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Speaker 5: Plus transitions.
Speaker 3: You are now listening to true Murder, the most shocking
Speaker 3: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 3: written about them. Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every
Speaker 3: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 3: infamous killers in true crime history True Murder with your
Speaker 3: host journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Speaker 5: Good Evening. In nineteen seventy one, there began in Rochester,
Speaker 5: New York, a series of hideous murders, cases that offer
Speaker 5: the starkest of contrasts between good and evil. Perfectly innocent victims,
Speaker 5: perfectly evil predators. The three victims were little girls, each
Speaker 5: named with the same first and last initial. Each, the
Speaker 5: legend said, had been dumped in a town that also
Speaker 5: began with that letter. The victims had all been last
Speaker 5: seen in an urban setting, and their lifeless bodies were
Speaker 5: found raped and carelessly dumped along a rural roadside, strangled
Speaker 5: by ligature. Local girls with a litter of names were
Speaker 5: unhigh alert and told to be vigilant. The little ones
Speaker 5: didn't quite get it, but they sensed it, something in
Speaker 5: their mother's tighter grip on their little hand, or the
Speaker 5: v way mum never relaxed. When they were out of doors.
Speaker 5: The older ones looked at maps and guessed where their
Speaker 5: own lifeless bodies would be discovered in a ditch. No
Speaker 5: one wondered why the initials were important, what it all meant.
Speaker 5: They understood one thing, it was terrifying. The book they
Speaker 5: were featuring this evening is Nightmare in Rochester, the Double
Speaker 5: Initial Murders, with my special guest, journalist and author Michael Benson. Welcome,
Speaker 5: Welcome back to the program, and thank you very much
Speaker 5: for this interview Michael Benson.
Speaker 4: Thanks Dan, thanks for having me.
Speaker 5: Thank you very much once again. Always interesting and the
Speaker 5: inaugural the opening debut of our program True Murder on Spreaker.
Speaker 5: So thank you very much for this Nightmare in Rochester.
Speaker 4: Want congratulations on the new platform.
Speaker 5: Thank you very much. Let's talk about as you write,
Speaker 5: your fascination with evil stems from a June twenty fifth,
Speaker 5: nineteen sixty six disappearance. Tell us about this and why
Speaker 5: this is important to your entire true crime and writing career.
Speaker 4: Sure, when I was nine years old, my babysitter, Georgia
Speaker 4: and Formacola and her friend Kathy Bernhardt from down the
Speaker 4: road went swimming in a swimming hole behind my house
Speaker 4: in a rural section of Monroe County, New York town
Speaker 4: of Chilight, and they didn't come back. They were last
Speaker 4: scene on one side of my house and their bodies
Speaker 4: were found a month later on the other side. And
Speaker 4: they'd been horribly dismembered and perhaps cannibalized. It was a
Speaker 4: real Jack the Ripper Jack the Ripper crime scene, and
Speaker 4: it was just terrifying to the community. I grew up
Speaker 4: with a fascination for psycho killers. Because of that, I
Speaker 4: tried to, in an amateur way try to figure out
Speaker 4: who did it as a kid, and as a teenager
Speaker 4: and as a young adult. And I's no coincidence. I
Speaker 4: became a true crime writer and in twenty eleven I
Speaker 4: teamed up with private investigator Don Tubman and Kathy Bernhardt's mom,
Speaker 4: Alice Bernhardt, and we started a fresh investigation, developed a
Speaker 4: new suspect, and sad to say, Alice passed away a
Speaker 4: few weeks back age ninety two, and hopefully we gave
Speaker 4: her a little bit of closure with the book that
Speaker 4: came out, The Devil a Genoese Junction. Now, that book
Speaker 4: came out two days after my own mom passed away,
Speaker 4: So it was with a heavy heart that I started
Speaker 4: doing publicity material publicity of appearances for it. And the
Speaker 4: first one I did was at the Scottsville Free Library
Speaker 4: in the town where I had gone to high school,
Speaker 4: and a lot of old friends came out and the
Speaker 4: place was packed, and after I gave my a little presentation,
Speaker 4: somebody said, well, what are you going to do for
Speaker 4: an encore? And I said, well, I think I am
Speaker 4: going to take on the double initial murders. And I
Speaker 4: just sort of set it off the top of my
Speaker 4: head because I'd been thinking about it a lot, but
Speaker 4: it seemed like a big chunk at that moment, still
Speaker 4: grieving over my bluff my mom, but the reaction was
Speaker 4: just ecstatic. It made everybody very very happy. So I
Speaker 4: knew I had to do it. And about five years
Speaker 4: after my girls and child I were killed, the series
Speaker 4: of new murders started in the city of Rochester, which
Speaker 4: caused such a hysteria in the community that in some
Speaker 4: senses the Genesee Junction murders were a little bit forgotten.
Speaker 4: But there's no describing how the murders. These three little
Speaker 4: girls terrified everyone, largely because of the first victim, and
Speaker 4: they were all ten and eleven years old, and Carmen
Speaker 4: Cologne was the first victim. She disappeared on Tuesday afternoon,
Speaker 4: November sixteenth, nineteen seventy one, autumn day school day. Temperature
Speaker 4: was in the mid fifties. Carmen's mother was only twenty
Speaker 4: four years old. She'd been fourteen when she had Carmen,
Speaker 4: and in recent years, Carmen had been living with her grandfather,
Speaker 4: Felix and his wife Candy, on a side street in
Speaker 4: the Bullshead section of Rochester, which was once a thriving
Speaker 4: shopping district, but by nineteen seventy one had deteriorated and
Speaker 4: become populated with transiencects, cons', drug addicts, and mental cases.
Speaker 4: So Little Carmen didn't really speak much English. She was
Speaker 4: mentally handicapped. She understood more than a recording of her
Speaker 4: teachers she was learning, but she still didn't know very
Speaker 4: much English. She'd lived in Puerto Rico for much of
Speaker 4: her life, and she had a limited ability to explain
Speaker 4: her feelings or her experiences, but she was improving by
Speaker 4: all accounts. She's tiny girl, four feet tall, sixty five pounds.
Speaker 4: Her playmates were her cousins and sometimes neighbor kids, but
Speaker 4: they spoke only Spanish, and on that afternoon, about four
Speaker 4: point thirty in the afternoon, Carmen's mom sent Carmen around
Speaker 4: the corner to a drug store on Rochester's main street,
Speaker 4: West to have a prescription filled for her baby's sister,
Speaker 4: who had an earache. How Carmen left, turned around the
Speaker 4: corner under the busy thoroughfare and never returned. Now, on
Speaker 4: previous occasions when Carmen had been asked to run errand
Speaker 4: her grandfather had stood on the front porch so there
Speaker 4: was a candy Penny candy store up the block, and
Speaker 4: he could stand on the porch and watch her go
Speaker 4: and watch her come back. And when she went to
Speaker 4: the drug store, and she'd done this a couple of
Speaker 4: times before, he would walk behind her and she come
Speaker 4: out of the drug store, and she run past him,
Speaker 4: and then he would tell her back home again. And
Speaker 4: by those trips she was she learned a careful and
Speaker 4: small sense of independence. But on this day she forgot
Speaker 4: to tell her grandfather she was going. She grabbed the
Speaker 4: prescription and headed out the door and found herself alone
Speaker 4: on the streets. The guy on duty and the drug
Speaker 4: store took the prescription, said, this is a Medicaid prescription.
