Kill for Thrill (8 page)

Scattering rocks with their shuffling feet, Michael and John picked their way west along Route 22. The shoulder of the highway was stony and sloped quickly away from the edge of the highway. Walking was difficult, but having abandoned their only transportation the night before, the pair was forced to trudge along on foot.

Michael and John were headed to a room that they had rented at Thatcher’s Motel. It was a stone’s throw from the stubbly cornfield behind Joe’s Steakhouse where they had dumped Peter Levato’s car. The short half-mile walk on William Penn Highway to the motel seemed endless in the subzero blistering winds. They complained silently to themselves as warm, happy motorists zipped out of and back into the darkness.

Around the bend, the single-story mom and pop motel in the old motor lodge style sat beckoning them. It was small—tiny actually. It had barely a dozen rooms for rent. In fact, if not for the towering red and white roadside sign advertising “ROOMS,” the motel would barely be noticeable from the roadway. Hidden neatly behind several full-grown spruce trees, its rustic, A-frame roof and tidy, white wooden pillars were an unopened invitation to weary guests to shake the road dust off and “stay a spell.”

Finally, having arrived at their destination, Michael slipped the key into the door lock and walked inside. They had returned to their room. They were hungry, broke and unsure of their next move, but for now, they were warm.

Inside the cramped motel room, dozens of empty beer cans rattled around. Every step the men took risked disturbing a bit of trash or discarded can. Colorful flowered bedspreads had been balled up and carelessly flung across the room, where they landed in a heap near the corner. Half-filled beer bottles, cigarette stubs and fast-food wrappers sat piled up on the pale yellow lowboy that cowered beneath the hanging mirror on the west wall of the tiny room.

Rifling through the rubbish, Michael scoured the place for food, beer, grass—anything. Everywhere he looked, he found nothing. His stomach was no longer satisfied with the few scraps of food since his last full meal—compliments of Peter Levato’s fifty-nine dollars—and his head chimed in. Swollen and throbbing, it screamed ceaseless orders with an unrelenting vigor. He needed to shut them up.

With the rent overdue and no money left in their pockets, creative thinking was required if they expected to stay warm, fed and high for very long. Armed robbery had gotten them this far. Yesterday they had added murder to their credit, and Michael was determined that somehow they would put some food in their bellies. Fortunately, Michael didn’t limit his creativity to legal alternatives. Once again, he knew exactly what to do.

With renewed resolve fueled by his growing hunger and fading intoxication, Michael gathered a few of life’s essentials and stuffed them into a bag. Within minutes, he and John stepped back out onto the bleached concrete porch of the quaint motel. Michael pulled the door closed behind them, and they set off into the frigid night to find their next exploit.

While Michael and John set out into the cold, the man who would ultimately bring them to justice lay fast asleep in the warmth of his Greensburg home. Tom Tridico was dreaming of eventual retirement and a life away from men like Michael Travaglia and John Lesko.

Homicide investigators bump up against the worst that society has to offer. Not only must they confront the horrors of a life snuffed out in violence and anger, but they must also meet head on the pain heaped upon those left behind.

Training and experience can guard against the revulsion you feel when you walk into a crime scene littered with gray matter, human flesh, blood and half-putrefied remains. The deeper, more lasting emotional scars that often plague experienced homicide investigators are hazards that no amount of training can help you avoid.

Meeting the challenge of comforting those for whom a loved-one’s demise is both untimely and exceedingly violent forces the homicide investigator to walk a precariously thin line between compassion and dispassion. On the one hand, compassion for the victim, his family and loved ones allows the investigator to do what his training tells him to do—speak for those who cannot speak. On the other hand, compassion, empathy and identification with the survivors can lead to over involvement and tremendous emotional burdens.

If they wish to survive, homicide investigators learn early on that the things they do cannot become personal. Personal involvement, when it occurs, will bring with it the inevitable feelings of loss, emotional struggle and failure when the inevitable happens—and it always does.

Even though statistics show that of all major crimes, homicides are usually the most solvable, there will be times when even the most dedicated efforts fail to deliver anyone in handcuffs. When this happens, overly impassioned investigators risk falling prey to their own self-doubts and feelings of failure—feelings that, if left unchecked, can lead to further psychological issues such as alcoholism, depression and even suicide.

Veteran homicide investigators develop a tough, callous exterior—a shell—something to protect them from witnessing, day-in and day-out, things unimagined by the average person. The depth of man’s depravity and the violence of which he is capable is branded into the homicide investigator’s psyche at nearly every crime scene. Whether it is husband against wife, child against parent or stranger against stranger, there is a never-ending parade of horrific and unspeakable acts that confront a homicide investigator over the course of his career.

For the average citizen, these seamy incidents are the stuff of movies, tabloids and the six o’clock news. For the homicide investigator, they are a way of life—a way of life that cannot be ignored.

Tom Tridico was such an investigator. Surviving thirty years in the trenches is a testament to the skill with which he had navigated these turbulent seas. Avoiding such common “cop” pitfalls as alcoholism, divorce and suicide, Tom had weathered the storm. He had persevered. That is, until now.

