WAREHAM – Less than 10 days after a gas explosion killed nine people and injured 60 more in Onset in the summer of 1946, a petite 25-year-old woman from Cambridge visiting the village went missing.
These events that occurred 81 years ago were totally unrelated but drew intense attention to the busy vacation spot for horrific reasons.
Ruth McGurk had vacationed in Onset for the previous five years. She was a supervisor at a 5 and 10 store in Central Square in the city, where she lived with her widowed mother on the third floor of a three-family home.
She was engaged to marry Arthur L. Doucette, a Navy cook who was on duty at Bikini atoll with the atom bomb test fleet. They were to wed on his next leave, and she wore his $700 diamond engagement ring.
Ruth arrived in Onset on Saturday, July 27, with girlfriends Helen Leary, and Ruth Jefferson. They had taken the train up from Boston.
A young woman’s disappearance and murder brought unwanted notoriety to Onset and Wareham back in 1946. They got a room at a West Central Avenue rooming house, had lunch and went to the beach.
Later that evening they went to the Colonial Casino, better known as the Onset Casino, to dance. The Casino at Onset Avenue and 10th Street, destroyed in a 1963 fire, drew big names back in the day, including Tommy Dorsey and Duke Ellington.
Dancing was on the second floor and it was packed with patrons on this summer night, estimated at around 700 people.It was only Ruth’s second visit to the Casino All three danced with men they met there.Ruth approached her two friends after 10 p.m. and said she was going out with “Frank” with whom she had been dancing.
She asked them to wait up for her, to keep the lights on. She wouldn’t be late. She also said he was from Onset, though whether she actually said that would later come into question.
Her friends saw Frank briefly, and described him as being short, perhaps only two inches taller than the 5-foot-2, 102-pound Ruth, and that he was between the ages of 25 and 30, and about 140 pounds.
They thought she might be going for an ice cream. She didn’t drink.
Back at their room, when they woke up at 3 a.m., Ruth had still not returned.
They went to Wareham police on Sunday.
Still missing on Monday, searches were conducted through the woods in Onset and East Wareham, including Great Neck. Empty shacks were searched. Even yachts and boats in the harbor were checked.
Ruth’s body was found in a South Carver bog pond on Aug. 1, just over the Wareham border, about eight miles from the Casino. She had been savagely beaten, raped, and choked to death. A carpenter on his way to work discovered the body. Her $700 diamond engagement ring was still on her hand. Her brother Edwin had to travel to Wareham to identify her body.The town was flooded with investigators, and news reporters.
Charles Russell Goodale, 25, was a Navy veteran who lived with his parents on Onset Avenue, only a few hundred yards from the Casino. He studied art at the Swain School of Design in New Bedford
He had been charged earlier that month with assault on a Lowell girl, a student nurse, which was alleged to have occurred after a dance. He had been working for a local cranberry company at nearby bogs since May.
He pleaded not guilty in the assault, but came under the focus of the murder investigation and was arrested for it.
He had no other record, and residents were reportedly shocked at the arrest. He was more familiarly known around town as Russ, and said he never used the name Frank.
He admitted to being at the Casino the night Ruth went missing, but said he never met her. Instead, he said he met another woman and they left together at around 10:15 p.m. He couldn’t recall her name, only that he called her, “Chum.”
They stopped at two Buzzards Bay nightspots, he said. The first was Tiny Jim’s, which was too crowded so they left. They then went to the King Midas restaurant where they each had a rye “highball.” He said he dropped her off back at Onset and went home around midnight.
Goodale was held for 10 months awaiting trial. During that time, he painted portraits of other inmates and marine scenes. He was said to be quite good.The 15-day trial began in mid-May 1947 in Plymouth.
Goodale took the stand in his own defense and denied killing Ruth McGurk. He was reported to have been nervous but unshakeable.
Though Helen Leary and Ruth Jefferson both identified Goodale as Frank during the trial, neither had been able to do so when given the opportunity during the initial investigation.
There was testimony that Goodale had been seen during the stops at Buzzards Bay as he had testified. He was also somewhat taller than the description of Frank.
It didn’t come out at the trial but he denied assaulting the Lowell woman and that charge was dropped in Wareham District Court.
There was also conflicting testimony whether Ruth had said Frank was an Onset native.
The defense maintained that the only physical evidence against Goodale was the discovery of three strands of hair found in his car that prosecutors said were Ruth’s. This was before DNA refinements and the prosecution’s expert witness had to acknowledge the hairs could have come from any one of thousands of women.
The case went to the jury a little after 1 p.m. on Thursday, May 29, 1947 and jurors began deliberating after lunch at about 2:10 p.m. They had supper around 6 p.m., and then returned to their deliberations.
At 12:45 a.m., the judge sent them a note asking if they wished to adjourn for the night. They declined.
They reached a verdict shortly after 1 a.m.
Not guilty.
The Old Colony Memorial reported that three of the jurors declined to shake Goodale’s hand in the aftermath following the verdict.
More than 100 people tried to visit Ruth’s grave at Cambridge Cemetery the day of the verdict, the Boston Globe reported. The grave’s location was not divulged to most.Helen Leary visited the grave, the Globe reported, where she had left flowers the previous day. She prayed briefly.
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