Speaker 4: It's going to take about a half hour to fill
Speaker 4: out some forms. Come back. Then. Almost impossible to tell
Speaker 4: if Carmen under at any of that, But she left
Speaker 4: and was never seen again other than one horrible moment
Speaker 4: about an hour later. So anyway, when Carmen didn't return
Speaker 4: home and uncle began searching the neighborhood, the police weren't
Speaker 4: called until seven fifty, so she'd been gone for about
Speaker 4: three hours before the police were informed. But during that time,
Speaker 4: about an hour after her abduction, hours before the police
Speaker 4: had been notified, Carmen apparently wriggled free from her abductor
Speaker 4: or abductors and jumped out of the car. She was
Speaker 4: naked from the waist down, holding her pants in one hand,
Speaker 4: and she ran hysterically down the shoulder of the Western
Speaker 4: Expressway now known as Interstate four ninety. She ran toward
Speaker 4: heavy oncoming rush hour traffic, screaming for help, and was
Speaker 4: seen by dozens of motorists as they approached Exit three
Speaker 4: heading towards Churchville. One of those drivers saw a car
Speaker 4: behind her, backing up toward her. Some saw a parked
Speaker 4: car and an adult running after her. Scores of cars
Speaker 4: drove by, observing the challenge of distress, but no one stopped,
Speaker 4: and Carmen was presumably caught and dragged back. Now, every
Speaker 4: witness seemed to see something different. Most agreed it was
Speaker 4: a luxury car, Cadillac Ford Ltd, Lincoln Continent or something
Speaker 4: like that. And you have to remember people don't have
Speaker 4: cell phones and they're on an expressway going sixty five
Speaker 4: miles an hour in a hurry to get home. And
Speaker 4: everybody thought the same thing if they recognized that there
Speaker 4: was a crisis at all, and some didn't. They thought, well,
Speaker 4: somebody behind me will be in better situation to take
Speaker 4: care of it. And they had to wait until they
Speaker 4: got home before they could call the police, and some did.
Speaker 4: Some got home and said, you know, I saw a
Speaker 4: really creepy thing on the side of the road. I
Speaker 4: think maybe you should look into it. But by that time,
Speaker 4: of course, it was too late. Psychologists were kind to
Speaker 4: the motorists. They said, you know, the site was too
Speaker 4: bizarre to be I said swiftly. And you know, I've
Speaker 4: done a lot of thinking about this over the years,
Speaker 4: and it occurs to me that if someone had stopped,
Speaker 4: it probably would have prevented the murder. But there's at
Speaker 4: least a fifty to fifty that they would have helped
Speaker 4: the adult catch the child. All the adult would have
Speaker 4: to say is, you know, that's my niece. She's you know,
Speaker 4: autistic or whatever he wanted to say, and the adult
Speaker 4: would immediately stop thinking that this is a crime and
Speaker 4: help the adult catch the hysterical little girl who has
Speaker 4: taken her pants off. Anyway, that's that's the last time
Speaker 4: we see we see Carmen alive.
Speaker 5: Now you talk about this, there is there is a
Speaker 5: car description, or there are several car descriptions. Tell us
Speaker 5: about what type of car that at least police are
Speaker 5: alerting for, and also how and talk about Carmen's uncle
Speaker 5: Miguel and how he comes to the BSS.
Speaker 4: Right well, as I said that they were pretty witnesses
Speaker 4: were pretty much in agreement that it was a luxury car.
Speaker 4: I was a big boat of a car. And on
Speaker 4: the cover of our book we have a nice Cadillac
Speaker 4: which we've put in black and white, so you can't
Speaker 4: tell that it's bright red. I don't think the car
Speaker 4: was bright red. And one fellow that we are most
Speaker 4: familiar with don spoke to him in person. I spoke
Speaker 4: to his widow. He pass away a few years ago.
Speaker 4: There was a fellow named Nick Zook, and he remained
Speaker 4: plagued by his thoughts of what if he was one
Speaker 4: of the guys that drove, but he thought the car
Speaker 4: was a Lincoln Continental, saw the little girl and saw
Speaker 4: an adult get out of the passenger side of the car,
Speaker 4: thought it was a woman and had a head towards
Speaker 4: the tail of the car in pursuit, So that would
Speaker 4: indicate two people in the car, at least one of
Speaker 4: them a woman. This is very different from all of
Speaker 4: the descriptions of cars that we get for the other
Speaker 4: two victims. Now, Carmen has found after school on Thursday,
Speaker 4: two days after her disappearance, in a desolate section of
Speaker 4: the town of Raiga. Two teenage boys out joy riding
Speaker 4: on a eighty cc Suzuki motorcycle and they found Carmen's
Speaker 4: naked and an exposed body in a deep ditch that
Speaker 4: ran along the side of the road. Her body had
Speaker 4: been clearly sexually abused and was covered with fingernail scratches,
Speaker 4: maybe something might expect from a woman attacker. The head
Speaker 4: was against a large rock, and the boys got the
Speaker 4: impression of the body that had placed at that spot
Speaker 4: rather than rolled down the incline. Although they weren't experts,
Speaker 4: the sheriff said he believed the girl had been slain
Speaker 4: elsewhere and then transported by car to the dumb site.
Speaker 4: Police later found Carmen's pants near the spot where she'd
Speaker 4: been seen running, but her underwear remained forever missing. Now
Speaker 4: to get to Uncle Miguel, as I had said, Carmen's
Speaker 4: mom had Carmen when she was fourteen years old, and
Speaker 4: the father biological father was a fellow named Gustiano Cologne
Speaker 4: who was thirty two years old, and his much younger
Speaker 4: brother subsequently sub subsequently became Carmen's mother's boyfriend, and he drove.
Speaker 4: I knew to him Cadillac, and we recently I had
Speaker 4: two beautiful ladies. Deb Spurling and Christine Green interviewed Carmen's
Speaker 4: mom and Carmen's half sister, and we found out that
Speaker 4: Carmen came to be because of a swift and romance
Speaker 4: free twist with a much older man. Now, not long
Speaker 4: after Carmon's death, Uncle Miguel splits. He takes off from
Speaker 4: Rochester goes back to Puerto Rico. So he says, where
Speaker 4: are you going? He says, I did something wrong. I've
Speaker 4: got to get away, and this alerts the police to
Speaker 4: him as a suspect, and plus his car is found
Speaker 4: to have Carmen's doll inside it, and the trunk of
Speaker 4: the car has been washed out with a detergent that
Speaker 4: wasn't used by the car dealership that sold him the car. So,
Speaker 4: I mean a lot of police figure this is it.
Speaker 4: We've got him. So they go to Puerto Rico in
Speaker 4: March of nineteen seventy two, four months after the murder,
Speaker 4: they find him. They return him to Monroe County so
Speaker 4: he can be interrogated, and Sheriff Skinner himself sheriff for
Speaker 4: decades and decades old Sheriff big Man, who lean on
Speaker 4: guys to get him to confess. But Miguel hangs tough.
Speaker 4: He says, I didn't have anything to do with Carmen's death.
Speaker 4: What we found out from the family was that he
Speaker 4: did say that he had done something wrong. But the
Speaker 4: thing he had done wrong, he thought was he was
Speaker 4: living with Carmen's mom who was on food stamps, and somebody,
Speaker 4: possibly his older brother and Carmen's biological father, told him
Speaker 4: that you better get away from here. They're going to
Speaker 4: arrest you for fraud if they catch you and living
Speaker 4: with a woman on welfare. So this, on purpose or
Speaker 4: inadvertently makes Miguel look like a suspect more so than
Speaker 4: he would otherwise, And and that's pretty much the way
Speaker 4: it stayed. That there was no concrete evidence linking Miguel
Speaker 4: to the crime. And the women we've talked to, the
Speaker 4: Colone women we've talked to, are insistent he's not the
Speaker 4: guy that he was. You know, he loved Carmen, was
Speaker 4: there a stepfather of sorts, and it wasn't him, which
Speaker 4: isn't to say it isn't somehow involved with the dysfunction
Speaker 4: in the Cologne family. But they defend him very strongly.
