by John Luciew
In this case, the primary victim was dead and beyond the agency’s help. And two of the victims left behind — Todd and his son Nick — had other labels just then. They were suspects in Darlene Ewalt’s murder. Storm said Troop H officers and county prosecutors warned her and her office away from the earliest stages of the investigation.
“In this case, we were immediately informed that they were suspects,” Storm says. “We were not really allowed as much access. We were also extremely discouraged by the PSP from providing them with too many services because they were the prime suspects. We were hands-off until they determined who did what.”
Days later, Storm would reach out to Margaret Moran, Todd’s mother from Arizona who would handle the funeral arrangements. Storm familiarized her with procedures to file for burial compensation and other crime victim benefits. Later, she began working with daughter Nicole, as well. But it would be weeks before Storm and her team could assist Todd Ewalt, and to a lesser extent, Nick.
By then, both men would harbor deep-seated anger toward the Pennsylvania State Police, their handling of the investigation, and the tactics employed in pursuing each as suspects.
“He understands the methodology that when the police arrived, they had to secure the scene and treat everybody as a suspect. He gets all that,” Storm says of Todd Ewalt. “I think the manner in which he was told his wife was murdered was completely insensitive. It was like two hours later. They basically sat him down and said, ‘Hey, you’re wife’s dead’.”
And it didn’t stop there.
“He was followed. He was harassed. His son was harassed at school. I believe some of the police officers actually called the school, called his coach,” Storm says. “They (state police) used every tactic they could. Part of that is part of their job. They have to figure out who did this and ensure public safety. But according to the family, the harassment they faced was pretty severe by the state police.”
While declining to address specific questions, a spokesman for Troop H defended the investigation.
“Our actions were appropriate based upon the investigatory leads that we had at the time,” Trooper Thomas Pinkerton, Troop H public information officer, said. “This crime was certainly unique in the method it was carried out, however the arrest and subsequent conviction (guilty plea) were a direct result of the comprehensive investigation conducted by the members of the Pennsylvania State Police.”
Storm disagrees. So does Todd Ewalt.
“I knew I was the No. 1 suspect. I had to be,” Todd Ewalt admits. “The problem is, they figured it was me from the very beginning, and they didn’t go too far from there. They didn’t do a lot of things they should have.”
Storm insists the entire case should become a case study in lessons learned.
“This man’s wife was brutally murdered by a serial killer,” she says. “He was targeted as the suspect and not treated with any dignity or respect – at all. He’s got some justifiable anger about the way he was treated.”
6
AFTER BEING ROUSTED FROM BED, handcuffed for three hours and questioned until 5:30 a.m., Todd Ewalt was getting a break. With the morning sun now up, Todd, clad in a T-shirt, sweat pants and slippers, could grieve for his wife, be with his children, and begin the notification process that accompanies a death in the family. Todd’s first call was to his mother, Margaret, and her second husband, Vince Moran, an ex-cop and retired journalist from New Jersey now living in Tempe, AZ. The couple booked the next plane for Harrisburg.
Meanwhile, state police wanted Todd to come to the Troop H barracks near Routes 22 and 39 at 11 a.m. the next morning. It would be more questions and the same strategy — Todd Ewalt as a chief suspect.
After spending the night at a nearby motel — his house remained a crime scene — Todd arrived at the barracks 15 minutes early. He wouldn’t leave until 9:45 p.m. What transpired was a complete dissection of his life, his personality, his finances and his marriage.
Police drilled Todd on what they portrayed as his collapsing marriage. They argued that he and his wife had grown apart. She was taking trips without him. She was staying up late talking on the phone with other men. She was driving off for days to supposedly deliver items that could have been shipped Federal Express.
Detectives showed Todd what they claimed was Darlene’s divorce filing. “It dawned on me that it wasn’t even her hand writing,” Todd recalls.
Next, they went after his bank account.
