'Double initial' murders remain mystery after 35 years — Police still track leads into three 1970s slayings that shattered community's calm

Gary Craig | Rochester

Show Caption Hide Caption Who killed Carmen Colon? The Colon family talk about how 40 years later authorities are investigating the possibility of a connection to the double initial case to killings in California. Video story by Marie De Jesus.

This story was first published March 1, 2009

Carmen Colon was the first victim.



A 10-year-old sprite with an effervescent smile, Carmen lived with her grandparents when she disappeared on Nov. 16, 1971, from the Bull's Head neighborhood in southwest Rochester.

Two days later, her crumpled body was found in a gully, lying against a rock, along an infrequently traveled road in the town of Riga, near the Chili border. Perhaps dead for a day, Carmen had been strangled and sexually assaulted.

At a time when parents felt safe with children wandering their neighborhoods, Carmen's death shattered a sense of comfort. Police swarmed the city neighborhood for clues, for leads, for resolution.

But they were not to come.



And more killings would follow.



Almost 17 months later, in April 1973, Wanda Walkowicz, 11, vanished from the neighborhood near her Avenue D home. She was found slain the next day in an isolated area at a rest stop in Webster.

Six months later, someone grabbed 11-year-old Michelle Maenza off the streets near her Rochester home on Webster Crescent. Her corpse was found two days later in a largely rural stretch of Wayne County in the town of Macedon.

Now, nearly 40 years later, the "double initial" killings — dubbed this because each of the victims had matching initials — remain among this region's most notorious unsolved crimes.

For police, the cases are far from closed.



"At this point, as we have for several years, we feel like we're making progress," said State Police Investigator Thomas Crowley. "The thought that we would be able to solve this someday is always there and keeps us going quite a bit."

The four law enforcement agencies — the State Police, Rochester Police Department, and the Monroe and Wayne County sheriff's offices — that keep open files on the abductions and killings regularly discuss possible new leads.

Police maintain a database with information about the hundreds of suspects they've identified through the years.



And, through technology not available to the original investigators, police now use genetic evidence from the crimes and ask possible suspects for saliva swabs to determine whether there is a match. Police refuse to be more specific about what physical evidence they have.

Police have even exhumed the corpse of one suspect — a city firefighter suspected of being a serial rapist — to compare his DNA with that from a crime scene.

For some investigators, solving this case has become a mission. Those now on the case meet with retired former colleagues who investigated the crimes in the 1970s. They talk about theories, suspects and promising leads that may still need attention.

Wayne County Sheriff Richard Pisciotti, who is retiring this year after 40 years with the office, was among the investigators of Michelle's murder. He photographed her autopsy in 1973, and now occasionally reviews the file with his current investigators assigned to the case.

"Seeing those images is like it happened yesterday," Pisciotti said. "That's something that will never leave me."



The day will come, Pisciotti said, when there will be answers.

"These kids have never really been put to rest. And until there's a closure to this case, those kids never will be put to rest."

From safe to fearful

The double initial killings represented a tectonic shift for the Rochester community, a jolting transformation away from a reassuring sense of safety. The slayings had unquestionable similarities. None of the victims lived in a household with both parents. Each had learning difficulties. Each was Roman Catholic. Each disappeared in late afternoon. Each likely was abducted by someone in a car. And no one saw the girls kidnapped, despite the busy neighborhoods where they lived.

Also, each girl was sexually assaulted and strangled.



The double initials — the slayings have also been dubbed the "alphabet killings" — added another strangely lurid twist to the crimes. Each girl was found in or near an area matching their initials: Carmen near Chili, Wanda in Webster, and Michelle in the town of Macedon.

Through the years another bizarre notion has been added to the grisly lore of the slayings: That the killer chose Carmen then Wanda then Michelle not only because of the matching initials but because their initials, when grouped, were an abbreviation for the abductor/killer's possible words to his victims — "Come with me."

The macabre crimes made them natural fodder for the mass media. In 2001, the Discovery Channel enlisted the help of retired FBI crime profilers for an hourlong television show in which the sleuths tried to decide who the killer — or killers — could be. Late last year, the movie The Alphabet Killer was released, a fictional supernatural-detective tale filmed in Rochester and based loosely on the slayings.

