The Alphabet Murders

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On today's episode we are bringing it back to the world of true crime. If you're a regular listener you know that we don't do much true crime as there are exactly 1,742,657,301 true crime podcasts out there. You'll also know that when we do true crime stuff we like to touch on the unsolved crimes. And if you're not a regular listener you won't know this stuff and what's your problem anyways. All that being said, today we are looking at the alphabet killer or also known as the double Initial killer. There are some weird coincidences and crazy connections in this case so it makes for an interesting one for sure.

 

The alphabet killer is so named for the fact that his/her victims all had names that were double Initial names. So first off let's get into the lives and tragic deaths of the victims. 

 

 The first victim we're going to talk about is Carmen Colon. This one is nuts as people essentially saw her abduction happening and no one did anything to help, but we'll get to that point in a minute. Carmen Colon was only 10 years old when she went missing on November 16, 1971. She was on her way home after running an errand for her grandmother; getting a prescription filled at the local pharmacy. She left the pharmacy empty handed after learning that the prescription was not yet ready. Store owner Jack Corbin remembers Carmen’s hurried last words to him: “I got to go. I got to go.”

 

She was seen by witnesses entering a parked car nearby the pharmacy and was reported missing later that night by her family. 

 

Approximately fifty minutes after Colón exited the pharmacy, scores of motorists driving along Interstate 490 observed the child, naked from the waist down, running from a reversing vehicle believed to be a dark-colored Ford Pinto hatchback, frantically waving her arms and shouting in an attempt to flag down a passing vehicle. At least one of these witnesses observed Colón being submissively led back to this vehicle by her abductor. Police say that more than 100 motorists saw this happening and no one called the police or stopped to try and help this girl. Experts attribute this to a thing known as the bystander effect or genovese syndrome.  The bystander effect, or bystander apathy, is a social psychological theory that states that individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim when there are other people present. First proposed in 1964, much research, mostly in the lab, has focused on increasingly varied factors, such as the number of bystanders, ambiguity, group cohesiveness, and diffusion of responsibility that reinforces mutual denial. The theory was prompted by the murder of Kitty Genovese about which it was wrongly reported that 38 bystanders watched passively. Recent research has focused on "real world" events captured on security cameras, and the coherency and robustness of the effect has come under question. More recent studies also show that this effect can generalize to workplace settings, where subordinates often refrain from informing managers regarding ideas, concerns, and opinions.

 

Whatever the reason, the fact that no one stopped or made a phone call to help these girls sounds pretty ridiculous.

 

It would be two full days before her body was discovered, two teenage boys discovered Colón's partially nude body in a gully not far from Interstate 490, and close to the village of Churchville. This location was approximately 12 miles from where Colón had last been seen alive.  Her coat was found in a culvert 300 feet from her body, but her trousers were only found almost two weeks later, close to a service road where she was last seen attempting to escape her kidnapper.

 

The forensic examiner noted that Carmen suffered a fractured skull, and a broken vertebrae before she was strangled to death. She was also raped, and her body indicated excessive fingernail scratches throughout. The viciousness of the beating and the scratches indicate an incredibly emotionally charged murder. Perhaps an impulsive one, as a result of her attempt at escape, which the other children did not manage to do. 

 

Almost a year and a half later, on April 2, 1973, little red-haired Wanda Walkowicz, 11, disappeared from east Rochester, also when returning home from an errand. She visited a delicatessen to purchase a few groceries, and was seen by the owner of the store walking down a major avenue at 5:15 pm. Wanda was reported missing by her mother three hours later, when she failed to return home.

Wanda Walkowicz

Detectives quickly jumped into action, orchestrating an intensive search to locate the missing child. Approximately 50 police officers searched a wide area around her home, the store where she was last seen and a nearby river where Wanda used to play.

 

While the search was ultimately fruitless, several witnesses saw Wanda struggling to carry the bag of groceries, with three classmates recalling with clarity that they saw her brace the bag against a fence so she could get a better grip, as a brown car drove past her. The same color vehicle that witnesses saw in the Carmen Colon abduction. 

 

After setting up a tip hotline, police received a witness who claimed to have seen the young girl standing next to the passenger door of a large, brown vehicle as she spoke to the driver. Another witness that came forward said they saw a man forcing a young girl matching Wanda’s description into a light-colored Dodge Dart on the day she went missing. The witness who originally gave the partial number plate returned to the police station several days after his original visit. The man had luckily come across the same beige vehicle he had stopped to help but this time he was able to get a full license number. This led police to an unemployed petty criminal living with his family in Lyons, New York.

