JUSTICE STORY: Mystery of NYC’s ‘Red Circle Slayer’ who branded victims with lipstick

Richard Jarvis was never shocked anymore at what he’d find on his Sunday morning strolls through a patch of isolated woods off the Grand Central Parkway in Hollis Hills, Queens.

The area was popular for picnicking by day and petting parties at night, so the avid hiker was accustomed to the requisite rubbish of Saturday night revelry in the notorious lovers’ lane: Booze bottles, used prophylactics, the occasional ladies’ unmentionables left behind in a haze of liquor and lust.

But when Jarvis stumbled upon a car parked in a more desolate part of the woods on a brisk October morning in 1937, what he found was beyond shocking.

The passenger door was wide open, and as he came closer it became obvious the young couple in the front seat wasn’t just sleeping off a rough night.

Body of Lewis Weiss, second victim of the Red Circle Slayer, is removed from the murder car. (New York Daily News)

Slumped against the driver’s side window was a man, mouth agape and eyes slightly open, with twin trickles of dried blood on his right temple from two small-bore bullet holes.

Sprawled across the front seat was a woman, her legs hanging halfway out of the vehicle, her red velvet skirt hiked up to her thighs. She also took two bullets to the right temple — and more.

Her blouse was caked with blood, and police would later determine she had been stabbed seven times in the chest, likely with an ice pick, as she lay dead or dying.

Police and detectives converge on the coupe in the lovers’ lane oby Springfield Blvd., Queens, near Grand Central Parkway, where Lewis Weiss and Frances Hajek were slain. (New York Daily News/New York Daily News)

And in a final act of depravity, the killer had branded his victims.

Using the woman’s own lipstick, he’d drawn a blood-red circle on each of their foreheads. The twisted touch was clearly visible the next day in graphic photos of the bodies splashed across the front pages of the city’s papers.

The tabloids, of course, also came up with a catchy name for the unknown assailant — the “Red Circle Slayer” — as a legion of NYPD detectives scrambled to solve the Lipstick Murders case.

The victims were particularly sympathetic despite their meeting a ghastly end in what appeared to be a passionate tryst interrupted. Both were only children described by their respective parents as hard-working, serious-minded and devoted to each other.

He was Lewis Weiss, 20, of Queens Village, who worked as a steel company clerk in the Empire State Building while taking engineering courses at Cooper Union College downtown.

Murder victim Lewis Weiss in a high school photo.

She was Frances Hajek, 19, the pretty and popular daughter of Hungarian immigrants who worked at her family’s Jamaica Ave. bakery — they lived above the shop — and studied dress designing at Pratt Institute.

Childhood friends who had been seriously dating for over a year, Weiss and Hajek had openly discussed getting engaged. Their folks, in fact, figured the young couple had eloped when they failed to come home after what was supposed to be a routine Saturday night date of roller skating at a nearby rink.

New York Daily News front page of Monday, Oct. 4, 1937.

Investigators tracing their last steps for clues knew Weiss had picked Hajek up around 8:30 p.m. in his Ford coupe, and the pair had briefly gone skating and enjoyed a couple of beers before making a final, fatal stop for some innocent smooching in the dark woods.

Cops also agreed that despite the creepy scarlet circles making it seem like a budding serial killer was on the loose, the way he savagely hacked Hajek made them believe he already knew the bubbly brunette with no shortage of male admirers.

In this scenario, the killer — likely a scorned suitor — had been lurking in the dark with a .25 automatic as he waited for the young lovers to arrive at the familiar trysting spot.

Francis Hajek at her elementary school graduation.

It initially made sense, especially when Hajek’s friends told of a neighborhood youth who had been constantly “pestering” the winsome young woman by following her home and writing her bizarre, passionate poems.

But as that lead fizzled and the case continued to dominate the news, the investigation was suddenly hampered by too many weak suspects, false tips and discordant clues.

Cops followed up, then quickly discounted, several “witness” accounts, including that the couple was seen drinking with a trio of toughs or riding with a mysterious soldier in the back seat the night they were killed.

One young man, clearly disturbed, told cops he “might have” committed the murders. Another deranged tipster, a Harlem woman who described herself as a “carnival dancer,” told cops she actually witnessed the slayings. She claimed she was “picked up” by a stranger with a German accent who drove out to Queens, shot the couple, and ordered her to ditch the gun before dropping her off.

Frustrated police even started to consider the possibility the murders were the work of an infamous spree killer who had terrified New Yorkers seven years earlier.

In separate incidents in the summer of 1930, a man ambushed two couples parked in lovers’ lanes — one of them near the Red Circle site. But in both attacks the perpetrator fatally shot the men and spared the women, whom he then escorted safely to nearby bus stops.

Much like Son of Sam, who would likewise terrorize the city four decades later by preying on couples in cars, the killer gave himself a nickname — “3-X” — and taunted police with a series of notes before going into hiding.

The Return of 3-X theory failed to pan out, but cops finally caught a break in the Red Circle case when they hauled in a one-man crime wave named Walter Wiley, who had a long rap sheet that included burglary — and robbing couples necking in cars.

Wiley, an army deserter known to carry a gun and knife, lived five blocks from Hajek in Queens Village and had long “admired” her, friends said. He’d also been heard boasting to cronies about being behind the killings, at least according to cops.

Plus, he lied about his alibi for that night, claiming he was in another state when he was actually in the neighborhood.

But police just didn’t have enough to indict Wiley, who in 1938 was given a max sentence of 40 years in prison for unrelated robberies.

With the strongest and likeliest suspect out of the picture, the case of the Red Circle Slayer soon collapsed into itself and has remained one of New York’s more perplexing unsolved mysteries for more than 80 years.

Source: nydailynews.com