Speaker 5: You talk about also that they demanded a lide detective
Speaker 5: test and he also passed. He did just as you say,
Speaker 5: just not enough evidence to ever take it to court
Speaker 5: at all.
Speaker 4: But well, that's that's right, although you know, at least
Speaker 4: one investigator wanted to throw it to the grand jury
Speaker 4: and see what happened, but that never happened. And then
Speaker 4: there's there's there's a year and four months of quiet,
Speaker 4: and the Carmen Cologne case fades away from the front pages.
Speaker 4: But then it starts up again in April second, nineteen
Speaker 4: seventy three, with Wanda Walkawitz.
Speaker 5: Tell us a little bit about Wanda Lee Welkowitz and
Speaker 5: any similarities to Cormen Cologne.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, uh, you'll find that all of the all
Speaker 4: of the victims came from lower income families. They all
Speaker 4: came from broken homes. Moms were all accepting uh, you know, assistance,
Speaker 4: and they all went to uh they were all Catholics,
Speaker 4: and they were all ten or eleven years old. They
Speaker 4: were all walking alone on the street when they disappeared.
Speaker 4: But other than that, I mean, and in the broad
Speaker 4: stroke sense, there seemed to be a lot of similarities.
Speaker 4: But the closely look, the fewer similarities there were.
Speaker 5: There.
Speaker 4: There wasn't anybody who knew all three for example, and
Speaker 4: boy have people looked. But anyway, so Wanda, Wanda was
Speaker 4: a redheaded fifth grader Rochester's School number eight. There was
Speaker 4: a rainy Monday, late afternoon. She's eleven, and she is
Speaker 4: running an errand for her mother, Joyce, who's a widower
Speaker 4: and a little bit of a lay about, who has
Speaker 4: Wanda doing a lot of the chores for her. Wanda's
Speaker 4: had to change schools because of a truancy problem, and
Speaker 4: the reason she's not going to schools because she's needed
Speaker 4: at home to take care of things because mom can't.
Speaker 4: So since Joyce Walkwit's the mom had been widowed, she'd
Speaker 4: been through a series of men, and they lived about
Speaker 4: a half block from Conky Avenue on Rochester's East Side,
Speaker 4: which is another section of Rochester that had seen better days.
Speaker 4: Wanda was four foot seven inches tall, she weighed seventy
Speaker 4: seven pounds, bright red hair like you could spot her
Speaker 4: a mile away, and her mom gave her a shopping
Speaker 4: list and said, this is what we need for dinner.
Speaker 4: And Wanda left for the store as she had done
Speaker 4: many many times before. So she walked three blocks to
Speaker 4: the corner store on Knaky Avenue, s wearing a blue
Speaker 4: and white dress with white socks and sneakers her red
Speaker 4: and green checked coat. She bought the groceries and was
Speaker 4: returning home with a big, full shopping bag in her
Speaker 4: arms when she disappeared. Now several witnesses saw Wanda leave
Speaker 4: the deli with her bag. At one point, she stopped
Speaker 4: at the school eight fence and she used a fence
Speaker 4: to help brace the bag and get a better grip
Speaker 4: on it, and then continued walking towards home. She had
Speaker 4: friends who saw her looked away, looked back and she
Speaker 4: was gone. Now. Unlike Carmen, there was an indication that
Speaker 4: Wanda had been targeted earlier by a creep on the street.
Speaker 4: On the Saturday night at ten pm, only two days
Speaker 4: before her abduction, Wanda and her friend Linda are followed
Speaker 4: by a stranger as the girls are walking of the
Speaker 4: Conky Avenue area after dark. The stalking incident was considered
Speaker 4: so serious that Linda's mom filed a report with police,
Speaker 4: who came but found no sign of the guy. The
Speaker 4: guy apparently chased them all the way to Wanda's house
Speaker 4: and they ran up to her upstairs apartment, and the
Speaker 4: guy came into the building and was standing at the
Speaker 4: bottom of the stairs when he finally gave up and left,
Speaker 4: So it's considered a serious incident. The girls reported that
Speaker 4: they hadn't gotten a good look at his face because
Speaker 4: he hid behind a bush when they spotted him, and
Speaker 4: the only detail that they noticed was they had a
Speaker 4: buckle on his shoe. Now we found Linda Diamond. I
Speaker 4: found Linda, and of course, now she's a grown woman,
Speaker 4: and I suggested to her that she'd seen the guy,
Speaker 4: and she said that, you know, she suspected that was true.
Speaker 4: She knows that after that incident, after that Saturday night,
Speaker 4: Mom said, that's it, You're not going outside alone anymore.
Speaker 4: But unfortunately Wanda was never told that, and two days
Speaker 4: later she was snatched off the street. Now, unlike Michelle
Speaker 4: and Carmen, Wanda is found very quickly. By the time
Speaker 4: the newspapers already with the story about her being missing,
Speaker 4: they have to change everything because her body has been
Speaker 4: found ten fifteen in the morning. The morning after her disappearance,
Speaker 4: on an access road in the town of Webster, a
Speaker 4: state trooper found Wanda's body, faced down, thrown over a
Speaker 4: railing and allowed to roll down an embankment. Now the
Speaker 4: obvious similarities between Carmen and Wanda. Both girls were alone
Speaker 4: on the street running errands. Oddly, they both had involved
Speaker 4: walks that involved one right hand turn two streets. Both
Speaker 4: had successfully reached their destination had left when they were snatched.
Speaker 4: But there are differences. Wanda was bruised but not scratched.
Speaker 4: Carmen had been found exposed, whereas Wanda had been re
Speaker 4: dressed right. One had been strangled face to face, the
Speaker 4: other had been strangled from behind. That's a major psychological difference.
Speaker 4: That's a difference in modus operandi right there, that's very stark.
Speaker 5: What about content the stomach? But what about contents in
Speaker 5: the stomach and what does that indicate the police?
Speaker 4: Yes, well, Wanda had been fed by her killer. The
Speaker 4: Monroe County Medical Examiner discovered custard in the girl's stomach,
Speaker 4: but it was a mystery where she'd gotten it. Now,
Speaker 4: the assumption was that she must have been given the
Speaker 4: food by her killer. Her mother insisted that couldn't have
Speaker 4: been the case because Wanda had a nervous stomach and
Speaker 4: she wouldn't have been able to keep it down under
Speaker 4: the stress of the attack. But who knows, says somewhere
Speaker 4: between when she left for that store when she was
Speaker 4: found dead, she had eaten custard, and the bet theory
Speaker 4: is that the killer gave it to her. Another difference
Speaker 4: is that no one saw the killer from then saw
Speaker 4: the killer's car from then on, mistook it for a
Speaker 4: luxury car. Witness called the police hotline and said he
Speaker 4: saw a white man of medium height forcing a red
Speaker 4: haired girl into a light colored Dodge Dart on Kaaki Avenue,
Speaker 4: and that would start a series of sightings that all
Speaker 4: involved what I like to call piece of crap American cars.
Speaker 4: They're in sharp contrast to the Lincoln Ltd. Or cadillact
Speaker 4: that was seen in Carmen's case.
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Speaker 5: Now, there are suspects arise, there are tip lines, there's many,
Speaker 5: many tips come in. They look at a young man
Speaker 5: in California that has an article clipping in his wallet
Speaker 5: of the story of people that look good. Tell us
Speaker 5: a little bit about that suspect that they eliminate eventually.
Speaker 5: And profile that's created by a doctor David Barry.
