Sebastian Russo

Case background and investigation

Sebastian Russo was born in Riposto, Sicily, on November 15, 1924, according to his Wikipedia biography, and later settled in Baltimore, where he worked as a primary care physician. He practiced out of a rowhouse office on Harford Road in the Hamilton neighborhood of northeast Baltimore. Columnist Dan Rodricks, who has written about the case several times, describes him as an old-fashioned doctor who opened his office early in the morning, saw dozens of patients a day and still made house calls. Because he usually charged $5 or less for a visit, he was remembered after his death as the last of Baltimore's "$5 doctors."

On the evening of Friday, February 27, 1981, a neighbor heard a noise coming from the office and called police. According to the account summarized on Wikipedia, officers arrived some time after 9:30 p.m. and found Russo lying on his back with a single gunshot wound to the upper left chest. His keys were on the floor beside him and the door of a drug cabinet was open. Those details led Baltimore homicide detectives to suspect that the person responsible had been looking for drugs.

Patients who had been in the waiting room that evening gave investigators their best lead. They said a man had come into the office, left, then come back a few minutes later and waited about an hour to be seen. When the last of those witnesses left, the man and a woman were still in the office; it was not clear whether the two had arrived together. Rodricks reports that police circulated descriptions of a man in a green jacket and a woman in a tan coat, and that the two were believed to have left in a blue van. Neither person was ever identified.

The investigation was led by Sergeant Dick Ellwood of the Baltimore Police homicide unit. No arrest was made. According to Wikipedia, a reward fund set up for information about the killing went unclaimed, and part of the money was later used to help pay for a memorial clock erected in the doctor's honor in 1983.

More than four decades later the case has not been solved. Rodricks wrote in 2023 that it remains open but is not being actively investigated, and he published the Baltimore Police Department's homicide tip contacts for anyone with information. No suspect has ever been publicly named or charged in connection with Dr. Russo's death.