It was early Sunday morning on August 7, 1966, near the small town of Everman, Texas, just a few miles south of Fort Worth. A farmer who was out on his routine rounds spotted a car abandoned on the side of the road. The trunk had been left ajar, and when he opened it, he saw the dead bodies of two young boys.
This tragic discovery marked the beginning of a series of crimes and trials that would span nearly three decades and ultimately transform Texas law.
Nobody should die that way. I’ve never seen anything that horrific. One of the duties of a pathologist is to determine the cause of death.
On Monday, October 26, 1993, one of the most famous trials in the history of Texas would bring a defiant killer face to face with the team of small-town prosecutors. It would be the biggest case of their lives. If all that was standing between this violent and dangerous man and society was my group of prosecutors and investigators, we had a big responsibility to make sure we got it done.
Almost three decades earlier, in 1966, the Everman Texas Sheriff’s Department responded to the scene of a terrible crime. A local farmer had discovered the bodies of two young boys in the trunk of an abandoned car. The local sheriff was baffled by the execution-style murders.
In this episode, some of the names have been changed to protect the identity of the victims and their families.
The farmer who discovered the body said he knew the youngsters. Both boys, Richard Bond and his cousin Matthew Duncan, grew up in Everman. Authorities learned that the last time their parents saw them was Saturday night, when they headed off to meet Richard’s girlfriend, 17-year-old Laura Smith.
Investigators feared she had been kidnapped or worse.
News of the shooting traveled quickly. That same morning, 100 miles away in the small town of Rosebud, a distraught young man surrendered to the local sheriff. His name was Roy Dale Green, and he said he had to make a confession.
Green told Rosebud Sheriff Brady Pamplin that all three youngsters had been kidnapped and tortured by a local bully named Kenneth McDuff. It was not the first time Sheriff Pamplin had heard McDuff’s name. He had previously locked him up for burglary, robbery, and assault at the age of 17.
Today, 25 years later, Sheriff Brady Pamplin’s son Larry Pamplin is the retired Sheriff of Falls County. A young deputy at the time, he remembers the day Roy Dale Green walked into his father’s office. My dad had been in law enforcement all of his life, and he said that Kenneth McDuff was probably the most vicious, violent individual that he had ever come into contact with.
Green told the sheriff that he and McDuff were cruising the small town of Everman when they saw two boys and a girl standing by a car near a baseball field. McDuff told Green that he wanted to find a girl he could rape and 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁. The girl we got in in his truck, it was just a three, and he told Green if he told anyone, he’d 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 him too.
Green said when they approached the baseball field, McDuff got out of the car with a gun in his hand and walked up to the three teens. Green waited by the car. He said he didn’t believe McDuff really planned to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 anyone.
He thought he was just fooling around, trying to scare them a bit.
Hey, get out of the car. Get out right now.
But it was clear to the frightened teens that McDuff wasn’t kidding. Come on. He held them at gunpoint and took their wallets.
All right, come on back here.
As Green watched, McDuff ordered the three youngsters to get into the trunk of their car. Come on, man, get in there. Get in.
Hurry up. You’re next. Come on, come on.
Here we go, here we go.
When McDuff told Green they had to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 the teens because they had gotten a good look at his face, Green said he still thought McDuff was joking. Yeah, we’re going to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 them. Take the car.
Drop. Follow me. All right, all right.
Where we going?
And he just went along with the game. McDuff drove the car with the three teens in the trunk, and Roy Dale Green followed in McDuff’s car. They didn’t stop until they reached a secluded area on the far side of town.
Finally, on a dark back road, McDuff pulled over. Just a girl. Come on out.
He opened the trunk, told the two boys to lay still, and ordered Laura out of the car. Hey, come on over here.
Green said McDuff told him to put Laura in the trunk of McDuff’s car. That’s right. What are you doing, man?
Both boys were shot repeatedly in the face. My father just couldn’t visualize any individual, especially a person 21 years old, being so hardcore and so violent and having no sign of a conscience that they would repeatedly shoot the two little boys in the head.
Green said McDuff told him to erase their tire tracks while he wiped the car clean of fingerprints. Then McDuff got into his own car, along with Roy Dale Green, the little girl being in the trunk. They drove on down the gravel road, actually into Johnson County, and at that point in time stopped the vehicle and raped the little girl.
Green raped the little girl. McDuff raped her again and then choked her to death on the gravel road, with Green holding her ankles. According to Green, they threw the body over a fence and covered it with brush.
Sheriff Pamplin launched a massive search to find the body of Laura Smith. Roy Dale Green tried to help, but the area was unfamiliar to him, and he couldn’t remember where they had left the body. At the same time, a manhunt was launched to find Kenneth McDuff.
Investigators had information that McDuff would be out on a date that night with a girl from Everman, Texas. They waited at the girl’s house, hoping he would arrive.
You know, it’s been a number of years, but if I remember correctly, it was like 11:30 p. m. exactly when all hell broke loose.
McDuff saw the lawmen, tried to back out, but the sheriff’s deputies opened fire, shooting out his tires and radiator, crippling the car. McDuff was taken unhurt.
It took days of searching before the body of Laura Smith was found and her family could bury her. Kenneth McDuff and Roy Dale Green went to trial in October of 1966. The first case to be tried was for the murder of Matthew Duncan.
The prosecutors were confident they could get a capital conviction. They had a body, evidence linking McDuff to the victim, and an eyewitness. Former prosecutor Charlie Butts recalls that Roy Dale Green’s cooperation alone would not be enough to convict McDuff of the murder.
Then we had the problem in Texas of corroborating an accomplice witness, and certainly he was. He needs to be corroborated with some evidence that tends to show that he’s telling the truth or tends to connect the person he is saying is guilty.
Key pieces of evidence enabled the prosecutors to corroborate Green’s testimony. Two wallets belonging to the victims were found in a field, and Kenneth McDuff’s burned and bloody shirt was found buried on property belonging to his older brother. In return for his testimony, the prosecutors would not pursue the death penalty for Roy Dale Green’s role in the murders.
But McDuff would get no plea bargain, and he didn’t want one. He denied any part of the crime, and his biggest supporter was his mother. She had a long history of denying any of her son’s troubles, and she supported her son Kenneth in blaming Green for the murders.
The prosecutors exploited what they considered to be the weakest element of McDuff’s defense. Then he made a mistake of laying it all off on Green. He said that he had taken a nap or something and claimed that Green had gone off and done all these things.
You could look at Green and tell that kid couldn’t do, couldn’t even conceive of doing that, let alone carry it out by himself.
The jury reached a verdict. McDuff claimed he was innocent, that the police were out to frame him. Now the jury would have to make the decision to convict Kenneth McDuff for murder or to set him free.
In November 1966, in Fort Worth, Texas, 21-year-old Kenneth Allen McDuff was convicted for the murder of 15-year-old Matthew Duncan. The jury sentenced him to death in the electric chair for the execution-style slaying. McDuff showed little emotion after the trial.
