Suspect/Victim

by John Luciew

  Meanwhile, after discovering details on the Internet, one of Massaro’s friends began wondering about the similarities between Monica’s murder and that of the wife and mother whose throat was slit as she sat on her patio in Pennsylvania.

  Was there a connection?

  These similarities still weren’t registering a state away in Pennsylvania, where the knife-killings of two women and the knife attack on a third remained largely unconnected.

  “New Jersey State Police, as well as some of her (Massaro’s) friends were looking at our case,” Marsico says in hindsight. “There was some talk that here are some white women in suburban-type neighborhoods, all killed or assaulted with a knife. Is that something we should be looking at? What would tie it together?”

  Police and prosecutors in Pennsylvania didn’t know, despite a June 2007 FBI bulletin alerting law enforcement that truck driver serial killers could be responsible for the murders of as many as 500 women across the country.

  Instead of dogged police work, it would take the heroic actions of an ordinary family in suburban Massachusetts to change everything.

  “None of them are linked until Massachusetts,” Marsico says of the cases that fit together so neatly now.

  The tables were about to turn — both for Adam Lane and for Todd Ewalt.

  9

  FITTINGLY, ADAM LEROY LANE’S TRAIL of death would be stopped by one of the families he tried to prey upon.

  It started with a series of 911 calls on what normally would be a quiet Sunday night in Chelmsford, Mass., about 25 miles northwest of Boston. First, a woman spotted a suspicious figure, dressed all in black, milling around outside her home and peeking in windows. In one case, the prowler broke an outside light and was banging on a door. The final call about an attempted break-in came after 2 a.m. on July 30. But Adam Lane wasn’t giving up.

  About two hours later, he found what he was looking for — an unlocked door at the McDonough house. Interstate 495 was so close; one could hear the rush of traffic from the backyard.

  When 15-year-old Shea McDonough arrived home just after midnight, her parents, Jeannie and Kevin, were already in bed. She decided to leave the back door unlocked for her older brother, not knowing he was sleeping over at a friend’s.

  It was the opening Adam Lane needed.

  At about 4 a.m., Shea McDonough awoke to cold pressure on her neck. In various statements, she said she realized almost instantly that it was a knife, her skin sensing the cold steel.

  “I kind of just assumed that it was a knife,” Shea recounts in an NBC interview. “Because of the blade and everything. It was just cold, and I could just feel it like being pressed down.”

  But she didn’t panic.

  At first, she thought it was her brother pulling a prank. Then a hand covered her mouth, and she heard a chilling warning: Don’t make a sound or you’re fucking dead.

  As her eyes adjusted, she could make out the shape of a bearish man wearing a mask, hovering over her. Knowing her parents were asleep in the next room, a squirming, whimpering Shea McDonough tried to make as much noise as she could — without getting herself killed.

  It was enough to wake both of her parents. Instinct led them to their daughter’s room.

  Kevin McDonough saw the knife and went for Lane’s wrists.

  “I said, ‘What are you doin’?” Kevin recalls in an NBC interview. “And he turned to me. And the mask is what scared me the most, so I just grabbed his, both wrists. And I said, ‘knife’.”

  The two struggled, but Kevin kept hold of the hand with the knife. Finally, he got an elbow around Lane’s neck.

  That’s when Jeannie McDonough was able to grab the knife away from the killer. Shea McDonough grabbed a phone and dialed 911, while her father held Adam Lane until police arrived.

  The family had no way of knowing that they had just captured a serial killer.

  “I had made a comment that there were angels in the house that night. And I firmly believe it,” Kevin McDonough tells NBC.

  That night, Adam Lane was armed with three knives, a choke wire and a martial arts throwing star. But it was his tractor-trailer that held a treasure trove of evidence.

  There, a DVD entitled “Hunting Humans” was still inside the truck’s videodisc player. It tells the story of a serial killer who murders with no motive. There were masks, black clothes, a spotting scope and two large serrated hunting knives, as well.

