. Her friends insisted that she must have known the person who killed her because she was found four miles off her route, and was not the type of person to accept rides from strangers.
The autopsy revealed that she had eaten shortly before she died, which strengthened the argument that she knew her killer. There were no restaurants open at that time near where she was dropped off and where she died.
Rachel’s wristwatch was stopped at 3:15 a.m., but it is unclear whether that was because it ran down or was damaged in the attack that killed her.
In the days after Rachel’s murder, police inspected more than 900 cars in and around the campus, looking for one that was bloodstained. They were unsuccessful. They then turned to the Penn State intrafraternity council, asking the heads of each fraternity on campus to report anyone who was “absent without explanation” from 1 a.m. until dawn on March 29. At the time half of Penn State’s 5,000 male students belonged to a fraternity.
Police found a bloodstained handkerchief at the crime scene, as well as a man’s footprints in the snow, but those leads never panned out.
Eventually, authorities abandoned the theory that Rachel knew her killer when interviews with as many friends as they could find led nowhere.
“Of course, there’s nothing definite on (the theory that she had been forced into the car), but we’ve questioned all of her friends, including the boys she knew, and they didn’t pick her up,” detective Wilbur F. Leitzell told the press. “But we’re certain an automobile was used by the slayer.”...
LINK:
Another Penn State Stalker