For the murder of Matthew Duncan, the prosecutors saw no cause to try McDuff for the murders of the other two teenagers.
Kenneth McDuff had been sentenced to die in the electric chair. Texas author Gary Lavergne covered McDuff’s murderous career for his book Bad Boy from Rosebud. There was some security there because he had been convicted of one murder and had been sentenced to death, and at least there was a notion in Texas at the time that surely nothing could be more final than a death penalty.
At Huntsville Prison in Texas, McDuff was on death row. His first execution date was stayed, then his second. By April 1970, McDuff was still in his 20s.
He was awaiting his third scheduled execution date, but he was confident that this date too would be canceled.
Then in 1972, the Supreme Court made its landmark decision in the case of Furman versus Georgia. The Court ruled that the death penalty as it was currently practiced was unconstitutional. Minorities and those with low incomes were not receiving equal treatment in the courts.
As a result of the ruling, McDuff’s sentence was reduced to life imprisonment. Under Texas law at that time, that meant eventually this triple murderer would have the right to apply for parole.
Eight years later, in 1980, McDuff came up for parole. To make it very clear, at the time three parole board members would hear an inmate’s case, and it would take two votes to pass. McDuff’s good behavior in prison convinced one of the members, but the other two voted it down.
By the late 1980s, Texas prisons were getting dangerously overcrowded, while little money was being spent to build new ones. The parole review system was taking the heat. The people of Texas did not want to vote new taxes to expand government, and expanding a prison system is an expansion of state government.
So political leaders at the time responded by instructing the Board of Pardons and Paroles to literally release thousands of people every month. As time went on, more and more violent criminals were being paroled under a perfectly legal process.
By the time McDuff was up for parole once again in 1989, his application was just one file stacked on top of a mountain of others. After 15 denials for parole, Kenneth McDuff incredibly got his letter of release.
It didn’t take long for word to reach the sheriff’s office in his hometown. Sheriff Brady Pamplin, who had arrested McDuff in 1966 for the shooting of the three teenagers, had retired, and his son Larry was now the new sheriff of Falls County. When I first found out that Kenneth Allen McDuff had been released from prison, the first thing I did was call Parnell McNamara in Waco, Texas, Deputy US Marshal.
Parnell and his brother Mike both are Marshals, and we’ve been friends ever since we were little bitty boys. I called Parnell and told him, I said, Parnell, you’re not going to believe this, but they’ve released Kenneth McDuff. I don’t know if it’ll be 3 days, 3 weeks, 3 months, but sooner or later the bodies of young girls, young ladies, or boys are going to start turning up.
Now a second generation of Texas lawmen feared they would be dealing with Kenneth McDuff. Parnell McNamara and his brother Mike are the sons of a lawman who helped put away McDuff in the 1960s. Today they are investigators with the US Marshals Service.
I remember just sitting there in total disbelief. I absolutely could not believe that anyone in their right mind would have ever paroled a serial killer, someone who had brutally murdered three young people like he had. Total disbelief.
On October 11, 1989, Kenneth McDuff was escorted out of Ramsey Prison. Although he had been sentenced to die 23 years earlier, he was now a free man. McDuff returned to the town of Rosebud, Texas, where he grew up.
People in his hometown were terrified when they learned he had been released. The town began to shut down. Doors were locked, shades drawn, attendance at the schools dropped.
There were reports of families not letting their children out, bus drivers being told to be careful because McDuff is out. That’s the sad irony of all of this. When he was in school, he caused school officials trouble even as a young kid.
Now he’s been in prison for 23 years, he’s let out, and bus drivers have to be careful all over again. It was a very bizarre event in the history of Central Texas.
Citizens of Rosebud were much relieved when Kenneth McDuff moved away from home. In the spring of 1991, McDuff enrolled in the Texas State Technical College at Waco and moved into a dormitory on campus. He received financial aid as part of his rehabilitation program, and for the next year he regularly reported to his parole officer.
But authorities would soon learn that McDuff was far from rehabilitated.
On March 1, 1992, Waco Police responded to a call that a clerk from a convenience store had disappeared. 22-year-old Melissa Northrup was working alone on the overnight shift at a Quick Pack. From the time he got here, her husband told police that he had just been on the phone with her when a customer walked in.
He called back a few minutes later but got no answer. Police found Melissa’s purse under the counter, and her car was missing from the parking lot.
Waco Police did a routine check of cars at a nearby motel. They found a car that the manager confirmed did not belong to a guest. Investigators found a wallet in the car.
It contained a social security card and a driver’s license, both belonging to Kenneth McDuff. Investigators looked for McDuff at his college, but no one had seen him for several weeks. Students said he was a heavy 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 user and prostitutes visited his dorm room.
Waco Police could not locate McDuff, but investigators were soon called back to the college. A student had found a naked, decomposed body in a shallow grave in a wooded area behind McDuff’s dormitory. But this would not be the body of Melissa Northrup.
It was yet another victim.
With McDuff on the loose, local investigators had to act fast. They feared that after 23 years, Kenneth McDuff was once again on a killing spree. On March 25, 1992, a woman’s body was found buried in a shallow grave behind the Texas State Technical College at Waco.
This victim would turn out to be Valencia K. Joshua. According to a student witness, she was last seen on campus looking for Kenneth McDuff weeks earlier.
Kenneth McDuff’s car was found abandoned near the Quick Pack store where another missing woman, Melissa Northrup, was last seen. But in both cases, the investigation had produced only the most circumstantial evidence.
With McDuff on the run, local investigators sought the help of US Attorney Bill Johnston. Our concern was now, who’s he killing now? Who’s he going to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 tonight?
We really felt strongly that he was on a spree. Johnston knew that if he could charge McDuff with a federal violation, he could coordinate a statewide effort to apprehend McDuff, and he could bring in the full investigative talents of US Marshals Parnell and Mike McNamara. I wanted to find a way for Mike and Parnell McNamara to get involved in this thing.
I’d seen them on many manhunts. I knew how good they were, and I just wanted some hook to drag them in with.
McDuff’s well-known 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 use opened the door. The federal investigators found a young man who said McDuff had given him LSD. This was enough to write a federal 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 warrant, and a task force was formed.
US Marshal Mike McNamara: We contacted every agency that we possibly could, and in a very short period of time, every law enforcement agency in the central Texas area was involved in this manhunt.
The McNamara brothers began interviewing anyone who ever associated with McDuff. When they tracked down a man named Alva Hank Worley to a Temple motel, they knew they were on to something. Worley said he didn’t know anything about the Melissa Northrup abduction or the Valencia K.
Joshua killing. Worley did not respond like a normal person would to our interviews. When we explained to him what McDuff had done in 1966, Worley seemed oblivious to it.
It didn’t seem to either register with him or bother him in the least. So when we left the motel where Worley was living, everyone in the car agreed that something was wrong with Worley, that he wasn’t acting right.
