Squirrel commented on my blog about how crime hasn’t changed much in Nyack.

Here are a few brief Nyack murder stories where family and friends were involved.

1) My friend Jim’s Uncle killed Jim’s other Uncle (mid 1930s). The younger brother shot his older brother who was physically and emotionally abusive. Jim’s mother hid the gun in the woods on the west side of Highland Avenue just north of Oak Hill. The police eventually broke down Jim’s mother and she took them to where the gun was hidden. Jim’s Uncle confessed. Because he was a minor and everyone in town knew how bad the brother was, he spent a short time in a youth facility (called a reform school, then). He moved away from Nyack and has not been heard from since. Jim still lives in the same house where the murder occurred.

2) My great Uncle killed a man around 1900 (The circumstances no longer known). My Great Grandfather had to pay the judge $500 (a huge amount then) to keep his son out of prison. He complained about it until the day he died claiming that his son was not worth it, and he should have let him go to jail.

3) One of my friends in Jr. High School (around 1964) was a foster child. His foster father was the pastor at a local church. The man had a fight with his wife and she locked herself in the bedroom. The pastor took a shotgun and tried to shoot out the lock to the door, accidentally killing his wife. He then took the shotgun, put it in his mouth and pulled the trigger. My friend, a track star, ran all the way in the winter in his bare feet to Nyack Hospital to get an ambulance.

4) My second cousin is a notorious murderer and is in jail now.

5) My mother’s best friend and roommate at nursing school injected her husband and his mistress with an overdose of insulin while they slept. The mistress deserved it as she killed Mom’s friend’s cat. They caught her and she did 20 years in prison and my Mom went to see here twice a month. She now lives in Nyack.

6) A woman’s body was found in the woods near where I grew up in Central Nyack when I was about 10. She was killed by a shotgun blast. A little while later my brother found a shotgun in the trunk of an abandoned car in the same area. He kept the shotgun and never told anyone until years later.

I have hazy recollections of other similar stories. My Grandfather was Chief of Police in Nyack for a while in the nineteen-teens. He was given the position of chief because he was the only one on the police force who owned a car (an old ,even then, used Model A Ford). He used to tell great stories. I have some of his stories on tape and will put them on the blog as audio files if I ever find them again.