Has a shocking crime that took place in East Hampton Village in 1955 finally been solved? Mayor Jerry Larsen believes it has, and he isn’t alone.
“Crimes of the Hamptons,” a discussion on Sunday at the East Hampton Library and part of the third annual Hamptons Whodunit crime and mystery festival, drew a large and spellbound audience that learned of the long-forgotten, never-solved case. A recent re-examination of the event, however, points to a possible culprit. Although his identity may never be known with certainty, Hilary Osborn Malecki, whose family has been in East Hampton Town for more than three centuries, believes she knows exactly whodunit.
Around 11:15 p.m. on Aug. 6, 1955, a 14-year-old babysitter was abducted by a masked man from the La Forest Lane house of the New York City radio host Casper Citron and his wife, Anne, a fashion model. The man blindfolded the girl and took her through an adjacent yard and a wooded area to his car. He drove for 10 to 15 minutes, according to the girl’s statement to police, after which he beat and raped her over the course of several hours.
After photographing her, the man finally released the girl, ordering her to “start running and not to look around,” according to her statement. She walked until recognizing Route 114, and, when reunited with her family, was taken to a doctor.
“The chief of police at the time said he had doubts about the girl’s story, because he believed she might have known the attacker and was trying to shield him,” said Mr. Larsen, who is a retired village police chief himself. The girl and her attacker had fallen asleep in the car, he said, “and she had an opportunity to leave and she didn’t. I think that’s why the police didn’t totally believe her story.”
Eight days later, a masked man matching the description provided by the babysitter entered the Citrons’ house and attempted to abduct another sitter. Knowing what had happened days earlier, however, the second, 18-year-old sitter took her dog for protection. The dog bit the assailant, and the babysitter was able to call the police. The house now under surveillance, officers, stationed outside, chased the man through the house, but the intruder escaped. He was never found.
“Now,” said Mr. Larsen, “a huge manhunt starts. The county district attorney is involved, the state police.” One suspect was later cleared, as was another, and then another.
Appearing via Zoom video conference, Christiane Citron, who was 6 then and had been in the babysitter’s care with her 1-year-old sister, told the gathering that she vividly remembers her parents and police “asking me if I had heard anything, which I had not.”
On the night of the second incident, “my babysitter was reading to me,” Ms. Citron said. “I was upstairs, and we heard steps on the stairs and thought it was my father coming back, but it was not. It was this man with a bandanna pointing a gun at us, and it was extremely terrifying.”
For decades, she was never told about the first babysitter’s abduction and rape, Ms. Citron said. “But I did experience this confrontation.” She was paralyzed with fear. “I mean, this is all completely tranquil and pastoral,” she said of the village in 1955. Having come into the house twice, “it certainly didn’t seem unlikely that he would come back again.”
During his tenure as police chief, Mr. Larsen received a call from Ms. Citron. “I thought she had the wrong police department,” he recalled, “but I took all the information, I went down into the archives, and there it was. . . . It had never been talked about.”
(The story was eventually detailed in a 2017 article in The Star’s East magazine.)
“Like you, I love a good crime story,” Ms. Osborn Malecki told the gathering. At 22, she became a federal civilian special agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. In East Hampton, “I turned my interests into digging into the backgrounds of families and people in my family tree.” While perusing an old obituary in The Star, “I landed on this page with great eye-catching crime scene photos.” It was a report of the babysitter’s abduction and rape. “The more I read, the more horrified I was.”
“How had I never heard about this awful case?” she wondered. “I was shocked to find it unsolved. Why didn’t anyone tell me to lock the doors when I went out babysitting at 14, 15 years later?”
She devoured every report she could find, eventually returning to researching her family’s history. But “I have had a lot of interesting coincidences,” she said. “Things I’m interested in seem to pop up when I’m looking for something else.”
While reading an article about an ancestor, she saw a brief report “only a handful of years after the babysitter rape case.” A man had been charged with molesting six girls, all of them babysitters of his child. “The case began when a mother reported her 11-year-old daughter was pregnant,” Ms. Osborn Malecki said. “I knew the odds of a second babysitter/child rapist in this small town within five years was very slim. I believed I may have stumbled upon the identity of the 1955 babysitter rapist.” For the next few weeks, “I did nothing but burn dinners on the stove while I researched everything I could on this man.”
He lived just half a mile from the Citrons, she said. “While the police were looking for perverts in Riverhead, as is often the case, he was right around the corner.” A childhood friend’s mother had lived in the same neighborhood as the man and the pregnant girl. “I called her right up,” she said. “She knew the pregnant 11-year-old, and he lived right next door to her.”
Ms. Osborn Malecki said records indicate that the man she believes was the rapist was born in the central United States around 1910 and living in East Hampton by 1929. He married a local woman and they had a child. “He, like many other men in the town at the time, was a chauffeur.”
The couple divorced in 1952, and the man remarried in 1954 and had a second child. By the late 1950s, he “is having the neighborhood girls, all between 11 and 13, coming into his home to babysit this young child,” Ms. Osborn Malecki said. “He insists they spend the night while they babysit.”
The babysitter abducted from the Citrons’ house had indicated that her assailant had an Army blanket in his car, and Ms. Osborn Malecki’s suspect had served in the Army during World War II. “I was able to find two photographs” of the man, she said, and they closely match a sketch of him.
The townspeople “were looking for a sex maniac,” Ms. Osborn Malecki said. “They weren’t looking at the groomsman from their wedding, not at the man who fought for his country, not at their neighbor, not at the church employee, and not their close friend. . . . We now know to start looking closer to home, to the guy who knew where the neighborhood girls were babysitting, for the guy who knew the dirt roads off 114.”
The man was arrested, Ms. Osborn Malecki continued, and admitted to abusing the six girls. Two months after his arrest, he used a shotgun to kill himself in his garage. “Nowhere in the reports of this investigation was there any mention of the 1955 babysitter rape case that occurred just a few years earlier, just a half mile away.”
She believes the community likely wanted “to allow these poor, innocent, traumatized girls a chance to grow up normally in a very small town. . . . The story literally disappeared, a case so horrible it would be 70 years before the community could mention it again.”
“I think Hilary has definitely solved this crime,” Mr. Larsen said.