"You have this aura of the initials," said Robert Hetzke, a detective lieutenant with the Wayne County Sheriff's Office who is now involved in the investigation. "Are they connected? Are they not connected? We don't know that."

But when Michelle's body was found in November 1973, police then were clearly fearful that they had a serial killer on their hands.



"The man who killed Wanda Walkowicz is responsible for this murder," a Rochester police detective lieutenant, the late Anthony Fantigrossi, said after Michelle's slaying. "There's a strong possibility that he's also responsible for killing Carmen Colon."

Forensic psychiatrist David Barry, who has worked in the community since the late 1960s, said the similarities of the crimes convinced him then that the slayings had "to be the work of a serial killer."

"It seemed to make sense, that somebody was setting out to kill young girls of that age," Barry said.

Many potential witnesses

On Nov. 18, 1971, two young teenage boys were bicycling along Stearns Road in Riga when they spotted a tiny body in a ditch. At first they thought it was a doll someone had tossed aside.

Instead, it was the body of Carmen Colon, who had disappeared two days before after she left a drugstore on West Main Street near her Brown Street home.

Carmen had been strangled and sexually assaulted, the medical examiner determined. Fingernail marks scarred her neck and much of her body.



Once media accounts circulated about her slaying, another unsettling report came to the fore: Dozens of drivers may have seen Carmen running semi-nude along Interstate 490 westbound about a mile east of Riga.

After the discovery of Carmen's body, several drivers reported to police that they'd seen the young girl, almost naked, with a car backing along the shoulder toward her the afternoon of her disappearance.

Most cars were driving upward of 70 miles per hour when they passed her and none stopped, with the drivers apparently unsure of what they'd seen. Cell phones, of course, were not in use then.

"I know they feel horrible (they didn't stop) and they were courageous enough to come forward after the fact," said Monroe County Sheriff's Office Investigator Patrick Crough, who is now investigating Carmen's death.

The police scoured Carmen's neighborhood, as well as the Riga area where she was found.



"Everybody (in the Bull's Head neighborhood) knew her," said retired Rochester police detective Vito D'Ambrosio. "We were going door-to-door and everybody knew her."

Police developed several suspects. To this day, two former colleagues and friends still think their suspect may have been Carmen's killer.



Former Monroe County sheriff's detective Nicholas DeRosa traveled to Puerto Rico to try to hunt down Carmen's uncle, Miguel Colon, who'd left the area shortly after the slaying. In Colon's car police had discovered a doll of Carmen's. The car also appeared to have been scrubbed clean.

Colon later returned to New York and was questioned but never charged with the murder. "I was disappointed that they never threw it into the grand jury" to see whether Colon could be indicted, DeRosa said.

In 1991, Colon committed suicide inside his Radio Street home after a domestic dispute in which he shot and wounded his wife and brother-in-law. When police responded, Colon yelled at them to shoot him. He then shot himself.

Afterward, police questioned relatives about whether Colon had ever admitted to killing Carmen, but none said he had. His family has insisted he is innocent of Carmen's killing.

Robert Russello, now retired from the Sheriff's Office, focused on another suspect, James Barber, shortly after Carmen's murder. Barber also quickly took off from the area after Carmen's disappearance, leaving many belongings in his apartment.

Barber worked in the Bull's Head area and appeared to have penciled in information on his time card — instead of punching in with an automated system — around the time of the crimes. More importantly, Russello said, was the fact that Barber was wanted on an outstanding warrant for assaulting and sodomizing a 15-year-old girl in Ohio.

Barber also is now dead, according to Crough. 'I remember that day' On the day before Rita Walkowicz's 10th birthday, her sister, Wanda, disappeared.

"They took her the day before my birthday and I turned 10 when they found her," the sister, now Rita DeCann, said in a recent interview.



Wanda was a 65-pound red-haired tomboy, a tiny bundle of frenetic energy. She was a year older than Rita and, as the younger sister now recalls, was more into tussling and joking with the neighborhood boys than playing with Barbies.

With their infant sister, Michelle, and mother, Joyce, they lived in the upper apartment of a home on Avenue D. Their father had died earlier of a heart attack.

