Adam Leroy Lane was a long-haul truck driver from North Carolina who, over a span of 17 days in July 2007, attacked four women and girls in their homes near the interstate highways he drove. Two of them died. Darlene Ewalt, 42, was stabbed on the back patio of her home near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in the early hours of July 13, 2007. Monica Massaro, 38, was killed in her bed in Bloomsbury, New Jersey, near the end of the month. A woman in York County, Pennsylvania, and a 15-year-old girl in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, survived.
Lane was caught in the act in Chelmsford, when the girl's parents heard her in distress, burst into her room and held him until police arrived. What police found in his truck, and in a dumpster where his belongings were later thrown away, led detectives in New Jersey and Pennsylvania to him. Laboratory tests on his knives found the blood of both murdered women and cleared Darlene Ewalt's husband, who had spent weeks as the main suspect in her death. Lane pleaded guilty in all three states. In June 2010 a Pennsylvania judge sentenced him to life in prison.
Lane lived in Jonesville, a small town in North Carolina, according to the New Jersey State Police and the Associated Press. He was 43 when New Jersey charged him in August 2007, and 45 when he was sentenced in Pennsylvania in June 2010. He was married and had three daughters, CBS News reported.
He drove a truck for a living, and his long-haul routes took him up the East Coast, including runs to Nashua, New Hampshire, and towns around Boston. Investigators found no criminal history. Dateline NBC described him as a married father with no record, and CBS News's 48 Hours reported that relatives and police described a normal childhood. He had no record of any kind in Massachusetts.
Beyond that, his life before July 2007 is thinly documented. No clear motive has been reported, and the detective who interviewed him at length in New Jersey said he could not find one.
Prosecutors described a pattern that was simple and hard to detect. Lane would stop his truck at a truck stop or rest area near an interstate highway, late at night. He would then go on foot into the nearby streets, dressed in black, looking for a house he could get into. In Pennsylvania, AP reported, prosecutors said he picked his victims at random and attacked them at homes close to the highways he traveled.
Dauphin County's district attorney, Ed Marsico, later said that a random killing of this kind went against his experience. People killed in their own homes, he explained, are usually killed by someone they know. That assumption shaped the first weeks of the investigation into Darlene Ewalt's death.
Darlene M. Ewalt was 42 and lived in West Hanover Township, a suburb of Harrisburg in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. Her death notice described her as a saddle maker. Her husband, Todd, told The Patriot-News of Harrisburg, in remarks reported by AP, that she made saddles for thoroughbred racehorses, tended the family garden and was a fun-loving free spirit. They had been married 23 years. Todd Ewalt, a carpenter who also coached football, said he had known her since he was 15.
They had two children, a son, Nick, and a daughter, Nicole, who later used the surname Pogasic. Darlene had married young and the couple had raised their children on a tight budget, Dateline reported. She loved adventure but had seldom traveled, and her backyard was a gathering place for friends and for people she had only just met. Her daughter said she made people laugh and would not let anyone sit by themselves. "My mom had no enemies," Nicole told 48 Hours.
Shortly before her death, friends offered her a ticket for a Caribbean cruise that October. Todd could not go because it was football season. Darlene wanted to go anyway.
In the early hours of Friday, July 13, 2007, at about 2 a.m., Darlene Ewalt was sitting on the back patio of her home, talking on the phone with a friend about the cruise. Her husband and son were asleep inside. A man with a long knife attacked her there. Her friend heard her cry out "Oh my God" several times before the line went dead, and he drove to the house with his wife. They found her in a chair on the patio. She had died within minutes of being stabbed in the neck.
Police later believed that the attacker had walked back to his truck at a nearby truck stop and driven away. At the time, they had no sign of him.
When police reached the house they pointed guns at Todd Ewalt and handcuffed him; he said later that at first he thought his son was playing a joke. Their son was also detained. Todd said he was a heavy sleeper and had heard nothing.
