Nicholas Wiley was born in 1962 and lived in an apartment building on West Onondaga Street in Syracuse, New York, where he also worked as the handyman.
His record began at sixteen. In 1979 he was convicted of sexually assaulting and stabbing a woman of twenty-five and served four years. In 1983 he was convicted of entering a house on Niagara Street and beating a sixty-seven-year-old woman over the head with a claw hammer; he took sixty dollars and six dollars in food stamps. In 1991 he was convicted of beating and sexually assaulting a girl of sixteen.
The appeals court at Rochester overturned both the 1983 and the 1991 convictions. He went back to prison in each case with a shorter sentence. The first chief assistant district attorney later described him as having been freakishly successful at appealing his earlier convictions.
He was released as a Level 3 sex offender, the highest risk category in New York, and killed three women within months.
Tammy Passineau, seventeen, disappeared in April 2004. Her body has never been found. The authorities believe he put it in the refuse bin outside the building and that it was taken to the county's rubbish-burning plant.
Hannah Finnerty, twenty-two, was stabbed and left in that same bin. She was five months pregnant.
Lottie Thompson, thirty-one, was stabbed to death in her own flat in the building. She had been dead several days when the building manager found her, and it was Wiley who told the manager about the smell coming from her flat.
Police began in Thompson's flat and worked outwards, and found Finnerty in the bin the following day. Wiley was arrested on the day Thompson was found, and after hours of questioning admitted killing both women and discussed the possibility of others. The Criminal Investigation Division and the Missing Persons Division then worked the case jointly. At that stage he faced two counts of second degree murder, and prosecutors said that if a third victim were found he could face a first degree charge and they would seek the death penalty.
A jury convicted him of first and second degree murder. Judge Joseph Fahey sentenced him in October 2006 to life without the possibility of parole, telling him he was one of those creatures that occasionally slips through the gates of hell and walks among us causing death, pain and destruction.
On November 13, 2009 the Rochester appeals court upheld the convictions. It found sufficient evidence that the three murders had been committed in a similar fashion, and rejected his claim that his confession was the product of psychological coercion by the police. It overturned only the fines Fahey had imposed on the weapons charges. The prosecutor called the decision gratifying, given how his earlier appeals had gone.