 

The suspect was a good match for sketches given by witnesses. He had also been the owner of the beige sedan witnesses had reported seeing. Despite this, the suspect claimed he had nothing to do with the murders and that he had an alibi.

 

The man’s alibi was that he was job hunting all day. After checking his account of events telephone records appeared to confirm his story, though it could just as easily been a family member using the phone, and his family also gave him an alibi. Police eventually released the suspect, who has never been named, after he passed a polygraph.

 

Only one day later Wanda’s body was discovered by a police officer in the morning, at the base of a hill alongside the access road to state route 104, in Webster, about seven miles from her hometown of Rochester. The way her body was positioned seemed to indicate that she was likely thrown from a moving vehicle, her small delicate body rolling down the dirty embankment to its final resting place.

 

Just like Carmen, she too was sexually assaulted and strangled. Although unlike Carmen, she was fully clothed, and was strangled by a ligature (thought to be a belt) from behind, whereas Carmen was manually strangled from the front. She also appeared to have been redressed after her death, with the autopsy revealing traces of semen and pubic hair on her body.

 

Interestingly, several strands of white cat fur were found on her clothes, although her family didn’t own a pet with white fur.

 

Only seven months later, on November 26, 1973, another 11-year-old girl went missing. Michelle Maenza failed to return home from school, and was last seen by her classmates walking alone towards a shopping plaza located close to her school, with the intention of getting a purse her mother had left inside a store in the plaza earlier that day.

A little while after she was seen walking to the plaza, a witness saw Michelle sitting in a beige or tan car that was traveling at high speed. The witness noted that Michelle was weeping.

 

Hours later, another motorist saw a man standing by a large beige or tan car with a flat tire, alongside Route 350 in the nearby town of Walworth, holding a girl he believed to be Michelle by the wrist. When the motorist stopped to offer a hand, the man “grabbed the girl and pushed her behind his back”, while also covering his license plate from view. The witness claimed that the man stared at him with an angry, menacing look that compelled the driver to move along, although he did write down a partial license plate.

 

Two days later, Michelle’s small, fully clothed body was found lying face down in a ditch on a rural road in Macedon, 15 miles from Rochester. Like the other two girls she had been raped, strangled from behind with a ligature, with her body bearing bountiful evidence indicating excessive blunt force trauma.

 

Like Wanda, there was the presence of white cat fur on her clothing, while leaf samples in her clenched fists matched those in the surrounding area where her body was found, meaning she was likely strangled to death at the location she was discovered. Police also noted the presence of semen, which helped determine that she was raped by only one person. Unlike the other cases, detectives were able to recover a partial palm print from her neck, although so far of little use.

 

Oddly, her stomach contents revealed that she had eaten a hamburger and onion rings approximately one hour before she was murdered. This was corroborated by earlier reports of a girl matching Michelle’s description eating at a nearby fast food joint with a white male with dark hair, aged between 25 and 35, approximately 6 ft tall.

 

Those are the three victims. The search began for suspects almost immediately after the first murder. Next up we'll talk about the suspects in the car. There are some interesting people in this set of suspects.

 

Building on police investigators’ theory that Carmen knew her killer, police strongly consider Carmen’s uncle Miguel Colon as the main suspect. Miguel was Carmen’s father’s brother, and once her parents divorced, he formed a relationship with Carmen’s mother, quickly becoming known as Uncle Miguel.

 

There are several compelling reasons why he is thought to have been her killer:

 

Weeks prior to her murder, Miguel purchased a car that closely resembled the vehicle seen by witnesses reversing down the interstate chasing down Carmen.  When investigators searched his vehicle after the murder, they found that it had been wiped clean both inside and out.

To add to the suspicious nature of the state of his car, the trunk was found to have been washed with an incredibly potent cleaning solution. The dealership that sold him the car confirmed to police that they didn’t wash the car’s trunk with detergent before selling it.

One of Carmen’s dolls was found in his car, which relatives informed police was not unusual considering that she frequently traveled with Miguel.

Merely two days after the death of his niece, Miguel informed his friends that he had to leave the country to Puerto Rico, as he had “done something wrong in Rochester.” He left only four days after Carmen was murdered.

While investigators did travel to Puerto Rico to question Miguel in 1972, local papers leaked this, causing Miguel to flee. He eventually surrendered a few weeks later and was extradited back to Rochester for questioning. Although he didn’t have a credible alibi on the date of Carmen’s murder, and other circumstantial evidence, there was simply no physical evidence at the scene or his vehicle to link him to the murder. And so he was released.

