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Hey, bingers, welcome back. On this week's Binge'd series, we're tackling two serial killer cases where the serial killer has never been identified, much less caught. It's the most terrifying kind of case, the unsolved serial murder case. A faceless, nameless killer, like something out of a horror movie, a shadow, a phantom, a stranger killing strangers.
often blending into the community and disguising himself as an ordinary guy. Maybe he's your next door neighbor, your coworker, or a member of your own family. These killers are able to hide their true nature so well that sometimes they're never found out.
Our first episode will explore the case of the Connecticut River Valley Killer and also one misguided private investigator's efforts to declare the case closed and how those efforts may have hindered the case and hurt the only known survivor. So like with many stories about multiple murders where the crimes are spread out over a large period of time, there are several different points in time we could open today's story.
In fact, we don't even know for sure where the story begins. It may have begun in 1984 or in 1981 or even earlier in 1978. Some think the story of the Connecticut River Valley killings started way back in 1968 and we'll get to why later. But for now, we're actually going to open our story in 1988.
on a muggy night in early August at the peak of summer. Jane Borowski is six and a half months pregnant. Things have been strained lately with her boyfriend Ted, and they've been strained ever since she broke the news about her pregnancy. Ted wanted an abortion, but Jane didn't. On August 6th, Jane and Ted had plans to spend the day at the Cheshire County Fair in Swansea. This is a town in southwestern New Hampshire where the couple lived.
The county fair had been an annual tradition for Jane and Ted since they'd first begun dating less than three years ago. But because of the growing tensions in her relationship, Jane moved out of the place she shared with Ted and into a trailer with close friends, Sandra and Steve.
As Sandra and Steve are preparing to leave for the fair, they invite Jane to ride along with them. But Jane declines. The wounds from a recent argument with Ted are still too fresh, and she can't bear to see him again just yet. So she stays behind. Night begins to fall. The trailer park is empty and still. The quiet amplifies Jane's intrusive thoughts, which keep looping as she sits and ruminates.
Jane wonders to herself if she was really better off staying home. She begins to regret not joining her friends, but heck, it's not like she's stranded. She has a car. She has a car, in fact, thanks to Ted, when he surprised her last Christmas with a used 85 Firebird, possibly the best Christmas gift anyone ever gave her. So Jane decides to just drive to the fair.
A little late maybe, but Saturday night is just getting started. And that's when the fair festivities are in full swing. Jane puts on some jeans and sneakers, gets into the Firebird and makes her way to the fair.
When she gets there, she runs into Sandra and Steve and later Ted's parents who are remaining neutral. They're being like Switzerland. They're not taking sides in the couple squabbling. So Jane has fun. She misses running into Ted, but that's okay because she wasn't sure she wanted to see him just yet anyway.
Jane then leaves the fair. She's in her Firebird driving home on Route 10. It's after midnight, but it's still in the high 70s and humid. The very pregnant Jane then starts to think about how refreshing a Pepsi would be right about now. And as luck would have it, she sees up ahead the glow of Gamarlo's, which is a country store on Route 10.
The store is already closed, but there's a vending machine out front. So Jane pulls into the parking lot and parks in front of the store. She fishes through her purse and finds just enough change so she goes to the vending machine. Afterwards, she gets back to the Firebird with her cold can of cola and cracks it open.
Just then, headlights sweep into the parking lot. Another car pulls into the spot next to hers. Now, Jane doesn't really pay it much mind as she's too busy savoring the refreshing soft drink that had been on her mind for most of her drive.
What happens next remains in the periphery of her vision and attention. The man gets out of the car, walks around the back of Jane's, and the next thing she knows, he's standing next to her open window. The man, who appears to be in his 30s, is clean cut and slight in build.
He speaks to Jane, asking her, is the phone working tonight? The interaction catches Jane off guard. And before she can think of what to say in response, the man suddenly grabs her by the arm and pulls her door open. And he says, come with me. Now, Jane fights. She asks this man who he is and what he wants. She tells him she's seven months pregnant. She begs him to leave her alone.
