Delaware 1972 Cold Case Solved — The Babysitter Was Never Even a Suspect

 

She was 7 years old. She weighed 41 lb. On the evening of October 14th, 1972, she kissed her mother on the cheek, walked across the hall to the neighbor’s apartment, and was never seen alive again. That is not a story about a little girl who wandered off. That is a story about a person her family trusted completely.

Someone who sat with her at the kitchen table, braided her hair, taught her to count to 20 in Spanish, and then made certain she would never have the chance to grow up. And it would take 52 years, a retired detective who could not sleep, and a database that did not exist until 2019, to finally put a name to what happened inside that apartment on a quiet Thursday evening in Wilmington, Delaware.

But before we get to any of that, we have to go back to the beginning. Because to understand what was lost, you first have to understand who Rosalie Greer was. Wilmington, Delaware in 1972 was a city that had seen better days and was trying hard not to show it. The big DuPont plants still ran shifts. The corner stores on Market Street still kept their signs hand-lettered in the window.

 On October evenings, the smell of wood smoke and turned leaves drifted down from Brandywine Park. And if you lived in the Riverside apartment complex on the north side of the city, you knew your neighbors’ names. You knew which kids belonged to which floor. And you left your door unlocked when you were home and expected company. Rosalie Greer was the second of three children born to Patricia and Gerald Greer.

Patricia worked the lunch counter at a Woolworth’s on King Street. Gerald drove a delivery truck for a regional grocery chain. They were not wealthy people. They were solid, hard-working people who believed in church on Sundays and supper at 6:00 and the idea that Riverside was a good enough place to raise a family because the neighbors looked after each other and the children played in the courtyard and someone was always watching.

Rosalie was small for her age and full of opinions about everything. She had her father’s dark eyes and her mother’s laugh, which was loud enough to carry through a closed door. She was in second grade at Stanton Elementary and had recently decided, with tremendous seriousness, that she was going to be a veterinarian.

She kept a shoebox under her bed with a hamster named Biscuit and a library copy of a book about dog breeds that was 6 weeks overdue. On the refrigerator, held there by a magnet shaped like a lighthouse, was a drawing she had made in crayon her family, Biscuit, and a large orange cat she did not yet own, but planned to name Captain.

 On the evening of October 14th, Gerald was working a late delivery run. Patricia needed to go to the pharmacy on Lancaster Avenue. Rosalie had a cough that had been lingering for days and the trip would take no more than 30 minutes. Across the hall, in apartment 4C, lived a young woman named Beverly Crane. Beverly was 19 years old.

She had been babysitting for the Greers on and off since the family moved to Riverside 2 years earlier. Patricia trusted her without reservation. In the 2 years she had known her, Beverly had never given her a single reason not to. That was the last time Patricia Greer saw her daughter standing upright. Patricia returned to Riverside at 7:22 p.m.

She had been gone 40 minutes. She crossed the courtyard, climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, and knocked on the door of apartment 4C. No one answered. She knocked again. She tried the handle. The door opened. The apartment was empty. Beverly Crane was gone. Rosalie was gone. A half-empty glass of orange juice sat on the coffee table.

 The television was on, turned to a cartoon. Patricia called for Rosalie. No answer. She stepped back into the hallway. Called again. Nothing. She went to her own apartment, opened the door, walked through every room. Empty. She went back to the hallway and stood there for a moment, telling herself there was a simple explanation.

They had stepped out for fresh air. They were in the courtyard. They had gone to the corner store for a popsicle. At 7:31 p.m. she called the Wilmington Police Department. The first officer arrived at 7:48 p.m. The building was searched floor to floor, the courtyard, the parking lot, the alley behind the complex.

Nothing. A second unit was dispatched. Gerald Greer was reached by radio at the truck depot at 8:15 p.m. and told to come home immediately. He made a 15-minute drive in nine. By 10 p.m. 18 people were searching the surrounding blocks. By midnight, there was still no sign of Rosalie Greer or Beverly Crane. At 6:14 the following morning, a maintenance worker for the City Parks Department named Walter Hobbs arrived at a small retention area near the Christina River, 3/4 of a mile from Riverside.

 He found Rosalie Greer in the tall grass beside the water. She had been there for several hours. She was 7 years old. She weighed 41 lb. She was wearing the same red corduroy jacket she had been wearing when her mother crossed the hall and left her in Beverly Crane’s care. Beverly Crane was gone. There was no trace of her.

And she had not been seen since. The detective assigned to the case was a 29-year-old named Dennis Harlow, 11 months out of patrol and still finding his footing in the investigative unit. What Dennis lacked in experience, he compensated for with a particular quality his supervisor described as a refusal to accept the easy answer.

He would carry that quality with him for the next five decades. From the first 72 hours, two facts anchored the investigation. One, there were no signs that anyone had forced entry into apartment 4C. Two, Beverly Crane had vanished so completely that within a week, investigators were operating under the assumption she had planned the disappearance in advance.

