Kill for Thrill Page 4

  Regardless of whether John followed or, as others claim, led, the two were destined for infamy from the moment they met.

  The two met when both men worked at the Allegheny County Airport. Michael was pursuing training as an airplane mechanic, and both men seemed to find a common bond. Sharing a penchant for drugs and alcohol, the union between these two men forged an alliance that would ultimately lead to the death of four innocent people.

  This chance meeting at the Allegheny County Airport in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, would set in motion seven days of pure, vicious evil. Whether it was John’s tortured childhood and cycle of abuse that made him the way he was or whether he was pure and simply born evil, it did not matter—there was something about the derelict and malevolent Edison Hotel that felt like home.

  It was this fitting home to which Michael and John were en route when a chance encounter with forty-nine-year-old, unemployed security guard Peter Levato would change history.

  As the frigid men walked under the cloudless, coal black city sky, John began thinking about where his next meal was going to come from. Broke, hungry and depressingly sober, they needed some cash—and quick. He sidestepped a tiny bit of debris as it flew past him and then stepped down off the curb onto the street.

  They were two blocks from the Edison and gaining ground. The pair crossed the street and picked up their pace.

  PETER LEVATO BECOMES THE FIRST VICTIM

  The hushed pair braced against the stiff east wind. Liberty Avenue ran north and south, parallel to the Allegheny River, and the ancient granite buildings that stood watch on both sides of the avenue had offered at least some shelter from the blistering winds that whipped off the water. Now, heading down Ninth, free of the shadow of the towering gothic stone structures, the walk was more painful. The men surged forward into the cold. They were almost there.

  Halfway down the block, the familiar grayish brown stones of the Edison Hotel came into view, and the scattered, impotent light from the few streetlights barely reached the ground long enough for the men to pick their way through the empty bottles and trash. Hunched over, with their freezing fists punched deeper into their jacket pockets, they pushed forward in determined strides. At first, they didn’t notice the gold Ford Grenada as it slowed beside them. The window crept slowly down and Peter Levato stuck out his head.

  “You guys want to party?”

  Neither man reacted. Seemingly ignorant of the offer, both men continued east toward French Street and the hotel. Peter Levato’s two-door crept along beside them.

  John leaned into Michael and, in hushed tones, said, “Let’s have some fun with this queer.”

  Michael obviously had a better idea. “Keep walking. I’ve got a plan.”

  John continued to the corner and made a quick right onto French Street just beyond the beckoning doors of the Edison Hotel. Michael paused for a moment. The Grenada paused beside him. Stepping into the street and in front of the headlights of Peter Levato’s car, he quickly circled around to the driver’s side. Michael’s lean, wiry frame towered over the open window of Peter’s idling Ford. A warm river of heat spilled out of the car and washed over Michael as he studied Peter Levato’s face.

  Without warning, Michael ripped open the door and crammed the barrel of a .22-caliber revolver against Peter’s temple, freezing him in mid-breath.

  “Slide over!” Michael barked.

  Peter Levato released his grip on the steering wheel and pushed himself into the passenger’s seat with a look of disbelief on his face. In one practiced motion, Michael slid behind the wheel and deftly tapped the horn twice.

  On cue, John stepped out from the shadows of French Street into the warm light spilling from the doorway of the Edison. His lean, angular face, half in shadow and half bathed in the warm glow of the Edison, had the appearance of weathered granite as he glanced left, then right. Confident that there were no onlookers, he hustled to the waiting getaway car.

  Once John had dropped into the seat beside Peter, sandwiching him between the .22 and John’s own stout frame, Michael gunned the engine and sped out of the city toward the suburbs. He seemed energized.

  Heading west on Penn Avenue, Michael deftly navigated his way through the confusing one-way streets of the city like a veteran taxi driver until the looming green entrance ramp to Route 376 appeared on the horizon. Heading east, he eased onto the four-lane expressway and settled in for a forty-mile drive.

