In June 1976, I was embarking on a thrilling new project, my first novel. The subject, of course, was murder. I figured that if I wanted to learn about homicide, I should talk to the investigators in the homicide squad in Suffolk County, where my story was set.
In mid-June, having applied for and gotten permission to do just that, I was ushered into the office of Lt. Tom Richmond, the homicide squad commander. A private, powder-blue, two-story home had been converted into the squad’s temporary headquarters while the regular quarters were under construction.
Richmond was a warm, garrulous man with a funeral business on the side, and he answered my questions willingly and well. Indeed, I was thrilled when he told me things like, “The body speaks to you.” I could see such utterances enlivening and adding credibility to my novel.
After around forty-five minutes, I left the office and headed for my car. Little did I know that as I did, a detective with a high-powered, long-distance camera was taking multiple pictures of me. The reason, I was to find out, was that police everywhere know that killers like playing with fire and often contact police in some way after a murder. For example, Edmund Kemper, the notorious serial killer from the West Coast, would go to a bar called the Jury Room in Santa Cruz, California, where the cops who were investigating the murders he had committed hung out.
A week before I showed up at the Suffolk County homicide squad, the body of a 13-year-old girl named Katherine Woods had been found in Huntington. I was aware of that because the story was splashed all over the newspapers, but at the time I had no active interest in it for my book. As it happened, I immediately and routinely became a “person of interest” in Katherine’s case.
After my visit, one of the Suffolk County homicide detectives invited me to accompany him on his rounds the next day. Jimmy Pavese was a burly, cigar-inhaling guy who was as tough as cops come. I thought he was just being nice and trying to help me get the research I needed to write my book. Jimmy also supplemented my crash course in homicide by giving me Manner of Death, a book written by medical examiner Howard Adelman that showed all kinds of people who had left this life violently, and all in living color.
The next day was old hat for him but not for me. I got to view a young, deceased guy who had already been autopsied on a stainless-steel gurney in the morgue and, therefore, saw for the first time the characteristic Y-shaped incision on a victim’s chest. This guy had been murdered by the Mafia, and I was astonished to see only a tiny hole from a .22 bullet in his head. Unfortunately, I was still there when the dead man’s wife or girlfriend came in and started screaming hysterically.
Two things got to me that day. One was Jimmy’s cynicism. At the end of the day, when we had stopped for a few beers, he commented offhandedly that “people stink, Tommy.”
And the other was what real homicide is all about. It’s a horror, a far cry from the sanitized material presented on TV or in the movies.
A couple of days later, I got another pleasant surprise. Jimmy knocked unexpectedly on my door and asked if I wanted to go to the crime scene of the Kathy Woods case. I was out the door in a flash.
As we drove to the scene, I recalled what I knew about the case from the newspapers. Kathy Woods was from Italy and had been adopted by Thomas Woods and his wife, Marian, as were four other kids: Jill (Kathy’s biological sister), Steven, Thomas, and Merrie.
Kathy attended Burr Hill Elementary School. On June 2, a Wednesday, she had gone to a big playground after school with friends and then had left to go home. She never got there and was reported missing by the Woods family.
On the following Saturday morning, her body was found by a family of bikers in woods adjacent to Sweet Hollow Road in Huntington, about five or six miles from her posh home in the upscale community of Dix Hills.
Because they were looking for a thirteen-year-old girl, cops didn’t know at first that this was Kathy’s body. The person they found looked like a spectacularly curvaceous woman in her early twenties. Indeed, I found out later that a number of cops came from other precincts in the county just to view the body.
Sweet Hollow was a very narrow road that was relatively primitive for being in the middle of the bustling town of Huntington. The road was partly paved and partly packed dirt. It was flanked by heavy woods, and later, after traveling it many times, I learned that the road was in perpetual shadow because the tops of trees from both sides of the road interlaced and blocked the sun. Much later, it became a mecca for ghost hunters because at night it was very spooky.