Her personal belongings, clothing, a small wooden jewelry box, a savings passbook from a bank on Concord Pike, were gone from her apartment. What remained behind suggested a deliberate departure, not a panic. The Crane family lived 40 miles north in a town called Hockessin. Beverly’s mother, Donna, was interviewed twice in the first week.

She described her daughter as a quiet girl, a little lost after dropping out of community college the previous spring, with a boyfriend the family didn’t know much about. The boyfriend’s name was Russell. Donna did not know his last name. She had only seen him twice, and both times he had waited outside in a car.

A name and a partial description. Russell, dark hair, a green car, possibly an Oldsmobile. That was it. Investigators spent 4 months chasing the thread. They identified nine men named Russell in a 50-mi radius who drove green cars matching the description. They interviewed all nine. They found nothing. Not a single solid connection.

Not a single witness who could place any of them near Riverside on the evening of October 14th. Patricia Greer sat at the kitchen table through that winter and made lists. Lists of every person Beverly had ever mentioned. Lists of every car she had seen parked outside the building on the nights Beverly came to babysit.

She gave those lists to Dennis Harlow, and he worked through every name on them. One by one, each one closed without an answer. By the spring of 1973, the leads had dried up. Beverly Crane remained a missing person. The case of Rosalie Greer remained open, but the trail had gone cold in a way that Dennis Harlow had never encountered before.

It was not that every lead pointed somewhere and came back empty. It was that the leads had simply stopped existing. Beverly Crane seemed to have walked out of apartment 4C and out of the world entirely. The institutional failure that would shadow this case for decades happened quietly, without anyone making a dramatic decision.

The Wilmington Police Department, overwhelmed with an escalating crime caseload through the mid-1970s, gradually reallocated resources away from cases with no active leads. The Greer case was not closed. It was filed. There is a difference, though for the Greer family, the difference was almost impossible to feel.

By 1979, 7 years had passed. Patricia Greer had stopped counting them the way she once did. Gerald had developed a deep, settled quietness that his surviving children found harder to reach as the years went on. Rosalie’s younger brother Marcus grew up understanding that the absence in the apartment was not something you name directly.

 Her older sister Diane kept Rosalie’s crammed family portrait, the one with the orange cat named Captain, in a frame on her dresser until she moved out at 18. And then, she took it with her. By 1985, the Wilmington Police Department had turned over almost entirely. The officers who had walked the corridor of the Riverside complex that October night were scattered, retired, transferred, one of them dead.

Dennis Harlow had left the department in 1981 to take a position with the Delaware State Police. He kept a manila folder in the bottom drawer of his desk that he did not discuss with colleagues. When people asked what was in it, he said it was an old case. He said it the way you say a thing you do not want to explain.

The Riverside apartment complex was demolished in 1988. A distribution center was built on the site. The courtyard where Rosalie had played was gone, paved over under 15,000 square feet of concrete loading dock. By 1995, 23 years had passed. Patricia Greer had moved to a smaller apartment in Newark. She still had the lighthouse magnet.

It was on a different refrigerator now, in a different kitchen, but she had brought it with her, and it still held nothing up. She had not replaced what it once held. Some things you cannot replace. Every case on this channel represents weeks of research, verifying facts, and piecing together the lives of people who deserved more than what they were given.

If you want us to keep uncovering the truth behind stories like this one, take a second to like this video and subscribe. Drop a comment and tell us where in the world you’re watching from. Your support is what makes this work possible. Now, let’s get back to Rosalie. The case had been cold for 30 years when Dennis Harlow retired from the Delaware State Police in 2002.

He was 59 years old. He collected his pension and moved to a house in Middletown and spent more time in his vegetable garden than he had anticipated. He also spent more time at his kitchen table in the evenings going through the Manila folder. Old habits. Some things do not retire when you do. Then, in 2021, something happened that no one had anticipated.

It was a Tuesday morning in February when Dennis Harlow received an email from a forensic genealogist named Carrie Mott, who worked with a cold case unit that had been quietly reviewing unsolved Delaware homicides with biological evidence. Rosalie Greer’s case had biological evidence. There had always been biological evidence.

 It had been collected in 1972, preserved according to the standards of the time, and had been sitting in the Delaware evidence repository for 49 years waiting for technology that did not yet exist to catch up with it. The technology existed now. Carrie Mott’s team had uploaded the DNA profile to a public genealogy database, the same kind of website where ordinary families trace their ancestry and discover long-lost cousins, and then patiently and painstakingly traced the genetic relatives back to identify a single unknown contributor.

The process took 4 months. The result was a name. Not Russell. Not anyone from Donna Crane’s partial description. Someone else entirely. Someone who had never been interviewed. Someone who had never been considered. Someone whose name was not in any of Patricia Greer’s careful handwritten lists. Dennis Harlow read the name twice.

Then he sat back in his chair and looked out the window at his garden, the bare February earth, and he picked up the phone and called the Wilmington Police Department for the first time in 20 years. The name was Gary Mott. And Gary Mott had not been a boyfriend waiting in a green car. Gary Mott had been Beverly Crane’s older half-brother, 17 years her senior, a man who lived in Chester, Pennsylvania, and who had, according to the genealogy data, contributed DNA found at the scene of Rosalie Greer’s death.

