On the night of August 27, 1982, Anna Olesiewicz, eighteen, drove with a friend from Camden to the Jersey Shore, where they planned to stay at the friend's uncle's house in Neptune City. They walked over to the Asbury Park boardwalk and sat on a bench listening to the music coming out of a nearby club. The friend went to find a bathroom. When she came back the bench was empty, and she could not find Anna anywhere.
Anna was the youngest of five children of a Camden fire captain. It was her first trip to the shore that summer; her brother Robert said she wanted one weekend away before she started classes at Camden County Community College, and she was due home on Sunday. When Sunday came and she did not, the family knew something had happened, he said, because she was not the kind of person to go off without telling anyone. Her former boyfriend, Michael Knoblauch, was woken by a call from Robert that weekend and spent the next three days in Asbury Park looking for her. For several weekends afterward Robert went back to the boardwalk with her picture, showing it to strangers and asking whether they had seen her.
On January 14, 1983, a skeleton was found in a vacant lot behind a fast food restaurant on Route 35 in Ocean Township. It was dressed in what Anna had been wearing that night, blue jeans and a dark shirt, and dental charts identified her. There were four bullet holes in the skull. The ring she had worn was missing from her finger; it turned up later in the jewelry box of Diane Biegenwald, the wife of a forty-two-year-old parolee named Richard Biegenwald.
A week after the body was found, Theresa Smith, a twenty-two-year-old waitress who had been living with the Biegenwalds in their house in Asbury Park, went to the police. She said Biegenwald had shown her a young woman's body under a mattress in his garage. He told her he had met the girl on the boardwalk, offered her marijuana, taken her back to the house and shot her in the head. He also told Smith, by her account, that the girl had been meant to be Smith's own first victim, that he had tried to wake her while the girl was still alive to do it, and that Smith had not got up; he had wanted her to kill someone to prove she was tough. The next day, she said, Biegenwald and Dherran Fitzgerald, a friend who lived in the neighboring apartment, carried the body away and left it behind the restaurant.
The man Smith described had spent most of his life in institutions. Richard Fran Biegenwald was born on Staten Island on August 24, 1940, and was often beaten by his alcoholic father. His mother, Sally, told reporters years later, while police were digging up her yard, that he had been a hyperactive child who set fires in his bedroom; once he lit his own bed and threw himself into the flames. At five he set fire to the family home and was sent for observation at a Rockland County psychiatric center; by eight he was drinking and gambling, and at nine he was given electroshock treatment at Bellevue. A medical report from his boyhood, as described in the press after his arrest, recorded a death fantasy and night terrors. He spent years at the State Training School for Boys in Warwick, New York, where he was accused of theft and of inciting escapes. Released at sixteen, he dropped out of high school within months and drifted through the South. Accounts of those years differ in their details: one has him arrested in Kentucky by federal agents for taking a stolen car across state lines, another arrested in Nashville for stealing a car and jailed for thirty days in Kentucky for loitering.
Back on Staten Island in 1958, at eighteen, he stole another car and went to Bayonne, New Jersey, where on December 18, with an accomplice, Frank Spardoff, he robbed a corner grocery and shot dead its owner, Stephen Sladowski, who was also a municipal prosecutor. He was caught two days later in Salisbury, Maryland, after a high-speed chase and a shootout with police. On August 6, 1959, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life.
He served the sentence quietly. At Trenton State Prison he worked five years in the machine shop and then in the print shop; on May 1, 1973, he was transferred to Rahway State Prison, where he made false teeth in the dental lab. The parole board turned him down on March 12, 1974, and approved him that October 12, effective June 12, 1975. A board member later estimated the state had spent more than $250,000 keeping him, and summed up the prisoner it released by saying he was neither the Birdman of Alcatraz nor Jack the Ripper. The first parole reports were good. He lived in Perth Amboy and then Teaneck, and on July 1, 1977, he left the area without his parole officer's permission, and a warrant went out. In June 1980 police in New York picked him up for questioning about a rape; the victim could not pick him out of a lineup, he was never charged, and he went back to Rahway as a parole violator. He was released again in February 1981. He settled in Asbury Park with his wife, Diane, twenty-two, who had grown up next door to his mother on Staten Island, and with Fitzgerald, a friend from prison, who by later accounts helped him with several of the killings.
After his arrest he was charged in separate indictments with four more killings besides Anna Olesiewicz's. Maria Ciallella, seventeen, of Brick Town, left her parents' house on Village Way about 6:30 on the evening of October 31, 1981. She borrowed a dollar from her father and promised to be home by midnight. Shortly after midnight, the Monmouth County prosecutor, Alexander Lehrer, said, a Point Pleasant police officer answering a radio call saw her walking along Route 88 toward home and meant to come back and give her a ride once the call was finished; when he returned about ten minutes later she was gone. The indictment dated her murder to October 31; UPI, reporting in April 1983, said she had disappeared on November 1. She had been shot twice in the head with a .22 and dismembered. Her body was dug up at the house on Staten Island where Biegenwald's mother still lived, along with the body of a second girl who had been stabbed in the chest and stomach, later identified as Deborah Osborne, seventeen, whose murder the indictment dated to April 7, 1982.
