Kill for Thrill (2 page)

Thomas Tridico, who has offered me insight, shared his experiences and provided me with details that otherwise would have gone unrecorded in history.

Dr. William H. Kerr, who was instrumental in bringing greater personal perspective to the events of Christmas 1979 and was kind enough to share with me many of his personal writings and ruminations on the murder of Leonard Miller.

Jim Clawson, who was perhaps Leonard’s closest friend at the time of his death. By graciously allowing me into his world, Jim offered me a very precious glance of who Leonard Miller was.

Dr. Maggie Patterson, professor of communications at Duquesne University, who was tremendously helpful in understanding the events that made John Lesko the person he is. Her research and that of her students into John Lesko and his family have formed the basis for much of what ends up being a very shocking glimpse of what it must have been like to be John Lesko in 1979.

Rick Facchine, with whom I worked during most of my police career. I am permanently in his debt. He acted as a visionary, a sounding board, an instigator and, above all, a good friend during twenty years of policing and beyond.

The late Richard Murphy, who will never know how helpful his sardonic wit and down-to-earth manner were in helping me understand Leonard Miller a little bit better.

For their tireless editorial support, I would like to thank my mother and father, Ronald Sheetz and Carol Sue Nichols, and my wife, Susan, whose patience gave me the courage to finish this project.

Although this book is intentionally neutral on the validity or efficacy of the death penalty as a means of punishment for criminal conduct, the implication of everything that it touches nearly screams for attention.

Like any emotionally charged topic, death penalty discussions often create strong division among its various factions. In this matter, there are rarely abstainers from the debate, and usually both camps offer strong, emotion-laden defenses of their positions.

In this brief introduction, you will hear neither emotion nor argument. Instead, what I have prepared for you is a cursory overview of the death penalty that may await Travaglia and Lesko at the end of this completely sordid ordeal.

In November 1990, Governor Robert P. Casey signed into law a bill changing Pennsylvania’s method of execution from death by electrocution to death by lethal injection. For many years, the state kept the methods, exact drugs composing the lethal cocktail and execution procedures strictly confidential. However, recent disclosures by the state have made the execution process more transparent.

Pursuant to the switch to lethal injection, Pennsylvania dismantled its electric chair and, in 1997, remodeled the execution complex at SCI Rockview. As part of the renovations, the state relocated the complex to a former field hospital on the grounds of the facility but outside the walls of the prison. Included in the complex, in addition to the execution chamber itself, are three maximum-security cells used to house condemned inmates immediately before the state carries out their sentences, office space and the apparatus of the execution.

The new location of the complex offers several benefits to corrections officials, including easing the preparation process without disturbing the day-to-day operations of the rest of the facility. Additionally, it allows the witnesses and family members to attend the execution without having to pass into the facility. Officials herald this as an increase in safety and security.

While the execution complex is used to house condemned inmates immediately prior to their execution, inmates under a pending sentence of death are housed in administrative custody status in a housing area known as Restricted Housing Units (RHU). Even though Pennsylvania has several maximum-security facilities, currently the only facilities that Pennsylvania state law authorizes to house death row inmates are State Correctional Institutes (SCI) Greene and Graterford for men and SCI Muncy for women.

Once the governor has signed the condemned inmate’s death warrant, officials transfer him to solitary confinement, where he is under constant direct supervision. His visitation rights are also severely restricted. In most circumstances, immediate family, legal counsel and a designated member of the clergy are the only people who may visit the inmate.

In addition to restrictions on their visitation, inmates’ personal belongings are strictly limited. Guards allow them a mattress, a pillow, a blanket, sheets, a towel, a bar of soap, their institutional clothing, some limited religious material, legal papers, a few personal photos and very few consumables like cigarettes, a toothbrush, toothpaste and pens/pencils. In addition, an inmate may possess one book at a time and may have a television or radio placed outside his cell and within view for a limited time each day.

On the day prior to the execution, the inmate is prepared for execution and offered a selection of a last meal from a prepared list of available items. Contrary to Hollywood portrayals, the prisoner’s last meal is not anything he chooses. Instead, each inmate is given a list of available meals from which to choose his final meal.

At the designated time of execution, the execution team escorts the inmate to the injection room, where team members strap him to a gurney. One intravenous needle is then inserted into each arm—one primary to carry out the execution and a backup in the event that the first fails to perform properly. The tubes from these IV needles are connected to an IV pump in another room, and a saline drip is begun to ensure proper flow of liquids into the prisoner’s system.

Medical personnel attach a heart monitor to the inmate, and once the execution team receives confirmation from the warden that the execution is to proceed, someone opens the curtain separating the injection room from the observation gallery. Once the defendant has completed his final words, the warden signals that the execution is to begin. Barring a last-minute stay, the execution team begins to administer a lethal cocktail of drugs consisting of two to five grams of sodium thiopental (commonly known as sodium pentothal), one hundred milligrams of pancuronium bromide and one hundred microequivalents of potassium chloride.

Sodium thiopental is an ultra–short acting barbiturate, which in high dosages causes near instantaneous coma. At nearly five times the average normal dose, the amount used in the execution cocktail is usually sufficient to induce coma within ten seconds.

Pancuronium bromide acts as a paralyzing agent, inducing total muscular paralysis within fifteen to thirty seconds. Although some states use tubocurarine chloride or succinylcholine chloride, they all serve the same function in the execution cocktail—paralyze the defendant and induce respiratory arrest within thirty seconds.

Between the delivery of each drug in the cocktail, technicians flush the IV lines in order to prevent accidental mixtures of the three drugs. Inadvertent mixing of the chemicals would form precipitates and would ultimately block the tubing, leading to a botched execution.

