Chapter 18: The Murder of Colleen Ritzer

C: Hi guys! I'm Courtney

L: And I'm Lisa

C: Welcome to the next chapter in The Book of the Dead

-Music-

C: Hi Guys, I hope you had a good thanksgiving, and I hope that you found some good deals if you guys went Black Friday shopping. For all my retail workers out there, I see you I feel you. I also worked Black Friday and Black Friday weekend, but I will take advantage of cyber Monday. So we are actually going to jump right into this story today. we are recording this very, very late in the week. It is currently Saturday this episode has to be up 9am tomorrow. So this is kind of a mad dash, but, again, as all my retail-er as all the-our retail friends will understand that the week of thanksgiving is no joke when it comes to working and scheduling and over time and all of that fun stuff. So we're a little late for the party today

that's OK. uhm-i-i've done the whole retail thing myself. it's not fun. for those that do it you are a special people 'cause you deal with a lot of, I'll say unhappy customers at time and you've got to keep your cool and sometimes I don't understand how you do it. 

so anyway, we're gonna jump right into today's case. Today's chapter is going to be on the murder of Colleen Ritzer. Have you actually ever heard of this?

I doubt believe that I have but I-I think that you're going to take me down a very dark rabbit whole because that's what you like to do.

Yeah, this is another case that made me really angry so let's be-

-Oh, great. Im still raging about the junko furuta case. uhm I can't imagine anyone listening to that and not being completely outraged uhm at the injustice for that poor girl that poor family. It's horrifying. I'm still horrified. I wake up horrified and raging.

Colleen Ritzer was described by pretty much every one that knew her as being an inspiration having a good heart, always having a positive attitude and she was incredibly intelligent. her friend and former coworker Charlotte zerkatz described her as energetic. Quote she was compassionate you couldn't as her-you couldn't ask for anything more from a teacher or a friend. Now colleen graduated from Assumption College in 2011-uhm-Magna Cum Laude with a BA in-in math and a minor in psych and secondary education. And she was actually going for her Master's Degree at Salem State University. Now after graduation she went on to teach at Hale middle school for a year where she met Charlotte her-zerchatz before moving on to teach algebra at Danvers high school in Massachusetts. Now colleen pretty much always knew she wanted to be a teacher. According to colleenritzer.org she grew to love teaching at the age of three because of just how wonderful her preschool teacher was. like-her preschool ended up being like her friend and mentor when she grew up and went to college and went into teaching herself. So , I mean, this teacher had to have been like one hell of an amazing teacher for her to like keep in contact for like 20 years. you know what I mean?

Oh absolutely but-well- her-her preschool teacher must have been amazing and she probably instilled in her how to do that. How to be amazing. I mean it-it's something I think you're born with you know teachers, again, are a special breed, but when you have a mentor that instills that kind of passion for teaching? that's pretty incredible

Exactly. like I-i mean I had amazing teachers or some amazing teachers growing up, but I can't imagine like-or I can only imagine what it's like to have a teacher that really instilled such passion at such a young age. Cause preschool you're like 3 or 4. actually, in fact, teaching ended up not being just a career but she considered it to be her calling. Colleen really wanted to be able to nurture her students and be a mentor to them like her teacher was. and she was brilliant at math. like I can not relate this-colleen was brilliant at math. like she could explain these complex mathematical concepts and equations in a way that literally anybody can understand. and she ended up having a lot of her students growing up to love math as well because of her passion for it and her excitement. I mean her twitter bio literally said quote a math teacher often too excited about the topics I'm teaching. like she loved that-math that much. her twitter was all about planning uhm-like the curriculum for students because she was so excited about math. she taught her students math but she also taught them to appreciate all that was good in their lives and how to be responsible and all of her students really, really adored her. Which is so amazing to see a teacher to have that kind of connection with her students because it really is so rare to find an educator that makes every class better. That's not to say there aren't good teachers out there but to like-for a teacher to connect with every single student is just hard to find. You know?

oh absolutely. I-i-i've known of one other teacher that connected with all students whether they were in this teacher's class or not. all the kids just absolutely loved this one particular teacher. 

colleen was also incredibly close with her family and I mean like her entire family. her mom and dad tom and Peggy, her younger brother and sister Dan and Lauren, her grand[arents her aunts, her uncles, cousins like everyone. her extended family, her immediate family, she was close with all of them. a lot of her vacations growing up were to visit family members in other states and she was at every hockey game her sister had and was apparently always planning family parties to get everyone together. colleen was also just such an optimist according to her family and she even found a way to turn the devastating loss of her grandmother due to heart disease into something positive. SO after her grandmother died she signed her whole family up for a 5k walk for the American heart disease association and named the families team Footsteps for Bev to honor her grandmother. like-just-colleen was just the most pure hearted person. like literally no one could ever say anything bad about her. According to an article for the NYPost, Chris Weimer, one of her students, described Colleen as quote the nicest teacher anyone could ever have. she always had a warm smile Ono her face. Every student loved her. I keep saying that but I can't emphasize that enough. like she was just genuinely such. wonderful human being. now, like I said, colleen Ritzer was an algebra teacher at Danvers High School in Danvers, Massachussetts and at the start of 20-of the 2013 school year danvers high welcomed a new student form Clarksville Tennessee named Philip Chism who had moved to massachussets with her-with his mother and his two younger sisters. Now Philip was a freshman, he was 14, and he was described by his peers as being quiet but pretty pleasant like he was a pretty nice kid. A junior at Danvers named Kyle Cahill said that chasm was the top goal scorer on the school's JV soccer team. So he was obviously like a pretty talented athlete and it seemed like even with being the new kid he wa making friends and kids seemed to really like him. which is good because, I mean I've been the new kid and it's really, really hard to make friends. so it seemed that he was-seemed like he was you know having-you. know he was finding himself in this new school. Now on October 22^nd, 2013 during his algebra class, Colleen approached Chism and asked if he would stay after class, according to another student. now there was an exam coming up and colleen wanted to go over any questions Philip may have had about it or Maybe go over some equations he could have been struggling with you know that kind of thing.Another student also stayed after school for some extra hekp before the exam ad it was reported in multiple sources that Colleen had tried to engage Chism in conversation, maybe to potentially get him to open up a little bit since he was new to the school. Now she allegedly asked how he was liking danvers compared to his prior home in Tennessee and according to this other student chism was visibly upset at the mention of Tennessee. Now this could have been because his parents had gone through, or were currently going through a really stressful divorce which I’m sure was really hard for him to go through. I used to work with children and I had a 7 year old with a lot of anger issues because of his parents divorce because he couldn’t understand why like his parents didn’t love each other anymore. And things like that. Like trust me as a child of divorce my self I totally get it. But anyway, colleen noticed that chism was starting to get upset so she changed the subject according to an article for cnn.com