Speaker 4: Oh boy, well, David Barry's profile doesn't really come into
Speaker 4: it until after Michelle Mayenne's crime. Okay, if we have
Speaker 4: to get through Michelle first before we can get to
Speaker 4: that stuff, okay. And then there wasn't as long of
Speaker 4: a gap this time between crimes. That November, almost factly,
Speaker 4: two years after Carmen's attack, fear grew to panic in Rochester.
Speaker 4: The Monday after Thanksgiving, ten year old Michelle my Enza
Speaker 4: disappeared in the Webster Avenue area of Rochester on the
Speaker 4: East Side. Michelle was chubby and slow. She was a
Speaker 4: pupil at School thirty three, where she was cruelly bullied.
Speaker 4: Her last day at school had been a rough one.
Speaker 4: She'd been teased relentlessly during recess, so severely that she
Speaker 4: had to leave her classroom and spend most of the
Speaker 4: afternoon crying in the nurse's office. How to make madness worse,
Speaker 4: she and her primary tormentor had been made to stay
Speaker 4: after school, so when Michelle's mom came to pick Michelle
Speaker 4: and her sister up, Michelle wasn't released, so mom walked
Speaker 4: the sister home and left Michelle defend for herself. Michelle
Speaker 4: walked in the Market View section of Rochester that's on
Speaker 4: it's over by Webster Avenue on the east side, and
Speaker 4: as was true of Carmen and Wanda, she disappeared while
Speaker 4: walking alone after school, but before dinner. Now after her
Speaker 4: bad day, Michelle left school somewhere between three twenty and
Speaker 4: three thirty in the afternoon and made it to a
Speaker 4: spot at the intersection of Webster Avenue in Ackerman Street,
Speaker 4: at which point there's a series of witnesses. We have
Speaker 4: a fairly good idea of what happens because people see Michelle,
Speaker 4: and our first witness is a little girl that we
Speaker 4: call Cynthia because we're protecting her. And Cynthia saw Michelle
Speaker 4: at the corner of Ackerman in Webster and from that
Speaker 4: point Michelle headed up a stretch of street that went
Speaker 4: to the shopping plaza where Michelle's uncle Phil saw her
Speaker 4: offered her a ride home and she declined. Now only
Speaker 4: a few minutes after that, Cynthia sees Michelle a second time,
Speaker 4: and this time she's in a beige Ford speeding recklessly
Speaker 4: away from the area, cutting the corner from Ackerman On
Speaker 4: to Webster Avenue so tightly that Cynthia had a step
Speaker 4: back to avoid being hit, and another car came slammed
Speaker 4: on the brakes to avoid an accident, and the car
Speaker 4: with Michelle in it disappeared to the heading towards the northeast.
Speaker 4: Cynthia is a little girl. She knows Michelle because she
Speaker 4: used to go to school with her, but police are
Speaker 4: not taking her as seriously as they might if she
Speaker 4: were an adult, until the motors who slammed down her
Speaker 4: breaks comes forward and says, no, that really happened. It
Speaker 4: was a beige Ford pinto another piece of crap American car.
Speaker 4: So we found and interviewed Cynthia, and she's a very
Speaker 4: important witness because she saw the killer's face. It was
Speaker 4: a long time ago, but she saw him, and we, uh,
Speaker 4: you know, we're we later showed her a bunch of
Speaker 4: pictures and she picked the one she liked best. But
Speaker 4: I'll get to that now. The next time we hear
Speaker 4: about Michelle, she's at a fast food restaurant. Uh in
Speaker 4: an eastern suburb. A woman pulled into a Carol's fast
Speaker 4: food restaurant in Rochester back in the seventies. We had
Speaker 4: Carol's before we had McDonald's. The same thing. The woman
Speaker 4: pulls into the fast food restaurant, but there's a there's
Speaker 4: a song on the radio she likes, so she doesn't
Speaker 4: get out the car right away, and she notices that
Speaker 4: there's a chubby little girl sitting in the car next
Speaker 4: to her, which is light colored, possibly beige, possibly tan,
Speaker 4: which she thinks is a Plymouth duster either nineteen seventy
Speaker 4: one or seventy two, you know, pinto duster. Medical examiner
Speaker 4: Labor later gave this witness credibility by finding a fast
Speaker 4: food hamburger in Michelle's stomach. Again, the killer had fed
Speaker 4: his victim before killing her. Now, the woman eventually did
Speaker 4: get out of her car and go to the restaurant.
Speaker 4: And as she was doing so, a man carrying a
Speaker 4: bag of food and a soft drink came back and
Speaker 4: got in the car with the little girl in it,
Speaker 4: so she got a look at the killer's face as well.
Speaker 4: Now is a third witness, and this is maybe fifteen
Speaker 4: twenty minutes after that, and this witness stopped because a
Speaker 4: car out of country road in the town of Massaden
Speaker 4: was parked off the shoulder and in the car was
Speaker 4: a and in a girl. The man tried to hide
Speaker 4: the girl and angrily told the good Samaritan he was
Speaker 4: just trying to change a flat tire and to please
Speaker 4: go away. That guy also got a look at the
Speaker 4: guy's face, and slot of this, we get a composite
Speaker 4: drawing of our suspect, a pretty good idea what this
Speaker 4: guy looks like. They put the face that is drawn
Speaker 4: on a photograph of a police officer who's dressed as
Speaker 4: the killer had been dressed. So they have a composite.
Speaker 4: It's mostly photographed with a drawn face on it. And
Speaker 4: this goes in the newspapers, and apparently it looks exactly
Speaker 4: like everybody's ex husband and Davy and Dad. So there's
Speaker 4: lots of lots of leads at that point, most of
Speaker 4: them lead nowhere.
Speaker 5: What about account Yeah, what about police making any kind
Speaker 5: of connection between any of the murderers as done by
Speaker 5: the same perpetrator.
Speaker 4: Well, the Monroe County Medical Examiner and the people who
Speaker 4: have been at Michelle and Wanda's crime scenes say the
Speaker 4: same guy killed Wanda and Michelle, no doubt in their mind.
Speaker 4: And we don't need to know why. I mean, they're
Speaker 4: keeping that part secret to you weed out false confessors.
Speaker 4: But there are dramatic differences between one and Michelle's crime
Speaker 4: scenes and Carmen's. So that the one thing, the one
Speaker 4: thing that holds all three crime scenes together and supports
Speaker 4: the theory of one man doing it all, is that
Speaker 4: white animal hairs were found on all three bodies. Incredible, Yes, Anyway,
Speaker 4: after a couple of days, Michelle's fully clothes and lifeless
Speaker 4: body was found in a ditch about eight feet from
Speaker 4: the north shoulder of a deserted road in the town
Speaker 4: of Massat. It's partially on its side in front, and
Speaker 4: found by a volunteer fireman from neighboring Walworth. Now, the
Speaker 4: killer had dropped the body at the top of an
Speaker 4: incline at the side of the road and rolled it down.
Speaker 4: Michelle's coat was missing. Now, as was true with Carmen Igwanda,
Speaker 4: the thing that you noticed by visiting the site is
Speaker 4: this is an unusually deserted stretch of road. The road
Speaker 4: was two miles long, had ten houses on it. The
Speaker 4: nearest house was in another town, so there was one. Yeah.
Speaker 4: After Michelle's murder, people first noticed the initials thing, but
Speaker 4: it was just considered an oddity, a weird coincidence, and
Speaker 4: it didn't become part of the story until a local
Speaker 4: psychiatrist affiliated with the top Rochester University published his theory
Speaker 4: in the daily newspaper Democrat and Chronicle and said that
Speaker 4: the sets of double initials cc, wwnmm was an indication
Speaker 4: that the killer was a criminal mastermind who knew the
Speaker 4: girls ahead of time so he could pick ones with
Speaker 4: alliterative names. The psychiatrist even ben geography a little bit.
