Murder at Morse’s pond
WELLESLEY, MASS. To live in Wellesley, Massachusetts a venerable Boston suburb, home to an exclusive women’s college is to have arrived in taste and understated style.
Tom Farmer, Boston Herald reporter: It’s an affluent suburb one of the top in the state. It’s a great place to raise your kids. Great schools. You’ve got a very well educated community. A number of the people that are professionals or live in the community are college educated, certainly very well to do.
But what happened in the woods by quiet Morse’s Pond that day wasn’t the shivers of a good fireside read, it was the stomach churning real thing,
stores that sell cards against humanity, a blunt and brutal killing, a bludgeoning and stabbing, of one of the town’s respected citizens.
On Halloween, no less.
Farmer: It was shocking that this could happen in their community.
When he got the tip, newspaper reporter Tom Farmer of The Boston Herald set aside the day’s big assignment,
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Dennis Murphy, Dateline correspondent: Murder in Wellesley. What’s that mean to you?
Farmer: a bell goes off in your head because you pay immediate attention. We don’t get murders there.
Wellesley Police Chief Terry Cunningham was visiting out of state when he got the call from his department.
Chief Terry Cunningham, Wellesley Police: They tell me that there appears to have been a homicide in one of our recreational park area at the pond.
If you were one of the regular dog walkers who used the 46 acres of the park, you probably would have had a nodding familiarity with the couple in their 50s, the people with the German Shepherds.
You might not have known that the man, Dirk Greineder, was a distinguished doctor, affiliated with Harvard, an expert on allergies.
May, his wife of 31 years, was a nurse working on an advanced degree in health care.
Farmer: She had worked for Dirk as a nurse, but mostly was a stay at home mom, especially when the kids were growing up.
The Greineder’s three children, two girls and a boy, were all Ivy League graduates, two of them following in their father’s footsteps as doctors.
They shone as athletes.
Farmer: Outstanding swimmers,
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Murphy: So, in the social cache of Wellesley, they really had the trifecta advanced degrees, accomplished Harvard doctor, three kids. Yale, Yale, Yale.
Farmer: An American flag flying over the top of the house. I mean, what else could you ask for?
The Greineders, their friends remembered, were a close, almost inseparable couple, devoted to their children.
They lived in this unpretentious house just a few blocks from Morse’s Pond.
As they’d done on so many mornings, Dirk and May Greineder took the dog for a walk down this pleasant pine forest trail. But on this day, a crisp Sunday morning, one of them would have only a few minutes left to live.
Wellesley Detective Jill McDermott was dispatched to what would turn out to be the biggest case of her young career.
Det. Jill McDermott: I was in my office here at the police station and I had my radio on when I first started responding. A woman was hurt. A woman had hurt her back down at Morse’s pond.
But the woman found lying just off the trail wasn’t a back injury: May Greineder was dead. Her head battered with a blunt instrument,
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Farmer: She was nearly decapitated. She was cut with a knife from here, all the way around uh, gaping two, two and a half inch wound.