MICHAEL BENSON TRUE CRIME RETROSPECTIVE-Michael Benson

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to justice. He is currently a regular commentator for two true crime series, Evil Twins and Evil Kin on the Investigation Discovery ID channel, and also had made guest appearances on that channel's Evil Stepmoms, Deadly Sins, Southern Fried Homicide, and on the case with Paula's On a Devil at Genese Junction tells the story of his return to the scene of a childhood trauma. Two of his friends were murdered and mutilated near his rural home south of Rochester,

New York, when he was nine. Those murders were never solved. As an adult and veteran true crime writer, Benson teamed up with the mother of one of the victims and a local private investigator to heat up that cold case

and propel it in a startling new direction. During his three decades as professional writer, Benson has worked closely with a retired Army intelligence agent during the ten Stays After nine to eleven for a book about the CIA, and with a retired FBI agent for a book about national security.

Co written two books with a former New York Police Department Cop of the Year, explored the Grassey Noel in Dallas with a former KGB agent while researching his much acclaimed Who's Who in the jfk Assassination, collaborated efficiently with an astronaut, and covered the Stephen Hayes triple murder trial

in New Haven, Connecticut for The New York Post. The episode Tonight is Michael Benson True Crime Retrospective with my special guest, artist, writer, filmmaker, and true crime author extraordinaire Michael Benson. Welcome to the Welcome back to the program, and thank you very much for this, Thanks for having me retrospective. Thank you so much. As I was saying when I looked, just to do more research for this

after I've had you on now. This is the ninth appearance I believe, covering nine of your now true crime. It almost looks like there's another Michael Benson, the filmmaker and artist. And because when I mentioned to you for the audience, when you mentioned prolific, When you say prolific author, then you have Michael Benson.

that was my dad. He wanted to live in the country and he had his job in the city, so we moved to the end of a dirt road, as my kids called it when they were visiting Grandma and Grandpa in the middle of nowhere, and it was just a great place for a little kid to grow up. I mean there were third paths everywhere. You take a bee line to each other's houses through the woods. We had treehouses, roots, cellar forts. There was a field of

wild strawberries spelled great. Come June, go out and pick strawberries, come back with a bucket full. We played war cowboys and Indians. We had a barn, no horses, but the barn was still there. The Black Creek was the northern border of my dad's property, so we'd go fishing. Lots of adventures in the woods, but it stopped being idyllic on June twenty fifth, nineteen sixty six, when something really bad happened.

to tug barges on the Genesee Valley Canal. Canal was long gone, and now it took railroad tracks across Black Creek, but there was a nice swimming hole there and it was a place where police never went, so it was sort of the domain of teenagers. And in the daytime kids go swimming there. At nighttime kids go back there drink beer. And on June twenty fifth, nineteen sixty six,

they went back to go swimming around dust and never returned. Now, at first, you know, there was a lot of optimistic thinking perhaps they'd just run off, and the mother said that I couldn't be the case because all they had

was their bathing suits and a towel. You know, they didn't take their perse, they didn't take their makeup, nothing, So well, maybe they got picked up by men, and who knows, But the optimist optimism died a couple of days after they disappeared, when Kathy's transistor radio her prize possession, was found broken in the weeds, so it was pretty

obvious the girls had been taken by force. So for a month they were missing, and then one day in July, a farmer two miles to the west of our property found the remains of the girls in the weeds, next to the same railroad tracks, but down the line of the way and just thought of a lover's lane and they'd been horribly mutilated with a knife, sexually mutilated, details of which I overheard adults talking about. So yeah, here, I'm a nine year I don't even know if the facts.

I like that, and I'm learning about sex crimes before I'm learning about sex And it was traumatic, and the whole neighborhood did change. It was a dark cloud came over our area sort of stayed. No more paths through the woods. Everybody had to stay in their own yard, and it became bleak, and I became obsessed with finding out what happened to those girls because the case wasn't solved. You know, there was a booking man out there and perhaps living nearby, and we didn't know who he was.

