After 50 years, missing woman's remains may have been found

Her disappearance, as decades went by and investigators made little progress, increasingly seemed like a mystery that would never be solved. Her daughter feared that her mother, who she had last seen when she was 11, would be forgotten.

But on Monday, shortly before noon, investigators from the Suffolk County Police Department’s Homicide Squad uncovered skeletal remains buried near the basement of a home in Southold, on the northern tip of Long Island. In a statement released late Monday, the police said the remains might be those of Pietrewicz. The home had once belonged to a police officer with whom she had a romantic relationship.

“You want to bring her home, and when reality happens, it’s like, I can’t believe we finally found her,” Sandy Blampied, Pietrewicz’s daughter, said in a telephone interview Tuesday morning. “It’s almost like a dream. After 51 years! Unbelievable! Thank God, thank God!”

The discovery was first reported by The Suffolk Times.

Pietrewicz, who was 38 at the time she disappeared, had been part of a community of working-class Polish-American farmers who lived and worked in the vast expanse of woods and farmland that was the North Fork of Long Island at that time.

Her disappearance stirred the small-town rumor mill in Cutchogue, where she had lived. Some believed that her estranged husband, a well-regarded farmer, could have been responsible. When his barn was demolished years ago, a curious crowd gathered because of speculation that she could have been buried under a Prohibition-era booze cellar.

Beyond that, her case failed to attract much attention — in the local news media or from authorities, with the investigation stalling after detectives made little progress. Her name was not added to the national registry of missing people until recently.

But last year, Times Review Media, a news organization that publishes weekly newspapers covering the eastern end of Long Island, dug into her case; its reporters spent months interviewing relatives and investigators and scouring records. In October, the reporting was the basis of a 10,000-word story published in The Suffolk Times and The Riverhead News-Review and a multipart documentary examining the case.

Pietrewicz’s disappearance, as the reporters Steve Wick and Grant Parpan wrote, “was hidden away behind a wall of indifference, her plight reduced to small-town gossip and whispered rumors.”

The article offered a stinging assessment of the local police at the time, and it also zeroed in on one figure that could have been responsible: William Boken, a married police officer Pietrewicz had a romantic relationship with after she left her husband. The story included notes from an investigator, now dead, who suspected that Boken killed Pietrewicz and dumped her body. The reporters found that Boken nearly disappeared himself, leaving his job, the area and his own family not long after Pietrewicz vanished. He died in New York City in 1982 and was buried on Hart Island, the city’s potter’s field.

Boken had once lived in a clapboard house across from a cemetery on a narrow road in Southold, a town stretching across the North Fork. Investigators had searched the basement of the house in 2013, and even dug up part of it, but nothing was found.

Investigators returned to the basement last week and searched an area just a few feet away. The Suffolk Times reported that the police were led back to the basement after Boken’s former wife told a detective that a body had been wrapped in burlap and buried. (The family sold the house in the 1970s.)

Police officials said that investigators, using a ground-penetrating sonar echolocating device, did not find anything initially, but they continued digging deeper through concrete and dirt. After reaching about 7 feet, a jawbone was found. Soon after, the police said, investigators uncovered an entire skeleton.

“She does have a living relative, so it is nice to be able to bring closure to the family,” Gerard Gigante, the chief of detectives for the Suffolk County Police, said during a news conference at the Police Department’s headquarters. “No murder case or missing person case is resolved until we find a body or make an arrest for murder. So, in this case, it is good to bring it to a close.”

Police said the remains are being reviewed by the medical examiner to confirm their identity and determine the cause of death.

Blampied said police called her late Monday afternoon to ask for another DNA sample, and told her that a detective was driving to her house, several hours away in Middletown, New York, that night to collect it. When the detective got there, he told Blampied of the discovery.

She confessed that she feared the possibility of the remains not being her mother’s. “Don’t think it hasn’t crossed my mind,” she said. But mostly, she said, she feels relief.

“I think I’ll have her cremated, bring her here, and have her with me for the rest of my life,” Blampied said. “I’ve been without her long enough.”