The Case of Lauretta Wakelin

Who killed Lauretta Wakelin? That was the question on everyone’s lips in Melrose on June 1st, 1916. One hundred and five years later, it’s still an open question.

Lauretta was seven years old on that day. She lived with her family at 88 Dexter Road, right at the top of the street. She would walk down the hill to attend the Ripley School, which at that time was a little one-room wooden schoolhouse that is today a private residence at 29 Swains Pond Avenue. It was about a fifteen-minute walk. On the morning of June 1st, she forgot one of her textbooks, and her teacher sent her back home to retrieve it. That was the last time anyone saw her alive.

Searching the woods for her later that day, her father, Joseph, came upon her lifeless body, which had been mutilated. The cause of death was suffocation by forced ingestion of sawdust.

Melrose in 1916 was a much more violent community than it is today, with assaults and robberies committed at a rate that we would find alarming, but this murder was beyond anything the city had ever seen. It captured national headlines, and city and state police launched an all-out manhunt. A series of suspects were brought forward—a former resident of an insane asylum, a couple of runaway teenage boys from Melrose, a homeless Polish immigrant—but after questioning, all of them were released.

Exactly a year later, with all other leads exhausted, the police charged none other than Joseph and Sarah Wakelin, Lauretta’s parents, with the crime. Joseph was found guilty, but under questionable circumstances. He was only convicted of the lesser crime of manslaughter, and the chief evidence brought against him was a conversation overheard between him and his wife when they shared adjoining jail cells. Prosecutors alleged that Wakelin had strangled his child in a fit of rage, accidentally killing her, then moved the body and later pretended to discover it. Wakelin served only a short sentence, and lived the rest of his life in Malden.

A century later, a number of mysteries surround Lauretta Wakelin’s death. It remains one of the most horrific crimes in the city’s history.