So I grew up to become a true crime writer. And that's not a coincidence. That's I wanted, you know, right from the time I was twelve, I started to write about the murders. And I finished the book about the murders forty seven years later. Wow, A lot a

lot happened in between. I went to college, I got a degree, graduated with honors from hofstin university degree in journalism, communication Arts, and after bouncing around a little bit, I got a job as a magazine editor for the Starlock Group and during that time I launched my first adult investigation into those murders. Didn't have a book in mind,

I just wanted to know. What I found was that there was a fellow named Arthur Shawcross sure right, all of your listeners have heard of and he was He was arrested for killing a series of sex workers in Rochester. And I investigated him and found out that during the summer nineteen sixty six, he was twenty one years old and was driving around upstate New York of looking for places to fish, and the show put him potentially near Black Creek. Now you know, he was having problems with

his then wife, He had sexual problems. He kind of misunderstood what the affection and consent was all about. He was he He went on to kill two children in Watertown, New York a few years later, but this was in nineteen sixty six. As far as we know, had never hurt anybody. He was an expert with a knife. He

hunted deer and could dress game. He once talked about wanting to kill a doe so that he could use his hunting knife to remove the animal's vagina, which me is you know that that sent up a red flag considering my victims were sexually mutilated. Now, as a young adult, he worked as an apprentice butcher, and he was I thought a very good candidate to become the we could

to be the killer of the Childie girls. But I got in touch with the Monroe County Sheriff, sent a nice letter explaining all my stuff, and they sent a team to the prison to talk to Arthur Shawcross. Confronted him with pictures of the Childie girls, and he closed his eyes, quenched his fists, and put his chin on his chest, which I understand was the same reaction he

had when people asked him questions about his mother. So he was given a chance to deny doing it and didn't, and I was told that's about as far as he can go with that. And I realized that in order for me to really do justice to the case in investigation, I needed to know about the original investigation in nineteen sixty six, and to do that I needed to have the rights of next to kin, which I didn't have.

And life went on. I had a very mediocre career as a sportswriter, but every time I had a lunch with a acquisition editor from a publisher, I always told the story of what happened when I was nine and what a great book I thought it would make. And what happened was Gary Goldstein from Kensaday Books gave me a call one day. He says, you're for Rochester, right, I said yeah. He said, well, there's a murder in

Rochester that I really think you should write about. Beautiful young woman was murdered and her husband and her half brother have been arrested for the crime. And that's when my official true crime career began. I'd also ghost written a book, a true crime book the year before, which went to number four on the New York Times bestseller list, but my name wasn't on it, but people in the industry knew who had actually written it, and that was another reason why Gary gave me a call.

that's horrible, it kind of happens all the time. The husband's always the number one suspect, but hiring you know, her brother to do it for him sort of gave it that special edge of depravity that you know, I think you look for in a successful true murder story. It still astounds me that that, you know, Cyril Winebrenner, the brother would be so addicted to cocaine that his sister would seem dispensable to him in exchange for you know, a couple of weeks of really doing some good blow.

Game magazine and we were covering heavyweight championship fights. Bob was freelancing for Ring Magazine at the time, and we sat next to each other in the corral where the press sits next to the ring, and he told me his story. How about he went to Brockport State which is near Rochester, and his he had a friend named Joel Riskin in college and they covered fights together. He would write about it and Joel took photographs. And then

Joel dropped out of school and they lost touch. Didn't speak to another for twenty years until Joel was arrested for being a serial killer on long Island, and here's the old college buddy is getting together again. One's a serial killer and one's a homicide detective, so a lot. It's a pretty good story. But I have one too, and I told him my story when I was nine, and we both agreed that our books deserve to be published, and eventually they both were. So that's our first book

I'd do with Bob was Lethal Embrace. Right, So they told us, try to make your title combined sex and violence. So Lethal Embrace right in the Murder cobout in January seventeenth. Yeah, go ahead.

it and all three women died horribly. His dad managed to get free himself when he heard screams and made it into the backyard and started to yell. At that point somebody called the cops. Somebody saw smoke and called the fire department, and the authorities arrived and captured the guys right away coming out of the house. The two kids, Mikayla and Haley, were eleven and seventeen at the time. I had two children, they were eleven and seventeen at the time, so I took it very personally. And the

community was just very distraught. It's an upscale community. Things like that just don't happen there. They were angry, they were a little embarrassed by it. They're just grieving their brains out. That is so sad. And six months after the crime, my book Murder in Connecticut comes out, and I'm getting death threats because there are only so many emotions they can feel on the subject, and anger is

being focused in me. I had to do radio interviews to defend myself, and the book itself is nothing worthy of a death threat. The crime is described, but the second half of the book is all about how wonderful the community is and how they rallied around the doctor and just try to be as positive as possible. And then when Stephen Hayes was tried in new Haven, Connecticut for the triple homicide, signed by the New York Post to be their freelancer, and it was just devastating to me.

