NIGHTMARE IN ROCHESTER-Michael Benson

began with that letter. The victims had all been last seen in an urban setting, and their lifeless bodies were found raped and carelessly dumped along a rural roadside, strangled by ligature. Local girls with a litter of names were unhigh alert and told to be vigilant. The little ones didn't quite get it, but they sensed it, something in their mother's tighter grip on their little hand, or the v way mum never relaxed. When they were out of doors.

The older ones looked at maps and guessed where their own lifeless bodies would be discovered in a ditch. No one wondered why the initials were important, what it all meant. They understood one thing, it was terrifying. The book they were featuring this evening is Nightmare in Rochester, the Double Initial Murders, with my special guest, journalist and author Michael Benson. Welcome, Welcome back to the program, and thank you very much for this interview Michael Benson.

it was just terrifying to the community. I grew up with a fascination for psycho killers. Because of that, I tried to, in an amateur way try to figure out who did it as a kid, and as a teenager

and as a young adult. And I's no coincidence. I became a true crime writer and in twenty eleven I teamed up with private investigator Don Tubman and Kathy Bernhardt's mom, Alice Bernhardt, and we started a fresh investigation, developed a new suspect, and sad to say, Alice passed away a few weeks back age ninety two, and hopefully we gave her a little bit of closure with the book that

came out, The Devil a Genoese Junction. Now, that book came out two days after my own mom passed away, So it was with a heavy heart that I started doing publicity material publicity of appearances for it. And the first one I did was at the Scottsville Free Library in the town where I had gone to high school, and a lot of old friends came out and the place was packed, and after I gave my a little presentation, somebody said, well, what are you going to do for

an encore? And I said, well, I think I am going to take on the double initial murders. And I just sort of set it off the top of my head because I'd been thinking about it a lot, but it seemed like a big chunk at that moment, still grieving over my bluff my mom, but the reaction was just ecstatic. It made everybody very very happy. So I

knew I had to do it. And about five years after my girls and child I were killed, the series of new murders started in the city of Rochester, which caused such a hysteria in the community that in some senses the Genesee Junction murders were a little bit forgotten. But there's no describing how the murders. These three little girls terrified everyone, largely because of the first victim, and they were all ten and eleven years old, and Carmen

Cologne was the first victim. She disappeared on Tuesday afternoon, November sixteenth, nineteen seventy one, autumn day school day. Temperature was in the mid fifties. Carmen's mother was only twenty

four years old. She'd been fourteen when she had Carmen, and in recent years, Carmen had been living with her grandfather, Felix and his wife Candy, on a side street in the Bullshead section of Rochester, which was once a thriving shopping district, but by nineteen seventy one had deteriorated and become populated with transiencects, cons', drug addicts, and mental cases. So Little Carmen didn't really speak much English. She was

mentally handicapped. She understood more than a recording of her teachers she was learning, but she still didn't know very much English. She'd lived in Puerto Rico for much of her life, and she had a limited ability to explain her feelings or her experiences, but she was improving by all accounts. She's tiny girl, four feet tall, sixty five pounds.

Her playmates were her cousins and sometimes neighbor kids, but they spoke only Spanish, and on that afternoon, about four point thirty in the afternoon, Carmen's mom sent Carmen around the corner to a drug store on Rochester's main street, West to have a prescription filled for her baby's sister, who had an earache. How Carmen left, turned around the

corner under the busy thoroughfare and never returned. Now, on previous occasions when Carmen had been asked to run errand her grandfather had stood on the front porch so there was a candy Penny candy store up the block, and he could stand on the porch and watch her go and watch her come back. And when she went to the drug store, and she'd done this a couple of times before, he would walk behind her and she come out of the drug store, and she run past him,

and then he would tell her back home again. And by those trips she was she learned a careful and small sense of independence. But on this day she forgot to tell her grandfather she was going. She grabbed the prescription and headed out the door and found herself alone on the streets. The guy on duty and the drug store took the prescription, said, this is a Medicaid prescription. It's going to take about a half hour to fill

out some forms. Come back. Then. Almost impossible to tell if Carmen under at any of that, But she left and was never seen again other than one horrible moment about an hour later. So anyway, when Carmen didn't return home and uncle began searching the neighborhood, the police weren't called until seven fifty, so she'd been gone for about

three hours before the police were informed. But during that time, about an hour after her abduction, hours before the police had been notified, Carmen apparently wriggled free from her abductor or abductors and jumped out of the car. She was naked from the waist down, holding her pants in one hand, and she ran hysterically down the shoulder of the Western

