The Open Door at Midnight: The Brutal Unsolved Murder of Judith Ann Roberts

5/31/2026

July 6, 1954

The air in Miami was thick enough to drink, and palm tree fronds swayed sluggishly. Heat rose off the sidewalks in shimmering waves as six-year-old Judith Ann Roberts laughed in the cool, turquoise waters of the Venetian Pool in Coral Gables. Her three-year-old sister Betty splashed beside her. Their mother, Shirley, watched from the side, while grandparents Harry and Dora Rosenberg kept a careful eye. It was supposed to be paradise. The family visited every year to escape the grind of Baltimore, but this year it was supposed to be a place of healing.

Judith Ann had already endured more pain than most children twice her age. Born with a tumor in her throat, she had recently undergone surgery and faced another operation soon. Her father, 43-year-old James T. Roberts, a sharp-tongued union attorney and failed politician, wanted her to have one perfect summer before the next round of hospitals and scars.

But James carried his own shadows. The stress of representing the United Auto Workers, the sting of losing a Maryland state legislature race despite his fiery pro-union stance, and whispers about his wandering eye had worn him thin. Miami was meant to be his reset.

Accompanying the family was Dorothy Lawrence with her 3-year-old daughter. The young waitress was a friend of the Roberts, and he was representing her in a divorce suit being settled in Miami.

The kidnapping and murder of Judith Ann Roberts in 1954 shocked Miami

The Rosenbergs lived in a modest duplex at 1234 SW 13th Avenue. They had purchased the home after Harry Rosenberg retired from New York's garment district. It was a quiet Art Deco-lined street where neighbors still left doors unlocked, and children played until the streetlights buzzed on. That evening, after the pool, the family settled in front of their black-and-white television. By 9:30 p.m., the girls were in bed. Judith Ann on the living room couch near the front door and window. Betty was on a makeshift bed on the back porch.

James was still out. The doors remained unlocked for him. At 11 p.m., the last light clicked off.

Dora Rosenberg awoke around 12:30 a.m. when she heard a car speeding away. Around 1:00 a.m., she couldn’t shake the unease. She rose and padded through the darkened house. What she found would shatter her world forever.

The front door stood wide open. Judith Ann was gone.

Panic exploded. The family tore through the house and yard. Harry Rosenberg, still in pajamas, searched frantically. When he returned for his pants—always hung religiously on the bedpost—he found them crumpled on the living room floor near the door. And the family’s 1952 Oldsmobile, parked at the curb hours earlier, had vanished too.

Miami police responded quickly. Detective Irving Whitman, working the graveyard shift, immediately sensed something darker than a simple runaway. When he learned the missing girl’s father was a union leader and political figure, he called the FBI. Kidnapping for ransom seemed plausible.

Police and FBI agents searched the neighborhood and spread out across the city. A notice was sent out to all police on patrol to look for the girl wearing a white and red polka dot nightgown. Bloodhounds were brought in to aid in the search.

Soon, they discovered this was no ransom plot.

The funeral of Judith Ann Roberts c.1954

The Discovery

At dawn, Lt. Ford located the stolen Oldsmobile off Kirk Street in Coconut Grove, perched precariously on a sandy fill almost in Biscayne Bay. It was stuck in sand beside the bay-front street, and it was obvious the driver had tried desperately to leave but was unable to do so. The keys were tossed in the back seat. Footprints led from the car toward the water… and disappeared.

Only a smudged fingerprint would eventually be recovered from the car, and a pair of pants nearby, but since the fill was used as a dumping ground, police did not believe it was tied to the crime.

At 6:15 a.m., a fireman searching a nearby mangrove clump made the grim discovery.

Judith Ann Roberts lay among the roots, still in her white-and-red polka-dot nightgown (later reports said she was nude). Her head had been savagely beaten. A thin rope and a wash rag bound her hands behind her back. A handkerchief—later identified as one from Harry Rosenberg’s own pocket—gagged her. Another piece of cord was knotted around her neck. Her face was swollen and blackened, and her teeth loosened from blows to the mouth. There were bruises on her thighs and genitals, apparently inflicted with a tree branch in a crude attempt to suggest sexual assault.

She had not been raped, even though later reports would say she was sexually assaulted.

Dr. Ben Sheppard, the coroner, placed her time of death between 1:30 and 3:30 a.m.