I didn't sleep for days and days and days. I wrote up the first day in the elevator with doctor Pettitt. It's a strong, sturdy man, and I can remember very well sitting in the courtroom when they brought Hayes in and I felt blasted backward by his evil and it's like a wind of evil hit me and made me recoil. After a while that wore off, and I saw him just as a little worm. In the contrast between the worm of a defendant and the huge dad of the

representing the victims was just so stark. But probably the worst part was they chose twelve members of the media and I know it was twelve because they put us in the jury box. Chose twelve members of the media to show the crime scenes photos too. I got to see the poor burned ladies, and it was pretty much ready to throw up. I walked out of the courthouse and was grabbed by CBS News and they put me

on the air in that condition. And I've never seen it, but people from all over texted me at the time tell me how great it was. And I don't know. I can remember blurting out that. You know, I'm not a big proponent of the death penalty, but I think there's three cases where it's called for, and that's you know, guys who commit murders in prison, who are already serving life,

cop killers, and these two bastards. Yeah, so it was the whole thing was just scruciating and and if I could do it over again, I would have written the same book, but I would have had it published a year later. They're given that town a little chance to heal. Before all the sudden, the reporters were back and there were new questions to answer all regarding me.

But it was it was a mean thing to do that town, to have the book come out while the you know, the wounds were still so raw.

her sister, and which I believe to be true. And Shila developed a psychosis, and she was sort of a nymphomaniacal dominatrix. And she recruited men with mental disabilities to work on her farm. She was recently widowed. Her husband had died under suspicious circumstances for which there was never

any charges. But she was recently widowed, and she brought these men in and she would start a sexual relation with relationship with them, then it would become more and more abusive, and unlike I guess your ritualize s and M, there were no safe words. She tortured these guys until they admitted that they were pedophiles, even though they probably didn't know what pedophile meant, and then she would kill them, chop them up, and throw them into the bonfire in

front of her house, thus making it the burn farm. Now, when I went up to it took place in Epping, New Hampshire, and she lived in a dirt road off of a dirt road, and there was a lady who lived down the road who wanted to write a book about the case herself. And when I contacted her for an interview, she was nasty to me and didn't want to cooperate. When I watch your people from New York

taking our stories and embarrassing us with the book. So I went up there and went to the house where it happened, looked at the pit where they found the bones, and the cop car pulled up, and I walked over and the cop I read his night and plate. I said, hell, you're in my book. You're one of the heroes of my book. Explained to Michael Benson, a writer, and he said, well, your opinion of me is about to change because you're

under arrest. And I was arrested for criminal trespassing, which was their way of saying, you know, get out of town. But I wrote the book anyway, and I think it's absolutely, you know, one of the most well it's it's I think we're we're a little bit more conditioned to think of men as psycho killers, female psycho killers, especially especially when there's sex mixed in, is something new and different

and the book certainly was. The One person who reviewed it on Amazon dot com sept Uh, you know, this is the dirtiest book I ever read, which didn't hurt sales at all. But I really wanted to say, but it's not sexy. Now, there's nothing sexy in this book. The sex is not sexy. It's horrible anyway.

who had also done time for murder. And then when I looked at the two cases, I realized that even though they had spent most of their lives separate because one or the other was in jail all the time, the two male victims involved here, one by Robert, one by Steven, the killings themselves were near identical. So it becomes this really fascinating story of nature versus nurture. Just

a one psycho killer only photocopied into two. You know, it's it's still a little bit a little bit amazing to me and I for the first time, and I used this technique sense. I became pen pals with Robert Spahalski, and he told me all about how he became a serial killer only denied being a serial killer. He thought all four incidents were individual. Okay, he was a serial killer, you just don't admit it. And but he, I said, well, when did you When did you learn how to kill?

And when did you swell. First thing that pops into my head is I killed my dad's favorite pig, put a gun to its head, bang my dad's favorite pig, debt And I said, wow, you manage your father's No. No, I just wanted pork chops that night. So it's a little, a little, a little view into the mind of a guy who has no sense of guilt, a real psychopath. You know. Psychopaths think that they have something extra that you don't have, the ability to fight through feeling bad

about things, and in reality, they're just missing something. They're missing the whole uh sense of right and wrong. It's not there. Yeah, And that that really really set into my personal knowledge of how psychopaths think, because they don't need much of a reason to kill somebody, because there's no reason not to. If you think you're gonna get away with it. There's no reason not to. If a person's in your way, destroy them. Person looks like you're funny,

destroy them. It doesn't have to be anything motive to a psychopath. Is it could be I killed last week and it was fun as I'm want to do it again. And I think they're eventually going to find a genetic component to being a psychopath. But until then, it's as close as we're ever going to come to finding what evil really is.

