Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide And The Criminal Mind

by Hazelwood, Roy

  The police already were familiar with the name. DiStefano had been actively shadowing the murder case. He was first questioned at Clarks Summit Police Headquarters on the night of April 6. Case records showed that the next morning, Sunday, DiStefano drove his white 1990 Geo Storm past the parking lot where Christine’s body had been discovered. Patrolman Michael Carachilo, on duty at the crime scene, waved him over and asked DiStefano his business.

  The intense, dark-haired young man answered that he knew the victim and that he felt he should see the site where she had been found. Carachilo said that wouldn’t be possible and asked for identification. DiStefano produced a laminated private investigator’s license. When the officer asked to see his driver’s license, DiStefano obliged. Carachilo recorded his name, and then the young man slowly drove his Geo through the parking lot, stopped, turned around, and left.

  Investigators grew increasingly interested in DiStefano. They interviewed Ryan Ofcharsky, his roommate at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, about sixty miles from Scranton, where Christine’s onetime boyfriend was taking education classes in order to earn a teaching certificate.

  According to Ofcharsky, DiStefano was an introvert who was either unable or unwilling to carry on a conversation. “I got sick of listening to myself speak,” Ofcharsky told them. “He just absorbed everything and never really gave me any feedback.”

  On Monday following the murder, Ofcharsky discovered that DiStefano had decorated his walls with more than twenty-five photographs of himself and a girl in various poses. Both were dressed in formal attire.

  “This was a bit strange,” said the roommate. “But since he was a bit strange himself, I just figured he’d gotten back with his old girlfriend and needed me to know.”

  As it turned out, the photos were of Christopher and Christine, taken at his 1990 college senior dance. Killers often construct “memorials” to their victims and DiStefano actually asked Ofcharsky, “Did you see my memorial? That was the girl who got killed.” He told Ofcharsky of his encounter with Officer Carachilo and said he knew that he was a suspect in the homicide.

  Usually there are a large number of potential suspects when a prostitute is murdered—all her customers to begin with. But almost from the beginning of the Burgerhof case, Christopher DiStefano made himself a prime suspect by deliberately attracting attention in several ways. Injecting himself into the investigation was just one of them.

  When I was called in as a prosecution consultant two years later, I learned that DiStefano’s notable preoffense and postoffense behaviors further implicated him. Sexually deviant criminals usually display some, but not all, of the behaviors that profilers look for in particular types of crimes. But DiStefano came as close as any subject I have ever seen to having all of the behaviors that we look for. His actions and abnormal interests rang so many bells that he seemed to have come straight out of a profiler’s textbook.

  He was very intelligent, deeply troubled, and, as we’ll see, a classic narcissist. Estimates of his IQ ranged as high as 170. He attended Scranton Preparatory School, where DiStefano graduated in 1986 in the top fifth of his class. His younger brother, Mike, a Clarks Summit police officer at the time of the Burgerhof murder, reported that Chris had trouble communicating with people, and that he had been harassed and bullied in high school.

  Mike DiStefano also reported that Chris kept a detailed daily diary. This, as I would discover, was an extraordinary document.

  At the University of Scranton, where he majored in electrical engineering, DiStefano’s grade point average was 3.48. At Penn State, where he earned a masters in physics, he was a 3.38 student.

  According to Mike, Chris spent a lot of time on the Internet, where he researched police-related subjects and established cyber friendships.

  One of these was with a young woman in Pittsburgh named Stephanie. In 1994, DiStefano moved to Pittsburgh in order to be close to her. The relationship didn’t work out. He called home in tears. Chris suffered panic attacks and other emotional problems. A Pittsburgh psychiatrist said he suffered from depression and placed him on Paxil, an antidepressant medication.

  On April 9, 1996, four days after Christine Burgerhof’s murder, he visited the dead woman’s mother. He wrote Cathy Biasotto an E-mail about the visit, saying, “How cold it would have been of me not to call/visit and show support and sympathy! My mom really pissed me off earlier when I told her that I was going to visit the Negveskys and she said that wasn’t a good idea since I may be a suspect and all and it wouldn’t look good.”