Over a period of weeks, the McNamaras returned to the motel to talk to Worley, trying to break him down. Eventually Worley agreed to come into the Bell County Sheriff’s Department and give a complete statement. He claimed he knew nothing about Northrup or Joshua, but Worley said he had information about a missing person’s case currently under investigation by Austin Police.
Hank Worley told us that on the night of December 29, 1991, he and McDuff were in Austin and they passed by a car wash. McDuff pulled into one of the car wash bays and told Worley to stay with the car.
According to Worley, McDuff went to the next bay, where a young woman was washing her car. Worley said McDuff turned to his vehicle holding her by the throat. He said McDuff raped and killed her, but he claimed he didn’t participate in the murder.
In the abandoned car, Austin Police found a purse and identification belonging to the victim, Colleen Reed. A surveillance photo at a nearby ATM machine helped narrow the time of her disappearance to sometime after 9:15 p. m.
Worley claimed he could not remember where McDuff had disposed of her body.
Now investigators finally had an eyewitness, the same kind of weak, suggestible accomplice that helped put McDuff away 30 years earlier in the murder of the three teenagers. But they still had to find McDuff. Over 12 state and federal agencies participated in the hunt for him.
When there seemed to be no trace of McDuff in Texas, the search went nationwide. All the major networks and news organizations ran stories on the fugitive. A hotline was set up.
On May 3rd, they received a tip. The call was that a fellow who drives a trash truck, a garbage truck in Kansas City, thinks McDuff might be up there with him. Of course we thought, you got to be kidding.
I mean, Kansas City might as well have said the moon to us, because we were convinced he would probably stay in areas he was familiar with. The tipster said another driver going by the name of Richard Fowler looked like McDuff. Luckily, this Mr.
Fowler had been arrested for soliciting in Kansas City, and Kansas City Police had a sole index fingerprint on file. That one fingerprint belonged to Kenneth McDuff.
At 1:30 in the afternoon on Monday, May 4th, McDuff, now on the run as Richard Fowler, was driving his garbage truck to the Kansas City dump. Police posing as truck inspectors waved him down for what he thought was a routine check. McDuff came out of his truck with his log and was too surprised to run when they cuffed him.
Kenneth McDuff was flown back to Texas under heavy guard. The burden was now on the prosecutors to make sure McDuff never again walked the streets of Central Texas. The body of Melissa Northrup, the Quick Pack store clerk, had recently been found in an abandoned quarry in Dallas County, her car stuck in the woods nearby.
The body of Colleen Reed, the woman abducted from the car wash, was still missing. Prosecutors had an eyewitness, but without a body, murder would be difficult to prove. For the homicide of Valencia Joshua, there was no eyewitness and no physical evidence pointing to McDuff.
Of the three cases, elected prosecutor of McLennan County John Segrist decided to first try McDuff for the murder of Melissa Northrup. Our strategy was to tie him as many times as we could to the victim, to the scene of the crime, to where the body was found, to the motive for murder, to anything we could possibly find to make those ties and reinforce the ties as many times as you possibly could, because hopefully we could build a case that was strong enough and the circumstances were such that this jury could say that there, beyond a reasonable doubt, this was the man responsible.
First Assistant Crawford Long, a forensic expert, would present what little physical evidence they had and concentrate on trying to prove McDuff’s pattern of behavior to the jury. When you’re presenting a case of circumstantial evidence, the problem is the jury likes to hear a person come in and say, I saw that person do the crime. I saw the defendant 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 the person.
In a circumstantial case, you’re not going to have that. You’re going to have small bits and pieces of evidence that, when taken all together, will point out the defendant as the killer.
First Assistant Long would bring McDuff’s associates to the stand to provide testimony about his movements on the day of the murder and the violent nature of his behavior generally. A person’s character is not admissible to prove their conduct. However, the law in Texas provides it can be used to prove motive and to prove identity.
We had a case that was built like a domino house, a domino house built around a man who knew how to cover his tracks. Even his friend said he understood a single hair could send him to prison. He took great care wiping off fingerprints.
But ultimately, no crime scene can be left perfectly clean, and there were some foreign hairs found in Melissa Northrup’s abandoned car. Though DNA tests were ordered on the hair, a portion of the test became contaminated by the lab contracted to perform the analysis, and the prosecutors couldn’t present any of the DNA evidence in court.
The small-town prosecutors would have to prove to the Houston jury it was McDuff, and only McDuff, who killed Melissa Northrup. But without an eyewitness and no conclusive forensic evidence, McDuff’s attorneys could make a convincing argument that their client was innocent.
Kenneth McDuff’s trial for the murder of Melissa Northrup began in Houston in February of 1993. The prosecutor made his opening statement to the 12-member jury. He began with a detailed account of the events leading up to Melissa Northrup’s kidnapping and murder.
He described how McDuff’s car broke down near Highway 35 and New Road in Waco, that McDuff had spent the day trying to raise money to smoke crack, and as McDuff had said to a friend, get a woman. Walking distance of that convenience store, just before 4 in the morning, the prosecutor told the jury, McDuff left the car in the parking lot of the New Road Inn.
At this point there are no eyewitnesses, but the prosecution sets the scenario that McDuff walked to the nearby Quick Pack convenience store. The prosecution would show that McDuff had worked briefly at a different Quick Pack store and he knew how it operated. He knew it had no security cameras.
He knew the night clerk was alone. He knew there was cash in the register. And he left no evidence, not a single fingerprint.
The prosecutor told the jury that Melissa Northrup’s car was found near Dallas a few days after she had disappeared. A short while later, her body was found floating in a gravel pit by a couple of fishermen. Her hands and feet had been tied with shoestrings.
There were no fingerprints, no confessions, nothing personal left at the crime scene except a few hairs.
The prosecution’s strategy was twofold. To build their circumstantial case, they needed to track Kenneth McDuff’s every move on the day and night Northrup disappeared. Secondly, they needed to prove a pattern of violence.
Hoping to establish McDuff’s violent, unpredictable behavior, the prosecution questioned his associates on the stand. The problem was these witnesses had criminal records of 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 use, prostitution, and other crimes, and the prosecutors had to convince the jury their testimony was truthful.
Before the prosecution’s key witness could take the stand, the prosecutors would have to convince the judge to allow his testimony. The judge asked the jury to step out of the courtroom before he would hear the state’s argument for calling Alva Hank Worley. Worley was a witness to the abduction and murder of Colleen Reed.
The prosecutors needed Worley’s testimony to show a pattern between the Reed and the Northrup case, the pattern of the hunt, the capture, the torture, and the hiding of the two bodies. We were able to show the judge what we believed were 22 characteristics that were consistent with the Melissa Northrup case.
The judge agreed that there were at least 15 consistencies between those two cases. For example, both were young white Caucasian females. Both were short and weighed approximately 100 pounds.
Both had their purses left behind. Both took place along Interstate 35 corridor. Although the Colleen Reed case had not yet come to trial, the judge ruled that Hank Worley, the eyewitness to Reed’s alleged abduction from the car wash and her murder, could tell the court what he had seen.