  One of the knives was stained with Darlene Ewalt’s blood, but the results wouldn’t be known for several more weeks.

  Meanwhile in Dauphin County, a Sept. 5 court date had been set for a grand jury to begin investigating Darlene Ewalt’s murder. Subpoenas had been issued, and Todd Ewalt would have no choice but to take the stand.

  10

  IF FINGER PRINTING DROVE the last century of crime fighting and criminal investigation, DNA is what defines this century’s tactics. Police from every jurisdiction submit samples from their violent crimes to a national database. Each one is a cop’s prayer in search of a match that can close a case.

  Pennsylvania State Police Troop H and District Attorney Ed Marsico received an answer to the prayer that was Darlene Ewalt’s DNA when a sample they had submitted at the outset of the case drew a hit from Adam Leroy Lane’s knife.

  “Once we had Darlene’s blood on that knife, I knew it was case-closed,” Marsico says in relief. “The day that DNA was on the knife, the case was done. I thought, ‘It’s a serial killer. A serial killer!’ I knew right away this was huge.”

  The break in the case couldn’t have come any later for Todd Ewalt. It was the end of August, and he was within days of taking the stand before a grand jury — a process that had the potential to result in criminal charges against him.

  “It was right down to the wire,” recalls Storm, convinced that Todd would have remained a chief suspect had the DNA break not come.

  “I think Todd could have gone on trial,” Storm insists. “I think it was luck, and you had Massachusetts and New Jersey doing really skilled police work. That’s what solved this case. By default, we just happened to reap the benefits.”

  “We’re just lucky,” adds Todd Ewalt. “That could have been my sentencing.”

  Marsico doesn’t believe it would have gotten that far.

  “There was no physical evidence to connect Todd with the crime,” he points out. “Absent other evidence, Todd wouldn’t have been charged.”

  Yet Marsico adds that there’s no telling what a grand jury might do. And had the jury investigating Darlene Ewalt’s murder returned a presentment against Todd, the district attorney concedes that his office likely would have filed charges.

  “Normally, when there is a presentment, we file the charges,” Marsico says.

  The dogged DA who has always believed in motive credits the McDonoughs with saving the day.

  “If it weren’t for them, who knows?” Marsico muses. “They stopped him. And that’s what led police to search his truck.”

  Todd Ewalt agrees.

  “I owe them a lot,” he says of the McDonoughs. “There are a lot of other people who owe them who don’t even know it because this guy (Lane) was not going to stop. And I don’t think Pennsylvania would have solved it.”

  Epilogue

  ADAM LEROY LANE, now 45, his head shaved and his body leaner from three years of prison life, smirked at the victims’ families gathered in a Dauphin County courtroom to hear his guilty plea and sentence for taking Darlene Ewalt’s life.

  The June 28, 2010, hearing marked a resolution to the Ewalt family’s three-year journey to justice, but it was a far from satisfying one.

  Three years of FBI and police work tracing Lane’s former trucking routes that took him as far west as California and as far south as Georgia have failed to match Lane with any other unsolved homicides. And Lane isn’t talking.

  What is more, Lane has never satisfied investigators’ thirst for a motive in the case. The women he attacked just happened to be
in his path.

  Nick Ewalt, now 25, was against the plea and life sentence favored by his dad and sister. But the son didn’t take part in the family’s discussions with Marsico.

  The family says there’s no rift over the outcome. Nick, unemployed with two years of college, lives at home with Todd. The son simply wanted to see Lane suffer death for all the hurt he wrought.

  He now hopes Lane gets killed in prison.

  “I still think about it every day,” Nick says of his mother’s murder. “I don’t stop. I miss my mom. That’s it.”

  Making matters worse, the young father whose daughter will never know her grandmother still harbors anger at the state police. So much so, that when it was Nick’s turn to speak at the sentencing, he used the forum to submit an open records request for all of the case files and to call for an investigation into Troop H’s handling of the case.

  Marsico says Pennsylvania’s open records law doesn’t cover files of police investigations. But he’s willing to sit down with Ewalt family members and share some information, files and photographs as part of the family’s healing process.

