The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (18 page)

A few days after reading that Nicholaou had killed his second wife and her daughter, Carty was on the Internet when she came across the unsolved Connecticut River Valley murders and noticed that all the victims had been dumped beside back roads along the I–91 in a stretch that straddled Vermont and New Hampshire.

Cary also noticed that several of the victims were nurses. She remembered hearing that Nicholaou’s first wife had been a nurse and that his mother had worked at a hospital. A note in one of Michelle’s abandoned baby book place her and Nicholaou at a hospital in Hanover, New Hampshire, hospital on Thanksgiving in 1986. A nurse from that hospital disappeared in January, a few miles from the Vermont home where the Nicholaous spent Christmas and the few weeks that followed.

Carty tracked down a phone number for Susan Nicholaou, who was a nurse in Connecticut when Nicholaou married her in 1978. The two divorced in 1982, a year after the first valley victim, Elizabeth Critchley, disappeared off I–91. Little was known of their short marriage, but Nicholaou took off with their daughter soon after she was born, infuriating his wife.

When Carty called, Susan was guarded.

“I’m not going to talk to you,” she said in a voice that shook. “I’m not going to talk about him.”

But Carty pressed on. What kind of cars did he drive? she asked. Susan said she barely saw him.

“I got away from him,” she said.

Had she been afraid of Nicholaou? Carty asked.

“What do you think?” Susan screamed.

Nicholaou’s mother denied knowing him until she learned that her name and phone number were noted in a Tampa Police Department homicide report.

“I threw him out years ago,” she said. “He stole my car and took off. I haven’t seen him or heard from him since.”

While she heard little from Nicholaou, FBI agents had contacted her three times in the past 15 years looking for him, she said. Once, they asked about Susan Nicholaou’s baby. The other times, they did not say why they wanted him.

Nicholaou had claimed that his mother molested him when he was young. His mother insisted that Nicholaou was never sexually abused, but admitted that her second husband, Rudy, had hit him. Nicholaou’s birth father, Edward Stafford, is a registered sex offender in South Carolina. He was a child molester. His mother divorced Stafford on grounds of “extreme cruelty” when Nicholaou was three years old. Otherwise Nicholaou had a relatively stable childhood on Long Island, New York, riding a motorcycle to high school in Farmingdale, in Nassau County, where he distinguished himself as a wrestler. He enlisted in the Army in Brooklyn in 1968.

When Cary studied the testimony of Jane Boroski, the pregnant woman who survived the attack, she discovered that the killer had used a martial arts grip during the attack. Nicholaou had a black belt in karate. Nicholaou also wore dark-framed glasses like those that appeared in the composite sketch of the Connecticut River Valley killer.

Michelle Ashley’s relatives had told Cary that they remembered taking Christmas gifts out of a station wagon with wood-panelled sides in the mid 1980s. Jane Boroski had told police her attacker drove a wood-panelled Jeep Wagoneer. This last attack was only four months before Michelle disappeared and Nicholaou left the area.

Carty contacted criminal psychologist John Philpin who, in the 1980s, had helped police profile the serial killer. He agreed Nicholaou could be the killer. She called New Hampshire State Police, who had not heard of Nicholaou before, but soon made him one of their three strongest suspects – the other two are still alive, so little more could be done in their cases without showing probable cause. However, the introduction of Nicholaou has now meant that the investigation can be opened up again.

Denver’s Down-and-Out Destroyer

Five homeless men have been found beaten to death in downtown Denver in 1999 in what was thought to be a murder spree by a thrill killer. Although police did not officially link the five deaths, the circumstances in the five killings appear too similar and they happened over too short a time to be coincidental. All five men were bludgeoned to death in September and they were all found within a six-block radius of Coors Field.

On 7 September the bodies of 62-year-old George Worth and 51-year-old Donald Dyer were found under a loading dock at 2460 Blake Street. Forty-seven-year-old Melvin Washington was found the following day on 18th Street. He had been severely beaten and died from his injuries in hospital a week later. On 26 September the battered body of 51-year-old Milo Harris was found in the South Platte River. The body of the fifth man, 42-year-old Kenneth Rapp, was not found until 22 October, when municipal workers cutting weeds in a field at Lipan and 19th Streets northwest of Coors Field stumbled across it. Investigators believe Rapp had lain there undiscovered for four to eight weeks – putting his murder in September. Like the others, he had died from blunt trauma to the head.

