Read The Killer Book of Cold Cases Online
Authors: Tom Philbin
The Killer Book of Cold Cases (23 page)
He took Dorothy into his bedroom, threw her down on a futon on the floor, and pulled her clothing off until she was naked. Then he tied her up and assaulted her sexually.
But there was a problem. He couldn’t complete the sex act and stopped.
Dorothy begged him to let her go.
“No,” he said, “you’ll talk. I have to think.”
He carried her to the basement and placed her on a small throw rug. Then he wrapped a cord around her neck and stuck a gag in her mouth. She spit it out right away, screaming and crying. Then she cleverly asked him to loosen the ropes because their tightness was cutting off her circulation.
He complied, but he didn’t notice that Dorothy had stuck her finger in one of the knots to make it looser.
When he’d finished tying her again, he turned off all the lights in the basement, leaving Dorothy in total darkness, and went upstairs. Dorothy saw her chance. Because of her finger in the knot, she was able to get loose and untie herself. Then, alone and naked, she thought about how she could get out. Was he still upstairs? Would he hear her and come cascading down the stairs?
She listened but could hear nothing. She knew she had to take a life-or-death chance. She found the light cord and turned on the lights. Still no sound from above.
Scanning the basement, she spotted a window high up on the foundation. Dorothy knew that as small as she was, she would not be able to reach it. But she saw a board sticking out of the foundation beneath a window and stepped up on it so she could get to the window, which she was able to open, and then push out a screen.
She crawled through the window and, still nude, raced toward the street and ran out into it, hoping that the monster who had abducted her would not show up.
In most cases, people don’t want to get involved in someone else’s trouble, and drivers seeing a nude woman suddenly bursting into the street might not stop. But she got very lucky. A man in a truck stopped and picked her up, and she hysterically blurted out what had happened to her. As they drove toward police headquarters, they spotted a cop and Dorothy repeated the horrific story for him.
Before long, the cops were on their way back to the house, which they discovered belonged to Steven Impellizzeri, an upstanding member of the community who was very involved in ecological matters.
But when they arrived, he wasn’t there—and neither was Dorothy’s white Nova. Apparently, Impellizzeri had driven it away, presumably as the first step in covering his tracks. He fully intended to murder Dorothy.
At the house, investigators found bloody sheets in Impellizzeri’s bedroom, blood in the basement, and a collection of porn. And outside, lying in the grass, was a bracelet Dorothy had worn and that had been pulled off as he wrestled her into the house.
Police started to track him down. They called his mother’s house in Smithtown, Long Island (about seven miles from where Kathy Woods’ body had been found), and got him on the phone.
The sheriff urged Impellizzeri to come back to Pennsylvania, and he did by 7 p.m. He was immediately brought before a judge and sent to jail with bail set at $500,000, which he was unable to raise.
The news of the charges and Impellizzeri’s arrest was a shocker to a lot of people, including those who worked with him in the environmental group. After a vote, he was immediately suspended from the board.
“It was shocking,” said one person close to the scene. “Steve used to talk about plants as if they were people that you shouldn’t hurt. That he could do something like this was really shocking.”
But at least one person had long sensed that Impellizzeri had the ability to savage females.
Delvin Powell first encountered Impellizzeri during a case of domestic abuse against his wife in 1989. Powell, a sex-crimes investigator with the state police in Bethlehem, had been struck by Impellizzeri’s weirdness and savagery. Impellizzeri had slashed his wife’s tires and loosened the lug nuts, and Powell could easily see that Impellizzeri was dangerous.
So Powell kept tabs on him. “I didn’t think it would be the last time we would hear from him,” the investigator said.
After Impellizzeri’s arrest for assaulting Dorothy, Powell queried police in towns where Impellizzeri had lived. Powell was looking for unsolved rape-murders that matched the methods Impellizzeri had used against Dorothy—anal intercourse, trying to stuff a gag down her throat, and above all, the specific way he tied her up.
One department responded—Suffolk County. Cops there gave Pennsylvania investigators the case info on Kathy Woods. Later, Jacquelyn Paradis, the Lehigh County assistant district attorney who prosecuted Impellizzeri, said, “There are many striking similarities between what happened to my victim and that other victim (Kathy Woods), particularly the way she was tied and the way she was sexually abused.”
Impellizzeri’s defense was that Dorothy and he had been having consensual sex, and then she changed her mind.
One bone of contention was that Dorothy was so small that she could not possibly have gotten up to the basement window by herself. She was short and weighed only one hundred pounds.
But ADA Paradis had a petite secretary from her office try to climb out the same basement window and she succeeded. The secretary’s ability to get out of the basement was videotaped, and the judge allowed the tape as evidence, over the strong objections of defense counsel.
Impellizzeri was convicted of fourteen assorted counts of rape and robbery. On March 3, 1994, the judge sentenced him to twenty to forty years in jail.
The defense filed an appeal and seemed to have a good shot. Two of the jurors said they had read news accounts of the attack and wondered if they could be objective. The defense argued that the judge should not have allowed them to sit on the jury. The appeals court said that while that could have been counted as a mistake, the two jurors also had said that they thought they could be objective and that was good enough. Impellizzeri’s conviction was affirmed.
He is still doing time as this is being written.
