WITHIN five days last month, two young women from Columbus, Ohio, were stabbed to death in this city. Both came from stable, supportive families, and both moved here in the belief that New York air smacks of possibility.
You may already know about the murder of one of these women, Catherine Woods. Many news reports essentially and unfortunately summed up her death, and life, this way: wholesome stripper slain.
A daughter of the man who directs the Ohio State University marching band, Ms. Woods harbored dreams of becoming a professional dancer. She trained, auditioned, and, to pay the rent for an Upper East Side apartment, occasionally danced at topless clubs. She was 21, and white. No one has been charged in her murder, but the police are looking hard at an ex-boyfriend.
You probably do not know about the murder of the other woman, Erica Robertson, whose death merited only a newspaper paragraph or two, and usually with her surname misspelled as Robinson.
The daughter of an equipment operator and a hospital nurse, she worked as a guard at a homeless shelter to pay the rent for an apartment in the Concourse section of the Bronx. She was 29, and black. No one has been charged in her murder, but the police are looking hard at an ex-boyfriend.
The killing of Catherine Woods made the front page of at least one newspaper, lasted several news cycles, and became a topic of discussion on a few cable-news talk shows. Since the killing of Erica Robertson did not, here is her story, as conveyed by her older brother, Phillip, who spoke by telephone from the Ohio home of their brokenhearted parents.
Erica surprised her close family four years ago when she suddenly packed up her daughter, Brittany, and moved to the Bronx to be with a New York man she had met. "It didn't really sit well with anybody," Mr. Robertson recalled.
But time soothed the hurt, and before long Mr. Robertson, a truck driver, was driving 540 miles east every few weeks to sleep on a futon in his kid sister's apartment.
"At first I was worried about her being there," he said. "Once she showed me she knew what she was doing down there, I didn't worry too much."
Her relationship with the boyfriend gradually soured, amid accusations of domestic violence. She ended it four months ago, her brother said. "She would give a person chances, but when she was through, it was over." Still, she continued to raise one of his daughters, who, like Brittany, was 12.
Erica saw a lot of her family. A few days before her murder, her older brother drove her to Columbus for their younger brother's wedding reception and drove her back to the Bronx, all in the same weekend. She talked a lot on the trip about the large Thanksgiving dinner she was preparing for her friends from work.
THE day before Thanksgiving, authorities in the Bronx telephoned a home in Columbus. Erica's parents and two brothers settled into a Dodge Durango and drove through the night, through a snowstorm, and arrived in the Bronx at Thanksgiving dawn - only to get lost in the unfamiliar terrain.
"I couldn't think that night," Mr. Robertson said.
They identified her body. They collected her distraught daughter. They packed up some of the food she had prepared for that Thanksgiving meal - the macaroni and cheese, the shrimp cocktail - and they drove back to Columbus, where they ate it in a shared state of shock.
Who killed Erica? All Mr. Robertson knows is that the ex-boyfriend had a key to the apartment that he refused to return to Erica. That the man's daughter, now in foster care, says she saw him in the apartment that night. That Erica's co-workers told her family he had been threatening her. And that the man, now living in Columbus, did not attend the funeral.
"He didn't call or give his condolences, nothing," Mr. Robertson said.
Last week Mr. Robertson and a friend drove back to the Bronx in a big white truck, while his mother and an uncle followed in a Chrysler. They spent five hours removing Erica's belongings from the apartment that she had once made so cozy. Her protective older brother choked up a bit as he threw that futon into the back of the truck.
"We came back right after that," he said.
And that is the New York story of Erica Robertson, the other woman from Columbus, Ohio.