CHASE FOR KILLERS GOES ON
After four decades, the grisly murder of Queens teenager Leslie Zaret remains unsolved — even though it’s apparent that she was killed by someone she knew, police said.
The popular 17-year-old John Bowne High School student was found naked and strangled inside the schoolyard of Public School 203 on Aug. 17, 1974.
Police said she was killed around midnight, but her body wasn’t discovered for several hours.
“We believe that she met someone, someone she probably knew,” Nilsen said. “At some point they were walking through the schoolyard and hanging out and then something went terribly wrong, which caused her death.”
Police sources said that Zaret may have had sex with her killer or had been sexually abused before her death. Her clothes were found in a pile
Henryk Siwiak, like many others, left his home in the Rockaways on Sept. 11, 2001 for Lower Manhattan and never returned.
Unlike the nearly 3,000 people murdered by terrorists at the World Trade Center, Siwiak’s killer remains a mystery. The Polish immigrant was shot to death in Brooklyn on the day the World Trade Center came down.
His sister, who helped him settle into the American way of life when he arrived 11 months earlier, fears she and the slain man’s family – a wife and two children left behind in Poland – will never get justice.
“I don’t have any new information from police,” said the sister, Lucyna Siwiak, 67. “Everyone in the family is upset because there is nothing.”
Police are similarly frustrated. Each Sept. 11 for the last 15 years, detectives near her body in Bayside, officials said.
“We believe it’s either someone she knew for some period of time, or someone she met that night,” Nilsen said.
Over the decades several possible suspects have been interviewed and ruled out — leaving the investigation frozen in its tracks.
Even a renewed look into the murder led by NYPD Chief of Community Affairs Bureau Joanne Jaffe, who lived in Bayside and was 16 when the killing took place, has turned up nothing new.
Zaret’s grieving family is left with little hope that her killer will be found. Her sister Melissa Zaret, 63, now living in Manhattan, declined to comment when reached.
“(A new story on the killing) is not going to bring my sister back or close the case,” she said. have handed out flyers at the crime scene, Decatur St. and Albany Ave. in BedfordStuyvesant, hoping to fill in the blanks left by the eight people who saw or heard some sort of confrontation between Siwiak and another man.
None recalled enough to identify the gunman.
Earlier that day, Siwiak was supposed to work a construction job in lower Manhattan, only to turn and head home in fear after the Twin Towers were leveled by terrorists, his sister recalled.
That night, Siwiak was set to start a second job as a night cleaner at a Pathmark on Albany Ave. But he got lost on the way, exiting the A train at a stop three miles from the store. While trying to find his way to the supermarket, Siwiak crossed paths with his killer.
About $50 was found in Siwiak’s pockets when police arrived, and detectives remain unable to determine if the killing was a botched robbery or something more sinister.
His widow suspects her husband was mistaken for Middle Eastern — he had dark features and was wearing camouflage pants — but police said there is no evidence he was the victim of a hate crime.
As with many unsolved murders, the Siwiak file remains at the 79th Precinct, where detectives still work the case.
Lt. Anthony Caroselli said the most frustrating aspect of the investigation is his belief that someone out there — a witness, a confidant of the killer — knows who’s responsible.
“I don’t know why they wouldn’t come forward,” he said. “It’s something that always bothered us.” Police ask anyone with information on any of the murders profiled in the Daily News to call Crime Stoppers at (800)-577-TIPS. All calls will be kept confidential.