The Murdered April Fells

The Murdered 
April Fells
Queens, New York

🖤 The Murder of April Fells (1973) 🌹 

On November 8, 1973, 19 year old April Fells was found murdered in a vacant lot behind 178-27 146th Drive in Springfield Gardens, Queens, New York. She lived nearby at 179-17 146th Drive and had been returning home from Manhattan on the night of November 6 after visiting her fiancé. According to police, her fiancé, Gerald Parish, last saw her around 8:15 p.m. when she entered the BMT subway at Union Square. She traveled to Parsons Boulevard in Jamaica, Queens, then boarded a bus. The bus driver recalled dropping her off at the intersection of 146th Drive and New York Boulevard (Guy R. Brewer Boulevard) at approximately 10:50 p.m., just a few hundred yards from her home. She never made it to her front door.
  Two days later, her body was discovered face down in an overgrown, weed-choked lot near her residence. She was wearing a red blouse but was nude from the waist down; her blue jeans and flowered underwear were found nearby. An autopsy determined that she had been strangled, stabbed three times in the back, and sexually assaulted. The Medical Examiner estimated she had been dead for approximately 48 hours before being found.
April, who was soon to be married, was remembered by neighbors as friendly but shy. Her death deeply shook the Springfield Gardens community, though some residents expressed ongoing crime and safety concerns in the area. The neighborhood, located near the Queens–Nassau County border and not far from Kennedy International Airport, contained several abandoned, overgrown lots that neighbors said were often avoided at night. Tragically, it was in one of those secluded lots that April’s life was taken.

If you have any further information, please contact the NYPD 116th Precinct at 718-610-4500.🕯️

Sources:

https://nypdcc.org/fells.htm

https://www.nypdcc.org/
https://www.lishk.org/cases.htm 
https://www.nytimes.com/1973/11/09/archives/a-bridetobe-19-is-found-murdered-near-queens-home.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1973/11/10/archives/slain-womans-friends-sadbut-not-surprised-stabbed-three-times.html