The Serial Killer's Apprentice

by James Renner

  This time around, the investigation is being lead by Captain Robert Sackett and Detective Carl Biegacki, two men who grew up in Garfield Heights and who understand the community intimately. Captain Sackett is friendly and quick to smile, a wiry man who likes his job and wants to tell you so, but not in so many words. Above his desk is a handcrafted wooden train, made by Ted Jarosz. Detective Biegacki (“common spelling,” he jokes) is more stoic, with a dry sense of humor but a similar affection for his tough occupation. The pair reopened the Jarosz case in 2004, hoping that advances in DNA might yield new clues. They asked “six or seven” people to submit DNA and requested the coroner’s office test evidence for the presence of DNA as well. They pored through the old case files and newspaper clippings, searching for the smallest detail that might unlock the riddle. And even though they do not know, for sure, the identity of Bev’s killer, they have come to understand him well through the facts of the crime.

  “A girl didn’t do this,” says Sackett.

  “This was a blitz-style attack on her,” says Biegacki. “He definitely came from behind with the rope, which was prepared before he got there.”

  “We think it is someone she knew,” Sackett continues. “There wasn’t a struggle on the first floor. All the violence is upstairs, which leads you to believe she let this person into the house. But what’s this guy’s real intent? Was it rape or was it murder?”

  “Why did he bring two weapons?” asks Biegacki, meaning the rope and whatever instrument he used to stab her 40 times. It’s unusual for someone to bring two murder weapons to a crime scene.

  Quickly, their passion for solving this case and their frustration from not yet having done so becomes evident. They could theorize forever about intent, but it brings them no closer to a resolution. Detective Horrigan spent most of his life hoping for a resolution that never came. It must have been even harder for him.

  “I know how not solving this makes me feel,” says Sackett, shaking his head.

  “It drives you crazy,” says Biegacki. “But you can only do your best with what you have on your desk.”

  * * *

  While researching this story, I was given permission to view documents at the coroner’s office that were collected by investigators in 1964. From those papers I was able to gather the names of several people who were questioned about the crime. One person I contacted was John Paliyan, the young man who had once lived two doors east of the Jarosz residence. Paliyan was asked to take a lie detector test in 1965, but the results were inconclusive. A man who worked with Paliyan at that time claimed Paliyan asked him how to beat the test.

  Paliyan surprised me by saying any request for an interview should go through his lawyer, Jay Milano. Apparently, he had recently spoken to detectives from Garfield Heights. He claimed he was being framed and that there was a cover-up going on. He is currently dying of lung disease but was smoking a thin cigar when I dropped by his house one afternoon. Paliyan also said his sister had been questioned and so I visited her as well.

  Paliyan’s sister did not talk to me, but her husband did. He’s still angry that Garfield Heights detectives visited his wife at work and interrogated her for over an hour before putting her in a cruiser to take her to the station for more questioning. According to him, the detectives wanted to know if she had disposed of the murder weapon for her brother. But his wife contacted an attorney on her cell phone on the way to the station, and on the advice of that lawyer, asked to be dropped off before they got to Garfield Heights.

  “It’s nonsense,” says the husband. “And we would have cooperated with police if they had treated her kindly.”

  Sackett and Biegacki won’t comment on any specific suspect. They will only say that there are a number of men they keep an eye on.

  Roger McNamara still lives in Northeast Ohio and has worked for a number of financial firms over the years. He remains a steadfast Republican and Catholic. I caught up with him as he was leaving his apartment for a short walk one evening, with a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. He declined an interview. Dan Schulte could not be located. He left the country in 2005 and is rumored to be living in Israel.

  “It was somebody close,” says Biegacki. “If you start taking 10 steps outside the box, you get lost. It’s usually a simple answer. Look, prosecution is not the main goal for the family. Before Bev’s parents pass they would just like to know what happened. God may forgive you, but the family still deserves to know.”

  The Jarosz family also still hopes for closure.