According to Texas law, a witness could provide testimony to show the modus operandi of the accused.
Now the prosecutors could show the jury how McDuff kidnapped and murdered his victims. What in particular did Mr. McDuff say?
He said he was going to take himself a girl that night. McDuff’s friends were generally slow-witted people that McDuff felt he needed to have around him to reinforce his superior complex. What he didn’t figure on was that these people would have a conscience and would break down.
Worley said McDuff liked to talk about snatching women, and he saw him do it to Colleen Reed at the Austin car wash. He got out of the car and he walked around the wall and he grabbed the girl by the throat and then he brought her back over to the car. What did he intend to do with her?
Well, he said that he was going to get rid of her, use her up or get rid of her. Worley said McDuff tied her feet and hands with shoelaces, just like the shoelaces found on the body of Melissa Northrup.
Having failed to prevent Worley’s damaging testimony from being heard by the jury, the defense now had only one recourse: to discredit the witness. McDuff’s attorney viciously attacked Worley as a liar and a rapist. Isn’t it true that in fact you stated at one time, I tried to untie her.
I told her I would try to help her. She wanted me to stay back there with her because she knew I would not hurt her. That’s right.
And you helped her by raping her, isn’t that correct? I did not rape her. Are you telling the jury that she voluntarily had 𝒔𝒆𝒙 with you?
She knew that I wasn’t going to hurt her. So long as I was back there with her, I wasn’t going to hurt her.
The defense’s attack on Worley was a blow to the prosecution, and there was still another weakness in the case. There was no eyewitness placing McDuff at the gravel pits in Combine, Texas, where Melissa Northrup’s body was found. But then a surprise witness came forward.
I got a note from my investigator that there was a phone call from a young lady in Dallas County who lived very near the gravel pits where Melissa Northrup’s body was found, and she wanted to talk to us.
Sher Robinson testified that on March 2nd, 36 hours after Melissa Northrup was abducted from the Quick Pack store, a dirty and disheveled McDuff came to her door late at night asking for food. I heard a light tap at the door, and I opened the door and I stood there, and he said he was hungry and him and his old lady had just gotten into an argument, and he asked me if I had a sandwich. I said, I don’t have a sandwich, I have a bowl of beans.
That’d be fine, that’d be fine. Well, I got the bowl of beans and I gave it to him, and he went on his way.
Robinson had placed McDuff within 2 miles of the location where Northrup’s body was found. Stunned by Robinson’s testimony, McDuff demanded to tell his side of the story, though his defense lawyers argued against it. McDuff was confident he could convince the jury of his innocence.
His attorney was so upset he asked the judge to be taken off the case, but the judge denied his request. We had hope that McDuff would take the witness stand. Even the judge took him back into chambers and told him, you’re making a bad move.
McDuff took the stand. He believed he only needed the chance to tell his side of the story, and once he did, the jury would see that he was an innocent man. Against the advice of his lawyers and the judge, Kenneth McDuff took the stand and professed his innocence.
Mr. McDuff, did you on March 1st, 1992, abduct and murder Miss Melissa Northrup? No, I had nothing to do with that.
On Saturday, I went out and I bought some beer and I was already…
He began to recount a long and winding journey on the day of the murder. Saturday night, he barely let his lawyer get a word in edgewise. I was already starting to drink.
Before we get into that, watch you let me finish this. Okay, no, I want to ask you another question. It was Saturday night, I bought the beer and…
McDuff claimed his car trouble at the New Road Inn was just a coincidence. He said he spent the early morning pushing his car with another car up to the motel curb. He testified that at about 5 a.
m. , he went back to the dorm of the Texas State Technical College and went to sleep. Afraid of getting sent back to jail, he said he took off the next day, afraid of trouble from his parole officer because he was doing drugs.
Now the prosecutor had his chance to question McDuff. He asked him if he had abducted Northrup from the Quick Pack, used her car to drive her to a remote area about 100 miles north of Waco, and eventually abandoned the car near a quarry where her body was found. Well, if it would have been me, I wouldn’t have drove that car that far.
If I was going to commit… I mean, it just doesn’t make sense to me. So what you’re telling the jury is it’s your tough luck that you happen to be at the very place where Melissa Northrup was kidnapped at the time she was kidnapped?
Look, I think the facts show that I was there after that event. I had to push that car for 45 minutes. Okay, if I had to walk from where my car broke down to the Quick Pack and then walked back again, I mean, we’re talking about a whole lot of time here.
The prosecutor had no more questions. For the first time, McDuff admitted having been at the Quick Pack store. He seemed to have become entangled in his own incredible story and inadvertently blurted out the truth.
The defense attorney told the jury that the case had little to do with law or evidence. It depended on fear, hatred, and a willingness to despise the defendant. In the state’s closing, the prosecutors argued the pattern was clear.
Going to show you today that the evidence shows the defendant was every person’s nightmare. The evidence shows that he’s a monster that comes out of the dark and snatches innocent people.
The jury was out for just over 3 hours. McDuff fit the definition that most people would have of a true sociopath in that he showed no emotion whatsoever, except anger. Kenneth McDuff, this court finds you guilty of the kidnapping and murder of Melissa Northrup.
This court is adjourned. He showed no emotion whatsoever. One of the prosecutors of the 1966 trial described his eyes as dead eyes, that they were black and like a shark.
For the kidnapping and murder of Melissa Northrup, McDuff would get the death sentence. Confident they could win again, the prosecutors indicted McDuff for the murder of Colleen Reed. Once again, the verdict was guilty, and the sentence was death.
Certainly the citizens of Texas were in an outrage that their parole board ever released McDuff in the first place. While serving a life sentence for the 1966 murder, it inspired Texas voters to fund a $2 billion building program for new prisons. The governor at the time, Ann Richards, was able to spearhead a number of reforms that became known as the McDuff laws, including a new definition of life in prison as 45 years behind bars before coming up for parole.
Assistant US Attorney Bill Johnston moved on to other cases but kept his eye on some unfinished business in the McDuff case. The body of Colleen Reed and two other victims had not been found. His time for execution was like a month or two away when we felt like, let’s try, let’s make a push here.
McDuff had admitted to a regular visitor that he had killed two other women in addition to Colleen Reed and Melissa Northrup. He told the visitor where he had buried their bodies, but for some reason McDuff refused to talk about Colleen Reed. He didn’t want to, and what he said was, they won’t need me anymore.
Well, I mean, this is a guy that’s going to be executed in 3 weeks. I wasn’t sure quite what he thought anybody needed him for.
Then prison officials promised McDuff whatever he said, he would be treated no differently, no better but no worse. And McDuff revealed a remote location by the Brazos River. Even after following McDuff’s directions, investigators were having no luck.
In a last-minute decision, prison officials brought McDuff, chained and shackled, to the Brazos River site. I didn’t like him being so personally involved. I didn’t want him to have that satisfaction, but it turned out that it had to be.
There was just no way to do it without him.
