Genevieve Benke was 87 years old when she died on Tuesday, April 18, 2006, in Westchester. According to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner, she died after sustaining blunt force trauma at 8117 Kenyon Ave. Her death was ruled a homicide, and it is listed as a Los Angeles Police Department case handled by the Pacific Division.
The Los Angeles Times Homicide Report recorded her death in a single entry drawn from coroner's records. It gave her age, described her as a white woman and placed her death in Westchester. It did not say how she was hurt, who found her, or whether detectives had identified anyone they wanted to question.
Her family's own words fill in a little more. A paid obituary published in the Los Angeles Times at the end of April 2006 said she was "Born Genevieve Patrylo in New York City on February 12, 1919," and that she "Passed away on April 18, 2006." It described her as "A woman more loved by those who knew her than she could ever know," and said she was survived by three sons, Paul, Jack and David, along with other family members. The parts of the obituary that could be read for this story did not mention how she died.
Property records list the house at 8117 Kenyon Ave. as held by a living trust in her name, which suggests that she was hurt in or near her own home. She had been born in New York just after the end of the First World War, and by the time of her death she appears to have been living in a quiet residential part of Los Angeles, far from the city where her life began.
The death of an 87-year-old woman from blunt force trauma at her own address raises questions that the public record does not answer. It is not known whether someone entered the home, whether she was attacked by a person she knew, or whether she was hurt in some other way that the coroner later found to be a homicide. No suspect, motive or description of what happened was ever released.
Westchester is a neighborhood on the Westside of Los Angeles, just north of Los Angeles International Airport. It is home to Loyola Marymount University and is known for its tree-lined streets of single-family houses, many of them built in the years after World War II. It is the kind of settled, family neighborhood where older residents often live in the same houses for decades and where neighbors notice when something is out of place.
Los Angeles still recorded roughly 480 to 520 homicides a year in the mid-2000s, and many of those killings were never solved.
No arrest, criminal charge or court case connected to the death of Genevieve Benke could be found in news archives or public records. More than 19 years later, there is no public sign that anyone has been held responsible. Anyone who lived near the 8100 block of Kenyon Avenue in Westchester in April 2006, or who knew Genevieve and the people who visited her home, may hold information that could help. Even a small detail, such as a name overheard, a vehicle seen nearby or a conversation remembered, can help detectives move a case forward. Anyone with information can call the Los Angeles Police Department at 877-527-3247 or leave an anonymous tip with Crime Stoppers at 800-222-TIPS.
