The last woman in the bar: The 1961 murder of an Anchorage lounge singer

Part of a continuing weekly series on Alaska history by local historian David Reamer. Have a question about Anchorage or Alaska history or an idea for a future article? Go to the form at the bottom of this story.

The small clock on the wall revealed a somber reality of the dark, exhausting hours of the early morning. It was Nov. 20, 1961 and nearly 5 a.m., amid the last ticks of the long day at the Club 210, an Anchorage bar on East Fifth Avenue. There were four people in proper attendance, including bartender and co-owner Robert “Chick” Adams serving lounge singer Rose Dawn. The other two men were armed, eager to relieve the establishment of its cash. Three of those four principal actors survived the ensuing tragedy. Those readers familiar with either recent or distant Alaska history will be unsurprised. It was the woman who died.

Rose Dawn was a stage name, coincidentally also a popular brand of nylons back then. Rosemary Niedzwiecki was born in 1938 in San Diego and grew up there, attending Abraham Lincoln High School. She lived to sing, made it her profession, even at a young age establishing herself as a traveling act in destinations like Las Vegas. Meanwhile, as Anchorage boomed in the 1940s through 1950s, waves of new bars and clubs opened here, each viciously competing with the others for the right to raid local wallets. And one way they attracted business was by importing Lower 48 talent as B-girls, dancers and singers. As of November 1961, Rose Dawn was just 23 years old, a dark-eyed beauty working a standing gig for Leo’s Supper Club at the Forest Park Country Club. Forest Park was a golf course, just west of what is now the Westchester Lagoon, then the Chester Creek mudflats.

Club 210 opened in 1956, the name seemingly a bowling reference, as their address was 224 E. Fifth Ave. Joseph Miljas was an original co-owner. Miljas (1913-1979), also known as Papa Joe, later owned the notorious Spenard Road strip club PJ’s, hence the meaning behind those two letters. “Chick” Adams was born in Kentucky and had been in Anchorage for around a decade as of 1961. The smaller bars and clubs then took much of their personality from their owners, who were frequently the bartenders as well. So, the bar was also called “Chick n’ Joes,” or the place to drink with “Chic.” Consistent spelling was hardly a crucial step in getting drunk.

The fateful morning, Nov. 20, 1961, Dawn was unwinding after another grinding performance, verbally dancing with Adams in that expected pattern of bartender and unloading patron. She may have wondered, aloud or otherwise, about the progression or lack thereof in her career. Anchorage clubs in those days tended to pay well but weren’t the sort of prestige gigs that could advance a singer onwards and upwards. No one outside Alaska cared if you headlined the Buckaroo or Last Chance or even Leo’s Supper Club. Perhaps, just perhaps, that is why Dawn was the last woman in the last bar still open on a crisp, chilly night.

Two young men conspired at a table away from the bar, nursing drunks, both of them edgy and uncertain, eyes drifting about to soak in the details. Gerald Lee Cox and Terrance Wayne Brady were both 22 and residents at the Chinook Hotel. Nearing 5 a.m., the last customer besides themselves and Dawn left, prompting Cox and Brady to huddle around the bar. Cox stood and moved as if toward the restroom, only to turn around suddenly while holding an automatic pistol. “My friend wants to see how well you’ve done tonight,” the robber declared.

Cox guarded Dawn and Adams while Brady ransacked the cash register. It had been a solid night at the bar, producing a $250 score, roughly $2,700 in 2025, not counting the hundreds more in checks left behind. But the robbers wanted more. “You got any dough besides what’s in here?” they asked. Adams retorted, “You think I’d keep all that dough in the register if I had a safe?”

A storage room lay behind the bar, cold and drafty. Cox and Brady escorted Dawn and Adams into the back. They demanded Adams’ keys. “What for,” replied the barkeep. “So, I can lock the joint up when we leave,” replied one of the robbers. “We don’t want anybody to come stumbling in here and find you until we’ve had a chance to get away.” Adams grimaced at a sudden realization. His partner wouldn’t arrive to open the bar until 10, nearly five hours later, which should be enough time to let the criminals slip town. Still, he stared at their faces, willing their features into his memory. If given the chance, he wanted to remember them.

Seeing Dawn shiver, Adams argued, “Give the girl a break and let her have her coat. It gets damn cold back here.” One of the thieves responded ominously: “You’ll never feel it.” Then they struck the bartender over the head with a liquor bottle. He swayed toward the floor, dazed, then lost consciousness.