  On the tenth, he E-mailed Biasotto once again. “I was at Chris’s mom’s house… for about four hours last night,” he wrote. “I think they liked my visit.”

  Donna Negvesky would testify at trial that her daughter’s former boyfriend seemed “calm” and “calculating” to her during his extended visit. DiStefano handed her a sympathy card but made no move to embrace the stricken woman. “There was no compassion, no sympathy,” Christine’s mother told the court.

  Early Wednesday afternoon, April 10, Pennsylvania State Police trooper Joseph G. Pacifico telephoned DiStefano at his ESU dormitory.

  Pacifico asked if DiStefano would drive over to the state police facility in Dunmore, near Scranton, that evening for an interview. The suspect agreed to do so and arrived for his appointment at 7:08 P.M., according to Pacifico’s notes. Appearing polite and cooperative, DiStefano even brought along an album full of photographs of himself and the victim.

  When Pacifico asked for some background on their relationship, DiStefano offered to write it all out in chronological order, an obsessive-compulsive trait. His meticulous record keeping accounted for his wonderful ability to recount his relationship in meticulous step-by-step fashion.

  Christine Negvesky attended public high school, then enrolled at Keystone Junior College before transferring to Misericordia, where she earned an undergraduate degree in psychology in 1993. DiStefano told Trooper Pacifico that he had met her in early 1988 (he was then nineteen and she was sixteen, at a roller-skating rink in the Scranton suburb of Taylor, where Negvesky lived with her family. As he told the story, Christine was the first to pursue a relationship. After skating a “couples only” skate or two, they left separately and she called him the next day.

  Trooper Pacifico later wrote in his report, “Over the next couple months, the relationship got more serious and they would do one activity during the week and one during the weekend (going to a movie, roller skating, playing pool, dancing or concerts).”

  By summertime, said DiStefano, he and Christine were dating three times a week. It was a “good, fun summer,” he wrote on the legal pad Trooper Pacifico provided him. It proved to be the high point of his relationship with Christine.

  Even at its most intense, the romance was hardly torrid. Christine, whom DiStefano described as being “frigid,” permitted a little kissing and some through-the-clothing petting, but that was all. Christopher claimed he was not disappointed and said he believed that sexual intercourse should be confined to the marriage bed and should only be engaged in for the purpose of procreation.

  DiStefano recounted that he and Christine quarreled over some unspecified issue in September 1988, and their relationship never fully recovered. They drifted apart and she saw other boys. Then the affair heated up for a while in mid-1989. Christine, he noted with interest, had learned how to French kiss. “But the relationship was never quite the same,” DiStefano wrote.

  When DiStefano took Christine to his senior dance in May 1990, “Christine was very cold. The romance was clearly over.” A week later Christine returned all the dance photographs to DiStefano. These were the same pictures with which he would construct his dormitory room “memorial” to her after her death six years later.

  According to his written time line, he and Christine saw one another intermittently from 1990 to 1996. DiStefano noted that Christine called when she needed him for something, often to help with her schoolwork at Misericordia. Co
nsequently, he befriended her roommate, Cathy Biasotto, and even attended Christine’s wedding to Bob Burgerhof. Stefanie, the girl from Pittsburgh, was his date for the occasion.

  Chris claimed he last saw Christine around Christmas of 1995. His last contact with her, he said, was the Sunday before her murder, when they spoke on the telephone about bruises Christine had suffered in a recent auto accident.

  DiStefano finished the time line around 8:45 P.M., accepted the offer of a Coke from Pacifico, and then posed a couple of his own questions. He wanted to know if an FBI profile of Christine’s killer was being done and whether the police had developed any forensic evidence. Pacifico later wrote, “I told him the profile had been started and that I couldn’t discuss physical evidence.”