Speaker 4: He said Karmen had been left in Churchville, it was
Speaker 4: actually Raiga outside of Churchville, Wanda in Webster, and Michelle
Speaker 4: in Macedon. Interesting thing here is that this theory instantly
Speaker 4: becomes the accepted fact in Rochester instantly, all of a sudden,
Speaker 4: it goes from being three murders that are very similar
Speaker 4: to one another to boom. They are the double initials murders.
Speaker 4: Dahl has to do with the alphabet. The psychiatrist says
Speaker 4: that if you follow the numerology of the letters, that
Speaker 4: the next victim is going to be gg and found
Speaker 4: in the town starting with GES. So, I mean, Michelle
Speaker 4: was technically found in Macedon, but I've talked to the
Speaker 4: nearest neighbor and she said, we live in Walworth and
Speaker 4: no one knows where the borderline is. And I don't
Speaker 4: think the killer knew where the borderline was, so at
Speaker 4: least the geography part of the theory, I don't think wash.
Speaker 4: It just doesn't. It doesn't fit. Now, with the exception
Speaker 4: of the investigators, who were guided by evidence and logic,
Speaker 4: everyone believed the psychiatrist's initials became the thing and the
Speaker 4: killer was given superhuman powers. Not only did he know
Speaker 4: their names, he knew when they were going to the
Speaker 4: drug store, when they were sent shopping by their mother,
Speaker 4: when they were walking home alone because of detention, and
Speaker 4: little girls with double initials, as you said in the opening,
Speaker 4: girls with dublins and their parents were terrified. And I
Speaker 4: find this even more disturbing in a way. But some
Speaker 4: little girls were different first and last initials than their
Speaker 4: parents figured they were off the hook, and those little
Speaker 4: girls were allowed to go to the park without an
Speaker 4: adult supervision. Yeah, you're okay. You know you don't have
Speaker 4: the same first and last initials. The creep doesn't want you,
Speaker 4: and that and that's that brings us to to our
Speaker 4: to our suspects. The first one I guess I should
Speaker 4: talk about is can be ankey and you know him.
Speaker 5: Let's let's just before we yes, before we do that,
Speaker 5: we we should talk about detective Detective Fonte Grossi. But
Speaker 5: we're gonna have to use this as an opportunity just
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Speaker 5: were just about to talk about the suspects that arise
Speaker 5: in this case and now that has been deemed and
Speaker 5: been named and entitled the Double Initial murders. But there
Speaker 5: is a person that doesn't believe in the profiler's assessment
Speaker 5: of this at all, and his name is Detective Fonte Grossi.
Speaker 5: So tell us a little bit about this detective and
Speaker 5: his ideas about what has happened a contrary to what
Speaker 5: the doctor has said, and tell us about the first
Speaker 5: suspects that arise.
Speaker 4: Well, Detective fan of Grossi doesn't believe in the double
Speaker 4: initial thing at all. He doesn't believe in the towns
Speaker 4: being meaning full, and he doesn't think that the names
Speaker 4: of the girls are meaningfully He's dealt enough with predator
Speaker 4: behavior to know that most of these guys are opportunists.
Speaker 4: They may have a plan involving a neighborhood, I'll cruise
Speaker 4: this neighborhood today, but what they're basically looking for is
Speaker 4: a soft target that they can exploit and get away
Speaker 4: without being seen, and all three of these crimes fit
Speaker 4: that pattern. He also believed that Carmen's killer had something
Speaker 4: to do with the family she was in, whereas Gwanda
Speaker 4: and Michelle's killer was a different fellow. I think that
Speaker 4: he suspect did the Carmen's killer probably was a Spanish speaker,
Speaker 4: and that Wander and Michelle's killer was an English speaker. Now,
Speaker 4: the suspect that I want to talk about first is
Speaker 4: you know, Kenneth Bianchi, who later became famous as one
Speaker 4: of the Hillsides stranglers. And he's you know, Rochester is
Speaker 4: a medium sized city at the time, they had about
Speaker 4: three hundred thousand people, but it's really a small town
Speaker 4: in a lot of ways. And Kenny and I went
Speaker 4: to the same school for a year when he was
Speaker 4: in fifth grade. I was in kindergarten at the Holy
Speaker 4: Family School at Campbell and Ames Street in Rochester. And
Speaker 4: he eventually moved out to Gates and I moved to Chila,
Speaker 4: And I first looked into him involving the nineteen sixty
Speaker 4: six killings because he was so nearby, and eventually came
Speaker 4: to the conclusion was probably too young, but he wasn't
Speaker 4: too young for these crimes. Now. He later went on
Speaker 4: with his late cousin Angelo bono to kill at least
Speaker 4: ten girls and women in the Los Angeles area nineteen
Speaker 4: seventy seven and seventy eight, and Bianki alone killed two
Speaker 4: more in the state of Washington before his arrest in
Speaker 4: January seventy nine. He was twenty years old when Carmen
Speaker 4: was killed, and he drove a black and white Cadillac,
Speaker 4: which could have been the car seen off the Western
Speaker 4: Expressway chasing Carmen Cologne. Now. Following Carmen Cologne's murder, Bianki
Speaker 4: was questioned, as were many men who drove Cadillacs, Lincoln's
Speaker 4: and LCDs, and when Bianki moved to California a few
Speaker 4: years later, he told a friend he had to get
Speaker 4: out of Rochester because cops thought he was the double
Speaker 4: initial killer. Now I know several people who were interviewed
Speaker 4: in that same campassing young men who drove their dad's
Speaker 4: luxury car and were asked where they were when Carmen
Speaker 4: was seen running down the road, but they didn't leave
Speaker 4: town because of it. And Bianchi didn't even know. He
Speaker 4: hadn't even been put on a suspect list, at least
Speaker 4: not yet, and yet he later claimed he used his
Speaker 4: suspect status as an excuse to switch coasts. Now, so
Speaker 4: I checked all twelve ken Biyanki victims. Zero had double initials,
Speaker 4: not a single one. Eleven of them were grown women,
Speaker 4: one was a child. One striking thing is that the
Speaker 4: method of killing and body disposal is very similar between
Speaker 4: the double initials and the Hillside strangler cases. He was
Speaker 4: a strangler, of course, and the rolled bodies down into
Speaker 4: the ditches when he was done with them. Investigators knew
Speaker 4: Bianchi and the killers shared some blood characteristics. Now by
Speaker 4: July nineteen eighty one, Bianchi had been referred to by
Speaker 4: Rochester and Monroe County investigators as a serious suspect. Noway
Speaker 4: to the art technology was used during Michelle Maenz's autopsy.
