For nearly four decades, the brutal killing of a bright young woman in her Boston apartment remained a painful mystery, a cold case that refused to fade from the memory of her loved ones. Ellen Faith Rutchick, a 23-year-old Female, had moved to the city with dreams and ambitions, only to have her life violently cut short. A native of Saint Paul, Minnesota, and a 1970 graduate of the University of Minnesota, Ellen was building a life for herself in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood. She worked as a secretary at the Colonnade Hotel and was known for her warmth and kindness.
On the night of January 5, 1972, Ellen was attacked in her tenth-floor apartment on Beacon Street. After she didn't show up for work, concerned colleagues went to her home to check on her. They found the door slightly ajar and discovered a horrific scene inside. Ellen had been sexually assaulted and strangled to death with a stereo speaker cord. She was found on her sofa, wearing only a housecoat and a torn bra.
Neighbors later recalled hearing a scream on the night of the murder, but no one had called the police. The initial investigation yielded few leads, and for years, the case grew cold, leaving her family with unanswered questions and a profound sense of loss.
The perpetrator was a predator hiding in plain sight, a career criminal named Michael Eugene Sumpter. Born in 1947, Sumpter had a long history of crime, starting with a purse snatching at age 19. His offenses escalated over the years to include assault, battery, unarmed robbery, and multiple rapes. Sumpter was a serial killer responsible for the deaths of at least three women in the Boston area between 1969 and 1973, employing methods of strangulation and blunt force trauma. His other known murder victims were 23-year-old Harvard graduate student Jane Britton in 1969 and 24-year-old Mary Lee McClain in 1973.
Sumpter was in and out of prison for various crimes but was never a suspect in the murders during the initial investigations. In 1975, he was convicted for the rape of another woman and sentenced to 15 to 20 years in prison. He was paroled in 2000 and died of cancer on August 10, 2001, at the age of 53. At the time of his death, he had never been held accountable for the lives he had taken. Justice for Ellen Rutchick and his other victims seemed to have died with him.
Decades passed, but Ellen's family never gave up hope for answers. Their persistence was a key factor in the eventual resolution of the case. Hearing about advancements in forensic technology, the Rutchick family urged authorities to re-examine the evidence from Ellen's murder. In 2009, cold case investigators submitted biological evidence from the 1972 crime scene for DNA analysis. The results were entered into the FBI's Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS.
In February 2010, nearly 40 years after Ellen's death, investigators got the breakthrough they had been waiting for. The DNA profile from the crime scene was a match to Michael Eugene Sumpter, whose DNA was in the system from a prior felony conviction. Subsequent investigations also linked Sumpter's DNA to the murders of Jane Britton and Mary Lee McClain, confirming he was the serial killer who had terrorized Boston in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Though Sumpter could not be prosecuted, the DNA evidence definitively identified him as Ellen's killer, finally bringing a measure of closure to her family. The case is now considered solved, with the primary suspect deceased.
