For decades, Westfield police were baffled by the death of Lena Triano, a quiet secretary who lived alone in the Ripley Place home where she was killed in 1976.
The 57-year-old Triano looked after the neighborhood kids, loaned money to a close friend, and liked to speak Italian, said the friend, Maria Sclama, now 74. She never had any kids and was never married, but was, by all accounts, a warm lady with a caring heart.
So who, police wondered, would have wanted to kill Triano, let alone rape, strangle and stab her to death?
Detectives couldn’t answer that question, and her March 1976 death became a cold case, labeled an unsolved homicide for 36 years.
"There were no suspects, no clues, nothing left behind — it was a very difficult case," said Ray Lynch, a retired detective who ran the Union County Prosecutor’s Office homicide squad at the time. "It’s frustrating, especially when you see the condition of this woman and what was done to her. It didn’t seem to make much sense why someone would hurt this woman."
Now, nearly four decades after her death, police say they’ve used forensic evidence to solve her slaying, and that the truth may be more bizarre than anything they could have imagined.
Investigators believe Triano’s killer lived a few hundred feet away, on Stirling Place, and was just 15 at the time. They say he hog-tied her, raped, strangled, beat and stabbed her again and again, puncturing her lungs more than once.
"We determined this individual who lived in the neighborhood had relations with this woman. He raped her," said Union County Prosecutor Theodore Romanow, who yesterday announced the arrest of the now 51-year-old accused killer. "We have evidence that the individual will claim he did not know her."
Romankow and the investigators who broke the case, agent Vinny Byron and Sgt. Harvey Barnwell of the prosecutor’s homicide task force, said they could not publicly name the man. Under the juvenile law in 1976, he can’t be tried as an adult and his name cannot be released to the public. The prosecutor’s office, however, is seeking a judge’s permission to release the name.
But The Star-Ledger has learned through law enforcement sources the suspect is Carlton R. Franklin, an oil truck driver who spent nearly two decades in prison for kidnapping and robbery. He was released in 1999, according to state corrections records.
At the time of Triano’s death, Franklin lived with his family in a house at 617 Stirling Place. His backyard abutted Triano’s at 616 Ripley Place.
Every night after rerturning from her job as a legal secretary in Newark, Triano would park her car behind her house and walk in through the back door, which she always kept unlocked, prosecutors said. The day they found her body, March 15, 1976, detectives found the back door locked and the key to it missing. Police believe Triano had been killed the day before.
Barnwell said the suspect was arrested Monday morning at his job, and he barely reacted.
"He didn’t seem surprised," Barnwell said.
Franklin and his three siblings were born in Savannah, Ga., and spent their childhood bouncing back and forth between there and New Jersey, his sister, Venetia Franklin, now 53, said. She lives in Savannah now, as does their 71-year-old mother, Rosetta Franklin, who said she is caring for Carlton’s two children, ages 9 and 10. The family learned of his arrest yesterday.
"Why would he kill her? Why would you take a life when you can’t give a life? Jesus, have mercy," the mother said in a phone interview. "How could he have lived with this all of these years?"
Both mother and daughter said they didn’t recall Triano’s death, but confirmed they lived on Stirling Place in 1976. They hadn’t been there for long, perhaps a year, they said.
Rosetta Franklin said she understands the pain Triano’s family would have felt after her death. In 1985, her son Tyrone Franklin was shot to death, she said.
"My baby boy was killed in 85. I know what that’s like," she said. "I am so sorry for what he did. I am very sorry."
Photos from the 1977 edition of "The Weather Vane," the Westfield High School yearbook, show Carlton Franklin as smiling boy with youthful features. Some five years later, he was arrested in what authorities described as a home-invasion robbery in which he wore a ski mask, carried a pistol and held a Westfield family hostage.
His sister, who remained in New Jersey while he was in prison, said her brother didn’t know anyone was in the house and that things went bad. He hasn’t done a thing wrong since he was released, she said.
"He didn’t do this," Venetia Franklin said. "He’s had the same job since he’s been out."
The cold case is the oldest the prosecutor’s office has solved, Romankow said. There are about a dozen cold cases under investigation in Union County.
Authorities said Byron, a prosecutor’s agent assigned to investigating cold cases, was looking into a February 1975 murder of Beverly Manoff in Springfield when he stumbled on Triano’s case. As Byron looked into Manoff’s death, he realized Triano was killed about a year after Manoff. Stranger still, he said, was that Triano at one time had worked for Manoff’s husband at his Westfield law office.
With limited evidence still existing in the Springfield case, Byron turned his attention to the Triano homicide. The Westfield Police Department had preserved evidence for 35 years and, using Triano’s clothing from the day of her slaying, prosecutors discovered she’d been raped. Forensic testing led them to their suspect, they said.
Lynch, the former homicide chief who’s been retired 15 years, credited the Westfield Police Department’s evidence preservation.
"It’s absolutely and positively gratifying to hear someone is being brought to justice," the 78-year-old said from his home in Cranford. "Technology changes things. You can’t hide behind time anymore."
Franklin, who has been charged with murder, is being held without bail at the Union County jail in Elizabeth.
For Scalma, Triano’s former neighbor who still lives on Ripley Place, news of the arrest was shocking, but welcomed.
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