Graveyardbride

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Murder on Christmas Eve



On Christmas Eve of 1963, Chapel Hill was almost like a ghost town. University of North Carolina students had gone home for their holiday break more than a week earlier and many of the town’s residents were away visiting relatives. Sometime between 10 o’clock and noon that day, the most brutal murder in Chapel Hill history occurred. In a small apartment at 105 North Street, approximately one block from the police station, a young five-months-pregnant wife, was violently struck on the head with a large flashlight, which likely knocked her unconscious. Her attacker then stuffed a sock into her mouth, tightly knotted a scarf around her mouth and nose and forced a small pillow hard against her face until she went limp. The 32-year-old woman was not sexually assaulted and nothing was taken from the apartment. The killing probably took no more than five minutes.



The lady’s name was Lucille Beggs Rinaldi (above) and she had been married less than five months to Frank Joseph Rinaldi, who was working toward a PhD. in English at UNC. Later that day, he was charged with first degree murder and arrested. Over the course of the next two years, there would be two murder trials in the case. In the first, Rinaldi was convicted of murder and transported to Central Prison in Raleigh. In the second, he was found not guilty.



Lucille Rinaldi had hopes of a merry Christmas when she traveled from her home in Waterbury, Connecticut, to Chapel Hill to visit her estranged husband, from whom she had been separated since early September. She was the only daughter of a Waterbury police sergeant, attended St. Thomas School and church and was considered a great teacher by the Waterbury school superintendent. Rinaldi, also from a good family, had gone to the prestigious Taft School and then to Georgetown University. Lucille and Frank were married July 31, 1963, in Waterbury, but something – which Lucille refused to talk about – was seriously wrong with their relationship and she did not accompany her new husband when he returned to Chapel Hill. Throughout the month of August, the two wrote and talked by telephone and when she discovered she was pregnant, Lucille decided to attempt a reconciliation with her husband for the sake of their child and moved from Connecticut to North Carolina. In early September, she was hired as a teacher at the newly opened Guy B. Phillips Junior High School on Estes Drive. She was in her classroom the first day of school, but on the second, she failed to appear. Concerned, the superintendent discovered she had left Chapel Hill and returned to her parents’ home in Waterbury. When questioned, she said she had to leave because of domestic difficulties.



On the day of his wife’s murder, Rinaldi and his close “friend,” John Sipp, went Christmas shopping in nearby Durham and then returned to Chapel Hill to do some additional shopping. According to his statement, during the time Lucille was fighting for her life against an intruder, he was shopping on Franklin Street, which was no more than a few hundred feet from his home. In other words, Rinaldi could easily have slipped away for 10 minutes, hurried to his apartment, dispatched his wife and returned. A clerk at Rose’s 5 & 10 Cent Store recalled talking with Sipp that morning, but he appeared to be alone and she did not see Rinaldi. Rose’s was located almost directly in line with the Rinaldi home and the store had a back entrance, as did several others along the street. Following the murder, many had a hard time understanding why Rinaldi was out shopping on Christmas Eve with a male friend rather than with his wife, particularly if he was serious about trying to save their marriage as he claimed.



A few months prior to Lucille’s death, Sipp had sold Frank Rinaldi two life insurance policies. The policy on his wife was for $40,000 ($310,000 in today’s currency) and it contained a double indemnity clause in the case of accidental death. He also purchased a $10,000 policy on his own life, however, he stopped paying the premiums on his policy several weeks before his wife’s untimely death. At the same time, Rinaldi, a student with little money, borrowed $720 ($5,500 today) from the Bank of Chapel Hill and used some of the money to pay the premium on Lucille’s policy through the end of December. Even if he had not canceled the policy on himself, one might wonder why he would want Lucille and his child to collect only $10,000 ($77,000 in today’s currency) if he died accidently, while he would end up with $40,000 if his pregnant wife, who was two years younger, came to a tragic end. Additionally, investigators discovered that after purchasing the policies, Rinaldi’s letters to his wife became more “friendly” and he encouraged her to come to Chapel Hill for a visit during Christmas. Investigation also revealed that Rinaldi was kind to his wife the last three days of her life and surmised this was because he intended to kill her and didn’t want her to get mad and leave before he could do the deed. Some also wondered if Sipp knew about Rinaldi’s plans to kill Lucille.