on her daughter's bed, confessing to killing Daddy and David. So, you know, you hear about mothers killing their children, and that usually that the kids are very small, usually infants, and I think it's a form of suicide, it's postpartum depression. But here's a woman who has raised this child to the age of eighteen. The daughter is in her first week of college, and you're going to sacrifice her to

save your own boy. And that just flies in the face of everything we think we know about maternal instinct. How could she do that? And she never, ever, ever admitted to doing it. She died of a heart attack in prison at age forty eight, denying she'd had anything to do it, saying, nope, it with my daughter. Who was the killer? You know, just said Ashley, the daughter. She wakes up in the emergency room and there are all these people looking at her. Why did you try

to kill yourself? Why did you leave that note? And she's going, I didn't try to kill myself. I didn't leave a note. Last thing I remember, my mom was giving me his foul tasting drink. So, I mean, any question about whether who was the actual killer went away when a cyber sleuth went into the family computer and found earlier drafts of the suicide note being written at times when Ashley was at school, So it had to

be Stacy was the mom who did it. And I don't think we're going to see her the likes of her again. I just can't imagine a set of circumstances where a desperate woman would sacrifice a child to get out of a jam. And it should be the other way around. She should be sacrificing herself and get her daughter out of a jam, and that's the way we think it should be, and yet she was completely opposite.

wearing shorts and shared two little boys at home. Dad was at work, and he went in, grabbed her and threw in the car, took her back to his house where he had a room set up as sort of a sex dungeon, and he raped her repeatedly and then put her back in the car and was taking her

to a place where he was going to kill her. Now, Denise was the daughter of a police officer and smart, and she managed to get Michael King's cell phone dialed nine to one one, and when the operator came on, by talking to the killer using her own name, mentioning her own address, she communicated to the dispatcher the jam she was in. Now, Unfortunately, the the dispatcher was at the end of her shift and didn't quite absorb the desperation of the of the you know, the significance of

what she was hearing. Kept asking questions, please repeat that. And eventually Michael King realizes that he doesn't have his cell phone she's talking into it, grabs it away from her and the call has ended. Now moments later, there's a woman driving down the highway and she looks in the car next to her. She thinks there's a child.

Denis's a tiny woman, there's a child in the backseat, obviously in distress, pounding on the window, saying help me, help me, help me, And she calls nine to one one gets this same lady, who's not even closer to the end of her shift, and says, I think there's a child in trouble, and gives in real time, in real space, where she is, where the car is. Car's taking a lot not to go straight to them in the wrong way, and car's taking a left. Go that

way and you'll find it well. The dispatcher writes that down and leaves, and by the time the next dispatcher sits down ready to take calls, reads the note, it's too late and Denise's Denise has found dead in the in the weeds outside of town. So that's it's uh, yeah, it's a sad, sad story. The husband, Denise's husband tried to make a big deal out of it, tried to turn it into a national cause. But I think, with good intentions, let's just revamp nine to one one systems

because this can never happen again. And I mean the problem with that was that most of you know, most of North America has very very good one one systems. I know that if I call nine to one one here, I'm going to get an ambulance, a cop car, and a fire trucks just in case, and it's going to be quick. But you know, in that particular town in Florida, on that particular day nine one one did Denise samber Lee no good whatsoever.

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Head to rothis dot com slash true Murder today. Now, Michael, we were talking about Mummy Dye, another one of your books. What was one of the most extraordinary things about working on that book. Watch Mummy Dye.

in here, and he got it published. So he came out of prison actually having improved himself a little bit. He was a published author, and he was going to all psyched to write his second book, which was going to be about serial killers. And it's all he needed was a branch library with a pretty library. He'd be all set now. The pretty librarian turned out to be Laura Ling, who became his girlfriend as he did his research. And one she had a teenage daughter who was also

very beautiful, and one night he went nuts. He was is the pressure cooker and he raped the daughter, slit her throat and then made her watch as he killed her mother. He then stole her car, drove to a man's house who had befriended him, fella named Henry Lee Turner killed him as well, and then went on the lamb in Turner's truck, so he he At this point it becomes truly extraordinary. I think Sin's Ted Bundy has

has been a guy like this. He is running for his life, and yet he's got time to party, to make friends. He picks up a woman in a bar, and he's getting a new girlfriend already. And he's in Augusta, Georgia, at the time of the master's golf tournament. And you know, he said, he's a white guy wearing a golf shirt

and some khaki shorts. His photo is in the newspapers wanted, it's on the TV, is wanted, and he is walking around and nobody is noticing that this is the guy because he looks just like every other guy who's at the golf tournament. So but think they eventually catch him, and when they find out his research, the research in this book and serial killers. Now the sheriff says, I don't think he was researching for a book at all.