Gary Mott was still alive. He was 76 years old. He was living in a retirement community in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. And he had no idea on the February morning when Carrie Mott’s report landed in Dennis Harlow’s email that after 49 years, the evidence had finally found its way back to him. The detectives who reviewed the case file in the weeks that followed built a picture of Gary Mott that was, in retrospect, both mundane and devastating.

In 1972, he had been 27 years old. He had a record, two misdemeanor charges in Pennsylvania from the late 1960s, both involving young girls. Both resolved without prison time in the way these things were sometimes resolved in the early 1970s when the legal system had not yet understood what it was dealing with.

Those charges had never been connected to Delaware. No one had known to look. Beverly Crane, it emerged, had known her half-brother as a distant but present figure in her life. A man who appeared at family gatherings who called occasionally who had visited her at the Riverside apartment at least twice in the weeks before October 14th.

 A neighbor on the fourth floor, a woman named Helen Barr, who was 91 years old at the time, investigators located her in a nursing home outside Philadelphia, remembered seeing a man in the hallway outside Beverly’s apartment in early October 1972. Older man dark hair going gray. She had assumed he was a relative. He had smiled at her politely and she had thought nothing of it.

 When investigators from the Delaware Cold Case Unit arrived at the Lancaster County Retirement Community on the morning of March 8th, 2022 Gary Mott was eating breakfast in the common room. He did not recognize the detectives. He invited them to sit down. He offered them coffee with the easy confidence of a man who had lived for half a century without a knock on the door that signaled the end of everything.

The knock had come 50 years late. But it had come. He was arrested without incident. He did not speak on the way to the car. A staff member at the retirement community who had known him for 3 years stood in the doorway of the common room and watched it happen. She said later that she could not reconcile what she was seeing with the man she thought she knew.

He had been, she said, the most ordinary person you could imagine. Quiet, polite, good at crossword puzzles. The kind of man no one ever suspected of anything. In September 2023, Gary Moss pled guilty in a Delaware court to the murder of Rosalie Greer. He offered no statement at sentencing. He sat at the defense table and looked at nothing in particular while the judge, a 63-year-old woman named the Honorable Carol Ashworth, read the sentence into the record.

Life in prison, no possibility of parole. She said, before she closed the file in front of her, that Rosalie Greer had been 7 years old, that she had weighed 41 lb, and that the court wished to state clearly and for the record that she had deserved every year she did not get. As for Beverly Crane, she was located in 2022, alive, living under a different name in Tucson, Arizona.

She was 69 years old. She had been 17 when Gary Moss entered her life. She had been 19 when she fled the state of Delaware and did not look back. Investigators determined that she had not participated in the crime directly and had lived for 50 years with what she knew. The legal outcome of her cooperation with investigators remained, at the time of this video’s research, ongoing.

Whatever justice looks like for Beverly Crane is not a simple question. And this channel does not intend to answer it simply. What is simple is this. Rosalie Greer was not forgotten. She was never forgotten. Not by her family. Not by a detective who kept a manila folder in a desk drawer for 30 years. And not by a forensic genealogist who spent 4 months tracing the branches of a family tree back to a single name that had spent 50 years in the dark.

Diane Greer, Rosalie’s older sister, was 63 years old when she learned that her sister’s case had been solved. She was living in Hockessin, Delaware, not far from where Beverly Crane had once called home. And she was a retired school teacher with three grown children and a refrigerator of her own covered in crayon drawings.

 She told a reporter who covered the sentencing that her first reaction when the detective called was silence. Not crying. Not relief. Silence. And then she said, “I always told her she would find her way home.” Whether she was speaking about Rosalie or about justice itself, the reporter did not clarify. It did not need clarification. Rosalie Greer was 7 years old in October 1972.

 She had a hamster named Biscuit and a library book about dog breeds and a drawing on the refrigerator of a cat she had named Captain who she was planning on getting as soon as she was old enough to care for one properly. She had opinions about everything. She had a laugh that could carry through a closed door. She had a whole future that belonged to her, and it was taken from her by someone her family had no reason to suspect in a place they believed was safe during the 30 minutes they thought she was being looked after.

It took 52 years for the truth to find its way to the surface. That is a long time. It is not long enough to be called justice by anyone who knew her. But it is something. For the Greer family, it is something that matters. Justice found Rosalie Greer after 52 years. It found her because someone preserved the evidence.

Because someone refused to retire the question. Because a database and a genealogist and a former detective with a folder in his kitchen made a phone call on a Tuesday morning in February. That chain of ordinary decisions made by ordinary people who chose to keep going is what the justice system looks like when it finally works.

What do you think about the role Beverly Crane played? And what accountability, if any, should she face 50 years later? Is there a statute of limitations on moral responsibility that the law should recognize? Or should proximity to a crime always carry consequence? And what does this case suggest about the way communities in 1972 and today extend trust without asking the questions that might protect the most vulnerable people among us? If you’ve made it to the end of this story, you already know the answer matters.

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