The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (17 page)

In Chicago, 43-year-old Josephine Ross was found dead on 5 June 1945; as was 30-year-old Frances Brown on 10 December 1945; and six-year-old Suzanne Degnan on 7 January 1946 in the so-called “Red Lipstick Murders”. Said to be the victim of the “Mad Butcher of Kenmore Avenue”, Degnan was strangled and her body was cut into seven pieces. Six months later, 17-year-old University of Chicago student William Heirens was arrested for burglary and became a suspect in the Red Lipstick Murders. Throughout his interrogation he maintained his innocence but, after being charged with the crimes, he agreed to plead guilty to avoid the electric chair. Sentenced to four terms of life, he protested his innocence ever since. Rasmussen maintains that there was another Red Lipstick Murder in Los Angeles on 10 February 1947. The victim: Jeanne Axford French. That links to the Black Dahlia Murder, where the body of 22-year-old aspiring actress Elizabeth Short was found in a vacant lot in Leimert Park in Los Angeles on 14 January 1947, less than a month before. Like the women in the Cleveland Torso case, Elizabeth Short’s body had been cut in two. It was said that Short was “terribly preoccupied with the details of the Degnan murder”. The murders of both Jeanne Axford French and Elizabeth Short remain unsolved, though Merylo believed that the Cleveland Torso Killer was responsible for Short’s death.

Rasmussen has placed Jack Anderson Wilson in Indianapolis and Los Angeles at crucial times. He spent his early years in Canton, Ohio less than 50 miles south of Cleveland. He was at Cleveland for the Great Lakes Exposition in 1936, during the Cleveland Torso Murders. He was in Los Angeles at the time Cleveland Police Chief Matowitz got the letter from the killer saying he was in sunny California and when Elizabeth Short and Jeanne Axford French were killed, and he was in Indianapolis when Maoma Ridings was slain. Los Angeles Detective John St John – aka “Jigsaw John” – was convinced that Wilson was the killer in the Black Dahlia case and was about to arrest him in 1982 when Wilson’s hotel in downtown Los Angeles burned down.

The Connecticut River Valley Killings

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, two serial killers stalked the scenic Connecticut River Valley between New Hampshire and Vermont. One, Gary Schaefer, was captured. The other remains at large.

The unknown slayer’s first victim was probably 26-year-old Cathy Millican. Her body found on 25 September 1978, in a wetlands preserve near New London, New Hampshire. She had been viciously stabbed to death. A hitchhiker named Mary Elizabeth Critchley disappeared from Interstate 91 in Massachusetts in 1981. Her body was found in New Hampshire. By then Gary Schaefer had got to work.

A native of neighbouring Vermont, Schaefer was a member of the fundamentalist Christadelphian Church. He first fell foul of authority while serving in the US Navy, where he was charged with arson and possession of illegal drugs. He entered a plea of insanity, but the Navy psychiatrists found him competent to stand trial. Discharged, he managed to convince his family and friends that he was both sane and responsible. However, under his quiet exterior, he was seething with violent sexual obsessions.

In 1979, Schaefer kidnapped, raped and murdered 13-year-old Sherry Nastasia, whose family lived in a Springfield apartment complex managed by Schaefer’s brother. Theresa Fenton suffered the same fate in 1981. However, in 1982, 17-year-old Deana Buxton survived an attack in Brattleboro on the border with New Hampshire. The description of her attacker she gave focused police attention on Schaefer, but there was little hard evidence.

On 9 April 1983, Schaefer abducted young Catherine Richards in Springfield. He drove to a remote spot where he forced her to perform oral sex, then crushed her skull with a stone. The body was found at noon the following day. Descriptions of Catherine’s abductor given by an eyewitness matched that Deana Buxton had given the year before.

The police put a case together against Schaefer and were preparing to arrest him in September 1983, when Catherine Richards’ mother wrote an open letter to Schaefer, accusing him of murder and challenging him to confess his sins, in accordance with the precepts of his church.

Schaefer cracked. In custody, he confessed to the murders of Theresa Fenton and Catherine Richards, and the rape of Deana Buxton. In December 1983, he pleaded guilty to kidnapping, sexual assault, and second-degree murder in the Catherine Richards’ case. The charges in the Fenton case were dismissed as part of a plea bargain. A month later, Schaefer was sentenced to a term of 30 years to life in the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas.