But the man doesn't seem to even hear her as he tightens his grip on Jane's wrist and pulls at her harder. During the struggle, both Jane and the man are momentarily stunned when Jane's foot goes through the windshield of the Firebird. "All right," the man says, "if you're gonna be like that." He then produces a knife and warns her that if she doesn't get out of the car, he'll cut her. But Jane continues to resist, so the man puts his knife to Jane's throat.
She asks, "What do you want from me?" "You beat up my girlfriend," he tells her. Jane has no idea what he's talking about. She denies it, says he's got the wrong person. He then appears confused. "Isn't this a Massachusetts car?" he asks. "No," Jane tells him, "It's a New Hampshire car." The man releases his grip and walks around to the back of the car to check.
Jane breathes a sigh of relief. It's just a case of mistaken identity, she thinks to herself, with her adrenaline levels beginning to drop. But then she looks at the hole in her windshield and starts to feel angry. She could barely make ends meet as it is, and now she's going to have to fork over hundreds of dollars to get her windshield replaced?
Jane decides she isn't having it. What about my windshield? She calls out to the man. And then to her shock, the man again rushes at her, pressing his knife against her neck. You're still coming with me, he says, as he yanks her out of the car. Jane fights some more and tries to run. And before she knows it, she's being stabbed.
The stranger pounds his knife into her again and again, all over her body as she falls to the ground and struggles to turn herself over onto her stomach to protect her unborn child. Nearly 30 stab wounds later, the attack ends. Jane lies bleeding in the middle of a deserted parking lot as the man enters his Jeep Wagoneer and casually drives away, looking down clinically at his victim as he leaves her to bleed out and die. Only Jane does not die.
Miraculously, despite a cut jugular vein, a collapsed lung, and numerous severed tendons, she manages to make her way back to her car, back onto Route 10, and toward a friend's house. But as she's speeding towards her friend's house, she sees another vehicle up ahead. And as she gets closer, she sees that it's the Jeep Wagoneer. She's driving behind the man that attacked her.
Up to the left, her friend's house comes into view and she pulls a sharp turn onto the lawn. She runs up and bangs on the front door and her friend opens it to find her friend, Jane, shaken and covered in blood in desperate need of medical attention. It was at this point that that Jeep Wagoneer does a U-turn and slowly passes by the front of the friend's house. The driver watches as Jane's friend attends to her and he can see that Jane sees him.
He then drives on, disappearing into the dark of night, never to be seen again. As Jane began her recovery at the Cheshire Medical Center, she underwent hypnosis to see if her memory of her attacker and his car could be sharpened. She remembered, or thought she remembered, part of a license plate number. But when authorities reviewed registered Jeep Wagoneers in the area, they could not find anything that matched the numbers Jane recalled during hypnosis.
And then a composite sketch of her attacker was created based on Jane's recollection. She described the man who stabbed her as a white male between 32 and 40 years of age, about 150 to 160 pounds, approximately five foot eight and clean shaven with blonde hair. Investigators in Sullivan County, one county up, didn't believe the attack on Jane was targeted. And they also didn't believe it was an isolated incident.
Because for the past four years, authorities in that area had been hunting what they believed was a serial killer. A killer who would come to be known as the Connecticut River Valley Killer.
The investigation began with a pair of disappearances in 1984. 17-year-old Bernice Cortamont left her job at the Sullivan County Nursing Home on the afternoon of May 30th, 1984, and had a co-worker drop her off in downtown Claremont, New Hampshire. From there, Bernice planned to hitch a ride east to her sister's house in Newport, where she planned to meet up with her boyfriend,
She never made it. Nearly two years later, on April 19th, 1986, a pair of fishermen made what true crime shows like to call a grisly discovery. Bernice's skeletal remains in a stream. The location was off a logging track in a densely wooded area known as Kellyville at the westernmost edge of Newport. This was an area that Bernice's killer likely knew well.
The previous September, the remains of a 27-year-old nurse named Ellen Freed were found only a few thousand yards away from where Bernice had been discovered. The condition of both skeletons led the coroner to conclude that the cause of death had been the same: multiple stab wounds.
