BAD CROWD, BAD END
‘Woman’ of 14 found dead on train tracks in 1954 – mystery lives on
All that was known about her on that mild autumn morning was that she was young, blonde, pretty, and dead.
“MURDERED WOMAN’S BODY FOUND ON MT. WASHINGTON R.R. TRACKS,” screamed the front-page banner headline of the Baltimore Evening Sun on Nov. 9, 1954.
Around 7 a.m., a Pennsylvania Railroad engineer guiding his train into Baltimore from Harrisburg, Pa., had spotted her sprawled facedown on the tracks.
She wore just bobby socks rolled over her ankles. A blood-soaked pink sweater, a brassiere and a black silk bandanna were knotted around her neck. Curlers still clung to her hair, and someone had scrawled the name “Paul” in bold letters of lipstick or Mercurochrome on her thigh.
The medical examiner estimated that the 5-foot-2, 110-pound mystery woman died from a skull fracture at around 11 p.m. the previous day. There was no sign of rape.
Twelve hours passed before anyone knew her name — Carolyn Wasilewski. Friends called her Peaches.
Despite widespread front-page coverage of the body on the tracks, her parents, Stanley and Nora Mary Wasilewski, had hesitated to come forward. Newspaper descriptions of the corpse sounded like it could be Carolyn, the oldest of their seven children. Their daughter had gone missing the previous afternoon.
One detail made them pause. Police estimated that Carolyn was in her 20s.
She was 14.
Like many Baltimore teens of the 1950s, Carolyn was a girl who hung around with the “drapes,” the city’s name for young toughs who were later widely called “greasers.” The term drapes was a nod to the gang uniform, described by a Sun reporter as a “subdued” version of the zoot suit — pants that tapered to the ankle, gaudy shirts and ties, and ducktail haircuts.
After Carolyn’s father gave a positive identification of the body, he offered his opinion that her death was the work of local drapes.
“Who else could it have been? They’re the type that will dare to do anything,” he told The Baltimore Sun.
Criminal drape activity was rampant in Baltimore in the years before Carolyn’s murder. The city had a “known juvenile gang problem,” noted a U.S. Senate subcommittee report. Drapes engaged in all kinds of mayhem and carried a terrifying assortment of weapons that they used without restraint. Sometimes, their clashes were deadly.
Knives, guns, clubs and ice picks were commonplace. Still, the kids also showed tremendous ingenuity in creating others — homemade blackjacks crafted from lead and tape and “a vicious gouging weapon made of a beer-can opener honed down to a fine edge,” the Sun reported.
Carolyn’s mother said that her daughter had been running around with a fast crowd and was chasing bad boys older than she was. Once, her parents sent her to a reform school for three weeks.
The afternoon of her murder, she told her mother she was going to meet a friend and they planned to sign up for a new teen club at her school. Then she walked out the door, rollers in her hair, for the last time.
The friend later called her parents and asked where she was.
Police determined that she had been killed elsewhere and then dragged or thrown to the tracks. They guessed that the killer had tossed her there, hoping that a train would hit her, mangling the corpse and impeding any investigation. But the first train that might have done so had been diverted from the track. Usually, the train would have passed over her body.
They later found blood, about 2 quarts of it, and some of Carolyn’s belongings near her home about 8 miles away.
Carolyn’s father had told police that she was infatuated with a young thug, Paul Fish, 20. Police tracked him down in jail, where he was locked up on a grand larceny charge. He had been behind bars at the time of the murder. Carolyn had many boyfriends, Fish told police, and she “would hitchhike with anyone.”
Another possible suspect — Ralph Garrett, 35, who worked in an auto glass shop — was a married man who, rumor had it, was seeing Carolyn on the side. Two days after her murder, his body was found, hanging by the neck from a belt suspended from the brake wheel of a railroad car. His death was ruled a suicide.
More than 100 people were interviewed and investigated in the first month. Detectives pulled in drapes, dope addicts, drunks staggering out of bars, truck drivers, soldiers, school chums and anyone else who might have known her. They sought clues in her notebooks and love letters that she decorated with poems and pierced hearts.
They retraced her steps that day. They hired a polygraph expert from Pennsylvania. Everything led to dead ends.
Just before Christmas 1954, the newspapers reported that, for the first time in weeks, “homicide detectives failed to question anyone about the Carolyn Wasilewski murder case.”
“Grim Anniversary: Hundreds Quizzed In Year, But Carolyn’s Slayer Still Is Free,” noted the Baltimore Evening Sun headline on Nov. 7, 1955.
Decades passed, and a new millennium dawned, but no arrests were ever made.
Although largely forgotten, the teen has a legacy. Director John Waters grew up in Baltimore and remembers reading about the case as a boy. In his 2010 book, “Role Models,” Waters describes her as “Carolyn Wasilewski, also aka ‘Peaches,’ the white 14-year-old girl delinquent who inspired my movie ‘Cry-Baby’ by being murdered in 1954 with the name ‘Paul’ written in Mercurochrome on her right thigh.”