New York rapist-murderer arrested after routine traffic stop

On Saturday morning, June 5, 1954, police officer Gustave Roniger, 29, spotted a black Pontiac as it blew through a red light and headed the wrong way down a street in Queens. Roniger parked the car.

It appeared to be a routine traffic stop until the officer got a good look at the driver. He matched the description of a person wanted in connection with a heinous crime committed days earlier.

At 8:30 a.m. Wednesday morning, beautiful, blue-eyed Dorothy Westwater, 14, known to her friends as “Sugar,” stepped out of her family’s apartment in Yorkville, headed to St. Jean Baptiste Parochial High School on E. 75th St. between Third and Lexington. She never left the building.

Less than ten minutes later, a neighbor, Mae Sullivan, a nurse’s assistant, heard moaning in the hallway. She followed the sound and came across a man with wild dark hair and a pipe in his hand hurrying out of the building.

Sullivan found Westwater under a stairwell, sprawled in her blood, her schoolbooks and lunch scattered next to her. The teen had been strangled eight times and stabbed in the chest, neck and back. She had a punctured lung and one of her fingers was almost severed. Four blows to the head had fractured her skull. She was naked from the waist down.

Despite the terrible injuries, she was still breathing.

Police believed that the rapist who attacked Dorothy was responsible for other violent crimes in the area. In November, Rosa Chronik, an 85-year-old widow, was stabbed 11 times with an ice pick during an apparent robbery.

In April, Marion Brown, a 17-year-old waitress, was stabbed in the back in her apartment building on E. 65th St., just two and a half blocks from Westwater’s home.

Later that month, a passenger stabbed a butcher knife into the back of taxi driver Alexander Jablonka, 43. These crimes all took place within a few blocks of each other.

Based on Sullivan’s glimpse of the stranger, newspapers described the Westwater attacker as white, about 6 feet tall, of medium build, with dark unruly hair.

The wrong-way driver Roniger stopped on Rockaway Blvd. was John Francis Roche, 27, no stranger to the police. Roche had been in and out of prison since 1944 and had begun his career as a troublemaker years earlier. Police determined the Pontiac was a stolen vehicle and found a knife and a blood-stained pipe in the car.

After his arrest, Roche made little effort to conceal his recent activities.

“FIEND ADMITS GIRL ASSAULT, 3 MURDERS” was the only headline on the front page of the Daily News on Sunday, June 6, 1954. Below were two images, one showing Roche in custody and the other a headshot of him looking at the camera.

The confessions of his crimes came “surprisingly quickly – almost as if he was happy to reveal them,” The News reported. Detectives asked him for an account of his movements and activities over the past week. Fridays and Thursdays were normal, but then Wednesday came.

“On Wednesday I killed that girl in town,” he calmly told investigators. He described how he came up behind her and fractured her skull, dragged her under the stairwell, then raped and killed her.

Crowd cries: ‘Kill him! Kill him!” met the handcuffed inmate as police put him in a car in Queens and delivered him to the 19th Precinct stationhouse, which oversees Yorkville.

Roche confessed to the murders of Chronik, Brown and Jablonka. He also took credit for the grievous death of Edward Bates, 22, a sailor, at Rockaway Beach in August 1953.

Another man, Paul Pfeffer, 21, had already confessed and was locked up in Sing Sing for that crime. Pfeffer walked away after Roche confessed, but he was soon back behind bars, serving 20 to 40 years for murder and robbery committed after he was released.

On Monday morning the newspapers broke the sad news that Westwater had lost her fight for life after four days in an iron lung. The device was needed because one of the blows to the girl’s head damaged a nerve that controls breathing.

At his trial for Westwater’s murder in November 1954, Roche’s court-appointed attorney said his client had a “mind like scrambled eggs and an upbringing that parallels Tobacco Road.”

The “Devil of Yorkville,” as residents called him, had been born into poverty, the son of a drunkard who died of tuberculosis when John was a child. His mother turned to prostitution, but also died young. Despite their rough start, his older brother and sister made a life for themselves.

John, the youngest, became a criminal.

Roche had little interest in saving himself. “No, I don’t want that,” was all he said when his lawyer instructed him to tell his story to the court.

“Why bother with all this?” he told psychiatrists. “I don’t want to go to jail. I don’t want to be sent to an insane asylum. I want to die.”

It took about 90 minutes for a jury to grant his wish and find him guilty of first-degree murder, which meant a date with the electric chair.

Appeals delayed justice until January 26, 1956. Roche showed no remorse or remorse as he stared at the witnesses and then collapsed onto the death chair without a word.

Jack Smee of The News wrote: “Silent to the end, multiple murderer John Francis Roche went to his death last night in the electric chair at Sing Sing, as he had said – like a man who ‘wanted to die.’”