Detectives treated him as their main suspect. He told Dateline that they accused him of killing his wife over money problems and of knowing she meant to divorce him. He took a polygraph examination and was told he had failed it. "How could I fail it when I didn't commit the crime?" he said. He hired a lawyer, which investigators took as another reason for suspicion. Marsico said afterward that he had believed at first that the husband was responsible, and that the lack of physical evidence had been frustrating.
By late summer Todd Ewalt had been subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury in early September 2007, CBS News reported. He said he grew more worried as the date came closer. His daughter said she never once wondered whether her father had killed her mother: "I just knew." Todd later said investigators should have "thought outside the box" instead of relying on statistics.
About four days after Darlene Ewalt's death, and roughly 25 miles to the south, a 37-year-old woman was asleep on the couch in her home north of York, in York County, Pennsylvania. At about 2 a.m. a man dressed in black stabbed her in the shoulder and cut her neck. When she screamed and sat up, he fled out the back door. Her family called for help, and she survived. She told police later that she never clearly saw his face. AP did not name her in its 2010 report on Lane's sentencing, and she is not named here.
Investigators later found a pair of black gloves in a yard about half a mile from her home. The gloves carried Lane's DNA and Darlene Ewalt's blood, AP reported in 2008.
Monica Massaro was 38 and lived alone in Bloomsbury, a small borough in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, near a truck stop and an interstate highway. She ran a house-cleaning business. Friends described her to Dateline as outgoing and sociable, a woman who loved photography, motorcycles and rock music, Aerosmith above all. Her friends said the town felt like a Norman Rockwell painting, and she rarely locked her doors. She was the only child of Frank and Faye Massaro. Her birthday was August 11.
On the last Saturday of July 2007, Monica Massaro canceled plans with friends at the last minute. During that night or the next, a man parked at the truck stop near her home and walked to her house. "The door was unlocked, and he walked right in through her front door," said Detective Sergeant Geoffrey Noble of the New Jersey State Police. "He went through her house. He spent time in her house." He found her in her first-floor bedroom and stabbed her to death.
The exact date varies between the sources. ABC News gave it as July 28, 2007; CBS News said she was killed on or about July 29, the day before the Chelmsford attack. On Monday, July 30, a client found her missing, and state troopers carrying out a well-being check at her home found her body. There had been no break-in. Detectives looked first at her friends and her romantic contacts. Because her home lay so close to the truck stop and the interstate, they also began to consider a stranger.
A task force of the New Jersey State Police Major Crime Unit and the Hunterdon County Prosecutor's Office interviewed her friends and acquaintances and canvassed the neighborhood. A State Police recruit class carried out a grid search of the area.
Lane drove north. By the night of July 29 he was in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, a town about 30 miles outside Boston, with his truck parked near Interstate 495. Chelmsford police said he spent about five hours roaming the town that night and tried to get into at least three other houses. Neighbors reported a man in black near one home, and about 2 a.m. a caller told police that a man was trying to break in. Officers searched and found no one.
At about 4 a.m. on July 30, he entered a house beside the interstate through a back door that the family's 15-year-old daughter had left unlocked for her brother. He was dressed in black and masked, and he carried a knife. He went into the girl's bedroom and held the knife to her. She made enough noise to wake her parents in the next room.
Her father went in, wrestled Lane to the floor and held him in a headlock. Her mother seized the blade of the knife with her bare hands and was cut. The girl ran to call 911. Officers arrived and arrested Lane at the scene with the father still holding him. Neither the girl nor her family is named here.
Police recovered knives, a throwing star, choking wire, a leather mask and a hood, Chelmsford Detective George Tyros told Dateline. In the cab of Lane's truck a DVD player still held a disc of a horror film called "Hunting Humans," which Tyros described as a story about a serial killer who kills for no real motive. Lane later complained, according to 48 Hours, that he was being portrayed unfairly because he liked horror films.
A judge held Lane without bail, finding him a danger to the community and to the family, and a Massachusetts grand jury indicted him on charges from the Chelmsford home invasion.
