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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and how.
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I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Weyborg Thun, and tonight I bring, as promised, to you a fresh new serial killer, Expose. Unsurprisingly, I am a fan of crime fiction as well as true crime. My all-time favorite crime author is the inimitable Agatha Christie.
Her short stories and novels about Hercule Poirot are, simply put, all masterpieces, and I never get enough of reading them and seeing them brought to life on TV. One of my very favorite Hercule Poirot novels is the one called The ABC Murders.
the story is one of a select few of christie's works concerning a serial killer and this particular serial killer uses the alphabet to choose his victims to-night
We take a closer look at a serial killer who did just that, but not in the classy 1920s England, but early 1970s New York, United States of America. I am, of course, talking about none other than the enigmatic alphabet killer, also known as the double initial killer.
A murderer never apprehended, and to this day we do not know for certain who he is. On the 16th of November, 1971, a very young girl with dark hair and naked from the waist down was seen by dozens of drivers and commuters on their way out of Rochester.
She was running along the breakdown lane of the I-490W, near the Chiliriga exit, seemingly beckoning for the attention of passers-by as she frantically waved her arms. This was the early seventies, and there were no such things as cell phones or pages, no easy way for motorists to call 911. Hundreds of cars passed her.
None of them stopped to help as a car backed slowly towards her, from which a man exited and proceeded to grab the terrified girl by the arm and lead her back to the car. He turned back onto the highway and quickened away. Amazingly, thirty-eight people reported witnessing this horrifying sight
However, the first report, shockingly, wasn't made for a further three days. Tragically, by this time, the body of the ten-year-old Carmen Colon had been discovered. It is easy for us, living in the 21st century, to imagine such an occurrence being impossible today. Cell phones are constantly filming and recording everything, and everyone is connected. However...
This assumption would be wrong. For example, in 2009, a woman in her 20s was brutally raped by a panhandler in broad daylight in a park in Spokane, Washington, as hundreds of witnesses either watched or listened to her screams with apparent disregard. Another example from the same year
tells how a 15-year-old girl left her California high school homecoming dance, was brutally raped by a gang, and almost beaten to death for more than two hours. Some 20 witnesses either watched or took part in the gang rape. No one called the police.
In Carmen's case, anyone could have turned off on exit three, passed the Black Creek Bridge to find a payphone, or go to the fire and rescue squad just seconds down the street in the village of Churchville. Or better yet, they could have stopped and hindered the predator grabbing the screaming little half-naked girl. But they didn't.
Karen Carpenter was a beautiful American singer in the 1970s. And if you can, dear listener, imagine a ten-year-old version of her. You will have someone very much similar to Carmen Cole. She was a ten-year-old sprite with an effervescent smile and lived with her grandparents in the Bull's Head neighborhood in southwest Rochester.
Carmen, originally from Puerto Rico, before moving to live in one of the poorer areas of Rochester, had a learning disability and struggled to learn English. She was placed in a special ed class at the John Williams School No. 5. According to her contemporaries, she had an upbeat, affable personality, and her principal at the school described her as a sweet little angel.
Carmen went missing that fateful afternoon. The young girl had agreed to run an errand for her mother and go pick up her prescription from the local drugstore. She had put on white sneakers, a red and black sweater, green trousers, and a long red wool coat before going out. Carmen never returned. The last eyewitness report given before she was seen half-naked on the highway was
was of Carmen getting into a car, which appeared to be waiting for her after she left the chemist. The body of the young girl was found the next day by fifteen-year-old Mark Allen and thirteen-year-old James Gillen. The boys had been bike-riding when they spotted what they thought was a plastic broken doll crumpled against a boulder on the side of the road.
When the body had been taken away for identification and an autopsy, Carmen's uncles Angelo and Julio identified their niece and said they could see dried tears on her cheeks. Monroe County Medical Examiner Dr. John Edlund conducted the autopsy and determined that Carmen had been raped, beaten,
and strangled to death. Severe bruising and what appeared to be human fingernail scratches covered her slim little body. Eadland also found that she had suffered fractures to the skull and the area about the neck during the attack. Wanda was a sixty-five pound red-haired tomboy, a tiny bundle of frenetic energy. She was a year older than her sister Rita,
and was more into tussling and joking with the neighborhood boys than playing with barbies with their infant sister michelle and mother joyce they lived in the upper apartment of a home on avenue d their father had died earlier of a heart attack
Almost seventeen months later, at roughly 5.10 p.m. on the 2nd of April, 1973, eleven-year-old Wanda went to collect some groceries for her mother from the local store. By 8 p.m. that evening, Wanda had failed to return home, and so her mother, desperate with worry, called the police to report her daughter missing.
Just over fourteen hours later, Wanda's mother, Joyce, got a knock on the door that every parent has nightmares about. A state police trooper had found Wanda's body in Webster, near the bottom of an embankment at a rest area off of Route 104. Like Carmen Colon, she had been strangled, possibly with a belt, and raped.
