Fishkill Jane Doe

By M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
​On March 20, 1980 Thomas Newman and Stanley O'Dell, maintenance workers, found a steamer trunk behind a dumpster at the Hudson View Apartments. Naturally they assumed someone wanted it to go out with the trash. Then they noticed blood on the outside.

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The "white thing with no head" would remain nameless for decades

The trunk was old, green and beat up with black trim and brass fittings. There were stickers on the outside for the French ocean liner Flandre and others from the Cunard Lines. It appeared the trunk had been tampered with because there was tape around the seams, and some of it had been pulled off. The men tried to lift it, but found it was too heavy. So they opened it, and inside was the nude body of a white, young woman with her head and hands missing.

Later Newman told newspapers he was having nightmares, he said, "I woke up in the middle of the night and I saw the white thing with no head."

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Police responded to the apartment complex located off Route 9D in Fishkill, New York, about 70 miles from Manhattan. 

Authorities searched the wooded area nearby for the missing body parts, but found nothing.

The corpse had been fitted into a space that measured 21 inches wide, 37 inches long, and 14 inches deep. Inside it was lined in blue fabric. 

​Troopers interviewed the occupants of the 500-plus apartment complex for any leads in the case. It was believed the trunk was left there between noon and 10 p.m. on March 18.

The body was originally examined by Dutchess County Medical Examiner Dr. John Supple, and then was autopsied by Dr. Francis McMahon at Vassar Hospital. It was estimated she was 5'3" to 5'6", weighed about 140 pounds and had dark body hair. She wore a size 12 or 14, had a 26 inch waist, wore a size 34B bra and had type O negative blood.

Her uterus exam indicated she wasn't pregnant, but had given birth at one time. The M.E. found no marks of violence on the body, however the head was amputated between C3 - C4 level, and the hands were amputated at the wrist joints. The head and hands were cut carefully, but not surgically. The body had been virtually drained of blood, and it was "very clean". She had small feet, about a size 4 or 5 which was unusual for a woman of that height. 

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Anne Papalardo-Blake identified as Fishkill Jane Doe, murdered in 1980

The trunk was traced to a Greenwich Village resident artist named June Leaf. She told police that she had lost track of the trunk in 1960. The stickers corresponded to when she had crossed from New York to Le Havre, France, and returned on the Cunard Line in the 1950s.

The police followed many leads, and they tried to match the corpse to any missing women reports from the eastern United States. 

Without fingerprints or teeth to compare, the limited technology at that time did not permit any identification to be made of the remains, which is what the killer intended when they mutilated the body. However it was inevitable the body would be found. One could interpret it as the killer wanted the dead woman to be found, he was lazy or had run out of time in which to dispose of the body.

The case became cold, and she became known as Dutchess County Jane Doe or Fishkill Jane Doe.

During those years there were similar murders of other women.

In April, 1976 a woman's body, missing the head and one or both hands was found floating in Greenwood Lake in Warwick, Orange County, New York.

Three months before Fishkill Jane Doe was found, firemen were called to a fire at the Travel Inn Motel on the West Side (Manhattan).

A fireman carried a body outside and set it down ready to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, then he realized that would be impossible because the body had no head. The hands were also missing.

A second corpse was found as well, also missing the hands and the head.

The women were believed to be in their late teens or early twenties. The lower portions of the bodies had been doused with a flammable liquid, and set on fire by whoever killed them. 

Officials said the amputations had been done with surgical skill, perhaps using a scalpel.

Two sets of name brand jeans, blouses and platform shoes were found neatly piled in the bathtub, and a fur coat was next to one of the burning beds.

The room had been rented four days before by a man, who it was assumed to have been using an alias.

One was later identified as a prostitute from Trenton, New Jersey, but the murderer of both women remained unknown.

​In 2011, the Dutchess County Jane Doe case was entered into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs).

The FBI was able to obtain a DNA sample from the mutilated body and handed it over to a private lab, which created a DNA profile for the victim.

Her full name was Anna L. Papalardo-Blake, 44. She was reported missing on March 18, 1980. She worked as a receptionist at the Vidal Sassoon Salon at 160 5th Ave. in Manhattan, and was last seen at her place of employment about 6 p.m.

State police were able to positively identify the victim as Papalardo-Blake on May 26, 2022. However, the identification was not publicly announced until several months later.

No one has ever been arrested in connection to Papalardo's murder, because it seems the murderer was dead by the time she was identified.

