Richard Biegenwald was a convicted murderer on parole when, in the early 1980s, a series of young people disappeared along the northern Jersey Shore. He was 42 when he was arrested in Asbury Park in January 1983. Juries in New Jersey convicted him of two of those killings: the shooting of Anna Olesiewicz, 18, of Camden, who disappeared from the Asbury Park boardwalk in August 1982, and the shooting of William J. Ward, 34, a man with whom prosecutors said he had illegal business dealings. He was also indicted for the murders of Maria Ciallella and Deborah Osborne, whose bodies were found on Staten Island, and of Betsy Bacon, 17, of Sea Girt. Monmouth County's prosecutor said he believed Biegenwald had killed five people after his parole. Newspapers called him the "thrill killer."
He had killed before. In 1958, at 18, he shot and killed Stephen Sladowski, a store owner in Bayonne who was also an assistant city prosecutor, during a robbery. He was convicted of murder in 1959, served about 17 or 18 years, and was paroled in 1975.
The Olesiewicz case went to the New Jersey Supreme Court four times. Twice a jury sentenced him to death, and twice the court set the sentence aside. The rulings addressed central questions under New Jersey's 1982 death penalty statute: what a jury must find before it could impose death, when an earlier murder conviction could be counted against a defendant, and how prospective jurors must be questioned. New Jersey never executed him. He died in March 2008, at 67, at a Trenton hospital that treats inmates from New Jersey State Prison.
Little reliable detail survives about his early years outside what his defense put before sentencing juries. A forensic psychiatrist who testified for him in 1983 and again in 1989, Dr. Azariah Eshkenazi, described a childhood of abuse. According to the Supreme Court's summary of that testimony, his father beat him, he stole from his mother and ran away from home many times, and he was placed in an institution at the age of eight. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a child and was given 20 electroconvulsive shock treatments. The Associated Press reported in 2008 that at the age of five he had tried to burn down the family home and was taken to a children's psychiatric hospital in New York.
Dr. Eshkenazi diagnosed a severe personality disorder, antisocial personality with paranoid traits. In the court's words, he testified that Biegenwald lacked the capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of what he did "emotionally, though not intellectually." A second psychiatrist, first hired to explore a possible insanity defense, told the 1983 jury that Biegenwald lacked the emotional capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of his act.
His mother still lived on Staten Island in 1983, UPI reported.
In 1958, when he was 18, Biegenwald robbed a store in Bayonne, New Jersey, and killed its owner, Stephen Sladowski. Sladowski was also an assistant city prosecutor, and wire reports later described the victim simply as a Bayonne prosecutor or a New Jersey lawyer. The New Jersey Supreme Court recorded the case as a murder committed while robbing a store, for which a judgment of conviction was entered in 1959.
He served what the court described as a prison term of seventeen or eighteen years; another of its opinions says he served almost eighteen years. He was paroled in 1975. According to the Associated Press, he spent the next several years in and out of jail for violating his parole. In 1980 he married, and he and his wife moved to Point Pleasant Beach and later to Asbury Park. In 1982 he was still a parolee, a status the Supreme Court later noted in reviewing his case.
By 1982 Biegenwald was sharing a home in Asbury Park with his wife and others, among them a 22-year-old woman who later became the state's chief witness against him. His friend Dherran Fitzgerald lived in an apartment there as well. Fitzgerald, whom UPI gave as 52 in April 1983, described himself to police as a murderer and a mercenary, according to Biegenwald's defense lawyer, and at a later trial he called himself a "hired killer."
According to the woman's account to police, which the Supreme Court said was essentially the same as her trial testimony, Biegenwald encouraged her to find and kill a "victim" to prove she was "tough." The two of them, she said, discussed killing one of her co-workers, a woman named Betsy. Fitzgerald testified in 1983 that he had bought a .22 caliber pistol in Florida on June 17, 1982, and given it to Biegenwald.
The first of the killings for which Biegenwald was later indicted was that of Maria Ciallella, 17, of Brick Township in Ocean County. The indictment, as listed by the New Jersey Supreme Court, alleged that she was killed on October 31, 1981; UPI, reporting from Monmouth County in April 1983, said she had disappeared on November 1, 1981. She had been shot. Her body was found on Staten Island in April 1983 and identified that month.