Once he arrived at the site, McDuff told investigators where to look for the grave of Colleen Reed. Finally, Colleen’s remains were revealed.
Kenneth McDuff’s appeals finally ran out on November 17, 1998. On that day, he was administered a lethal injection. His last words were, release me.
And that summarizes the murderous life of Kenneth Allen McDuff. To the very end, he considered himself the victim. He considered himself the object of oppression.
Kenneth Allen McDuff murdered and disposed of his victims with dead precision and chilling premeditation. When investigators found the shallow grave of Valencia K. Joshua, they also found a second grave nearby, but this one was empty.
Fortunately, McDuff was arrested before he had the chance to find his next victim.
May 15, 1990, in rural Delaware, investigators exhumed a partially decomposed body from a shallow grave. Detectives launched a nationwide investigation, and a sadistic serial killer became the target of a streetwise New Jersey prosecutor who had to build his case on circumstantial evidence and the testimony of a convicted felon.
In 1990, William J. Phee, assistant district attorney, coordinated an investigation and prosecution in an effort to end the deadly rampage of a brutal killer and the people who protected him. They thought they had everything figured out, and they had pretty much effectively gotten away with murder on two other occasions.
Police were on their heels but never could get enough to just push it over the edge.
On July 9, 1990, Newcastle County, Delaware police received an urgent 911 call. A body had been discovered in a shallow grave on the side of a dead-end road. Detective Alan Ruth headed the investigation.
Heavy rains during a recent thunderstorm had 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 a skull and shoulder to the elements. A forensic team removed the earth surrounding the bones and revealed a complete body. The corpse appeared to have been folded over and buried in a fetal position.
A local resident and his wife had found the body while walking their dog.
Detective Ruth instructed the officers to secure the area. Police closed the road while the forensic team removed the body from the earth. Working like archaeologists, the investigators carefully dug a trench around the remains.
We actually dug down, started off really far away with shovels, and then we actually got to where we felt we were lower than the body would be just by the angle of the upper shoulder area in the head, and we worked our way into the body with little small spades. The medical examiner decided to remove the surrounding earth along with the body so as not to disturb any evidence. The remains were then transported to the morgue for autopsy.
The medical examiner determined that the remains were those of a young woman in her early 20s who at one time had given birth. The advanced state of decay prevented the medical examiner from determining the exact cause of death. He did, however, classify the case as a homicide.
Detective Ruth met with investigators and briefed them on details of the case. As you can see by the picture, the grounds were wet. For those of you who weren’t down at the crime scene, he didn’t go to any great effort to bury her deep.
He hoped that the area surrounding the grave might yield some clues to the woman’s identity and that of her killer. See if we can track down any of the guys who are responsible for mowing grass that are up there all the time, to give us an idea when they were there last.
Investigators checked police reports of missing persons in neighboring states, but they found nothing. Detective Ruth ran a search on the NCIC, the National Database for Violent Crime and Missing Persons. He got a match in Clifton, New Jersey.
Detective Nicholas Donato had been investigating a missing person. A woman had called the station to report that her cousin, Myra Napolitano, had disappeared. She felt that Myra, a devoted mother of two, would not leave and abandon her children.
Donato had questioned the missing woman’s neighbors and family. Now, nearly a month into the case, Donato got his first break regarding Myra. It was a phone call from Detective Ruth in Delaware.
Ruth informed Donato of the body they had recovered from the shallow grave. It matched the description of Myra Napolitano, which Donato had entered into the NCIC database.
To confirm that it was Myra, Donato located her dental records, and investigators met with a forensic odontologist. He was able to positively identify the remains as belonging to Myra Napolitano. Myra had disappeared from her Clifton, New Jersey home on June 21st.
Working with Donato on the case was Detective Lieutenant John Burke. I think that we were comfortable at that point of officially saying it’s not a missing persons anymore. You know, it is now a homicide.
And then the next question was jurisdiction. With a body found in Delaware and the missing person’s investigation originating in New Jersey, the prosecutors from both states determined that the Passaic County prosecutor’s office would take the investigation with the assistance of the Delaware State Police.
Two days after Myra Napolitano was reported missing, her husband had come into the Clifton police station. Eric Napolitano was accompanied by one of his two sons and his mother, Carolyn. Eric shrugged off the report of his wife’s disappearance, saying she had walked out on him.
He even seemed offended by the officer’s concern.
Donato was not convinced by Napolitano’s explanation for his wife’s disappearance, and he was troubled by Eric’s defensive reaction to the police investigation. He decided to question Eric’s neighbors. Teresa Malz said she had last seen Eric leaving the building the night before his wife disappeared, and he had, in her words, murder in his eyes.
I started to hear different stories of threats and certain behavior that was combative, explosive, and threatening throughout the last couple of months. Marital problems had increased because Eric had a girlfriend, and Myra was finally coming to the decision that she was going to leave him. There were threats made that if Myra ever left, Eric would 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 her.
Detectives wanted to re-interview Eric Napolitano. They found him at his apartment and asked him exactly when he had last seen his wife alive. He replied it was June 20th around 8:00 p.
m. at their apartment. The family had planned to have dinner at his mother’s apartment in Manhattan, but Myra refused to go.
When he and the children got home around 11:00 p. m. , Myra was gone.
He said he tried calling her a few times during the night, but nobody picked up the phone.
Detectives were still skeptical about Eric’s story. He was given different stories whenever we talked to him. He said that Myra’s family was hiding her out in the Bronx.
We checked it out, that wasn’t true. Then he said that oh, she has a boyfriend. We checked that out, we couldn’t verify that.
Then he said that they were hiding her out in Puerto Rico. We checked it out, that wasn’t true.
Within a week after Myra’s disappearance, Eric and the children had moved out of the apartment. When Detective Donato conducted a routine background check, he discovered that Eric Napolitano had been a suspect in a homicide on April 29, 1985. Eric’s mother-in-law from his first marriage, Gladys Matos, was found dead on a street corner in the Bronx.
She had been shot in the face six times. A few days before the shooting, Gladys had filed charges against Eric for beating and torturing her daughter, Wanda Matos. The murder weapon was never recovered, and no eyewitness was ever located.
Digging still deeper into Napolitano’s past, Donato learned that an old girlfriend of Eric’s had also been murdered on June 2, 1984. The body of Maria Cudero was found at a national park in eastern Pennsylvania. She had been wrapped in a comforter and bound with a thick cord.
Her throat, face, and head had been violently slashed. The coroner’s autopsy found that she was pregnant and may have been tortured. The body remained unidentified for more than 2 years until someone in the New York City Police Department noticed that a missing person’s report for a Maria Cudero had never been entered into the National Database for Missing Persons.
When the mistake was corrected, the body was immediately identified as Cudero. The only suspect in her murder was Eric Napolitano, a man who investigators now feared was a serial killer.
Detectives found links between the 1984 murder of Maria Cudero, whose tortured body was found in a Pennsylvania park, and the murder of Gladys Matos, who was gunned down on a Bronx street corner in 1985. The suspect in both cases was Eric Napolitano. Eric had been Cudero’s boyfriend and Matos’s son-in-law.