  “I think about her every day,” says Carol. “I have nobody to remember my childhood with. No nieces or nephews to share my children’s lives with. I think about her all the time. I had a dream about her the other night. We were walking together near Canton and I lost her. I thought, ‘I’ll never see her again.’ But then I turned the corner and there she was.”

  “I’ve only dreamt about her once in all these years,” says Bev’s mother, Eleanor. “In the dream, she was living upstairs in Grandma’s house and I was so happy to see her. I dream about other people all the time, but never her.”

  Carol still has Bev’s book of poems and keeps it nearby like a talisman. One of the last entries is dated July 17, 1964:

  What is this thing called time?

  Time is measured eternity.

  It is that which is counted

  between the meetings of foolish lovers.

  Time is a wilted flower . . .

  or a dead bird.

  It is a graying half moon

  in a midnight sky.

  Time is death itself.

  * * *

  Anyone with information related to this crime can contact Garfield Heights police at 216-475-3056.

  Beverly’s school picture. In the months leading up to her murder, Beverly feared she was supposed to die. (Garfield Heights High School yearbook)

  The Jarosz home on Thornton Avenue in Garfield Heights. Beverly’s killer fled through the back door. (Garfield Heights Police Department)

  The crime scene: the bedroom Beverly shared with her younger sister. (Garfield Heights Police Department)

  Beverly’s killer stabbed her so violently that the rope being used to strangle her was accidentally cut. (Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office)

  Classmates at Marymount High mourned the loss of their friend. (Cleveland State University, Cleveland Press Archives)

  Chapter 3

  The River’s Edge

  The Unsolved Disappearance of Ray Gricar

  The village of Bellefonte—which the residents pronounce Bell-font—is located alongside a river on the side of a mountain in central Pennsylvania. In the fall months, the town is saturated with hues of red, brown, and yellow from leaves hanging from the maples, oaks, and elms of the endless forest that surrounds it.

  The tale of Ray Gricar’s disappearance is already legend here.

  Plaza Centre Antiques is in sight of the courthouse where Gricar worked. Two gray-hairs biding time at a card table near the entrance are happy to share their theories on the fate of the prosecutor.

  “Someone got rid of him,” says Karl Rudeen, the one in the blue cap. “Everyone he put in jail has a motive. Take a number, get in line. He was killed for what was on that computer.”

  “Now hold on,” interjects Ron Denker, a skinny fellow in a red flannel button-down, his white hair slicked back against his skull. “The man took an early vacation. Started a new life somewhere. I’ve thought about doing it. Everyone has. And he knew how to do it, because that was his business.”

  The two men bicker and change their minds. Finally, they give up, frustrated. Denker walks away to tend to his section of the store.

  “We’ve had a couple guys disappear around here, never seen again,” Rudeen says in a low voice. “But that’s just from a couple of wags.” He shrugs. “Maybe he’ll show up downstream, in Yellowknife.”

  * * *

  Visitors to Bellefonte stay at Schnitzel’s Tavern, a h
istoric brick hotel constructed in 1868, one of the first in the country to have electric lights. Today, it advertises “Authentic German Dining in an Old World Setting.” Across the street, a tall monument honors the seven men from Bellefonte who went on to become governor. Orange koi swim under a bridge in the park and for a quarter you can feed them.

  At the center of town, High Street splits in two at a memorial for soldiers killed in combat and loops around the county courthouse and jail. Until 2005, the man in charge there was District Attorney Ray Gricar. Gricar was a Cleveland kid. Collinwood native, avid Indians fan.

  Off Lamb Street is a large brick building, mostly garage, which serves as both the police station and firehouse. More than 30 bicycles lean against a wall beside two cruisers, just inside the back door. “You’d be surprised how many people lose a bike and never come to claim it,” says Officer Darrel Zaccagni (pronounced Zeg-anny) as he leads me upstairs. You can tell this bit of information digs at him a little, a collection of stories without conclusion.