Tyros began to wonder whether Lane had done this before. Among the papers in the truck were a log book and receipts. One receipt, for a radar detector, came from a truck stop in Bloomsbury, New Jersey, and was dated July 29, 2007.
In New Jersey, detectives working the Massaro case had asked the FBI's national database, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, known as ViCAP, for reports of similar knife attacks near busy highways. The FBI had just received word of the Chelmsford arrest. The Hunterdon County Prosecutor's Office learned of it through ViCAP, according to the joint press release later issued by the prosecutor's office and the State Police. On August 20 the Massachusetts arrest was confirmed to New Jersey investigators, and when a Massachusetts detective confirmed the Bloomsbury receipt by phone, Noble said, the whole focus of the investigation changed.
By then Lane's truck had been returned. Chelmsford police held it for about three weeks before releasing it to its owner, whose company threw Lane's belongings into a dumpster. New Jersey detectives went through the trash and recovered his clothing, shoes and socks just before a hauler came to collect it. The black clothing was stained, and long blond hairs were found on it, Dateline reported; the program did not give the results of any test on the hairs.
Noble and his colleagues traveled to Massachusetts to question Lane in jail. Noble talked with him casually for about an hour before asking him directly whether he had attacked someone in New Jersey. Lane said, "I'm done," and Noble had to stop.
Lane then asked whether New Jersey had the death penalty, and whether Noble would talk if he were in Lane's position. Noble said he would. When Lane nodded at him through the window, Noble went back in, and Lane agreed to keep talking. His manner changed once he understood he had been caught, Noble said. "This is gonna kill my family," Lane told him.
In the account he then gave, Lane said he had gone into the house to rob it after finding the door unlocked. He said he had put the knife down on the bed and that Monica Massaro rolled against it and was cut, calling her death an accident. He said she had bled to death in less than 60 seconds, and he denied any sexual motive. Detectives did not believe the accident story.
"There is no 'why' with Adam Lane," Noble told 48 Hours. He called Lane one of the most dangerous men he had ever personally encountered, and said Lane had killed Monica Massaro "for the sport of it."
On August 28, 2007, New Jersey filed criminal complaints charging Lane with first-degree murder, second-degree burglary and third-degree possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose. The release announcing the charges noted that he was presumed innocent and that he was being held without bail in Massachusetts.
Some weeks after the confession, laboratory results came back on the knives that New Jersey detectives had submitted for testing. They showed Monica Massaro's DNA, and they also showed the blood of Darlene Ewalt, the Pennsylvania woman whose husband was then the main suspect in her death. AP reported in 2008 that Ewalt's blood was found on a knife recovered from Lane's truck. Pennsylvania investigators then tied Lane by DNA to the York County attack as well, through the gloves found near that victim's home.
Marsico called the result "a complete game changer." He met Todd Ewalt, apologized to him for treating him as a suspect, and told the family they would have the office's support in bringing Lane to justice. Nicole Ewalt said learning that the evidence had cleared her father was a relief.
The Massachusetts case never went to trial. Prosecutors said that was never likely, because Lane had been caught in the act. In December 2007 he pleaded guilty to charges from the Chelmsford attack and was sentenced to 25 to 30 years in state prison, AP and Dateline reported. Under the plea agreement, a count that would have required the girl to testify was dropped, which her mother said was why the family accepted it.
Assistant District Attorney Kerry Ahern said he would have liked a longer sentence, but that Lane faced murder charges in other states and "was never gonna get out."
Lane was held in a New Jersey jail while the Massaro case went forward. In early August 2008 he pleaded not guilty to the murder, AP reported. Later in 2008 he changed his plea and admitted killing Monica Massaro. At the hearing, according to Dateline, the prosecutor described the killing as a premeditated attack rather than an accident.
