Fiend snuffs life from doting B’klyn grandma and devoted granddaughter

Patrick Murray knew something was amiss the moment he heard the frantic howls of his landlady’s dog from a block away.

It was nearly 4 a.m. on a cold and moonless night in Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, and Murray wanted nothing more than to hit the sack after pulling a graveyard shift as a BMT conductor.

But what had been a long and tiring evening was about to turn into an endlessly tragic day.

As the weary subway worker approached the two-family house on Marine Ave. where he lived upstairs with his wife and child, he spotted the distressed dog tied to a post in the backyard, jumping and barking.

Murray knew Mrs. Kelly always took Brownie inside by 10 p.m., and his first thought was that the kindly old lady might have collapsed inside the house.

Her fate was far worse than he could ever imagine.

Murray untied the mutt and followed as it led him to the basement, yelping and scratching at the door. Murray opened it as Brownie raced past him down the stairs. His heart pounding, he called out to Mrs. Kelly into the darkness below.

No response. Just Brownie, whimpering now.

Murray found a flashlight and tread slowly down the stairs, then gasped at the ghastly sight caught in the light.

Nora Kelly, 60, was hanging from a rafter at the end of a thick telephone wire digging into the skin of her slender neck. As the dog circled excitedly, Murray ran to an all-night coffee shop to call the cops.

Police who came to the scene in the pre-dawn hours of April 1, 1935, had to deal with both a distraught dog and a deeply disturbed Murray, who couldn’t comprehend why Kelly would take her own life in such a horrific manner.

She was a longtime widow who had raised five children in the modest house on Marine Ave. She did it on a tight income, washing clothes for soldiers at nearby Fort Hamilton. After her kids moved out, she took in boarders like the Murray family, whose $30 a month in rent went a long way during the depths of the Great Depression.

Kelly also had raised several grandchildren as her own. After one daughter died giving birth to twins about a dozen years before, she took the babies in along with their older sister. The girls lived with her up until a few months previously, when they moved into their father’s apartment in Willimsburg.

She also raised another granddaughter, the child of Kelly’s other daughter, after the father walked out on them and the mother couldn’t cope.

Murray told cops the nowgrown granddaughter, 18-year-old Florence McVey, was an excellent student but quit high school and took a job as a live-in governess for a Brooklyn family to help with the bills. Shy and reserved, Florence was devoted to her grandma and made sure to spend every Sunday with her.

Police were likewise baffled over the apparent suicide. In the kitchen were the half-eaten remnants of a Sunday dinner for two: a bowl of meatballs, some bread, two used coffee cups. They figured Florence must have paid her usual visit earlier in the evening, then left. But what would cause the gentle grandmother to get up from the table, go to a dark basement and hang herself?

They soon had an answer. Detectives tasked with finding and questioning Florence at her employer’s home didn’t have to go far to find her. A cop snooping in the parlor found the teen lying dead on the floor in front of a sofa, eyes open and mouth agape. There were no signs of a struggle, no bruises on her face or neck, no traces of bile or blood in her mouth that might signify she’d been poisoned — accidentally or otherwise.