The Ivy League Killer (2 page)

Chapter 4: These Cases Are Connected

James Taylor never imagined that when he said good-bye to his wife Debra on the evening of June 15, it was for the last time. Around midnight, they’d run out of gas near Danielson, Connecticut, which had caused an argument. Unsure where a gas station might be, they’d decided to split up, each going in a different direction.

Debra walked along the side of the unlit road, hoping she could find a ride, and ended up in a park in town. She sat down. She just wanted to go home. A man pulled over. He was slender, looked quite young, and wore glasses. He sold insurance, he said. He asked if she needed help. He seemed friendly enough, and there was nothing sinister about him. Debra said that she’d like a ride home. He agreed to take her and opened the car door.

When James made his way back to the car, he filled the gas tank and then drove along the way that he believed Debra had gone. He kept his eyes on the side of the road, but he didn’t see her. He didn’t know she was already dead. Finally, he reported her missing and returned home to Jewett City, as the police organized an extensive search of the area. Debra didn’t call. She didn’t show up at home. Over the next four months, James was in agony. He knew that something terrible had happened to her.

After he strangled Debra Taylor, the killer promised himself that he would not harm anyone else ever again. No matter how good it felt to rape and strangle a girl, no matter how it soothed his obsessive, raging sexual demands, he
had
to stop.

Debra Taylor
Victim

Detective Malchik soon heard about the Debra Taylor case. The woman had disappeared just five miles from where Tammy Williams had apparently been abducted. The location raised a red flag. When Malchik read Debra’s description, he realized how much she resembled Tammy in size and appearance. Both had been small and attractive, and both had walked along roadways alone. He thought there might be a link, so he asked to take charge of the Taylor case, or at least to be included in the unfolding investigation. His supervisor saw no link, so the request was denied.

Malchik wasn’t deterred. When no one was looking, he grabbed the file and took it home to study on his own time. The more he read, the more he was certain there was a connection from both cases to a single offender—possibly a serial killer. If he was right, there was every indication that the man would kill again. He believed they should gather a task force at once. However, his chief didn’t budge. When Debra Taylor remained missing, Malchik suggested that they put something in the newspaper about both her and Tammy. No dice. The chief said that these women were missing persons cases. That was all. No publicity.

Malchik decided to act on his own. Even though his hands were officially tied, he knew that the police weren’t the only ones who went looking for clues. He called a reporter to leak what he knew. He hoped to inspire some kind of exploration into a link between the missing women, believing the suspect would have a record of sexual assault.

The leak turned out to be a bad move. The reporter published an article quoting Malchik that linked the cases and Malchik’s chief was angry that the community had been unnecessarily alerted to the possibility of a serial killer. He did not want to be on the receiving end of reporters’ queries when there were no leads, no certainty about the details, and no hope of reassuring residents that the streets would soon be safe. Most police administrators prefer to work on such cases as quietly as possible until they have something productive to report. Malchik was told in no uncertain terms to back off or risk losing his job.

The reporter’s piece had spooked people. In fact, it had spooked the killer. He’d figured this day was coming. He even pondered turning himself in, or killing himself. When he saw no more mention of a serial killer in the days that followed, he felt better. He kept Malchik’s name in the back of his mind.
That
was the man to fear.

On October 23, hunters discovered skeletal remains in a cornfield near Canterbury, Connecticut. When Malchik heard about it, he called his partner, Frank Griffin, and rushed to the scene to learn the details. The medical examiner indicated that the remains were from a female and that her skull had been crushed. However, with such advanced decomposition, it was difficult to determine if she’d been sexually assaulted. By this time, weather and animals had wiped out whatever clues there might have been to her killer’s identity. This victim, it turned out, was Debra Taylor.

Malchik and Griffin looked through the body dump site to see if they could turn up leads. They were aware that other detectives had already learned that Dan Ross, who owned a Brooklyn-based chicken farm, Eggs, Inc., routinely dumped manure onto this field. The detectives met with Ross and he offered the names of workers who would know about the field. However, a check on each of them turned up nothing suspicious. What had seemed a viable lead turned into a dead end. Malchick kept it in the back of his mind. For all he knew, it was a lead that just didn’t yet look like a lead.

Malchik didn’t realize that the killer was serving a short sentence in Ohio for a botched assault. Getting an early release in December (he’d persuaded the judge that he’d been acting out over his parents’ divorce), the killer was ready to resume. The psychiatrist who’d treated him had believed that this “over-achiever” and “workaholic” had “too much time on his hands” and should take a graduate course, start jogging, or “get a hobby.”

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Chapter 5: Diversion

The killer stayed under the radar for five months, until May 1983. He was on the street, moving from one telephone pole to another, when a woman passed him. He honed in: This was the one.

“Bad night to be walking in the rain,” he said.

Vivian Dobson ignored him. She was close to home. She carried a knife wherever she went and she stayed vigilant, but she never heard her attacker come up behind her. His voice changed as he told her to do as he said. She wasn’t about to go down so easily. She had three young children waiting for her. Struggling with him, Vivian was able to get the knife close to his chest. She knew she could just push it in and at least hurt him enough to escape. But then she made a mistake. She looked into his eyes. He was smiling at her. He opened up his arms in a gesture of surrender, and she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She reacted just as he knew she would. And then she was helpless.