In Hunterdon County Superior Court, Lane was sentenced to 50 years in New Jersey State Prison. AP later described the New Jersey term as consecutive. Monica's parents were in court. So were the Chelmsford girl's parents, who had resolved to attend every hearing for the other families. It was there that they first met Todd Ewalt.
In early August 2008, police in central Pennsylvania filed a murder charge against Lane for the killing of Darlene Ewalt, AP reported. The charges also covered the York County attack. Dauphin County prosecutors at first sought the death penalty.
The Ewalt family worried about a trial. It would force them to relive Darlene's death in detail, and a defense lawyer might try to put the blame on Todd, the man the police had first suspected. Prosecutors agreed to a deal under which Lane would plead guilty and they would not seek a death sentence. Marsico said executions rarely take place in Pennsylvania. Todd Ewalt said later that it had not been hard to accept a plea deal that sent Lane to prison for life.
On June 28, 2010, Lane appeared before Dauphin County Judge Todd Hoover in Harrisburg in handcuffs and orange-and-white prison clothes. He pleaded guilty to murder and other charges in the death of Darlene Ewalt and to attempted murder in the York County attack. He showed no emotion and declined to speak. "I haven't got anything to say," he told the judge.
Hoover sentenced him to life imprisonment for the murder, with a consecutive 10 to 20 years for the attempted murder. Fran Chardo, the county's first assistant district attorney, said the case was the kind of crime everyone fears most.
Todd Ewalt called the killing "an unnecessary, senseless act committed by a coward." Their son, Nick, then 25, asked the judge to look at how the investigation had been handled and to sentence Lane to death. "I just want him dead," he told reporters. Nicole said Lane showed no reaction at all: "He was a blank slate." Todd Ewalt said the plea changed nothing for him, and that nothing could make up for the pain Lane had caused. The Massaros and the Chelmsford parents were in the courtroom.
Lane's case came to light just as the FBI was drawing attention to killings along the nation's highways. In April 2009 the Bureau announced its Highway Serial Killings Initiative, built on ViCAP. It traced the effort to 2004, when an analyst with the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation noticed murdered women being left along the Interstate 40 corridor. The FBI said its national matrix held more than 500 victims killed along or near highways over about 30 years, with about 200 potential suspects, most of them long-haul truck drivers, and that at least 10 suspects had been taken into custody for about 30 killings. Its announcement did not name any suspect.
Most of the victims in the FBI's matrix were women picked up at truck stops or service stations and left beside highways. Lane's crimes were different: he left his truck and walked into homes. ABC News's Nightline, reporting on the FBI's highway concerns in May 2009, used the Ewalt and Massaro killings to illustrate how a trucker could use the interstates to pick victims at random. In Lane's own case the FBI's database had already played a direct part: the New Jersey prosecutors learned of his Massachusetts arrest through ViCAP.
An FBI spokesperson told Fox News Digital in 2024 that the highway initiative was no longer active, without saying why it ended.
Lane has not been reported as charged with, or confessing to, any killing beyond the two to which he pleaded guilty.
CBS News's 48 Hours reported that Lane had been linked to attacks on two more women, one in Pennsylvania and one in New York, both of whom survived. It gave no names, dates or places, and it is not clear whether the Pennsylvania case it meant was the York County attack to which he pleaded guilty. No charge in New York has been reported.
In 2008 and again in 2010, AP reported that police in Jonesville, North Carolina, Lane's hometown, wanted to question him about the unsolved October 1996 shooting of a local police officer, who was found beside his cruiser after stopping a reported stolen pickup truck. The officer was Sergeant Gregory Keith Martin, who was killed during a traffic stop on Interstate 77 on October 5, 1996. Lane was never charged. In October 2012 the FBI announced the arrest of another man, Scott Vincent Sica, on a charge of first-degree murder in Martin's death, and the Town of Jonesville reports that Sica later pleaded guilty and was sentenced in 2014 to life without parole.
