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Cold case solved: Killer identified in Mass. woman's 'brutal' murder from 45 years ago
After 45 years, investigators have named the person they believe is responsible for stabbing a 48-year-old woman to death in her Ayer home — thanks to genetic genealogy, the Middlesex County District Attorney's Office announced Thursday.
On May 21, 1980, Katharina Reitz Brow was found dead in her trailer from 30 stab wounds, the district attorney's office said in a press release. Within years of her death, a man was wrongly convicted of her murder, but a new DNA analysis of a bloodstain found at the scene of the crime has identified Joseph Leo Boudreau as Brow's killer.
Born in Natick in 1943, Boudreau was a long-time Massachusetts resident who worked in the Framingham area as an adult, the district attorney's office said. He was convicted of armed robbery in New Hampshire in 1975.
Boudreau was 27 years old when Brow was killed, the district attorney's office said. He moved to Maine in 1987 and lived there until his death in 2004 at age 61.
'We do not forget when someone enters Middlesex County and violently takes a person's life. No matter how much time passes, our priority remains the same — to seek answers," Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan said in the release. 'In this case, that meant identifying the person responsible for Mrs. Brow's death, even though they could no longer be held accountable through the criminal system.'
On the day of her death, Brow was killed between 7:10 a.m. — when her husband left for work — and 10:45 a.m. when her body was found, Ryan said during a press conference about the case on Thursday. Five of the 30 stab wounds penetrated Brow's heart, and she was also hit repeatedly with some kind of blunt object.
Brow was likely conscious for at least half of the attack, Ryan said. She is estimated to have remained alive for 10 to 20 minutes after the assault ended.
The inside of Brow's home showed signs of a struggle, but no indications of forced entry, Ryan said. Her purse and a large sum of cash she kept in her linen closet were found to be missing, but investigators recovered one of the murder weapons — a knife — from a wastebasket inside the home.
In October 1982, a man named Kenneth Waters was arrested and charged with Brow's murder, Ryan said. He lived near Brow and worked at Park Street Diner in Ayer, at which she was a regular.
Waters was convicted of Brow's murder in May 1983 — partially based on analysis of a bloodstain left at the scene of the crime, the district attorney's office said. The blood was found to be type O — Waters' blood type.
At the time of the conviction, blood typing was among the few analyses the crime lab responsible for the case was capable of conducting, the district attorney's office said. But Waters' conviction was vacated in March 2001 when DNA analysis of the bloodstain determined that it was left by a man — but not Waters.
The 2010 movie 'Conviction,' starring Hilary Swank, tells the story of Waters' conviction and how it was overturned.
'Since the conviction in this case was vacated in 2001, many investigators had been assigned to review the investigation, follow up on leads and apply known investigative techniques. Unfortunately, information to further the investigation never developed,' Ayer Police Chief Brian Gill said in the release.
In 2022, the district attorney's office's Cold Case Unit began working with forensic chemists at Virgina-based Parabon NanoLabs to try to identify the man who left the bloodstain using genetic genealogy, the district attorney's office said. Investigators isolated a genetic line that implicated two brothers as potential suspects — but both brothers were now dead.
Investigators then tried to find the brothers' living relatives and ultimately convinced them to cooperate with the investigation, the district attorney's office said. Using DNA samples from the relatives, scientists at Virginia-based Bode Laboratories determined with 'an overwhelming statistical likelihood' that one of the brothers — Joseph Boudreau — was the man who'd left the bloodstain.
Brow's family has been informed that their loved one's murder has been solved, Ryan said during the press conference.
" Today, what's important is that we wanna keep the focus on Katharina Reitz Brow," she said. 'She was a hardworking wife, mother and sister who died violently in her own home.'
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Read the original article on MassLive.
