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Police Chief Re-Opens Cold Case After Dreaming About Victim
17-year-old Leslie Zaret was brutally raped and strangled 45 years ago
NYPD Chief Joanne Jaffe had a dream that she couldn’t shake. In it, a girl was crying out to her for help. The problem was Joanne didn’t know if the girl was real or a figment of her imagination.
Joanne grew up in Queens, New York. During her childhood in the 1970s, she vaguely remembered that a teenage girl was raped and strangled just a block away from her childhood home.
But she couldn’t remember the girl’s name or any other facts about the case except one gruesome detail that haunted her: a hairbrush had been found in the girl’s vagina.
When Joanne asked her mother and sister if they, too, remembered this tragic incident, they both said no. And because this alleged event happened so long ago, few police records or even police officers were around to verify its occurrence.
A retired cop remembers the case, confirming it wasn’t just a dream
As it turns out, Joanne hadn’t dreamed up the victim. She eventually connected with Detective Patty Kelly, now 80-years-old, who had worked on this unforgettable case decades before.
Patty confirmed that a 17-year-old girl named Leslie Zaret had been found raped and strangled in a schoolyard in Queens in the summer of 1974. And just as Joanne remembered, the sadistic killer had left a hairbrush inside Leslie’s body.
No arrests had been made in connection with the case in the intervening decades. Joanne was determined to change that.
Joanne was optimistic that massive advances in DNA technology could finally bring justice for Leslie. What made her especially hopeful was that the Queens police department was incredibly able to recover boxes of case records and evidence from the crime scene, including the hairbrush.