Expressway now known as Interstate four ninety. She ran toward heavy oncoming rush hour traffic, screaming for help, and was seen by dozens of motorists as they approached Exit three heading towards Churchville. One of those drivers saw a car behind her, backing up toward her. Some saw a parked car and an adult running after her. Scores of cars drove by, observing the challenge of distress, but no one stopped, and Carmen was presumably caught and dragged back. Now, every

witness seemed to see something different. Most agreed it was a luxury car, Cadillac Ford Ltd, Lincoln Continent or something like that. And you have to remember people don't have cell phones and they're on an expressway going sixty five miles an hour in a hurry to get home. And everybody thought the same thing if they recognized that there was a crisis at all, and some didn't. They thought, well, somebody behind me will be in better situation to take

care of it. And they had to wait until they got home before they could call the police, and some did. Some got home and said, you know, I saw a really creepy thing on the side of the road. I think maybe you should look into it. But by that time, of course, it was too late. Psychologists were kind to the motorists. They said, you know, the site was too

bizarre to be I said swiftly. And you know, I've done a lot of thinking about this over the years, and it occurs to me that if someone had stopped, it probably would have prevented the murder. But there's at least a fifty to fifty that they would have helped the adult catch the child. All the adult would have

to say is, you know, that's my niece. She's you know, autistic or whatever he wanted to say, and the adult would immediately stop thinking that this is a crime and help the adult catch the hysterical little girl who has taken her pants off. Anyway, that's that's the last time we see we see Carmen alive.

There was a fellow named Nick Zook, and he remained plagued by his thoughts of what if he was one of the guys that drove, but he thought the car was a Lincoln Continental, saw the little girl and saw an adult get out of the passenger side of the car, thought it was a woman and had a head towards the tail of the car in pursuit, So that would indicate two people in the car, at least one of them a woman. This is very different from all of the descriptions of cars that we get for the other

two victims. Now, Carmen has found after school on Thursday, two days after her disappearance, in a desolate section of the town of Raiga. Two teenage boys out joy riding on a eighty cc Suzuki motorcycle and they found Carmen's naked and an exposed body in a deep ditch that ran along the side of the road. Her body had been clearly sexually abused and was covered with fingernail scratches,

maybe something might expect from a woman attacker. The head was against a large rock, and the boys got the impression of the body that had placed at that spot rather than rolled down the incline. Although they weren't experts, the sheriff said he believed the girl had been slain elsewhere and then transported by car to the dumb site. Police later found Carmen's pants near the spot where she'd

been seen running, but her underwear remained forever missing. Now to get to Uncle Miguel, as I had said, Carmen's mom had Carmen when she was fourteen years old, and the father biological father was a fellow named Gustiano Cologne who was thirty two years old, and his much younger brother subsequently sub subsequently became Carmen's mother's boyfriend, and he drove. I knew to him Cadillac, and we recently I had

two beautiful ladies. Deb Spurling and Christine Green interviewed Carmen's mom and Carmen's half sister, and we found out that Carmen came to be because of a swift and romance free twist with a much older man. Now, not long after Carmon's death, Uncle Miguel splits. He takes off from Rochester goes back to Puerto Rico. So he says, where

are you going? He says, I did something wrong. I've got to get away, and this alerts the police to him as a suspect, and plus his car is found to have Carmen's doll inside it, and the trunk of the car has been washed out with a detergent that wasn't used by the car dealership that sold him the car. So, I mean a lot of police figure this is it. We've got him. So they go to Puerto Rico in March of nineteen seventy two, four months after the murder,

they find him. They return him to Monroe County so he can be interrogated, and Sheriff Skinner himself sheriff for decades and decades old Sheriff big Man, who lean on guys to get him to confess. But Miguel hangs tough. He says, I didn't have anything to do with Carmen's death. What we found out from the family was that he

did say that he had done something wrong. But the thing he had done wrong, he thought was he was living with Carmen's mom who was on food stamps, and somebody, possibly his older brother and Carmen's biological father, told him that you better get away from here. They're going to arrest you for fraud if they catch you and living with a woman on welfare. So this, on purpose or inadvertently makes Miguel look like a suspect more so than he would otherwise, And and that's pretty much the way

it stayed. That there was no concrete evidence linking Miguel to the crime. And the women we've talked to, the Colone women we've talked to, are insistent he's not the guy that he was. You know, he loved Carmen, was there a stepfather of sorts, and it wasn't him, which isn't to say it isn't somehow involved with the dysfunction in the Cologne family. But they defend him very strongly.