  Deserted and spacious at two o’clock in the morning, the Penn-Lincoln Parkway, simply the “Parkway” to locals, was a straight shot out of the city past Mercy Hospital and the decaying steel mills that lined the Monongahela River. Bordering Schenly and Frick Parks, during the hectic rush hours in Pittsburgh, the Parkway was a bumper-to-bumper morass of suburburanites making their daily trek from the quiet neighborhoods into the city. At this hour, the Grenada sped along in solitude. Michael relaxed his grip on the wheel.

  Once they were far out of the city, Michael pulled the car over. All three men piled out of the car—two more readily than the third. Holding Peter at gunpoint, Michael popped the trunk and motioned to John, who began rummaging through its contents. Moments later, John emerged from the shadows with a short length of rope. The men hurriedly wrapped the rope around Peter’s wrists and cinched it tight.

  Michael eyed Peter, and then he rifled through Peter’s pockets, removed his wallet and belongings and motioned for John. The two each grabbed their captive and hoisted the struggling man unceremoniously into the trunk. The hollow thud of Peter’s body hitting the trunk floor, followed by the resonant thud of the trunk slamming, echoed endlessly, and Michael quickly counted Peter’s money—fifty-nine dollars. With their mission only half finished, both men jumped into the front seat of what used to be Peter Levato’s car, and they were once again eastbound into Westmoreland County.

  Disoriented and in darkness, fear gripped Peter. The stench of gasoline and Goodyear was overwhelming. His thoughts darted back and forth as he grappled with what had just happened. What had just happened?

  The Grenada rattled along the winding highway into the rolling hills outside of Pittsburgh. As they sped farther from the city, fear began to fill Peter’s head. He methodically made a checklist in his head: abducted at gunpoint, robbed, tied and heading into the country. He knew that nothing good would come of this. His mind seized on the possibility that death was waiting for him at the end of his journey. He flushed the thought from his mind, determined to think of a plan.

  As the car whistled through Five Points and past Shieldburg and New Alexandria, the sounds of the highway and the rhythmic thud of the tires rumbling over the expansion joints were the only sounds that Peter heard. He strained to seize an occasional glimpse of the conversation between his captors, but only wisps of their muffled voices faded in and out of his head. Peter knew that he was alone, bumping along into the night.

  As the minutes crept by, Peter’s thoughts continued to ricochet. First he abandoned hope and then almost immediately he envisioned a well-played scenario in which he could overpower his captors and make good his escape into the brush. Each time, the buzzing in his brain bounced him from one extreme to the other. His thoughts offered him no comfort.

  In the middle of nowhere, surrounded by darkness and pine trees, Michael Travaglia expertly guided the speeding car northward on Route 981 toward Loyalhanna. Conversation was sparse between him and John, and what was unspoken was as telling as what was spoken. Michael knew that John knew what had to be done.

  Route 981 gently curved to the right, and Michael slowed. Two hundred yards farther on, invisible in the coal black night, Michael knew that Loyalhanna Dam Road lurked ahead. He slowed the car, jerked the wheel to the left, turning onto a two-lane road, and then accelerated.

  The tiny towns and white-sided churches zipped by as he sped into the night. Tiny homesteads, the occasional farm and diminutive one-horse towns appeared and disappeared along the roadway outside his window. The winding stretch of r
oad leading up to the dam’s spillway was desolate. The clear northern sky, cloudless and velveteen, hung over the frosted fields that blanketed both sides of the roadway, and Michael aimed the stolen Ford down the middle. Dodging in and out of the thick, coniferous forests surrounding the dam, the winding two-lane road carried Peter Levato closer to the dark waters of the reservoir with each passing mile. Fifty yards farther ahead, an opening emerged where Loyalhanna Dam Road crossed over Loyalhanna Creek. Michael knew they were close.

  The fifty-yard-wide bridge sat twenty feet above the swiftly running waters of Loyalhanna Creek, which left the dam and wended its way to meet its larger sister, the Conemaugh River, at Saltsburg.

