Nigel Cawthorne - The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large

In 1979, Schaefer kidnapped, raped and murdered 13-year-old Sherry Nastasia, whose family lived in a Springfield apartment complex managed by Schaefer’s brother. Theresa Fenton suffered the same fate in 1981. However, in 1982, 17-year-old Deana Buxton survived an attack in Brattleboro on the border with New Hampshire. The description of her attacker she gave focused police attention on Schaefer, but there was little hard evidence.

On 9 April 1983, Schaefer abducted young Catherine Richards in Springfield. He drove to a remote spot where he forced her to perform oral sex, then crushed her skull with a stone. The body was found at noon the following day. Descriptions of Catherine’s abductor given by an eyewitness matched that Deana Buxton had given the year before.

The police put a case together against Schaefer and were preparing to arrest him in September 1983, when Catherine Richards’ mother wrote an open letter to Schaefer, accusing him of murder and challenging him to confess his sins, in accordance with the precepts of his church.

Schaefer cracked. In custody, he confessed to the murders of Theresa Fenton and Catherine Richards, and the rape of Deana Buxton. In December 1983, he pleaded guilty to kidnapping, sexual assault, and second-degree murder in the Catherine Richards’ case. The charges in the Fenton case were dismissed as part of a plea bargain. A month later, Schaefer was sentenced to a term of 30 years to life in the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas.

Schaefer was safely in jail when the Connecticut River Valley Killer struck again. On 30 May 1984, 17-year-old nurse’s aide Bernice Courtemanche disappeared while hitch-hiking in Claremont, New Hampshire, on her way to see her boyfriend eight miles away in Newport. Her remains were found by a fisherman in Newport on 19 April 1986, almost two years after her disappearance. A post mortem revealed that she died from stab wounds to the neck.

Two months after Bernice Courtemanche disappeared, another nurse went missing. Twenty-seven-year-old Ellen Fried, who was a supervising nurse at Valley Regional Hospital in Claremont, stopped late at night on 10 July 1984 outside Leo’s Market, a Claremont convenience store. It was on Main Street, five miles from I–91 and not far from where Bernice Courtemanche was last seen. Ellen Fried regularly used the payphone there to call her sister who was out of town. They talked for almost an hour. Then, something spooked Fried.

“That’s strange,” she said.

“What?”

“A car just drove through.”

There was a pause. Then Ellen spoke again.

“Hold on a minute,” said

Her sister heard an engine turn over. When Fried returned to the phone, she said she wanted to make sure her car would start. They talked for a few more minutes, then hung up.

Fried was never heard from again. Her skeletal remains were found in 19 September 1985 near the spot where Bernice Coutermanche’s remains were discovered. A post mortem failed to determine exactly how she died. But, like Bernice Courtemanche, she showed signs of knife wounds to the neck.

Single mother Eva Morse was last seen hitch-hiking in Charlestown, New Hampshire, after leaving her place of work on 10 July 1985. A logger found her body on 25 April 1986. The remains still showed signs of knife wounds. Then, on 15 May 1986, housewife Lynda Moore was stabbed to death in her home outside Saxtons River over the state line in Vermont.

Another nurse was murdered in January 1987. Thirty-six-year-old Barbara Agnew disappeared on her way home from a skiing trip. Her car was found abandoned at a Vermont rest stop, but her body was not recovered until 28 March. She too had been killed by vicious stab wounds to the neck and lower abdomen. Investigators now recognized this as the Valley Killer’s signature. However, two more murders, one dating back to 1968, are also considered as possible victims of the Valley Killer, despite the fact that both victims had been not stabbed but strangled.

Then detectives got a break. On the night of 6 August 1988, Jane Boroski was cornered by a man outside of a rural store near Keane, New Hampshire. The attacker pulled the pregnant 22-year-old from her car and stabbed her repeatedly. But she was saved when another vehicle approached and scared her assailant away. Jane Boroski survived the ordeal to give birth later to a healthy baby daughter.

The police now had a good description of the man they were looking for. An artist produced a sketch which was circulated, but this led nowhere. The killer did not strike again—at least not in the Connecticut River Valley.

The trail then went cold for nearly 30 years until a murder-suicide on New Year’s Eve 2005 caught the attention of a private investigator in St Petersburg named Lynn-Marie Carty. When she opened the newspaper on New Year’s Day, she recognized the name of the killer, Michael Nicholaou, who had attacked his estranged wife, Aileen, in her home the day before.

According to the St Petersburg Times , Nicholaou had “slipped into the West Tampa home on New Year’s Eve. It was daylight. He wore a black suit and tie and carried a guitar case full of guns.

“He found his estranged wife at the dining room table.

“‘You didn’t think you were ever going to see me again,” he said.

“When it was over that day on Walnut Street, blood stained a floral bedspread and a beige and pink dresser. Nicholaou, 56, killed his wife and fatally wounded his stepdaughter before shooting himself in the mouth.”

Five years earlier, a Vermont mother had hired Carty, a detective who specialized in reuniting families, to find her daughter, Michelle Ashley, who had had two children by Nicholaou before she disappeared in 1988.

“If I ever go missing,” she had told her mother beforehand, “he killed me, and you need to track him down and find the kids.”

After a few minutes at the computer, Carty found a phone number for Nicholaou and called it.

“How did you find me?” she remembered him asking.

Carty asked about Michelle Ashley. At first, Nicholaou denied knowing her, but when she pressed, he said Michelle was a slut who was taking drugs and had run off, abandoning the children. Carty then asked about the children. Nicholaou said he had them and they were fine. The conversation was curtailed at this point, but when Carty called back the next day, Nicholaou’s phone line was disconnected.

Reading of the murder-suicide of Michael Nicholaou, Aileen Nicholaou and her daughter Terrin Bowman in 2006 stirred up old memories. Carty began wondering what had happened to the children, Nick and Joy. After a bit more digging, Carty found a new phone number. This time she got Nick Nicholaou, now 18, on the phone and told him she did not think their mother had abandoned them. Nick said that he and his sister had never believed it. He cried as he described the hard life they suffered being dragged around the country by their father, who was still traumatized by his service in the Vietnam war that had ended more than three decades before.

Nicholaou had flown helicopters with the 335th Aviation Company, known as the Cowboys, in Vietnam. His comrades remembered Nicholaou as a brave man always prepared to do his duty. He earned a Distinguished Flying Cross, Bronze Star and Air Medal, among other honours, flying into combat zones to drop supplies and recover the wounded. But he had a dark side. A least once, he had left camp on his own, carrying only a knife and bent on hand-to-hand combat with the enemy. His solo efforts became a legend in the company.

Then in May 1971 Nicholaou and seven other helicopter crewmen were charged with murder for strafing innocent civilians while on a flight in the Mekong Delta the previous year. But the charges were dropped due to insufficient evidence. A few days later, Nicholaou was stood down from active duty. He returned to the United States, but his homecoming celebration was short. The war had already become unpopular at home. He worked doing odd jobs and moved from place to place, never staying anywhere for long. Friends soon spotted the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. He later sought treatment in Miami and Tampa.