Wanda doing a lot of the chores for her. Wanda's had to change schools because of a truancy problem, and the reason she's not going to schools because she's needed at home to take care of things because mom can't. So since Joyce Walkwit's the mom had been widowed, she'd been through a series of men, and they lived about a half block from Conky Avenue on Rochester's East Side, which is another section of Rochester that had seen better days.

Wanda was four foot seven inches tall, she weighed seventy seven pounds, bright red hair like you could spot her a mile away, and her mom gave her a shopping list and said, this is what we need for dinner. And Wanda left for the store as she had done many many times before. So she walked three blocks to the corner store on Knaky Avenue, s wearing a blue and white dress with white socks and sneakers her red

and green checked coat. She bought the groceries and was returning home with a big, full shopping bag in her arms when she disappeared. Now several witnesses saw Wanda leave the deli with her bag. At one point, she stopped at the school eight fence and she used a fence to help brace the bag and get a better grip on it, and then continued walking towards home. She had friends who saw her looked away, looked back and she

was gone. Now. Unlike Carmen, there was an indication that Wanda had been targeted earlier by a creep on the street. On the Saturday night at ten pm, only two days before her abduction, Wanda and her friend Linda are followed by a stranger as the girls are walking of the Conky Avenue area after dark. The stalking incident was considered so serious that Linda's mom filed a report with police,

who came but found no sign of the guy. The guy apparently chased them all the way to Wanda's house and they ran up to her upstairs apartment, and the guy came into the building and was standing at the bottom of the stairs when he finally gave up and left, So it's considered a serious incident. The girls reported that they hadn't gotten a good look at his face because he hid behind a bush when they spotted him, and the only detail that they noticed was they had a

buckle on his shoe. Now we found Linda Diamond. I found Linda, and of course, now she's a grown woman, and I suggested to her that she'd seen the guy, and she said that, you know, she suspected that was true. She knows that after that incident, after that Saturday night, Mom said, that's it, You're not going outside alone anymore. But unfortunately Wanda was never told that, and two days later she was snatched off the street. Now, unlike Michelle

and Carmen, Wanda is found very quickly. By the time the newspapers already with the story about her being missing, they have to change everything because her body has been found ten fifteen in the morning. The morning after her disappearance, on an access road in the town of Webster, a state trooper found Wanda's body, faced down, thrown over a railing and allowed to roll down an embankment. Now the obvious similarities between Carmen and Wanda. Both girls were alone

on the street running errands. Oddly, they both had involved walks that involved one right hand turn two streets. Both had successfully reached their destination had left when they were snatched. But there are differences. Wanda was bruised but not scratched. Carmen had been found exposed, whereas Wanda had been re dressed right. One had been strangled face to face, the other had been strangled from behind. That's a major psychological difference.

That's a difference in modus operandi right there, that's very stark.

the stress of the attack. But who knows, says somewhere between when she left for that store when she was found dead, she had eaten custard, and the bet theory is that the killer gave it to her. Another difference is that no one saw the killer from then saw the killer's car from then on, mistook it for a

luxury car. Witness called the police hotline and said he saw a white man of medium height forcing a red haired girl into a light colored Dodge Dart on Kaaki Avenue, and that would start a series of sightings that all involved what I like to call piece of crap American cars. They're in sharp contrast to the Lincoln Ltd. Or cadillact that was seen in Carmen's case.

