Probe of Frug Stabbing Still Yields No Progress

State and Cambridge police are continuing their investigation into the April 4 fatal stabbing of Bunting Fellow Mary Joe Frug, but still have yet to find a motive or a suspect, Jill Reilly, a spokesperson for the district attorney's office, said yesterday.

Police recently sent a basic description of the assailant--a dark-haired, white male in his 20s, approximately six feet tall--along with an account of the incident by teletype to "most of the police departments in the country," Reilly said. The teletype broadcast is standard procedure in an unsolved homicide, she said.

Only one police department, whose input did not prove helpful, has so far responded to the teletype, Reilly said.

Frug, a professor at New England School of Law who was spending this year doing research at Radcliffe's Bunting Institute, was brutally killed as she was walking to a convenience store near her home in Cambridge's elite Brattle St. neighborhood.

Hunting Knife

Police have not yet received results from an FBI laboratory analysis of a hunting knife that may have been used in the stabbing, Reilly said.

She said investigators questioned a woman who lives near Frug and was said to resemble her to determine whether Frug's assailant mistook Frug for the woman. The woman has been harassed by a homeless person in the past, Reilly said.

But the neighbor turned out not to really look like Frug at all, and police have since discarded that line of investigation, Reilly said.