Speaker 4: Medical examiner doctor John Edlund tried to find fingerprints on
Speaker 4: the body itself by blowing iodine vapor across the skin
Speaker 4: of The vapor lodged on the fats and oils left
Speaker 4: there by the killer's sweat, and one mark was found
Speaker 4: on Michelle's neck. A silver plated piece of metal was
Speaker 4: pressed onto the area, and the iodine etched a copy
Speaker 4: of the print onto the metal, which was then photographed
Speaker 4: with a New York State Police fingerprint camera. It was
Speaker 4: believed that the print was made mostly by our wrist,
Speaker 4: with a small portion of palm attached. Although the print
Speaker 4: had some crucial detail in it, it was nonetheless impossible
Speaker 4: to determine if it had been made by a right
Speaker 4: or a left wrist. So it's not the greatest, but
Speaker 4: there's something there. You can find a match. Now, Bianci
Speaker 4: was considered a serious enough suspect that his palm and
Speaker 4: wrist prints were taken in jail and compared to the
Speaker 4: mark found on Michelle's neck, no match. And when DNA
Speaker 4: science was developed, well, this is the thing I should
Speaker 4: say first. Before DNA technology came into being in the
Speaker 4: nineteen eighties, tests had been made on the physical evidence
Speaker 4: for all three double initials cases, and in two of
Speaker 4: the cases the evidence had been used up. They were
Speaker 4: trying to determine whether or not the killer was a
Speaker 4: secretor which was a key thing back then. The eighty
Speaker 4: percent of people secrete blood, twenty percent don't. By the
Speaker 4: way around, I'm not even sure. But they had used
Speaker 4: up the evidence, not knowing that if they just saved
Speaker 4: a little bit, they just saved a little bit of it,
Speaker 4: they might have had a case twenty years down the
Speaker 4: road with better technology, but they didn't. So what we
Speaker 4: have is we have DNA left from Wanda's killing, but
Speaker 4: not from Carmen's or Michelle's. We don't even know for
Speaker 4: sure if the DNA was the same for all three.
Speaker 4: Some that's and when they eventually did have DNA technology,
Speaker 4: they determined that Kenny Bianki was not the person who
Speaker 4: had raped one to walk away. That's all they can
Speaker 4: tell is you can't really eliminate him as a suspect
Speaker 4: at all three. And of course there are always going
Speaker 4: to be many who think Kenny Bianchi had to have
Speaker 4: been involved in some way. And that's not the first suspect.
Speaker 4: I'm going to say that about Rochester Head at Sheriff Creeps.
Speaker 4: Back in the day now, right around the same time
Speaker 4: as the Double Initials killers, there was a second set
Speaker 4: of serial rapes going on by a guy that was
Speaker 4: known as the Garage Rapist, and he was caught on
Speaker 4: January first, nineteen seventy four, determined to be Dennis Termini,
Speaker 4: and he was discovered in the act raping a woman
Speaker 4: in the garage, but he ran and committed suicide before
Speaker 4: he could be arrested. Now, The thing about Termini that
Speaker 4: a lot of investigators really like is he had white
Speaker 4: cat hairs in his car. Remember the three the white
Speaker 4: animal hairs that also be seen. So you know, I'm
Speaker 4: not privy to it as to how. I'm not privy
Speaker 4: as how, but they do know that, according to investigators,
Speaker 4: they can show that Termini was in the area where
Speaker 4: Michelle was walking home when she disappeared. So he became
Speaker 4: a favorite suspect, strong enough so that in two thousand
Speaker 4: and seven his body was disinterred. A DNA sample was
Speaker 4: taken and it failed to match the remaining double initials DNA. Again, Yeah,
Speaker 4: there are veteran cops out there. This is no way
Speaker 4: he had to be involved in some way. He's still
Speaker 4: on my list. Something's up. Now. The guy you were
Speaker 4: talking about in California earlier as this is, Yeah, I
Speaker 4: wanted to put more about this guy in the book,
Speaker 4: but eventually it got to be ridiculous because there's so
Speaker 4: much to put This guy named Joseph Naso. It's also
Speaker 4: known as the California double initials killer, which is weird
Speaker 4: enough as it is. But he grew up in Rochester,
Speaker 4: New York. He married a Rochester girl, he married a
Speaker 4: girl who grew up across the street from my dad. Now,
Speaker 4: when Rochesterians heard of his arrest and they were convinced
Speaker 4: that he had to be the guy, all he had
Speaker 4: to do is look at his roster of victims. They
Speaker 4: were Roxine rag Ash, Chryl Carter, that's the CC, Marina Mitchell,
Speaker 4: Tracy Defoya, Pamela Perkins, and most astoundingly, and this is
Speaker 4: the kicker, another Carmen Cologne. This one an adult woman.
Speaker 5: Incredible.
Speaker 4: Now, everybody has their own limits of what they can
Speaker 4: accept as a coincidence. Yeah, and I think a lot
Speaker 4: of people reach their breaking point right there. But yeah,
Speaker 4: if Naso is just a guy who's playing you know,
Speaker 4: who's paying homage to the Rochester double initials killer, then
Speaker 4: all of this could be separate and different from the
Speaker 4: Rochester crimes, although still really fascinating. But on the other hand,
Speaker 4: you've got investigators from California saying, well, we don't think
Speaker 4: he ever knew Carmen Cologne's actual name. She was a
Speaker 4: sex worker on the street, usually identified herself by a
Speaker 4: street name, you know, it was Tricksy or Tatiana or whatever.
Speaker 4: She wouldn't have said hi, I'm Carmen Cologne. So it's
Speaker 4: a chance he never knew the chance that was just
Speaker 4: a coincidence. Wow, And in a case with so many coincidences. Now,
Speaker 4: Naso's trial is one of the most bizarre that ever covered,
Speaker 4: because not only was he a Grade A creep and weirdo,
Speaker 4: but he also insisted done defending himself. Now, his cross
Speaker 4: examination of his ex wife deteriorated almost immediately into a
Speaker 4: marital squabble. And it was a long trial because he
Speaker 4: left so much evidence. He loved to memorialize all of
Speaker 4: his nasty habits. He was a photographer. He would seduce
Speaker 4: women into positions where they could be killed by promising
Speaker 4: to take pictures of them. You should be a model.
Speaker 4: I have a camera. I take pictures of models. There
Speaker 4: was a line that worked so the women he raped
Speaker 4: and killed, but all the way back to Rochester, and
Speaker 4: in his notes it became clear that in some cases
Speaker 4: he didn't know the name of his victims. He might
Speaker 4: have known the street name, he may not have known
Speaker 4: their name at all, He only knew the location he
Speaker 4: picked them up. He took note of many things about
Speaker 4: the crimes. Body types, he liked, legs, amount of resistance.
Speaker 4: The women put up the number of photos he'd taken
Speaker 4: positions he took the photos in He never once mentioned
Speaker 4: the alphabet initials, the significance of the victims' names are
Speaker 4: anything similar to that, and his DNA is not a
Speaker 4: match for the rapist of Wanda Walkaway. Sonzo was convicted
Speaker 4: and currently resides on California's death row, But how could
Speaker 4: he not be the guy?
Speaker 5: Yeah you so you take us?
Speaker 4: Yeah, go ahead, go ahead. So the questions do the
Speaker 4: initials really matter? And and there are people out there
Speaker 4: who want to believe the initials matter because that makes
Speaker 4: the story more fascinating. And I will say to them
Speaker 4: that there is no evidence that the initials do matter,
Speaker 4: but there's no evidence that they don't. To say that
Speaker 4: all three victims have the same first and last initial
Speaker 4: is an obvious statement, but to make the leap to
Speaker 4: say that that's the reason they were chosen and killed
Speaker 4: is a tremendous jump of logically. And I've been impressed
Speaker 4: with the number of Rochester investigators, including Fana Grossi, who
Speaker 4: thought Carmen was killed by one killer and Wanda Michelle
Speaker 4: by another and never bought into the initials bit, thinking
Speaker 4: that it was an interesting coincidence, but no more than that,
Speaker 4: and that the naso stuff can be chalked up as
Speaker 4: one psycho paying homage to another.
Speaker 5: Yea.