East Side. Michelle was chubby and slow. She was a pupil at School thirty three, where she was cruelly bullied. Her last day at school had been a rough one. She'd been teased relentlessly during recess, so severely that she had to leave her classroom and spend most of the

afternoon crying in the nurse's office. How to make madness worse, she and her primary tormentor had been made to stay after school, so when Michelle's mom came to pick Michelle and her sister up, Michelle wasn't released, so mom walked the sister home and left Michelle defend for herself. Michelle walked in the Market View section of Rochester that's on it's over by Webster Avenue on the east side, and as was true of Carmen and Wanda, she disappeared while

walking alone after school, but before dinner. Now after her bad day, Michelle left school somewhere between three twenty and three thirty in the afternoon and made it to a spot at the intersection of Webster Avenue in Ackerman Street, at which point there's a series of witnesses. We have a fairly good idea of what happens because people see Michelle, and our first witness is a little girl that we

call Cynthia because we're protecting her. And Cynthia saw Michelle at the corner of Ackerman in Webster and from that point Michelle headed up a stretch of street that went to the shopping plaza where Michelle's uncle Phil saw her

offered her a ride home and she declined. Now only a few minutes after that, Cynthia sees Michelle a second time, and this time she's in a beige Ford speeding recklessly away from the area, cutting the corner from Ackerman On to Webster Avenue so tightly that Cynthia had a step back to avoid being hit, and another car came slammed on the brakes to avoid an accident, and the car with Michelle in it disappeared to the heading towards the northeast.

Cynthia is a little girl. She knows Michelle because she used to go to school with her, but police are not taking her as seriously as they might if she were an adult, until the motors who slammed down her breaks comes forward and says, no, that really happened. It was a beige Ford pinto another piece of crap American car. So we found and interviewed Cynthia, and she's a very

important witness because she saw the killer's face. It was a long time ago, but she saw him, and we, uh, you know, we're we later showed her a bunch of pictures and she picked the one she liked best. But I'll get to that now. The next time we hear about Michelle, she's at a fast food restaurant. Uh in an eastern suburb. A woman pulled into a Carol's fast food restaurant in Rochester back in the seventies. We had

Carol's before we had McDonald's. The same thing. The woman pulls into the fast food restaurant, but there's a there's a song on the radio she likes, so she doesn't get out the car right away, and she notices that there's a chubby little girl sitting in the car next to her, which is light colored, possibly beige, possibly tan, which she thinks is a Plymouth duster either nineteen seventy

one or seventy two, you know, pinto duster. Medical examiner Labor later gave this witness credibility by finding a fast food hamburger in Michelle's stomach. Again, the killer had fed his victim before killing her. Now, the woman eventually did get out of her car and go to the restaurant. And as she was doing so, a man carrying a bag of food and a soft drink came back and got in the car with the little girl in it, so she got a look at the killer's face as well.

Now is a third witness, and this is maybe fifteen twenty minutes after that, and this witness stopped because a car out of country road in the town of Massaden was parked off the shoulder and in the car was a and in a girl. The man tried to hide the girl and angrily told the good Samaritan he was just trying to change a flat tire and to please go away. That guy also got a look at the guy's face, and slot of this, we get a composite drawing of our suspect, a pretty good idea what this

guy looks like. They put the face that is drawn on a photograph of a police officer who's dressed as the killer had been dressed. So they have a composite. It's mostly photographed with a drawn face on it. And this goes in the newspapers, and apparently it looks exactly like everybody's ex husband and Davy and Dad. So there's lots of lots of leads at that point, most of them lead nowhere.

scenes and Carmen's. So that the one thing, the one thing that holds all three crime scenes together and supports the theory of one man doing it all, is that white animal hairs were found on all three bodies. Incredible, Yes, Anyway, after a couple of days, Michelle's fully clothes and lifeless body was found in a ditch about eight feet from the north shoulder of a deserted road in the town of Massat. It's partially on its side in front, and

found by a volunteer fireman from neighboring Walworth. Now, the killer had dropped the body at the top of an incline at the side of the road and rolled it down. Michelle's coat was missing. Now, as was true with Carmen Igwanda, the thing that you noticed by visiting the site is this is an unusually deserted stretch of road. The road was two miles long, had ten houses on it. The nearest house was in another town, so there was one. Yeah.

After Michelle's murder, people first noticed the initials thing, but it was just considered an oddity, a weird coincidence, and it didn't become part of the story until a local psychiatrist affiliated with the top Rochester University published his theory in the daily newspaper Democrat and Chronicle and said that the sets of double initials cc, wwnmm was an indication that the killer was a criminal mastermind who knew the girls ahead of time so he could pick ones with

alliterative names. The psychiatrist even ben geography a little bit. He said Karmen had been left in Churchville, it was actually Raiga outside of Churchville, Wanda in Webster, and Michelle in Macedon. Interesting thing here is that this theory instantly becomes the accepted fact in Rochester instantly, all of a sudden, it goes from being three murders that are very similar to one another to boom. They are the double initials murders.