  The trooper asked DiStefano how he believed the crime had been committed. The suspect responded with his “speculation” that the killer was a customer who had an appointment with Christine that night. “The guy had touched Christine in her private areas,” DiStefano surmised, “but… she wouldn’t touch him back.”

  The killer then left, DiStefano went on, only to return at closing time to ask Christine for a date. She let him into the Reflex Center but declined his repeated requests to go out with him.

  “DISTEFANO,” Pacifico wrote, “speculated that the guy asked Christine more forcefully if she would go out with him and she rejected him and the guy’s love and passion turned to rage. He speculated the guy shoved Christine and she fell to the floor and that she might have hit her head or back on the safe. He speculated Christine was unconscious on the floor and the guy knelt next to her and tried to revive her. He speculated the guy would have panicked and not known what to do.” DiStefano speculated that the killer thought one possibility would be the hospital, but “then thought if he brought her body to the hospital they would then think he murdered her.” Finally, he decided “to hide the body in a respectable manner and then hide himself.”

  The Scranton parking lot caught his attention. “DISTEFANO speculated the guy found the Dumpster, but wouldn’t throw Victim into the Dumpster out of respect for the Victim. He said he couldn’t just throw her on the ground or into the garbage because he loved her and he wanted to show her respect. He said he speculated the guy layed (sic) out Victim on the ground and ran his fingers through her hair and moved the hair away from her face. DISTEFANO then smiled and quickly said he speculated the guy then drove away and found a bar to have a beer to calm his nerves.”

  After providing Pacifico with an account of his movements on the day of Christine Burgerhof’s murder, DiStefano said he worked his security guard job that night and was home at 12:15 A.M.—DiStefano signed a waiver to allow officers to search his car. They would later obtain search warrants for his ESU dorm room as well as his bedroom at home.

  He repeated his third-person reconstruction to a second investigator, Det. Walter “Pete” Carlson of the Lackawanna County District Attorney’s Office. Pete Carlson, like Pacifico, listened attentively to DiStefano, then compared notes with the trooper. Together, the two decided to confront their suspect a bit more directly.

  “Det. CARLSON and I told DISTEFANO that ‘the guy’ in his scenario was him,” Pacifico wrote. “He denied the guy was him and then asked if we had any physical evidence or tire tracks. We advised him that we had physical evidence and that lab tests were being conducted but did not discuss specifics.”

  According to Pacifico’s notes, DiStefano was particularly interested in knowing whether DNA evidence might show “if someone had performed CPR with artificial respiration on a person, and he was advised it would show. He was advised we had obtained swabs from Victim’s mouth at her autopsy.”

  This news apparently jolted their suspect. At 3:50 A.M., “DISTEFANO said he would tell us what happened,” Pacifico wrote. The suspect requested a third party be present besides Detective Carlson and Trooper Pacifico, so State Trooper James G. Gilgallon was brought to the interview room as well.

  No audio or video record was made of the interview. Instead, Pacifico took notes as they spoke, and later DiStefano wrote out and signed a confession in long hand. He initialed each page as well. At the trial the defendant’s lawyers would argue that his questioners failed to read their client all of his Miranda rights, nor did they have him sign a written waiver of his right to have an attorney present.

  DiStefano told the lawmen that he occasionally dropped by the Reflex Center to visit Christine but stressed that he was not a paying customer. He wrote that on the night of the murder, he went by just after midnight. Christine let him in through the back door. He asked her to go out with him to a Mr. Donut. “She said no. She had to go home. I asked her again, not understanding why she would refuse such a simple request. She said no again.”

  An argument erupted. “It had been a long day for me, and I shouted back frustrations. She returned the outburst, pointing her finger. I stepped forward, pushed her hand out of the way. She pushed me back and that’s when I lost control. I put my hands on her throat, and she put her hands on my throat. We struggled. She fell to the floor on her back still clutching each other. When she let go of my throat, I let go of hers and she was asleep.

