Mae and Anne Rubenstein

March 13, 2026·50 min·4 clips

A 9-year-old boy finds his aunt lying in a pool of blood, then discovers her 11-year-old daughter dead just feet away.

An ordinary Saturday becomes the hinge. The host starts in Highland Park, New Jersey, inside the Rubenstein home: a mother, a daughter, a husband, and a son. May was only eleven. Her father and older brother were at work, and Ann was out buying groceries, the sort of routine nobody studies until something terrible happens. That normal rhythm matters. A child at home, a mother running errands, a quiet neighborhood. Later, each detail gets picked over. The case soon opens wider. Police see a boy jump from a car and run into nearby woods, getting away from Lieutenant Cuddy that night. Newark police find him near his home the next morning. He is questioned, but the host says he was never treated as a prime suspect. Then the lead seems to go quiet. Outside a few articles, it fades from view, unless investigators knew more and kept it out of the papers. At the end of October, another strange turn arrives. In Albany, New York, about 200 miles away, John Myers tells two police officers he killed a mother and daughter in Highland Park. It sounds dramatic at first. Then the details fall apart. Myers says strangulation, while the autopsy points to stabbing and says nothing about strangulation. He gets the house wrong too, calling it white and blue when it was yellow. One detail nearly lands: Ann had groceries. But that had already been widely reported, so police do not seem to treat it as proof. The case remains unresolved. The host ends by separating legal punishment from the quieter relief that can come with resolution.

As heard by us

A quiet New Jersey Saturday opens into a cold case shaped by missing answers and a confession that does not fit.

A regular Saturday in Highland Park, New Jersey turns into the frame for Sarah Turney's measured account of the 1965 killings of 11-year-old May Rubenstein and her mother, Ann.

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You want an unresolved case where a confession cannot get the house color right? Press play.

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