In July 1973 four young people died in three separate events across upstate New York, and the man later tied to all of them, Robert Garrow, was convicted of only one. A Hamilton County jury found him guilty of the murder of 18-year-old Philip Domblewski, a camper from Schenectady, and he was sentenced in 1974 to a term reported as 25 years to life. The other deaths were never put to a jury. Alicia Hauck, 16, of Syracuse, and Susan Petz, 20, were the subject of his own admissions, made first to his court-appointed lawyers and later on the witness stand. Daniel Porter, 23, who was with Petz, is linked to him in the accounts of the case, though no charge or verdict for his death is on record.
The case is remembered for two reasons. The first is the manhunt that followed Domblewski's death, which lasted 12 days and was described by Adirondack.net as the largest search in New York State history up to that time. The second is what happened in a lawyer's office. Garrow's two defense lawyers learned of two deaths he had not been charged with, and they kept that knowledge to themselves for months while the victims' families waited for news. When it came out at his trial, the two men faced public anger, a grand jury and a criminal indictment against one of them. The courts dismissed it, and the episode, known in legal writing as the Lake Pleasant case, is still taught in law schools and on bar panels as a test of the limits of client confidentiality.
Robert Francis Garrow Jr. was born in 1936 in Dannemora, the village in Clinton County that is better known for its state prison, and grew up in Mineville, an iron-mining community in Essex County about 50 miles to the south, according to the Schenectady Daily Gazette. Adirondack Life described him as a boy who hunted, fished and trapped, and as an adult who was a capable woodsman. The same magazine reported that testimony in his case later described brutal physical and emotional abuse by both of his parents. A man who had worked with the family on construction jobs told the magazine that Garrow was big and very quiet, with a stare that stayed with people.
Garrow married and had a son, who lived in Syracuse. His family ties in the Mineville and Witherbee area would matter in 1973: a sister and a nephew lived there, and they figured in the search.
In November 1961 Garrow was convicted of rape. Accounts differ on the details. The Glens Falls Chronicle gave the date of conviction as November 3, 1961; the Adirondack.net history page said he pleaded guilty to first-degree rape and received a sentence of 10 to 20 years; the Daily Gazette said he received 20 years, later cut to seven because he was a model prisoner. All agree he was released in 1968. He moved to Syracuse and took work with a bakery there, the Daily Gazette and Adirondack.net reported.
In the spring of 1973, around Memorial Day, he was facing charges in Onondaga County that were separate from the killings. A court date was set for July 12. According to Adirondack.net and a WBEN history, he did not appear, and Onondaga County Judge Ormand N. Gale issued a warrant. The outcome of those charges is not on record.
Garrow was never charged with her death. He told his lawyers about it, and he later said so under oath at his trial.
Garrow was not charged with Porter's death in the Hamilton County proceeding, and no charge for it is on record. Adirondack Life wrote that as part of a plea bargain he confessed to killing Hauck, Petz and Porter. Law Times and the American Bar Association Journal describe his admissions at trial as covering Domblewski, Hauck and Petz, and the ABA Journal adds that he admitted other crimes. Whether Porter's death was among the matters he put before the jury is uncertain, and it remains attributed to him, not admitted.
The surviving campers described the man, and they picked his photograph from police mug shots. A car left near the scene had been traced through its plate. Together these identified Garrow as the suspect, Adirondack.net and WBEN reported, and the manhunt began that day. The three survivors later gave evidence at his trial; WBEN reported that they would not tell the jury that Garrow had acted irrationally.
Sheriff Arthur Parker of Hamilton County was among those who set up the search, WBEN reported. State police, forest rangers, conservation officers and dog handlers worked through the Speculator and Wells area, and roadblocks went up on the main roads. Adirondack.net described Garrow as moving through the woods parallel to the roads, avoiding them. He was reported at a gas station in Speculator on August 6, and on August 7 he got through a roadblock on Route 28, east of Indian Lake, according to Adirondack Life.
Residents of the park lived with the search for nearly two weeks. Adirondack Life collected recollections from people who were there: a priest stopped in a restaurant because he resembled the wanted man, a driver of a similar car nearly stopped at a roadblock, a campground and beach closed, and a lifeguard who recalled that the manhunt hurt tourism that summer. A retired ranger told the magazine that searchers had been told not to kill Garrow, in case Susan Petz was still alive.