  Skidding to a stop on the southwest side of the bridge, Michael threw the car into park and shut off the ignition. Instantly, the dark, still silence of the steep, wooded hillsides enveloped both men. Even the rushing headwaters of the spillway were distant, faint whispers as they escaped the Loyalhanna Dam and rolled down through the limestone rock and the crispness of the frozen world. In the stillness of the wintry night, the river swallowed up even their thoughts. Michael moved first and stepped out onto the bridge.

  The metallic chatter of keys pierced the silence. The sharp thunk-click of the trunk lock and then the rusty creak of the Grenada’s trunk lid hinge rattled through the leafless trees along the riverbank. It startled a family of opossums that were innocently foraging for grubs under the concrete abutment, and they quickly dove beneath some rocks near the creek’s edge.

  Michael looked down at Peter Levato’s cold, motionless body. It looked stiff from the nearly hour-and-a-half ride out of the city. Peter began to stir. Startled by his sudden movement, Michael raised the revolver over his head and viciously crushed it down onto Peter’s skull. Tiny rivulets of blood trickled down Peter’s forehead. Shoving the gun into his waistband, Michael motioned to John and then grabbed the dazed Levato and began to hoist him from the trunk.

  Both men struggled with opposite ends of Peter Levato’s wriggling body. They maneuvered him from the well of the trunk and carried him to the concrete retaining wall that separated them from the icy creek twenty feet below. Unceremoniously, they hurled his bruised and dazed body over the edge. Michael thought to himself how easy it had been as he listened to the splash echo off the valley walls and dissolve into the night. The silence once again overpowered the night air.

  Suddenly, a commotion erupted from under the bridge. A cacophonous barrage of splashes and screams echoed from under the concrete piling. Peering over the edge, Michael could see nothing in the darkness. Peter Levato’s screams of pure desperation grew louder and more frantic.

  Determined not to go quietly into the night, Peter pulled his hands from the ropes and began to swim to shore. Although fewer than one hundred yards wide at the bridge, the ice cold temperatures made an otherwise routine swim across the creek nearly impossible. As he struggled against the cold and swift current of the creek, Peter’s flailing alerted John and Michael, who were standing above him staring down into the swirling water beneath the bridge. They didn’t react. Maybe they didn’t see him, Peter thought.

  Moments later, with frantic, irate energy, Michael and John sprinted to the west end of the bridge and scrambled down the embankment. Sliding on the leaf litter and broken branches that had collected over the past autumn, they reached the riverbank in seconds.

  The men paused and listened. The sounds of snapping twigs and crunching leaves followed Peter as he reached the shore and raced headlong down the riverbank and into the woods. Peter could hear his pursuers as they carefully picked their way along the thick, tree-lined river’s edge after him.

  Peter’s swim and subsequent flight had left him gasping for breath. Cold, exhausted and disoriented, miles from the nearest building and entirely dependent on himself for salvation, his body commanded that he rest—just for a minute. He slipped behind the largest tree he could find. Carefully, he maneuvered to put the tree between his pursuers and himself, and then he listened. There was no sound. The snapping of twigs and crunching of leaves had stopped.

  Crouched against the tree, Peter struggled for breath and willed his heart to slow and his hands to stop shaking. Whether from the cold, fear or exertion, his whole body was quivering uncontrollably. No matter how hard he tried, he could not make it stop.

  Peter still didn’t hear anything. He saw even less. Squinting his eyes in the velvet black darkness, he searched and searched. He still saw nothing.

  A shadow darted in front of him. Instantly, both his pursuers were upon him. Pinned against the tree, Peter’s killers had left him nowhere to go. As they towered over his crouching, freezing body, Michael Travaglia gripped the knurled handle of a .22 and aimed for the middle of Peter’s body.

