Kill for Thrill (7 page)

Snow crunched beneath Edward Wolak’s boots as he picked his way down the bank into the ravine below. It was getting late in the morning. He ducked beneath the snow-draped branch of a spruce tree. “Just one more trap to check,” he mumbled, “and then home in time for lunch.”

The feeble morning sun peeked through the trees behind him as he made his way along the steep bank, squashing the dappled sunlight with his hunting boots. One hundred feet beyond, a fallen oak tree stretched across the mouth of the ditch. The long-retired patriarch of the glen marked the spot where Eddie’s next trap lay in wait, with its famished mouth open wide, eagerly awaiting its next meal. He squeezed under the recumbent oak and knelt beside the trap. It was empty. It was always empty. He didn’t expect today to be much different than any other day. The only things two years of trapping in these woods had earned him were a few mangy squirrels, an opossum and one rather scruffy beaver pelt.

He stood up, brushed the forest litter from the knees of his brown corduroy pants and shuffled his thick rubber boots through the ankle-deep layer of leafy debris. As he followed the gently curving ditch toward a large stand of evergreens, the rush of the creek behind him drowned out his thoughts.

The chains of the two galvanized steel-jawed traps that hung over his left shoulder rhythmically jangled and clanked in his ear to the beat of his rising and falling feet. He adjusted them with a gloved hand and pushed through a wall of pine boughs like a passenger forcing his way onto the subway.

By now, the sun had climbed into the late morning cerulean sky, and as he stepped onto the road, the muted world of the ravine receded into his memory. He looked up. Tears filled his squinting eyes as they struggled to adjust to the solar onslaught. Eddie lifted his hand to shield his eyes and stared down the road leading back toward his house, where he knew a warm lunch would surely greet him. As he crossed Loyalhanna Dam Road and headed for the banks of Loyalhanna Creek, he hoped that his Saturday morning had not been a total waste.

Eddie scattered some loose twigs with the toes of his boots as he walked. Silent thoughts of lunch wrapped around him like a warm blanket as step after step rose and fell, bringing him closer and closer to his home. As he picked his way through the underbrush, his eyes were drawn to the base of a large tree sitting about twenty feet from the edge of the creek. He moved in for a closer look.

Growing out of the side of the tree was what looked like an odd, twisted branch. It was misshapen and knurled. As Edward circled the tree, a sharp bit of sunlight caught his eye and everything flashed white. He rubbed his eye with wool-gloved fists and took two more steps. Standing in the long shadow of the large tree, Edward Wolak slowly reopened his eyes.

He was staring into Peter Levato’s lifeless face. An invisible fist landed squarely in Eddie’s gut with a dull thud. It forced every thread of air out of his lungs, while microscopic tremors crept into his boots. They inched up his legs, knocking his knees together like bowling pins until his quivering hands dangling by his sides shivered in chaotic gyration. The two vacant eyes fixed on him through puffy, blood-smeared cheeks. He could not move; he could not even breathe.

Trooper Charles Lutz was the investigator with Troop A who received the call from Ed Wolak on that late December afternoon. As luck or misfortune would have it, he was the duty investigator assigned for that weekend, and fate had put him in the right place at the right time. The desolate, post-Christmas barracks was silent. Empty except for a few critical employees, the barracks gave Chuck Lutz time to be alone with his thoughts.

Most of the troopers assigned to patrol were already out blanketing their assigned areas, and the sporadic crime that occasionally stirred in the valley was obviously on Christmas hiatus, so Chuck relaxed at his desk. As he did, he thumbed through stale cases and drank stale coffee.

At 12:30 p.m., the clattering ring of the phone snapped Chuck back into 1979. He lifted the receiver from its cradle and the voice of his boss, Sergeant Tom Tridico, began to rattle off names and locations. Scribbling in his own brand of shorthand onto his desk blotter, he grunted and “Yupped” his way through the next three minutes of the morning. A reassuring, “I’m on it,” ended the official call, and Charles Lutz lowered the black Bakelite receiver onto its resting place.

He scooped up his jacket from the back of the chair and quickly poked two arms through the sleeves. Then he gathered his notebook from his desk, tucked it into his inside jacket pocket and slid open his desk drawer. Slipping the stainless steel Ruger .357 revolver into its holster, he slammed the drawer shut, adjusted his jacket over his holster and grabbed the keys to his police interceptor. He quickly slipped out of the squad room and headed down the stairs and out the back door of the barracks. Chuck Lutz did not know that waiting for him below the Loyalhanna Dam was a murder investigation that would last for thirty years.

He headed out Route 66 from the barracks, mentally preparing for a routine death investigation. With the afternoon sun at his back, he quickly sped along the hilly highway, turned onto 380 and then slipped down into the winding valleys leading out to Loyalhanna Reservoir. Each mile drew him closer and closer to Peter Levato. He turned sharply onto Loyalhanna Dam Road and headed down toward the bridge.

Michael Travaglia was a nice kid. By many accounts, this unassuming, nondescript youth was virtually indistinguishable from every other student at Kiski Area Senior High. Snuggled into the rolling pastures forty miles east of Pittsburgh, Kiski was a brand-new school when Michael began there in 1973.

