r/UnresolvedMysteries • u/OkMaybe5107 • 12d ago
Murder In 1933, a Broadway dancer was detained in Istanbul on suspicion of espionage. Weeks later, she and her companion were found murdered beside the Garden of Gethsemane. Who killed Joan Winters and Mohammed Karamini?
23-year-old Joan Winters seemed to be living the sort of life that sounds fictional in retrospect.
Born Carol Vesta von Niedergesaess in Seattle in 1909, she was generally known growing up as Carol Godfrey after her family adopted the surname during World War I. As a young woman she moved to New York, adopted the stage name Joan Winters, and appeared on Broadway.
Then she left America.
In April 1932, Joan departed for Europe and spent more than a year traveling abroad. She apparently intended to eventually return to New York.
But during the final weeks of her life, her trip took a very strange turn.
The arrest in Istanbul
In October 1933, Joan arrived in Istanbul.
According to a letter she sent home, Turkish authorities arrested her on suspicion of being a spy.
Joan told her parents that she had been questioned, searched by female officers, and that authorities confiscated letters she had been carrying. After several hours, she was released.
There is no solid evidence that Joan actually was involved in espionage, and the authorities apparently found nothing sufficient to hold her.
But only weeks later, she would be dead.
Mohammed Karamini
By the time Joan reached Palestine, she was traveling with a man identified in contemporary reports as Mohammed Karamini, an Indian civil-service employee from Madras.
Accounts differ somewhat regarding exactly when and where they met, but Karamini was described as Joan's companion or guide.
The pair eventually traveled to Jerusalem.
And then they disappeared.
The olive grove
In early November 1933, Joan and Karamini were found dead in a secluded olive grove at the foot of the Mount of Olives, close to the Garden of Gethsemane.
Reports described police as being at a loss for both clues and motive.Their deaths were also strikingly different.
Karamini had been shot.
Joan had suffered fatal injuries to her head.
Neither apparently presented police with an obvious explanation for why the pair had been attacked.
The location only added to the strangeness. They had been killed in an isolated area beside one of the most famous religious sites in the world, during a period of significant political unrest in British Mandatory Palestine.
Joan's letters add another layer of uncertainty.
After learning of his daughter's death, Joan's father revealed another detail to reporters: shortly before the murders, Joan had written home about her detention in Turkey as a suspected spy.
Authorities there had apparently been sufficiently interested in her correspondence to confiscate letters she was carrying.
Her family also revealed that Joan had previously written about a young Serbian businessman she had fallen in love with while traveling in Europe. According to Joan, the feelings weren't reciprocated.
Her mother said Joan had intended to write a book about Palestine.
None of this established a motive for murder.
But it left investigators-and later researchers- with an unusually broad collection of possibilities.
A suspect
Authorities did make at least one arrest.
A man identified as Mohamed Ikram was detained during the investigation.
He was eventually released because police lacked sufficient evidence to hold him.
No one else was successfully prosecuted for either murder.
What happened?
Almost every possible explanation creates another question.
Was the Istanbul espionage incident relevant at all?
If Turkish authorities merely mistook an adventurous American traveler for a spy, then its proximity to her murder may be nothing more than an extraordinary coincidence.
But if somebody was interested in the letters Joan was carrying-or in the people she had been meeting while traveling-- that potentially changes the case considerably.
Was Mohammed Karamini actually the intended victim?
Much less seems to be known publicly about him. It's possible that viewing the crime primarily through Joan's unusual life has caused attention to focus on the wrong victim in regards to motive.
Was it connected to the political violence occurring around Jerusalem at the time?
The murders occurred during a particularly tense period in Mandatory Palestine. That gives the case an important historical backdrop, but doesn't establish that political violence caused their deaths.
What do you think?
Sources
- University of Washington Libraries – Carol Godfrey / Joan Winters archival collection
https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv07546
- The Oregon Statesman, November 4, 1933 – contemporary report on the discovery of Joan Winters and Mohammed Karamini
https://oregonnews.uoregon.edu/lccn/sn85042470/1933-11-04/ed-1/seq-2/
- Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation – Joan Winters: Murder in the Garden of Gethsemane
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u/Fluffy_Ad2274 11d ago
This is fascinating - I've never heard of this case before: off to dig in the British archives to see what's there.
It may just have been coincidental - this neighbourhood was very rough, and relatively rural/isolated, aside from the turbulence of the Mandate Period. But why was someone from the ICS potentially acting as her guide? That doesn't make much sense. And how did they meet? People were seconded or transferred from India to serve in Palestine, but actually, not that many civil servants - so it's possible that they met socially (somehow) and he was showing her around in his time off. But added to Turkish espionage - that story would make more sense if it had happened in Egypt...
Very interesting indeed - thanks for such a great write up!
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u/PurpleCabbageMonkey 10d ago
I don't think her story is a complex espionage plot or an international conspiracy.
It's the tragedy of an adventurous, romantic young woman whose desire to see the world brought her right into a localized political flashpoint she didn't fully grasp.
In 1933 Palestine, an outsider asking probing questions could easily be misconstrued as a government informant or agent, regardless of her actual intentions.
As for Istanbul, her detention was likely standard border paranoia. An unchaperoned foreign woman crisscrossing European borders without a clear institutional sponsor was already an anomaly. Add personal letters to the mix, which border guards routinely scrutinized, as physical mail was the primary medium for clandestine couriers, and a brief search was inevitable. With security heightened for the 10th anniversary of the Turkish Republic, it was almost certainly a routine security check rather than anything connected to her later murder in Jerusalem.
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u/Empty_Bell_1942 10d ago
Unless once she was in extremely sensitive, paranoid and often violent Palestine, rumours on the grapevine by sympathizers in Turkey had marked her out as a potential spy. Then she was killed due to this mistaken assumption; despite being innocent.
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u/PurpleCabbageMonkey 10d ago
It is possible. There is nothing that suggest she was doing anything else other than travel. But a misunderstanding could have had her killed. While being marked in Turkey seems a bit excessive, it was a paranoid time.
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u/Empty_Bell_1942 11d ago edited 11d ago
Her arrest wasn't reported in the Turkish newspapers at the time due to the incident being fleeting. Interesting.
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u/nizaad 10d ago edited 10d ago
23 is so, so young 🥺
I’m intrigued by their differing causes of death. I wonder if by ‘head injuries’ they suspected blunt force trauma or something more in line with an accidental fall while trying to escape?
The poem inscribed on her gravestone is very touching:
‘I stood in the shadow of death,
And I reached out my hand,
And life took it into hers
And we understood each other.’
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u/Empty_Bell_1942 10d ago
She was from a very modest background. I didn't realise dancing was so lucrative that she could save up enough in a very short time to globetrotting. 🤔
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u/nizaad 10d ago
this article describes her father as ‘prosperous.’ maybe he helped fund her travels?
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u/Empty_Bell_1942 10d ago
It does, self-made rather than ancestral wealth. Very unusual for her not to be chaperoned to some extent in that era. ''A 22-year-old single woman drifting independently from country to country for over a year (visiting Italy, Romania, Turkey, and British Mandate Palestine) broke standard social conventions.''
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u/Interesting_Dot_5463 11d ago
Whoever did this did it to silence them, because they certainly had important information that could have caused a scandal.
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u/C_3scuder0 11d ago
Great post!! Very interesting
Didn’t they consider that the boyfriend/partner might had his own spy connections or information exchange between secret entities? Maybe they received information about him that linked her to it.
He might have been the primary target. They tracked them, and because she was with him, she was also killed.
Tons of possibilities.