The grotesque torture and homicide of Catherine Blackburn haunted her household for many years.
The beloved 50-year-old Albany-area girl was displaying her condominium to potential renters on Sept. 13, 1964, when she was bludgeoned, raped and tortured with heated kitchen knives for hours — an assault so vicious that she died from blood loss moderately than the assaults on her physique.
Now, police have lastly recognized the cold-blooded monster behind the macabre homicide.
“Sixty-one years in the past, evil entered my aunt’s home. It modified our lives ceaselessly,” Sandra Carmichael, the slain girl’s niece, mentioned at a press convention Wednesday.
“We’ve prayed for at the present time,” Carmichael, now 81, advised reporters. “To all who made this attainable, might God bless all of you and will my aunt relaxation in peace.”
Albany police mentioned Joseph Nowakowski, a profession legal who died in 1998, was the person who viciously killed Blackburn.
His stays had been exhumed final month — and he was recognized because the killer because of a high-tech DNA match and a decided group of cops, educators and members of the family, cops mentioned.
“There isn’t any such factor as a chilly case,” Albany Police Chief Brendan Cox mentioned on the press convention, flanked by Blackburn’s nieces.
“Traumatic circumstances of murder, they take a toll on a household. I don’t know if we ever actually convey justice to a household,” Cox mentioned, “however the police division and the district legal professional’s workplace, we’re all the time going to face with the household, we’re all the time going to attempt to search justice and convey justice.”
The crime was one of many state’s most horrific.
Blackburn, the forewoman on the Mohawk Brush Firm, was attempting to lease an upstairs condominium at her Colonie Road residence — and hurriedly bought off the cellphone together with her sister on the day she died when a possible tenant arrived, in line with reviews.
Police mentioned that’s when the sadistic assault started.
Blackburn was struck behind the pinnacle and stabbed within the neck, then sexually molested whereas she was unconscious earlier than the killer heated up a number of steak knives on her fuel range, and burned “shapes” into her lips and chest, the Albany Occasions-Union reported.
“That morning, a co-worker of Catherine’s tried to choose her as much as go to work, and upon arriving at her residence and never receiving any acknowledgement of being residence, she contacted Catherine’s good, Sandy, to strive to determine what was occurring,” Cox mentioned Wednesday.
“Sandy and Catherine’s sister responded to the deal with and got here throughout a fairly grotesque scene,” the chief mentioned.
“In the end, medical personnel and police personnel had been summoned to the scene and that began a 61-year course of.”
Police had one title to work with tied to the case — Robert Broadhead, a reputation scribbled on a lease receipt.
However investigators remained stumped because the path ran chilly.
The break got here in 2018, when Albany PD forensics Det. Melissa Morrie took over the investigation — and reached out to Dr. Christina Lane, the pinnacle of the Chilly Case Evaluation Heart on the School of St. Rose.
Utilizing proof preserved from the decades-old case, police had been capable of determine Nowakowski as a possible suspect and, with a court docket order to exhume obtained by the district legal professional’s workplace, dug up his stays in September — 61 years to the week after Blackburn’s homicide.
It was a match.
“Do you consider in miracles?” Blackburn’s different niece, Mary Ann Simard, mentioned at Wednesday’s press convention.
“I stand earlier than you to say that our household acquired a miracle,” she mentioned. “After 61 years we now know who murdered Catherine Blackburn.”
Police mentioned Nowakowski, who was 37 on the time of Blackburn’s homicide, was a profession legal who had a string of housebreaking arrests and was jailed for assaulting a girl in Schenectady in 1973.
He was launched from state jail in 1980 and lived “underneath the radar” till his loss of life practically 20 years later.
“Our aunt Kate cherished her religion, household and mates. She was a daughter, sister, aunt and neighbor,” Simard mentioned Wednesday.
“Catherine Blackburn, you aren’t forgotten.”
