New York City in the mid-1970s was a metropolis teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, its streets rife with crime and danger. For a 15-year-old girl alone on those streets, survival was a precarious gamble. Karen Baxter, a slim, red-haired teenager who had run away from her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was one of thousands trying to navigate this perilous landscape. Her life, already fraught with uncertainty, ended violently in a transient hotel room, a story all too common in a city that often preyed on its most vulnerable.
On the night of Saturday, February 22, 1975, Karen’s struggle came to a brutal end inside the Hotel Belmore. Located at 61 Lexington Avenue, at the corner of East 25th Street, the hotel was known to police as a haunt for streetwalkers. At 10:00 p.m., a desk clerk checked Karen, a female, and a male client in for a short, four-hour room rental. The man was described as dark-skinned.
Just ten minutes later, at 10:10 p.m., the same man came back downstairs and dropped the key to Room 202 at the front desk before leaving.
When Karen didn't come down after a short while, the clerk went to check the room. At 10:20 p.m., he made a grim discovery. Karen was found murdered, lying face down on the bed. She was nude except for a single stocking and was partially covered by a bedsheet. The cause of death was strangulation; the killer had used her own necklace chain as the weapon. The speed and coldness of the act were shocking, even for a city hardened by violence. The entire encounter, from check-in to the discovery of her body, had lasted only twenty minutes.
The New York Police Department launched a homicide investigation. In March, they arrested a suspect: 30-year-old Reynold Stoddard of the Bronx. Stoddard, who worked at a bakery in Maspeth, Queens, and had no prior criminal record, was charged with Karen’s murder. His arrest came after another woman, a prostitute, reported that Stoddard had attempted to kill her in his car near the same hotel on March 3. She told detectives he had threatened her with a knife and a pistol before she managed to escape and note his license plate. A search of Stoddard's car, where he lived with his wife and two children, turned up an imitation gun.
Despite the initial charges, the case against Stoddard for Karen's murder quickly fell apart. On May 2, 1975, the murder charges were dropped. An assistant district attorney stated that while Stoddard's wife had provided an alibi, this was not the "prime factor" in the decision. The specifics of why the case was dismissed were not made public. Stoddard remained free on $1,500 bail for the separate attempted murder charge. With the collapse of the case against their only suspect, the investigation into Karen Baxter's murder stalled.
In the decades since, Karen’s case has grown cold, one of countless unsolved homicides from a turbulent era in New York City's history. While her name is sometimes listed by researchers in connection with other unsolved female strangulations from that period, and there is speculation about potential links to serial killers like Richard Cottingham who were active in the area, no official connection has ever been confirmed by the NYPD. Her story serves as a tragic footnote in the city's history, a reminder of the estimated 40,000 sex workers, many of them teenagers like Karen, who worked the city's streets in the 1970s.
Little is publicly known about Karen’s life in Cambridge or the circumstances that led her to run away. Records indicate she had a younger sister, Liz, who was 12 at the time of Karen's death. The pain and loss her family endured have remained private. As of the latest available information from May 1975, the investigation into Karen Baxter's murder is continuing, though it is now considered an unsolved cold case by the New York Police Department.
