by Tom Philbin
Gradually I became more and more emotionally involved in the case—having two daughters about Kathy’s age added to my involvement—and I thought of ways I might help Jimmy on the investigation.
I had a freelance gig as the editor-in-chief of Caper and Escapade, two unremarkable girlie magazines, and I knew a bondage expert who I thought might be able to help us. Jack Jackson ran a photo studio in Manhattan and would occasionally shoot photos of nude models for use in Caper and Escapade. But Jackson was also head of the Eulenspiegel Society, a bondage and domination club.
Jack liked me, I knew, and of course he made money off me for the photos he took. One day, after clearing it with Jimmy Pavese, I told Jack about the murder of Kathy Woods and how he might be able to help by giving us his feedback on how Kathy was tied.
He agreed to do it, and on a weekday morning a few days later, I was riding in a police car with two detectives. Pete was driving, and sitting next to me in the back was Richie Reck, who I would become friendly with.
As we drove, Richie handed me a sheaf of eight-by-ten color photos that I had never seen. They all showed how Kathy had been tied up when they found her.
I leafed through the photos, and they were appalling. She was lying on her belly on a stainless-steel gurney in the morgue with her black hair mussed and her dark, dead eyes open, fixed, and dilated. I could instantly see from the way she was tied that if she moved at all, she would choke herself.
We met with Jackson at about ten thirty and went into a local bar and ordered beers.
Examining the Pictures
Richie Reck handed Jackson the photos, and he leafed through them one by one. His brow wrinkled and his face became very serious. He was disturbed.
He went through all the photos and then said something I will never forget.
“We [the Eulenspiegel Society] play games,” he said. “This is the work of a psycho.”
We finished our beers, but before we left, the cops tried something that was not part of the original plan for Jackson, and it really pissed me off. They wanted access to his file listing all of the Eulenspiegel members. I told them that was not part of the deal, and Jackson categorically refused to do it.
In the car on the way home, Richie Reck said to me, “Tom, if we thought he had anything to do with the death, we would have arrested him on the spot.”
I had been naïve. Cops are cops, and the only thing that matters to them is collaring the perp.
My Own Investigation
Over the next couple of months, my wife, Catherine, who had also become emotionally involved in the case, and I tried to investigate it ourselves. We drove by Kathy’s house, and followed the two routes that cops theorized the murderer might have traveled to her home—either hitchhiking on Caledonia Road which would only take a couple of minutes, or using a shortcut through the woods off Arbor Road. We drove endlessly up and down Sweet Hollow Road and many other places.
We were by no means Holmes and Watson, but some things were easy to deduce. For example, the killer had to be a local because only a local would be likely to know the existence of a road that was such a perfect place to dump a body at night. Anyone could stop a car at the wide part of Sweet Hollow Road and then walk quickly into the woods and dump the body. The killed would have had ample time to hide if he or she saw the lights of a vehicle—which would be at least a half a mile away—approaching.
The Case Goes Cold
Eventually, the case went cold, and things went terrible for the Woods family. Thomas Woods was diabetic and he started to abuse his body, taking up smoking and drinking. He died at the age of sixty-one. Kathy’s sister, Jill, ran away from home and, for three years after the murder, was in a number of different foster homes. The other kids, who were older, left as well. Kathy’s mother, Marian, invested her insurance money in a religious articles shop in Florida but eventually went bankrupt.
The oldest sister, Merrie, summed up what happened to her family very well: “He just killed us all.”
The case stayed cold for sixteen years, when suddenly it came back. It all started late one Friday night, August 2, 1991, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, once famous for its steel. A small, dark-haired woman who must remain anonymous—let’s call her Dorothy—left her parents’ home in Northampton, where she lived, and drove her white Chevy Nova to the Ramada Inn on MacArthur Road in Whitehall to pick up her best friend, Kelly, who worked there. Then they drove to Mickey’s, a small neighborhood bar favored by young people for its cheap beer and loose dress code.
They had a few drinks, listened to songs on the jukebox, and stayed until the bar closed at 2 a.m. Then they drove to Perkins Restaurant, a pancake house. Dorothy called her parents from there and told them that she would be home after she and Kelly left the restaurant.
The young woman drove Kelly back to the Ramada Inn so she could pick up her car, and then they planned to follow each other home.
As she waited for Kelly to drive up in her car, Dorothy lit a cigarette and listened to the radio. Then, the passenger door was wrenched open abruptly, and a wild-eyed, black-haired man got into the car. In his hand he held a wicked-looking, two-inch folding knife. “Do you know what this is?” he asked. Dorothy nodded, terrified.
He pushed and pulled her into the backseat, out of sight, and warned her to stay as she was. Then he got behind the wheel and drove the terrified young woman for ten minutes to a large old house on a street with a constant flow of traffic. He went around to the back of the house where there was another door.
After parking in a small gravel parking lot, he grabbed Dorothy and pulled her roughly from the backseat. With one arm wrapped around her neck, he pulled her along the back path into the house. Once inside, he continued to pull her upstairs past a photograph of himself and a little girl, who was likely his daughter, hanging on the wall.
Through her terror, Dorothy was puzzled.