The Chelmsford parents kept a promise to stand with the other families. They attended Lane's sentencings in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and Nicole Ewalt later said the girl's mother had become like a second mother to her. Nicole called the couple heroes for stopping Lane and saving other women. In 2011 the girl's mother published a memoir of the case, written with Paul Lonardo, and said she had written it partly to understand why he killed. She urged people to lock their doors and trust their instincts.
The girl went through therapy. Her parents told 48 Hours that she struggled with anxiety and had to leave college for a time. She said she sometimes felt guilty that she was still alive and others were not. Her father said he believed Lane had been sent to their house to be stopped.
For Todd Ewalt, the weeks under suspicion stayed with him. "I felt like someone ripped my heart out of my chest," he told ABC News of his wife's death. His daughter said she no longer went outside alone at night, and his son said he often lay awake thinking about what had happened.
When Lane was sentenced in Pennsylvania in June 2010, District Attorney Ed Marsico said he was expected to remain in the Pennsylvania prison system, serving the life sentence there. No later report on his custody has appeared. In June 2010 he was serving life imprisonment in Pennsylvania, with consecutive terms from New Jersey and Massachusetts.
Proven by his own guilty pleas, and final: the murders of Darlene Ewalt and Monica Massaro, the attempted murder of the York County woman, and charges from the attack on the girl in Chelmsford.
Not proven: the further attacks in Pennsylvania and New York that CBS News said were linked to him. No charges were reported.
Questioned only, and later solved against another man: the 1996 killing of Sergeant Greg Martin in North Carolina.
Rejected by investigators: Lane's account to Detective Noble that Monica Massaro's death was an accident during a burglary. The prosecutor told the New Jersey court it was premeditated, and Lane pleaded guilty to her murder.
Details that vary between sources: the date of Monica Massaro's death (July 28 in ABC News; on or about July 29 in CBS News; her body was found July 30); her age (38 in AP, ABC News and Dateline; 37 in one CBS News account); the date of Darlene Ewalt's death (July 13 at about 2 a.m. in AP, ABC News and her death notice; "around July 12" in CBS News, and the night of July 12 to 13 in Dateline); and the date of the Chelmsford attack (July 30 in AP and the New Jersey release; July 29 in one CBS News article, which reflects the night it began).
2007, July 13, about 2 a.m.: Darlene Ewalt, 42, is stabbed to death on her patio in West Hanover Township, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Her husband becomes the main suspect.
About four days later: a 37-year-old woman is stabbed and cut while asleep on her couch north of York, Pennsylvania; she survives.
Last weekend of July 2007: Monica Massaro, 38, is killed in her home in Bloomsbury, New Jersey.
July 30, 2007, about 4 a.m.: Lane attacks a 15-year-old girl in her bedroom in Chelmsford, Massachusetts; her parents overpower him and he is arrested. Monica Massaro's body is found the same day.
August 2007: New Jersey learns of the Chelmsford arrest through the FBI's ViCAP; the arrest is confirmed August 20. Lane confesses to Detective Sergeant Geoff Noble, calling the killing an accident.
August 28, 2007: New Jersey charges Lane with first-degree murder, burglary and a weapons offense.
Early September 2007: Todd Ewalt is due before a Pennsylvania grand jury; knife evidence later clears him.
December 2007: Lane pleads guilty in Massachusetts and is sentenced to 25 to 30 years.
Early August 2008: he pleads not guilty in New Jersey, and Pennsylvania police charge him with Darlene Ewalt's murder.
2008: Lane pleads guilty to Monica Massaro's murder and is sentenced to 50 years in Hunterdon County Superior Court.
April 6, 2009: the FBI announces its Highway Serial Killings Initiative.
June 28, 2010: in Dauphin County, Lane pleads guilty to Darlene Ewalt's murder and the York County attempted murder and is sentenced to life plus 10 to 20 years; the death penalty is dropped under the plea deal.
2011: the Chelmsford girl's mother publishes a memoir of the case.
October 2012: another man is arrested for the 1996 Jonesville officer killing that police had once wanted to ask Lane about.