At about five in the morning on May 17, 2005, a security camera in Center City recorded a woman getting off a bus and walking toward Pennsylvania Hospital with her hands in her pockets and her head down. A man in a baseball cap, a light jacket and green pants fell in behind her, followed her down the block, drew a pistol and shot her once in the head. Then he ran.
Patricia McDermott, known as Trish, was forty-eight and a radiographer at the hospital, walking in for an early shift. A passing driver found her. Accounts of where she fell differ: some put the shooting on Spruce Street, beside the hospital, and others on Market Street. Her colleagues described her afterward in the plainest terms available: she was a good person and she was good at her job.
Nothing had been taken from her, neither money nor belongings, and the bullet came from a .380 pistol. Detectives collected tape from the surrounding buildings and found a second recording, from a parking lot, that showed the gunman running across it and let them map his route away. The face was never clear. The department asked the FBI and NFL Films to help with the footage, and when that produced nothing it released the pictures to the public along with a composite sketch.
Hundreds of tips came in. One came from an employee of a bus company, who said the man was Juan Covington, a subcontractor who hauled medical waste for the hospital.
What finished it was the hospital's own surveillance from that morning, which showed Covington arriving in the clothes the gunman had been wearing. He was arrested on July 12, 2005 with a handgun on him.
He explained himself at once, and in a written statement. He said McDermott had pushed a cart into a machine and switched it on deliberately to expose him to radiation, that she had been poisoning him with X-rays, and that he had killed her because nobody would have believed him if he complained.
Then he kept going, and the case became something else. He admitted two more killings and two more shootings that nobody had connected to each other or to him, and for two of them the police were holding the wrong man.
He was born on March 3, 1962 in the Logan section of Philadelphia, one of two brothers who looked nearly identical. His family said his childhood was unremarkable until his father died in 1990. After that he fell into depressions and went on medication, and a few years later he announced that he was cured. What followed said otherwise. He took to wearing military fatigues and patrolling the neighborhood against forces nobody else could see, and he stopped washing. One Christmas he stood staring at the decorated tree because he believed it was moving.
Neighbors found him quiet and quick to take offense, and otherwise ordinary. He drove buses for SEPTA for about eighteen years before he switched to hauling medical waste for local hospitals, which is how he came to be working in the building where Patricia McDermott worked.
The first killing was on August 19, 1998. The Reverend Thomas Lee Devlin, forty-nine, was a Baptist pastor, and Covington shot him thirteen times with a SIG Sauer inside his church on Old York Road; early accounts said Devlin was leading a prayer service at the time. Much of the press called Covington the pastor's cousin, and the claim was repeated for years. Other accounts state that the two men were not related at all and that Covington knew Devlin only slightly.
His reason, as he gave it later, was that Devlin had used witchcraft to put evil spells on him. He went to the funeral and was seen to be deeply upset. Nobody suspected him. Police first thought the killing grew out of a custody dispute between Devlin and a former girlfriend, although no record of any such dispute with the mother of any of Devlin's children has ever come to light.
Nearly five years passed. On May 20, 2003, walking through Logan, Covington came across David Stewart, reported as forty-one in some accounts and forty-three in others, pulled a nine-millimeter pistol and fired nine times. Stewart lived, paralyzed from the waist down, and afterward got about on crutches.
On April 26, 2004, on West Ruscomb Street, he shot William Bryant Jr., thirty-two or thirty-three by different reports, nine times. Bryant survived with lasting disabilities, among them trouble with his speech. A thirty-two-year-old social worker, Clyde A. Johnson, was arrested for that shooting and held in detention to await trial.
On March 7, 2005 Covington shot and killed Odies Bosket, thirty-six, a clerk for the Revenue Department. By one account Bosket was on his way to collect his daughter from a nursery in Logan; another places the shooting at a subway station. Morris Wells, thirty-seven, was charged with his murder and held in custody.
Ballistics matched the bullets to guns Covington owned, and the five cases became one. The charges against Johnson and Wells were dropped and both men were released.
At first he would not plead guilty. He called himself "the chosen One" and said the three people he had killed were devils trying to harm him. In March 2006 he pleaded guilty but mentally ill before Judge Benjamin Lerner of the Court of Common Pleas. That is a specific plea in Pennsylvania and not the same as a straightforward guilty plea: it records that the defendant was mentally ill at the time and criminally responsible anyway, and it carries an ordinary sentence with a direction that treatment be provided. He took three life terms without parole for Devlin, Bosket and McDermott, and twenty to forty years for shooting Stewart and Bryant.
His lawyer, A. Charles Peruto Jr., told the court he was severely mentally ill and had believed himself chosen by God to exterminate the devil; the defense had put his history and a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia forward to keep him from a death sentence. Psychiatric evidence described a persecutory delusional system, and the reporting noted that he did not seem to take any pleasure in the killings. He fixed on people he had decided were threats and acted when he could no longer contain the fear.
Peruto also said his client had not wanted to plead guilty at all, because he did not accept that he had done anything wrong. Lerner asked him whether he was taking any medication. He said he was not.
No member of his family came to the sentencing. Peruto told the court that Covington's brother had stayed away because of the family resemblance.
The court ordered psychiatric treatment. He was sent first to SCI Waymart and later moved to SCI Rockview at Bellefonte, where he is held.
He has been named as a possible suspect in two other cases and charged in neither. Brenwanda Smith, twenty-four, a SEPTA bus driver who is said to have turned down his advances, vanished after an argument with him in Hunting Park on February 18, 1997, and has never been found. Ann Yuille, twenty-five, a hospital worker, was found shot dead at Ninth Street and Girard Avenue in North Philadelphia on May 7, 2004; his work may have brought him into contact with her, and that is the whole of the reason he is considered.