So the last person to hear from Ellen Fried had been her sister. Ellen had called her up from a payphone in the early morning hours of July 20th, 1984, which was just two months after Bernice disappeared.
Ellen relied upon public pay phones because she had no phone in her apartment. And it was from a pay phone outside a convenience store called Leo's One Stop Market that Freed spoke her last known words. Midway through the conversation, Freed mentioned to her sister that a strange car had just crept through the otherwise empty parking lot of the closed convenience store. Something about this vehicle had unnerved Ellen.
She put the receiver down for a minute, leaving her sister on hold to go turn over her car's engine to make sure it would start. And then she returned to the phone and talked for a few more minutes before telling her sister goodnight. And then she vanished. Sometime after daybreak, Ellen's car was found locked and abandoned four miles away from the market on a lonely dirt road surrounded by woods.
A few days after that, Ellen's coworkers at Valley Regional Hospital reported that she had not shown up for work for two consecutive days, which was highly uncharacteristic of her. And by the time a pair of hunters stumbled upon Ellen Fried's skeleton on September 19th, 1985, Bernice had been missing for over a year, and yet another local woman had gone missing earlier that summer. Okay, most beauty brands don't understand fine color-treated hair, but Pro
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27-year-old Eva Morse, who had hitchhiked to work in North Charleston on July 10th, 1985, told her supervisor she wasn't feeling well and left work shortly after. She then continued hitchhiking to an unknown destination, unknown because she would never again be seen alive. Eva had a hard life and some believe she had simply just run away from it all.
But on April 25th, 1986, Eva Morse's fate became clear when two loggers found her remains in some woods in West Unity, which is about halfway between where she was last seen and Claremont. And again, from what the medical examiner could tell, this victim had been stabbed to death. So the last known locations of Bernice and Ellen were less than a mile from each other and the bodies were dumped within a few miles of each other.
And on top of that, the general dump sites were approximately 10 miles from where each disappeared. When you add that to the fact that all of these women were stabbed to death, it leaves little doubt of a common perpetrator. But then either the killer got more brazen and began changing his MO or there were multiple knife killers operating in the same sparsely populated 50 mile radius. But the
the stabbing death of Linda Moore was different. Linda Moore was a 36-year-old housewife whose husband had left her home alone on the afternoon of April 15th, 1986 as he went to work, which was nothing out of the ordinary. But when her husband returned home that afternoon, he found Linda dead on the floor, riddled with stab wounds. So unlike the other victims, Linda Moore was stabbed to death in her own home and
in the middle of the afternoon. She was in the security of her home. One of the first phone calls Linda's husband made after finding his wife's body was to his attorney and cops on the scene found his demeanor cold and not appropriate to the situation. He immediately became a suspect, but he was soon cleared at least of firsthand involvement when it was confirmed that he was actually at work at the time the murder likely took place.
The Moore's home was located right off of Route 121 in Saxton's River, Vermont, just across the state line within a stone's throw from I-91.
It was highly visible from the highway and a number of witnesses came forward after the murder to report vehicles and individuals they had seen in the area of the Moore's home that day. Now, among the unidentified subjects witnesses had seen was a clean shaven, stocky young man with dark hair, thick framed glasses and a blue knapsack. He was seen walking near the Moore home shortly before the approximate time of Linda's death.
This sighting yielded a composite sketch. Now, Linda Moore had put up an enormous fight against her attacker, and this was evident in the high number of defensive wounds and abrasions on her hands and arms.
And the motive behind this brutal killing was unclear. In the Ellen Freed case, at the very least, there was some evidence that sexual assault had taken place. With Linda, who was killed in her own home, it appeared that the assailant had entered, confronted her, viciously knifed her to death, and then left. But
But variations in MO and inconsistencies across this appearance series begin to match up, at least in pairs. I mean, the circumstances of the first victim story, Borowski's attack, were eerily similar to those of Ellen Fried's disappearance.
