I (Tom) have wanted to tell this story for a long time. It is a story of the murder of a young girl, Katherine Woods, a thirteen-year-old who was much more physically mature than her age would indicate.
It has been a cold case for a long time, but I still hope the perpetrator may well be brought to justice. The fact is that I think I know who killed her.
In May 1976 I got a contract to do my first novel, called The Yearbook Killer, and if I had learned anything about writing it was that the more research you do, the better the quality of the book. And I had also learned that the best possible research came from the horse’s mouth, the people who lived what you were trying to talk about. You can read books, you can watch movies, but nothing beats talking to people who have what I call “dirty fingernail” knowledge of a subject.
So, for my novel, which involved a number of murders, I had to talk to the homicide squad detectives.
I wove my way through the various official procedures to get permission to talk with these cops, and I eventually found myself sitting in a room opposite the head of homicide, a man named Tommy Richmond.
I found what he had to say about homicide fascinating, and I got along well with him. Eventually he asked me if I wanted to accompany one of the homicide investigators, and I jumped at the chance. In due course I was introduced to a big, burly man with a raspy voice—he inhaled cigars—Jimmy Pavese, and started to follow him around.
I found the experience a far cry from what you see on TV. At one point I went into the morgue and stood next to a Mafia victim who was lying nude on a gurney with a single small hole in his head—the smallness of the hole surprised me—and witnessed a black couple identify the remains of their son, a son on whom I saw the characteristic Y-shaped incision on his chest, the distinctive sign of an autopsy.
At one point Jimmy Pavese gave me a homicide book called Practical Homicide Investigation and I sat down and perused this book.
It was horrendous, a shocker to me, filled with four-color photos of people who had been murdered in every way imaginable.
All told, it finally got to me, and at one point I sat down, slugged from a bottle of beer, and started to cry.
In analyzing why I cried, I determined that it was not just the up close exposure to murder and the homicide book I examined, but rather it was the cynicism of the cops.
People always talk of “cops’ eyes,” which means eyes that are full of cynicism, eyes that see the world as filled with felons, a world where everyone is guilty of some sort of crime, but not everyone has yet been caught. And the world was a place that was full of danger.
I found myself being infected by this attitude. A girl hitchhiking was in grave danger of being picked up by a serial murderer like Edmund Kemper, people were out to cheat you, and even your relatives were not sacrosanct. Indeed at one point after my cop experience I visited my mother in the Bronx and said to her, “Hi Ma. What’d you do lately?”
My mother, of course, didn’t have a clue what I was talking about.
Of course in the cops’ world, though I didn’t find this out until much later, I was not trusted. I was a “civilian.” Indeed, little did I know that the very first day—and Jimmy Pavese told me this later—as I emerged from the homicide headquarters (which in those days was temporarily housed in a converted private home), a detective standing a hundred yards away was snapping photos of me with a 400 mm lens, I guess to make sure I was who I said I was. Of course they had already checked me out at the Department of Motor Vehicles and for a criminal record.
Later, when I boiled it all down, I realized that the main reason—other than cop paranoia—was to determine if I was a murderer. It turns out murderers love returning to the scenes of their crimes, and they love playing with fire, which in this case is the police.
For example, the aforementioned Edmund Kemper, who murdered six coeds, his mother, and her friends, used to hang out at the Jury Room, a bar across the street from the court where cops hung out.
I didn’t even know it when I first showed up at homicide headquarters, but a horrendous murder had been committed, this of a teenage girl whose name was Kathy Woods. As it turned out, it was a killing that would really get inside me, not only because my two daughters were about the same age, but because the cops, who had grown to like me, had let me somewhat inside the homicide investigation. I not only learned most of the gory details, but actually ended up helping the cops try to collar the killer.
The body of the girl, Katherine Woods, was discovered by a family of bikers who were riding on Saturday morning, June 6, 1976, along Sweet Hollow Road in Huntington, a sprawling community on the North Shore of Long Island. Sweet Hollow Road is a packed-dirt, very narrow road—two cars could hardly squeeze by together—and mostly straight, but winding in some places and flanked by heavy woods. It ran from Jericho Turnpike, one of those busy, multilane thoroughfares cluttered with all kinds of stores—gas stations, delicatessens, computer outlets, hardware stores. At the other end, flanked all the way by the heavy woods, is Old Country Road, a regular two-lane asphalt road.