Police interrogated Eric about both murders. At the time of the Matos shooting, Eric claimed to have been asleep at his mother’s apartment. When questioned separately, Carolyn Napolitano backed up her son’s story.
She even filed harassment charges against one of the investigating officers. Because of his mother’s alibis in both cases, Eric could not be charged with the killings. Investigators learned that Carolyn had a job in the New York City Police Department.
According to investigators, she had access to, among other things, the missing person’s database.
William J. Phee was an assistant district attorney of Passaic County, New Jersey at the time of the investigation. Very frustrating thing about this job is to investigate a case, possibly know who did it, but not have enough evidence to move ahead and go to court with it.
And that’s where this was. That was the status of those two investigations.
Eric Napolitano was the only suspect in the murder of his wife Myra. Investigators obtained a warrant to search Eric’s now-empty Clifton, New Jersey apartment. Around the side, near a row of trash cans, they found a large cardboard box.
At one time, it apparently had contained a bumper for a Toyota Corolla, the same model of car that Eric drove. Assistant Prosecutor Walter R. Dewey could not help but notice it was the right size to carry a body.
I think all of us got the sense that this was, in a sense, Myra’s coffin, and that Myra had been transported down to Delaware for burial in Eric’s trunk, inside this box.
Investigators wanted to search Eric’s car for evidence. Using an undercover police car disguised as a Yellow Cab, they placed Eric under surveillance. After following him through the Lincoln Tunnel, they closed in and seized the car in New Jersey.
Eric was furious. He accused the police of harassment and demanded to know what he was being charged with. The investigators replied that he was not under arrest.
They only had a warrant to impound and search his car.
The vehicle, a one-year-old Toyota, was towed to a garage at the Clifton Police Department. Forensic investigators examined the car. They sprayed it with luminol, a substance that fluoresces in the presence of blood, but none was found.
Special vacuums were used to collect fibers from the trunk and passenger compartment. The cardboard box that investigators had found outside Eric’s apartment was sent to the FBI’s hair and fiber unit in Washington, DC. Clifton investigators hoped the FBI lab would find some microscopic evidence that could help convince a jury of Eric’s guilt.
It became increasingly clear that Eric had covered his tracks well, and after 3 months, the investigation was losing momentum. But a subpoena for Eric’s telephone records provided an important new lead. Investigators were particularly interested in one phone call made from Eric’s apartment on the night of Myra’s disappearance.
A phone call was made at 2:44 a. m. Eric had told investigators that he and the children had gone over to his mother’s house for dinner that night.
He said that when he returned home at 11:00 p. m. , Myra was gone.
The 2:44 a. m. phone call was interesting because it was a call from the Clifton apartment where the Napolitanos lived to the apartment of Al Giovani in Queens, New York.
Al Giovani was a close friend of the Napolitano family. They called him Uncle Al.
Detective Donato and Lieutenant Burke visited Giovani’s apartment. They wanted to know why Eric had called him at 2:44 and whether Myra had been part of the conversation. But Giovani flatly denied ever getting the call.
According to the phone records, he was lying. Detectives questioned Giovani several more times, but he repeatedly denied getting the call. Investigator Pete Taro of the District Attorney’s Office found that Giovani would change his stories from one day to the next.
Every interview would be different with Al. Sometimes he would remember things. The next time you would question him about them, he didn’t remember ever saying anything like that.
He was an interesting person to deal with.
Finally, the prosecutor offered Giovani immunity in exchange for information about Eric Napolitano and the murder of his wife. But Giovani refused the offer and divulged nothing. The investigators were getting nowhere.
They suspected Eric had killed Myra but were having trouble assembling enough evidence for an arrest and a conviction.
In October 1990, 4 months after her murder, Myra’s parents were awarded visitation rights with their two grandchildren. But when Myra’s parents went to visit their grandchildren, Eric and the two boys were gone. Now investigators feared that Eric had skipped town, and they had no way to find him.
They enlisted the help of the FBI. Agents began tracking purchases made on a credit card they had learned Eric borrowed from Giovani. They discovered that it had been used to rent a moving van.
When the vehicle was returned to a rental office in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the FBI knew where to begin looking.
Nearly 7 months after the murder of Myra Napolitano, Eric was living with his children in Albuquerque. Agents were surprised to learn he was married again, for the third time. His bride, Sandra, was unaware that the man she had married was under investigation for murder.
When the FBI discovered that Eric had taken out a life insurance policy on his new wife, they worried whether they could stop him before he killed again.
Agents from the FBI had located three-time murder suspect Eric Napolitano in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the midst of an intensive investigation. Eric had fled 1,800 miles from his home in New Jersey. He was now married again, but three women who had crossed Eric in the past were now dead.
In an effort to predict Eric’s next move and obtain a court order for a wiretap, investigators called upon Special Agent Greg McCrary at the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. They asked McCrary to assemble a profile of Eric. The profile that emerged came from both background information on Eric Napolitano himself as well as the crimes.
Together we were able to piece this together, and it was clear to me looking at this that we had an unusual type of offender, a sexually sadistic serial killer who in fact was victimizing people he knew, which is many times unusual. Many times they’re more commonly strangers. He had a pattern of abusive behavior with these women, whether they were his girlfriends, wives, or whomever.
Many times it’s the need to dominate, humiliate, subjugate, and ultimately possess their victims. And the ultimate way to possess is to possess their lives.
The FBI profile classified Eric Napolitano as a sexually sadistic serial killer. The report convinced a judge to issue a court order to tap the work phone of his best friend, Al Giovani. They were able to correctly predict that Eric Napolitano, because of his relationship with Al Giovani and his mother, would almost certainly turn to them.
They had initially received phone records that did indicate they were in almost daily contact, several times a day. Eric would call Al Giovani’s toll-free number, and Al would patch him through to Carolyn. The three would be on the phone together.
The wiretaps were interesting, not that they had any admissions on them. None of these people ever came out and said I did it, but they constantly spoke in a manner that was inconsistent with anyone who was innocent. They also learned that Eric had obtained a semi-automatic weapon that he was carrying openly, which is legal out in New Mexico.
But on the telephone, they learned that he was carrying that and he was planning to possibly shoot Myra’s father should he come looking for him to get the grandchildren.
Early on the morning of March 27th, an FBI SWAT team staked out Eric’s apartment in Albuquerque. Concerned for the safety of Eric’s wife, his children, and Myra’s father, the FBI prepared to apprehend their suspect. The SWAT team’s first step was to secure the apartment.
When Eric left the building, they made their move. Eric’s wife opened the door, and the SWAT team rushed in. They swiftly moved her and the children to safety in a back bedroom.
Then they waited for Eric to return.
As soon as he returned home, he was ordered to get on the floor. His gun was taken from him. An agent told Eric that he was not under arrest.
They only had a warrant to search his apartment. It was a ploy designed to get Eric to make one last self-incriminating phone call. They were hoping that he was going to go to a public telephone.