The killer had taken her from the couch, used the family’s own car, and staged the scene with items taken from inside the house. Someone who knew the layout. Someone who knew where the keys were kept. Someone who knew which child slept where. This should have narrowed the list of suspects to a mere whisper, but it didn't.

(L) Harry Rosenberg (C) The Oldsmobile stuck in the sand (R) The Rosenbergs ' duplex c.1954

A City in Fear

Detective Whitman hoped to keep the grisly details a secret, but news soon leaked out. The murder made national and international headlines. Miami newspapers ran chilling warnings: “Lock Your Homes Before Retiring” and “Warn Your Children About Molesters.” Two hundred known sex offenders were rounded up and grilled. Tips flooded the police station. The FBI withdrew from the case, and acting Governor Charley Johns pledged unlimited resources.

Police believed they were looking for a sexual deviant. Detectives also considered that the kidnapper was a stranger, a burglar, or even a peeping Tom.

Yet promising leads evaporated. The mysterious “Man in White” seen near the body turned out to be a hospital orderly walking to work at Mercy Hospital.

Judith Ann was buried in a pink casket, covered with a half dozen wreaths of flowers. It was closed during the service but opened later. She was buried in Mt. Nebo Memorial Cemetery in Miami, Florida.

Suspicion began to coil inward—toward the people who knew Judith Ann best.

(L) Dorothy Lawrence (C) James Roberts with Shirley turning himself into Miami police (R) Shirley Roberts c.1954

The Family Under the Microscope

James T. Roberts returned home at 2:30 a.m. to face a parent's worst nightmare. He claimed threats had been made against him due to his union work. Investigators later discovered this was a lie. He was also broke after his failed political campaign. Had he staged a kidnapping for ransom money from his in-laws that spiraled into murder?

Worse, while his daughter was being killed, James had been bar-hopping across Miami with his female client, Dorothy Lawrence.

Detectives questioned Dorothy Lawrence about her relationship with Roberts. She verified his story, saying he had been with her except for 15 minutes. She told them that on the drive down from Baltimore to Florida, Mr. and Mrs. Roberts had argued about James' womanizing in front of her. After dropping off Mrs. Roberts and the girls at her parents', they had spent the day together. They had met with another attorney, who would take over her case, and then they had made the rounds of local nightclubs.

Dinner was at a restaurant on Biscayne Blvd, and then they went to the 1200 Bar at 1260 SW 8th Street, only 5 blocks from the Rosenbergs' duplex. They stayed there until 10 p.m. and then went to the Jungle Club. From there, they headed to the beach and to the Circus Bar, then to the Paddock Club. They left at about 1:45 a.m., and Roberts dropped off Dorothy Lawrence at the home of Muriel Press (1925-1988), Shirley Roberts' sister. Mrs. Press relayed the message from the police that his daughter was missing, and he raced to his in-laws' house.

The pressure was on when two months passed, and the police had not made an arrest. Promising leads led to dead ends.

Cherokee drifter Walter Yow was picked up in Marietta, Georgia, for passing a bad check. Under questioning, he confessed to killing Judith Ann. Yow, however, his story was full of inaccuracies, and he couldn't even remember being in Miami. He had a long criminal record, including convictions for assault on a female, larceny, and assault. He told police he was once held at the North Carolina hospital for the criminally insane in 1950. Police determined he had made it up to grab public attention.

(L) Betty Roberts with her grandmother Dora (R) Bloodhounds were brought in for the search, James Roberts c.1954

The Dade County State Attorney said that everyone in the family was under suspicion. In late September, the girl's father emerged as a main suspect.

C. Clark Wood, a private detective, told the state attorney that he had seen Roberts near the murder scene while he was following a couple unrelated to the case. Based on his statement, the grand jury charged Roberts with the murder of his daughter. Two other people, identified as John Doe and Mary Roe, were also indicted. Roberts surrendered and was driven back to Miami to stand trial. He was released on a $10,000 bond.

The case started to come apart when Dorothy Lawrence alleged prosecutors badgered and browbeat her into admitting she had seen a rope in Roberts' car the day of the murder. Two investigators with the State Attorney's office insisted she change her story, since "they knew Mr. Roberts had done it."

The private eye who testified he had seen Roberts at the Clover Club was found to be a liar since the club was closed on the night he claimed to have been there. He would later be charged with perjury.

