Suspect/Victim Read online

  SUSPECT/VICTIM

  A True Story

  BY

  JOHN LUCIEW

  Author of KILL THE STORY

  This book is drawn from my articles first published in The Patriot-News, Harrisburg, Pa.

  1

  ON THE NIGHT HIS WORLD CHANGED, Todd Ewalt turned in early, just after 10 p.m., well ahead of his night-owl wife, Darlene. Sleep came to him quickly, the benefits of a union carpenter’s physical labor and clear, uncluttered mind.

  He doesn’t remember if he dreamed that night, July 12, 2007. Looking back on it, his uncomplicated life in the family of four’s ordered, suburban split-level home in rural Harrisburg, Pa., is what seems like the dream.

  Todd Ewalt’s blissful but brief slumber ended abruptly with shouts in the wee hours of the next morning. Loud, authoritative voices drilled through his unconscious, jolting him awake.

  Strangers — intruders — were in the upstairs bedroom of his West Hanover Twp., Dauphin County, home. They were pointing flashlights — and something else. Through squints and without his glasses, he saw the guns. They were drawn and leveled at him.

  Beneath the covers, Todd Ewalt was naked. But his faculties were racing back. A surge of adrenaline fueled his pounding heart. It was the classic fight-or-flight response. Yet he couldn’t fight or flee these intruders. He saw now that they wore uniforms and badges — Pennsylvania State Police.

  Next, he heard their commands: Hands in the air! Do it now!

  Warily, the officers drew nearer to him, their arms outstretched, fists squeezed around guns, all pointed at Todd Ewalt. They cuffed his wrists behind his back, then stood him up.

  Ewalt asked for his pants. They ignored him.

  The state police were asking the questions just then: Who else is in the house?

  His reason returning, Todd Ewalt thought that it must be some kind of mistake. A drug bust gone bad, perhaps. The cops must have gotten the address wrong. Those kinds of things happened, didn’t they? Surely, he could explain things, if only they’d stop shouting and listen.

  In those early minutes, naked and handcuffed in his own bedroom, Todd Ewalt didn’t see the full sweep of the rapidly unfolding events. He had no inkling that those few hours of untroubled sleep would be his last for a long, long time.

  He had gone to bed that evening a husband, a father and a man who knew himself and who gladly accepted his life. Less than four hours later, rudely rousted from sleep, Todd Ewalt awoke a widower, a single father and a chief suspect in his wife’s brutal murder.

  But he didn’t know any of this yet.

  It would be more than two hours before state police investigators decided to tell Todd Ewalt that his wife of 22 years was dead. And it would take three years for the serial killer who took her life, Adam Leroy Lane, to plead guilty and accept a life sentence for her murder.

  This is the story of the Ewalts’ long journey to justice — a tortured, winding, heart-rending road that finally ended with Lane’s June 28, 2010, guilty plea.

  2

  THE DARK SHAPE MOVED UNNOTICED from one of the truck stops clustered at the intersection of Interstate 81 and Route 39, about 15 miles northeast of Harrisburg.

  Clad in black, Adam Lane was leaving behind the small, anonymous Interstate city of idling diesels, twangy music and bad coffee. He was venturing out into the night, where families slumbered in nicely spaced suburban homes.

  Once Lane exited the harsh glow of the halogen lamps of the floodlit truck stops, he likely pulled on the ninja mask, completing his disguise. At a Halloween party, Lane’s getup might have elicited laughs. The bushy, beard-stubbled truck driver made for an overweight ninja. Picture John Belushi trying to be menacing.

  But for the bearish North Carolina father of three daughters who even friends said hated women, this was no costume.

  These were his hunting clothes. The neighborhoods before him were his hunting grounds. And the people — specifically the women — who slept in those dark, tranquil houses were his prey.

  No one knows how long Lane spent seeking out his prey that night. Nobody will ever know how many doors he might have tried, hoping to find one unlocked. Did he encounter any open windows on the warm summer night and ponder climbing through? Where there any screen doors that he could have sliced open with his hunting knife and gained entry?