I think he was trying to learn how to be a serial killer, which, wow, it struck me as pretty interesting because I'm sure that he and I read some of the same books. The only difference was he thought this seemed like a good idea, and I of course think that evil should be vanquished. Yea. Other than that, we might have some things in common.

It was the early days of social media, and I think it was a little bit of a warning signal because if this had happened ten years earlier, these girls would have had an argument or a fight and then they would have been separated and there would have been a chance for the hostilities to simmer down. But because they had their cell phones with them, they could continue

the insults twenty four hours a day. And because it's a social media they were in essence doing it in public, So not only were they insulting each other, they were doing it in front of all their friends. So the person who's being insulted is also being humiliated at the same time. And it builds up to a major fight.

And Rachel, who's a cute, little blonde, and Sarah, who's a larger woman in a brunette, meet to fight in the middle of the street, and Rachel brought a kitchen knife with her, and I envisioned Sarah putting up her dukes ready to fight, and Rachel stabs in the chest with the knife, and Sarah's dead and just so sad. The other thing that struck me as important in the case, and it's since become big news, but at the time it hadn't even occurred to me. But all these kids

were hooked on opioid painkillers. There'd been a major theft of a pharmaceutical company down there, and you know, millions of oxy cotones went into the high school and they're all hooked. So their behavior is erratic, even more than considering that they're teenaged early twenties. You're not expected to act like a full fledged adult yet, but under the

numb conditions that they're in, it's even more erratic. And I ended up befriending, you know, some of the other girls in this group, and I still keep tads on them, rooting for them, and they said they'd be doing okay. They've kicked the habit and they're having adult lives now, so that's good. And that's but you know, Rachel Wade is the only killer I exchanged letters with who dotted her eyes with little hearts.

who had all kinds of mental difficulties. He wandered around all day and night picking up garbage thinking he thought he was an artist and he would make paintings, but they just look like mud everybody else. And one day he decides he's got the voices in his brainer telling him to go out and rape a woman. So he's chicken. So he goes into a bar to drink himself into the courage to do it, and goes into an art

gallery where a woman named Joyce Wishart is working. She owns the place, and there are pieces of art all over the walls, and they're on the ground, leaning against the wall, this somewhere on the floor. And he tries to rape her, and there's only one exit out the front, so he pretty much traps her in there. There's no back exit for her to run too. But he can't accomplish the rape. Cannot accomplish the rape because he spent too much time in the bar, and that's when his

knife came out. And he removes stabs her to death, and then removes her vagina and takes it with him. Now, according to the people who lived with him in his rooming house, that night, for the only time ever, Elton says, I'm cooking dinner, and he serves his neighbor's pork stew, which got mixed reviews, And it seems pretty clear to me.

He admits to taking human flesh home with him, admits to chopping it up in little pieces, admits to serving dinner to his neighbors, but denies that those two things are connected. So it's a lot of times you'll find these guys will admit to everything except for one thing, because if the word gets out about it, they their life in prison could get to be uncomfortable. I know there are lots of guys who will admit to raping adult women who will not admit to raping children because

child rapists get murdered in prison. Maybe that that's that's the story there, And it was after it was near the end of Evil season. I would say, Okay, now I'm ready to go back and write about my own experiences when I was a kid, and as fate would have it, at the same time, my mom and Kathy Bernhard's mom that the second victim in the Child I murders, are at a party together, sitting in lawn chairs in a backyard, and my mom has a copy of my

latest books. She said, my son Michael writes about nasty murders, and everybody say, oh, that's great, and I'm so proud of him. And Alice Bernhardt says, it's too bad your Michael can't write a book about my Kathy. My mom said, ask him, I think he'd love to. Well, Alice was too shy to do that. We needed a eating an intermediary, a matchmaker named Evelyn Douglas, who called me up and said, Alice really wants to talk to you. And I know you want to talk to Alice, So why didn't you

guys get that together? And we did, and Alice says, bring me any paperwork you got, I'll sign it. And I would love to have a book just like the one your mom showed me about Kathy and George Anne. And so I can't promise a book because that's not up to me, but I can promise I will give you a full investigation. Now that I have next to kin writes, we should be able to get the sheriff