He was a carpenter, bills were piling up and work was spotty. Darlene must have resented being forced to toil in the couple’s side business, hand-crafting synthetic racing saddles to make ends meet, they told him.
One of the secondary detectives even drew Todd a picture of the hooked, jagged-edge knife that police believed was the murder weapon. It was as if they were saying, ‘we know you have one just like it — somewhere.’
As police fired questions ranging from the couple’s sleeping patterns to their sex life, Todd mostly kept his cool. But he couldn’t win. One of the officers suggested to Todd that he was wrapped too tight and must have snapped.
Yet when Todd pushed back against relentless police accusations, it was proof of something else.
After a barrage of belittling over his bank account, Todd defiantly pulled out his wallet and plucked out a thick wad of cash — nearly $1,200. He challenged anyone in the interview room to match the sum.
“We weren’t rich, but we weren’t in financial trouble,” Todd says. “The bills were paid.”
To investigators, Todd’s flash of defensiveness was a glimpse of his deep-seated rage. If they could push his buttons so easily, perhaps an unhappy wife could cause him go nuclear.
Again and again, hour after hour, Todd denied murdering his wife. He even took a lie detector test. Forty-five minutes later, a detective returned and promptly informed Todd that he had failed it. Not knowing if the officer was lying, Todd shot back that the results had to be wrong. Either that, or the machine wasn’t working. To this day, he doesn’t know the actual results.
It was stalemate, and it was back to Square One — another wave of the same basic questions couched in different words and in new tones. After a round of goading, another officer would try sympathy.
“Accidents happen,” Todd recalls one of the empathetic detectives telling him. “We’ll take care of everything for you. Just tell us what happened. I’m thinking, ‘do you really think I’m that stupid?’”
For Todd, a fan of the documentary-style detective show “The First 48,” all of it was sounding very familiar. He realized police were pulling out all the stops to pin him as the suspect.
“Just stupid tactics,” he says. “They were throwing everything at the wall to see if it stuck.”
As the hours ticked by, Todd Ewalt’s family — particularly his gruff-voiced stepfather, Vince Moran, grew wary. The veteran journalist was well acquainted with investigative techniques and interview tactics. He suspected that police were eyeing Todd for Darlene’s murder, and he insisted to other family members that it was time to get Todd some help.
The family phoned an attorney.
“He’s in there all those hours,” Moran recalls. “It went on and on. They kept trying to pin it on him Eventually I said, ‘Get him a lawyer.’ We retained someone on the spot.”
The newly hired lawyer first phoned the barracks to halt the questioning, but it wasn’t until the attorney showed up that the interrogation stopped.
The long day of questioning was over, but the police’s pursuit didn’t end there. According to Ewalt family members, the family home was searched a second time later that weekend. A police helicopter swooped low and snapped aerial photographs of the house and grounds. Officers in unmarked cars kept the house and family members under surveillance from Pavone’s parking lot. And detectives repeatedly asked to speak with Todd, but he was now insisting that all questions be funneled through his lawyer.
A married female friend worried that Todd,
who lost 25 pounds during the ordeal, wasn’t eating and decided to take him out for dinner and a movie. This prompted police to question friends about “Todd’s girlfriend” — even though the woman’s husband knew all about the outing.
To this day, Ewalt family members are convinced that police informed Nick’s college about his status as a suspect, as well as the steroids found in his bedroom. Nick was never charged for possessing the drugs, but his football scholarship was revoked the following year.
Marsico confirmed that by “lawyering up” Todd Ewalt only piqued the interest of investigators. And while Marsico said he wasn’t privy to all of the tactics used during the investigation, he doesn’t doubt that state police kept very close tabs on Todd Ewalt, and to a lesser extent, Nick.
“I think cops, by their nature, any time someone gets an attorney, they think the person’s guilty,” Marsico explains. “I’ve got a little different slant on that, but not too much.”
