Murder of Nancy Titterton

On April 10, 1936, this building at twenty-two Beekman Place became the site of a landmark investigation in forensic history. Nancy Titterton, an aspiring novelist, was discovered dead in her apartment by a furniture repairman who had been at the home the day before to pick up a sofa for reupholstering. Police arrived to find the scene eerily sparse, with almost no physical evidence left behind. The killer had meticulously cleaned the area, leaving only a single horsehair on a bedspread and a short length of cord discovered hidden beneath the victim in the bathtub. Investigators eventually traced that specific type of cord to a manufacturer in Pennsylvania that supplied a local upholstery shop. By matching the horsehair found at the crime scene to the stuffing in the sofa they had recently repaired, detectives linked the murder directly to an assistant at that shop named John Fiorenza. The case remains a textbook example of early forensic science, as police successfully broke the perpetrator's denials in just seven days by methodically connecting these two small, seemingly insignificant clues to his workplace and his past criminal record.