  One can speculate about what drew Lane’s dark presence toward the Ewalt home on Manor Drive, just off Route 39 near Pavone’s Restaurant.

  Darlene’s voice must have carried well in those quiet pre-dawn hours. Her bursts of laughter and her unmistakable enthusiasm would have enlivened her tone above the gentle concerto of crickets.

  Darlene Ewalt, 42, was still buzzing about the trip she would be taking — a Caribbean cruise with family friends Patty and Chet Gerhart that October. Her husband Todd had bowed out. He coached junior football and wouldn’t hear of missing the time. But Darlene’s anticipation was undiminished.

  A blonde-haired product of small-town Nebraska, she loved adventure and adored traveling. She’d think nothing of driving hundreds of miles to deliver the hand-made, ultra-light thoroughbred horse racing saddles she and Todd made in their side business.

  That’s because Darlene Ewalt — friends called her “Dar” — was a study in contrasts. On one hand, she was the ultimate homemaker and mother who met her husband — tall and fit with brown hair and glasses — when both were still in their teens.

  A whiz in the kitchen, she satisfied the hearty appetites of her college football-playing son and her drywall-hanging husband. They were two big men, but they looked to Darlene to care for them.

  She tended a small garden in the summer. She nursed her beloved Pomeranian, Jag, from a baby bottle as a pup and still sometimes toted the dog around in the pocket of her apron. When it came to Christmas, Darlene made sure each one was like a storybook — only she hated sitting for the family’s formal holiday portrait.

  Yet she loved the lure of the open road, as well.

  As traditional as she was, she was absolutely independent. She traveled frequently to Nebraska to visit her brother and his grandchildren. She remained fiercely faithful to her home state college football team, the Nebraska Cornhuskers. She delighted in bedeviling the bevy of blue-bleeding Penn State fans that abounded in Central Pennsylvania.

  So when the opportunity arose to sail the Caribbean with the Gerharts, Darlene didn’t hesitate. She was going, Todd or no Todd.

  She was hashing over the travel plans early that morning, sitting out on her back patio and chatting on a cordless phone with Chet Gerhart. It didn’t matter that she and Todd had just dined with the Gerharts, who lived in a nearby development. Darlene remained excited, and she wanted to talk. The later it got, the chattier Darlene often became. The night owl would think nothing of dialing up her daughter at 2 a.m. just to say ‘hi.’

  “I’d get a phone call at 2 o’clock in the morning: ‘Phone tag. You’re it. Luv ya. Bye’,” recalls Nicole (Ewalt) Pogasic, who was just out of high school when her mom was murdered and is now 22 and married. “I miss those.”

  While wee-hour phone conversations weren’t unusual for Darlene, her long, last phone call with a male friend would raise suspicions among the detectives who would investigate her murder. They’d see a wife talking for hours with another man and wonder whether Todd Ewalt had picked up the other line and overheard something inappropriate. Might it have been enough to throw a husband into a murderous rage? Investigators soon would think that perhaps it was.

  Darlene was still talking at around 2 a.m. on July 13.

  To Adam Leroy Lane, a fledgling serial killer whose senses had to be enlivened on his human hunt, Darlene’s conversation almost certainly was the beacon that summoned him.

&nb
sp; At the other end of the line, Chet Gerhart suddenly heard Darlene utter, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”

  Then there was nothing — no sounds — even though the line remained connected.

  Gerhart raced to wake his wife, then the couple sped over to the Ewalts’ and dialed 911. Minutes later, they found their friend slumped in a patio chair. Light from the kitchen shone on her face.

  Darlene Ewalt’s eyes were open, but her throat was slashed.

  Authorities believe her killer took Darlene Ewalt from behind, quickly sliding a hooked, serrated knife across her neck.

  As the mother of two bled out on her patio, the only witness was a pet bunny in a wire pen at the far end of the yard.