So he did that, and just as predicted, he called Al Giovani, told him what was happening in his apartment, started talking about evidence, started talking about what they would find, what they wouldn’t find. It worked very well.
Later that day, he was arrested and returned to New Jersey. At the federal Marshal’s office in New Jersey, he was turned over to Detective Donato of the Clifton Police Department, who read him his Miranda rights. After reading his Miranda rights and asking him, Eric, do you wish to make a statement at this time?
Eric said to Detective Donato, what do you think? And that was all they got out of him.
Eric was charged with the murder of his wife Myra. Carolyn was charged with obstructing the efforts of law enforcement officials. But then the strength of the case was called into question.
Although the evidence was purely circumstantial, William J. Phee, the assistant district attorney in New Jersey, believed he had enough to build a case. I was more comfortable with it.
I knew it was a tough case, but I went to my boss and talked to him, and my boss decided to go ahead and do it.
Then the prosecution received some good news. After months of work, the FBI hair and fiber unit issued their forensic report. Fibers had been recovered from a pair of shorts on Myra’s body.
FBI technicians compared these to fibers found in the cardboard box outside Eric’s apartment and fibers from the trunk of his car. When arranged side by side in a comparison microscope, all three samples matched perfectly. But even this important forensic evidence was circumstantial and by itself did not prove that Eric had killed Myra.
The 9-month investigation had not produced a single shred of direct evidence that Eric had killed his wife. The case of the State of New Jersey versus Eric Napolitano was tried in the Passaic County Courthouse in Clifton. Presiding over the trial was Superior Court Judge Vincent E.
Hull Jr. Eric was charged with the murder of his wife Myra Napolitano. The prosecutors would not be allowed to submit evidence from the two previous murders Eric was thought to have committed.
They would therefore be unable to establish a modus operandi linking Eric to three murders.
Opening statements began on April 22, 1993. Phee went on the attack. He warned the jury that as they dig under the surface of the defendant’s seemingly normal life, they will see what he called dirty little facts.
We have testimony. No one would be saying they saw Eric 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 his wife, but the circumstantial evidence would be convincing. Circumstantial evidence can be more compelling and more powerful, and a jury can be more certain of circumstantial evidence than direct evidence.
Eyewitnesses can lie. Eyewitnesses can misperceive certain things. A defendant can lie if you admit his statement.
Circumstantial evidence doesn’t lie. It’s often compared to a puzzle. You start putting it together, and pretty soon what emerges, even without all the pieces yet, is that this person is guilty.
Opening for the defense, Capella conceded that his client may indeed be obnoxious and spiteful and deceptive. The prosecution may prove Napolitano may be a bad person, Capella said, but the prosecution had no cold, hard evidence that Eric had killed his wife. My client Eric may have had a few flaws, but he’s not on trial for his personal characteristics.
He’s on trial for murder.
The prosecution called its first witness, Teresa Malz, Eric’s downstairs neighbor. She would testify to Eric’s demeanor at the time of Myra’s disappearance. To refresh her memory, Phee pointed to a large calendar, but Malz said she couldn’t see too well.
I can’t see that, I’m sorry. Not the sort of thing a prosecutor wants to hear from a witness.
Malz testified that she last saw Myra the night before she disappeared. She appeared really upset. Malz knew that Myra was planning to leave Eric and move back to Puerto Rico.
Myra, she testified, looked upset. When Malz asked her if everything was all right, Myra slammed the door in her face.
But as Malz continued, her memory seemed to fail her. She waffled on her story and appeared confused. About the mother, at first she said Eric’s mother had red hair, then later described her as having black hair.
The prosecutor asked Malz if she saw Eric later that day. Sure, that’s how you remember it. It was around 7:30 that evening, Malz said, when he came out of the apartment.
Didn’t look very happy. That’s all that I can say.
In her pre-trial interviews, Malz had told investigators that Eric had, in her words, murder in his eyes. Now she changed her story to something much milder. When Phee asked Malz to read her prior statements, she said she couldn’t read.
Judge, I’m done with this witness. The prosecutors appeared ridiculously ill-prepared. Walter and I left the courtroom that day saying, what did we do?
What did we get ourselves into? This case is nothing.
At the end of their first day, Phee told Dewey, this case is over. We’ve lost.
Eric Napolitano was charged with the murder of his wife. As the trial entered its second day, the prosecutors feared they would be unable to regain the jury’s confidence. Their first witness had waffled in her testimony, creating an impression that the state had no case.
The prosecutors could only hope that the testimony of Janette Cuculo, Eric and Myra’s neighbor, would be more consistent. Cuculo testified that she was present during a Monopoly game at Eric and Myra’s apartment around Christmas 1989. The more Myra won, the more Eric became upset.
He lunged at her across the table. You think you’re taking the children from me? And they started arguing.
You’re taking anything from me? You ever try to take the children from me, I’ll 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 you. Do you understand me?
Calm down. I’ll 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 you. Myra, calm down.
Sit down, Eric.
Now, this threat that if she left with the kids, that he would 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 her, did you hear that on just this occasion or was it more than one occasion? More than one. Several times.
The prosecutor questioned Cuculo about another incident 4 days after Myra disappeared. Eric asked her to come help with the laundry. He asked her if she wanted some of Myra’s clothing.
Cuculo, confused by the offer, asked Eric what he meant. Myra might come back, she told him. I don’t think she’s ever coming back.
After a disastrous first day, the prosecution’s case was back on track. The state’s next witness was Detective Nicholas Donato. For Donato, this was the climax of an exhaustive investigation.
Donato testified that in interviews with Napolitano, Eric said that the night Myra disappeared, he last saw her at about 8:00 p. m. as he was leaving to have dinner at his mother’s apartment.
When he returned home later that night, Eric said Myra was gone.
In an effort to show that Eric had lied to Donato, the prosecutor next called Gregory Vales. Vales had been living with Al Giovani at the time of Myra’s disappearance. Phone records showed that a call had been made from Eric Napolitano’s apartment to Uncle Al’s apartment at 2:44 that morning.
Vales testified that he answered the phone. It was Eric. Eric said that he got Al out of bed and went back to playing a video game.
Al was hard of hearing and had a speaker phone that he turned up loud. This made it possible for Vales to hear the conversation. Eric was yelling at his wife.
He told Al that Myra had a boyfriend. Vales said he could hear Myra in the background vehemently denying Eric’s accusation. When Giovani asked Myra if Eric was hitting her, Myra said no.
All I know is there was an argument. Vales said he overheard both Myra and Eric speaking to Giovani on the phone. It was almost 7 hours after Eric had told Donato he had last seen Myra.
The prosecution had shown that Eric had lied to the investigators. The prosecutors next attempted to physically link the defendant with the crime. They called an FBI forensics expert to the stand.
The agent related how he examined the cardboard box recovered outside Eric’s Clifton apartment. In the box, he said he found fibers that matched fibers found on the victim’s shorts and in the trunk of Eric’s car. The FBI technician testified that in his opinion, the fibers were all from the same item, a blanket or a throw rug.
