Murder at Morse's pond

Dennis Murphy Correspondent • Profile

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. 

In a town like this, murder is most often a safe encounter in the true-crime section of the little book store on Central Street.

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, 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, the crash of an Egypt Air jetliner, and started working the phones. 

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. I mean the type of kids that you hope your kids grow-up to be.

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, her chest stabbed, and her throat slashed.

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.

Murphy: Some evidence of a sexual violation?

Farmer: Her blouse had been pulled up, and her pants had been pulled down.

Detective McDermott listened to a shaken Dr. Greineder recount his last moments with his wife.

Det. McDermott: May had twinged her back and he said that may told him to go along with the dog down to the water and he said that’s what he did. He said that the dog ran back to May, and that’s when he found her lying in the path.    

Doctor Greineder said he checked his wife’s vital signs, and then tried to lift her, but she was too heavy.

So, he ran to the main road that cuts through the park.

Right there, he told police, someone caught his eye, someone running down the road just across from where he emerged. He went after the figure he thought he’d glimpsed.

Det. McDermott: He wanted to go get help and he thought he saw a runner on that pathway so he ran over there. 

But the runner was gone.  Back out on the main road, the doctor met the first of two people he asks for help, a dog walker, then a jogger.

Neither had a phone so he kept running up the road to where he and May had left their van.

Finally, he got to his cell phone and made this 911 call.

911 call

Dispatcher: Wellesley Police. This call is recorded.

Greineder: Help. I’m at the park. I think someone, someone attacked my wife. I’m trying to get police. 

Dispatcher: Where are you?

Greineder: I’m at, at the park - Morse’s Pond.

Less than an hour later, the police secured the crime scene.

Chief Cunningham: We wanted to be able to lock that area down. We knew immediately that physical evidence was going to be extremely important.

A murder in the park in Wellesley—a doctor’s wife—was a full-scale alert at the police department.

This was the third person killed in a county park in the last year.   

And the reporters arriving at the closed-off crime scene were well aware of that violent pattern. They smelled a big story.

Just the previous December, a 75-year-old woman had been killed while walking through a park with her husband in the nearby town of Walpole.

Farmer: Irene Kennedy was taking a morning walk with her husband. Their normal routine was she was in better shape than he was. He would walk a certain distance with her, stop and rest, and then she would complete her circuit. Come back and they’d go home. Well, she didn’t come back. When the police arrived they found her brutally murdered, sexually mutilated. A horrific, horrific crime.

Then—just a few months later—an 80-year-old man also out for a morning walk was savagely beaten in a park in the neighboring town of Westwood.

Farmer: And the other thing was all these communities begin with the letter “W” so now we’re saying, you know, there’s somebody killing people in towns that begin with a “W” in Norfolk county.

Murphy: In the very safe, secure, little town of Wellesley, how did that go down?

Farmer: Oh, there was immediate concern. There was a furor because the district attorney and the police chief allowed trick or treating to go on that night.

Murphy: People were scared?

Farmer: People were very scared.

Chief Cunningham: No question that there was a fear, that there was a fear not only here in Wellesley but in other areas that there was an individual out there that had committed all three of these homicides.

Detectives started combing through the wooded path.

Chief Cunningham: One of the most difficult crime scenes is an outdoor crime scene, to try and contain it, just contain the area, and to, and to make sure that we don’t lose any of that evidence. 

And amidst the dead leaves they found some odd things…

Det. McDermott: Zip lock bags were found in the path right near May’s body, and the loaf pan and lighter fluid and some latex gloves in a plastic bag were found a few feet way from May’s body under some debris.

Were they clues left behind by the killer? Or just bits of litter?

Forensic specialists measured the drag marks left by May’s body, another identified footprints, then, just a few hours later, they got a big break.

A police dog hit on a storm drain in the park concealed from view by autumn leaves.

Chief Cunningham: Once they cleaned it off and lifted the lid up, they looked down four feet at the bottom of the storm drain, the knife, the hammer and one of the gloves. My common sense told me that there had to be another glove and it had to be somewhere down here on the scene.

Murphy: So you went looking for it?

Cunningham: That’s correct.

And the next day, in a second storm drain, the Wellesley police discovered a second glove.

Now they had the killer’s gloves and weapons, and some odd items found at the scene of the crime.

But who would want May Greineder dead?

As fall turned to winter, the police were still trying to answer that question and fear had buried itself in the town like a virus. Three people murdered in county parks and no arrest.  

Chief Cunningham was swamped with panicky phone calls from city selectmen and concerned citizens alike.

Chief Cunnigham: The tone and feeling in the town of Wellesly was one of nervousness, that a homicide had been committed and at this point we hadn’t identified anyone.

But finally, four months into the investigation, the district attorney announced that they had made an arrest in the brutal killing of May Greineder.

Not a serial killer stalking the parks, not a stranger psychopath, but a Harvard doctor: Dirk Greineder—emminent allergist, father of three, constant companion of his wife May— was charged with her first-degree murder.

Chief Cunnigham: We followed every lead that we could, we went in very direction that it took us to and it kept bringing us back to Dirk Greineder.

An accomplished doctor, a prominent member of the community, a model father, but also a man with a secret life and ferocious appetites.

It was all about to spill out in a New England courtroom.

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