Fairly deep in the woods on one side of the Sweet Hollow, they saw something. Though the police did not reveal at first what was found, it was later determined that it was the body of Kathy Woods, wrapped in a piece of white canvas.
Sweet Hollow Road, where even in late fall heavy vegetation flanks the road
The police descended on the site, and though there was no clear sign as to who it was, from the maturity level it was determined that it was a full-grown woman. Indeed, her body was so outstanding—“she was built like Sophia Loren,” said one physician’s assistant to me—with long, tapering legs and very large breasts, police thought that the body was that of a woman around twenty-two or twenty-three. One person close to the case said that a number of cops from jurisdictions outside were visiting the morgue just to observe her body.
Missing persons was checked and no one answering the description of a woman built like the deceased was reported missing. Perhaps part of the problem was that everyone was looking for someone who was typically built like a thirteen-year-old, not a full-grown woman.
Then there was a breakthrough, and the body was identified as that of Kathy Woods, who lived in Dix Hills, a posh section of the Island, and had been reported missing a couple of days earlier.
She had been brutally murdered. The medical examiner, I heard, said it appeared that she had died by having a gag—her own underwear—stuffed down her throat. She also had been cut in the throat, though not deep enough to kill her, stabbed in the back, and her face had bruises on it.
Kathy was an adopted child who had been born in Italy, the daughter of Marian and John Woods. From Italy, she had two sisters and a brother, and attended the Burr Hill Middle School.
Investigation subsequently concluded that after school she had gone to vast Caledonia Park and then had headed home, walking down Caledonia Road. Caledonia Road would take her to an area where she could walk through some woods and enter though the yard in her house that abutted the woods.
The question police had was whether she had walked all the way or had hitchhiked. Whether they ever found out, I don’t know, but I suspect she hitchhiked.
I do know that my close up involvement in the case started one day when I got a surprise. Detective Jimmy Pavese showed up at my door. He was wearing a big smile.
“Hey Tom,” he said, “I’m on my way over to the crime scene. Would you like to accompany me?”
I was thrilled. “Absolutely,” I said.
We took his plain detective’s car, and within twenty minutes we were on our way down Sweet Hollow Road, starting from the Old Country Road end, heading toward Jericho Turnpike.
“I haven’t been to the crime yet,” he said, “but I do know that her body was found five feet behind LILCO pole number…” and he gave me a number.
I was puzzled. “How are we going to know,” I said.
“The numbers are on medallions nailed to the telephone poles.”
“Good,” I said, and I thought, “Here’s another little detail for a book.”
“I’ll take this side,” he said, “and you can take the other.”
We proceeded down the road very slowly. As we went, we talked. Or, more accurately, he popped a number of theoretical questions at me.
“If you were involved in this,” he said, “what would you do?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, would you leave the body here.”
“I don’t think she was killed here,” I said.
“Where was she killed?”
“I haven’t got a clue but it would be crazy to kill her here.”
“Why?”
“I mean it is an isolated area, but it’s not totally isolated. If she screamed, someone might hear her.”
“Oh.”
“Also,” I said, “it would be uncomfortable in the woods, I would think.”
Pavese said nothing, but we continued to drive slowly along. And as we did I noticed something odd.
“You know, Jimmy,” I said, “these numbers on the poles are not really in sequence. I mean they don’t run logically; they’re all over the place.”
“Okay,” he said, “let’s go get a drink.”
So we drove to a local bar, and had a drink, and after he took a sip, he looked at me sincerely and said: “I hope you don’t think I was trying to refamiliarize you with the crime.”
For a moment, I didn’t know what he was saying—and then I did. I was still suspected as a possible murderer, and the ride down Sweet Hollow was to determine if I knew too much, or would have an emotional reaction of someone who was guilty, perhaps would slip and give him a detail or two that I could not possibly have known—unless I was the killer.
But I played the game with Jim. “Oh,” I said, “I know.”
I started hanging out with Jimmy and the more I did, the more he trusted me and revealed new details on the crime, though, I know, not all the details. Cops never do that.