  “I will give them some access to some of the reports,” says Marsico. “I want to ask them specifically, ‘What are you looking for?’”

  While Marsico doesn’t second-guess the investigation, he has personally apologized to Todd Ewalt for pursuing him as a suspect.

  “I think the police did a good job,” Marsico says. “It’s a shame that Mr. Ewalt was a suspect. I feel for him. I said that to him, ‘I’m sorry I thought you were a suspect. I’m sorry for what you went through’.”

  But Storm says Todd Ewalt and his family have never heard anything remotely similar from state police.

  “Even after they determined Adam Leroy Lane is our guy, that we know it for certain, the officers were still a dick to him,” Storm says of Troop H’s treatment of Todd. “The officers said, ‘We will never apologize for the way that we treated you because we were just doing our job’,” she adds. “There wasn’t even any extension of sympathy to this man, no extension of an apology.”

  Enduring a trial at which Todd Ewalt’s life might have been torn apart anew by a zealous defense attorney looking to safeguard his client’s life would have been even more cruel, Storm insists.

  “If you’re a good defense attorney, who are you going to peg it on?” asks Storm, who mediated the discussions between the Ewalts and Marsico over Lane’s plea deal. “Todd would have had to endure seven to ten days of public scrutiny, once again. It would have been too taxing, too emotional. He said he wanted it done and over with.”

  And Todd Ewalt has been through enough. First, he was a victim in his wife’s murder, then he became a suspect and was victimized a second time.

  “When you’re victimized, your entire reality is shattered,” Storm explains. “I don’t know that I’ve had an interaction with Todd where he hasn’t broken down and gotten emotional. When you see him, you think he’s this wall of strength. But what he went through is hard. It’s devastating. It has impacted every aspect of his life. And he’ll never be the same. You’re never made whole.”

  These days, Todd Ewalt is a laid-off carpenter who spent part of the spring fixing up his tan-brick home — the same home he shared with his wife. The place where she was murdered.

  There’s a semblance of normalcy in his life, the comfort of routines. He has more remodeling work to do. He has a girlfriend of more than a year now. He’ll be on the sidelines of his junior league football team this fall, but not as head coach. Yet the carpenter who’s always been a whiz at building things admits he’s still putting his life back together. There’s no blueprints, no budget, no deadlines. He’s just feeling his way.

  “I’m not exactly sure how I’ve dealt with it, to be truthful,” he says of the three years since Darlene was taken. “I’m working, trying to stay afloat. I’m going along, doing the best I can.”

  Todd Ewalt pauses for a moment, as if summoning some profound sentiment that just doesn’t come.

  “I don’t have anything miraculous to say, really,” he says.

  CASE FILE NOTES:

  THE THREE-YEAR JOURNEY TO JUSTICE

  July 13, 2007 — Darlene Ewalt, 42, has her throat slit while talking on the phone to a family friend out on the back patio of her West Hanover Twp. home at around 2 a.m. Her husband, Todd Ewalt, now 46, and to a lesser extent, her son, Nick, 25, are immediately considered suspects by Pennsylvania State Police Troop H detectives. They will remain suspects for more than a month.

  July 17, 2007 — Patricia Brooks, 37, is attacked by a portly man wearing black and wielding a knife as she slept on the couch in her Conewago Twp., York County, home at about 2 a.m. She survives her neck and shoulder wounds. And at least one Pennsylvania State Police detective theorizes that the Brooks attack might be related to the Ewalt murder. But Dauphin County District Attorney Edward M. Marsico Jr. rejects the notion.

  July 29, 2007 — Lane breaks into the Bloomsbury, N. J. home of 38-year-old Monica Massaro and slits her throat in her bedroom in the early morning hours. When her body is discovered a day later, a New Jersey detective is immediately concerned about the close proximity of an I-78 truck stop to the Massaro home. However, no immediate connection is made to the similar knife attacks in Pennsylvania.

