In the late spring of 1969, a sense of unease settled over the wooded communities of southern Connecticut. This feeling was tragically realized in the case of 10-year-old Dawn Cave, a White female from Bethany. On May 30, 1969, following a disagreement with her sister, Dawn left her home and walked out into a day from which she would never return. Her family and the local community were plunged into a state of anxious uncertainty as initial searches for the young girl yielded nothing.
For weeks, her absence was a painful, unanswered question.
The heartbreaking answer came later that summer. A young girl, out riding her horse in a hayfield about a mile from Dawn's home, made a grim discovery. There, in what appeared to be a makeshift grave circled with stones, lay Dawn's badly decomposed body. An autopsy would later reveal the brutal manner of her death: she had suffered a fractured skull, the result of being bludgeoned with a rock. Investigators noted that some of the stones near her body appeared to be stained with blood.
Dawn's murder was not an isolated incident, but rather one of a string of similar slayings of young girls in the New Haven area that year, creating a climate of fear. The victims were all killed in a similar fashion—blunt force trauma to the head with a rock—leading investigators to believe a serial killer was responsible.
In the years that followed, investigators began to focus on a man named Harold Meade, a gas station attendant and tow truck driver. Meade was already serving three life sentences for the 1970 murders of three individuals with special needs, whom he had also killed with a rock. A circumstantial case against Meade in the child murders began to form. An eyewitness claimed to have seen a man matching Meade's description dragging a girl, presumed to be Dawn, over a stone wall near where her body was found, returning later with blood on his hands. Another witness claimed Meade had a milk route that took him through the neighborhood of another young victim. It was also alleged that Meade confessed to the murders on multiple occasions, including to a state trooper while in prison.
Despite the witness statements and the chillingly similar method of operation in the murders he was convicted of, Harold Meade was never formally charged in the death of Dawn Cave or the other young girls. A plea deal in his other murder convictions stipulated that authorities could not charge him with any other killings. Meade himself publicly denied his involvement in the girls' deaths. He died in prison from an illness, taking any certain knowledge of his role in Dawn Cave's death with him. No arrests were ever made, and her case, along with the others, remains officially unsolved, a dark chapter in Connecticut's history.