History was yet to write the final chapters of Tom Tridico’s celebrated career. At 5:00 a.m. on Sunday, December 30, 1979, the game was afoot. Events had been set in motion from which the story of his life would emerge. As he dozed peacefully in the warmth of his two-story house in the sleepy county seat of Westmoreland County, Tom Tridico’s dreams could not prepare him for what he was about to encounter. In fewer than ten days, history would link the names of Michael Travaglia and John Lesko indelibly and irrevocably with Sergeant Tom Tridico.

At 9:00 a.m., Rich Dickey and George Boyerinas each hovered over his desk, coffee in hand. They were killing time at the Kiski Valley Barracks, waiting for Tom Tridico and his regularly scheduled intelligence meeting. Sharing information among investigators was a big deal to Tridico—it helped spot patterns. It helped solve cases. Peter Levato’s frozen corpse was on the agenda for this morning. He was John Doe #1.

When Tridico arrived at the barracks, he gathered his investigators around and began talking, listening and thinking. He told of a hunter named Ed Wolak and how the crime scene was straightforward. John Doe’s killer had bound him with common white cotton rope, but he had somehow managed to free himself. The condition of the body hinted that he had been in the water but had managed to swim to shore and climb out onto the bank. His pockets were empty, and there were signs that his killer had beaten him.

The autopsy revealed that the suspect shot him three times with a .22-caliber weapon at close range. The first shot entered his chest and pierced his heart, and then the killer fired the next two shots at close range into the back of his skull. The crime scene technicians scoured the surrounding woods but found no identification, money or personal effects near the body. As odd as it sounded, Tridico noted that the suspect had removed Peter Levato’s dentures. These were the insipid little details of Peter Levato’s death, and he relayed them in all their clinical sterility.

After fielding a few questions about John Doe, Tridico steered the meeting toward the rest of the day’s business. A rash of robberies was troubling the Indiana barracks, the local police had handled a few local burglaries and overall, with the exception of John Doe, it was shaping up to be a very calm Christmas season.

As Tom Tridico wrapped up his meeting, he scanned the teletype printouts from the past several days. His eyes drifted down the page. A litany of “Be on the look-outs,” all-points bulletins and missing endangered persons announcements were scattered among the names of wanted felons and escaped prisoners sent out across the state. One entry caught his eye. The Penn Township Police had recovered an abandoned 1975 Ford Grenada in a field along Route 22 near Joe’s Steakhouse.

Tridico pulled the printout off the stack. The registration of the vehicle listed forty-nine-year-old Peter Levato of 3120 Mount Hope Road in Pittsburgh as the owner. Sensing that these seemingly unrelated pieces of information might be tied together, Tridico sent Trooper Curtis Hahn and Detective George Boyerinas to canvass Peter Levato’s Mount Hope neighborhood. He sent a photograph of Chuck Lutz’s John Doe with them just in case.

It wasn’t long after Hahn and Boyerinas began showing the photograph around that neighbors positively identified the man as Peter Levato. Peter Levato was now the first official victim of Michael Travaglia and John Lesko. He now had the dubious distinction of being the tip of a four-murder iceberg that would emerge from the frozen waters surrounding the Alle-Kiski Valley.

Unfortunately, as with most criminal investigations, the information on the murder of Peter Levato came in fits and spurts. To the lament of Tom Tridico, the search of both Peter Levato’s 1975 Grenada and the cornfield behind Joe’s Steakhouse revealed very little new information about his killers. Because of either extreme care or pure accident, John Lesko and Michael Travaglia had left behind few tangible clues.

The true irony of the search of the Joe’s Steakhouse cornfield lies in the fact that, as Sergeant Tom Tridico and Rich Dickey combed the frozen earth of the field in search of a link to Peter Levato’s killer, Michael Travaglia and John Lesko lay passed out in the warmth of their rented beds at Thatcher’s Motel. Slumbering in their drug-clouded, dreamless sleep, Peter Levato’s killers were less than one mile from the police dragnet. The first meeting between police and the murderous duo was not to be on that brisk December day. For that, Tridico would have to wait four more days.

As the first real day of progress in the Peter Levato murder investigation ended, members of Pennsylvania State Police’s Kiski Valley Barracks were on the cusp of a discovery for which they were not prepared. Tom Tridico in particular left his office at the end of his tour comfortably knowing that he and his men were working a random, or at least uncomplicated, murder. The facts that had emerged suggested to these trained investigators that Peter Levato had been killed as part of a robbery.

In homicide parlance, detectives call it presentation—the body position, scene condition and circumstances of the scene. In Peter Levato’s case, everything pointed to a robbery and murder; a scenario that, between them, they had seen dozens of times. Nonetheless, Peter Levato’s frozen corpse, now disemboweled, embalmed and en route to his final earthen rest, had brought forth key clues that would eventually resonate throughout the barracks like a thunderclap.