Colleen Ritzer was born on May 13th, 1989 in Lawrence, MA. She was a 9th-grade algebra teacher at Danvers high school. The high school was home to around 1000 students & 100 teachers at the time. She was said to be most students’ favorite teacher & was a very sweet person in general. She still lived with her parents as she was still only 24 & had no need to move out.
October 22nd, 2013; that day was the same as any other school day. She would teach & then do a tutor session for about an hour after school around 2:30. & then at 4:00 is when extracurricular activities would start for the kids like sports & stuff. During one of those extracurriculars, soccer, the coach noticed one of the kids was not there, 14-year-old Philip Chism, but as Philip was a new student, he was not too worried about it & thought maybe he was doing stuff to move in.
Philip had recently moved to Danvers with his mom after a harsh divorce between his parents. They had only moved about two weeks prior, so it was probably hard, especially since he had so many friends & even a girlfriend back in Tennessee that he had to leave behind. Philip had also been in Colleen’s 4th-period class & then had attended the tutor session. Though Colleen had voiced to another teacher that she did not know why he was there because he was doing fine in math & usually, the tutor class was invite-only. Later that night, at around dinner time, Philip had not shown up for dinner & his mom tried calling him & he did not answer & since they were still so new to the area, she knew it was unlikely he was with a friend, so that is when she reported Philip Chism as missing.
At around the same time, Colleen’s parents were also wondering where Colleen was. They called her & she did not answer but they thought maybe she was working late, so her dad went to the school. He saw her car when he pulled up, so he was relieved but he still wanted visual confirmation that she was there. He went inside the school but no one had seen her in hours. He called her friends to see if maybe she went to hang out with them but they had not seen her either. He was worried since she usually always told them her whereabouts, so then they also reported their child as missing.
The principal sent out a mass email about Philip being missing at around 8 & almost right after it was sent out, he got a call about a teacher at his school who was also missing. It was very odd that two people from the school were missing, especially a student & a teacher. But everyone assumed that they were together because that would be too much of a coincidence if they were not.
When the police arrived at the school, they started checking the security cameras & recently they had installed 140 new cameras in the school but the computer they were connected to was not updated. It was very laggy & kept crashing. It also took forever to load. The cameras were also not labeled yet, so they did not know which ones were the cameras in front of her class. They just let it load anyway while they searched the school. The police had tried pinging Philips phone & it went through, it was pinging towards a nearby movie theatre, so they went there to investigate. They interviewed the employees & found out he was there a couple of hours ago to watch a movie but there was not a woman with him & everyone thought that they were together. But since he had not been there in a couple of hours, they had to keep looking.
Back at the school, they had found Colleen’s purse on the sidewalk outside with all of its important belongings missing, like her ID, money, cards, etc. Near the purse was also a pair of black women’s flats, & soccer cleats. This was concerning since they were in Colleen’s size & Philip was supposed to have Soccer earlier that day. They were later positively identified as theirs. But it was not enough to draw any conclusions. At the theater, they left & found out he had also gone to a Wendy’s after the movie. But after that, they did not seem to find any other traces of him, so they got a hold of the street security cameras to see where he was.
Behind the school was a forest, they went over there to do some more searching & found a recycling bin with blood in it & a note next to it that says “I hate you all”. Since they could not know right off the bat whose blood that was, they went a little farther into the forest. That is where they found the body of Colleen Ritzer, who was naked from the waist down with her clothes strewn about the body. Philip’s backpack was also near the body & reported it but, since the police had primarily been searching for Philip since he is a minor in the situation, they thought his body was found. They almost stopped looking for him to go to the crime scene but, luckily, they kept looking.
They found him walking on a sidewalk in a town about 15 minutes away from the school. He was using a drawstring backpack & when they asked him where he was going, he said nowhere. They investigated his bag & found Colleen’s belongings, the ones that were missing from her purse. When they confronted him, he said he robbed her car at a gas station a few minutes back but, we already know her car was still at the school & undisturbed. He also had a bloody box cutter, bloody gloves, & bloody women’s underwear & when they asked him about that, all he said was “the girl”.
When the security cameras were finally done loading, they found footage of Colleen leaving her class to go to the bathroom. Philip shortly also left the class with his hood on & stalked Colleen to the restrooms. They were in the restrooms for a few minutes before a girl walked in & immediately turned around & left. Philip, seemingly caught, also leaves the restrooms.
Since then, that girl said she did not see Colleen & only saw Philip’s butt & she thought someone was changing, so she left but Philip did not know that. Philip walked around the school for a while, changing clothes several times, & eventually brought a recycling bin into the restrooms & spent a few minutes there. He then leaves with a ski mask on, blood on his pants, & hauling a recycling bin. He takes it downstairs & into the woods.
When interrogated, Philip admits to strangling her when entering the restrooms, he then proceeds to stab her 16 times in the neck before slitting her throat & then sexually assaulting her. He also admits that when he took her into the woods, he sexually assaulted her again for about 30 minutes.
Of course, he was charged for like a million things but, when it comes to the sexual assault portion, he only got charged for one of the two assaults. The reason for that is because they knew she was alive for the first one, but they do not know if she was alive for the second one since she had gone unconscious earlier & those are two very different charges. A sexual assault charge & necrophilia are two very different things, so they did not charge him for that even though that was the worse & more disgusting one. Philip was sentenced to at least 40 years but with a possibility of parole in 25 starting from 2016.
Since Colleen’s dream had always been to be a teacher & she only got to experience that for two years, in honor of her, her family created the Colleen E Ritzer Memorial Fund where students with a desire to teach in Andover & Danvers are given money for tuition. They often do fundraisers like marathons to raise money for the memorial funds. You can donate & learn more online at Colleenritzer.org.