Deborah Osborne was 18 and from Toms River, in Ocean County, according to UPI's account of the charges against Biegenwald in November 1983. The indictment alleged that she was killed on April 7, 1982. Her body was found on Staten Island in April 1983, in the same search that found Maria Ciallella. When UPI reported the search on April 22, 1983, the second girl found there had not yet been identified; she had been stabbed, the medical evidence showed. The Associated Press later named the two victims found on Staten Island as Maria Ciallella and Deborah Osborne.
Anna Olesiewicz was 18 and lived in Camden. On August 27, 1982, she and a friend traveled from Camden to Neptune City, near the shore, and went to the Asbury Park boardwalk. At some point the friend left her on a bench to find a bathroom. When she came back, Anna was gone, and she could not find her. The friend, testifying in tears at the trial, said she had last seen Anna alive at about midnight, and that Anna had told her she would wait for her.
Her remains were found on January 14, 1983, in Ocean Township, and dental charts identified her. She had been shot. The autopsy showed she had died several months earlier.
According to the state's case, Biegenwald met her on the boardwalk and lured her away with the promise of marijuana. The next day, the housemate testified, he told her he had shot the young woman after meeting her on the boardwalk. Fitzgerald testified that on the morning of August 28, 1982, Biegenwald told him he had killed Anna the night before. About a month later, the housemate said, Biegenwald gave her the dead woman's black and gold ring, which she later passed to his wife. Police later found it among his wife's jewelry.
Fitzgerald said Biegenwald did not clearly explain why he had killed her. He tied it to the housemate, who testified that Anna had been meant to be her own "victim" until Biegenwald changed his mind.
William J. Ward was 34. UPI described him in April 1983 as a self-employed video game operator from North Wildwood, and in November 1983 as being from Neptune. Prosecutors said he dealt in drugs. The indictment alleged that he was killed on September 21, 1982; the Monmouth County prosecutor, Alexander Lehrer, said he disappeared on September 21 or 22.
Lehrer said in April 1983 that Ward and Biegenwald had a business association, that Ward's dealings were not legitimate, and that an argument between them ended in the shooting. The county medical examiner, Dr. Stanley Becker, said Ward had been shot. At trial in 1984 Fitzgerald gave a different account of the circumstances, and a prosecutor quoted by the Associated Press in 2008 gave a third.
Betsy Bacon was 17 and lived in Sea Girt. She was last seen at 11 p.m. on November 20, 1982, when she told her mother she was going to a convenience store to buy cigarettes. The county medical examiner said she died of gunshot wounds from a small-caliber weapon. Her body was found in Tinton Falls in April 1983.
Lehrer said he knew of no apparent motive for the killings of the young women. He said he believed Biegenwald had picked Betsy Bacon up. The Supreme Court record shows that Biegenwald was indicted for her murder and that a prosecution for it was under way by the time of the 1989 resentencing, but the reports do not give its outcome by name.
About a week after Anna Olesiewicz's remains were found in January 1983, the 22-year-old housemate went to the police and told them what Biegenwald had said to her. Officers arrested Biegenwald; his wife; Fitzgerald; Fitzgerald's girlfriend; and the girlfriend's daughter. The search of the household turned up stolen weapons and controlled substances in Biegenwald's part of the house. The gun the state identified as the murder weapon was found in Fitzgerald's apartment. The ring was among his wife's jewelry, and both his wife and Fitzgerald had bought .22 Short ammunition.
Biegenwald was held at Trenton State Prison after his arrest. Fitzgerald was first charged with Anna's murder too, but that charge was dismissed in exchange for his testimony. He was instead indicted on drug, weapons and hindering-prosecution charges, and agreed to plead guilty to the hindering and weapons charges. UPI reported in November 1983 that he had pleaded guilty the previous summer to reduced charges of hindering Biegenwald's arrest.
As part of his bargain, Fitzgerald led police to several of the bodies, among them those of Ward and Betsy Bacon in New Jersey and two on Staten Island. In April 1983 police recovered Betsy Bacon's body in Tinton Falls and Ward's in Neptune Township. On Staten Island the digging began on a Tuesday and went on for four days. The first victim identified there was Maria Ciallella. The second, a girl whose identity was not yet known, had been stabbed; Lehrer set up a telephone line for families of teenage girls who had gone missing in Monmouth or Ocean County, saying he believed she came from one of them.
The searches drew the press in large numbers. According to the New Jersey Supreme Court, the prosecutor was accompanied by about 200 reporters during the Staten Island search. Front pages carried photographs of the searches and of Biegenwald in handcuffs. The press called him the "thrill killer," the court noted, because it had been reported that he killed only for pleasure.