William J. Ward, thirty-four, of North Wildwood, was killed on September 21, 1982, by the indictment; Lehrer said he disappeared on September 21 or 22, described him as a self-employed video game operator, and said he had a business association with Biegenwald that was not legitimate. The medical examiner said he died of multiple gunshot wounds to the head. Betsy Bacon, seventeen, of Sea Girt, was last seen at 11 p.m. on November 20, 1982, when she told her mother she was going out for cigarettes, to a 7-Eleven on Route 71; she had been shot twice in the head. Lehrer said he knew of no motive for her murder or for those of the other young women. Smith told the court that on the day Anna disappeared she had driven around the shore towns with a woman named Betsy after discussing with Biegenwald a plan to kill her. Later accounts say he was also suspected, but never charged, in two other killings: the 1978 shooting of John Petrone, whose body was found in Jackson Township on May 11, 1983, and the September 1982 stabbing of Virginia Clayton, seventeen, of Freehold Township, whose body was found in a wildlife refuge.
Police arrested everyone living in the Asbury Park house on Smith's statement, on January 22, 1983: Richard Biegenwald, his pregnant wife Diane, Fitzgerald, who was forty-eight, and Fitzgerald's girlfriend, Jennifer Metz, twenty-nine, of Bradley Beach. Detectives staged a fake arrest behind the house, and when Biegenwald came out the back door to see what was happening, he was seized. Accounts of the arrest say Fitzgerald hid in a concealed room with several weapons and surrendered when detectives threatened to shoot through the wall. The murder weapon was found in Fitzgerald's apartment, with an extensive cache of guns, and a sporting goods store's ammunition register showed that both Diane Biegenwald and Fitzgerald had bought .22 Short cartridges. Fitzgerald was charged with Anna's murder too, and the charge was dropped in exchange for his testimony.
In April 1983 he took a county task force to the graves. On April 14 they found Betsy Bacon's body in Tinton Falls. A few days later, behind Mount Calvary Cemetery in Neptune, they dug up a fully clothed man buried six feet down with gunshot wounds to the head, who was identified as William Ward. On April 19 the two girls were unearthed in the yard on Staten Island. Lehrer had invited some two hundred reporters to watch the digging there, and the papers named Biegenwald the thrill killer.
He first meant to plead insanity. On June 17, 1983, he was refused public money to pay a psychiatrist to support the defense, and on November 14 his lawyers dropped it without explanation. In between, in August, Diane gave birth to a daughter. The trial for Anna's murder opened in Monmouth County on November 28. The day before, news reports repeated the prosecutor's statement that he had killed her because "he wanted to see someone die that night."
Michael Knoblauch was called for one purpose, to identify the ring. It was a gold band with a dark sapphire, and he testified that he had given it to her; he told a reporter afterward that he had given it on June 5, 1980, the eighth anniversary of her mother's death, to cheer her up. They had been neighbors in South Camden and classmates in elementary school, and had gone out for more than three years before she broke it off in June 1982. She was still wearing his ring the night she disappeared. Testimony at the trial was that Biegenwald gave it to his girlfriend, and the police found it in his wife's jewelry box. Two friends of Maria Ciallella's sat among the spectators.
The jury convicted him on December 7, 1983, and directed that he be put to death. Knoblauch told the television cameras he was glad of the verdict. Then he sat in the courthouse cafeteria and told a reporter that it did not mean anything to him.
A second jury tried him for William Ward's murder. Fitzgerald, who admitted to being a hired killer, testified that Ward had come to the Asbury Park apartment to discuss killing a member of Ward's drug operation, that Biegenwald left before Ward arrived and told Fitzgerald to keep him busy until he returned, and that Biegenwald shot Ward four times in the head while Ward was struggling with Fitzgerald behind the apartment. A neighbor testified that she had watched part of the struggle from an upstairs window, and Theresa Smith and Fitzgerald's girlfriend Kathy Bertucci testified to what they had been told about it. Lehrer, when the body was found, had said Ward was shot inside the house after an argument. The jury convicted Biegenwald on February 16, 1984, but heard only the 1959 conviction as an aggravating factor, because the trial judge ruled that the Olesiewicz verdict, still on appeal, could not yet count; it sentenced him to life with thirty years before parole. In June 1984 the Supreme Court of New Jersey agreed that a conviction still under appeal could not be used to send a man to death. The remaining cases were resolved by guilty plea. Fitzgerald was charged only with a weapons count and with being an accessory after the fact, and was released from New Jersey State Prison in 1994.
On March 5, 1987, the court upheld his conviction for Anna's murder, rejecting his argument that the publicity had made a fair trial impossible, but reversed the death sentence because the jury had not been told that it had to find beyond a reasonable doubt that the aggravating factors outweighed the mitigating ones. In 1988 it held that the Ward conviction, final by then, could be used at the new sentencing, and in 1989 the federal appeals court in Philadelphia revived his suit over being kept on death row after his sentence had been vacated. A second jury sentenced him to death. His lawyers had asked it to spare him so that he could be studied in the search for a cure for the antisocial personality disorder they said he suffered from; the prosecution reminded it that this was his third murder conviction and called him an evil and cold-blooded killer for whom death was the only appropriate punishment. On August 8, 1991, the court vacated that sentence as well, by four votes to three, because prospective jurors had not been properly questioned about their views on capital punishment. He was never resentenced to death.
He spent the rest of his life in New Jersey State Prison and died on March 10, 2008, at sixty-seven, at St. Francis Medical Center in Trenton, of respiratory and kidney failure.