Before we started rolling down it, Jimmy pointed out the window and said, “Look, there are metal medallions on the light poles in the woods. We’re looking for the LILCO (Long Island Lighting Company) pole numbered 62, which is near where she was found. Why don’t I look on my side and you look on yours?”
We did that, and as we did, Jimmy started to ask me questions about the murder, things like how I would’ve handled it if it were me. I found the questions quite complimentary.
“One thing I wouldn’t do is murder her in these woods,” I said. “There are only a few houses along the road, but certainly she would scream and be heard by someone. I think she was killed somewhere else and her body dumped here.”
For some reason, we couldn’t find LILCO Pole 62. After a half hour, Jimmy suggested we quit and go to one of his favorite places, the nearest bar.
As we sipped beers, Jimmy remained quiet until he suddenly said, “I hope you don’t think I was trying to refamiliarize you with the scene.”
It took me a moment to understand what he was getting at. He would have loved for me to give him a fact I shouldn’t know, such as the location of well-hidden LILCO Pole 62.
I was still a person of interest.
Once he was convinced I was not involved in Kathy’ murder, I got to be friends with Jimmy and he really let me inside the case, though, of course, not all the way inside. He told me Kathy’s throat had been cut and she had been stabbed in the back. There were bruises on her face but she died of asphyxiation. A gag the killer shoved down her throat had choked her to death.
And she had been hog-tied with cord made of yellow polypropylene. The cords were tight and interconnected to her neck, so if she moved, she would choke.
But undoubtedly the worst detail was that cops speculated—since time of death is so difficult to prove—that the killer had kept her alive for at least three days, sexually and physically assaulting her the entire time. She definitely was not murdered on Sweet Hollow. They called it a crime scene, but it was just the place where the body had been dumped. Kathy had been tortured and killed somewhere else. She had been a little girl, and I found the details of her abduction and death almost unbearable to think about.
Gradually I became more and more emotionally involved in the case—having two daughters about Kathy’s age added to my involvement—and I thought of ways I might help Jimmy on the investigation.
I had a freelance gig as the editor-in-chief of Caper and Escapade, two unremarkable girlie magazines, and I knew a bondage expert who I thought might be able to help us. Jack Jackson ran a photo studio in Manhattan and would occasionally shoot photos of nude models for use in Caper and Escapade. But Jackson was also head of the Eulenspiegel Society, a bondage and domination club.
Jack liked me, I knew, and of course he made money off me for the photos he took. One day, after clearing it with Jimmy Pavese, I told Jack about the murder of Kathy Woods and how he might be able to help by giving us his feedback on how Kathy was tied.
He agreed to do it, and on a weekday morning a few days later, I was riding in a police car with two detectives. Pete was driving, and sitting next to me in the back was Richie Reck, who I would become friendly with.
As we drove, Richie handed me a sheaf of eight-by-ten color photos that I had never seen. They all showed how Kathy had been tied up when they found her.
I leafed through the photos, and they were appalling. She was lying on her belly on a stainless-steel gurney in the morgue with her black hair mussed and her dark, dead eyes open, fixed, and dilated. I could instantly see from the way she was tied that if she moved at all, she would choke herself.
We met with Jackson at about ten thirty and went into a local bar and ordered beers.
Richie Reck handed Jackson the photos, and he leafed through them one by one. His brow wrinkled and his face became very serious. He was disturbed.
He went through all the photos and then said something I will never forget.
“We [the Eulenspiegel Society] play games,” he said. “This is the work of a psycho.”
We finished our beers, but before we left, the cops tried something that was not part of the original plan for Jackson, and it really pissed me off. They wanted access to his file listing all of the Eulenspiegel members. I told them that was not part of the deal, and Jackson categorically refused to do it.
In the car on the way home, Richie Reck said to me, “Tom, if we thought he had anything to do with the death, we would have arrested him on the spot.”
I had been naïve. Cops are cops, and the only thing that matters to them is collaring the perp.
Over the next couple of months, my wife, Catherine, who had also become emotionally involved in the case, and I tried to investigate it ourselves. We drove by Kathy’s house, and followed the two routes that cops theorized the murderer might have traveled to her home—either hitchhiking on Caledonia Road which would only take a couple of minutes, or using a shortcut through the woods off Arbor Road. We drove endlessly up and down Sweet Hollow Road and many other places.