 

Several years later Miguel would commit suicide in 1991 after a domestic violence incident in which he shot his wife and his brother, both of whom survived.

 

Many family members are still vocal about their belief that Miguel is Carmen's killer.

 

Next up a giant piece of shit. Just weeks after the death of the final victim of the Alphabet Murders, Michelle Maenza, a man held a teenager at gunpoint. The girl refused to stop screaming despite his repeated threats so the man decided to flee and go on the hunt for an easier target. The man in question was a Rochester firefighter named Dennis Termini. Termini was a prolific serial offender known as the "Garage Rapist" who is known to have committed a minimum of fourteen rapes of teenage girls and young women between 1971 and 1973. He is also known to have owned a beige vehicle similar in description to the vehicle observed by several eyewitnesses to the abductions. On top of this he lives roughly a block away from where Michelle Maenza was abducted. After he was chased by police from his botched kidnapping he was cornered in his car where he promptly did the world a favor and shit himself in the head. A subsequent forensic examination of Termini's vehicle did reveal traces of white cat fur upon the upholstery.In January 2007, Termini's body was exhumed to obtain a DNA sample for comparison with the semen samples recovered from Walkowicz's body. The results of this test confirmed Termini was not responsible for her murder. Despite this he still remains a plausible suspect in the other abductions. 

 

Another interesting suspect is none other than Kenneth Bianchi. We're going to assume that you guys know who that is but for those who don't, google the hillside stranglers. Before Bianchi headed to Los Angeles and committed the hillside strangler murders he lived in the area of the murders and worked as an ice cream vendor. While he was never charged in the murders he remains a suspect. He was known to drive a car similar to the description given of the car involved in the alphabet murders by witnesses. Bianchi would vehemently deny any involvement in the case. He repeatedly asked investigators to officially clear him as a suspect but they did not.

 

The last suspect we're gonna talk about is a guy they called Crazy Joe. Joseph Naso is a convicted serial killer and serial rapist sentenced to death for the murder of six women in California. His crimes spanned between 1977 to 1994. Naso has been one of those killers who seemed to take pride in his work, so much so that he had a rape diary containing gruesome details of the victim's deaths. And that wasn't all. He had a list better known as 'The List of Ten' of his ten murders that he seemed insanely proud of. While the details of the list were vague for the layman, it was a reminder of his work for Naso. He led a life as a photographer with a penchant for clicking pictures of dead women — especially those he killed and had quite the collection. Naso lived in Sacramento between 1999 and 2003 and finally settled in Reno, Nevada, in 2004. He was arrested in 2010. It was quite the body count he stacked up. Roxenne Roggasch was found dead in 1977 after her body was dumped near Fairfax. She was strangled to death. This was followed by Carmen Colon in 1978. This one is obviously crazy considering that it's the same name of one of the victims in New York.  Pamela Parsons was a waitress who was found murdered in 1993. Three of those four fit the same pattern as New York. Double initials. He drugged, raped and strangled these women before dumping their bodies. He was also convicted in the murder of another double Initial murder of Tracy Tafoya. All of this is pretty similar to what went down in New York. Another victim would be identified from his book, Sarah Dylan. All told six women would be connected to Naso but the other four in his book would never be identified. Naso also had numerous pictures of women in various states of undress all seemingly unconscious, some of which were found to be his murder victims. Not only was Naso linked due to the double initials of his victims and those in the Rochester Alphabet Murders but also because his modus operandi was to offer a lift in his vehicle before murdering his victims, similar to how police believed the Rochester perpetrator enticed his victims. Police were given further hope as Joseph Naso was born in Rochester, New York and lived there for many years, including the time period when the young girls were murdered. Again investigators we're hopeful with this lead but again when the DNA taken from Wanda was tested with crazy Joe it was negative. Due to this he had been largely written off as a suspect but many still think he had something to do with at least one of the murders in New York.

 

DNA was only able to be collected from one victim. And while the suspects mentioned did not match her, it didn't necessarily rule them out on the other ones. Some people think there were separate killers. With a popular opinion being that Miguel killed Carmen Colon and someone else was responsible for the other two. This is another case that has fascinated true crime enthusiasts and confused investigators. We may never get the answers we're looking for but that won't stop people from looking and speculating. 

https://addictedtohorrormovies.com/2017/06/15/the-10-best-horror-movies-of-1995/