  On the second floor, a conference room serves as both the city council chambers and a fine place to interview witnesses. The room has a sterile, cold feeling, drab walls contrasting with the tall-backed red leather chairs that surround a cheap wooden table. The officer sits and sighs. He was supposed to meet with Fox News today about the Gricar case, but they canceled again. They keep bumping him for updates on Michael Jackson, Natalee Holloway, hurricanes, the horror of the moment. His uniform is still crisp for the canceled interview.

  He wrings his hands, considering where to start.

  “His girlfriend called us 11, 11:30, that night to report Ray had not come home yet,” he begins.

  “Wait,” I ask. “Take it from the beginning. How did you know Ray? Can you tell me a little about him?”

  “Ray was the district attorney—county prosecutor, same thing out here—for 20 years. I would go to his office sometimes and talk to him about a case. He was the type of guy where when we were done [talking], he would go over and open the door and wait for me to leave. You didn’t chitchat with Ray at work. He would walk right by you in the hallway. He would just be so focused. When you went into the office, if you didn’t know there was a relationship between them, you couldn’t tell.”

  “Between Ray and Patty, his girlfriend?”

  Zaccagni nods. Patty Fornicola worked in the prosecutor’s office as a victims’ rights advocate. They started dating after Gricar’s second marriage dissolved. Zaccagni has known her since she was in high school and he was a rookie.

  Pity the small town officer who finds himself swallowed up by high-profile mystery. With this one, it’s tempting to rush past the beginning and jump ahead like this, to the laptop the fishermen found in the river, to the possible sighting in Texas, and work the clues backward. That seems the easiest way to go. Taken chronologically, it’s easy to get lost.

  * * *

  The life of Ray Gricar never diverged much. It was as if a path had been set for him at birth, which he followed obediently for 59 years.

  Ray was born in October 1945, in the first wave of the Baby Boom. His family lived in the proudly Polish section of Collinwood. Growing up, Ray became passionate about Cleveland sports and often went to Indians games with his older brother, Roy. Later, he attended Gilmour Academy, an expensive Catholic preparatory school in Gates Mills, and earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Dayton, where he met a young freshman named Barbara Gray.

  Though he first had aspirations to study Russian history, he focused on law after landing an internship at the prosecutor’s office. After graduation, he and Barbara moved to Cleveland and married in 1969. He earned a law degree from Case Western Reserve University and took a job as an assistant prosecutor for Cuyahoga County. He went after career criminals. Rape. Murder. The tough cases.

  In 1978, he and Barbara adopted a newborn girl, Lara. When Barbara was offered a position at Penn State in 1985, Ray took some time off, opting to become a stay-at-home dad. They moved into a house near State College, Pennsylvania. This brief respite from the dark side of human nature was short-lived. Eventually, the darkness found him.

  Word in Bellefonte was a young prosecutor had moved to Centre County, looking to get away from the big city. It just so happened that District Attorney David Grine needed a part-time assistant. It doesn’t appear that Gricar put up much of a fight when the town posse came knocking at his door. Maybe he thought this would be different. After all, Centre County sees only one or two homicides a year.

  Gricar became first assistant prosecutor for Centre County in 1985. When the D.A. became a judge later that same year, Gricar ran for the open position, and won.

  Even though the D.A. gig was considered part-time, he often put in over 40 hours a week. That first year, he successfully prosecuted one of the first cases in the country to use postpartum depression as a defense after a woman tossed her one-month-old son from a bridge into a local stream. She got 8 to 20 years. In 1992, he prosecuted James R. Cruz, an interstate trucker who had dumped the body of a young girl on the on-ramp to I-80 heading out of town. Cruz was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. When an ROTC student opened fire in the student union at Penn State in 1996—killing one girl and wounding another—Gricar put the shooter away for 30 to 60 years. Homicides were his specialty.

  He and his wife divorced in the early ’90s, but it appears the only other time Gricar’s life took an unexpected turn was in May 1996, when his brother, Roy, suddenly disappeared. Roy was living in Dayton at the time. He had just been fired from his job as a private contractor at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. He suffered from bipolar disorder and had been acting erratic. On the pretense of heading to the store to buy a bag of mulch, Roy left the house and didn’t come back.