The prosecution then played excerpts culled from 2 weeks of wiretaps. On the recordings, Eric seemed particularly concerned that Al may have had his phone bugged. I don’t think a judge would give them a court order to bug your work phone.
I really don’t think they would. What are you going to… You know what I mean?
Some bugging your phone. Even though you talk to me, you’re talking eight, nine months ago. What am I going to be talking about it on the phone?
You know what I’m saying? Yeah, so I doubt it.
They were constantly speaking about anything going on with that investigation, and in tones like this, very, very suspect tones. The jury was able to hear this and say, these are not innocent people talking.
The prosecution had built a compelling case based on circumstantial evidence. Now they would have to take their greatest risk as they called their most controversial witness. The jury had heard witnesses implicating Eric Napolitano in the murder of his wife, but the evidence was only circumstantial.
Prosecutors felt they needed more proof, someone who knew Eric intimately, someone to whom he had confided his secrets.
The state called Al Giovani to the witness stand. Giovani would be the final piece in the prosecution’s puzzle. They hoped his testimony would convince the jury that Eric was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
They knew the defense could attack Giovani’s credibility by exposing his relationship with Gregory Vales, known to police as a prostitute and 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 user. In an effort to minimize the damage, the prosecutor decided to reveal this information himself. Did you pay him for 𝒔𝒆𝒙 the first time you met him?
First time, yes.
The prosecutor moved on to the key question of whether Giovani remembered receiving a phone call at 2:44 a. m. on June 21st, 1990, something he had repeatedly denied.
Yes, I did. And who was that phone call from? From Eric and Myra.
And what was going on during this phone call? What information was given to you by Eric? Eric told me about her intentions to go back to Puerto Rico, and he was against that.
He wanted her to get that Section 8 housing. There was a lot of hollering and screaming going on.
Giovani then told the court about a call he received the following day, on the evening of June 22nd. It was Carolyn calling to tell him that Eric was coming over. When Giovani heard Eric beep his horn, he came down.
Eric said, I got to tell you something. Are you wearing a wire? No, I’m not.
I killed Myra. She was going to take the kids to Puerto Rico. I took her to Delaware.
You’re sick. I did what I had to do. You’re sick.
Giovani said he was disgusted by Eric’s confession but was afraid to go to the police. He said he knew what Eric was capable of doing. Giovani testified that the following day, Eric asked him to come over to his mother’s house to pick up some clothes for the kids and himself.
Eric seemed worried about going back to Clifton. He said, what do we do if the police are there? He said, I’ve cleaned the car up so they’re not going to find any evidence.
Giovani’s testimony that Eric had admitted killing Myra and that he had attempted to obstruct the investigation was a stunning blow to the defense. To get Giovani’s testimony, the state had to drop all charges against him except for hindering the investigation. It was an agreement that was made for him to testify, and he got away with only a few years in jail.
This is something that’s a necessary evil of law enforcement. We make deals with people sometimes, but we felt we were making deals with the person who didn’t do the killing but did know something about it.
The defense team struck back swiftly, raising questions about the reliability of his testimony. You’re going to have five years cut off your prison sentence, correct? I imagine so, yes.
The defense hammered at Giovani’s credibility. They wanted to show the jury that Uncle Al was capable of lying under oath to save himself from more prison time. Five long years, that’s a long time, isn’t it?
Well, it is to me, of course it is.
The prosecution knew the risks of presenting a witness whose testimony came as the result of a deal, but it was a gamble they felt they had to make. Because it was a circumstantial case, I felt that a jury, even if they’re satisfied this is a circumstantial case, they could go out of there more satisfied if they get just one witness who said, yes, the defendant said he did it. He told me he did it.
So that’s why I put Al on, because he was going to give us that information.
The prosecution rested its case. When Judge Hull prompted the defense to begin presenting their witnesses, Capella filed a motion to acquit based on insufficient evidence. Judge Hull denied the motion.
The defense called Assistant US Attorney Glen J. Moramarco to the stand. Moramarco testified that the motion to reduce Giovani’s sentence for conspiracy was contingent on Al’s cooperation with the prosecution.
More importantly, this bolstered the impression that Giovani’s testimony had been bought.
The defense called only three witnesses. Eric declined to testify in his own defense.
It had taken just two weeks for both sides to present their cases. On Thursday, May 6th, closing summations began in the murder trial of Eric Napolitano. The defendant’s attorney stated his belief that many of the witnesses had an agenda.
In other words, they didn’t like Eric, and they didn’t want the jury to like him either. Capella admitted that his client may have been guilty of marital infidelity, but that didn’t mean he was guilty of murder. Eric wasn’t on trial for being a bad person.
He was on trial for murder. The circumstantial evidence was not convincing enough to convict. There are huge pieces at the center of the puzzle, but they are missing.
You must come back with the verdict of not guilty.
In his summation, the prosecutor simply asked the jury to look at the whole picture. If they did, the certainty of Eric’s guilt would be clear. We have witnesses, witnesses that have no reason to lie.
We have evidence.
The jury began their deliberations on Friday. The following Monday, they had reached a verdict. There’s a saying around the courthouse that once the summations are in and the jury goes back into that room, the saying is, you never know what’s going to happen.
And it was certainly no different in this case.
The jury found Eric Napolitano guilty of murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with no eligibility for parole for 32 and a half years. I was satisfied.
The family was satisfied that we had finally stopped this individual who had certainly killed before, and there was a real good chance he was going to do it again if we didn’t band together and convict him and put him in jail for the rest of his life.
Investigators continued to develop leads in the killing of Maria Cudero. Twelve years after the young woman’s body was found at a park in Pennsylvania, Eric Napolitano was finally indicted for her murder. He agreed to plead guilty.
The prosecutors believed that Eric’s plea was prompted by a desire to protect his mother. Carolyn Napolitano was facing charges that she obstructed justice during the investigations and provided alibis for Eric. Ultimately, we made an offer to the Napolitanos that we would allow Carolyn into what they call pre-trial intervention.
She goes on probation, and when it’s over, the case is dismissed against her, if and only if Eric Napolitano would come clean about one of the other murders.
As the court listened in stunned silence, Eric confessed to the murder of his girlfriend Maria Cudero. Eric Napolitano was sentenced to an additional 15 years to life. By having another conviction in New York, we felt that we could guarantee that Eric would spend the rest of his life in jail without ever hoping for parole.
As part of Eric’s plea agreement, his mother was not prosecuted for her role in any crimes. A New York Police Department Internal Affairs inquiry eventually filed disciplinary charges against her. Carolyn was accused of providing false information in the investigations into the murders of Gladys Matos and Maria Cudero.
In 1997, on the eve of a hearing to decide her future, Carolyn Napolitano resigned.
When the women in Eric’s life tried to leave him, he murdered them. Convicted of two brutal slayings, Eric Napolitano will spend the rest of his life behind bars.