Eugenia Borda, a 90-year-old female resident of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, died on July 19, 1983, inside the Kearsley Home at Christ Church Hospital, a nursing home where several deaths had begun to form a frightening pattern. What first might have been mistaken as another quiet death among vulnerable residents became something far darker when medical examiners found that Borda had been sexually assaulted and strangled.
Another resident, Mildred Alston, was found dead the same day and was also determined to have been sexually assaulted, with authorities saying she had been suffocated.
The discovery of Borda and Alston changed the direction of the investigation. Earlier deaths at the nursing home had not all been treated as homicides at first, but after the July 19 findings, investigators and medical examiners looked back at other residents who had died under suspicious circumstances. Court-ordered exhumations followed, and police later said four additional deaths were being treated as homicides after autopsies were completed. Those findings turned the case from a pair of suspicious deaths into a serial murder investigation centered on the nursing home itself.
The suspect was Anthony Joyner, a former kitchen worker at the Kearsley Home. He was arrested and held without bail after being charged in the deaths of Borda and Alston. Investigators believed the killer had access to the facility, and Joyner’s position at the home placed him close to the residents whose rooms were supposed to be safe. In August 1983, he was ordered to stand trial on rape and murder charges connected to Borda and Alston’s deaths.
As the case widened, prosecutors connected Joyner to six deaths at the nursing home. Authorities said the victims were sexually assaulted and killed in their private rooms, and additional charges followed after the exhumations. Joyner was also charged in connection with the rape of a 69-year-old woman in July 1982, a prior assault that police linked to the broader investigation.
Joyner went to trial in 1984. Prosecutors presented him as the man responsible for the killings of six elderly nursing home residents, including Borda. A jury convicted him of raping and killing the residents, but during the penalty phase, jurors could not agree on whether he should receive the death penalty. Because the jury deadlocked, he avoided execution and received life imprisonment.
In September 1985, Joyner was sentenced to six consecutive life terms for the slayings of the six residents. The sentence closed the criminal case with convictions and life imprisonment, but Borda’s death remained part of a larger institutional failure: a killing that occurred in a place built for care, where signs of violence against frail residents were not immediately understood for what they were.
