Around noon on Christmas Eve 1963, Alfred Foushee was finishing up some last-minute Christmas shopping in downtown Chapel Hill when he ran into Frank Rinaldi. Alfred had done some general housework for Frank in the late summer and was not excited to see him at all. Rinaldi was with another man, and he hoped that he did not notice him. Still, sure enough, their eyes met before Alfred could make his move to leave the shop without being noticed. When Frank noticed him, he did not greet him or smile. What he said turned Alfred’s blood cold and made him regret seeing him even more than he could have ever imagined.
“It is over; I did it,” he said and passed him by with his companion following behind. Alfred stood momentarily stunned, then hurriedly finished his business in the store and went home to spend Christmas with his family.
Alfred tried to push down the memories of the time he had spent with Frank Rinaldi. He had been hired to do some general cleaning and work for Frank Rinaldi, and he had been asked back several more times after that first day to do other jobs. It had become progressively more uncomfortable each time he went to his apartment. It had become a nightmare when one day Frank told him he would like to hire him to kill his wife, Lucille. Alfred had never even seen her and was only aware of the existence of a wife because Frank told him he was married. Frank lived in the apartment alone as far as he knew.
Alfred refused the offer to murder Frank’s wife, but Frank persisted. As time went by and he realized that Alfred would not do the job himself, he offered him $500 to find him someone else who would do it. Most important, Frank told him, was to find someone that could do it and make it look like an accident. Alfred again refused. The last time he had seen Frank Rinaldi, he had made very aggressive sexual advances towards Alfred, asking him to expose himself to Frank and then offering him money for sex. Alfred had refused, and Frank had apologized and even told him he was ashamed of himself for his actions as Alfred left. It had been the last time he had seen him until that day in the store.
Little did Alfred know that as he settled in for his Christmas celebration with his family, across town at Frank Rinaldi’s apartment on 105 North Street, the police were walking through a horrible crime scene they had been called to by Frank Rinaldi’s friend John Sipp. They found 32-year-old Lucille Rinaldi, five months pregnant, brutally beaten in the face and head. She had died in the small living room of the apartment she shared with her husband, Frank. A sock had been stuffed in her mouth and a scarf tied around her head, keeping the hose in her mouth. A blood-covered pillow sat near her on the floor, and the police deduced that she had been smothered with the pillow pressed hard against her face to kill her.
There was no sign of forced entry, but her pocketbook was opened and the contents strewn on the floor near it. A bent flashlight was found and determined to be the weapon used to bludgeon her. She was not sexually assaulted, although she was in her pajamas and a housecoat, and it seemed nothing was missing. It seemed a pretty blatant attempt to stage a robbery to the police officers because there were still valuables in the house. Their attention immediately turned to her husband Frank as the prime suspect, and he was arrested.
The detectives that investigated the murder found that Frank Rinaldi was an interesting, if not odd, man. He, like his wife, was from Waterbury, Connecticut, where they had met years before. He had graduated from Georgetown University in 1951 and taken a job with the CIA. In 1953, he enlisted in the Army to serve in Korea during the war. In 1956 when he got out of the Army, he moved to Chapel Hill, but left a year later to teach at the University of Missouri. From there, he worked with an advertising firm in New York City.
By 1960, he was back in Chapel Hill, where he worked on his Ph.D. and taught English as a graduate assistant. He had been engaged to Lucille in the Spring of 1963, and she had moved to Chapel Hill with him, where she took a job teaching at Guy B Phillips Junior High School. One day at the school in September, she had worked one day when school started but had resigned, citing “extreme personal family trouble.” She moved back to her parents in Waterbury while Frank stayed in Chapel Hill.
Although their marriage seemed strained, the police found that Frank had depended upon Lucille financially for some time. She had sent him several checks, sometimes of $200, to support him while he lived in Chapel Hill before they were married. Frank had taken out a $20,000 insurance policy on her naming himself as the beneficiary. Calling himself her fiancé on the application, Frank purchased a life insurance policy with a rider allowing for another $20,000 if her death was accidental. Letters from Frank to Lucille seemed more conciliatory after the policies were bought. He begins to ask her to come back to Chapel Hill.
Frank had also taken out several loans over the previous few months leading up to the murder of Lucille from the University Loan Fund for students and Carolina Bank Trust Company. The investigators found that he had made inquiries about his rights to any inheritance that Lucille was due in the event of the death of her parents. When the police talked to Alfred Foushee, they felt they had the damning information they needed for the district attorney to get a conviction.
Although it seemed that the trial would be little more than a formality, Frank Rinaldi would navigate through two separate trials and be acquitted in both. During the first trial, his lawyers argued that the police had not done a thorough investigation and focused on Rinaldi as a suspect instead of following the investigation process and solving the crime. They felt that it was more likely that a thief had been surprised by Mrs. Rinaldi and had killed her to keep from being implicated in the robbery. Also, in John Sipp’s testimony, he said he had been with Frank all day on their shopping trip. Sipp was a great witness and was able to recall tiny details about their time that day. Sipp and his wife had dined with Frank and Lucille the night before the murder, and Mrs. Sipp testified that she did not see anything indicating any turmoil between the two.
Many believed that Frank Rinaldi had escaped justice. It is theorized that he was a homosexual, who at this time would have felt inclined to remain closeted. When Lucille found out about his sexuality, she returned to Connecticut while wondering what she was to do. She was over thirty, newly married, and pregnant. Frank, having been discovered, began to find ways to eliminate Lucille so he could keep his secret and get a financial windfall from the insurance.
There is no way to prove this, of course, as so much time has passed. Frank Rinaldi was found not guilty in her death on two separate occasions. Still, doubt remains to this day as there seems to be so much evidence that Frank had a hand in his wife’s death. There has never been any other suspect identified as having anything to do with the murder. Unfortunately, Lucille and her unborn child have never received justice. Still, their memory remains for those that knew her and for those involved in the case. A sense of regret and loss hangs over the crime to this day as there hasn’t been justice for the young mother and child.
Rick Jackson 