  July 30, 2007 — Lane is arrested following an early morning struggle inside the Chelmsford, Mass., home of the McDonough family. His capture occurs when the father of a 15-year- old girl hears noises coming from her bedroom. He finds Lane standing over his daughter wearing a dark hood and brandishing a knife. The father wrestles Lane to the floor, while his wife grabs the large hunting knife from Lane’s hand, then summons police. A knife recovered from Lane’s truck is stained with Darlene Ewalt’s blood, but the DNA results will take weeks.

  Aug. 31, 2007 — Police announce for the first time that they are investigating whether Lane, already arrested in Massaro’s murder in New Jersey, also is connected to Darlene Ewalt’s murder. The investigation of this new lead is called “very preliminary.” As late as Aug. 15, Marsico says publicly that no arrests were imminent in the Ewalt case, and he adds that police have discounted the possibility of a connection between the Ewalt murder and the attack on Patricia Brooks.

  Sept. 5, 2007 — A Dauphin County grand jury impaneled to investigate Darlene Ewalt’s murder that could have recommended charges against Todd Ewalt is canceled at the 11th hour. Just days before its scheduled meeting, DNA results from New Jersey confirm that the knife found in Lane’s truck is stained with Darlene Ewalt’s blood.

  May 21, 2009 — After pleading guilty to his crimes in New Jersey and Massachusetts and being sentenced to a combined 75 years in prison, Adam Leroy Lane is brought to Dauphin County and arraigned on homicide charges that were filed on Aug. 6, 2008, for Darlene Ewalt’s murder. The arraignment comes nearly two years after her death. Marsico says he intends to seek the death penalty at trial.

  Spring, 2010 — After several months-long postponements in the start of Adam Leroy Lane’s death penalty trial for Darlene Ewalt’s murder, members of the Ewalt family begin talking with Marsico about the possibility of a plea deal to avoid a trial in order to gain some closure in their three-year ordeal.

  June 28, 2010 — Adam Leroy Lane pleads guilty to first-degree murder in Darlene Ewalt’s slaying and is sentenced to life in prison. The plea deal avoids a death penalty trial for Lane and spares the Ewalt family from reliving the murder. It also heads off the strong possibility that Lane’s defense could try to paint Todd Ewalt as an alternative suspect by using files documenting the extensive police investigation into Ewalt’s personal life during the period he was considered a suspect in his wife’s murder.

  THE OVERLOOKED EVIDENCE

  A SLEEPING HUSBAND: State police discover Todd Ewalt naked and asleep in his upstairs bedroom less than 20 minutes after a family friend hears Darlene Ewalt’s attack and murder over the phone. Could Ewalt have killed his wife, discarded the
murder knife, hidden possibly bloody clothes, washed up and then climbed into bed — all in such a short amount of time? Despite a glaring lack of physical evidence linking Todd Ewalt to his wife’s murder, he remains a chief suspect for more than a month.

  AN OVERLOOKED FBI REPORT: Shortly before the July 2007 Ewalt murder and the subsequent knife attacks on three other women by truck driver Adam Leroy Lane, the FBI issues a nationwide bulletin alerting law enforcement that truck driver serial killers could be responsible for the murders of as many as 500 women across the country. Yet Dauphin County District Attorney Edward M. Marsico Jr. concedes that investigators here largely overlooked the truck driver theory until DNA results in late August show Ewalt’s blood on Lane’s knife. The oversight occurs despite the fact that all four of Lane’s documented attacks occur within a mile of truck stops and Interstate highways. Indeed, Lane’s trucking routes and driving logs connect all of his victims.

  THE UNTESTED GLOVE: Within 24 hours of the July 17, 2007, attack on Patricia Brooks in York County, police recover a glove less than a mile from her Conewago Twp. home. The glove is discovered near an area where truckers pull off of Interstate 83 to park. It contains the DNA of both Adam Leroy Lane and Darlene Ewalt and would have linked the Ewalt murder and the Brooks attack because of where it was found and the similarity of both crimes. However, the glove remains in a police evidence bag and goes untested for months.