A young woman alone in the empty parking lot of a closed convenience store in the late evening, early morning hours. Ellen had been talking on a payphone while Jane Borowski's attacker asked about the payphone as though he assumed she had been using it. Also, as with the other Valley killings, Jane Borowski suffered multiple stab wounds. And a year before Jane's attack, a 38-year-old nurse named Barbara Agnew hadn't been as fortunate. Dr.
driving through a blizzard late one January night back to her Norwich, Vermont home from a ski trip, something or someone compelled Barbara to pull into the rest stop at White River Junction. This was weird because this rest stop was less than 10 minutes from Agnew's home. But because the weather conditions were rough, all investigators could do was speculate.
Once they came upon Agnew's BMW at this location with its door ajar and blood on the dashboard and steering wheel, they knew something bad had happened. Agnew was nowhere to be seen, however, and would remain that way until March 28th, 1987, when four friends out for an afternoon stroll found Agnew's body face down near an apple tree, almost perfectly preserved by the winter chill. So the condition of the body left no doubt as to the cause of death.
Barbara Agnew had been stabbed repeatedly. Now, the Connecticut River Valley region, like I may have mentioned earlier, is not a heavily populated corner of the country, nor is it one that's intimately acquainted with violent crime.
Five knife murders and a sixth knife attack over four years in the same general area seemed to make it highly unlikely that multiple offenders were responsible. All of the attacks shared similarities somehow. And as a task force examined these crimes, another unsolved murder further back in time seemed to raise the hair of a criminal profiler named John Philpin.
On October 24th, 1978, a 27-year-old telephone company worker and avid birdwatcher named Catherine Milliken parked her car at the Chandler Brook Wetland Preserve in New London, New Hampshire.
to photograph the area wildlife. At some point after 5:00 PM, an unknown individual confronted her and stabbed her at least 29 times, wounding her in the neck, chest, back, abdomen, and thighs. Several days later, bloodhounds led police to her body.
Philippine noticed that the autopsy photos revealed a V-shaped pattern of wounds, nearly identical to that found on the body of Barbara Agnew and on the lower body of Linda Moore. These cases had to be connected, he thought.
Also of interest to investigators was the 1981 death of Mary Elizabeth Critchley, a 37-year-old woman who disappeared while hitchhiking in July of that year and was found two weeks later in some woods in the town of Unity. Her cause of death could not be determined.
And though stabbing had been ruled out in the Critchley case, the location of where her body was found was a mere 500 yards from where Eva Morse's remains would be located five years later. And remarkably, the same two loggers who discovered Morse's body had also, together with a third man, discovered Critchley's body back in August of 1981.
And then in 1968, a 14-year-old girl named Joanne Dunham was raped and strangled in Charleston, which is where Eva Morse disappeared from in the 80s. And of course, Joanne was strangled and not stabbed. So it's only the geographical proximity that sometimes makes her case pop up in coverage or discussions of this series. And police were doing just this, looking at unsolved cases and seeing which ones also might be linked.
But with a case like this, it's hard to say which attacks are linked and which aren't. Outside of Bernice, Ellen, and Eva, whose deaths almost certainly were caused by the same individual,
But the composite and description of the man who attacked Jane Borowski were in no way consistent with the suspicious subject seen lurking outside of Linda Moore's home. Again, Linda Moore was the one attacked inside of her home and Jane Borowski was the pregnant woman who was attacked and lived at the beginning of our story.
One was blonde, the other had dark hair. One's stocky, the other isn't. And then there were between five and 10 years of age between the two.
The Rashomon effect, which I talked about in our previous episode on Adam Walsh, goes only so far in accounting for differences in individual perception. And here, only two conclusions are logical. A, the stocky man wearing the knapsack was not connected to Linda Moore's murder. And or B, Jane's attacker was not the same man who killed Linda Moore.
What also complicates the linkage of all these murders as one series is the deathbed confession of a 46-year-old paraplegic named Gary Eldon Westover, who died in 1998.