On May 4, 1983, a Monmouth County grand jury returned a ten-count indictment against him for the Olesiewicz killing. He pleaded not guilty to every count. Separate indictments charged him with the murders of Ward, Ciallella, Osborne and Bacon.
The publicity became one of the main issues in his appeals. The defense moved for a change of venue, arguing that no fair jury could be found in Monmouth County, and the trial court denied the motion. The court also barred the lawyers from commenting in public. Before that order, the prosecutor had made statements to the press that the Supreme Court later called improper and inflammatory, including that Biegenwald had killed "for the sheer pleasure of seeing her die" and that he had killed "because he wanted to see someone die that night." The Supreme Court disapproved of those remarks but held that they did not require a new trial, and it found that the jury actually chosen had been impartial.
Jury selection began on November 14, 1983, and took about five days. The trial itself opened in Freehold on November 28 before a jury of nine women and seven men. In his opening statement, Assistant Monmouth County Prosecutor James Fagan said Biegenwald had been "hunting for someone to kill" that night and had shot Anna "for the thrill of watching her die."
The state's case rested on two witnesses, the housemate and Fitzgerald. The defense, led by Louis Diamond, argued that Fitzgerald was the real killer. Diamond pointed out that Fitzgerald had bought the pistol, that it was found in his apartment, and that he had described his own occupation to police as murderer and mercenary. Three prison inmates testified that Fitzgerald had bragged about the killing. On cross-examination Diamond called Fitzgerald's testimony self-serving; Fitzgerald said he was testifying for "self-preservation."
The trial lasted nine days and ended on December 8. On December 7, 1983, the jury found Biegenwald guilty of murder, possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose, two counts of possession of a weapon without a permit, and possession of a controlled substance.
The same jury heard the penalty phase. Biegenwald wanted to waive a jury and be sentenced by the judge, but the prosecutor refused to agree. The jury found two aggravating factors: that he had previously been convicted of murder, and that the killing was "outrageously or wantonly vile, horrible or inhuman." It found mitigating factors, drawn from the psychiatric testimony about his childhood and mental illness, but did not find that they outweighed the aggravating factors. On December 8, 1983, he was sentenced to death. It was among the earliest death sentences in New Jersey after the state brought back capital punishment in 1982, the Philadelphia Inquirer noted in 2008.
After the sentence he was moved from the general population at Trenton State Prison to the Capital Sentence Unit, which a federal appeals court later described as a more restrictive unit for inmates facing death sentences.
The Ward case was tried in Mount Holly in early 1984. Fitzgerald was again the state's main witness. After deliberating about 13 hours over three days, the jury convicted Biegenwald of Ward's murder on February 16, 1984. UPI reported that he showed no visible reaction and kept looking at his hands as the verdict was read.
The state wanted the Ward jury to consider the Olesiewicz conviction as an aggravating factor, which could have made him eligible for a second death sentence. Because that conviction was still on appeal, the question went to the New Jersey Supreme Court. On June 26, 1984, in the first of its Biegenwald decisions, the court held that a murder conviction still under appeal could not be used to prove the aggravating factor of a prior murder conviction. The Ward jury therefore weighed only the 1959 conviction, and the trial court sentenced him to life imprisonment with 30 years of parole ineligibility. The Appellate Division affirmed the Ward conviction, and on May 28, 1987, the Supreme Court declined to review it, making it final.
The Legislature responded to the 1984 decision. A 1985 amendment changed the aggravating factor from a defendant who "has previously been convicted of murder" to one who "has been convicted, at any time, of another murder," and provided that a conviction counted once sentence was imposed, even while it was being appealed.
The Olesiewicz appeal was argued on February 5, 1985, and decided on March 5, 1987, together with the companion case State v. Ramseur, on which the court relied in upholding the 1982 death penalty law. In an opinion by Chief Justice Wilentz, the court affirmed the murder conviction. It rejected the arguments that the death penalty was unconstitutional in itself, that the jury selection had been handled wrongly, that the denial of a change of venue required reversal, and that the prosecutor's conduct had denied him a fair trial. It also held that a defendant had no constitutional right to waive a jury for sentencing on his own.
The court reversed the death sentence. Its instruction on the "vile" aggravating factor had been constitutionally inadequate, and, more broadly, the court held that in every case under the act the state had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the aggravating factors outweighed the mitigating ones. The jury had not been told that. The court sent the case back for a new sentencing hearing before a new jury, without a retrial of guilt. Justice Handler dissented; he would have reversed the conviction as well as the sentence.