One thing I learned was that they had one suspect who had climbed to the top of the water tower in Greenlawn, New York, masturbated, and then either fell or jumped to his death. My fantasy was that he jumped, that perhaps he was in love with Kathy and had remorse…Nothing was confirmed or denied.
Of course, neighbors on the street where she lived were also looked at closely.
I remember listening to WINS radio, which always started out—and still does today—“all news all the time, you give us twenty-two minutes and we’ll give you the world,” hoping that at any moment they would announce that they had collared the killer of Kathy Woods.
It never happened, but I was galvanized—perhaps because I had young girls—into action, and I started to investigate the case myself, based on what I knew. And my wife helped me.
One thing I quickly determined was that Sweet Hollow Road was a great place to dump a body. It ran through thick woods and if you did it at night, which we assumed the killer did, you could see another car’s lights from a half a mile. The scenario my wife and I created was that the killer had put Kathy’s body in the trunk of his car, driven to a spot on Sweet Hollow Road where he could see lights of other cars—which were few and far between—and then opened the trunk, picked up the canvas-wrapped body, walked into the woods five or ten yards and dropped it, then got into his car and drove away. Or maybe he turned off the lights when he came to a stop. Either way, the dumping couldn’t take more than a minute or two.
From this, my wife and I deduced that the killer was a local, not some serial murderer who happened to pick up a lovely young girl by chance and got lucky disposing of the body. This guy knew the terrain.
Jimmy Pavese and the homicide detectives were, meanwhile, doing the best they could. A detective I had been introduced to, Richie Reck, said that the cops were involved in “busy work,” checking all kinds of records that probably would yield nothing, but which had to be done.
She had been last seen on Arbor Lane and Caledonia Road by a couple of friends she had been playing with. She could have taken a shortcut through Arbor Lane or gone down the longer way, Caledonia Road. If she took Caledonia Road, she could have hitchhiked, though whether she ever did this was not something the cops were revealing.
The detective investigators followed the usual steps in investigating the case, everything from setting up road blocks on Caledonia to grilling the male members of the family because, as stated before, a murder investigation always starts from the inside out.
I also learned that she had been tied, and tied in a very special way by a series of interconnected ropes, one of which was looped around her neck. If she moved her legs, she would choke herself.
But perhaps the most potent, horrific fact I learned from Jimmy was that the killer probably had her alive for quite some time. The cops theorized that she had been abducted on Wednesday, June 3, 1976. Time of death is not as simple as CSI or the like would have it, but the medical examiner theorized that she had been dead less than twenty-four hours when the body was discovered on Saturday morning. She had been abducted on late Wednesday afternoon, so that would mean that the killer had her alive perhaps sixty hours or so, hours during which he could have been sexually and physically assaulting her.
For me, it was a hard thing to contemplate, and it was brought home with particular poignancy when Richie Reck told me that they had found a piece of chewed Juicy Fruit gum in Kathy’s mouth.
As time went by and no suspects were unearthed, I became more and more obsessed by the case, and so did my wife. We wanted very badly to get whoever had murdered Kathy Woods off the street. Instinctively, I knew—and Jimmy Pavese confirmed it—that it was not an ordinary murder where someone kills someone out of passion and goes away. There was too much process here…ropes, sexual and physical assault…too much planning. “This perp,” said Jimmy Pavese, “will do it again.”
So determined was I to help the cops that I made a decision to, as it were, come out of the closet. As a freelance writer I hardly ever said no to a job, and one of the jobs I was doing was “packaging” two low-class magazines called Caper and Escapade for Kensington Publishing. Each month I would put together magazines composed of women in provocative poses, 95 percent of them undressed. It was, as we used to say, a “stroke book.”
It was the kind of project where you met a lot of interesting people, and one day as I thought about Kathy Woods and the ropes that bound her I thought of Jim Jackson, a shaved-head photographer who used to do original photo shoots for me but who, importantly, was head of an S&M group called the Eulenspiegel Society.
Jim was an outgoing guy, always flashing a smile. With high irony, he was the S and a pretty white girl about half his age was the M, this signified by the tiny silver padlock she wore on her collar.