He shoved the knife away, forced her to remove her clothes, pushed her onto her stomach on the ground, and raped her. It was faster than she’d expected, but painful. He clearly enjoyed being cruel. She sensed that this act was merely about proving to himself that he was in control. She’d seen his face. She’d be dangerous to him, she knew, and she expected that once he was done, he’d kill her. She thought about her kids and wondered why she hadn’t acted when she’d had the chance. If she got another chance, she’d kill him. She’d stop him from ever doing this again to her or anyone else.

Inexplicably, he got up and looked down at her. She flinched, expecting a blow. He didn’t kill her. Instead, he told her that he knew where she lived and he would come back for her. The next time he saw her, he’d kill her. She’d never know when that might be.

For her, this became a prison sentence. For him, it was a way to relive in his mind the terror he was causing her, no matter how far away from her he was. She would be his victim every single day of her life. She wouldn’t get help because she wouldn’t dare go tell anyone what had happened to her. She’d be too scared for herself and her children. For all she knew, he lived somewhere in town and kept track of her movements. She would never again live a day without fear… unless he was caught.

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Chapter 6: Compulsion

One day at a time, the killer could count several months free of an assault. He told himself that he was trying. He’d even attempted to kill himself to prevent another incident. He was angry at the women. They made it too easy, out there walking alone or hitchhiking. It wasn’t entirely his fault, he assured himself. After getting a job with Prudential as a traveling insurance man (scoring second-highest on a national test), he made it through the summer of 1983, and into the fall. He thought he was going to be okay. But then, while he was driving through Norwich, Connecticut, on November 16, he saw a pretty girl all by herself, looking for a ride. He pulled over. She had no idea that once he had seen her, she was already dead.

Robin Stavinsky had just left work for the day, after an argument. She was on her way to see her boyfriend, but had refused a ride from a coworker. She wanted to walk off her anger before seeing her boyfriend. The 17-year-old secretary had been a state champion discus thrower. She was strong… but not strong enough. She refused a ride from second person, a stranger, but unlike the coworker, this man would not take “no” for an answer. Robin disappeared that day.

When Robin’s family reported her missing, the police conducted a search. Nothing turned up. Ironically, the girl had last been seen not far from the Connecticut State Police Major Crime Squad office. The word spread and friends and neighbors were frantic. They knew she wouldn’t have run away. But they found no trace of her in those first days after she’d vanished.

A week later, a man out jogging along Route 32 near Norwich State Hospital, a psychiatric institution, came across Robin’s body in the woods. She’d been raped and strangled, then left facedown.

Norwich Hospital, Admin. Bldg.
Photo by CLK Hatcher

Robin’s parents appealed to the public for information and Governor William O’Neil offered a $10,000 reward. Someone found Robin’s purse in a creek about nine miles from where her body was found, but nothing else of value to the investigation turned up. No one stepped forward with information that could earn the reward, so Robin’s killer went unidentified.

Six months later, Malchick pondered a link between the fatal assaults on Robin Stavinsky and Debra Taylor and the disappearance of two other girls from the same general area.

On Easter Sunday of 1984, April Brunais and Lesley Shelley hitchhiked home on Highway 138 after seeing a movie in Griswold, Connecticut. They wanted to go to the Jewett City pizza parlor, about four miles away. A young man pulled over and offered them a ride. He lived in Jewett City, he said, so it was on his way. The girls were delighted. He seemed completely harmless. Besides, it wasn’t that far. They would be there in less than 10 minutes. They got in and told him about the movie they’d just seen. He responded for a few minutes, as if he were truly just a man doing a neighborly favor.

Then something seemed wrong. When they passed their destination, the girls realized they weren’t headed to Jewett City. April touched the knife she kept on her for protection. It was just an ordinary steak knife, but she pulled it out and threatened him. She insisted that he stop the car and let them out. Startled, he nearly drove off the road. He yelled at her to give him the knife. She hesitated but then complied.

April Brunais and Lesley Shelley
Victims

The girls grew scared. Their parents had warned them about men like this. They demanded again that he stop and let them out. He kept driving on Highway 138, crossing over the border into Rhode Island before he found an isolated spot in the area of Beach Pond. He parked the car.

Using Leslie’s elastic belt, he tied her up and made her get into the trunk of the car. April told her to cooperate and he’d let them go. He let her believe it, but he had no such intention. He took April out of the car and had her use the steak knife to cut her jeans into strips. He used these to bind her, but she struggled until she could no longer move. Then he made her lie on her stomach. He raped and strangled her before putting her into the front passenger seat. Leslie called out to her, but April didn’t answer.

Leslie froze when the man opened the trunk and told her to get out. He apologized. He was going to have to kill her, he said. He’d already killed April. Leslie shook her head and started to cry, but she seemed resigned. He put her on her stomach, used his weight to hold her down, and strangled her. When he was sure they were both dead, he took the bodies back to a culvert near Preston, Connecticut, and dumped them.

This incident bothered him. He kept thinking about Leslie’s face, how small she’d been and how easy to kill. Of any other murder he’d committed, this one had seemed the most like his fantasies. He returned to his apartment, but the images haunted him.

He’d tried to stop killing. Every single time, he’d told himself it would not happen again. He felt like a loser—so different from the person everyone had expected him to be. He’d had such potential, but he’d performed badly at his recent jobs. He’d blown all of his relationships. The only thing he was good at was getting away with murder.

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