Dahl has to do with the alphabet. The psychiatrist says that if you follow the numerology of the letters, that the next victim is going to be gg and found in the town starting with GES. So, I mean, Michelle was technically found in Macedon, but I've talked to the nearest neighbor and she said, we live in Walworth and no one knows where the borderline is. And I don't think the killer knew where the borderline was, so at least the geography part of the theory, I don't think wash.

It just doesn't. It doesn't fit. Now, with the exception of the investigators, who were guided by evidence and logic, everyone believed the psychiatrist's initials became the thing and the killer was given superhuman powers. Not only did he know their names, he knew when they were going to the drug store, when they were sent shopping by their mother, when they were walking home alone because of detention, and little girls with double initials, as you said in the opening,

girls with dublins and their parents were terrified. And I find this even more disturbing in a way. But some little girls were different first and last initials than their parents figured they were off the hook, and those little girls were allowed to go to the park without an adult supervision. Yeah, you're okay. You know you don't have the same first and last initials. The creep doesn't want you, and that and that's that brings us to to our

to our suspects. The first one I guess I should talk about is can be ankey and you know him.

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your first month of personalized care of vitamins. Go to take care of dot Com and enter promo code true murder. That's for twenty five percent off your first month of personalized care of vitamins go to take care of dot com and enter promo code true murder. Now, Michael, we were just about to talk about the suspects that arise in this case and now that has been deemed and

been named and entitled the Double Initial murders. But there is a person that doesn't believe in the profiler's assessment of this at all, and his name is Detective Fonte Grossi. So tell us a little bit about this detective and his ideas about what has happened a contrary to what the doctor has said, and tell us about the first suspects that arise.

They may have a plan involving a neighborhood, I'll cruise this neighborhood today, but what they're basically looking for is a soft target that they can exploit and get away without being seen, and all three of these crimes fit that pattern. He also believed that Carmen's killer had something to do with the family she was in, whereas Gwanda and Michelle's killer was a different fellow. I think that he suspect did the Carmen's killer probably was a Spanish speaker,

and that Wander and Michelle's killer was an English speaker. Now, the suspect that I want to talk about first is you know, Kenneth Bianchi, who later became famous as one of the Hillsides stranglers. And he's you know, Rochester is a medium sized city at the time, they had about three hundred thousand people, but it's really a small town in a lot of ways. And Kenny and I went to the same school for a year when he was in fifth grade. I was in kindergarten at the Holy

Family School at Campbell and Ames Street in Rochester. And he eventually moved out to Gates and I moved to Chila, And I first looked into him involving the nineteen sixty six killings because he was so nearby, and eventually came to the conclusion was probably too young, but he wasn't

too young for these crimes. Now. He later went on with his late cousin Angelo bono to kill at least ten girls and women in the Los Angeles area nineteen seventy seven and seventy eight, and Bianki alone killed two more in the state of Washington before his arrest in January seventy nine. He was twenty years old when Carmen was killed, and he drove a black and white Cadillac, which could have been the car seen off the Western

Expressway chasing Carmen Cologne. Now. Following Carmen Cologne's murder, Bianki was questioned, as were many men who drove Cadillacs, Lincoln's and LCDs, and when Bianki moved to California a few years later, he told a friend he had to get out of Rochester because cops thought he was the double

initial killer. Now I know several people who were interviewed in that same campassing young men who drove their dad's luxury car and were asked where they were when Carmen was seen running down the road, but they didn't leave town because of it. And Bianchi didn't even know. He hadn't even been put on a suspect list, at least not yet, and yet he later claimed he used his suspect status as an excuse to switch coasts. Now, so I checked all twelve ken Biyanki victims. Zero had double initials,

not a single one. Eleven of them were grown women, one was a child. One striking thing is that the method of killing and body disposal is very similar between the double initials and the Hillside strangler cases. He was a strangler, of course, and the rolled bodies down into the ditches when he was done with them. Investigators knew Bianchi and the killers shared some blood characteristics. Now by July nineteen eighty one, Bianchi had been referred to by

