Town note
John Demarest's wool mill later became an optical company and then a piano factory.
about 0:06:24The story
His parents ran a busy luncheonette called the Sweet Sue Coffee Shop near Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and the episode suggests they worked long hours and left him largely unsupervised. A sister, Susan, was born in 1943 and caught polio as a child, so much of the family's attention went to her. In 1951 the family moved from New York to Fort Lee, New Jersey, and later to Closter.
The great influence on his life was his mother's sister, Lillian Booth. Lillian had waited tables at the family's coffee shop when a wealthy older customer, Ferris Booth, fell in love with her. They married in the mid-1940s, he died of a stroke in 1956, and she inherited about $50 million. She had no children and lavished money on her nieces and nephews; Bobby was her favourite. She paid for his holidays, his cars and, again and again, his lawyers. By 2007 she was worth almost $250 million after giving hundreds of millions to hospitals, churches and charities.
His record began in January 1957, when at sixteen he grabbed a woman by the throat outside her apartment building in New York and stole her purse. Later that year he committed a series of house burglaries, was put on indefinite probation and was examined at Menlow Park Hospital, where doctors found a narcissistic character disorder and strong repressed hostility towards women.
A month later, on 25 February 1962, he and an accomplice broke into a house in Fort Lee at 3.20 in the morning. The parents were away; inside were a fourteen-year-old girl, her older sister and a three-year-old nephew.
Within months he was seeing several women at once, among them Beverly Moles, a bank teller, and Judy Rosenberg, a married woman he met at a hotel swimming pool in Florida in February 1967.
On 27 April 1967 a Teaneck housewife, Bernice Caplin, came home at about 3.10 in the afternoon. She let him in. He walked towards the front door, then spun round and put his forearm round her throat, told her not to scream, demanded money, forced her against a wall and raped her, keeping his hand on her throat throughout. When she asked why, he said he was crazy. He told her that if her son came through the door he would kill him and that he had a gun. Then he left. A fourteen-year-old boy named Kenneth Strickland had noticed the green convertible at the kerb and two distinctive decals on its rear. On 29 April Mrs Caplin picked him out at police headquarters and then identified the car in the car park.
At Rawway he became the star of the sex offender treatment unit. She escaped and a patrolman found him in an ice cream shop, where he had hidden a blue-handled throwing knife.
He worked as a house painter and ran a small construction and sandblasting business, and he drove a dark red Opel station wagon.
On 6 October 1975 Susan Haines, a midwife from Gloucester, England, was at home in Haworth while her husband Jonathan was at work. He telephoned at about one o'clock and she was cheerful; at 5.50 p.m. he came home to an empty, locked house, her keys in the car, a parcel for her mother on the passenger seat and her pottery-class clothes laid out on the bed. A neighbour, Dorothy Slater, had spoken to her in the garden at about 3.30 p.m.; another neighbour later recalled a red Opel station wagon in the driveway. Police searched for days with dogs, hundreds of volunteers and even a psychic, and they cleared Jonathan after he passed a polygraph.
On 14 October 1975 Susan Reeve, twenty-two, a receptionist at Grey Advertising in Manhattan and the daughter of a former municipal judge, got off the commuter bus at Country Road and Anderson Avenue in Demarest at about 6.10 p.m., a quarter of a mile from her parents' house. A driver saw her talking to a man beside a dark red station wagon and thought the exchange looked odd. She never came home. At about 7.30 that evening a toll collector on the George Washington Bridge heard a woman's voice screaming from the back of a dark red station wagon: help me, he's crazy.
On 20 October a man sold a distinctive engagement ring at Macy's, then made a scene two days later when he came back for it and bought it back for $100. On 27 October a dog walker found Susan Haines's body in woods near a reservoir in Valley Cottage, New York, face down under branches, strangled with pantyhose tightened with a stick. The next day park workers checking a chlorine pipe found Susan Reeve's body in the water at Tallman State Park in Piermont, also strangled with pantyhose, her arm sticking up. Both women had fractured hyoid bones. Tracking dogs found Susan Reeve's scent and blood of her type in his aunt's vacant house in Closter, and hairs matching both victims were found in his station wagon.
By then he had already asked fellow inmates to find a hitman to kill his aunt and her companion, Misha Dabich, so that he could inherit money and pay for a better lawyer. In October 1979 he sprayed a guard, escaped from the courthouse, broke both ankles jumping from a window and was caught after a carjacking near Tuxedo, New York.
Lillian Booth died on 22 November 2007 at ninety-two, leaving him income from an $8.9 million trust; his mother's share added about $8 million more. In 2010 the Reeve family settled a civil suit for about $10 million and gave the money away. Susan Haines was buried in the churchyard in Warwickshire where she had married.