During the final weeks of his life, Gary confided in his uncle, a retired New Hampshire sheriff's deputy, that back in 1987, three of his friends picked him up for a ride in their van and later that night, all of them abducted Barbara Agnew, killing her and then disposing of her on a back road while the wheelchair-bound Westover was powerless to do anything.
The uncle recorded the names of these friends on a piece of paper and shared the information with authorities from whom there's no known indicator that there was ever any follow-up.
Gary Westover's uncle has since died and the piece of paper with the names has since been lost. The circumstances of Gary's confessions would seem to make it unlikely he was inventing or imagining this story. Therefore, if it's true, the account casts doubt on whether Agnew's death was connected to the Valley Killer series and that the Linda Moore murder and Jane Borowski's attack may also not have been connected.
And on top of that, police stated in 2006 that they do not link the 1978 murder of Kathy Milliken to the later Valley Killer homicides. But the attack on Jane Borowski seemed to mark the end of the apparent Valley Killer series.
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Suspects came and went. Suspects, for instance, like the area eccentric who'd send unwanted love letters to strangers and had a habit of calling into the local DJ and requesting the same song every time. It was bad to the bone. Or the 29-year-old Bellows Falls handyman whose psychic vision of Linda Moore's murder was uncanny in its accuracy and had been shared with friends months before the murder actually happened.
For faithful listeners to our main podcast, Murder With My Husband, this may remind you of the recent case we covered on our Murder Dream episode.
But no suspect in the Connecticut River Valley killings ever panned out, and these cases receded into the wintry northeastern void until 2006, when a Florida private detective became convinced that she'd identified the man responsible, thus bringing the case, as well as herself, into the public eye.
We're going to refer to that private detective by the name Lily Mae, which is not her real name, but we're giving her a pseudonym because we don't need to out her. The seeds of Lily Mae's enmeshment with the Valley Killer were sown in the year 2000 when a woman named Rose Young contacted Lily Mae for help.
for help finding out the fate of her daughter who had been missing for 12 years. The woman's missing daughter was Michelle Marie Ashley. And in the mid 1980s, Michelle had married a Vietnam vet named Michael Nicolaou. Now very soon into the marriage, Michael Nicolaou became abusive and controlling. And before long, Michelle became Michael's prisoner. After a few agonizing years, she managed to escape the marriage with their two children in August of 1988.
But Nicolau was able to convince Michelle to return to him. And that was the last anyone heard from her. Michelle's family began growing concerned after being repeatedly unable to reach her. And when they let themselves into the couple's home in Massachusetts, there was no sign of life. Michelle, Michael and the two children were gone. And more than a decade went by without a word from any of them.
When Lily Mae, the private investigator, began searching for the missing family, her investigation tracked Michael Niccolo's movements throughout Massachusetts, Illinois, Charlottesville, Virginia, and finally Florida. Ultimately, Lily Mae was able to locate him in 2001, living in a city in Florida called Lutz.
She picked up the phone and gave Nicolaou a call. Initially, a very wary sounding Michael denied having even known Michelle. But when confronted with what Lily May knew, he admitted at least having had a relationship with her. And he went on to explain that Michelle had abandoned him and the children and he loped with a Colombian drug dealer. After this conversation, Nicolaou picked up and moved again, hastily relocating to Georgia with his third wife, Eileen.
But this marriage was also not without its problems, like the time when Nicolaou attempted to run down Eileen with his car following a fight. Like Michelle Ashley, Eileen also fled her abusive husband, taking up refuge in her sister's home in Tampa, Florida.
But Nicolaou caught up with her. On New Year's Eve 2005, Michael Nicolaou arrived at his sister-in-law's Tampa home in a black trench coat, toting a guitar case full of guns, and barricaded himself inside, refusing to surrender once police were called to the scene. And then sometime during the standoff, a series of shots rang out from within the house.
Police rushed the door and inside they discovered the bodies of 45 year old Eileen Nicolaou and 56 year old Michael Nicolaou who had shot his wife to death before killing himself.