Yet for all their questions, police still had nothing to go on. Not a shred of direct evidence linked Todd Ewalt to his wife’s murder. And with Todd now deflecting the investigation with a lawyer, police needed another tact or their investigation risked growing cold.
Marsico had just the thing, one of the most powerful tools of prosecutors. The district attorney was preparing to impanel a grand jury with full subpoena powers to probe Darlene Ewalt’s murder.
The grand jury could compel Todd and Nick to testify. Sure, suspects could ‘plead the Fifth’ and refuse to answer questions directly implicating them in the crime. But they would be forced to answer other queries about the family background, relationships, and finances.
What is more, the grand jury could command phone records, banking information, credit card bills and other normally private files. Most of all, the grand jury had the option of issuing a presentment at the conclusion of its investigation that could lead directly to criminal charges against Todd Ewalt in the murder of his wife.
“Slapping a grand jury subpoena on somebody is pressure,” Marsico says of the move. “That’s certainly going to make someone think.”
The legal clock was ticking for Todd Ewalt. But time also was running out for several other women who happened to be in the path of a serial killer.
7
THE ONE THING LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIALS BELIEVED they didn’t have to worry about was another murder. Not with Todd Ewalt as a main suspect, they didn’t. Marsico said as much in his reassuring comments to the community in wake of the horrific crime.
“The biggest mistake I think I said to the press was, ‘We don’t think this was a random act, neighbors don’t have to be afraid’,” the district attorney recalls ruefully.
In one sense, Marsico was right. Adam Leroy Lane had moved on from West Hanover Twp. His trucking route was taking him to new hunting grounds.
In the early morning hours of July 17, Lane was again clad in black and searching anew for human prey. This time, his travels had brought him to northern York County south of Harrisburg to a neighborhood located less than a mile from Interstate 83 in Conewago Twp.
But there were no convenient targets like Darlene Ewalt sitting out on their patio in the wee hours. Lane would need a break.
He got one in the form of an unlocked back door. Behind it, Patricia Brooks, 37, lay dozing on her sofa at about 2 a.m.
A sharp pain in her neck startled her awake. She shot up from the couch, sucking in air and grabbing at her throat.
First, she saw the man in black with a knife. Then, she spotted the blood — her blood — dripping onto the carpet.
The man dressed dark clothes and sporting a beer belly fled out the back door. Brooks screamed for her family.
She had sustained severe knife wounds to her neck and shoulder. But she didn’t know then that she had been lucky. She would survive her brush with a serial killer.
In the span of four days, two women had been attacked with knives to their throats within a 25-mile radius. The coincidence caught the eye of one of the detectives working the Darlene Ewalt homicide.
Cpl. Cronin, a member of the state police’s Criminal Investigation Assessment Unit with 25 years of service, was considered the profiler on the case. He became the first to believe that there might be a connection between Darlene Ewalt’s murder and Patricia Brooks’ stabbing. But Marsico, the lead prosecutor, wasn’t buying it.
“To their credit, state police were immediately concerned about that stabbing,” Marsico says now. “Frankly, I was one who said, ‘You gotta be kidding me.’ I, as the prosecutor, was saying, ‘It just happened to be another stabbing.’ I’m thinking, there’s no chance two random women were going to get stabbed 20 miles apart.”
There were key differences. The two female victims were physically dissimilar. Darlene Ewalt was blonde and striking. Patricia Brooks was brunette and somewhat overweight. One attack occurred inside the house with a clear intruder as the perpetrator. The Ewalt murder happened outside, and the assailant didn’t leave a trace.
But within 24 hours of the Brooks attack, police discovered a key piece of evidence that could have put all those questions to rest. A glove was found less than a mile from the crime scene near an area where truckers pull off I-83 to rest.
No one knew it then, but the glove contained the DNA of both Adam Leroy Lane and Darlene Ewalt. It would have connected Lane to both knife attacks because of its proximity to the York County crime scene and the similarity of both crimes. In other words, it was the kind of evidence that could break a case wide open.
