Like most New Yorkers, Mrs. Edna Kane would have simply minded her own business and walked past the large suitcase resting unattended by the front stoop of her building any other day.

But considering the hour — 2 a.m. on a Sunday morning— and how it had to have been left on the sidewalk within the last few minutes since she would’ve definitely noticed it while leaving her Morningside Heights building with her dogs, Kane couldn’t help being a little suspicious.

Not to mention how the two Scottish terriers she was walking on this brisk October night in 1953 were yapping incessantly at the luggage and pulling frantically on their leashes to get a closer sniff.

Kane noticed this was no cheap cardboard case — it was made of leather, with brass fittings — and it wasn’t light, either. She could barely lift it. As wild thoughts raced through her head — could it be a bomb?— she decided to call the cops.

The middle-aged woman was far from relieved when police opened the suitcase and saw that it wasn’t filled with explosives.

Crammed inside was a woman’s body — or what was left of it.

The torso was missing a head, both legs, and right arm. The left arm, still connected to the body, was minus three fingers.

Below the torso cops found the right arm, wrapped in a man’s undershirt and underpants stiff with dried blood.

The victim was wearing a panty-girdle, bra and short-sleeved sweater, all caked in red. All of the garments were stripped of labels and laundry markings in an obvious attempt to hide both the victim’s and the killer’s identities.

At daybreak, detectives were suddenly called to another gruesome discovery on La Salle St., less than two blocks away. The super of a building near Barnard College found a second suitcase stuffed with body parts among the trash cans.

Inside was another grisly haul: the missing legs, which had been severed at the knees to fit into the luggage.

The woman’s head was still nowhere to be found.

That afternoon, a city medical examiner determined the horrible way the victim died — and the terrible way she lived.

The woman had nine deep stab wounds in her chest and abdomen as well as cuts and slashes on her palms, indicating she put up a vain struggle to ward off a maniac with a large knife.

The front page of the New York Daily News on Oct. 12, 1953. (New York Daily News)

She also had multiple track marks on her arms and legs — scars and scabs from needle punctures — a tell-tale sign the victim was a longtime drug addict.

Prints on the woman’s remaining fingers quickly identified her as Florence Pearl Gibbons, a 33-year-old Massachusetts woman with an arrest record for drug and prostitution charges in Boston and New York City.

Gibbons’ dreadful death and dismemberment pushed what would have been an otherwise sad but small story of a good woman gone bad into front page news.

“Seek Hophead As Redhead’s Torso Slayer” read the headline of the Oct. 12, 1953 lead story in the Daily News, which gave a glimpse of a sordid netherworld of sex and drugs most upstanding citizens couldn’t begin to fathom.

While detectives questioned dozens of people who knew the victim and set their sights on an unidentified man she was last seen with, The News’ crime reporters seized on Gibbons’ tragic life story.

Born in Brockton, Mass., she moved to Worcester as a teen and trained as a nurse. She was by all accounts a head-turner — or at least used to be. A blue-eyed redhead, her striking looks had been ravaged by a heroin jones and a sordid descent into prostitution to feed her addiction.

She didn’t have much of a family life. Gibbons was married to a man who was in a Rikers Island jail cell on a burglary charge when she was killed. He told police they were separated and hadn’t seen her in a year. Gibbons’ mother still lived in Massachusetts and hadn’t heard from her daughter in ages.

Daily News reporters were able to track Gibbons’ last days, determining that she’d spent the Friday night before her slaying with a group of men and women — addicts and ladies of the night among them — at a Manhattan watering hole.

Gibbons had been seen in the company of a man cops were very interested in speaking to, a tall, sandy-haired drug user no one could say was a john or a boyfriend.

Less than two days after she was murdered, police had their killer. And he was hardly a homicidal, hooker-hating customer.

The murderer was James Lew, a 34-year-old Chinese cook who had a soft spot for Gibbons despite her problems and profession. He was among the many people police had questioned, and cops brought him in for a second interrogation. After hours under the lights, he confessed to killing her in a jealous rage.

James Lew (Peodincuk, John/New York Daily News)

On the night of the murder, Lew and Gibbons spent time together at his W. 94th St. apartment. But when she told him she had feelings for another man, the two quarreled and Gibbons slapped the smaller man in the face.

A furious Lew grabbed a large steak knife and plunged it into the woman repeatedly, then used it to cut her body into pieces.

Under cover of darkness the next night, Lew made three trips outside to dump the body parts. After getting rid of the two suitcases, Gibbons’ head and fingers were placed in a brown paper bag and tossed into a litter basket, Lew told cops. The parts were never recovered.

After a psychiatric evaluation, Lew was indicted for first degree murder. Four months later, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to 7 to 20 years in prison, closing the tragic tale of a troubled woman and her less-than-dignified demise.

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Copyright © 2022, New York Daily News

Copyright © 2022, New York Daily News