The 1987 ruling left Biegenwald without a death sentence, but he stayed in the Capital Sentence Unit. He sent written requests for a transfer to the general population on June 16, August 1 and September 4, 1987, and, according to his complaint, received no answer. On May 6, 1988, acting as his own lawyer, he sued the state corrections commissioner, the warden of Trenton State Prison and the state attorney general in federal court. The state law and regulation at issue reserved the unit for inmates under a court-imposed death sentence and required them to be kept apart from other prisoners.
In August 1988 the state moved him and similar prisoners into the general population. That ended his claim for a transfer, but he kept seeking damages for the roughly 18 months he had spent in the unit. The district court set the case aside to wait for a state court ruling on the statute. On August 11, 1989, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit reversed that order and sent the case back to go forward; Judge Cowen wrote the opinion, and Senior Judge Garth dissented. By then, the state told the appeals court, Biegenwald had been sentenced to death again and was back in the Capital Sentence Unit.
Before the new hearing, the trial court ruled that the Ward conviction, now final, could not be used against him as an aggravating factor. The state appealed, and on June 20, 1988, the Supreme Court reversed in an opinion by Justice Garibaldi. By a vote of six to one, with Justice Handler dissenting, it held that the Ward conviction could be counted under the original wording of the statute. "Biegenwald's prior murder convictions are an indispensable consideration," the court wrote.
Jury selection for the second penalty trial began on January 17, 1989, and took three days; the evidence took less than a day. The defense again relied on Dr. Eshkenazi, this time on videotape. Biegenwald's lawyers argued that he had killed Anna because he feared she would report him for smoking marijuana, which could have sent him back to prison, and they asked the jury to spare his life so that he could be studied in the search for a cure for his disorder. The prosecution stressed that this was his third murder conviction, called him "an evil and cold-blooded killer," and argued that death was the only appropriate punishment. The jury unanimously found both aggravating factors. It unanimously rejected one of the mitigating factors offered; three jurors found another, and four found the catch-all factor. It returned a death verdict, and the court imposed it.
On August 8, 1991, the Supreme Court vacated the second death sentence. In an opinion by Justice Clifford, it held that the questioning of prospective jurors about the death penalty had been constitutionally inadequate. The trial court had refused to ask whether jurors could still consider mitigating evidence once they knew he had killed before, which the court called "serious error," and the questioning lacked open-ended and hypothetical questions and did not explain New Jersey's murder law. As a result, the court said, the jury "may have included members who were 'substantially impaired'" in their ability to follow the law. It rejected his other claims, among them the venue argument. Justice Stein dissented. The court sent the case back for a third sentencing hearing and said that in such cases questioning jurors about a prior murder conviction would most likely require a two-jury system.
The third hearing began in Freehold in early 1993 before Superior Court Judge James Ricciardi. Biegenwald's lawyers planned to argue that the electroshock treatment he had received as a child should persuade the jury to spare him. When CBS News scheduled a report on electroshock therapy during jury selection, the judge told potential jurors not to watch it and had court staff call about 200 people in the jury pool with the same warning. At that point, UPI reported, he had been convicted of four murders and charged with a fifth. The reports do not give the outcome of the 1993 hearing. Patch reported in 2016 that he was originally sentenced to death and that the sentence was overturned; the Associated Press said in 2008 that the state Supreme Court had twice overturned his death sentences and that he had defeated the state's attempts to execute him.
The record on the three other young people is thinner. The Supreme Court's 1988 opinion lists the indictments for the murders of Maria Ciallella, Deborah Osborne and Betsy Bacon with the dates alleged. The 1991 opinion refers to the Bacon prosecution, to a guilty-plea hearing in another of the murder prosecutions, and to his complaint that a jury had considered his guilty pleas to two murders in violation of a plea agreement in another case. In the Associated Press obituary of 2008, he was described as convicted of killing three female teenagers and a man, Ward, in 1981 and 1982. Which convictions came by plea, and when, was not reported.
Biegenwald died on March 10, 2008, at St. Francis Medical Center in Trenton, which treats inmates of New Jersey State Prison. He was 67. A Corrections Department spokeswoman, Deirdre Fedkenheuer, said he had been ill for some time, and the cause of death had not been determined when his death was announced. The Legislature had abolished capital punishment the previous year; New Jersey had not executed anyone in the 25 years it had the penalty.