“I couldn’t imagine him having a little girl and doing this,” she said later.
He took Dorothy into his bedroom, threw her down on a futon on the floor, and pulled her clothing off until she was naked. Then he tied her up and assaulted her sexually.
But there was a problem. He couldn’t complete the sex act and stopped.
Dorothy begged him to let her go.
“No,” he said, “you’ll talk. I have to think.”
He carried her to the basement and placed her on a small throw rug. Then he wrapped a cord around her neck and stuck a gag in her mouth. She spit it out right away, screaming and crying. Then she cleverly asked him to loosen the ropes because their tightness was cutting off her circulation.
He complied, but he didn’t notice that Dorothy had stuck her finger in one of the knots to make it looser.
When he’d finished tying her again, he turned off all the lights in the basement, leaving Dorothy in total darkness, and went upstairs. Dorothy saw her chance. Because of her finger in the knot, she was able to get loose and untie herself. Then, alone and naked, she thought about how she could get out. Was he still upstairs? Would he hear her and come cascading down the stairs?
She listened but could hear nothing. She knew she had to take a life-or-death chance. She found the light cord and turned on the lights. Still no sound from above.
Scanning the basement, she spotted a window high up on the foundation. Dorothy knew that as small as she was, she would not be able to reach it. But she saw a board sticking out of the foundation beneath a window and stepped up on it so she could get to the window, which she was able to open, and then push out a screen.
She crawled through the window and, still nude, raced toward the street and ran out into it, hoping that the monster who had abducted her would not show up.
In most cases, people don’t want to get involved in someone else’s trouble, and drivers seeing a nude woman suddenly bursting into the street might not stop. But she got very lucky. A man in a truck stopped and picked her up, and she hysterically blurted out what had happened to her. As they
drove toward police headquarters, they spotted a cop and Dorothy repeated the horrific story for him.
Cops Invade the House
Before long, the cops were on their way back to the house, which they discovered belonged to Steven Impellizzeri, an upstanding member of the community who was very involved in ecological matters.
But when they arrived, he wasn’t there—and neither was Dorothy’s white Nova. Apparently, Impellizzeri had driven it away, presumably as the first step in covering his tracks. He fully intended to murder Dorothy.
At the house, investigators found bloody sheets in Impellizzeri’s bedroom, blood in the basement, and a collection of porn. And outside, lying in the grass, was a bracelet Dorothy had worn and that had been pulled off as he wrestled her into the house.
Police started to track him down. They called his mother’s house in Smithtown, Long Island (about seven miles from where Kathy Woods’ body had been found), and got him on the phone.
The sheriff urged Impellizzeri to come back to Pennsylvania, and he did by 7 p.m. He was immediately brought before a judge and sent to jail with bail set at $500,000, which he was unable to raise.
The news of the charges and Impellizzeri’s arrest was a shocker to a lot of people, including those who worked with him in the environmental group. After a vote, he was immediately suspended from the board.
“It was shocking,” said one person close to the scene. “Steve used to talk about plants as if they were people that you shouldn’t hurt. That he could do something like this was really shocking.”
But at least one person had long sensed that Impellizzeri had the ability to savage females.
Delvin Powell first encountered Impellizzeri during a case of domestic abuse against his wife in 1989. Powell, a sex-crimes investigator with the state police in Bethlehem, had been struck by Impellizzeri’s weirdness and savagery. Impellizzeri had slashed his wife’s tires and loosened the lug nuts, and Powell could easily see that Impellizzeri was dangerous.
So Powell kept tabs on him. “I didn’t think it would be the last time we would hear from him,” the investigator said.
Any Other Victims?
After Impellizzeri’s arrest for assaulting Dorothy, Powell queried police in towns where Impellizzeri had lived. Powell was looking for unsolved rape-murders that matched the methods Impellizzeri had used against Dorothy—anal intercourse, trying to stuff a gag down her throat, and above all, the specific way he tied her up.
One department responded—Suffolk County. Cops there gave Pennsylvania investigators the case info on Kathy Woods. Later, Jacquelyn Paradis, the Lehigh County assistant district attorney who prosecuted Impellizzeri, said, “There are many striking similarities between what happened to my victim and that other victim (Kathy Woods), particularly the way she was tied and the way she was sexually abused.”
Impellizzeri’s defense was that Dorothy and he had been having consensual sex, and then she changed her mind.
One bone of contention was that Dorothy was so small that she could not possibly have gotten up to the basement window by herself. She was short and weighed only one hundred pounds.
But ADA Paradis had a petite secretary from her office try to climb out the same basement window and she succeeded. The secretary’s ability to get out of the basement was videotaped, and the judge allowed the tape as evidence, over the strong objections of defense counsel.
Impellizzeri was convicted of fourteen assorted counts of rape and robbery. On March 3, 1994, the judge sentenced him to twenty to forty years in jail.
The defense filed an appeal and seemed to have a good shot. Two of the jurors said they had read news accounts of the attack and wondered if they could be objective. The defense argued that the judge should not have allowed them to sit on the jury. The appeals court said that while that could have been counted as a mistake, the two jurors also had said that they thought they could be objective and that was good enough. Impellizzeri’s conviction was affirmed.
