Dr. Dirk Greineder

BA, Yale University Assistant Professor, Harvard University

He was born in Germany in 1940, which wasn’t such a great time to be born in Germany. His parents managed to whisk him away to Lebanon, where he grew up speaking German, Arabic, French, and English. He was a bright young man—bright enough^* to get into Yale, where he commenced his studies in 1958. He was a dedicated chemistry major who made time for athletics and, according to classmates, had an eye for the ladies. After Yale he went on to medical school at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, was a workaholic, and eventually rose to the august post of director of clinical allergy at Harvard affiliate Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He also taught at Harvard. He was married to a lovely woman, had three lovely kids, and lived in a lovely house in ritzy, lovely suburban Wellesley. In 1997 he won the lovely Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Outstanding Physician Award. Life was good—lovely, even—for Dr. Dirk Greineder.

There was one issue, if you can call it that. At some point a sexual Mr. Hyde emerged from the murky depths of the doctor’s, uh, soul. This was a computer-savvy Mr. Hyde who, by cleverly manipulating the keyboard of Dr. Greineder’s computer, downloaded heroic quantities of online pornography, arranged rendezvous with prostitutes, enrolled the doctor in a dating service, and introduced the doctor to online swingers, including a couple looking to experiment with a venturesome third party. He also wrote Viagra prescriptions for the fiftysomething Dr. Greineder.

Which is not to imply that Greineder actually had a multiple-personality disorder, or that “Mr. Hyde” was the name of the good doctor’s fiendish alter ego. No, that happened to be “Thomas Young,” a name borrowed from a Yale classmate Greineder hadn’t seen in many years. The alter ego had his own credit cards, which paid for everything from hot-sheet hotel rooms to calls to 1-900 phone-sex lines.*

There are no doubt many ostensibly happily married men whose computers would reveal similar browsing histories and cookie trails. Are they all wife murderers? What are you, crazy? Which is the point his lawyer made at Greineder’s murder trial: my client may have been a degenerate sex addict,^* but that doesn’t mean he killed his wife.

Yes, Mabel Greineder—May to friends—was murdered on Halloween morning 1999, near bucolic Morses Pond in Wellesley. The story her husband told is that he and May had taken one of their dogs for a walk; May somehow wrenched her back, so she rested on a rock while he continued walking the dog; he returned in a little while to find her dead, in the woods, with multiple stab wounds, her skull smashed, her throat slashed. He claimed that he tried to revive her—he had been an emergency-room doc for years—but he was too late. It must have been a mystery assailant, he theorized.

At least two books have been written on the crime and the trial, and barrels of newspaper ink have been spilled detailing the evidence that convicted Greineder of murder. Readers who wish to follow up are free to dig even deeper than we have dug, if you can imagine such a thing.

Meanwhile, we’ll stick with these telling bits:

• Police found a bloody hammer, a knife, and a pair of gloves near the crime scene. Greineder was covered in May’s blood when the police arrived but his hands were clean. The prosecution alleged, sensibly, that he’d had the gloves on when he killed her, then took them off and—unsuccessfully—disposed of them. If he’d actually tried to revive her, the argument went, his hands would have been at least as bloody as the rest of him.

• There were no mystery-assailant footprints in the area, just Greineder’s.

• DNA evidence linked Greineder to the hammer, knife, and gloves.

As we said, Greineder’s sexual proclivities do not mean that he killed his wife. But the crime scene evidence does. That established, here are two more bullet points to contemplate.

• The weekend before the murder, Dr. Greineder spent time with a hooker in a hotel in New Jersey. He must have really liked her because…

• The day after his wife’s murder he called to schedule another tryst with the same prostitute.

His position, current at the time of this writing, is Vice Chairman with an Emphasis on “Vice” of the Lifers’ Group at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution in Norfolk.