to cooperate a little. We'll see what happened. And we recruited Donald Tubman, who was a private investigator who also went to school with the girls. He was graduating from high school on the night of the murders, so he has an alibis and we and we went to work. And four years passed and we had developed a suspect that we liked a lot better than Arthur Shawcross. This was a guy who, you know, look at the in laws before we look at the outlaws. This is a

guy His brother was George Anne's brother in law. He himself was married to George Anna's first cousin. And I took Alice Bernhard was in her late eighties at the time, and I put her on the six o'clock news in Rochester saying something should be done about this. My daughter was forgotten way too soon. If you know anything, tell Michael Well. I got a series of reports from women in their fifties who were children at the time, all saying the same story. This guy Clint and is sometimes alone,

sometimes with his brothers. We're taking little girls out the Black Creek, putting a knife to their throat and saying, if you make any sounds, you're dead meat. On the night that George, Aana and Cathy were tilled in nineteen sixty six, there were multiple reports of one loud scream, and Georgian's throat had been cut so deeply that she was almost beheaded.

And this this had none of that. Eventually, The Devil at Geneasy Junction was published because I framed my proposal as a personal memoir that the thing that made this case special was and it's you know, my humility makes me hesitant to say this, but the thing that made it special was a guy who grew up to be a true crime writer, was a neighbor at the time, Right and Roman and Littlefield published it. They'd never published

a true crime book before or since. It's just it's the story of me overcoming childhood trauma by the cathartic use of investigation. But Alice and I knew what it was about. It's dedicated to Alice Bernhardt, and boy, oh boy, did I ever write it for her? And yeah, she wanted me to do two things. Find out what happened to her Kathy, because the crime scene was so ghastly that nobody had ever told her the details. And to get people to think about Kathy because she'd been forgotten

way too soon. So everybody think about Kathy Bernhard today. It's part of my mission. Both my mom and Alice had since passed away. But you know, it's a lifetime agreement, my lifetime not Hards and everybody should read The Devil gene Ze Junction. It is as close as I can come to writing something in my own blood. As I said, I started writing when I was twelve. I finished at age fifty nine, and my life changed after that came out. I for one thing. You know, I'm a little bit of a celebrity in.

put quotations around the word lost. Yeah, So I guess. I guess we're never going to know for sure. But I've had critics say that the book comes to us satisfying conclusion, and that's good enough for me.

a great structural engineer. You know. He could read blueprints upside down from across the room. He could think outside the box, and he was in a box, so that was good. And he found a way to get out of the prison through the catwalks and through the heating pipe which was only turned off for a couple of months every year, and then eventually out through a man

hall into a street in the town at Dana Mora. Now, the thing about the prison is it's surrounded by wilderness, miles and miles and miles of hills and valleys and woods and swamps. So it's a little bit like Alcatraz that you know, even if you do get out, what are you gonna do? Now? You got to get in

a boat and get to the mainland somehow. So these guys had hoped to get a car, and they befriended a civilian employee named Joyce Mitchell, and she agreed to help them, but chickened out at the last second and didn't show up with the away car. So they had no choice but to dash into the woods. And for three weeks it was the largest manhunt in New York

state history, which is saying something. And in the long run, Richard Matt was shot and killed, and two days later David Sweat was shot and wounded and captured again, and Joyce Mitchell did three years in prison and just recently got out.

murders of little girls in the city of Rochester. Carmen Cologne, Wanda walk Withoz, and Michelle Maenza and they were all abducted. They're ten eleven years old, all abducted walking alone on the street in the inner city of Rochester and found in a rural area outside the city, dumped beside the road. And it seemed like it might have all been the work of one guy. First one was a little bit different from the second, third, second and third were identical.

They're the same guy. Whether or not the first one's but the same guy, we don't know. But there was Two years after it began, there was an article in the Rochester Democratic Chronicle, an interview with a psychiatrist from the University of Rochester who said he had it all

figured out. The killer was a mastermind, and these killings that looked spontaneous and opportunistic were actually well fought out in advance, and that all three victims, of course, had the same first and last initial, and that all three had been dumped in a town that also began with that initial. There was a leap of logic there that because these girls had the same first and last initial, that that's the reason they were chosen as victims. But

everybody immediately embraced it and believed it. You know that there are still people who are absolutely convinced that this guy must have known these girls in advance, because he had chose only girls with the same first and last INNISI to investigate the case. I was thinking about this and it kind of didn't make any sense. And what are we supposed to believe This guy's cruising around the un city of Rochester looking for little girls by themselves.

