THE HOUSE AFTER THE HOUSE
The fate of the house at 431 Hillside Avenue tells its own small story about how communities deal with places where terrible things have happened.
After the investigation was completed in 1972, the property was sold. The new owners acquired a large Victorian mansion in an otherwise ordinary Westfield neighborhood, and they lived there — or tried to. The history of the property was not secret; it was, by that point, locally well-known. Whether the owners found the history manageable or not, the house changed hands.
At some point, the structure burned. The fire’s origin was never definitively established as arson or as accidental. The investigation into the fire produced no conclusive answer. The building was gone.
In the years since, the lot has been redeveloped. The specific address on Hillside Avenue is occupied by something different now — a different structure on the same ground where the Victorian mansion once stood.
This is not unusual for sites associated with famous crimes. Some are preserved — turned into museums or maintained as historical sites. Many are simply redeveloped, absorbed back into the ordinary flow of property transactions and construction and renovation that marks how communities maintain and change their built environments.
The Westfield community was not obligated to preserve a structure associated with a particularly dark piece of local history. The house being gone does not erase what happened there — the documentation exists, the graves exist, the memories of people who knew the family exist. What is gone is the specific physical space where the events occurred.
For investigators, the loss of the structure was primarily relevant in the early years of the case — the crime scene could not be revisited once the house was gone. By the time the arrest occurred in 1989, the crime scene had long since ceased to be accessible, and the case relied on the documentation gathered in 1971 and 1972.