Starr Faithfull

Case background and investigation

Starr Faithfull was born Starr Wyman in Evanston, Illinois, in January 1906, and grew up largely in New Jersey and Massachusetts. After her mother remarried in 1925, she and her sister took the surname of their stepfather, Stanley Faithfull, and the family settled in Greenwich Village in Manhattan. According to the New England Historical Society, she made repeated ocean voyages in the late 1920s and was known for slipping aboard liners during sailing-day parties.

On the morning of June 5, 1931, Faithfull left the family apartment at 12 St. Luke's Place. At about 6:30 a.m. on June 8, a beachcomber found her body on the sand at Long Beach, on the south shore of Long Island. She was wearing a dress and stockings; the rest of her outer clothing and accessories were missing. An autopsy concluded that she had drowned; it also recorded numerous bruises and a substantial quantity of a barbiturate sedative in her system.

Nassau County District Attorney Elvin Edwards treated the death as a probable homicide and halted the planned cremation so that a grand jury could examine the case. A search of the family's apartment turned up Faithfull's diary, which she called her "Mem Book." Its entries referred to men by initials, among them "AJP," which the press connected to Andrew J. Peters, a former mayor of Boston and a relative of her mother by marriage.

Her stepfather told investigators that Peters had sexually abused Faithfull beginning when she was about 11, and he produced records of a 1927 settlement under which Peters had paid the family $20,000. Peters publicly denied any improper conduct. He was questioned during the investigation but was never charged with any offense, and no evidence was presented tying him to her death.

The homicide theory was weakened later in June 1931 when Dr. George Jameson-Carr, a ship's surgeon, turned over letters Faithfull had written to him in the days before she disappeared, in which she spoke of ending her life. Stanley Faithfull maintained that the letters were forged and that his stepdaughter had been murdered. The grand jury proceedings ended without indictments.

Investigators continued to look at the case until December 1931, when a brief inquest was held and the jury reached no finding on whether the death was a homicide, a suicide or an accident. The case has never been officially resolved. It inspired several books, including John O'Hara's 1935 novel BUtterfield 8.