Six months had passed since Rose McCloskey, 19, met a horrible death, her skull crushed and her throat slit, in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park.

It was Jan. 5, 1933, when a park guard spotted the pretty shop girl’s corpse on a blood-soaked gravel mound under a catalpa tree.

But the murder remained a mystery until a ghost popped up in an elderly man’s bedroom in the middle of a night in June.

“She stood beside my bed — the dead girl,” Thomas Barry, 66, a railroad watchman, would later say in court. Rose appeared to him dressed all in white.

New York Daily News on Saturday, Jan. 7, 1933.

“She held out her arms to me, and I asked her what she wanted, and she just went up in the air,” he said. “Then I knew I had to tell what was on my mind, and I did.”

A little after 9 p.m. on the night of the murder, Barry said he was in the park with a girlfriend. They spotted a man near a secluded area that was popular as a lovers’ lane.

Barry said he saw the man’s face, illuminated by the glow of passing trolley lights, and noticed an “awful savage look in his eyes.”

One other thing: He was a towering figure, around seven feet tall.

Barry said he saw the giant following a young couple. Soon after, there was a blood-curdling scream and he and his girlfriend fled.

In a separate incident around 10 p.m., three boys saw a man staggering in the street near the park. “Are you drunk?” one of the boys called out.

Rose McCloskey and her fiancé Dennis Boyle. (New York Daily News Archive)

Then they got closer and saw blood pouring from wounds on his head and covering his face.

“No. Take me to the hospital,” he told them as he passed out.

Doctors said he had a compound skull fracture caused by at least three crushing blows. They feared he would not make it through the night.

Police inspected his clothing and found an id for Dennis Boyle, 30.

McCloskey and Boyle had been a couple for about a year. They were widely known as kind, pleasant people who seemed to belong together, and were devoted to each other.

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Dorothy D. Bartlett described him as the “tall, black-haired Beau Brummell of Rose’s dreams and ten years her senior.”

But Rose’s mother had forbidden her daughter from seeing Boyle. Her parents liked him, but felt he was not a good match for Rose because of the 10-year gap in their ages.

Instead of breaking up, they hid their romance, keeping company in the streets and parks. Even when they got engaged, they kept the news a secret.

Boyle survived the night, and by the following afternoon, he was able to speak.

“Is Rose all right?” was the first question out of his mouth. Fearing that the reality would be too much for him, doctors offered only vague answers.

A crowd gathered for Rose McCloskey's Philadelphia funeral. (New York Daily News Archive)

Police sat by his bedside for days, hoping to drag something useful from the injured man’s incoherent comments. Even after he regained his senses and was ready to leave the hospital, nothing he said aided the investigation. Boyle remembered only that one moment he and Rose were sitting on a bench planning their future. Then he felt a tremendous blow to his head. After that, everything was blank.

Philadelphia police rounded up scores of possible suspects, including a cross-dressing rag picker, but all leads fizzled.

Then, in June, Barry told his ghost story and gave detectives one key detail — the abnormal height of the loiterer. Barry said he had waited so long because he feared reprisals from local hoodlums.

Police were familiar with a perpetual troublemaker of such stature — 6-foot-6, 150-pound Richard Bach, Jr., 23, known on the street as “Big Slim.” He was one of the many thugs terrorizing young women and couples in Fairmount Park.

After hours of grilling, Bach confessed and explained his action.

“When I see a couple necking in the park, it just sets me off my noodle, I guess,” Bach told detectives. “I can’t control myself. I just want the girl.”

Big Slim described how he spotted and then attacked the couple in a statement that he dictated to a stenographer. “I picked up a granite rock weighing about four or five pounds and threw it down and hit the man on the head.”

Then he grabbed Rose and hit her with his fist. She struggled and screamed until Bach picked up another rock and slammed it into her forehead. He kept hitting her until she was silent and then slit her throat.

Police brought him to the scene, where he exhibited no signs that he thought he had done anything wrong as he described the attack.

“Grinning Killer Re-enacts Rose McCloskey’s Murder,” noted a Daily News headline on June 16, 1933.

The New York Daily News on Friday, June 16, 1933.

Bach repudiated his confession when it was read in court during his trial, which started in July. “The police made me say what I did,” he insisted on the stand, saying they kicked the confession out of him.

His lawyers presented an alibi. At the time of the murder, his parents testified that Bach was home playing cards with his mother.

The jury found him guilty of first-degree murder with the penalty of death in the electric chair.

“A tough break for me,” was all the killer said when he heard the verdict.

After two unsuccessful appeals, Big Slim died in the chair on April 9, 1934. He had no last words and his last meal was a cup of coffee.

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Copyright © 2022, New York Daily News

Copyright © 2022, New York Daily News