Also shot was Eileen's 20-year-old daughter, Taryn Bowman, who was found clinging to life by a thread and raced to the hospital where she sadly later died. Learning of this news, Lily Mae was floored and again returned her attention to Michael Nicolau. This man was a bad man. Using a search engine as her crystal ball, Lily Mae tried different combinations of search phrases. Michael Nicolau and murder.
New England and murder and so on. And among the things Lily May learned in her Google search was that Nicolaou, along with seven other soldiers, had been charged with murder by the U.S. Army, who accused him of attacking civilians in Vietnam. This was back in 1970.
Charges were later dropped and Nicolau then turned around and sued the army. What Lily May also discovered was the series of unsolved New England murders known as the Connecticut River Valley killings. When she came across this series, Lily May buzzed with a sense of accomplishment and
and began piecing together the undefined chunks in her mind. She became dead set on establishing a link between Michael Nicolau and the Valley Killer series. She tracked down and reached out to Nicolau's Vietnam buddies, and one of them claimed that Nicolau liked to leave camp in the middle of the night and go hunting humans, as he put it. He was, quote, in love with his knife, his nom comrades claimed. And for Lily Mae, she wouldn't let a pesky thing like fat
stand in the way of framing Nicolaou as the Connecticut River Valley Killer. Facts like Nicolaou having lived in Charlottesville, Virginia in the mid-1980s when most of the Valley Killer victims were murdered in New England. It was in Charlottesville in 1984 that Nicolaou's porno shop, the Pleasure Chest, had been raided by local authorities who subsequently slapped Nicolaou with felony obscenity charges.
That same year, Nicolaou and a business partner opened a gift shop in the same area in Virginia, while Bernice and Ellen went missing over 500 miles away up in New Hampshire. Also, Nicolaou never even lived in Claremont, New Hampshire. He moved from Virginia to Massachusetts, which is some 90 miles south of the Valley Killings epicenter. And that wasn't until the mid to late 1980s.
But Lily Mae pressed on anyway, reaching out to Jane Borowski and establishing a relationship with the person believed to be the only known surviving victim of the serial killer. When Lily Mae met up with her, she showed Jane a photograph of Michael and asked Borowski if he resembled the man who attacked her. Now, Jane said no, she didn't think so. At some point, Lily Mae showed Borowski the photo again and then again and again, and
And eventually Jane's mind began to change to where Lily Mae wanted it.
And Jane allowed that Nicolau looked similar to the man who attacked her and eventually gave in to Lily Mae's insistence that it was Nicolau who stabbed her. Then the two appeared together on THS Investigates. And on that program, Jane Borowski stated, I personally have no doubt in my mind that it was Michael Nicolau who attacked me. So somehow Jane had gone to being unconvinced and not feeling like the two men looked alike to having no doubt in her mind that
For an example of Lily Mae's persuasive skills here, one needed look no further than her own website, where she had presented this side-by-side of Nicolaou and the Borowski composite. The resemblance is vague at best, and the composite here appears to have been manipulated to make the hair appear darker. Remember that in 1988, Jane had described her attacker as blonde.
And what's also manipulated is the photo of Nicolaou. Here's the original picture untouched by Lily Mae's use of Photoshop. Now, if you aren't watching, let me explain. So on Lily Mae's side by side, she Photoshopped out Nicolaou's mustache to make him more closely resemble the composite.
Among Lily Mae's other findings are that Nicolaou may have owned a Jeep Wagoneer and may have taken occasional trips up to Claremont. Anna Agnew, the sister of Barbara, also contacted Lily Mae to share a letter she'd received from the aunt of Gary Westover. Remember, he's the man who confessed on his deathbed to being present when three other men abducted and killed Barbara. Lily Mae's
Lily may contacted Westover's aunt to ask her about the three friends Westover had claimed killed Agnew. Lily may asked if one of the names was Michael Nicolau Westover's aunt couldn't say for sure. After some back and forth, she could only concede that the name seemed quote familiar. Um,
Now, Lily may seem to be the kind of investigator who really fills in the gaps in others' memories. She's also gone on to propose would-be super criminal Michael Nicolau as a suspect in a 1984 Virginia attack attributed to the Blue Ridge Parkway rapist. In case you know, her valley killer sleuthing doesn't pan out. And you'll see in this side-by-side how Nicolau's mustache was photoshopped to make it the same length as the guy in the composite sketch. Again,
Again, changing the picture to make it seem the same. And she also suspected him in the unsolved Colonial Parkway serial killings and in a series known as the Route 29 stalker crimes. Now, meanwhile, poor Jane Borowski appeared on Dr. Phil and then another investigative TV series called Dark Minds, where she was again subjected to a series of photographs of possible suspects.