One strange detail was revealed during the autopsy. Wanda had eaten custard shortly before her murder. It was felt that the killer must have fed Wanda at some point, as it wasn't an item she purchased from the local store. And her mother was adamant this wasn't a food the young girl would have eaten at home or school.
Seven months after the murder of Wanda Walkowicz on the 26th of November, 1973, ten-year-old Michelle Maenza went missing on her way home from school. Michelle, a chubby, shy girl, had been at the Goodman Plaza shortly before she went missing.
Later on the day she went missing, a woman saw a young girl resembling Michelle in a car at a fast food restaurant in Penfield. A man was walking towards the car with a bag of food. Michelle's autopsy revealed she'd eaten a hamburger. Also that evening, a man stopped along Route 350 in Walworth after he saw a car stopped with an apparent flat tire.
A girl resembling Michelle sat in the car. The man with the flat tire made it apparent he wanted no help. So the would-be Good Samaritan simply drove off. Michelle's battered and beaten body would tragically be discovered two days after her original disappearance in Macedon, New York. Michelle was also fully clothed, but with obvious signs of sexual assault.
Like Carmen Colon and Wanda Walkowicz, she had died from strangulation. The double initial killings represented a tectonic shift for the Rochester community, a jolting transformation away from a reassuring sense of safety. The slayings had unquestionable similarities.
None of the victims lived in a household with both parents. Each had learning difficulties. Each was Roman Catholic. Each disappeared in late afternoon. Each likely was abducted by someone in a car, and no one saw the girls kidnapped, despite the busy neighborhoods where they lived. Also, each girl was sexually assaulted and strangled to death.
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But it's good to have some things that are non-negotiable. For some, that could be a night out with the boys, chugging beers and having a laugh. For others, it might be an eating night. For me, one non-negotiable activity is researching psychopathic serial killers and making this podcast. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's often near impossible to make time for it.
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Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash serialkiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash serialkiller. The double initials, the slayings have also been dubbed the alphabet killings, added another strangely lurid twist to the crimes.
each girl was found in or near an area matching their initials carmen near chile wanda in webster and michel in the town of macedon through the years another bizarre notion has been added to the grisly lore of the slayings
that the killer chose Carmen, then Wanda, then Michelle, not only because of the matching initials, but because their initials, when grouped, were an abbreviation for the abductor killer's possible words to his victims. Come with me. The macabre crimes made them natural fodder for the mass media.
In 2001, the Discovery Channel enlisted the help of retired FBI crime profilers for an hour-long television show in which the sleuths tried to decide who the killer, or killers, could be. The movie The Alphabet Killer was also released, a fictional supernatural detective tale filmed in Rochester and based loosely on the slayings.
Carmen's uncle, Miguel Colon, was from the get-go considered a suspect, at least for the murder of Carmen. Carmen was strangled from the front, unlike the other two young girls, who were both strangled from behind. It is also worth noting that whilst the killer fed Wanda and Michelle, this was not the case with Carmen. However...
Due to the similarities of the victims, the area they were all found in, the apparent particular choice of victim based on initials, and the fact that all victims were raped and strangled, it seems more likely that Carmen was a victim of the same killer as the other two, rather than just a coincidence. In 1991,
Miguel Colón committed suicide inside his Radio Street home after a domestic dispute in which he shot and wounded his wife and brother-in-law. When police responded, Colón yelled at them to shoot him. He then shot himself. Afterward, police questioned relatives about whether Colón had ever admitted to killing Carmen, but none said he had.
His family has insisted he is innocent of Carmen's killing. Just weeks after the death of the final victim of the Alphabet murders, Michelle Maenza, a man held a teenager at gunpoint. The girl refused to stop screaming despite his repeated threats, so the man decided to flee and go on the hunt for an easier target.
The man in question was a Rochester firefighter named Dennis Termini. Police chased Termini after spotting him with another would-be victim. At first, Termini, 25 years old, managed to evade capture. But police finally regained his trail and chased Termini to a parked car.
At this point, before he could be apprehended by the officers, Termini had committed suicide by turning his gun on himself. Dennis Termini owned a beige-colored car, like the one several witnesses reported seeing. Termini also lived just half a mile from the school of Michel Maenza, the final victim, and a map was in his car with the area Michel's body had been dumped at folded open.
His firefighter uniform was also in the car. This could have explained why the girls seemed willing to get into the car with Tormini as they would have seen him as someone they could trust. Police would confirm Dennis Tormini as the garage rapist, but that was all they could confirm. His known victims...
as the garage rapist, were between the ages of 18 and 21, which was one area of major doubt as to whether he could also have been responsible for the Alphabet murders.
In 2007, any doubt as to his innocence was cast aside as progressions in DNA testing proved that Termini was not responsible for the murders of Carmen, Wanda and Michelle. To those into true crime, the name Kenneth Bianchi will probably be well known.