In October 2016 a contractor working at a house in Asbury Park where Biegenwald had lived with his wife in the early 1980s found bones. The Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office and Asbury Park police investigated. A spokesman for the prosecutor's office, Charles Webster, said the remains were not believed to be human and that they could be animal remains; the medical examiner was asked to test them.
A retired New Jersey State Trooper, John O'Rourke, wrote a book about the case, The Jersey Shore Thrill Killer, and held a book signing in Holmdel in May 2015. News 12 has covered the case in its "Crime Files" series, which says investigators long questioned whether there were more victims than those he was convicted of killing.
Who fired the shots. Biegenwald's defense said Fitzgerald, not Biegenwald, killed Anna Olesiewicz, and three inmates testified that Fitzgerald had bragged about it. The jury rejected that defense, and the Supreme Court affirmed the conviction, though Justice Handler would have reversed it.
Motive. The prosecutors' public statements that he killed for pleasure gave him his nickname, and the Supreme Court called some of those statements improper. Lehrer said in 1983 that he knew of no apparent motive for the killings of the young women. The defense said in 1989 that Anna was killed because Biegenwald feared she would report him for using marijuana.
William Ward's death. Three accounts of the circumstances exist: Lehrer's 1983 statement, Fitzgerald's 1984 testimony and a prosecutor's account quoted by the Associated Press in 2008. The jury convicted on the case built on Fitzgerald's testimony.
Where Anna Olesiewicz was found. The court record places the discovery in Ocean Township; a 1993 UPI report put it in Asbury Park.
Other victims. Lehrer believed in 1983 that Biegenwald had killed five people after his parole. The 1987 opinion recorded press reports linking him to four or five earlier local killings, most of them of teenage girls. The Associated Press said in 2008 that he was suspected in at least one other killing but never charged. No other killing has been proved against him.
The 2016 bones. The prosecutor's office said they were not believed to be human. No later finding was reported.
1958: At 18, kills Stephen Sladowski, a Bayonne store owner and assistant city prosecutor, during a robbery.
1959: Judgment of conviction for murder.
1975: Paroled after about 17 years in prison.
1980: Marries; moves to Point Pleasant Beach and later Asbury Park.
October 31 or November 1, 1981: Maria Ciallella, 17, of Brick Township, disappears.
April 7, 1982: Date alleged in the indictment for the killing of Deborah Osborne, 18, of Toms River.
June 17, 1982: Fitzgerald buys a .22 caliber pistol in Florida, he later testifies, and gives it to Biegenwald.
August 27, 1982: Anna Olesiewicz, 18, of Camden, disappears from the Asbury Park boardwalk.
September 21, 1982: Date alleged for the killing of William J. Ward, 34.
November 20, 1982: Betsy Bacon, 17, of Sea Girt, is last seen.
January 14, 1983: Anna Olesiewicz's remains are found in Ocean Township.
January 1983: After the housemate goes to police, Biegenwald, his wife, Fitzgerald and others are arrested.
April 1983: Led by Fitzgerald, police recover the bodies of Betsy Bacon in Tinton Falls, William Ward in Neptune Township, and Maria Ciallella and a second girl on Staten Island.
May 4, 1983: Ten-count Monmouth County indictment in the Olesiewicz case.
November 28, 1983: Trial opens in Freehold.
December 7, 1983: Convicted of the murder of Anna Olesiewicz.
December 8, 1983: Sentenced to death.
February 16, 1984: Convicted in Mount Holly of the murder of William Ward; later sentenced to life with 30 years of parole ineligibility.
June 26, 1984: State Supreme Court rules a conviction on appeal cannot be used as a prior murder conviction.
1985: Legislature amends the prior-murder aggravating factor.
March 5, 1987: Supreme Court affirms the Olesiewicz conviction and reverses the death sentence.
May 28, 1987: Ward conviction becomes final.
May 6, 1988: Files a federal suit over his confinement in the Capital Sentence Unit.
June 20, 1988: Supreme Court rules the Ward conviction may be used at resentencing.
August 1988: Moved to the general prison population.
January 1989: Second penalty trial; sentenced to death again.
August 11, 1989: Third Circuit revives his federal suit.
August 8, 1991: Supreme Court vacates the second death sentence.
Early 1993: Third penalty hearing begins in Freehold.
March 10, 2008: Dies at 67 at St. Francis Medical Center, Trenton.
October 2016: Bones found at his former Asbury Park home; the prosecutor's office says they are not believed to be human.