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However, there is a coincidence which is hard to overlook.

Two years after the discovery of the mutilated body inside the green trunk, the case had grown cold and no one could have anticipated that the discovery on August 3, 1982 of a woman's body wrapped in a mattress would end up being connected the case of Fishkill Jane Doe.

The body had a telephone cord tied around the midsection, however she was toothless and appeared to have worn dentures which were missing. She had no urine in her bladder. There was a bruise on her leg that was inflicted 5 to 20 minutes before her death. The M.E. believed she was strangled to death at about 11 p.m. on August 1, 1982. There was no evidence of sexual assault.

Jerry Risco identified the body as that of his sister Maryann Blake. His suspicions against his brother-in-law John "Rick" Blake led police to the apartment the couple shared, where they confirmed through the use of fingerprints the dead woman was Maryann Blake. She had returned home three days before, after spending a week away with her mother due to an argument with her husband.

John "Rick" Blake, was the one time husband of Anne Papalardo-Blake. They had married in 1977, after her first husband of twenty years passed away.

Maryann lived with her husband and his 13-year-old daughter Tiffany. Occasionally her daughter, Gina, 17, would stay at their 5th floor apartment on Monroe Blvd. They had been married two years, and were known to quarrel frequently.

Blake was an electrical engineer, and a building maintenance supervisor for two Manhattan real estate management firms.

On August 3, police questioned Blake who told police he and his wife went to sleep at about 11 p.m. When he woke up the next morning she was gone. He told police he had taken the sheets they had slept on to Lee's Laundry Service. When the police obtained them, they discovered one of them was stained with urine and type O blood. 

Blake, 50, left his Long Beach apartment on August 9, with no forwarding address.  He faked his suicide, but police found him living in an East 65th Street apartment in Manhattan under another name. Residents of the apartment were his daughter Tiffany, his daughter's girlfriend and the girlfriend's mother. He had grown a beard. He told police he had left because he was being harassed by one of the detectives. He was arrested almost two months after his wife's body was discovered.

While awaiting trial Blake told Michael Nigro a cell mate in the Nassau County Jail, that he killed his wife after they had an argument. He kicked her in the leg and punched her in the face, knocking her dentures out of her mouth. He strangled her until she urinated in the bed. This was corroborated by the ME's report. He also told Nigro that if acquitted he would kill the prosecutor, and the two Nassau detectives who investigated the case.

During the trial, Anne Papalardo's family sought out prosecutors to learn of her whereabouts. She was last seen by her son on March 19, 1980. When Anne disappeared Rick Blake told police his wife left home after an argument and refused to tell him where she was going.

The couple had separated, but were in the process of reconciling. She disappeared the day she was to meet Blake to hunt for an apartment. His first wife died of cancer in 1967, and his second wife was living in Canada.

What was telling was that Blake never sought a divorce from Anne Papalardo before marrying Maryanne, which was six months after his third wife disappeared. It was as if he knew she was not alive anymore.

Four days after Papalardo disappeared, the family received a telegram from "Anne Blake," saying that "she was under great pressure and needed to get her head together. See you in a couple of weeks," the telegram concluded. But the family never believed the telegram was really from her. "She would never leave like that, without telling us where she was going," the son told police.

On March 23, 1984 Blake was convicted of murder in the second degree, and was sentenced to a term of imprisonment of 20 years to life. He appealed his conviction and was denied in 1987. After Blake filed several motions in state court he was prohibited in 1990 to attack his conviction on any ground raised in prior motions.

Rick Blake died in 2005, and it seems there is a good chance he killed his third wife.

In another strange twist, the  Green Acres Mall parking lot where Maryanne Blakes's body was found, was the same one where Diane Cusick was discovered in 1968. She was a victim of serial killer Richard Cottingham. The case was solved in 2022, when Cottingham confided to Dr. Peter Vronky that he frequented a drive-in movie theater next to Green Acres Mall. A DNA match was made to Cottingham. However in 1980, Cottingham was behind bars so he could not be Maryann Blake's killer.

Cottingham murdered and raped at least 18 young girls between 1967 and 1980. He earned the moniker of the New York Ripper, the Torso Killer and the Times Square Killer. In 2009, he told a journalist he had committed between 80 to 100 "perfect murders" of women in different parts of the United States. In 1966, he worked at Blue Cross with Rodney Alcala who would go on to become the Dating Game serial killer.

Sources - Poughkeepsie Journal, TheUnidentified.com

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