Thirty-seven years ago, Virginia Hannon, a cook at an elementary school in Pembroke, Massachusetts, was found dead in her home. She had been beaten, stabbed and strangled.
Detectives interviewed more than 50 people but were unable to solve the crime until a tipster called police last year and said that a man named Jesse Aylward, who had died the previous day, had confessed that he killed someone in Pembroke many years earlier.
On Thursday, authorities said, DNA evidence collected from Aylward’s body definitively linked him to the crime scene and proved that he was responsible for Hannon’s brutal death Feb. 13, 1984.
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Still, the slaying continues to trouble investigators and Hannon’s family, who said they did not know why Aylward had killed Hannon, who was 59 and lived alone, or whether they knew each other.
“There’s a lot of questions that we still would like to answer, and we may never get all of the answers,” Rick Wall, the former police chief in Pembroke, said at a news conference with Hannon’s family Thursday. “But we’re never going to stop looking for exactly what happened and be able to give them the truth.”
Aylward, who was 58 when he died in February 2020, grew up in Pembroke and lived near Hannon. Authorities said he had a criminal history from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s that included “some assaultive behavior.” An online obituary that matches his name and date of birth said he was a handyman who had once owned his own paving and seal-coating business.
Hannon was known as the “lunch lady” at Bryantville Elementary School in Pembroke, about 30 miles south of Boston. She took care of stray cats, kept biscuits in her house for neighborhood dogs and loved bingo, family cookouts and ice cubes in her beer glass, her nephew Richard Hannon said.
“She was a great woman,” Hannon said. “She was very family-oriented and loved the area, loved the people around here, and was very generous.”
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