The final drug in the cocktail is one hundred microequivalents of potassium chloride. Potassium chloride is an electrolyte. It elevates the levels of potassium in the system, which interfere with the ability of the heart muscle to contract. With the amount of potassium chloride in the execution cocktail, onset of cardiac arrest is quite rapid, irreversible and fatal.

While the execution team administers the cocktail, medical personnel continuously monitor the inmate’s heart rate until all cardiac activity has stopped. Once the attending physician makes a pronouncement of death, the warden declares the inmate a “Phase III” inmate and the execution is completed. During the execution, death commonly occurs within seven minutes of the first drug entering the inmate’s system.

Regardless of your personal stance, individual outlook or jurisprudential viewpoint, the questions raised in the name of due process, fairness and proportionality ring truer for the death penalty than for anywhere else in our criminal justice system. In the words of Justice Sutherland, when speaking of the government’s obligation to ensure fairness:

The United States Attorney is a representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all; and whose interest therefore in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done…He may prosecute with earnestness and vigor—indeed he should do so. But, while he may strike hard blows, he is not at liberty to strike foul ones. It is as much his duty to refrain from improper methods calculated to produce a wrongful conviction, as it is to use every legitimate means to bring about a just one.

While the prosecutorial conduct in the Lesko and Travaglia case is beyond reproach, the significance and gravity of the task that the government has been asked to undertake in this case serves not just as a reminder of the need for due process in this particular case, but also as a cautionary tale directed at the entire system, and as Justice Sutherland opined, it is the duty of those charged by the people with protecting the people to ensure that it is justice, not vengeance and not winning, that carries the day.

As the Travaglia and Lesko case unfolds, the somber reminder of this introduction should inform your reading. Understand well that at the end of the day, two men, deserving of society’s harshest punishment no doubt, will be strapped to a gurney, and with methodical, calculated precision, representatives of the larger society will legally and justifiably end their lives. Deserving of death or otherwise, there is no retrenchment from this punishment. Death is permanent, and given its permanence, extreme safeguards are called for.

What is left for others to decide—because this book will not attempt to do so—is at what point do we draw the line? Where shall we say enough is enough? Will we draw that line at some arbitrary point—say, four appeals? Alternatively, will we manage it on a case-by-case basis, evaluating every circumstance in order to say that we are certain beyond equivocation that we have made no mistakes? Have we, in fact, sent the proper man to his death for the proper reasons? The answers to these questions are not in the pages of this book—nor would I speculate are they in the pages of any book. Instead, they live inside each of us as we make decisions about what society owes its individuals—the innocent as well as the accused.

What
is
in this book are facts. Facts that, when taken together, paint a picture of dozens of lives irreparably broken due to the violent and depraved actions of two young men. These two men ripped parents and children from their loved ones. Communities were torn apart as they laid to rest their sons and daughters before their time. Two men whom you will grow to know intimately—men who, as of 2008, still sit on death row, unrepentant and unashamed—visited all of this repugnance within an eight-day period. Balance their lives against the lives of four innocent human beings who, if for no other reason, died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the end, you will have to decide for yourself what the fitting end to the story is because, as you will see, I cannot.

Leonard Miller pulled the heavy wooden door closed behind him and began the short walk to the back door of the station house. There were twenty steps to the door. Leonard only needed fifteen lumbering strides. At six feet, two inches tall, Leonard’s broad shoulders seemed to scrape the pale green walls as he strolled down the hall.

As he reached the end of the hallway, he thrust the heavy red door outward and stepped onto the sidewalk. Zipping his police jacket, he instinctively checked up and down the street. Lonely. Silent. Dark. As usual, North Pennsylvania Avenue was as deserted as the rest of Apollo Borough. At three o’clock in the morning, two days after New Years, it was even more so.

Nestled along the banks of the shallow, meandering Kiskiminetas River, for many years the tiny town of Apollo, Pennsylvania, had been home to the countless workers who commuted daily to and from the foundries and steel mills that once made Pittsburgh and its surrounding hills the epicenter of the Industrial Revolution. This one-square-mile flyspeck, caught between the river and the rural pasturelands of the rest of Armstrong County, was in serious economic decline. Just like every other mill town, Apollo had begun to give ground in its battle against the economic decline that had set upon the steel valley in the mid- to late 1970s. It was in this struggling community that Leonard Miller had made his mark and reached his dream.

As Leonard wedged his 250-pound frame behind the wheel of his blackand-white Chevy Nova, the light from the streetlamp bouncing off the silver shield on his left breast caught his attention and filled him with satisfaction at how far his journey had brought him. Although this was only Leonard’s third day as a full-time police officer, he knew these quiet streets backward and forward. After patrolling them for nearly three years, he was living his lifelong dream.

He pulled the seatbelt across his lap, adjusted it to fit his ample chest and then scribbled down his starting mileage. Once he had slipped his pen into the shiny black pocket of his jacket, he dropped the Nova into gear, pulled onto deserted Pennsylvania Avenue and then headed toward “downtown” Apollo.

When he rode past the fire hall, Leonard glanced instinctively at the gleaming white engines of the Apollo Volunteer Fire Department that were peeking out at him from the windows of their warm home. He knew these engines well. Two short blocks and one left turn later, he was heading down First Street toward North Plaza, the heart of the town’s tiny business district.

Leonard swung into the alley behind Armitages hardware store. He killed the headlights and slowed the cruiser to a crawl. The alley was inky black, so it took him a few moments before his eyes adjusted. Slowly, the shadows and blobs of the alley began to take shape. He began to survey the rear entrances to the businesses that lined the east end of the plaza. Adjusting the angle of the car’s Visibeam spotlight, he flipped the switch, instantly drenching the alley in ten thousand candlepower of light. Too cold for either man or beast, the alley was as he had hoped—empty. He doused the light and then inched along toward Grove Street.