You’ve Probably Never Heard of This Serial Killer | John Francis Roche — New York Daily News front pages of June 3 and June 6, 1954

Between August of 1953 and June of 1954, a series of four brutal murders took place that shook the people of New York City. A killer was on the loose that did not discriminate when it came to his victims. Age and gender did not matter to this vicious murderer. Each of these four people was just unfortunate enough to come across John Francis Roche.

John Francis Roche was born in Port Chester, New York on September 6th, 1927. His family then moved to New York City sometime not long after he had been born. His childhood was not a good one, like many other known killers. His father was an abusive alcoholic and his mother abandoned him sometime in his teens. It would not be long before Roche found himself behind bars for armed robbery. He was just 19 when he was locked for the first time.

It did not get better for Roche from there. Everything would come crashing down on him on June 2nd, 1954 after a 14-year-old girl was found barely alive underneath the first-floor stairs in her East 66th street apartment building.

Dorothy Westwater, nicknamed “Sugar” for her sweet nature, was on her way to school when she had the displeasure of crossing John Roche’s path. Before leaving the poor teenage girl for dead, Roche beat her with a lead pipe, stabbed her, choked her, and tragically raped her.

Surprisingly, Westwater did make it to the hospital after one of her neighbors found her. Her heart had stopped in the ambulance, but they were able to resuscitate her on the way to Bellevue.

Once at the hospital, they discovered that she had been stabbed a total of 8 times. One of her lungs had been punctured. One finger on her right hand had nearly been severed presumably from trying to fight off her attacker. Her skull was fractured due to the beating with the lead pipe, and she had bruising around her neck from being choked. Unfortunately, even after operations to try to save her, Dorothy would pass away a few days after the initial attack.

The police believed there was a possible link to another teenage girl that had been murdered in April. Marion Brown was stabbed in the back with a butcher knife as a man tried to sexually assault her. When she screamed, the man ran off. Unfortunately, she still died due to her injuries. Her attack had taken place in an apartment building on East 65th Street, close to where Dorothy Westwater had been attacked.

Tragically, they believed this killer had a third victim. In November of 1953, Rosa Chronik, an 85-year-old woman, was found dead in her East 66th Street apartment. She had been stabbed nearly a dozen times. Her apartment had been ransacked leading police to believe that Rosa had caught a burglar in the act. It would turn out that she had been unlucky enough to come home while the burglar was still in her apartment.

On June 5th, 1954, Officer Gustave Roniger spotted a black Pontiac going the wrong way on a one-way street. When the officer pulled the man over, he noticed that he matched the description given to the police by the woman that had found Dorothy Westwater. She had described Westwater’s attacker as a well-built young man with dark, unruly hair. That’s all she could tell as she saw him flee the scene.

The man Roniger had pulled over was John Francis Roche. At the time, he was 27 years old. He did not have a driver’s license or registration for the car he was driving. Officer Roniger got in the vehicle and instructed Roche to drive them both to the precinct.

Once at the station, Roche admitted to attacking Dorothy while he had been casing buildings to burglarize. He just happened to be in her building when she was leaving for school. He claimed he decided to rape her on a whim.

Roche showed no remorse for what he had done. He was only upset that the girl was so young. He would claim that he believed that she was 18-years-old. He said he was only sorry that she was 14. He was not sorry for his actions.

Roche would go on to confess to both the murder of Marion Brown and Rosa Chronik.

That is not where it ended, though. He confessed to killing a cab driver three weeks before his arrest. Roche drove a butcher knife into the back of 43-year-old Alexander Jablonski as he was driving Roche to his destination. Roche robbed the driver and left him to bleed out.

John Roche went on to confess to yet another murder. He claimed to have robbed and beaten a sailor to death in Rockaway. Edward Bates had been just 22 at the time of his death. Another man, Paul A. Pfeffer, had already been tried and found guilty of this killing and was freed after Roche’s confession. Roche would later recant his confession of killing the sailor. It is unclear who had been responsible for the death of Bates, Roche or Pfeffer.

When the trial began, Roche did not find any sympathy with the jury. It took less than an hour for the jury to come back with a guilty verdict. Roche was convicted of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to death via electric chair in Sing Sing, a maximum-security prison in Ossining, New York.

John Francis Roche was executed on January 26th, 1956. He had no last words and never showed any remorse for his brutal crimes.

You’ve Probably Never Heard of This Serial Killer | John Francis Roche