Zenovia Clegg, a 62-year-old Black woman, spent the last hours of her life moving through midtown Manhattan with a stranger she had only just met. Late on May 29, 1963, she approached Charles Terry on the street near Sixth Avenue and 43rd Street and asked him to show her the way to her hotel. She was described as small and elderly, walking with a limp and using a cane.
He agreed to accompany her, and along the way they stopped for drinks before ending up at the Hotel Woodstock, where they took the elevator to her room on the eleventh floor in the early morning darkness of May 30.
Inside the room, they continued drinking, sitting together on the bed. Clegg asked if he wanted to have sex, and he agreed, but he later said he could not perform. In his account to police, what followed was a burst of humiliation and rage: he said she mocked him, and he “blew top,” hitting her and then choking her. He told investigators he pressed his forearm into her throat and held it there for about five minutes until she stopped breathing, and when asked plainly if that meant she was dead, he answered yes. Afterward he passed out, and when he came to, he took property from the room—items later described as including jewelry and cash—and left the hotel by walking down the stairway as dawn approached.
Clegg’s death did not come to light immediately. Three days later, on June 2, a chambermaid finally realized something was terribly wrong and found her lying on the bed, not breathing. The grim detail that made the delay possible was that she had been seen in the same position on prior days without anyone recognizing she was dead. A medical examiner was called; the next day, June 3, an autopsy concluded she had been dead for roughly two to five days, and the cause of death was strangulation.
Police attention soon narrowed onto Terry. On the night of June 5, he was picked up at a Greenwich Village bar and taken to a station house. From there, the case pivoted on his confession: the record describes an initial oral confession to Detective LoCurto, followed by a longer, recorded statement taken by an assistant district attorney with a stenographer in the early morning hours. The same record also details property linked to the robbery aspect of the case, including a diamond pin appraised at $1,000, a pendant appraised at $300, a gold cigarette case, cash, and travelers checks bearing Clegg’s name—checks endorsed to another name in handwriting Terry admitted was his.
The prosecution moved forward with Terry as the central suspect and, ultimately, the only named perpetrator in the official account. After an 11-day jury trial in New York Supreme Court, New York County, he was convicted on November 1, 1963 of felony murder, treated as the equivalent of first-degree murder under the law applied in the case. A separate penalty phase followed, and on November 8, 1963 the jury chose the death penalty; he was sentenced to death on December 5, 1963, though the sentence was later commuted by the governor to life imprisonment. His conviction was affirmed on direct appeal by the New York Court of Appeals in 1965.
The killing rippled beyond New York because investigators and journalists placed it against the era’s wider fears about serial stranglings. Contemporary coverage later described Terry being grilled in connection with the “Boston Strangler” crimes after he confessed to Clegg’s killing, and later reporting revisited him as a convicted murderer and suspected serial killer whose known homicide in New York continued to be discussed alongside other unsolved cases.