A thin youth, Michael was tall for his age and quite shy. The younger of two children, Michael was born on August 31, 1958, to Bernard and Judith Travaglia. Bernard, his father, was a strict disciplinarian with a low tolerance for poor behavior. His disciplinary tactics went beyond normal definitions of authoritarian rule—even, perhaps, bordering on abusive.

Michael’s mother’s affection toward her youngest son bordered on cold and distant. She was an extremely religious woman and not one who was ready to show her two boys tremendous warmth and affection. Later in life, her failing health would take her before her time, leaving Bernard alone to face the drawn-out appeals waged by his son. In the end, both of Michael’s parents would distance themselves from their youngest son, neither visiting nor corresponding while their son sat on death row.

For whatever faults Michael’s father may have had, he was not lazy. He was, in fact, a very hard worker. A plasterer in business with his brother, Bernard Travaglia worked hard to provide his wife and two children with a well-kept home among the greening hills of Washington Township outside Apollo.

Bernard and his wife lovingly tended the Travaglia homestead as it perched atop a hill in tiny Paulton. Trying to make it a safe and inviting home for their two boys, they both worked hard and long hours. From the well-manicured lawn to the garage and shop in the back, it was a picturesque testament to rural life.

While some sibling rivalry is typical in all families, the dissention that existed between Michael and his brother, Kenneth, was beyond what most would consider normal. Preceding him in school by a year, Michael always saw Kenneth as the favored son, and whether real or perceived, this partiality by Michael’s parents toward his older sibling created great pressures for him.

As a student, many of Michael’s teachers spoke fondly of him. Some even testified as character witnesses on his behalf during his trial. Whether it was his swimming coach or Michael Lamendola, his symphonic band instructor, they described him as well behaved, straight-laced and incapable of committing such heinous atrocities as the news accounts had attributed to him.

A neighbor to the Travaglia family once described him as a timid boy who, when visiting their home to play with their son, wouldn’t even come into the kitchen without permission.

Other neighbors described a far different boy. This Michael Travaglia tortured small animals and displayed a disturbing mean streak.

His school record at Kiski Area Senior High School was, like most of Michael’s early years, unremarkable. He graduated in 1976 and shortly thereafter began training as an airplane mechanic. Studying at the Allegheny County Airport near Mount Pleasant, just outside Pittsburgh, Michael had a knack for the mechanical. Doing well in school, his training moved along as planned until late 1979. It was then that Michael first met John Lesko.

In hindsight, one might be tempted to speculate on the effect that the ultra-strict upbringing of Bernard and Judith Travaglia had on Michael. Whether his escape from the heavy-handedness of his father might have lent a strong push toward his eventual collapse into total chaos is unknown. Many have made such speculation, yet none has hit upon the definitive answer. Perhaps, as with a great deal of human behavior issues, no singular answer exists.

Whether attributable to a newfound freedom or his newly formed friendship with John Lesko—with its concomitant orgiastic feast of drugs and alcohol—something changed in Michael Travaglia after his graduation.

Although more than fifty witnesses testified to Michael’s good character, many of Michael’s post-incarceration writings hint at a very different child—a child prone to drug and alcohol abuse at an early age.

A self-professed Satanist at the time of his arrest, Michael claims that incarceration, as it does for many, has changed him. One such change has been a turn toward Christianity.

As with any claim of prison conversion, strong skepticism is warranted. While his current religious beliefs are 180 degrees from what he claimed in 1979, whether this is genuine or artificial, society will never know. The blank stare of impending death often changes a person’s outlook.

In addition to, or perhaps because of, his miraculous turn toward God, Michael has married a woman he met in prison. He originally met his wife, Fran Andrasy, through her church, and she first visited him on Christmas Day 1990. Two years later, in a “contact” prison ceremony, Fran Andrasy became Fran Travaglia. Even though the couple has been married fifteen years, their union is anything but conventional.

As a death row inmate, Travaglia is not allowed contact visits. Therefore, visitation between Mr. and Mrs. Travaglia is limited to Bible study sessions conducted from opposite sides of bulletproof glass. Seated across from Michael, separated by two inches of Plexiglas, Fran reads passages from the Bible that she and her husband selected earlier. Sharing in this communion of spirit brings Fran Travaglia some peace of mind. The rest of the community is not quite so reassured.

Attesting to his wholesale change in personality, Fran Travaglia is quick to speak in her husband’s defense. She urges all who will listen to consider the possibility that the Michael Travaglia from 1979 is not the same Michael Travaglia of 2008. In addition to these outward manifestations of change, Michael has undertaken some rather extensive writing.

Michael’s Internet writings proclaim his newfound Christian faith and offer a contrite outlook. They also offer a tiny glimpse into what may have played a part in his demonic snap in 1979.

In one such writing, Michael claims to have begun a pattern of drug and alcohol abuse during his high school years. He confesses that he began with beer, graduated to whiskey and vodka and moved on to all kinds of drugs, including marijuana and mescaline, and eventually developed an addiction to amphetamines. Surely, this drug- and alcohol-abusing Satanist is a far step from what character witnesses described as a good man, incapable of committing four murders.

Regardless of the identity of the catalyst that precipitated his fall, Michael’s spiral downward was rapid, violent and beyond question. We will debate the whys and the hows of Michael’s demise for the rest of time. What is certain, though, is that in the wee hours of Monday, December 30, 1979, Michael Travaglia, in the company of his partner John Lesko, found himself on Route 22 in Delmont without a car, without money and looking for more thrills.