Rochester and Monroe County investigators as a serious suspect. Noway to the art technology was used during Michelle Maenz's autopsy. Medical examiner doctor John Edlund tried to find fingerprints on the body itself by blowing iodine vapor across the skin of The vapor lodged on the fats and oils left there by the killer's sweat, and one mark was found

on Michelle's neck. A silver plated piece of metal was pressed onto the area, and the iodine etched a copy of the print onto the metal, which was then photographed with a New York State Police fingerprint camera. It was believed that the print was made mostly by our wrist, with a small portion of palm attached. Although the print had some crucial detail in it, it was nonetheless impossible to determine if it had been made by a right or a left wrist. So it's not the greatest, but

there's something there. You can find a match. Now, Bianci was considered a serious enough suspect that his palm and wrist prints were taken in jail and compared to the mark found on Michelle's neck, no match. And when DNA science was developed, well, this is the thing I should say first. Before DNA technology came into being in the nineteen eighties, tests had been made on the physical evidence for all three double initials cases, and in two of

the cases the evidence had been used up. They were trying to determine whether or not the killer was a secretor which was a key thing back then. The eighty percent of people secrete blood, twenty percent don't. By the way around, I'm not even sure. But they had used up the evidence, not knowing that if they just saved a little bit, they just saved a little bit of it, they might have had a case twenty years down the

road with better technology, but they didn't. So what we have is we have DNA left from Wanda's killing, but not from Carmen's or Michelle's. We don't even know for sure if the DNA was the same for all three. Some that's and when they eventually did have DNA technology, they determined that Kenny Bianki was not the person who had raped one to walk away. That's all they can tell is you can't really eliminate him as a suspect

at all three. And of course there are always going to be many who think Kenny Bianchi had to have been involved in some way. And that's not the first suspect. I'm going to say that about Rochester Head at Sheriff Creeps.

Back in the day now, right around the same time as the Double Initials killers, there was a second set of serial rapes going on by a guy that was known as the Garage Rapist, and he was caught on January first, nineteen seventy four, determined to be Dennis Termini, and he was discovered in the act raping a woman in the garage, but he ran and committed suicide before he could be arrested. Now, The thing about Termini that a lot of investigators really like is he had white

cat hairs in his car. Remember the three the white animal hairs that also be seen. So you know, I'm not privy to it as to how. I'm not privy as how, but they do know that, according to investigators, they can show that Termini was in the area where Michelle was walking home when she disappeared. So he became a favorite suspect, strong enough so that in two thousand and seven his body was disinterred. A DNA sample was taken and it failed to match the remaining double initials DNA. Again, Yeah,

there are veteran cops out there. This is no way he had to be involved in some way. He's still on my list. Something's up. Now. The guy you were talking about in California earlier as this is, Yeah, I wanted to put more about this guy in the book, but eventually it got to be ridiculous because there's so much to put This guy named Joseph Naso. It's also known as the California double initials killer, which is weird enough as it is. But he grew up in Rochester,

New York. He married a Rochester girl, he married a girl who grew up across the street from my dad. Now, when Rochesterians heard of his arrest and they were convinced that he had to be the guy, all he had to do is look at his roster of victims. They were Roxine rag Ash, Chryl Carter, that's the CC, Marina Mitchell, Tracy Defoya, Pamela Perkins, and most astoundingly, and this is the kicker, another Carmen Cologne. This one an adult woman.

he ever knew Carmen Cologne's actual name. She was a sex worker on the street, usually identified herself by a street name, you know, it was Tricksy or Tatiana or whatever. She wouldn't have said hi, I'm Carmen Cologne. So it's a chance he never knew the chance that was just a coincidence. Wow, And in a case with so many coincidences. Now, Naso's trial is one of the most bizarre that ever covered, because not only was he a Grade A creep and weirdo,

but he also insisted done defending himself. Now, his cross examination of his ex wife deteriorated almost immediately into a marital squabble. And it was a long trial because he left so much evidence. He loved to memorialize all of his nasty habits. He was a photographer. He would seduce women into positions where they could be killed by promising to take pictures of them. You should be a model.

I have a camera. I take pictures of models. There was a line that worked so the women he raped and killed, but all the way back to Rochester, and in his notes it became clear that in some cases he didn't know the name of his victims. He might have known the street name, he may not have known their name at all, He only knew the location he picked them up. He took note of many things about the crimes. Body types, he liked, legs, amount of resistance.

