A Portland man confessed last month to killing a woman in Boston 44 years ago, officials said.
Detectives arrested John Michael Irmer, 68, and transported him to Boston last weekend, just over a month after he walked into the Portland FBI office and told agents he had killed someone in 1979, the Suffolk County, Massachusetts, district attorney said in a statement Monday.
Irmer told agents that he met a red-haired woman at an ice-skating rink around Halloween that year and went with her to a house under renovation. Inside the house, Irmer grabbed a hammer, hit the woman on the head and then raped her, Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden said. Irmer fled to New York the next day.
Boston investigators confirmed that in 1979 Susan Marcia Rose was found dead at the address Irmer had given the FBI. The 24-year-old woman, originally from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, died of multiple blunt injuries to the head. A DNA sample collected at the scene matched a sample investigators collected from Irmer, the district attorney said.
About two years after Rose died, a man was tried in her killing. He was found not guilty.
“Nearly 44 years after losing her at such a young age, the family and friends of Susan Marcia Rose will finally have some answers,” Hayden said in a statement. “No matter how cold cases get resolved, it’s always the answers that are important for those who have lived with grief and loss and so many agonizing questions.”
Irmer was scheduled to be arraigned Monday.