  3

  STATE POLICE FINALLY AFFORDED Todd Ewalt the luxury of pants — a well-worn pair of sweats — but they still weren’t answering his questions.

  All the commotion in the house had awoken Todd’s college-age son, Nick, who was home from Northwest Missouri State University for the summer. Father and son were handcuffed and being held in their kitchen. But someone was missing.

  Where was Darlene?

  Todd kept screaming the question over and over at the police officers now swarming his house. But they didn’t answer.

  Then Todd spotted Darlene’s purse on the kitchen table. Her car keys and cell phone were there. Darlene wouldn’t have left them behind.

  Next came the rapid-fire camera flashes outside his house. The dozens and dozens of lightening-like white light flooding the dark windows of his home told Ewalt that his yard was now a crime scene.

  Something was wrong. Very wrong.

  “That’s when I got nervous,” he recalls.

  The investigation into Darlene Ewalt’s homicide wasn’t even an hour old, but police believed they had their first two suspects. They wasted little time in separating Nick and Todd Ewalt, and then launched into the questioning.

  They kept Nick in the kitchen and took Todd to the foyer. Suddenly, Todd heard his tough-as-nails, 270-pound defense tackle of a son wailing and crying. Then another officer gave Todd the news: Your wife’s dead.

  The revelation was cold and matter of fact. The words twisted in Todd’s gut as the life-altering realization sank in.

  “Everything is different. Every aspect of my life is different,” says Todd, now 46.

  At some point, Nick Ewalt managed to call his sister, who lived nearby. He broke the horrible news over the phone, but Nicole Ewalt didn’t believe him. It wasn’t until she raced over and saw her family’s home swarming with police and the neighborhood painted by swirling emergency lights that she accepted the harsh truth.

  Nicole made it out of her car, but a wave of grief paralyzed her.

  She collapsed on the lawn.

  “I mean, there is nothing worse to have taken from you than your mom,” says Nicole, now married. “She was the glue to the family.”

  Without their steady matriarch, the Ewalts were coming apart, undone by the most devastating news a family can receive.

  But the indignity wouldn’t stop there.

  The head of this wounded family was about to be on the receiving end of a full-court press by police who believed that Todd Ewalt was a chief suspect in his wife’s murder.

  Already, police were checking the house and its grounds for the clothes they believed that Todd could have quickly ditched, before slipping into bed naked. One of the first places they checked was the washing machine, but it was empty.

  Believing he had nothing to hide, Todd Ewalt early on gave police permission to search his home. He said investigators took numerous items, but to this day, he’s never received an itemized list of all that was confiscated — a violation of policy.

  Two 20-year-plus veteran detectives with Troop H of the Pennsylvania State Police would lead the investigation — Cpl. George W. Cronin and Trooper George W. Lokitis. Both declined to be interviewed for this story.

  Todd Ewalt would later describe the duo as the classic good cop, bad cop — one trying to sympathize and understand his plight, the other pressing buttons and looking to elicit a rise in what they suspected was a killer’s rage.

  But the investigators were looking in all the wrong places — and at the wrong person. Pennsylvania State Police and Dauphin County officials would make a point of reassuring residents that they had nothing to worry about. Darlene Ewalt’s murder wasn’t a random attack.

  Meanwhile, a serial killer bent on hunting and stabbing women was on the loose, and no one was tracking his bloody trail.

  4

  DAUPHIN COUNTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY Edward M. Marsico Jr. arrived at the Ewalt home on Manor Drive around dawn. Darlene Ewalt’s body was still on the patio and a small army of crime scene investigators was searching the grounds for clues. One team of technicians went so far as to spray the grass with Luminol, a chemical that causes blood traces to glow a striking blue. They were trying to track the killer’s blood trail, ultimately to no avail.

  Not wanting to disrupt the forensic work, the dark-haired, boyish-featured veteran district attorney didn’t go over for a closer inspection of the crime scene and murder victim. He saw enough to satisfy himself about the early direction of the investigation.