I knew that tying each other up was a common practice in Eulenspiegel, and I reasoned that maybe Jackson might know something about the specific method of tying and trace it back to its source and, possibly, from there to a killer.
I talked to Jim Jackson and he agreed to look at the way she was tied. Hopefully he would be able to identify some bizarre method. I knew that the yellow rope was polypropylene and floated, but it was quite a common kind of rope.
So one day Richie Reck and his partner and I drove into the city to meet with Jackson.
On the way in, Reck showed me the photos, 8"x10" in color, and they were quite horrific. There were various shots of her lying on a gurney in the morgue. She was tied in such a way, as I mentioned earlier, that she could not move without choking herself.
I remember being shocked at how mature she was—and I also remember being saddened and at the same time scared by the photo.
We met Jim Jackson at his studio, and then went to a local bar. We all ordered beers and then Reck handed Jackson the envelope full of photos.
As Jackson leafed through the photos his forehead creased, and I could tell he was not enjoying what he was looking at. After slowly leafing through all of the photos, he looked up and I was later to use what he said in a novel I wrote about the case.
“We play games,” he said. “This is the work of a psycho.”
And he couldn’t help ID the tying as anything special.
Eventually, the case went cold, and chaos descended on the Woods family. Thomas Woods, the father of five adopted children—Steven, Thomas, Jill, Merrie, and Kathy—was diabetic and he started to abuse his body, taking up smoking and drinking. He died at the age of sixty-one. The kids were scattered to the winds. Jill, Kathy’s natural sister, ran away from home and for three years after the murder was in a number of different foster homes. The older kids left as well. Kathy’s mother, Marion, invested her insurance money in a religious articles shop in Florida but eventually went bankrupt.
The oldest sister Merrie summed it up: “He just killed us all.” The case stayed cold for fifteen years, until August 2, 1991, when suddenly it came back in the spotlight, brought about by a dramatic incident.
It all started late one Friday night in the town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, famous for its steel. A small, dark-haired woman, who must remain anonymous, left her parents’ home where she lived, and drove her white Chevy Nova to the Ramada Inn on MacArthur Road in Whitehall to pick up her best friend, who worked there. Then they drove to Mickey’s, a small neighborhood bar favored by young people because it was cheap and the management didn’t mind the way patrons dressed.
They had a few drinks, listened to the jukebox, and stayed there until the bar closed at 2:00 a.m., then drove to a pancake house called Perkins. Once there, the young woman called her parents and told them that she would be home after she and her girlfriend left the restaurant.
The young woman drove her friend back to the Ramada Inn to pick up her car and then they planned to follow each other home.
As she waited, she lit a cigarette, and listened to the radio. Then, abruptly, someone wrenched the passenger door open and got into the car. It was a dark-haired wild-eyed man and in his hand he held a wicked looking two-inch folding knife.
“Do you know what this is?” he asked.
The young woman nodded, terrified.
He got in the car and pulled her over into the back seat out of sight.
He got behind the wheel and drove the terrified young woman for ten minutes to a house—which turned out to be where he lived—a large old house on a street with a constant flow of traffic. But he didn’t stop there. Instead, he drove to the back of the house, which is narrow and deserted, and had a back door.
He parked in a small gravel parking lot, then grabbed her from the back seat and, with one arm wrapped around her neck, pulled her along the back path into the house. As he did, unknown to him, an ankle bracelet came off and settled in the grass.
Once inside the house, he continued to pull her past a photograph of himself and a little girl she assumed was his daughter hanging on the wall. The captive woman was puzzled. “Why,” she thought, “I couldn’t imagine him having a little girl and doing this.”
Then he took her into his bedroom and threw her down on a futon on the floor, pulled her clothing off until she was naked, tied her up, and then assaulted her sexually.
The woman begged him to let her go.
“No,” he said, “you’ll talk. I have to think.”
Then he carried her down to the basement and placed her on a small throw rug, took another rope, wrapped it around her neck, and then stuck a gag in her mouth, which she spit out right away, screaming and crying. Then she asked him to loosen the ropes, that their tightness was cutting off her circulation.
He complied, but as he did, he didn’t notice that the woman had stuck her finger in one of the knots.