“However, not all the trauma has been the same,” said Denver Police Captain Tim Leary. Some of the victims appeared to have been beaten with a weapon, others with fists. Indeed Rapp had been completely decapitated, though his head was found.

Police have not been able to determine a motive.

The killings have scared many of the homeless who would normally spend their nights on the street into seeking shelter. In a survey in June 1998 there were 5,800 homeless people, but the city only had about 3,200 beds available. Due to the increased demand, the city advanced its winter policy allowing shelters and the rescue missions to take in more people than they are normally licensed for, and the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless began putting people up in motels. The Denver Rescue Mission was overflowing and continued to put up makeshift beds in the chapel. And an anonymous donor put up a reward of $100,000 for information leading to the apprehension of the killer.

Three homeless youths were charged with the murder of Melvin Washington and two of the suspects, along with four other homeless youths, have been charged with attempted first-degree murder in the beatings of two other homeless men.

Michael Leathers, aged 18, was charged with robbing and a non-fatal assault on a transient on 25 September. Leathers, who is from Littleton, to the south of the city, also is a suspect in the attack on another homeless man on 26 September. But blood samples did not connect him to any of the murder scenes.

But then on 18 November, more than a week after the suspects had been jailed, two more bodies were found in a field behind Union Station in the LoDo section of Denver. They had been beheaded. Their heads were never recovered and the bodies had lain dead for around a week. They were later identified as Harry Redden, aged 46, and Joe Mendoza, 50. The new discoveries sparked fears that a serial killer was at work, or that the original thrill killer had spawned a copycat. FBI profilers were called in.

On 16 November Denver police had arrested Rodney Donald Polk, aged 37, for beating a transient sleeping in the doorway of a building on Welton Street in the 16th Street Mall with a board.

Another Denver homeless man, 41-year-old Charles “Stoney” Sanbourne, told journalists that he was the victim of an unprovoked attack by two teenagers.

“The young punks hit me on the head with a two-by-four,” he said. “Why they tried to get me I don’t know.”

Sanbourne, a newspaper seller, said he was hanging out at the corner of California and 16th streets around 7 p.m. He already had a broken leg in a cast and was leaning against a wall next to his wheelchair when two teenagers sneaked up behind him. He said they struck him on the head with a board three times, inflicting injuries to his head and bruising his nose. They then ran off with the case of a Braille machine he used to write his blind mother.

He was standing near a Taco Bell on the 16th Street Mall, a prime hangout for homeless young people. The beating may have been retaliation for intruding on their turf, he said. Living on the streets, homeless teens and older homeless men often came into conflict. Sanbourne said he was an easy mark because of the cast.

“I was also kind of intoxicated,” he admitted.

Drinking kept him out of the shelters where he would not be able to take his “medication”. Others go off to remote areas to drink to avoid getting arrested for intoxication. This leaves them vulnerable. An ex-con, Sanbourne did not want to report the incident to the police–a 1995 survey in Denver showed an under-reporting of crimes by the homeless – and said he may resort to carrying a gun.

However, his assailants are unlikely to be responsible for the decapitations. Former FBI profiler Gregg McCrary said the beatings and the beheadings were probably not linked, though he would surprised if more than one person were involved in the beheadings.

“The likelihood that you’ve got more than one killer is pretty small because this is such bizarre pathological behaviour,” he said.

Meanwhile, the “mall rats” – the homeless youths who hang out in the 16th Street Mall – complained that they had been unfairly targeted in the wake of the killings of homeless men.

“Since all this really got started, like the last two or three weeks, I’ve had probably 30 friends arrested down here,” said a young man who called himself “Animal”.

The parents of Tommy Holden, who has been charged earlier, said they are sure of their son’s innocence, particularly in light of the discovery of the new bodies.

“Tommy’s got the best alibi he can have,” said his mother Denise. “He was in jail.”