Another eyewitness account was thrown out. The Florida Supreme Court ruled that Roberts' lie detector results could not be used. Three months later, the charges were dropped.

Then suspicion shifted to Harry Rosenberg. The driver’s seat of the Oldsmobile was pushed far forward—consistent with someone very short. Harry was under five feet tall. Had the grandfather tried to molest his granddaughter, panicked when she cried out, and then staged the scene? The theory had one fatal flaw: how did he get home without the car?

Police walked from where the body was dumped to the Rosenbergs' home and found that it could be done by taking some shortcuts, but Dora Rosenberg swore her husband had been asleep beside her all night long.

Harry Rosenberg complained that police made him a prime suspect because he had complained about their inability to find the culprit. He hired an investigator to gather evidence, but he never produced anything to lead to the killer.

Police never charged Rosenberg, but it cast a shadow over the rest of his life.

(L) Skeegie Cash murdered in 1938 (R) Roger Folwell murdered in 1950

Along with the story of Judith Ann's murder remaining unsolved, there were articles where psychiatrists were urging for molesters to be curbed.

Reference was made to the murder of 5-year-old James Bailey Cash Jr., taken from his home in Princeton in May 1938. He was found dead less than a mile away from his house. Franklin McCall, 21, was arrested, and he led police to where he killed the boy. He was planning to ask for ransom, but suffocated the boy to stop him from crying out. He had boarded with the Cash family and had aided in the search for the boy, knowing all along that Skeegie Cash, as he was known, was dead. McCall was executed in Florida’s electric chair in Raiford, Florida, in February 1939.

In 1950, Roger Folwell, 10, was taken from his home at 32 Pelican Isles. The body was found the next day near his home. He had been beaten to death with a hammer. Robert William Nelson, 33, was questioned. He had been arrested in Fort Lauderdale and convicted of committing an indecent act against a 9-year-old girl. He only got 30 days in jail for molesting the child. Psychiatrists who examined him noted that he had no history of bothering little boys, only females, and he had no assaultive tendencies; this was why he was bypassed when questioned about Roger Folwell's murder and released.

There were no new leads, and the case came to a standstill for almost a year.

Ten months later, a little girl came home and told her mother a man had annoyed her and the other children in the movie house. A Hollywood detective accompanied the girl and her mother to the theater, where she pointed the man out. It was Nelson. Under questioning, he admitted killing Roger Folwell.

Declared incompetent by two psychiatrists, Nelson was committed to the state hospital at Chattahoochee instead of facing a charge for first-degree murder.

In 1979, Roger Folwell's mother, Maxine, committed suicide by jumping from the balcony of her ninth-floor condominium at 1 Las Olas Circle. Her body struck a second-story balcony. She left a note saying she was too despondent to go on.

Roger's sister said her parents were never the same after the tragedy. They left for New York after their child was killed. Her father died in 1965, and asked to have his remains interred next to his son.

Upon the death of her mother, the one remaining member of the Folwell family discovered that the fate of her brother's killer was unknown. How long he stayed in the asylum, or whatever happened to him, became a mystery. Officials refused to give any information about Nelson. The state health department would only comment that he was not in the hospital any longer. Using privacy as an excuse, they would not say why or when he left the state hospital. She was barred from learning how soon he had been released, and indeed what price, if any, he had paid for his savage crime, and the destruction of her family's happiness.

In November 1953, Bruce Stranghagen, 8, was taken from his home in Ft Lauderdale and tortured by Winston H. Morse, 34, by being jabbed with needles. Surgeons removed needles from his heart and lung. The boy teetered at death's door but finally pulled through.

Morse came to South Florida to work as a second chef in the Las Olas Inn restaurant. Morse admitted to attacking four other boys in Massachusetts and being placed on probation. He was sentenced to 40 years for the sexual torture attack on the Stranghagen boy. His appeal to have his sentences run concurrently, which would have made him eligible for release, was denied in 1970. He died in 1995 at the age of 75.

There was good cause to fear deviants and molesters who roamed the streets of South Florida.

1234 SW 13th Avenue in 1954 and 2017

Decades of Ghosts

Three years after the murder of Judith Ann, Miami police called James and his wife, Shirley, in for more questioning. Three Florida officials traveled to Maryland and also spoke to Jimmy Roberts, Judith Ann's older half-brother, who was 17 when she was killed. They also questioned other people who lived in the Baltimore area. They were: Perl Wade, William Allred, Illa Allred, and Katherine Brennan. These were all friends of Dorothy Lawrence, who by then had moved to Louisiana.

