In the early morning hours of April 9, 1959, the city of Baltimore was once again gripped by fear as the body of 38-year-old Pearl Weiss, an African American woman, was discovered in an alleyway. Her life had been brutally taken; she had been strangled, the visible bruises on her neck and the bloodied state of her fingers a silent testament to the fierce struggle she had put up against her attacker. Adding a strange and unsettling detail to the scene, her shoes were missing, a possible signature of the perpetrator or an indication of a theft.
Pearl Weiss's murder was not an isolated incident but the third in a string of terrifyingly similar killings that had been plaguing the city. The pattern was chillingly clear: women were being attacked in the pre-dawn hours, their bodies left in alleys close to their homes. The press, sensing the presence of a serial offender, had already dubbed the unknown assailant 'The Dawn Strangler.' The first victim was Mae Hall, another 38-year-old African American woman, found strangled in a neighbor's yard on December 9, 1958. Just five days later, 57-year-old Lottie Kight, a white woman, was discovered strangled two doors from her own home.
The investigation into these heinous crimes seemed to be at a standstill until a breakthrough on April 21, 1959. Responding to a woman's screams in the early morning, Baltimore police officers apprehended a man lurking in an alley. A search of the man, who identified himself as 38-year-old Nathaniel Lipscomb, a laborer, revealed four pairs of women's underwear in his pockets. While Lipscomb admitted to stealing the undergarments from clotheslines, a more sinister connection to the recent murders was suspected. Further investigation into Lipscomb's past uncovered a prior arrest in 1951 in North Carolina for the murder of another woman, a crime to which he had confessed before recanting. This history, combined with the circumstances of his arrest, positioned him as a prime suspect in the slaying of Pearl Weiss and the other victims of the Dawn Strangler.