But the telltale glove wouldn’t be tested for months. It would remain in an evidence bag until sometime in 2008 -- all but useless to track a serial killer.
Meanwhile, the man who left it behind, Adam Leroy Lane, was determined to regain his murderous touch on his next human hunt.
8
THE EWALTS WERE CONSUMED with burying their dead, healing wounds and fending off persistent police queries to pay much attention to the York County attack, at least initially. What’s more, Lane’s next deadly strike would occur out of state and would likewise generate few ripples in Harrisburg.
The missed opportunities and overlooked evidence still gnaw at Todd Ewalt.
“Not every detective gets an opportunity to catch a guy like Adam Lane,” Ewalt muses. “They had an opportunity to really look like heroes, and they blew it.”
Although at least one detective believed there might be a connection to the Brooks stabbing in York County, state police kept up a united front against Todd.
“Police said to Todd, ‘these cases aren’t connected. You are still our prime suspect’,” Storm says, calling it salt in the family’s wounds. “That was troublesome to them.”
Others would begin to see a pattern. But it took another brutal murder before the pieces began falling into place.
The tranquility of Bloomsbury, N.J., belies its proximity to bustling I-78, just east of the Pennsylvania border. The quaint bedroom community of Victorians and colonials must have seemed a safe haven to Monica Massaro, 38. The owner of a house cleaning business, Massaro didn’t make point of always locking her doors, despite living alone. She couldn’t have known that her sense of security and carefree attitude would invite a serial killer.
“She loved the house, she loved the town that she lived in,” friend Lauren Berger tells Dateline NBC. “She used to say it was her-- that where she lived was like living in a Norman Rockwell painting. And she just-- felt safe, and everyone was friendly, she just loved living there.”
But to Adam Lane, an unlocked door is a passport for murder. And prowling Massaro’s neighborhood in the early hours of July 29, he turned the handle of her open door and let himself inside.
It was the rare Saturday night that Massaro, single and outgoing with numerous friends, decided to stay in. In fact, she uncharacteristically canceled an evening out. Her explanation: she just didn’t feel like it. She’s stay in and enjoy the home she owned.
But when the rest of the
weekend passed with no word from Monica, those same friends became alarmed. She also missed a work appointment that Monday, and repeated phone calls to her home rang unanswered. And when a friend finally dropped by her house later that Monday, Monica didn’t answer the door, either.
Immediately, he called police.
Officers found Monica’s door unlocked, just as Adam Lane had the morning before. There were no signs of a break in. In fact, nothing much was amiss inside the house — until officers ventured into Massaro’s bedroom. That’s where they discovered a blood-soaked massacre.
Monica Massaro had been stabbed multiple times in her bed. A medical examiner would determine that she died of a knife wound to her neck after initially struggling to fight back. But she wasn’t lucky like Patricia Brooks. This time, Adam Lane prevailed.
New Jersey State Police Detective Geoff Noble was among the homicide investigators assigned to the case. He’d run down the list of Monica’s boyfriends and other acquaintances. He’d trace her activity on the Internet, where she actively followed her favorite band, Aerosmith. In the summer, Monica often traveled from concert to concert.
But almost from the beginning, Noble harbored bad feelings about the busy truck stop at the end of Massaro’s block. He saw it as a neon-signed welcome mat for anyone traveling I-78 to come into the neighborhood.
And it could mean an endless list of suspects.
“Wow, that is-- an area where there’s all kinds of people from all-- all over the place frequent this particular truck stop,” Noble tells NBC, describing the suddenly widened scope of the case. “Boy, that just makes the case so much bigger. I mean, huge. It could be anybody now. I mean now it could be anyone driving down the street, basically. Absolutely. Absolutely. That became-- a very-- all-- almost-- almost overwhelming-- avenue of the investigation to start-- to start looking into.”