HILLSDALE, N.J.—This week we go back to summer 1930, when the people of Hillsdale were as frustrated as they were frightened. For six weeks the borough was plagued by a Peeping Tom, an elusive drifter whose demented acts escalated from peering in windows to attacking children. As quickly as the man would appear, he would slink away into the darkness. All summer long he evaded local law enforcement and left the citizens of Hillsdale afraid to open their windows. This is the story as it unfolded 95 years ago.
Police might have thought it was a simple misunderstanding when the first report came in during June from a resident in the Hillsdale Manor section. A caller said that an unknown man was in his yard. When the intruder was spotted, he ran across the street and the homeowner distinctly saw him silhouetted against the headlights of an approaching automobile before he ran into the shadows.
A second call came in from one of Hillsdale’s most well-known citizens. Seventy-year-old Mrs. Helen Riley lived in a beautiful Victorian mansion named Brookside Pines at the corner of Hillsdale Avenue and Patterson Street. At around 2:30 a.m., she heard a person on top of the porch roof, outside a second floor window.
The next evening at about midnight, Alton Kinmonth of Central Avenue heard someone moving through the bushes beneath an open window of his home.
In the weeks that followed, reports steadily flowed in through the phone line in the police booth. Confining his crimes to the central and northeastern parts of Hillsdale, the prowler was targeting houses that had a room with the lights on, the shade up, and usually a woman alone inside. Police determined that they had a thrill-seeking Peeping Tom on their hands.
On Sunday, June 22, a young woman sitting on the back porch of the Lorentz home on Conklin Avenue heard footsteps. She looked up to see the figure of a man stepping through the bushes in the backyard. He tiptoed to the side of the house and peered through the windows before disappearing.
Even the home of a police officer was targeted. Mrs. John Wolfangle, the wife of a Hillsdale patrolman, was alarmed by the rustling of a person outside her window as she was reading. She quickly closed the window and pulled down the shade, and then woke her husband, who was asleep upstairs. As on the previous occasions, the prowler had disappeared.
By the middle of July, at least a dozen residents of Hillsdale reported visits from the Peeping Tom. The prowler always seemed to slip into the shadows and fade away like a phantom before police could find him. Having eluded capture for weeks, the encounters became more brazen.
Over on Conklin Avenue, Mrs. Harry Pause was busy in her kitchen shortly before 10 o’clock when she was startled by two loud raps on the windowpane. Thinking it must be a neighbor, she went to the window and raised the shade fully, illuminating the garden outside. She saw the figure of a man slink past an apple tree and move through the bushes.
The situation continued to escalate and the perpetrator began to target children. On July 13, Nettie Gilbert of Washington Avenue reported to police that a strange man had followed her 12-year-old daughter while she was walking home. Days later, the man threatened a boy at the corner of Washington and Magnolia avenues, shook another boy at Conklin and Magnolia while shouting profane language at him, and then attacked a third near the Pascack Brook. The boys described him as a tall individual, middle-aged, with stooped shoulders, a mustache, and wearing a slouched hat.
Police believed the man might have been sleeping in an abandoned house on Piermont Avenue, but they never caught him there. A woman who lived across the street from the vacant home said one night she was walking past and heard the sound of a cat crying from inside. She looked through a window and saw the figure of a man lying on one of the beds that had been left behind by the last tenant. Police investigated the house and found that all the doors were unlocked and there were signs that someone had recently been there.
On Friday evening, July 25, Police Lt. William F. Bulach, Patrolman Frank Stoeckel, a newspaper reporter, and other citizens rushed to the home of John Humbert on Wilts Avenue. A man had been looking through the window and knocking on the door while two daughters were home alone.
Mr. and Mrs. Humbert were out for a drive when their daughters, through an open window, heard footsteps outside in the driveway. (At this point readers might be questioning why anyone would still have their windows open while a seemingly deranged prowler was at large. This writer can only surmise that it had to do with the July heat in an era before homes had air conditioning.) The sound of the footsteps suddenly went quiet, and then there was a knock at the door. Fourteen-year-old Doris, the older daughter, looked out the window and saw a man standing outside in the darkness, peering through the window at her.
The following night, Lt. Bulach was on patrol in the section of Hillsdale most visited by the perpetrator. Finding the streets quiet, he returned to the police booth, only to receive a phone call immediately upon entering. It was from the neighborhood he had just left.
Mrs. William Conley of Piermont Avenue was alone on the lower floor of her home while her husband was putting their baby to bed upstairs. There was a knock on the door, followed by a man peering through the window. The man murmured something and then fled. The family dog started growling and Mr. Conley rushed downstairs as his wife screamed. He released the dog into the yard, and the animal took off running northeast from the house, through a vacant field and toward Hillsdale Manor, as through it were chasing someone.
Maybe that last episode was enough to convince the perpetrator to move to a different area, because the reports stopped there. After a while, the people of Hillsdale were once again able to open their windows without fear.