Jane Durrua

Case background and investigation

Jane Durrua was a 13-year-old girl from Keansburg, in Monmouth County, New Jersey. She disappeared on the evening of November 4, 1968. According to the case summary published by Murderpedia, she had been making her way home and took a shortcut across a grassy field beside railroad tracks.

Her body was found the following morning in a field in the neighboring township of Middletown. She had been sexually assaulted and had died from blows to the head, according to the same account. The investigation at the time did not lead to an arrest, and the case went unsolved for decades.

When the evidence was later re-examined with DNA testing, the first result led investigators in the wrong direction. Murderpedia reports that another man was arrested in error because of a mix-up in the handling of DNA evidence, a mistake attributed to the Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office. That man was not responsible for the crime.

Further testing pointed to Robert Zarinsky, who was then a New Jersey state prisoner. Zarinsky had been convicted in 1975 of murdering Rosemary Calandriello, a 17-year-old from Atlantic Highlands who vanished on August 25, 1969 and whose body has never been found, and he was serving a life sentence for that crime. According to published accounts, genetic material recovered from Durrua's clothing matched his profile. On March 11, 2008, a grand jury indicted him for her murder.

The charge was never tested in court. Zarinsky died on November 28, 2008, at South Woods State Prison in Bridgeton, at the age of 68, before a trial could be held. Because he was not tried, he was never convicted of killing Jane Durrua, and the indictment ended with his death.

Zarinsky has been connected by investigators to other crimes. In 2001 a jury acquitted him of the 1958 murder of Rahway police officer Charles Bernoskie. In February 2016, WABC-TV reported that authorities had announced DNA evidence linking him to the 1965 killing of Mary Agnes Klinsky, an 18-year-old whose body was found beside the Garden State Parkway; that finding also came after his death and did not result in a prosecution. He had additionally been regarded as a suspect in several other killings of young women in New Jersey between 1969 and 1974, according to Wikipedia's summary, but was not charged in those cases. The 2008 indictment, returned forty years after Jane Durrua's death, is the closest her case came to a formal resolution.