Kenneth Bianchi, a Rochester, New York native, was one half of the Hillside Stranglers, who were responsible for the deaths of ten women between 1977 and 1978. Bianchi was caught when he committed a pair of murders without his partner Angelo Bruno, and made a mess of the crime scene.
Bianchi was still living in Rochester at the time of the Alphabet murders. He didn't move to L.A. until 1975. He was also employed as an ice cream vendor, a security guard, and an ambulance driver, all of which would have provided Bianchi with uniforms which would have made him seem approachable to a young girl.
There was also forensic evidence from the crime scene of Wanda's murder which could only be found present in 20% of males. Bianchi's profile fell in this 20%. All this seemingly made Bianchi a very good suspect, at least on paper.
Police decided to match a wristprint they had obtained from the Michelle Maenza murder and compare it to Bianchi. Disappointingly, it was not a match.
However, it should be said that wrist prints change over time, as the skin alters and loses elasticity, so this can't completely rule out Bianchi, as there was a ten-year gap between the prints had been made and it being compared to Bianchi.
It is worth pointing out that there is no evidence that Bianchi ever killed anyone before teaming up with Angelo Buono. The one time he did kill alone, he was caught due to the mistakes he made. Also, Bianchi was quite infamous for
So it makes you think that one of the many witnesses involved in the Alphabet murders may have recognized him once he was revealed as one of the Hillside Stranglers. To this day, police still consider Kenneth Bianchi a possible suspect in the Alphabet murders.
Bianchi, on the other hand, is adamant he had nothing to do with the murders of Carmen, Wanda and Michel, and has told police in the past to either charge him with the murders or leave him alone as he is tired of being linked to the murders.
On the 11th of April, 2011, police arrested 77-year-old Joseph Naso and charged him with the murders of four women. His victims were Roxanne Rogash, Pamela Parsons, Tracy Tafoya, and Carmen Colon, no relation to the Rochester victim. All were prostitutes.
Due to the double initial names of his victims, these crimes were referred to as the Alphabet Murders of California. Joseph Naso was the California Alphabet Killer. It was not far-fetched to think that he might have been the original Alphabet Killer of New York, too. During a search of Naso's home, police found a disturbing journal Naso had kept.
In the journal, he wrote about how he overpowered, raped, and killed ten victims. Eventually, two more of these victims would be identified as Sarah Dillon and Sharia Patton. Unfortunately, the other four women remain unidentified. Naso also had numerous pictures of women in various states of undress, all seemingly unconscious.
some of which were found to be his murder victims. Not only was Naso linked due to the double initials of his victims and those in the Rochester alphabet murders, but also because of his modus operandi was to offer a lift in his vehicle before murdering his victims, similar to how police believed the Rochester perpetrator enticed his victims.
Police were given further hope as Joseph Naso was born in Rochester, New York, and lived there for many years, including the time period when the young girls were murdered. As promising as all this seemed, the police and the families of the victims were again left disappointed, as Naso was later cleared of the Rochester murders by DNA evidence.
For police, the cases are far from closed. At this point, as we have for several years, we feel like we're making progress, said State Police Investigator Thomas Crowley. The thought that we would be able to solve this someday is always there and keeps us going quite a bit.
The four law enforcement agencies, the State Police, Rochester Police Department, and the Monroe and Wayne County Sheriff's Officers that keep open files on the abductions and killings regularly discuss possible new leads. Police maintain a database with information about the hundreds of suspects they've identified through the years.
And, through technology not available to the original investigators, police now use genetic evidence from the crimes and ask possible suspects for saliva swabs to determine whether there is a match. Police refuse to be more specific about what physical evidence they actually have.
Police have even exhumed the corpse of one suspect, a city firefighter suspected of being a serial rapist, to compare his DNA with that from a crime scene. For some investigators, solving this case has become a mission. Those now on the case meet with retired former colleagues who investigated the crimes in the 1970s.
They talk about theories, suspects, and promising leads that may still need attention. Wayne County Sheriff Richard Piscotti, who is retiring after 40 years with the office, was among the investigators of Michelle's murder. He photographed her autopsy in 1973, and now occasionally reviews the file with his current investigators assigned to the case.
"'Seeing those images is like it happened yesterday,' Piscotti said. "'That's something that will never leave me. Until there is a closure to this case, those kids never will be put to rest.'" The day will come, Piscotti said, when there will be answers.
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And so ends this stand-alone expose into one of the more obscure, interesting serial killer cases. I hope you enjoyed it. Next week I will begin on a new series covering a more famous case. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. This podcast would not be possible if it had not been for my dear patrons who pledge their hard-earned money every month.
There are especially a few of those patrons I would like to thank in person. These patrons are my 18 most loyal patrons. They have contributed for at least the last 33 episodes. And their names are... Maud Amber Anne Christina Claudette Cody Evan Jennifer Lisa Lisbeth Mark
You really helped produce this show and you have my deepest gratitude. Thank you.
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