We were by no means Holmes and Watson, but some things were easy to deduce. For example, the killer had to be a local because only a local would be likely to know the existence of a road that was such a perfect place to dump a body at night. Anyone could stop a car at the wide part of Sweet Hollow Road and then walk quickly into the woods and dump the body. The killed would have had ample time to hide if he or she saw the lights of a vehicle—which would be at least a half a mile away—approaching.
Eventually, the case went cold, and things went terrible for the Woods family. Thomas Woods was diabetic and he started to abuse his body, taking up smoking and drinking. He died at the age of sixty-one. Kathy’s sister, Jill, ran away from home and, for three years after the murder, was in a number of different foster homes. The other kids, who were older, left as well. Kathy’s mother, Marian, invested her insurance money in a religious articles shop in Florida but eventually went bankrupt.
The oldest sister, Merrie, summed up what happened to her family very well: “He just killed us all.”
The case stayed cold for sixteen years, when suddenly it came back. It all started late one Friday night, August 2, 1991, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, once famous for its steel. A small, dark-haired woman who must remain anonymous—let’s call her Dorothy—left her parents’ home in Northampton, where she lived, and drove her white Chevy Nova to the Ramada Inn on MacArthur Road in Whitehall to pick up her best friend, Kelly, who worked there. Then they drove to Mickey’s, a small neighborhood bar favored by young people for its cheap beer and loose dress code.
They had a few drinks, listened to songs on the jukebox, and stayed until the bar closed at 2 a.m. Then they drove to Perkins Restaurant, a pancake house. Dorothy called her parents from there and told them that she would be home after she and Kelly left the restaurant.
The young woman drove Kelly back to the Ramada Inn so she could pick up her car, and then they planned to follow each other home.
As she waited for Kelly to drive up in her car, Dorothy lit a cigarette and listened to the radio. Then, the passenger door was wrenched open abruptly, and a wild-eyed, black-haired man got into the car. In his hand he held a wicked-looking, two-inch folding knife. “Do you know what this is?” he asked. Dorothy nodded, terrified.
He pushed and pulled her into the backseat, out of sight, and warned her to stay as she was. Then he got behind the wheel and drove the terrified young woman for ten minutes to a large old house on a street with a constant flow of traffic. He went around to the back of the house where there was another door.
After parking in a small gravel parking lot, he grabbed Dorothy and pulled her roughly from the backseat. With one arm wrapped around her neck, he pulled her along the back path into the house. Once inside, he continued to pull her upstairs past a photograph of himself and a little girl, who was likely his daughter, hanging on the wall.
Through her terror, Dorothy was puzzled.
“I couldn’t imagine him having a little girl and doing this,” she said later.
He took Dorothy into his bedroom, threw her down on a futon on the floor, and pulled her clothing off until she was naked. Then he tied her up and assaulted her sexually.
But there was a problem. He couldn’t complete the sex act and stopped.
Dorothy begged him to let her go.
“No,” he said, “you’ll talk. I have to think.”
He carried her to the basement and placed her on a small throw rug. Then he wrapped a cord around her neck and stuck a gag in her mouth. She spit it out right away, screaming and crying. Then she cleverly asked him to loosen the ropes because their tightness was cutting off her circulation.
He complied, but he didn’t notice that Dorothy had stuck her finger in one of the knots to make it looser.
When he’d finished tying her again, he turned off all the lights in the basement, leaving Dorothy in total darkness, and went upstairs. Dorothy saw her chance. Because of her finger in the knot, she was able to get loose and untie herself. Then, alone and naked, she thought about how she could get out. Was he still upstairs? Would he hear her and come cascading down the stairs?
She listened but could hear nothing. She knew she had to take a life-or-death chance. She found the light cord and turned on the lights. Still no sound from above.