David Kadans, an organizer with the homeless outreach program Stand Up for Kids, said the mall rats were “being railroaded . . . There’s definitely the potential there for violence, but I can’t see any of them being driven to serial killing.”

The fact that the latest two bodies were found near the railway station led suspicions to fall on the Freight Train Riders of America, thought to have been responsible for some 300 similar murders.

The gang was formed in a Montana bar in 1984 by a small group of Vietnam veterans who were then transients riding trains across the western United States, according to a report by the Placer County Sheriff’s Department in Salem, Oregon. Three years later, the group formed a “goon squad” to keep its members in order and beat up other transients who did not want to join.

The FTRA is divided into various factions such as the Wrecking Crew, who use violence to steal clothing and food from other hobos, and the Stone Tramp People, who are heavy drug users. Although FTRA members claim that it is a loosely knit group of homeless people who gang together for mutual support, alumni have been associated with drug trafficking, theft, food stamp fraud and hundreds of assaults and murders committed on other transients. Some also leave racist graffiti with Nazi emblems, leading the authorities to believe that they are affiliated to white supremacist organizations.

Because of FTRA members’ use of multiple aliases and the nomadic nature of the gang, it is hard to know exactly how many riders there are. Estimates range from 600 to 2,000, according to Walt Copley, a criminology professor at the Metropolitan State College of Denver.

“They have a shifting membership and short-term leadership,” Copley says.

Another FTRA expert is retired Spokane police officer Bob Grandinetti who studied the riders when tracking a drifter suspected of killing a young girl in the early 1980s. He spent years developing informants within the group and likens them to outlaw motorcycle gangs, such as the Hell’s Angels.

“They’re hard-core druggies who prey on the weak,” he says.

Riders identified themselves by coloured bandanas around their necks, held in place by silver clasps known as conchos. Blue bandanas are worn by those from Northern states, red by those from the South and black by those from the Midwest. According to Grandinetti, a new rider is initiated by having three current members urinate on his bandana. After they have ridden over a million miles, they get a gold concho.

Its most notorious member is Robert Joseph Silveria Jnr – aka “Side Track” and the “Boxcar Serial Killer” – who has confessed to nine murders in seven states from Florida to Oregon, though he is thought to have stabbed and bludgeoned at least 14 transients to death and maybe as many as 100. He is currently serving three life sentences in Oregon State Penitentiary. If he is ever paroled, he faces another life sentence in Florida for robbing another drifter and beating to him death with a metal post.

Silveria boasted of killing at least 50 others and claimed he learned his craft from another unidentified, multiple-murdering rider, who Silveria says is still at large.

In the wake of the Denver killings, Bob Cote, former street person and long-time director of Step-13, a shelter and substance abuse rehabilitation centre in Denver, sought an interview with Silveria, as the riders pass through Denver on their way south during the autumn. Cotes believed that they may have stayed on longer that year because of the unusually warm weather. However, when he eventually got to meet Silveria, he found that the 39-year-old Californian was “as crazy as they come”.

“He made Charles Manson look like an altar boy,” Cote said.

However, Denver, Colorado, has recently had some success at catching a serial killer. On 29 November 2004, Richard Paul White was sentenced to two consecutive life prison terms. He had pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in the deaths of 27-year-old Annaletia Maria Gonzales and 32-year-old Victoria Lyn Turpin. The bodies of both women were found last year, buried in the yard of a home White once shared with a girlfriend.

He was sentenced to another 144 years after pleading guilty to three counts of sexual assault and assault with a deadly weapon for attacks on three women who survived. As part of his plea bargain, prosecutors agreed not to ask for the death sentence provided White co-operated in the search for the bodies of his other victims. He admitted to murdering five women and burying them around the state. Another victim had been discovered, but the remains have not been identified.

In a separate case, White pleaded guilty to first-degree murder of his friend, 27-year-old Jason Reichardt, shooting him dead while trying to rob his truck. It was after his arrest for Reichardt’s death in 2003 that White told detectives he had killed five women since 1998 and buried their bodies around the state. The bodies of Gonzales Turpin and were recovered. Authorities also searched sites in Costilla and Otero counties. One of those sites near Mesita, yielded the skeletal remains of a woman. White said he had picked her up at a bus stop and killed her later.