Speaker 4: Now, investigators distrusted the double initial theory because what that
Speaker 4: local shrink and now the public thought the thought was improbable,
Speaker 4: not impossible, but improbable. Most people felt the killer predetermined
Speaker 4: whose victims were going to be based up for bizarre
Speaker 4: reasons unknown on the way the names were spelled. Now,
Speaker 4: how did the killer know that Carmon Clone would be
Speaker 4: going to the drug store? How do you know Wanda
Speaker 4: would be going to the store. How do you know
Speaker 4: Michelle was walking home alone that day instead of with
Speaker 4: her mother and her sister as usual. Answer is he
Speaker 4: most likely didn't. It's cruising around the inner city looking
Speaker 4: for soft targets. I can't explain the initials, but it
Speaker 4: might be helpful to note that many girls of that
Speaker 4: age born around nineteen sixty had the same first and
Speaker 4: last initials. I think it's probably a higher percentage than
Speaker 4: other demographics because they were all born when the two
Speaker 4: most famous women in the world were movie stars Marilyn
Speaker 4: Monroe and Bridget Bardell, and they were referred to on
Speaker 4: the covers of movie magazines back then as MM and BB. Now,
Speaker 4: one thing I want to strongly state for all of
Speaker 4: your listeners stand if the initials turn out to be
Speaker 4: a coincidence, it doesn't make the people who did this
Speaker 4: less evil, and it doesn't make the victims less important,
Speaker 4: not at all. It does, however, remove from the killers
Speaker 4: resumes superpowers that they didn't have. So I came to
Speaker 4: delusion that, well, maybe the initials don't matter. Let's take
Speaker 4: a fresh look at everything, take all of the legend out.
Speaker 4: And that brings me to a fellow named Ted Gibbon.
Speaker 5: You talk about August third, nineteen seventy four. Yes, tell
Speaker 5: us about Ted Gibbons and how he becomes a big suspect.
Speaker 4: I love talking about Ted Gibbon. He is a flat
Speaker 4: out perverb pedophile. If he is not the guy, then
Speaker 4: he is just like the guy in my opinion, So
Speaker 4: we can learn things from him, whether or not he's
Speaker 4: involved in one, or all three, or any of these murders.
Speaker 4: At one thirty pm on Saturday, August third, nineteen seventy four,
Speaker 4: ten months after the murder of Michelle Maenza, Given drove
Speaker 4: his car into Lions Park, in the Rochester suburb of Gates.
Speaker 4: Now I remember I said earlier that the psychiatrist had
Speaker 4: said there was a numerology factor and the next victim
Speaker 4: was going to be gg in a town called g
Speaker 4: that's w Gate starts with a G. And while in
Speaker 4: that park, he lured two little girls to the trunk
Speaker 4: of his car, saying he had baby bunnies in the
Speaker 4: trunk of his car, and when they got there, he
Speaker 4: threw them in the trunk and slammed the lid on them.
Speaker 4: He told me that they were stunned and never had
Speaker 4: a chance to put up a fight. He drove them
Speaker 4: to an abandoned house, tied one of them up in
Speaker 4: the basement, and took the other upstairs to a room
Speaker 4: with a mattress and sexually attacked her. He then put
Speaker 4: the girls back in the car, returned them to the
Speaker 4: park and set them free. Now he was caught because
Speaker 4: people in the car saw the drop off and got
Speaker 4: a good description of the car. It was a gold
Speaker 4: nineteen sixty five Plymouth Valiant. The car had distinctive racing
Speaker 4: stripes with tape that was partially peeling. Then a couple
Speaker 4: of things happened. First, a cop beat the crap out
Speaker 4: a Given who he was, after all, a child rapist,
Speaker 4: and Given had to be hospitalized for an injured scroted them,
Speaker 4: and the whole matter turned into a police brutality story
Speaker 4: in the newspaper. Now, the other thing was a reporter
Speaker 4: asked the Gates police chief, who was only twenty seven
Speaker 4: years old at the time. He went on to become
Speaker 4: a legendary cop, but at the time he was twenty seven,
Speaker 4: and the reporter asked him, Hey, maybe this is the
Speaker 4: double initial killer, and that chief said, oh no, these
Speaker 4: girls had different first and last initials. Besides, he didn't
Speaker 4: kill them, he let them go. And there were other
Speaker 4: differences too. It wasn't a school day of summer vacation,
Speaker 4: it was a Saturday. Maybe it's me, but the similarities
Speaker 4: were more impressive than the differences. Here's a man, a
Speaker 4: pedophile predator, cruising for soft targets in his car, snatching
Speaker 4: them and taking them somewhere to do bad things. Now
Speaker 4: Ted admitted to me that he was questioned at the
Speaker 4: time of the Michelle's murder because of the kind of
Speaker 4: car he drove. Now, despite the distractions, Given was convicted
Speaker 4: of attempted rape in the Gate subductions and went away
Speaker 4: for ten years. I reviewed Given's criminal record, and I
Speaker 4: found out that he had always been in trouble. I'd
Speaker 4: been in jail more than he was out. He was
Speaker 4: a being e man who liked violating other people's personal space,
Speaker 4: and those types often evolved into rapists. Sort of makes sense, right.
Speaker 4: He was in jail when our Carmen Cologne was murdered,
Speaker 4: but he was out briefly for both Wanda and Michelle,
Speaker 4: And at the time of Michelle Mayennes's murder, he was
Speaker 4: sleeping on his dad's couch on Parcells Avenue, two hundred
Speaker 4: yards from Michelle Mayennes's home. Wow, he was a guy
Speaker 4: from the neighborhood. And you know, when we talked to
Speaker 4: the little girl, Cynthia, who had seen the killer's face,
Speaker 4: she said, I thought he was a guy from the neighborhood.
Speaker 4: I thought he was a guy I had seen before,
Speaker 4: maybe in a pizzeria down the street. Anyway, Ted would
Speaker 4: have been a guy from the neighborhood, just as Cynthia said.
Speaker 4: I lived across the street from the kid's favorite pet store,
Speaker 4: the one that led the county each spring in sales
Speaker 4: of baby bunnies. Now I also found, and this perhaps
Speaker 4: a coincidence, but terrifying in the same sense. I found
Speaker 4: that there was a big article in the Rochester Democrat
Speaker 4: and Chronicle about the pet store that sold the most
Speaker 4: baby bunnies before Easter every year. It was about the
Speaker 4: store across the street from where Ted Given lived, and
Speaker 4: that story ran the morning of Wanda Walkerwitz his abduction.
Speaker 4: My head exploited. So Given serves ten years for his
Speaker 4: crimes and gates for the double abduction and sexual attack.
Speaker 4: He's released from prison in nineteen eighty four, returned to Rochester,
Speaker 4: and eight months later there was another shocking unsolved Rochester
Speaker 4: murder that a fourteen year old Wendy Lynn Jerome was
Speaker 4: murdered on Thanksgiving night. Now, this is the third November
Speaker 4: killing we've talked about. Nineteen eighty four for beaten and rape.
Speaker 4: Body was found lying in an alcove of School thirty
Speaker 4: three on Webster Avenue, at the kindergarten entrance of the
Speaker 4: same school that Michelle Mayanza had attended and was walking
Speaker 4: home from at the time of her abduction, almost exactly
Speaker 4: eleven years earlier. And that eleven years is so big
Speaker 4: that investigators didn't put the two together, and they only
Speaker 4: fit together if you realized that the ten years in
Speaker 4: the middle. Ted givens in prison. So Ted remains free
Speaker 4: until September of nineteen eighty six, when he raped a
Speaker 4: little girl in a suburban home following a home invasion
Speaker 4: and was caught, and he's been locked up ever since.
Speaker 4: He was in prison until July fifth, twenty ten, when
Speaker 4: the Department of Corrections couldn't hold him any longer and
Speaker 4: he was civilly committed to an institution for the criminally insane,
Speaker 4: where Don and I found him and I became his
Speaker 4: pen pal. So I told him I was working on
Speaker 4: a book about the double initials faces, and since he
Speaker 4: had at least one stalked and adducted female children in
Speaker 4: his car, I wondered if he might have some insight
Speaker 4: into what made the double initials killer tick. And his
Speaker 4: response was fascinating. First of all, he said he preferred
Speaker 4: the name alphabet killer. Why he would have a conference,
Speaker 4: he didn't say, but he said, alphabet killer is correct,
Speaker 4: double initials killer is not, so I should get it right.