Scanning the basement, she spotted a window high up on the foundation. Dorothy knew that as small as she was, she would not be able to reach it. But she saw a board sticking out of the foundation beneath a window and stepped up on it so she could get to the window, which she was able to open, and then push out a screen.
She crawled through the window and, still nude, raced toward the street and ran out into it, hoping that the monster who had abducted her would not show up.
In most cases, people don’t want to get involved in someone else’s trouble, and drivers seeing a nude woman suddenly bursting into the street might not stop. But she got very lucky. A man in a truck stopped and picked her up, and she hysterically blurted out what had happened to her. As they drove toward police headquarters, they spotted a cop and Dorothy repeated the horrific story for him.
Before long, the cops were on their way back to the house, which they discovered belonged to Steven Impellizzeri, an upstanding member of the community who was very involved in ecological matters.
But when they arrived, he wasn’t there—and neither was Dorothy’s white Nova. Apparently, Impellizzeri had driven it away, presumably as the first step in covering his tracks. He fully intended to murder Dorothy.
At the house, investigators found bloody sheets in Impellizzeri’s bedroom, blood in the basement, and a collection of porn. And outside, lying in the grass, was a bracelet Dorothy had worn and that had been pulled off as he wrestled her into the house.
Police started to track him down. They called his mother’s house in Smithtown, Long Island (about seven miles from where Kathy Woods’ body had been found), and got him on the phone.
The sheriff urged Impellizzeri to come back to Pennsylvania, and he did by 7 p.m. He was immediately brought before a judge and sent to jail with bail set at $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, including those who worked with him in the environmental group. After a vote, he was immediately suspended from the board.
“It was shocking,” said one person close to the scene. “Steve 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 had long sensed that Impellizzeri had the ability to savage females.
Delvin Powell first encountered Impellizzeri during a case of domestic abuse against his wife in 1989. Powell, a sex-crimes investigator with the state police in Bethlehem, had been struck by Impellizzeri’s weirdness and savagery. Impellizzeri had slashed his wife’s tires and loosened the lug nuts, and Powell could easily see that Impellizzeri was dangerous.
So Powell kept tabs on him. “I didn’t think it would be the last time we would hear from him,” the investigator said.
After Impellizzeri’s arrest for assaulting Dorothy, Powell queried police in towns where Impellizzeri had lived. Powell was looking for unsolved rape-murders that matched the methods Impellizzeri had used against Dorothy—anal intercourse, trying to stuff a gag down her throat, and above all, the specific way he tied her up.
One department responded—Suffolk County. Cops there gave Pennsylvania investigators the case info on Kathy Woods. Later, Jacquelyn Paradis, the Lehigh County assistant district attorney who prosecuted Impellizzeri, said, “There are many striking similarities between what happened to my victim and that other victim (Kathy Woods), particularly the way she was tied and the way she was sexually abused.”
Impellizzeri’s defense was that Dorothy and he had been having consensual sex, and then she changed her mind.
One bone of contention was that Dorothy was so small that she could not possibly have gotten up to the basement window by herself. She was short and weighed only one hundred pounds.
But ADA Paradis had a petite secretary from her office try to climb out the same basement window and she succeeded. The secretary’s ability to get out of the basement was videotaped, and the judge allowed the tape as evidence, over the strong objections of defense counsel.
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 filed an appeal and 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 defense argued that the judge should not have allowed them to sit on the jury. The appeals court said that while that could have been counted as a mistake, the two jurors also had said that they thought they could be objective and that was good enough. Impellizzeri’s conviction was affirmed.
He is still doing time as this is being written.
But there is a problem. Police are concerned that if he gets out on parole, someone else will be at risk. Deep in my heart, I know you can bet on that. My suspicions are based not only on the cops being suspicious of him, but on the similarity in the crimes: the assault on the young woman in Whitehall and the murder of Kathy Woods. Both were sodomized, both were tied, both had a knife used against them, both victims were petite, and both had a gag inserted in their mouths.
My feelings toward him are simple. I hate the bastard—hate him for taking this young girl’s life, hate him for what he put her through. He must not ever be allowed to leave prison.