Schaefer was safely in jail when the Connecticut River Valley Killer struck again. On 30 May 1984, 17-year-old nurse’s aide Bernice Courtemanche disappeared while hitch-hiking in Claremont, New Hampshire, on her way to see her boyfriend eight miles away in Newport. Her remains were found by a fisherman in Newport on 19 April 1986, almost two years after her disappearance. A post mortem revealed that she died from stab wounds to the neck.

Two months after Bernice Courtemanche disappeared, another nurse went missing. Twenty-seven-year-old Ellen Fried, who was a supervising nurse at Valley Regional Hospital in Claremont, stopped late at night on 10 July 1984 outside Leo’s Market, a Claremont convenience store. It was on Main Street, five miles from I–91 and not far from where Bernice Courtemanche was last seen. Ellen Fried regularly used the payphone there to call her sister who was out of town. They talked for almost an hour. Then, something spooked Fried.

“That’s strange,” she said.

“What?”

“A car just drove through.”

There was a pause. Then Ellen spoke again.

“Hold on a minute,” said

Her sister heard an engine turn over. When Fried returned to the phone, she said she wanted to make sure her car would start. They talked for a few more minutes, then hung up.

Fried was never heard from again. Her skeletal remains were found in 19 September 1985 near the spot where Bernice Coutermanche’s remains were discovered. A post mortem failed to determine exactly how she died. But, like Bernice Courtemanche, she showed signs of knife wounds to the neck.

Single mother Eva Morse was last seen hitch-hiking in Charlestown, New Hampshire, after leaving her place of work on 10 July 1985. A logger found her body on 25 April 1986. The remains still showed signs of knife wounds. Then, on 15 May 1986, housewife Lynda Moore was stabbed to death in her home outside Saxtons River over the state line in Vermont.

Another nurse was murdered in January 1987. Thirty-six-year-old Barbara Agnew disappeared on her way home from a skiing trip. Her car was found abandoned at a Vermont rest stop, but her body was not recovered until 28 March. She too had been killed by vicious stab wounds to the neck and lower abdomen. Investigators now recognized this as the Valley Killer’s signature. However, two more murders, one dating back to 1968, are also considered as possible victims of the Valley Killer, despite the fact that both victims had been not stabbed but strangled.

Then detectives got a break. On the night of 6 August 1988, Jane Boroski was cornered by a man outside of a rural store near Keane, New Hampshire. The attacker pulled the pregnant 22-year-old from her car and stabbed her repeatedly. But she was saved when another vehicle approached and scared her assailant away. Jane Boroski survived the ordeal to give birth later to a healthy baby daughter.

The police now had a good description of the man they were looking for. An artist produced a sketch which was circulated, but this led nowhere. The killer did not strike again – at least not in the Connecticut River Valley.

The trail then went cold for nearly 30 years until a murder-suicide on New Year’s Eve 2005 caught the attention of a private investigator in St Petersburg named Lynn-Marie Carty. When she opened the newspaper on New Year’s Day, she recognized the name of the killer, Michael Nicholaou, who had attacked his estranged wife, Aileen, in her home the day before.

According to the
St Petersburg Times
, Nicholaou had “slipped into the West Tampa home on New Year’s Eve. It was daylight. He wore a black suit and tie and carried a guitar case full of guns.

“He found his estranged wife at the dining room table.

“‘You didn’t think you were ever going to see me again,” he said.

“When it was over that day on Walnut Street, blood stained a floral bedspread and a beige and pink dresser. Nicholaou, 56, killed his wife and fatally wounded his stepdaughter before shooting himself in the mouth.”

Five years earlier, a Vermont mother had hired Carty, a detective who specialized in reuniting families, to find her daughter, Michelle Ashley, who had had two children by Nicholaou before she disappeared in 1988.

“If I ever go missing,” she had told her mother beforehand, “he killed me, and you need to track him down and find the kids.”

After a few minutes at the computer, Carty found a phone number for Nicholaou and called it.

“How did you find me?” she remembered him asking.

Carty asked about Michelle Ashley. At first, Nicholaou denied knowing her, but when she pressed, he said Michelle was a slut who was taking drugs and had run off, abandoning the children. Carty then asked about the children. Nicholaou said he had them and they were fine. The conversation was curtailed at this point, but when Carty called back the next day, Nicholaou’s phone line was disconnected.