Finished tying her again, he turned off all the lights in the basement, leaving the woman in the dark, and went upstairs. The woman saw her chance. She was able, because of the slack in the knot, to untie herself. Then, alone and naked, she thought desperately of what she would do.
She listened, but could not hear him upstairs.
In the darkness, she reconnoitered the entire basement and saw a light cord and turned on the light. Then she saw a highup small basement window which, at first, looked too high for her to reach. But she found a board that she was able to lean against the wall and step on and got high enough so that she could open the window and push the screen out. She climbed through and, completely nude and totally terrified, ran out into the street and was spotted by a man driving along on it.
He stopped and picked her up, and then gave her his T-shirt to put on.
They drove down the street toward police headquarters, and when they spotted a cop the driver stopped and they told him what had happened.
It wasn’t long before the cops were on their way back to the house, but when they arrived he wasn’t there—and neither was the woman’s white Nova. Apparently he had driven it away, and it was a reasonable assumption that it would be the first step in covering his tracks: he had full intention to murder the woman.
Police started to track him down—his name, they discovered, was Steven Impellizzeri—and they called his mother’s house, which was in Commack, Long Island, some seven miles from where the body of Kathy Woods had been found.
On the phone, the sheriff convinced him to come back to Pennsylvania. He did by 7:00 p.m. that night, and was brought before a judge and sent to jail with a bail of $500,000, which he was unable to raise.
The news of the charges and Impellizzeri’s arrest was a shocker to a lot of people in the area, including the people who worked with him on an environmental group, but they faced a decision: whether he was to stay on the board or not. At one point, they voted and he was suspended from the board.
“It was shocking,” said one person close to the scene. “Steve was very pro-environment and used to talk about plants as if they were people that you shouldn’t hurt. That he could do something like this was really shocking.”
But at least one person wondered about Impellizzeri’s ability to savage females.
His name is Delvin Powell, and he had first encountered Impellizzeri in a case of domestic abuse against his wife in 1989 and was so struck by Impellizzeri that he tracked down his background and kept tabs on him.
Powell, a sex-crimes investigator for the state police in Bethlehem, said, “I didn’t think it would be the last time we would hear from him.”
After Impellizzeri’s arrest, Powell queried police in towns where he used to live for unsolved rape-murders that matched the methods that he had used against the Northampton woman. Suffolk County responded about Kathy Woods and later Lehigh County Assistant District Attorney Jacqueline Paradis said, “There are many striking similarities between what happened to my victim and that victim, particularly the way she was tied and the way she was sexually abused.”
A Close Call?
Sometimes life is filled with such remarkable coincidences. A friend of ours, a pretty dark-haired woman named Vicky Stolz, was around twelve years old and walking along a street in South Huntington, Long Island, the same area Kathy Woods was from, when a car pulled up and the driver, a young dark-haired guy, asked her if she wanted a lift. Says Vicky: “I looked into his eyes, and alarm bells went off, though I didn’t allow him to see my reaction. And he drove away.”
Just recently, Vicky was shown a picture of Steven Impellizzeri, and she said it could have been him, just much younger. Vicky may well have her stomach to thank for her life.
Besides the manner in which they were tied up, there was also a similarity between gags in the two incidents. Kathy Woods had been found with a variety of bruises and cuts on her—including being stabbed in the back and her throat slashed—but none of them would have killed her. What killed her was the gag in her mouth, which had been shoved so forcefully down her throat that she was asphyxiated.
The same thing might have happened to the Northampton woman if she had tolerated him putting a gag in her mouth. But fortunately for her she didn’t.
Police searched his house and they found pornographic materials including two videos, copies of Hustler magazine, as well as a magazine called Anal Connection. At the trial, the prosecutor was to say that was the kind of sexual contact favored by Impellizzeri.
Impellizzeri’s defense was that the woman and he were having consensual sex, and then she changed her mind.
One bone of contention was that the woman was so small—she was short and weighed ninety-nine pounds—that she could not possibly have gotten up to the window.
But the ADA had a secretary of similar size from her office try to climb out the window and she succeeded. Her ability to get out of the basement was videotaped, and the judge allowed the tape in as evidence over the strong objections of defense counsel.