The day of Wanda's disappearance was April 2, 1973, a drizzly gray Monday. "I remember that day very vividly because every Monday, if it's a rainy day, it's very dark for me," Rita said.

After school on April 2, Joyce Walkowicz sent Wanda to a Conkey Avenue supermarket for groceries. The sisters often would purchase groceries for the evening meal, Rita said.

"Back then we knew nothing about what can happen if you walk to the store," Rita said.



At the store, Wanda bought $8.52 worth of groceries, including tuna fish, milk, cupcakes and cat food. She left the store and vanished.

The next day, a State Police trooper found Wanda's body in Webster, near the bottom of an embankment at a rest area off of Route 104. Like Carmen Colon, she had been strangled — possibly with a belt — and raped. Like Carmen, she'd disappeared in the late afternoon while running an errand for the family.

Police quickly drew parallels with Carmen's killing. Tips rolled in, including reports that a man driving a brown car had pulled a red-haired girl into the car around Conkey Avenue the day of Wanda's abduction. The car did not match the one seen on Interstate 490 in Carmen's case. And, as with Carmen, police could not make an arrest.

Months passed with the crime unsolved. Then Michelle Maenza was murdered. And the community's fear reached a fever pitch. After Michelle's body was found in Macedon on Nov. 28, 1973 — two days after she disappeared while walking home in the afternoon — investigators focused on the similarities of the three slayings. "Killings Hauntingly Similar," declared a Democrat and Chronicle headline.

Youths who had once relished their childhood with unfettered abandon, playing outside during every free hour, were reined in by fearful parents.



"People were very concerned," said forensic psychiatrist Barry. "They were shocked, horrified by the murders ... that someone set out to murder three young girls. God forbid that he should strike again. That just terrified the community, especially since no arrests were made."

Michelle, a chubby shy girl, had been at the Goodman Plaza shortly before she went missing, said her brother, Stephen, who was two years older than his sister.

Their uncle saw Michelle at the plaza and offered to give her a ride home but she declined, Stephen said.



"It must have been shortly after he left the guy picked her up. My uncle was kind of upset with himself for many years because he didn't pick her up ... and go ahead and bring her back to the house."

Unlike the first two killings, however, police developed some solid leads about Michelle's disappearance.



Later on the day she went missing, a woman saw a young girl resembling Michelle in a car at a fast food restaurant in Penfield. A man was walking toward the car with a bag of food. Michelle's autopsy revealed she'd eaten a hamburger.

Also that evening, a man stopped along Route 350 in Walworth after he saw a car stopped with an apparent flat tire. A girl resembling Michelle sat in the car. The man with the flat tire made it apparent he wanted no help, so the would-be good Samaritan continued on his way.

Both witnesses gave similar descriptions of the man they saw, and police developed a composite that the media displayed for weeks. Calls came in by the thousands — many of them of little help. In fact, when the calls tapered off, they still numbered about 75 an hour during daytime hours.

Police picked up debris along the likely path from the restaurant to Eddy Road where Michelle was found dead, according to Pisciotti. The possible evidence filled the beds of several pickup trucks.

The investigation was ongoing when, on Jan. 1, 1974, a Rochester fireman named Dennis Termini tried to rape a teenage girl in a garage. Police intervened, and Termini ran.

"We chased him over fences and down the street," said Rochester police Capt. Lynde Johnston, who was among the patrolmen pursuing Termini.



Police closed in on him and Termini pulled out a handgun. "He had a .45 automatic pistol and he put it to his head and shot himself," Johnston said.

Termini, police decided, had raped another teenager in a garage. While both victims were older than the girls in the double initial murders, investigators thought Termini might be a prime suspect — and other evidence bolstered that belief.

His car matched the description of cars seen in the abductions and a map in his car was folded in a way highlighting Wayne County.



Also, Termini kept his firefighter uniform in the car, and police suspected that only an apparent authority figure could have lured the girls into the vehicles without a fight.

After talking to investigators, Joyce Walkowicz became convinced that Termini murdered her daughter. But with him dead, and no definitive clues, the case could not be closed.

For decades, Termini would stay at the top of the list of possible suspects. Then, in 2007, police would get another chance to test that theory — when they exhumed Termini's corpse.

GCRAIG@DemocratandChronicle.com