  Marsico recalls seeing blood around Darlene Ewalt’s body, but not spatter in every direction. This told him that a killer could have came upon her from behind, slit her throat, and then slipped away with little or no blood traces on him.

  “Someone could have done this and gotten out of there quickly without too much blood,” Marsico insists. “Believe me, I have seen many crime scenes where guys that I know committed the murder had nothing on them.”

  In other words, Marsico wasn’t ruling out Todd Ewalt just because he was found naked in bed less than 20 minutes after Chet Gerhart heard Darlene’s murder over the phone.

  In fact, one of the first things Marsico, a prosecutor with more than 20 years of experience, looks for in a murder investigation is motive — especially in one as brutally personal as a throat slashing and stabbing. And for a killer to have motive, he or she typically knows the victim.

  “If I wanted to kill Darlene Ewalt, how did I know she was going to be on the patio at two in the morning?” Marsico recalls thinking that night. “My thought process was the killer was someone who wanted to kill Darlene Ewalt. And who else knew other than her family where she was?”

  If we only hurt the ones we love, Marsico believed that most murder victims often were very close to their killers. They were lovers, spouses, brothers and best friends.

  Marsico didn’t buy the notion that the son, Nick, had conspired with his father on the killing. Things like that just didn’t happen in his experience. But he fully endorsed the strategy of separating the two family members and drilling them again and again on every detail of the evening. Was there a sound that Nick remembered but Todd couldn’t explain? Was there an earlier shouting match between husband and wife that Nick would confirm but that Todd conveniently left out of his story?

  He had no qualms that Pennsylvania State Police detectives planned to go after Todd Ewalt — hard. This would be the way authorities would close in on the killer, Marsico believed. They would mine for details and establish motive. They would find some fact to make sense of the senseless. They would bring some semblance of order and reason to the unthinkable.

  “I looked for a motive,” Marsico concedes now. “Lesson learned. I was incorrect in that sense.”

  But he stands by the investigation as complete and exhaustive. Police would interview friends, family and neighbors. They would check bank accounts, life insurance policies and wills. Investigators would pursue every lead and cast a wide net for other possible suspects, even checking the criminal records of neighbors. And after police found steroids and marijuana in Nick’s bedroom that night, Marsico said they pursued whether the crime could be connected to drugs.

  In other words, they were following the old law enforcement mantra of not ruling any
one in — or out. All of these avenues would prove dead ends.

  But as he stood in the Ewalts’ backyard as dawn gave way to morning, Marsico was confident they would find the answers — and his all-important motive — as long as they kept the focus on Darlene Ewalt’s life and who in it wanted her dead.

  Most of all, they would need Todd Ewalt to lock himself into a story, and then chip away at it with question after question, hour after hour, day after day.

  As his eyes scanned the yard one final time, Marsico caught sight of the penned up-bunny. He remembers thinking, “if only rabbits could talk, we could solve this case right now.”

  5

  WHEN VIOLENCE STRIKES, there is the person who is attacked, the primary victim. But the ramifications of such acts often ripple far beyond a single victim. These are the people Jennifer Storm and her agency, Dauphin County’s Victim/Witness Assistance Program, are personally committed and statutorily obligated to help.

  The tragic homicide of a wife and mother normally would bring Storm or one of her staffers to the scene to console the victims left behind and begin educating them on the services, rights and resources available to them under Pennsylvania law. In Dauphin County, a victim-witness representative is on call 24/7.

  “Typically, when there is a homicide we are called to the scene right along with the DA and responding detectives,” says Storm, a brunette former addict-turned victim rights crusader. “The death notification that was given to Todd normally would have come from my staff. We do the crisis intervention with the family. We make sure all their needs are met and that they have as much information as they possibly can.”

  But no one from the agency went to the Ewalt home the day Darlene Ewalt was murdered.