But there is a problem. Police are concerned that if he gets out on parole, someone else will be at risk. Deep in my heart, I know you can bet on that. My suspicions are based not only on the cops being suspicious of him, but on the similarity in the crimes: the assault on the young woman in Whitehall and the murder of Kathy Woods. Both were sodomized, both were tied, both had a knife used against them, both victims were petite, and both had a gag inserted in their mouths.
My feelings toward him are simple. I hate the bastard—hate him for taking this young girl’s life, hate him for what he put her through. He must not ever be allowed to leave prison.
In fall 1982, Chicagoland was shocked when multiple victims died after consuming Extra Strength Tylenol capsules that had been laced with the poison potassium cyanide. The first victim to die was 12-year-old Mary Kellerman of Elk Grove Village, Illinois. Adam Janus of Arlington Heights, Illinois, grew ill after taking pills and died in a hospital soon after. While mourning Adam’s death, his brother Stanley and sister-in-law Theresa died as well. They had consumed pills from the same poisoned bottle.
When three additional victims all had died in a similar fashion, investigators put together the Tylenol connection. Police and city officials spread urgent warnings throughout the Chicago area, broadcasting on radio and TV as well as delivering warnings in surrounding suburbs.
Once the poisoned Tylenol was discovered, the FBI entered the case and started an intensive investigation. They discovered that while a number of Tylenol bottles had been tampered with, the bottles had been manufactured at different factories. Instead of tampering with the capsules when they were manufactured and packaged, as investigators had first thought, the psychopath had bought Tylenol bottles from multiple grocery stores and pharmacies, added poison to the capsules, and then placed the bottles back on the shelf. As the investigation continued, another three tainted Tylenol bottles were discovered.
Johnson & Johnson, the parent company of McNeil Consumer Products, the manufacturer of Tylenol, blared warnings to hospitals and distributors, brought Tylenol production to a halt, and issued a nationwide recall of Tylenol products; a big job because more than 30 million bottles were out there. Of course, the company warned people not to ingest any Tylenol or other products that contained acetaminophen.
After continued investigation, officials learned that only gel capsules had been poisoned. Solid pills were safe so Johnson & Johnson soon was offering bottles of solid pills in exchange for capsules that were turned in.
No question that Stella Nickell has had a tough life. She grew up in a poor family in the Pacific Northwest, and at sixteen, when most girls are thinking about next year’s prom or their new boyfriend, Stella got pregnant and gave birth to a daughter. Over the next dozen years she married and had a second daughter, but her marriage went down in flames.
Then life seemed to take an upswing. At thirty-two, she fell for Bruce Nickell, and they were wed in 1976. Ten years later, on a balmy June evening, Bruce got home from work, told Stella he had a headache, and took four Excedrins. He took a short stroll out on the deck, and then he collapsed.
Stella called 911. When the EMTs arrived, they saw Bruce was in bad shape and got him to a helicopter where he was airlifted to a Seattle hospital. The diagnosis was emphysema, a condition that makes breathing difficult and enlarges the heart.
When Bruce died, Stella said that emphysema didn’t make sense as a diagnosis. It must have been something else.
Then Stella heard about the case of Sue Snow, a bank manager. Snow had died of poisoning, in fact, from cyanide-laced Excedrin. Stella alerted the police, who realized that Bruce Nickell had also taken Excedrin and probably had been poisoned. Cops immediately focused their investigative attention on Sue’s husband, Paul Webking, but he passed a polygraph test.
Then something happened that turned their suspicion toward Stella. She showed them two bottles of Excedrin she had bought, and both were tainted with cyanide. Cops had found only five tainted bottles of Excedrin anywhere, so the idea of her having two of them seemed highly unlikely.
The question was: Why should she prefer to have Bruce die of poisoning rather than emphysema? Because Bruce’s insurance policy would pay an extra $100,000 for an accidental death, including from poisoning.
“I think that she probably killed Bruce and expected them to find out that he died from cyanide poisoning,” said Detective Mike Dunbar. Investigators in Seattle say her plan was foiled when Bruce was diagnosed as having died from natural causes, so she spiked three more bottles and put them on store shelves. Then, when bank manager Snow died of cyanide poisoning, Stella could step forward and say, “See. Look at what happened to her and Bruce.”
But Stella forgot one thing. The FBI found green crystals in the cyanide that turned out to be algae destroyer used to kill algae in a fish tank. Stella had an aquarium but said she never used algae destroyer. However, a local fish-store manager, Tom Noonan, says she did.
She likely mixed the algae crystals in a bowl but forgot to clean it completely before she mixed cyanide in it.
A year and a half after her husband and Snow died, Stella went on trial. A surprise witness against her was her own daughter, who said she had heard her mother talking about murdering her father.
The jury found Stella guilty, and the judge sentenced her to ninety years in jail. One of the assistant district attorneys suggested that it would not be a “good idea to get a headache around her and ask for an aspirin.”
The police uncovered a number of suspects in the course of investigation. James W. Lewis sent Johnson & Johnson a letter asking for $1 million. In exchange, he said he would stop poisoning bottles. However, investigators never came up with enough evidence to pin him to the crimes. He was convicted of extortion instead and spent thirteen years in prison, released on parole in 1995. One TV station reported that police considered him guilty of the crimes but couldn’t prosecute him because they didn’t have enough evidence. Lewis continues to deny responsibility for the poisonings.