The women put up the number of photos he'd taken positions he took the photos in He never once mentioned the alphabet initials, the significance of the victims' names are anything similar to that, and his DNA is not a match for the rapist of Wanda Walkaway. Sonzo was convicted and currently resides on California's death row, But how could he not be the guy?

is a tremendous jump of logically. And I've been impressed with the number of Rochester investigators, including Fana Grossi, who thought Carmen was killed by one killer and Wanda Michelle by another and never bought into the initials bit, thinking that it was an interesting coincidence, but no more than that, and that the naso stuff can be chalked up as one psycho paying homage to another.

would be going to the store. How do you know Michelle was walking home alone that day instead of with her mother and her sister as usual. Answer is he most likely didn't. It's cruising around the inner city looking for soft targets. I can't explain the initials, but it might be helpful to note that many girls of that age born around nineteen sixty had the same first and

last initials. I think it's probably a higher percentage than other demographics because they were all born when the two most famous women in the world were movie stars Marilyn Monroe and Bridget Bardell, and they were referred to on

the covers of movie magazines back then as MM and BB. Now, one thing I want to strongly state for all of your listeners stand if the initials turn out to be a coincidence, it doesn't make the people who did this less evil, and it doesn't make the victims less important, not at all. It does, however, remove from the killers resumes superpowers that they didn't have. So I came to

delusion that, well, maybe the initials don't matter. Let's take a fresh look at everything, take all of the legend out. And that brings me to a fellow named Ted Gibbon.

Now I remember I said earlier that the psychiatrist had said there was a numerology factor and the next victim was going to be gg in a town called g that's w Gate starts with a G. And while in that park, he lured two little girls to the trunk of his car, saying he had baby bunnies in the trunk of his car, and when they got there, he threw them in the trunk and slammed the lid on them. He told me that they were stunned and never had

a chance to put up a fight. He drove them to an abandoned house, tied one of them up in the basement, and took the other upstairs to a room with a mattress and sexually attacked her. He then put the girls back in the car, returned them to the park and set them free. Now he was caught because people in the car saw the drop off and got a good description of the car. It was a gold nineteen sixty five Plymouth Valiant. The car had distinctive racing

stripes with tape that was partially peeling. Then a couple of things happened. First, a cop beat the crap out a Given who he was, after all, a child rapist, and Given had to be hospitalized for an injured scroted them, and the whole matter turned into a police brutality story in the newspaper. Now, the other thing was a reporter asked the Gates police chief, who was only twenty seven

years old at the time. He went on to become a legendary cop, but at the time he was twenty seven, and the reporter asked him, Hey, maybe this is the double initial killer, and that chief said, oh no, these girls had different first and last initials. Besides, he didn't kill them, he let them go. And there were other differences too. It wasn't a school day of summer vacation, it was a Saturday. Maybe it's me, but the similarities

were more impressive than the differences. Here's a man, a pedophile predator, cruising for soft targets in his car, snatching them and taking them somewhere to do bad things. Now Ted admitted to me that he was questioned at the time of the Michelle's murder because of the kind of car he drove. Now, despite the distractions, Given was convicted of attempted rape in the Gate subductions and went away for ten years. I reviewed Given's criminal record, and I

found out that he had always been in trouble. I'd been in jail more than he was out. He was a being e man who liked violating other people's personal space, and those types often evolved into rapists. Sort of makes sense, right. He was in jail when our Carmen Cologne was murdered, but he was out briefly for both Wanda and Michelle, And at the time of Michelle Mayennes's murder, he was sleeping on his dad's couch on Parcells Avenue, two hundred

yards from Michelle Mayennes's home. Wow, he was a guy from the neighborhood. And you know, when we talked to the little girl, Cynthia, who had seen the killer's face, she said, I thought he was a guy from the neighborhood. I thought he was a guy I had seen before, maybe in a pizzeria down the street. Anyway, Ted would have been a guy from the neighborhood, just as Cynthia said. I lived across the street from the kid's favorite pet store, the one that led the county each spring in sales

of baby bunnies. Now I also found, and this perhaps a coincidence, but terrifying in the same sense. I found that there was a big article in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle about the pet store that sold the most baby bunnies before Easter every year. It was about the store across the street from where Ted Given lived, and that story ran the morning of Wanda Walkerwitz his abduction.

My head exploited. So Given serves ten years for his crimes and gates for the double abduction and sexual attack. He's released from prison in nineteen eighty four, returned to Rochester, and eight months later there was another shocking unsolved Rochester murder that a fourteen year old Wendy Lynn Jerome was murdered on Thanksgiving night. Now, this is the third November killing we've talked about. Nineteen eighty four for beaten and rape.