  For the next week, Tony, Roy’s son, searched for his father. Ray drove to Dayton to speak to the local police and media. Then, Roy’s body was found in the Great Miami River. Cause of death was determined to be suicide by drowning.

  Tony says his uncle was noticeably affected by the tragedy. But the always-focused Ray tried his best to move forward. A month later he married his second wife, Emma. While Gricar was withdrawn, Emma was social and outgoing. She liked to dance. Maybe he liked her for the way she complemented his silent nature. But in the end, the differences were too great. They divorced in 2001.

  In January of 2005, after two decades as district attorney, Gricar announced he would not seek reelection. He wanted to travel, he said. He wanted to visit his daughter, Lara, in Seattle, where she attended college, maybe spend some time in New England—he especially liked Vermont.

  On Friday, April 15, Gricar told his new girlfriend, Patty Fornicola, he wouldn’t be going to work that day. He said he was going to play hooky and head into Lewisburg, an hour’s drive to the east, to do some antiquing. This was not unusual. Gricar would often take a half day off to visit antique shops in nearby towns, questing for vintage toys. Small metal cars. Outdated appliances.

  Fornicola asked him to call if he wouldn’t be back in time to walk the dog at noon. That was the last time she saw him.

  Since then, Tony has found himself filling the role for his uncle that Ray once took for Roy: family spokesman. The 32-year-old entrepreneur from Dayton now lives in seclusion at a family-owned condo in Celina, Ohio. He ventures out for Penn State games and to track down fresh leads in his uncle’s case. The lack of resolution wears on him.

  “There are enough clues to take you in any direction,” he says. “And enough left over to rein you back in.”

  * * *

  Officer Darrel Zaccagni’s voice takes on the air of urgency as he gets to the meat of his story, the part where Ray Gricar stops being an aloof acquaintance and becomes the main focus of his job.

  Zaccagni begins: “He called [Fornicola] about 11:30 that morning and said, ‘Well, I’m on 192. I’m not going to make it home in time to take care of the dog.’ He says, ‘See you later.’ ” Fornicola recalls nothing usu
al about his tone.

  “When he wasn’t home at dinner time—she kind of expected him home by then—and when he wasn’t there, she thought, ‘What’s keeping him? Oh, he stopped to get something to eat.’ But when it got to be ten, eleven o’clock at night, she’s like, ‘No, he should be home by now.’ So then she called us.

  “We put out a local message to be on the lookout for him. In the morning, we started taking it a little more seriously. Obviously, this was now a missing person.”

  That Saturday evening, a state trooper spotted Ray’s car in a parking lot across from an antique mall in Lewisburg. The interior and exterior of the car were examined, the surrounding area searched. There were no signs of a struggle, and no one had attempted to wipe away fingerprints.

  “The biggest thing that was found in that car that didn’t jive with what we know about Ray was some cigarette ashes,” Zaccagni continues. “Now, we’re not talking a lot. But some minute cigarette ash on the passenger’s side. When they opened the car, they got a tobacco smell. A cigarette smell came out of the car. Ray didn’t smoke. And he never let anybody smoke inside his Mini Cooper. Ray was very fastidious about his car. The cell phone was in there, turned off. Nothing appeared to be missing.

  “Later, we went to the house and his work and collected all the computers he used for processing. [To] see if there was something on his computers to tell us what had happened. When we went to collect the computer from the house, Patty asked us if we wanted his work laptop, too. They had been using his work laptop to do Internet searches and things, but had recently bought a separate one for the home. ‘So we don’t use it anymore,’ Patty said. So she goes up and brings down the empty case and says, ‘It’s not here.’ So, it’s missing, but all the peripheral stuff is there: the power cord, the floppy drive, everything extra you would need for the laptop. It’s all there. The only thing missing is the laptop with its self-powered battery that lasts for two or three hours.