Is he asking them their names? And if their names don't have the same first and last invisial, is he rejecting them and then continue his search. Because there weren't any little girls saying that they'd been asked their names by strangers. So I went into the theory Okay, it's a coincidence, and the geography part that didn't work out at all, because Carmen Cologne was not dumped in either Chili or Churchville. It was in a different town with

a different letter. Michelle Maenza was technically in massive In but it was right on the town line with Walworth and there's absolutely no way for the killer to know which town that was. It's just a cornfield. So I went on the the assumption that there was all coincidence, that what we had here was just a guy driving around. He knew what he liked, like ten or eleven year old girls, and if they were he did it always after school, but before dinner, when you're most have to

find big girls walking alone, and three times he was successful. Now, there were certain number of suspects that came up who lived in the town of Gates at that time, which was town next to Chili, and the crimes in terms of disposal greatly resembled those of the Hillside Stranglers, which he became one of. And he had shown that although he preferred adult women, he wasn't adverse to raping and killing a child. Two of the Hillside strangler victims were children.

I don't think many people know that, but he of course denies that he had anything to do with it. The thing I should not is it could be a DNA case. There is extant DNA from the Wanda Wakowitz crime scene. There was DNA evidence from the other two as well, but it was used up at the time for a secretion test, which was the state of the art at the time. Instead of just using a portion of the sample, they used the whole thing, never thinking that in fifty years this could be really valuable. Yeah.

Then there's there's Joseph Nazo, who grew up in Rochester, married a Rochester girl. His wife grew up across the street from my dad, and he went to California and became a serial killer and killed a series of sex workers, many of whom had the same first and last initial, including another Carmen Cologne, which was the name of the first victim in Rochester. How could that be a coincidence?

But you try to you try to look into that, and there's evidence that Joseph ever knew the adult Carmen Cologne's name, that she wouldn't have given him her real name. And he kept lots of notes, copious notes on all of his crimes dating back to when he was a teenager, and he mentions how good their legs are. He liked. He was a photographer. He took photos of women, both alive and dead, and there would be comments about the photos he took, the dates, the places. Never once did

he ever mention that he had anything for the alphabet. So, okay. The third suspect I looked at with a guy named Dennis Termini, and there are still cops in Rochester were convinced Toermini must be the guy. He was a serial rapist. As far as we know, he only raped adult women. But the thing that tied all three double initials cases together was that there were white animal hairs found at all the crime scenes, and Dennis Termini's car had cat hairs in it, and he killed himself after being caught

mid rape and so he could not be questioned. And his DNA as all you know, no DNA has ever matched. They want to walk awards DNA Now. The last one the guy I found is named Ted given Ted. If we assume that the initials don't mean anything, that what we're looking for the guy who cruises around looking to

pick up the little girls. Ted givens the guy. In nineteen seventy four, he abducts two little girls in the town of Gates and takes them to an abandoned house, ties one up in the basement and attempts to rape the other one upstairs, and when he's done, he then puts them back in the car, takes them back to the park. We found him and lets him go. And the police chief at the time of the town was asked by a reporter, do you think you have the double initial guy? And he goes, no, No, can't be.

These girls had different first and last initials.

And I probably shouldn't talk to you at all. But I've been looking at myself in the mirror a lot lately, and then I decided it's time to come to grips with some things. So right there, I thought it was a little bit, you know, he was leaning on an admission, but he didn't quite get there, and never did, by the way, But he told me in really grewsome detail how he became a pedophile, and we had all kinds

of insights into how pedophiles think. Again. You know, I think that the chances that all four of these guys are completely innocent in the nightmare in Rochester cases, it seems remote, and there's absolutely no reason to think that this is a lone nut. Pedophiles have clubs. We've seen it in the past. Those Breckinridge up in Vermont, a group of guys who used the computers to share, you know, kittie porn pictures. They find each other and facilitate each

other's weird needs. So I mean, it's entirely possible that that what we're seeing is a tip of an iceberg, much of which we can we haven't yet found. And eventually we're gonna fight in one of these guys and he is going to be a match for the one who walk we had seen.

crime magazine of cases. We changed the name from Cold Case Rochester to Haunting Homicides because by the time we were done, they weren't all cold cases. Some of them had been solved and now place in Rochester, although they had Rochester connections, so haunting and they're all haunting, that was for sure. So that became in violent. What was the.

and she never made it. And then a few days later her body was found seven miles to the north, hidden underneath some trees, and she'd been raped and murdered and glory d to the Livingston County sheriff. They kept that evidence and it is still good. There's a DNA profile, I mean from nineteen forty nine, there's a DNA profile. Unbelievable. But while I was doing research, I found that they used bloodhounds in an attempt to figure out what happened.

