Beryl Atherton Miss

Status:

Open

Jurisdiction:

Marblehead Police Department (MA)

Offense Location:

Marblehead, Massachusetts

Summary:

Beryl Atherton was a spinster who was strangled to death in her own kitchen on the Saturday night of Thanksgiving weekend in 1950, with her throat then slashed open in the sign of the cross. She was forty-seven years old, tall, and painfully thin, and a fifth-grade teacher at Glover School. Police were without a trace of murderer or motive from the first. The case remains unsolved.

Vital Statistics

Circumstances of Offense:

As winds grew to storm force on the afternoon of Saturday, November 25, Miss Atherton drove in her secondhand car to the adjacent town of Salem and took her fur coat out of storage. Back in Marblehead and wearing the coat, she stopped for a Boston Traveler and several food purchases, then returned through lashing rain to the little house on Sewell Street. She left her handbag in the dining room, and food packages and Traveler in the kitchen, and took the dog Esky for a quick airing. At about six, a boy delivering papers in the neighborhood saw her, still in the fur coat, emptying trash at the back door. It was Kenneth "Pint" Phillips, the milkman making his regular rounds, who found the kitchen door ajar and discovered the gruesome scene. Miss Atherton lay on her kitchen floor in a massive pool of blood. The killer slashed Miss Beryl Atherton six times. Strong hands left fingernail marks on the back of her neck and crushed a bone, causing strangulation. Three of her ribs were also crushed as well as four fingers and both thumbs. The vicious storm pounded the area that night and led to Atherton's body not being discovered for three days.

Additional Details:

Miss Atherton was a teacher at the Glover School in Marblehead and enjoyed many friendships with other teachers in the school system; they occasionally dined together at local restaurants. She never married but did date – even some married men – hoping for a proposal that never came. These were the days when you needed an operator's help to complete phone calls. Known as the "Hello Girls," the operators were intrigued enough to periodically listen in on her phone calls. But the Hello Girls unfortunately did not help the police at all. The apparent murder weapon, a bone-handled bread knife, was returned to its rightful place in a chest of drawers in the kitchen. Police did have someone that they identified as the likely killer but never had enough evidence to bring forth charges. In 2022, Harry Christensen published a comprehensive book "Murder in Marblehead" where he and Richard Santeusanio narrowed the suspect list down to three different suspects.

Case Last Updated:

Jul 20, 2026