James Roberts was finally exonerated, but he continued to be tortured by the death of his daughter. In 1958, he was found passed out drunk in his car in front of the Turf Bar at Biscayne Street and Ocean Drive. He told police he was visiting with his wife. She was with her parents, but he stayed at a hotel since he was estranged from his father-in-law.

In 1959, psychic Peter Hurkos offered his services to the Miami police regarding Judith Ann Roberts' murder. He claimed he could crack the case in two weeks, which turned out to be wrong.

In 1962, Robert Franklin Jones, a one-time carnival employee, confessed to killing Judith Ann. He took detectives to the site where the child's body was found, but he was declared insane, and the charges were dropped.

In 1972, a suspect was located in Arkansas. He was jailed on a lewd and lascivious behavior charge. In his dresser drawer was a newspaper clipping for the original story about Judith Ann. The newspaper snippet placed him in Miami at the time of the murder. The suspect fled either to Texas or Missouri, but with only a minor sex charge, authorities could not arrange for extradition back to Arkansas.

Many years later, Warren G. Holmes, a police sergeant in charge of the Miami Police Department's lie detector bureau, theorized Judith Ann's killer was a 16-year-old boy who was picked up in the hours following the murder. He was released after a lengthy questioning.

Holmes said he had known the teenager while he worked as a beat cop in Miami's red light district during the 1950s. The teenager was homeless and slept wherever he could in the area. On the night of the murder, the teenager was found sleeping behind a drugstore at Coral Way and SW 13th Avenue, just blocks from the Rosenberg house. He admitted to peering into the Rosenbergs ' window, but only since he was looking for a place to sleep.

Strangely, during the initial investigation into the child's murder, Dora Rosenberg believed someone had seen Judith Ann dancing naked in the living room before going to take a bath, which is what had triggered the kidnapping.

This same individual was arrested in February, 1953 on the complaint of an 8-year-old boy who said he was forced at knifepoint to engage in unnatural acts with the older boy. He said it was the second incident involving the 19-year-old. He pled guilty and was given a suspended sentence on the promise of his parents to seek psychiatric treatment for him.

In 1972, the teenager's wife called the police, stating her husband confessed during a violent argument that he had killed Judith Ann. He was now 34, and she said he was "hung up" about very young girls, and he was short, which fit in with the placement of the Oldsmobile's seat. At that time, he was in a Texas prison and had racked up an extensive criminal past. She said he had sexually molested their 10-year-old daughter. She submitted to a lie-detector test, and she passed, but when Holmes gave the test to the man, he registered no emotion to the questions. It was as if he had ice-water in his veins. He had all the traits of being a psychopath, but this was not enough to bring him up on charges. This led to the reopening of the case 18 years after it occurred, but it remained as cold as ever. This man's identity has never been released.

Judith Ann's grave, flanked by her grandparents in Mt. Nebo Cemetery c.2017

By 2006, when Miami PD’s Cold Case Squad reopened the files, nearly everyone involved was dead. Leads, old and new, yielded nothing.

It's believed the case was hampered by the change in State Attorneys. Brautigan was first in charge, and later, a young Dick Gerstein took over.

Dora Rosenberg died in 1960, telling friends she couldn’t pass until the killer of her granddaughter was caught. She never got her wish. Harry Rosenberg lived until 1969, forever under a cloud.

James and Shirley Roberts divorced. He married Catherine Bernahrd and died in 1980. Shirley Roberts disappeared. Perhaps it was heartbreak that made her seek the solace of anonymity. When she married James Roberts in 1946, she was a young widow. Her first husband, Sgt. Leon Berger, a member of an air corps fighter control squadron, disappeared over the Mediterranean in 1943. The couple had been married for only 3 months.

Judith Ann's brother James died in 1999. The whereabouts and fate of her sister, Betty, are unknown.

Irving Whitman, the original case detective turned lawyer, died in 2015.

Judith Ann Roberts lies in a pink casket at Mt. Nebo Memorial Cemetery in Miami, flanked by her grandparents. The duplex on SW 13th Avenue still stands. On quiet summer nights, some say you can almost hear the splash of the Venetian Pool and the distant sound of a car speeding into the darkness.
The front door, long since replaced, once stood open. And the question remains: Who walked through it that night?