Memories of Staten Island's most baffling murder case (commentary)

Eight-year-old Melvin Dean Nimer, flanked by his brother, Gregory, (left) and his sister, Jennifer, was at the center of a baffling murder mystery that stunned the nation in 1958. (Advance photo)


A few hours past midnight on Sept. 2, 1958, Dr. Melvin Nimer and his wife, Lou Jean, were stabbed to death in their home at 242 Vanderbilt Ave. in Clifton on Staten Island's East Shore. The brutal murders left their three young children orphans and plunged the entire community of mostly young families into sheer terror. I remember the astonishing events particularly well because I was a teenager at the time, living with my mother, father and two sisters at 250 Vanderbilt Ave., a mere two doors from the Nimer home. I knew the couple's oldest child, 8-year-old Melvin Dean, who was called Dean by his parents, and Deanie by us kids. My youngest sister, Maureen, knew the small, thin, blonde-haired boy even better, because the two often played together for hours in his backyard.

Clifton, in those pre-Verrazano Bridge days, was a peaceful slice of Americana where crime was virtually nonexistent. The Nimers had rented the house at 242 Vanderbilt from our good friends, Dr. and Mrs. John Glotfelty. Dr. Nimer was working at the Marine Hospital at the corner of Vanderbilt Avenue and Bay Street. While my mother remembered him as rather aloof, she recalled that Lou Jean, whom she described as "really beautiful," would regularly join the other mothers in the neighborhood for afternoon get-togethers. Since the Nimers were devout Mormons, Lou Jean drank the grain beverage Postum instead of tea.

Startling news

Sept. 1, 1958, was Labor Day. With the sun about to set, our family was wrapping up a barbecue with some visiting family members. Dr. Nimer walked into our yard, asking if we had seen his younger son, Gregory, who had wandered away from their home.

It was an especially cool night for early September, which made for excellent sleeping. In the early hours of the following morning, I was startled out of a deep sleep by rapid knocks on my bedroom door. My father was standing in the hallway. "I think there's been a murder," he said, obviously shaken. Stunned, I followed him to my parents' bedroom and looked out the front window to an incomprehensible scene. Vanderbilt Avenue -- generally stone-cold quiet at that hour -- looked like Times Square. There were numerous police cars, mobile media units and an army of reporters rushing about. Police had cordoned off the area from the Nimer house to ours.

Detectives soon confirmed the startling news to us in our living room. Dr. Melvin and Lou Jean Nimer had been stabled to death in their home by a masked intruder. The perpetrator was at large, and the couple's three children, whose nearest relatives were in Utah, were at the home of next-door neighbors Grace and Fred Ezell.

Fearful nights

In the ensuing hours, we were interviewed by more detectives and fended off a bevy of persistent reporters. I spoke with my friends by phone that day, all of us confined to our homes by parental decree. Our serendipitous neighborhood had been plunged into a vice of dark foreboding. Like the rest of my family, I feared the darkness of the coming night. How were any of us going to sleep with a madman on the loose? Yes, a heavy police presence remained on the scene around the clock for several days, but, emotionally at least, that didn't lessen images of being hacked to death in our beds.

Approximately one week later, in the early evening, a detective gave us the news everybody had been waiting for. Not only was the case solved, but the perpetrator was re-enacting the murders in the home at that very moment. The startling development led to a media onslaught that overran that entire section of Vanderbilt Avenue. We, of course, had a clear view of the Nimer house from the front of our property.

The unthinkable

Suddenly, floodlights illuminated the front door and little Dean Nimer was escorted outside. I didn't immediately comprehend the import of what I was seeing. They couldn't possibly be saying that Dean was the murderer, could they? Quickly, though, as a cascade of flashbulbs assaulted the darkness and people gasped, the unfathomable proposition slammed into my brain. They were, indeed, saying just that.

The shocking revelation that Dean Nimer had confessed to killing his parents catapulted the already frenzied media interest in New York to torrid proportions across the country. Perhaps the worst of the ensuing craziness occurred when a television news team descended on our neighborhood and interviewed children, without their parents' knowledge or consent, asking whether Dean Nimer had wanted to start a "Kill Your Mother and Father Club."

Although Dean soon recanted his confession, and other facts emerged that strongly called it into question, almost everybody in our neighborhood believed that he was guilty. Although it was a convenient conclusion that allowed them to feel safe, it never made any sense to me.

Next week, I'll explain why Dean Nimer, far from being a monstrous parent-killer, was actually a cruelly-persecuted little kid.

Read part two next week. Email Daniel D. Leddy at Follow him on Twitter @LegalHotShots.