  The staccato report from the gun startled all three men as tiny orange flames lit up the leafy ground around their feet. When the bullet struck Peter Levato in the chest, it instantly dropped him to his knees. The relentless searing-lead torpedo tore through his chest and into the flailing, faltering muscles of his heart. They seized instantly. He crumpled to the ground in a lifeless mass.

  Michael was obviously not satisfied. He walked deliberately and confidently toward Peter Levato’s motionless body and quickly fired two more shots. Bang! Bang! Both struck Levato’s lifeless body in the top of the head and bored down into his now vacant brain.

  For all the deafening commotion of the past two minutes, the banks of the Loyalhanna Creek were now eerily silent—deadly silent. Peter Levato was dead. Michael Travaglia and John Lesko had begun their seven-day reign of terror. The kill for thrill had begun.

  PART II

  EDWARD WOLAK FINDS THE BODY

  On Friday, December 28, 1979, an event so innocuous that it would go unnoticed for two days occurred. Yet it was an event so profound that when Sergeant Tom Tridico later heard of it, it would prove to be the first link in a chain of evidence that would lead Michael Travaglia, John Lesko and Tom Tridico into a head-on collision.

  Without fanfare and with little more than routine police effort, officers of the Penn Township Police Department had stumbled on the stubbly stalks of a quiescent cornfield in a remote part of the outskirts of Delmont, Pennsylvania. Located behind Joe’s Steakhouse on Route 22 near the interchange for Pennsylvania’s Turnpike, the snow-draped field had rested in undisturbed winter slumber until, shortly after executing Peter Levato, Michael Travaglia and John Lesko dumped his 1975 gold Ford Grenada among the field’s spent husks.

  When the Penn Township Police discovered Peter’s car abandoned and unoccupied, officers did what any member of a respectable municipal police department would do with an abandoned vehicle—they checked the license plate to see if it had been reported stolen. It had not. Without a crime to investigate, the police followed the next step in the procedure for dealing with abandoned vehicles—they towed it to an impoundment facility.

  For Sergeant Tom Tridico, the discovery of Peter Levato’s Grenada by the Penn Township Police would normally be nothing more than a tiny bump in the workday life of an investigative supervisor for the Pennsylvania State Police. In fact, chances are, had it not been for the events of the next few days, Tom Tridico might have finished the remainder of this thirty-three years with the state police having never even heard Peter Levato’s name.

  Tom Tridico grew up in Warren, Pennsylvania, a small town about forty minutes southeast of Erie and about five minutes from the New York—Pennsylvania state line. Tom’s father was the fire chief in Warren, and from an early age, he was attracted to police work. Growing up near the state police barracks in Erie helped, and shortly after ending his three-year naval enlistment, Tom signed up for the Pennsylvania State Police.

  In 1947, he graduated from the State Police Academy in Hershey, Pennsylvania. He had finally realized his dream. He was a cop. Tom was assigned the rank of private. Over the course of his career, Tom Tridico would serve in a number of capacities; however, the one for which he would become
most well known was his position as the supervisor of criminal investigations for the Troop A barracks of the Pennsylvania State Police in Greensburg, Pennsylvania.

  In this capacity, Tom oversaw the criminal investigation of his troop. He reviewed their cases, assigned them to investigations and, when cases like the Travaglia and Lesko one arose, he would coordinate the investigation. Supervising men such as Charles Lutz, Richard Dickey, Curtis Hahn, Robert Luniewski and countless others, Tom Tridico would eventually call upon them to bring Michael Travaglia and John Lesko to justice.

  By Tridico’s own count, he has handled thousands of criminal investigations and well over two hundred homicide investigations. Nevertheless, the Travaglia and Lesko case has most affected him. Probably in part because of Leonard Miller and in part because, as the years have dragged on, the criminal justice system has called on him to repeatedly recount for jurors and jurists alike the soul-robbing events that began for him on the cusp of the New Year in 1980. In 1979, Tom Tridico did not know Edward Wolak. Tom Tridico did not know Peter Levato. Soon, however, Edward Wolak would know both Peter Levato and Tom Tridico.

  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.