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The gruesome torture and murder of Catherine Blackburn haunted her family for decades.
The beloved 50-year-old Albany-area woman was showing her apartment to potential renters on Sept. 13, 1964, when she was bludgeoned, raped and tortured with heated kitchen knives for hours — an attack so vicious that she died from blood loss rather than the assaults on her body.
Now, police have finally identified the cold-blooded monster behind the macabre murder.
“Sixty-one years ago, evil entered my aunt’s house. It changed our lives forever,” Sandra Carmichael, the slain woman’s niece, said at a press conference Wednesday.
“We’ve prayed for this day,” Carmichael, now 81, told reporters. “To all who made this possible, may God bless all of you and may my aunt rest in peace.”
Albany police said Joseph Nowakowski, a career criminal who died in 1998, was the man who viciously killed Blackburn.
His remains were exhumed last month — and he was identified as the killer thanks to a high-tech DNA match and a determined team of cops, educators and family members, cops said.
“There is no such thing as a cold case,” Albany Police Chief Brendan Cox said at the press conference, flanked by Blackburn’s nieces.
“Traumatic cases of homicide, they take a toll on a family. I don’t know if we ever really bring justice to a family,” Cox said, “but the police department and the district attorney’s office, we’re always going to stand with the family, we’re always going to try to seek justice and bring justice.”
The crime was one of the state’s most horrific.
Blackburn, the forewoman at the Mohawk Brush Company, was trying to rent an upstairs apartment at her Colonie Street home — and hurriedly got off the phone with her sister on the day she died when a potential tenant arrived, according to reports.
Police said that’s when the sadistic assault began.
Blackburn was struck in the back of the head and stabbed in the neck, then sexually molested while she was unconscious before the killer heated up several steak knives on her gas stove, and burned “shapes” into her lips and chest, the Albany Times-Union reported.
“That morning, a co-worker of Catherine’s attempted to pick her up to go to work, and upon arriving at her residence and not receiving any acknowledgement of being home, she contacted Catherine’s nice, Sandy, to try to figure out what was going on,” Cox said Wednesday.
“Sandy and Catherine’s sister responded to the address and came across a pretty gruesome scene,” the chief said.
“Ultimately, medical personnel and police personnel were summoned to the scene and that started a 61-year process.”
Police had one name to work with tied to the case — Robert Broadhead, a name scribbled on a rent receipt.
But investigators remained stumped as the trail ran cold.
The break came in 2018, when Albany PD forensics Det. Melissa Morrie took over the investigation — and reached out to Dr. Christina Lane, the head of the Cold Case Analysis Center at the College of St. Rose.
Using evidence preserved from the decades-old case, police were able to identify Nowakowski as a potential suspect and, with a court order to exhume obtained by the district attorney’s office, dug up his remains in September — 61 years to the week after Blackburn’s murder.
It was a match.
“Do you believe in miracles?” Blackburn’s other niece, Mary Ann Simard, said at Wednesday’s press conference.
“I stand before you to say that our family received a miracle,” she said. “After 61 years we now know who murdered Catherine Blackburn.”
Police said Nowakowski, who was 37 at the time of Blackburn’s murder, was a career criminal who had a string of burglary arrests and was jailed for assaulting a woman in Schenectady in 1973.
He was released from state prison in 1980 and lived “under the radar” until his death nearly 20 years later.
“Our aunt Kate loved her faith, family and friends. She was a daughter, sister, aunt and neighbor,” Simard said Wednesday.
“Catherine Blackburn, you are not forgotten.”
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