  “I shook her shoulders. I touched her face, but there was still no response. I bent closer and looked, listened, and felt for her breath. There was none. I blew into her mouth and gave her artificial respiration. She didn’t respond.”

  According to Distefano, after trying unsuccessfully to revive Christine, he decided to head for his family’s house. He said he got home about 1:30 A.M., went to bed for a half hour, then got up and returned to the scene of the crime. At this time he put Christine in his car, stripped her body of clothing, and then drove off in search of “a respectable place to lay it.”

  He told the officers he finally “dropped off the body [at] the first place available”—the Scranton parking lot. He remembered brushing back Christine’s long hair; it was at its most sensual when she wore it straight, DiStefano said. “I lay her out, knelt beside her, expressed remorse and farewells, and left,” he recounted.

  The next morning, DiStefano continued, he bagged Christine’s clothing, put it in the rear of his Geo, then later transferred it to his dorm room. When the investigators later went to search his dorm room and didn’t find the clothing, DiStefano laughed and said he had intentionally put gaps in his account. This apparently was one of them.

  Under questioning, DiStefano specifically denied using a ligature, which contradicted the autopsy report. He also claimed he knew nothing about the missing money, Caller ID box, and receipts.

  In the investigators’ opinion, DiStefano had left no doubt about his guilt in the homicide. He was placed under arrest at 6:07 A.M. However, any hopes local authorities had of an iron-clad case vanished later that morning when the accused summoned Trooper Pacifico to the first-floor holding cell where he awaited arraignment and transfer to the Lakawanna County Jail.

  “DISTEFANO asked me if his written statement was enough to convict him,” Pacifico wrote of their five-minute meeting. “I told DISTEFANO that we not only had his written statement, but also lab tests, witnesses and other evidence. He told me he didn’t do it and that he didn’t know where Victim’s clothes were. DISTEFANO said there were holes in his statement. I told him we knew that [but] that he told us things only the killer would know. He told me that wasn’t what he meant, that he had left holes in his statement intentionally and that he knew of one already. He said the lab tests wouldn’t show anything. I asked DISTEFANO what hole he left in his statement and he said he wanted to remain silent so I left the room.”

  As it turned out, Chris DiStefano was right about the lab tests. At the trial, prosecutors would have no forensic evidence that proved DiStefano killed Christine Burgerhof or any eyewitnesses or compelling circumstantial evidence against him. They had only the disputed confession and a critical disputed fact within it.

  The prosecution contended that only Christine’s killer could have known (a
s DiStefano did) that her hair had been carefully arranged and how it was done. Defense attorneys argued that the hair arrangement had not been kept a strict secret, and that DiStefano could have learned about it before the eleven-hour interview in which he confessed the crime and provided specifics about how he had committed it.

  Other than the confession and his interesting behavior after the crime, the only other window on the defendant’s mind and actions was an extraordinary collection of material recovered in the searches of his rooms and car. Investigators found letters, nude bondage photos of a former girlfriend (plus a multimonth calendar of her menstrual cycles), a pair of handcuffs, homosexual erotica, padlocks, medical texts on aberrant sexual behavior, various kinds of adhesive tape (both new and used), lengths of ropes, gas masks, articles and drawings dealing with bondage (including a clipped Prince Valiant comic that depicted a man and woman with their wrists bound behind their backs), and even an Internet inquiry he had made asking for gagging techniques that reduce sound but also allow the “victim” to breathe. They also recovered a copy of Pauline Reage’s 1965 novel, The Story of O, which chronicles the complete sexual submission of a young woman named O, a successful fashion photographer, to Rene, her sadistic lover.

  DiStefano’s letters, written mostly to women, were often explicit. “I hate sex,” he wrote one girlfriend in 1985. “I hate to get hot. You CANNOT tell me that I like sex. You can’t change me.” Yet just weeks later, he wrote another girl, “I want to love you and fuck you. I really want to go to bed with you and slide my banana up your tight… I’ll be on top of you and you’ll be trapped, helpless, underneath, unable to escape.”