The prosecution did their job and Impellizzeri was convicted of fourteen assorted counts of rape and robbery. On March 3, 1994, the judge sentenced him to twenty to forty years in jail.
The defense filled an appeal, and they seemed to have a good shot. Two of the jurors said they had read news accounts of the attack and wondered if they could be objective. The judge, defense said, should not have allowed them to sit on the jury, but the appeals court said that while it could have been counted as a mistake, the jurors also said ultimately that they thought they would be able to be objective and that was good enough. Impellizzeri’s conviction was affirmed.
He went away to do his time, and is still doing it as this is being written.
But there is a problem, and police in Pennsylvania are concerned that once he gets out—if he gets out—that someone else will be at risk.
But rest assured that cops are aware of that, and are doing everything in their power to make sure he stays where he belongs.
Two of the detectives who investigated the Kathy Woods case, Richie Reck, who I got to know pretty well, and Jimmy Pavese, have died. But I must tell you my interest in the case has never flagged, and though it is now thirty-five years since she was murdered, I have not forgotten her, and from time to time I ride down Sweet Hollow Road, where her body was found, and I ride past the house where she lived and the Burr Hill Road School where she went to school and it all gives me a deeply sad feeling. Today, she would be forty-six years old, likely married, and on the way to having grandchildren maybe.
But that was not to be, and therein lies the tragedy of any murder. Whoever killed her—and I think because of the similarities of the crimes in Suffolk and Pennsylvania that it was Impellizzeri—robbed her of her life, the days, the weeks, the months, the years, the decades. I can only hope and pray that the search for her killer will never stop.
How Many Murders Go Unsolved?
One might think that with DNA at least 90 percent of homicides would be cleared. Not so. According to the FBI only 62.6 percent of homicides in 2004 were solved and almost 40 percent uncleared—that’s a lot of murder gone unpunished. Clearing, by the way, is defined by the FBI as when the perp is either arrested or there are factors that the arresting office can’t control that prevent arrest.
To put a face on this with some numbers, in 2004 there were 16,137 cases of non-negligent manslaughter in the United States. Some 34.7 percent or 6,035 folks literally got away with murder.
One of the problems is that cops who investigate cases are not as sharp as the fictional investigators on the tube. Indeed, there are numerous investigative instances where cops screw up royally. One that comes to mind is the Sharon Tate murder by Charles Manson and his “family.” When they arrived at the scene, cops were originally thrilled because they found a bloody fingerprint on a doorbell. But they were less than thrilled when they learned that the fingerprint belonged to a uniformed officer who had gotten blood on his fingers from one of the victims and then had pressed the doorbell with a bloody finger to see if anyone was home.
Another problem is some of the forensic techniques that one sees on TV are not as productive as one would imagine. For example, time of death is a case in point on TV shows where the medical examiner is always telling the cops just about when a murder victim died. But time of death is an extraordinarily difficult thing to determine, because of weather and a whole host of other variables. Indeed, an NYPD photographer once told the author that the best way to tell time of death was to talk to the person who last saw the victim alive.
Too many cops are simply not trained to investigate a crime scene, nor are ancillary personnel too swift. The author remembers one murder case involving a young woman where someone in the morgue hosed down the body to make it look better, thereby washing away invaluable evidence forever.
Usually, homicides occur inside a family unit and all the cop has to do is talk to people inside the family, find who the perp is, and make an arrest.
Or there might be a killing related to drugs, or someone suddenly blows their stack in a bar and shoots someone to death. The killer is usually known, and an arrest invariably follows.
The one good thing about a homicide investigation is that whether it’s a whodunit or not, the statute of limitations never runs out. Society frowns on people who murder other people, and for as long as they live the perps are subject to investigation and arrest.
1. Marilyn Sheppard | A. Arlington, TX |
2. Amber Hagerman | B. Boulder, CO |
3. Bob Crane | C. New York, NY |
4. Jon Benet Ramsey | D. Brentwood, CA |
5. Nicole Brown Simpson | E. Scottsdale, AZ |
6. Arnold Rothstein | F. Bay Village, OH |
Answers: 1-F, 2-A, 3-E, 4-B, 5-D, 6-C