In the house, where there was no evidence of forced entry, police discovered blood of Lucille’s type on the shirt and pants her husband had worn the day of the murder. They also found a large flashlight that was bent as if it had been used to strike a hard object, as well as a bloodstained pillow.



Even more damaging was the sworn testimony of Alfred Foushee, a local handyman who claimed Rinaldi (above) had offered him $500 to kill his wife while she was visiting during the Christmas holidays. When Foushee refused, Rinaldi then asked if he would be willing to find someone else to do the deed, adding that raping, strangling, choking or anything else the killer wanted to do was fine with him. According to Foshee, on the morning of Tuesday, December 24, he ran into Frank Rinaldi at Eastgate Hardware and Rinaldi told him: “It’s all over, Al, I did it.”



Frank Rinaldi was homosexual, something Lucille probably did not realize prior to their marriage. However, her husband’s homosexuality was more than likely the cause of the problems she refused to discuss. It was later revealed that Rinaldi was romantically involved with at least one man during his brief marriage and there’s a possibility Lucille found out about this liaison, which in 1963, would have been considered an abomination and something she would have been embarrassed to talk about.



Even after he was acquitted at his second trial, Lucille’s parents – who were more aware than anyone else of the serious problems that plagued the Rinaldi’s marriage – still believed their son-in-law was responsible for their daughter’s death.



Following his acquittal, Rinaldi made no attempt to discover the identity of his wife’s “real” killer and this is unusual for someone who has been falsely accused of murder. Instead, he returned to his parents’ home in Waterbury and eventually became an English professor at the Paier College of Art in Hamden, Connecticut. He died November 14, 2009, at the age of 80, and his obituary in the Waterbury Republican-American – which dwelt on his educational achievements and barely mentioned his late wife – unleashed a torrent of emotions in those who remembered Lucille Rinaldi and her brutal murder on Christmas Eve 46 years earlier. Clare Capuano of Southbury, Conn., Lucille’s former sister-in-law, said, “After his obit was in the paper, I thought justice was never served. It made me think he won’t get in the pearly gates.”



Henry A. Kogut of Naugatuck, who had dated Lucille when the two were in their 20s, was even less kind. “His obit bothered me,” he admitted. “I thought, that son-of-a-bitch murderer. I’m glad I outlived him. I might go and pee on his grave. I’m sure most people do not remember what happened. I remembered because as kids, Lucille and I were friends. Whenever I go by the cemetery where she is buried, I think about her.”



Even some of Rinaldi’s own relatives spoke unkindly of him. His niece, Diane Hawkins, whose parents and siblings have lived in the Daytona Beach area of Florida since 1971, said: “I have nothing good to say about Frank Rinaldi and neither will anyone else down here in Florida. My father (Paul Rinaldi) didn’t speak to him from 1986 until he died in 1998.”



Charly Mann, who has researched and studied the murder of Lucille Rinaldi, said: “If Frank Rinaldi is innocent, then for the only time I can discover in Chapel Hill history, someone randomly walked into a small student apartment with the intent of killing in broad daylight, someone they did not know. They had no other motive, and strangely, there was never a similar crime in Chapel Hill history.”



According to the NCADV (National Coalition Against Domestic Violence), nine out of 10 women who are murdered know their killer. In the case of Lucille Rinaldi, there was no burglary, no rape, i.e., absolutely no reason for a man (or woman) to enter her home, bash her over the head, stuff a sock in her mouth and smother her to death with a pillow. The only person who stood to gain from her death was her husband, Frank Rinaldi.



Author: Graveyardbride

Sources: “The Rinaldi Murder Case” by Charly Mann; Until Proven: A Mystery in 2 Parts by Nora Gaskin; Robyn Adams, The Republican-American, November 22, 2009; State of North Carolina v. Frank Joseph Rinaldi; and The Daily Tar Heel.