Like Lily Mae, Dark Minds wasn't really interested in facts or injustice, but just in the drama. And like Lily Mae, the show didn't seem interested in the integrity of a proper photo lineup. Now, the proper way to do a photo lineup is to mix up the suspect's picture with pictures of multiple other individuals of the same general age, race, and gender, and present those to the witness or victim in a way that avoids bias. Like, for example, all the
pictures should be similar in the way they're framed and the way the backgrounds look. If you have five pictures of subjects in their living rooms, for instance, and one picture that's a mugshot, it creates a bias in the witness toward that picture. But on both Dark Minds and with Lily Mae, Jane Borowski was only shown photos of the suspect, knowing full well that the individual whose face she was inspecting was the suspect. In the case of Dark Minds, Jane was shown photos of two suspects,
one of whom was Rodney Stanger, a convicted killer and prime suspect in the disappearance of 16-year-old Molly Bish, who was last seen at a swimming hole in Massachusetts in June 2000. Jane's reaction to the photo of the second suspect made for a good TV moment, at least for the undiscriminating viewer. Through dense layers of emotional release, Jane indicated that the man almost perfectly resembled the stranger who attacked her.
nearly 25 years earlier. In fact, there appeared to be as little doubts in her mind as there had been when she said the same thing about Michael Nicolau. Now, as a viewer, though, I couldn't help but feel for Jane and all the trauma she's been through and the pain of raising a child with handicaps related to the knife attack that she had suffered while pregnant.
It's hard not to get the sense that these people, Lily Mae and the producers of Dark Minds, were just using and exploiting Jane while also muddying the actual investigation. These days, it's looking unlikely that any of the Connecticut River Valley killings will be solved.
Scant forensic evidence together with what seems to be no official interest in the case and inadequate funding allow these investigations to continue stagnating. While Nicolaou's name and face has been plastered all over the public face of the series. You look up the
the Connecticut River Valley Killer, and his face pops up. It feels like an impossibility that Lily Mae will ever reconsider her conviction that Michael Nicolaou was the Valley Killer, even if it means concluding that a teleporter would have had to have been used for Nicolaou to be a plausible suspect. Lily Mae has seemingly absorbed Nicolaou and the case into her own identity.
In terms of public exposure, that's been a good thing for Lily Mae and only for Lily Mae as the genetic fusion of the Valley Killer case and Michael Nicolaou has resulted in a misfit. And that's the story of the Connecticut River Valley Killer, which is one serial killer case that may very well be unsolvable at this point in time.
And another serial killer who has never been caught, indeed America's most notorious uncaught serial killer, is the Zodiac Killer. The thing with the Zodiac Killer case is it's not an unsolvable case, even though many may assume it is. And while the Valley Killer really only had Lily Mae trying to sleuth it, much to the case's detriment,
The Zodiac, on the other hand, has received attention from more amateur sleuths than any other case in U.S. history. From Robert Graysmith, the cartoonist famously portrayed by Jake Gyllenhaal in David Fincher's Zodiac, to Dave Orinchak, who was one of the three men who cracked an unsolved Zodiac cipher in 2020. In fact, all these Zodiac ciphers that have been cracked have been cracked by civilians. And
And a writer who wrote a pair of books about the Zodiac Killer in 2022 may have finally uncovered this elusive villain's identity after so many before him have failed. And like me, you may have heard of this, but don't know the details. Well, we're going to talk about all of this and about the Zodiac Killer on our next episode of Binged, which you can tune into right now. We'll see you there.