Body was found lying in an alcove of School thirty three on Webster Avenue, at the kindergarten entrance of the same school that Michelle Mayanza had attended and was walking home from at the time of her abduction, almost exactly eleven years earlier. And that eleven years is so big that investigators didn't put the two together, and they only fit together if you realized that the ten years in

the middle. Ted givens in prison. So Ted remains free until September of nineteen eighty six, when he raped a little girl in a suburban home following a home invasion and was caught, and he's been locked up ever since. He was in prison until July fifth, twenty ten, when the Department of Corrections couldn't hold him any longer and he was civilly committed to an institution for the criminally insane, where Don and I found him and I became his

pen pal. So I told him I was working on a book about the double initials faces, and since he had at least one stalked and adducted female children in his car, I wondered if he might have some insight into what made the double initials killer tick. And his response was fascinating. First of all, he said he preferred the name alphabet killer. Why he would have a conference, he didn't say, but he said, alphabet killer is correct, double initials killer is not, so I should get it right.

He told me that he certainly was not the alphabet killer using the correct name, but since he was getting on in years. He thought it was time that he gave himself a good look in the mirror. So he exchanged letters for a year, and he told me, in gruesome detail how and why he had committed the Gate subductions. He drew me maps. He said that he lured the

girls to his car with promises of bunnies. He picked up the girls, throw him in the trunk of his car, and closed the lid so fast that they didn't have a chance to make a sound, and no one noticed him doing it. And this made me think of the abduction of our three victims. How could it happen in a public street without anyone noticing? And the answer might be simple. It might be just that it happened very fast. I asked ted if he had any insight into why he was a pedophile, and he told me he had

it all figured out. When he was sixteen and in prison and himself being repeatedly raped by a number of men, he found comfort in a nineteen sixties style porn magazine. There was a genre called a nudist colony magazine, and these were magazines that showed pictures of nudist colonies of men, women, sometimes whole families doing wholesome activities all start naked. Now, in one picture there was a family lounging by the pool.

Ted told me that in that photo there was a ten year old female line naked beside the pool, and that photo seriously got under his skin. And later when he was out of prison, he frequented the dirty bookstores, seeking that particular magazine with the photo of her Capital H, Capitoli, Capital R. And when he saw a little girl that resembled the one in the photo, he had trouble controlling himself. And that was what happened to him when he was in that Gates Park. So and again Ted's DNA does

not match that founded the Wanda Wakowitz crime scene. We don't know the matches wanted Michelle Maenza's crime scene, and he was in prison for Carmen Cologne. But I think he did tell me what made the double initials killer tick. I think that's exactly what made him tick. He saw the killer of Wanda and Michelle saw these events as little dates, as in a man and a woman going out. He took them out to eat Dwanda Custard. He took

Michelle out for cheeseburger. And when things didn't go well, he had to kill them to get rid of the only witness to his misdeed.

What do you make of that, because you don't really concribe.

the candy shop that was across the street. So that you know, Grandpa Felix could watch Carmen from the front of the house, but he couldn't because the drug store was around down Main Street. They and both Carmen's mom and her sister insist that Miguel Cologne never went to Puerto Rico, although they admit that he didn't show up when the rest of the family did for the police interviews right, and that he used the excuse he had done something wrong as a reason for for not cooperating

with the police. But the whole part well documented manhunt of Rochester police and Puerto Rican police looking for Miguel Cologne in the jungles of Puerto Rico, it doesn't exist to them anymore, if it ever did. I don't know if it's lying there is, but there's there's selective memory and some just false notions getting mixed in.

was bludgeoned. There was a there was a damage to the car, which has made some people think it might be a road rage infinite. But we're still looking for guys who might have had a crush on her, who might have happened upon her on a date with another guy. Right because the lover's lane that they were found on was so remote that you almost needed to know it was there, and that kind of cuts down on the

number of suspects. It's that's a fascinating case as well that I don't know if that's going to turn into a book, but that's a little working at now, and I'm currently writing a biography of the mobster Albert Anastasia as a sequel to my biography of Carmine Persico, came out earlier this year.

their help along and along the way. And hopefully we've looked at these cases through fresh eyes and giving people a new perspective on what happened.