Speaker 4: He told me that he certainly was not the alphabet
Speaker 4: killer using the correct name, but since he was getting
Speaker 4: on in years. He thought it was time that he
Speaker 4: gave himself a good look in the mirror. So he
Speaker 4: exchanged letters for a year, and he told me, in
Speaker 4: gruesome detail how and why he had committed the Gate subductions.
Speaker 4: He drew me maps. He said that he lured the
Speaker 4: girls to his car with promises of bunnies. He picked
Speaker 4: up the girls, throw him in the trunk of his car,
Speaker 4: and closed the lid so fast that they didn't have
Speaker 4: a chance to make a sound, and no one noticed
Speaker 4: him doing it. And this made me think of the
Speaker 4: abduction of our three victims. How could it happen in
Speaker 4: a public street without anyone noticing? And the answer might
Speaker 4: be simple. It might be just that it happened very fast.
Speaker 4: I asked ted if he had any insight into why
Speaker 4: he was a pedophile, and he told me he had
Speaker 4: it all figured out. When he was sixteen and in
Speaker 4: prison and himself being repeatedly raped by a number of men,
Speaker 4: he found comfort in a nineteen sixties style porn magazine.
Speaker 4: There was a genre called a nudist colony magazine, and
Speaker 4: these were magazines that showed pictures of nudist colonies of men, women,
Speaker 4: sometimes whole families doing wholesome activities all start naked. Now,
Speaker 4: in one picture there was a family lounging by the pool.
Speaker 4: Ted told me that in that photo there was a
Speaker 4: ten year old female line naked beside the pool, and
Speaker 4: that photo seriously got under his skin. And later when
Speaker 4: he was out of prison, he frequented the dirty bookstores,
Speaker 4: seeking that particular magazine with the photo of her Capital H, Capitoli,
Speaker 4: Capital R. And when he saw a little girl that
Speaker 4: resembled the one in the photo, he had trouble controlling himself.
Speaker 4: And that was what happened to him when he was
Speaker 4: in that Gates Park. So and again Ted's DNA does
Speaker 4: not match that founded the Wanda Wakowitz crime scene. We
Speaker 4: don't know the matches wanted Michelle Maenza's crime scene, and
Speaker 4: he was in prison for Carmen Cologne. But I think
Speaker 4: he did tell me what made the double initials killer tick.
Speaker 4: I think that's exactly what made him tick. He saw
Speaker 4: the killer of Wanda and Michelle saw these events as
Speaker 4: little dates, as in a man and a woman going out.
Speaker 4: He took them out to eat Dwanda Custard. He took
Speaker 4: Michelle out for cheeseburger. And when things didn't go well,
Speaker 4: he had to kill them to get rid of the
Speaker 4: only witness to his misdeed.
Speaker 5: In the research for this book, you contacted a family
Speaker 5: members like Mina, Carmen's mother, and some of the family
Speaker 5: member's story very interesting when you get a translator to
Speaker 5: because she wants to be interviewed in Spanish, and you
Speaker 5: have a part of your team Devin Christina and along
Speaker 5: with Tubman. But these people go and interview Gidermina and
Speaker 5: she it seems, at least from the book, that she
Speaker 5: is lying about certain certain things that she's being questioned about.
Speaker 5: What do you make of that, because you don't really concribe.
Speaker 4: Anything of that certain that Carmen's mom is a lying
Speaker 4: as much as she's being very productive, she's very protective
Speaker 4: of her family. She spent her entire life it's pretty
Speaker 4: much under siege because of what had happened to her
Speaker 4: little girl. And also I think that to some extent,
Speaker 4: her memories are selective. You know, she doesn't remember that
Speaker 4: drug store being around the corner. She's mistaken it for
Speaker 4: the candy shop that was across the street. So that
Speaker 4: you know, Grandpa Felix could watch Carmen from the front
Speaker 4: of the house, but he couldn't because the drug store
Speaker 4: was around down Main Street. They and both Carmen's mom
Speaker 4: and her sister insist that Miguel Cologne never went to
Speaker 4: Puerto Rico, although they admit that he didn't show up
Speaker 4: when the rest of the family did for the police
Speaker 4: interviews right, and that he used the excuse he had
Speaker 4: done something wrong as a reason for for not cooperating
Speaker 4: with the police. But the whole part well documented manhunt
Speaker 4: of Rochester police and Puerto Rican police looking for Miguel
Speaker 4: Cologne in the jungles of Puerto Rico, it doesn't exist
Speaker 4: to them anymore, if it ever did. I don't know
Speaker 4: if it's lying there is, but there's there's selective memory
Speaker 4: and some just false notions getting mixed in.
Speaker 5: Right now, as people asked you at Scottsville once upon
Speaker 5: a time, not so long ago, what's next for you
Speaker 5: from here? What's next after this investigation?
Speaker 4: What's next? Well, Don and I have been working on
Speaker 4: another notorious cold case in the Rochester area, murder of
Speaker 4: Jack King and Charismoyer andineteen sixty three in the town
Speaker 4: of Penfield. These were two kids. They'd been dating during
Speaker 4: the summer and they went to a drive in movie.
Speaker 4: The movie was Mutiny on the Bounty, three hours long,
Speaker 4: so shere had a special curfew, and they were found
Speaker 4: the next day on a lover's lane in the middle
Speaker 4: of nowhere, shot both shot in the back and Surrey
Speaker 4: was bludgeoned. There was a there was a damage to
Speaker 4: the car, which has made some people think it might
Speaker 4: be a road rage infinite. But we're still looking for
Speaker 4: guys who might have had a crush on her, who
Speaker 4: might have happened upon her on a date with another guy.
Speaker 4: Right because the lover's lane that they were found on
Speaker 4: was so remote that you almost needed to know it
Speaker 4: was there, and that kind of cuts down on the
Speaker 4: number of suspects. It's that's a fascinating case as well
Speaker 4: that I don't know if that's going to turn into
Speaker 4: a book, but that's a little working at now, and
Speaker 4: I'm currently writing a biography of the mobster Albert Anastasia
Speaker 4: as a sequel to my biography of Carmine Persico, came
Speaker 4: out earlier this year.
Speaker 5: Very interesting. I want to thank you very much for
Speaker 5: coming on and talking about Nightmare in Rochester. The double
Speaker 5: initial murders. For those that might want to take a look,
Speaker 5: you have a Facebook page and where might they be
Speaker 5: able to get this?
Speaker 4: The book is available on Amazon every Place and on
Speaker 4: the Barnes and Noble website. In the Rochester area, it
Speaker 4: is available at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Barnes and Noble,
Speaker 4: and at the Liftbridge Bookstore in Brockport. And I'd like
Speaker 4: to just thank you, know, Don Tubman, who's been my
Speaker 4: right hand man all along for all of this, Christine
Speaker 4: Green and Dead Spurling, the Spanish contingent, Jerry Warren, Nicholas Spicci,
Speaker 4: Tom and Ahan, a Baumba gardner, and thanks for all
Speaker 4: their help along and along the way. And hopefully we've
Speaker 4: looked at these cases through fresh eyes and giving people
Speaker 4: a new perspective on what happened.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, it was a fascinating book. Thank you very much
Speaker 5: for this interview. Nightmare in Rochester. Thank you very much, Michael,
Speaker 5: hope to talk to you again real soon. Yeah, Grady, thanks,
Speaker 5: take care, good night,