It was a late evening in January 1969, and I was about to join Karen, who had gone to bed earlier, when I heard the newscast. With its opening words I realized something terrible had happened; the woman who had been murdered was a friend, Cathy Kalberer. She had been married to Jack, a former Grants Associate and a close, personal friend. On several occasions we had eaten dinner with them in their apartment or at our own house. We were surprised when they had broken up last summer.
Cathy had moved to the Spring Lake Apartments on Democracy Blvd. and Jack remained in the one they had at the Grosvenor Apartments in Bethesda, near the NIH campus. Apparently, Cathy had been brutally stabbed. I noted in my journal at the time: “I had to tell Karen about it – needless to say she (nor I) could sleep the rest of the night. Statistically I suppose everyone will come in contact with a violent death – but you never really believe that.” I certainly didn’t.
The next day, I spoke with Palmer Saunders, Jack’s boss, whom I knew. He had gone with Jack to identify the body. On the way there, they were concerned Cathy had committed suicide. Instead, they found she had been repeatedly stabbed and her body covered with knife marks. Although killed in her apartment, her body had been found in a car outside her building. It was thought that some assailant had followed behind her as she returned to her apartment from grocery shopping.
Several days later I met with Jack in his office. Even after their breakup, he still was deeply in love with Cathy, and remained horror-struck with the development of the reports about the incident. We spoke of our times together; nostalgia was only a partial remedy for the hurt. I was pleased I could provide a sounding board for his reflections.
The NIH and the surrounding Montgomery County were shaken by the event. Evidently, Cathy’s murder was only one in a series. About two weeks before her murder, a 14-year-old girl who had been visiting the Spring Lake Apartments had been killed in a similar manner, by stabbing. Shortly after Cathy’s death, a young FBI secretary in nearby Virginia had also been stabbed in her apartment building. The newspapers pointed out that all three were blonds. Everyone was now making certain to lock their doors and cars. Women were staying away from Montgomery Mall, which was near the Spring Lake buildings. The GA monthly gathering, previously scheduled for the social lounge in Jack’s apartment building, was, of course, cancelled. The deaths were general topics of conversation by NIH members for several weeks afterwards. The cases remained unsolved. The news-coverage was finally concluded because of another death.
On July 18, Mary Jo Kopechne died in a car accident near a bridge at Chappaquidick. The driver was Sen. Ted Kennedy. Again, Karen’s concerns became more personal than what we might have expected them to be. Mary Jo had been a close friend of Francie Callan, Karen’s sorority sister, who having recovered from her broken leg, returned to work at the Library of Congress, where she wrote the one-sentence summary for children’s books processed by the Library. Francie spoke to us of her own views about Mary Jo and the Senator.
But few stories, even those about murders and accidents, have long lives in Washington, D.C. Within days, on July 25, 1969, Neil A. Armstrong walked on the moon. That night, or 2:54 a.m. to be more exact, we had encouraged Deb and Ken to join us around the television in our downstairs family room to watch the dim outlines of human legs and feet as they touched a surface other than one found on our earth. It has become a more significant memory than those of deaths in Washington.