Exchanging pleasantries with the driver, George Goddard, Rose Haber stepped off the bus at the corner of North Euclid and Jackson Streets, in Pittsburgh’s East Liberty. After two years of working as a clerk at the J.C. McNulty Pharmacy, the end of the work day marked the beginning of her first paid vacation. She did not have big plans for her time off. It was her mother’s seventy-sixth birthday. The chance to spend time at home with her parents and her many siblings who lived nearby was vacation enough.

Though it would have been a short walk from McNulty’s on North Highland Avenue to home on North St. Clair Street, where Haber lived with her parents, she preferred the safety that the bus provided. Thirty-five years old, single, and caring for her elderly parents, Haber was not a risk taker.

It was a few minutes after 11pm on July 12, 1941. The stifling heat and humidity of recent days had broken and the night air was again cool and pleasant. The streets of the comfortable residential neighborhood were quiet. As the bus drove off and Haber started down the sidewalk, she heard a man running up from behind her. Turning to look at him, she was struck across the face with a heavy weapon. She fell, bleeding and screaming.

“a white man about five foot nine”

As he had on many prior occasions, the man fled back into the darkness from which he had emerged to the familiar sanctuary of his car and drove off.

Though badly injured, Haber had been able to see her attacker. So had nineteen-year old Ella Kennedy, a live-in housekeeper in the home of Herman and Rebecca Fineberg at 5749 Jackson St., who heard Haber scream and looked out a window overlooking the bus stop in time to see a man look up at her as he ran away.

The first person on the scene was Henry Mazer, who also heard Haber scream. He later told police that Haber, whom he described as alert and stable, told him that her attacker “had a straw hat on and was well-dressed” (Pittsburgh Press, July 14, 1941).

Mazer, who would go on to a distinguished career conducting symphony orchestras around the world, went in pursuit of the assailant. His girlfriend and future wife, Virginia Miller, who lived across the street from Haber, and another couple who happened by, Jerome and Patricia Kimball, assisted Haber in walking to a drugstore, still open, a block away. The store’s owner, Emanuel Fibus, called police, who drove Haber to nearby Shadyside Hospital, where she was admitted at 11:20pm.

The next day, Rose was able to talk in the hospital with her brother, James, and with police. Doctors reassured her that her injuries required only stitches. It was her conversation with police that produced the fullest description of her attacker. As the Press reported, “she told detectives that he was a white man about five feet nine, weighing 165 pounds and wearing light colored slacks, a white shirt and a sailor straw hat” (Pittsburgh Press, July 14, 1941). The accounts provided to police by Patricia Kimball and James Haber added that Haber said she was attacked from behind soon after getting off the bus.

Rose Haber died unexpectedly at 3:48pm on July 13, seventeen hours after her attack. Her close-knit family was devastated. The news of her attack had made her mother, Magdaline, hysterical and verging on collapse (Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, July 14, 1941). The news of her death was too much to bear. George Haber, Rose’s father, died six weeks later, on August 24.

The coroner’s report indicated that death resulted from “extra and intradural hemorrhage following fracture of skull due to being struck by a blunt instrument by a person unknown.” Doctors had failed to detect the internal bleeding. The fatal injuries were to the left side of her face from the eye to the ear and upwards. Her assault was now a murder.