Caught in the Act

The picture that was quickly emerging of the forty-two-year-old high school dropout was that of a deadly stalker who used the interstate as his hunting ground. Adam Leroy Lane’s modus operandi would be to drive into a truck stop or rest area and park, then drift into nearby towns on foot in search of victims. This pattern of behavior, together with the efforts begun by the Chelmsford Police Department, would help authorities in several other state and local jurisdictions turn their attention to Lane.

Not long after Lane confessed to murdering Monica Massaro, he became the prime suspect in two more attacks, in Pennsylvania. On July 13, a knife-wielding attacker appeared out of nowhere and killed Darlene Ewalt on the back patio of her home while her family was sleeping inside. Four days later, and the next county over, Patricia Brooks survived a slashing attack by a man wearing dark hunting clothes. These crimes of violence had also taken place near interstates, and both involved late-night home invasions where the attacker had used a heavy, bladed weapon. Furthermore, trucking records confirmed that Lane signed for deliveries he made in Dauphin County on July 13 and in York County on July 17, just a few miles away from where the crimes took place on those days. Once these records were verified, officials knew that they had their man, and the announcement was not delayed.

“We found out pretty early on that Lane had made deliveries within miles of where the two victims were attacked,” announced Chief Carl Segatti of the Northern York County Regional Police Department. “It seemed to us that this coincidence was not just happenstance.”

A witness who was driving to work along Locust Point Road around the time of Patricia Brooks’s attack told investigators that he’d seen a man dressed entirely in black walking in the predawn darkness at around 4:35 a.m. The witness told police he’d thought it was odd that the man was wearing gloves in the middle of summer. He also reported seeing a tractor-trailer parked near the intersection of Locust Point Road and Susquehanna Trail near I-83.

At some point along his escape route the night Lane attacked Patricia, he’d tossed the black gloves he was wearing into a yard a half mile from the victim’s home. Investigators later found them both atop an embankment at a home on Locust Point Road. Subsequent testing revealed that Lane’s DNA was present on the gloves.

“Our case is going to be made or broken forensically,” Chief Segatti told the press. Despite the eyewitness account and photo ID by the victim, DNA evidence was still the most reliable.

Prosecutors in Pennsylvania were also confident that DNA evidence would unequivocally show that Darlene Ewalt was murdered by Adam Lane. Although it was not immediately verified, blood discovered on one of the knives that police had confiscated from Lane after his arrest was believed to be consistent with that of Darlene Ewalt. District Attorney Edward Marsico, of Dauphin County, called the potential DNA match “the major part of the evidence gathered so far” in the homicide investigation. Marsico said Lane would be charged in the murder after the homicide case in New Jersey was concluded. “Once we file the charges,” he said, “the clock starts ticking.”

According to an interstate agreement regarding detainers, Pennsylvania would have to wait until Lane’s cases were finished in Massachusetts and New Jersey before he could be returned to face homicide and attempted homicide charges there.

At the time, most everyone was okay with that. Because Lane was already being held, it took away the sense of urgency to immediately file charges in Pennsylvania. The extra time also afforded the police the added assurance that everything would be done right.

In the hope of gathering further forensic evidence that would tie Lane incontrovertibly to the crimes, Virginia State Police were once again called upon for assistance. Both New Jersey and Pennsylvania law enforcement authorities requested their help in processing several other trucks owned by Lane’s employer, Fancy Gap Trucking Company, which operated out of Virginia.

Lane had been driving one trailer when he went through New Jersey but a different one on the route that had taken him through Pennsylvania earlier that same month. It was a long shot that they would find anything of any use in the trucks, but it was more than worth the effort.

In addition to the death toll and the devastation to the victims and their families in the Pennsylvania attacks, Adam Leroy Lane also left in his wake an aura of fear in these two communities, just as he had in Chelmsford and Bloomsbury. Locksmiths and home-security companies may have enjoyed an increase in business in these areas as well, but no amount of crime prevention was going to make the people living there feel safe again.

The quiet York County township of Conewago, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains near the Virginia line, had been shaken by the attack on Patricia Brooks. Her rural home was surrounded by cornfields and was “not a place you would think someone would come to hunt and find someone to kill,” the outspoken Segatti said. “When something like this happens in a rural community, I think people are upset. Ordinary Pennsylvanians who never expect a criminal act of this magnitude go to bed worried.”

At the same time all this was going on, authorities in North Carolina began looking seriously at Lane as the triggerman in an eleven-year-old cold case shooting death of a Jonesville police sergeant. Although the manner in which the police officer was killed bore little similarity to Lane’s other crimes, a police artist’s sketch of a bearded suspect in a red baseball cap uncannily resembled Lane.

In the early hours of October 5, 1996, Sergeant Gregory Keith Martin had pulled over a red pickup on I-77. When he ran the registration, the vehicle came back stolen. The state trooper immediately called for backup, as was standard practice, but as soon as he approached the stolen vehicle, he was shot seven times and died on the highway beside his patrol car. The homicide of the thirty-year-old father of three became a top priority for law enforcement agencies in North Carolina, but frustratingly, no one was ever arrested, and the case quickly went cold. The week of Lane’s arrest in Massachusetts, however, the Yadkin County Sheriff’s Office suddenly began receiving calls from people who had seen Lane’s mug shot in the news and believed he was the person responsible for Sergeant Martin’s death.

All around Jonesville, sketches of a man wanted for questioning in the 1996 shooting of Sergeant Martin were still prominently displayed. The walls of convenience stores and other public and civic buildings were papered with images of the unknown suspect. One of the key witnesses was a car salesman from West Virginia who was able to provide a detailed physical description of the murder suspect. He reported that a burly, bearded man was one of two men who test drove the red pickup before it was stolen from the car lot where he was working.

The night that Sergeant Martin was killed, the stolen pickup was found abandoned in the parking lot of Lucia Inc., a clothing manufacturer in Elkin, North Carolina, not far from where Lane was living. A Lucia van was reported missing that same day and later found in nearby Gastonia. Other witnesses had come forward at that time and described seeing a burly, bearded man driving the stolen Lucia van, including one who recounted under hypnosis in 2005 that she saw a man resembling Lane driving the van less than an hour after Sergeant Martin was killed. One other bit of information I was later told was that in Lane’s Yadkin County trailer home, police recovered various newspaper clippings detailing the local police officer’s brutal murder.

Incidentally, the disturbing DVD Hunting Humans, which had been found in the truck Lane drove to Massachusetts, turned out to belong to an Elkin video shop close to Lane’s house and Lucia Inc. Lane had previously rented other movies from the store, but he’d never returned the serial killer title and hadn’t been back since he’d taken it out.

Although it was worthwhile to take a good look at the local trucker and now double murder suspect, the evidence that North Carolina investigators had against Lane in the Martin case was circumstantial, at best. Prosecutors could not go to trial with any of it. There was never any chance that they would even get a grand jury to consider indicting the trucker with what little they had.

With nothing much else to go on, any case against Lane in the Martin murder quickly fizzled out. Some investigators continued to believe that Lane shot the officer, but he was never charged in the homicide, and there remains no significant evidence to prove that he was responsible.

“It’s different crimes. It’s different weapons. It’s different everything,” said one FBI agent, summing up the feelings of the majority of law enforcement officials with regard to Lane’s possible connection to the murder of the North Carolina state trooper.