When Adams woke, he was gnawing on a cord wrapped around his head and pulled through his mouth. One of the bandits was trying to choke him to death. Nonetheless, he could see Dawn sprawled nearby, unmoving. As he struggled, two shots rang out in the small room. One passed through Adams’ neck. The other deflected off his skull and lodged near the junction with the spine. Of course, doctors later figured out all those specific details. As far as the robbers could tell, they’d shot Adams twice in the back of the head to massive crimson effect on the surroundings.

Adams was understandably woozy, in shock from the experience and wounds. Still, he recalled one of them talking, “Let’s get out of here. I got him right in the back of the head that time.” In one moment, they were there, standing over him, and in the next they were gone. Pained and growing cold, Adams scrabbled on the floor, moved himself by will toward a phone. With a heroic effort, he managed a single phone call for help, thereafter sinking back to the floor to await whatever came next. In his shaken daze, he had called the fire department, which dispatched an ambulance and subsequently contacted the police.

For a few minutes, Anchorage was shut down as the police sought to close off avenues of escape. They might not have bothered. Cox and Brady were arrested a few minutes later, just five blocks away from Club 210, albeit without gun or cash. They made for a rather conspicuous pair, two young men walking together around a freezing Anchorage at 5 in the morning right after two young men robbed a bar in the immediate vicinity. The officers on duty accomplished no incredible feat of policing when they put that particular two and two together. Because of fresh snow, it took a few days of searching, but the gun was eventually found tossed down an alley and the cash tucked away on a roof.

Given their age, both men had surprisingly lengthy rap sheets, but Cox in particular was well known to local law enforcement. In March 1960, he was arrested for robbing the Sears Roebuck store in Mountain View. After posting bail, he was arrested again that same day for an unconnected robbery. He faced additional charges after attempting to escape the local federal jail that May. In the summer of 1961, he robbed the Anchorage Transit System bus garage and was out on $10,000 bail at the very time he robbed Club 210.

When the ambulance arrived, Dawn was already dead. She had also been shot twice, once in the leg and again in the back of her head. Adams was alive but in serious condition. Doctors were unsure whether he would survive. A day later, he surprisingly improved and was able to identify Cox and Brady from his hospital bed.

As Adams continued to recover, establishing further clearance between himself and the grave, the outcome for the entire affair was carved deeper into stone. An injured living witness meant certainty, in the courts and for the imprisonment to come. There would be no clever legal maneuvers, no surprises. Cox, at least, understood this reality. At his arraignment, he told the judge, “Could you please appoint me (an attorney) so that I can begin proceedings and get this over with.” The waiting is the hardest part, he surely thought. Time to get on with whatever is next.

Adams indeed appeared at their preliminary hearing, pale but sure as he dramatically pointed out the killers, as if from a movie. After their indictments, Cox and Brady shaved a few visits to the courthouse off their lives and pleaded guilty. Their court-appointed attorneys — Ted Stevens represented Brady — argued for 20-year sentences, but Judge James Fitzgerald ordered life imprisonment without recommendation or parole. Fitzgerald described the murder as a “cruel and brutal killing, done with abandoned heart.”

The entire affair was featured in the April 1962 issue of “Official Detective Stories,” one of many pulpy true crime magazines then popular. “Without the Gun and the Money” appeared alongside other luridly titled articles, such as “Who Would Want to Bomb Congressman Green,” “Maybe Donna Had Too Many Friends,” “Human Bait for the Telephone Wolf,” and “I Want to Watch You Kill Me.”

Detective Earl Hibpshman worked the Club 210 case. An article on his 1974 retirement described the pulpy piece as “overdramatized, the old-timers say, and made Hibpshman and others who worked the case look like Columbo, Mike Hammer, and Sherlock Holmes rolled into one.”

Rose Dawn — Rosemary Niedzwiecki — was buried back in her hometown, at San Diego’s Holy Cross Cemetery. Alaska was her undoing, the end to any further career or fame. Or simply life. Alaska in general and Anchorage specifically are often touted as among the most dangerous places in the country for women, what with the dire rates of violence against women here. There are no trustworthy statistics for Alaska from the time of Rose Dawn’s brief tenure, but there is likewise nothing to suggest that it was a better reality. Again and again, a lesson learned, crime is no recent innovation in Anchorage.

[Trapped: The case of the 1951 Interior Alaska cabin fever murder that was solved and then retried]

[The great snoring assault of 1953 Anchorage and other snoring history]