And the bloodhounds went down the road where she was walking and got to a particular farmhouse which was known as Green Acres for some reason, and the dogs went one at a time, but they both did the same thing. They alongside the house behind the house, milled around behind the house, then came back to the shoulder and stopped end of trail. So the sheriff says, this must be where the motorists picked up the girl. And I said, wait a second. Those dogs went behind the house. They

both went behind the house. So we took a closer look at the house, and we found out that living there at the time was a middle aged man who had been kicked out of the house by his wife for trying some funny business with her stepdaughter who was a child, and he was living with his sister and with a sixteen year old boy who didn't seem to

be related to them in any way. And he was a key witness in the initial investigation because he said he was the only one who said he heard a scream and after he heard the scream, he went to the windows on both sides of his house and did

not see a car. League Later, on Don Tubman's find he went down into the basement of a retired cop and went to dusty boxes and found a letter that had been written to the Rochester Police chief in nineteen forty nine by a woman who worked with the sixteen year old kid's mom, and she was complaining that she couldn't get in t with him ever since the murder, and that one time she called him and he answered the phone, he hung up in the middle of a sentence,

which made her think that somebody was hanging up the phone for him. So we we have we have new suspects in the case. And well, yeah, and we have located, uh, we've located the adult man's grave in case there's any disinterring that needs to be done, because I don't mind digging up the debt if it's going to solve the crime.

direction and evolution in your writing? It seems to be even more satisfying than the writing of your other books for me, what do you think?

wrote about them. So there was an investigation to do, but there was no I wasn't breaking cases in any way, and since we had so much success with the devil Chancy Junction, I really do think we figured out what happened.

I couldn't stop. I'm always I'm always going to be looking at who done It's now and that's you know, if somebody pays me to write another book like like Evil Season or The Burned Farm where the killer is already in prison at the time I start, that's fine, but it's not as fine as taking away a question mark and putting a face in its place.

He had a magazine called Mob Candy, and he wrote a book, is an autobiography called h Lion in the Basement because Joey Gallo kept the Mountain Lion in the basement of the Social Club and if somebody owed him money, they just took him down the stairs and showed him the lion and the guy would pay up. The lion never actually had to kill anybody. So and and because and because Frank, you know, dropped out of school after fifth grade or whatever, because it was cutting into his

hanging out on street corners time. Uh. He's not an extremely literate guy, but he's smart and he's a reader. But the resulting book was someone endearing but comically flawed. You know, there's a lot of ds and dose and this and that, and I was given an assignment to take his self published book and to transform it into something that could be published by Kensington Books. And it became Growing Up Mafia the President Street Boys, which I

was an editor and he was the author. And after that we said, well, you know this this team works pretty good. You know he's got all the street cred. You know I can write sentences with propa grammar. And we took on the biography of Carmine Persica, who was a longtime head of one of the Five Families in

New York. And after we did that, which did very well, we took on the story of Albert Anastasia, who was the head of Murder Inc. And the it became a family, a godfather himself and was famously whacked by Carmine Persido in a barber chair in the Sheridan Hotel in Manhattan.

So it's it's been fun. It's it sounds perhaps a little cold, but because these are stories about guys who are killer be killed, Uh, there's not the sadness and there's not the heaviness that weighs on my brain that there is when I'm writing about cases where there's a stark contrast between good and evil. You know, this is

more like war stories. And I've been finding it fun for the first time in many years to write again, because usually then you know, some sort of the demon within me that that makes me do this stuff, and it's not that much fun. But telling telling Malkius stories can be kind of a riot.

I also wrote why the Grateful Dead matter? Perhaps there's no better way to alleviate yourself of much time on the dark side. Then, you know, listen to some grateful dad. It's it's very relaxed here.

And on the other side, there is there's more Rochester cases coming and I don't want to get too specific just yet, but the you know, Rochester bookstore should be aware that I'm coming up for a book signing sometime before the year's out and it's going to be great. I haven't come up with the title yet, but these are these are murder cases that took place very close to to Genesee Junction that well geographically, it's been a

real draw for evil. As you know, the name of Deviligent Tennessee Junction would imply it's it's kind of true. We've got throughout the throughout history, going back to the real olden times. It's a good place to to kill people in stash bodies.

turned it on, it almost over. But that was the Stacey cast the case.