Quick thinking and a resilient nature from a fierce young woman led investigators straight to a killer.
Adele Kohr, a nurse in her early 20s, was driving home to Long Island on July 20th, 1970. She’d just gotten off work from the Suffolk State School in Melville. She was tired, she was still wearing her uniform, and she wanted to go home. But there was a problem.
Adele noticed a car tailgating her in her rearview mirror. She sped up, they sped up. She slowed down, they slowed down. She changed lanes, they changed lanes. She couldn’t shake them off of her, and she knew that danger was imminent.
Thinking quickly, Adele grabbed a notebook and a pen and started taking notes, driving with one hand. The notes read, in part: “A man in a car pulled alongside me… he wants me to stop… he is following me in the same lane and I can’t pull away… doing sixty-five..”
She wrote other notes, including a description of the man, the car, and part of his licence plate number. She wrote that he had a beard, glasses, was wearing a blue shirt, and he looked like a hippie. The last thing that she wrote down was that he was wearing dark pants. Just two words on a page: “dark pants”.
Adele was then run off the road. The man in the car had pulled in front of her and blocked her in.
Around midnight, Adele’s car was found on the side of the road by a patrol officer. The engine was still running and the headlights were on. The driver’s side window was smashed in. The officer also found the notebook, still fully intact, on the passenger seat. Adele’s attacker either ignored it, or hadn’t noticed it.
As the officer was calling in to the station about the abandoned vehicle, Adele’s father was in the process of filing a missing person’s report for his daughter. She hadn’t come home from work, which was highly unusual, and he was terrified. He was assured that there would be an innocent explanation. Those assurances would prove false.
The following day, children playing near some woods found Adele’s body. She’d been brutally beaten, strangled, and raped. In one final act of sheer inhuman cruelty, Adele’s attacker ran her over with his car. She was identified by jewellery that Adele’s parents recognized as belonging to her.
With Adele’s notes in hand, investigators got to work. Adele’s final words to the world would lead directly to her killer, and bring him to justice.
With a detailed description of the make and model of the vehicle that had run Adele off the road, investigators gathered a list of vehicle owners who matched the description. One by one, they eliminated suspect after suspect. Until they got to the Meyers. Mrs. Meyer owned the vehicle – a green Pontiac Tempest. Robert Meyer, her husband, had access to the car. Investigators were flabbergasted – Robert Meyer was exactly as Adele had described him.
Investigators hadn’t even made it to the police station with Meyer before he admitted that he was “very, very sick” and that he needed help. After that, he easily confessed to the crime.
Investigators weren’t satisfied – they wanted to know what had led to this vicious and inhuman attack on Adele. It didn’t take long for them to find that Meyer had previous convictions for attacks on women, and that he had a lengthy history of violence against women.
Investigators soon discovered that a few weeks prior to the attack on Adele, Meyer had kidnapped, robbed, and raped a young woman around the same age.
In due course, Robert Meyer was charged with, and stood trial for, murder, kidnapping, rape, sodomy, and robbery. He tried to plead a defence of temporary insanity. The jury didn’t buy it for a minute.
Robert Meyer was subsequently convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to 25 years to life imprisonment.
Had it not been for Adele’s quick thinking and survival instincts, her last words to the world may never have given investigators the information they needed to find her killer.
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Sources:
The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes – Robin Odell
Victim Describes Her Slayer in Note – The New York Times archive
Words to die by – Max Haines – The News (New Glasgow) (I don’t have a link, but if you google “Adele Kohr Murder”, this will lead you to a PressReader link that, for whatever reason, I cannot save.)