Reading of the murder-suicide of Michael Nicholaou, Aileen Nicholaou and her daughter Terrin Bowman in 2006 stirred up old memories. Carty began wondering what had happened to the children, Nick and Joy. After a bit more digging, Carty found a new phone number. This time she got Nick Nicholaou, now 18, on the phone and told him she did not think their mother had abandoned them. Nick said that he and his sister had never believed it. He cried as he described the hard life they suffered being dragged around the country by their father, who was still traumatized by his service in the Vietnam war that had ended more than three decades before.

Nicholaou had flown helicopters with the 335th Aviation Company, known as the Cowboys, in Vietnam. His comrades remembered Nicholaou as a brave man always prepared to do his duty. He earned a Distinguished Flying Cross, Bronze Star and Air Medal, among other honours, flying into combat zones to drop supplies and recover the wounded. But he had a dark side. A least once, he had left camp on his own, carrying only a knife and bent on hand-to-hand combat with the enemy. His solo efforts became a legend in the company.

Then in May 1971 Nicholaou and seven other helicopter crewmen were charged with murder for strafing innocent civilians while on a flight in the Mekong Delta the previous year. But the charges were dropped due to insufficient evidence. A few days later, Nicholaou was stood down from active duty. He returned to the United States, but his homecoming celebration was short. The war had already become unpopular at home. He worked doing odd jobs and moved from place to place, never staying anywhere for long. Friends soon spotted the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. He later sought treatment in Miami and Tampa.

By 1977, Nicholaou was living off and on in Virginia. Police in Charlottesville busted him for dealing drugs, then used him as an informant. For years afterward, Nicholaou told people he was a cop, or that he worked for the CIA.

In 1983, he opened a porn shop called the Pleasure Chest in Charlottesville. At that time, he was living with his business partner and the partner’s wife. Two weeks after the porn shop opened, Nicholaou and his partner were charged with selling obscene materials. A jury convicted them. Months later, police raided again. This time another jury returned a not guilty verdict.

“Evidently the police don’t have enough serious robberies, murders and rapes to occupy their time,” he said told a local newspaper. The story was published on 22 May 1984.

Eight days later, 500 miles away, Bernice Courtemanche set off hitch-hiking in Claremont. For Carty, Nicholaou’s residence in Virginia is no alibi. He would often leave town alone, later telling friends he been in New York or Miami. And he had plenty of reasons to drive north. He spent Christmas in Vermont some years and his ex-wife Susan lived in Connecticut.

Michelle Marie Ashley grew up in the Connecticut River Valley. She was a tomboy who built tree forts with her cousin in the thick woods. Then, with her teens, she became interested in fashion and men. She met one and ran away with him. The next time the Ashleys saw Michelle, she had had a baby, but had left the child with its father. It was 1984, not long before she had met another man – Michael Nicholaou.

Her family were not impressed with her new beau. He was her mother’s age and they found him unsettlingly quiet and creepy when the couple visited Michelle’s mother and grandmother in Vermont. He had a deep voice and a thick New York accent. Her aunt, Chicki Merrill said that he would not let Michelle shave her underarms. He was possessive and seemed to follow Michelle about everywhere.

Undeterred, Michelle was soon pregnant again. She told her family they were married, though this could not be confirmed through public records. The couple moved in together in an apartment in Holyoke, Massachusetts, about 110 miles away from the family home down the I–91.

Michelle gave birth to Joy in August 1986 and Nick in January 1988, keeping detailed notes in their baby books. She wrote regularly to her cousin Julie Virgin, enclosing baby pictures. But then her letters slowed. At times she acted as if she wanted to confide in her family, Virgin said, but Nicholaou was always within earshot.

Finally, she told her mother that she was afraid of Nicholaou. She said that she planned to leave him after her sister’s wedding in November 1988. Nothing happened. Worried, her mother walked into the couple’s Holyoke apartment at the end of December 1988, looking for Michelle. The Christmas tree was up, but the presents were unopened and the refrigerator was full of spoiled food. The baby books were left incomplete. Michelle’s mother never saw her daughter again.

Carty tracked Nicholaou’s movements. In the years that followed, he visited his mother in Virginia, friends in Florida and Army buddies across the country, with the kids in tow. He told some that Michelle was dead; others that she had run off with a drug dealer. In the late 1990s, he met Aileen through a newspaper personal ad and they married.