He is still doing time as this is being written.
But there is a problem. Police are concerned that if he gets out on parole, someone else will be at risk. Deep in my heart, I know you can bet on that. My suspicions are based not only on the cops being suspicious of him, but on the similarity in the crimes: the assault on the young woman in Whitehall and the murder of Kathy Woods. Both were sodomized, both were tied, both had a knife used against them, both victims were petite, and both had a gag inserted in their mouths.
My feelings toward him are simple. I hate the bastard—hate him for taking this young girl’s life, hate him for what he put her through. He must not ever be allowed to leave prison.
In fall 1982, Chicagoland was shocked when multiple victims died after consuming Extra Strength Tylenol capsules that had been laced with the poison potassium cyanide. The first victim to die was 12-year-old Mary Kellerman of Elk Grove Village, Illinois. Adam Janus of Arlington Heights, Illinois, grew ill after taking pills and died in a hospital soon after. While mourning Adam’s death, his brother Stanley and sister-in-law Theresa died as well. They had consumed pills from the same poisoned bottle.
When three additional victims all had died in a similar fashion, investigators put together the Tylenol connection. Police and city officials spread urgent warnings throughout the Chicago area, broadcasting on radio and TV as well as delivering warnings in surrounding suburbs.
Enter the FBI
Once the poisoned Tylenol was discovered, the FBI entered the case and started an intensive investigation. They discovered that while a number of Tylenol bottles had been tampered with, the bottles had been manufactured at different factories. Instead of tampering with the capsules when they were manufactured and packaged, as investigators had first thought, the psychopath had bought Tylenol bottles from multiple grocery stores and pharmacies, added poison to the capsules, and then placed the bottles back on the shelf. As the investigation continued, another three tainted Tylenol bottles were discovered.
Johnson & Johnson, the parent company of McNeil Consumer Products, the manufacturer of Tylenol, blared warnings to hospitals and distributors, brought Tylenol production to a halt, and issued a nationwide recall of Tylenol products; a big job because more than 30 million bottles were out there. Of course, the company warned people not to ingest any Tylenol or other products that contained acetaminophen.
After continued investigation, officials learned that only gel capsules had been poisoned. Solid pills were safe so Johnson & Johnson soon was offering bottles of solid pills in exchange for capsules that were turned in.
Mini Mystery: Psychopath
No question that Stella Nickell has had a tough life. She grew up in a poor family in the Pacific Northwest, and at sixteen, when most girls are thinking about next year’s prom or their new boyfriend, Stella got pregnant and gave birth to a daughter. Over the next dozen years she married and had a second daughter, but her marriage went down in flames.
Then life seemed to take an upswing. At thirty-two, she fell for Bruce Nickell, and they were wed in 1976. Ten years later, on a balmy June evening, Bruce got home from work, told Stella he had a headache, and took four Excedrins. He took a short stroll out on the deck, and then he collapsed.
Stella called 911. When the EMTs arrived, they saw Bruce was in bad shape and got him to a helicopter where he was airlifted to a Seattle hospital. The diagnosis was emphysema, a condition that makes breathing difficult and enlarges the heart.
Wrong Diagnosis!
When Bruce died, Stella said that emphysema didn’t make sense as a diagnosis. It must have been something else.
Then Stella heard about the case of Sue Snow, a bank manager. Snow had died of poisoning, in fact, from cyanide-laced Excedrin. Stella alerted the police, who realized that Bruce Nickell had also taken Excedrin and probably had been poisoned. Cops immediately focused their investigative attention on Sue’s husband, Paul Webking, but he passed a polygraph test.
Then something happened that tu
rned their suspicion toward Stella. She showed them two bottles of Excedrin she had bought, and both were tainted with cyanide. Cops had found only five tainted bottles of Excedrin anywhere, so the idea of her having two of them seemed highly unlikely.
The question was: Why should she prefer to have Bruce die of poisoning rather than emphysema? Because Bruce’s insurance policy would pay an extra $100,000 for an accidental death, including from poisoning.
“I think that she probably killed Bruce and expected them to find out that he died from cyanide poisoning,” said Detective Mike Dunbar. Investigators in Seattle say her plan was foiled when Bruce was diagnosed as having died from natural causes, so she spiked three more bottles and put them on store shelves. Then, when bank manager Snow died of cyanide poisoning, Stella could step forward and say, “See. Look at what happened to her and Bruce.”
But Stella forgot one thing. The FBI found green crystals in the cyanide that turned out to be algae destroyer used to kill algae in a fish tank. Stella had an aquarium but said she never used algae destroyer. However, a local fish-store manager, Tom Noonan, says she did.
She likely mixed the algae crystals in a bowl but forgot to clean it completely before she mixed cyanide in it.
A year and a half after her husband and Snow died, Stella went on trial. A surprise witness against her was her own daughter, who said she had heard her mother talking about murdering her father.
The jury found Stella guilty, and the judge sentenced her to ninety years in jail. One of the assistant district attorneys suggested that it would not be a “good idea to get a headache around her and ask for an aspirin.”