Adirondack.net reported that helicopters broadcast a message from his wife and son asking him to surrender. As the search narrowed toward Mineville and Witherbee, where his relatives lived, state police suspected he was getting help from them. WBEN reported that an officer got his nephew to admit he had been bringing him food.
Garrow was treated and questioned for 41 days at Champlain Valley Physicians Hospital in Plattsburgh and was then moved to the Hamilton County jail at Lake Pleasant. A map was found in his Volkswagen with marked locations on it, which Adirondack Life described as 26 red dots and which CBC reported as 27 marked locations, including one in Hamilton, Ontario. No court finding about what the map meant is on record.
The court assigned Frank H. Armani of Syracuse and Francis R. Belge to defend him on the Domblewski charge in the summer of 1973. Armani had represented Garrow before and brought Belge in as co-counsel. The defense was to be insanity, and in preparing it the lawyers interviewed their client at length, including at the Plattsburgh hospital. In those interviews Garrow told them that he had also killed Alicia Hauck and Susan Petz, two deaths still unexplained to the police and to the victims' families, as the Law Times, Syracuse University and the American Bar Association accounts all record.
The lawyers did not tell the police or the families. Their reason, they said then and later, was the duty of confidentiality they owed their client: under New York's rules at the time, the ABA Journal explained, a lawyer could reveal a client's intention to commit a future crime, but not past acts confided to him. Armani later described the oath he took as a promise to keep inviolate the secrets and communications of clients, a recollection he gave at a 2007 national conference on professional responsibility. They did make one attempt to use what they knew. They offered prosecutors information about the two unsolved deaths in return for a plea agreement, and the prosecutors turned the offer down. The Glens Falls Chronicle's review of the book Sworn to Silence said the proposal was a placement in a mental health facility.
In the months that followed, Susan Petz's father made public appeals to anyone with knowledge of the case. Law Times recorded that neither this appeal nor community pressure changed the lawyers' decision. They kept the confidence for more than six months, and by one account nearly a year before it became public.
Garrow was tried for the murder of Philip Domblewski in Hamilton County Court at Lake Pleasant in June 1974. A Syracuse University news item said the trial began that month and lasted 15 days, and the Glens Falls Chronicle's review called it the county's first murder trial since 1929; WBEN gave the figure as 45 years. The defense was insanity. Garrow testified for two and a half days, the Chronicle reported. Questioned by Belge, he told the jury that he had killed Hauck and Petz and described other crimes in upstate New York, according to Law Times and the ABA Journal. The day after he finished testifying, Armani and Belge publicly acknowledged that they had known.
The jury returned a guilty verdict on one count of murder, the ABA Journal reported. A 1974 Onondaga County Court decision in a related grand jury matter describes him as tried and convicted of murder in Hamilton County. WBEN gave the date of verdict and sentence as July 1, 1974. The sentence is reported as 25 years to life by the ABA Journal, the Daily Gazette, the Chronicle, WBEN and Adirondack.net. Law Times gave 35 years to life, a figure the other accounts do not support. The name of the presiding judge is uncertain.
The disclosure ended the lawyers' standing in their communities. Law Times described public fury, lost clients and colleagues, practices that collapsed, and death threats against both men and their families. The Onondaga County District Attorney, Jon K. Holcombe, made public statements and put the matter to a grand jury. The grand jury did not indict Armani. It did return an indictment against Belge, charging him under two provisions of the Public Health Law on the reporting of deaths.
On August 1, 1975, Judge Ormand N. Gale of Onondaga County Court dismissed the indictment in People v. Belge. He ruled that the privilege against self-incrimination that belonged to Garrow, which counsel was bound to protect, outweighed the statutory duties in the circumstances, and that Belge had acted as an officer of the court in protecting his client's constitutional rights. The court dismissed on that ground and, in the alternative, in the interest of justice. The judge also observed that failing to report the matter was "in a sense, obstruction of justice," but held that the statutes charged were not the proper vehicle for that concern.
The Appellate Division affirmed. On December 20, 1976, the New York Court of Appeals affirmed in a per curiam opinion, People v. Belge. It held that the interest-of-justice dismissal was not reviewable, since the court could decide only questions of law and no abuse of discretion as a matter of law was shown, and that because the order could stand on the privilege ground it would not go further. Judge Fuchsberg concurred in a separate opinion and Judge Jasen dissented. The majority also criticized the statute on dismissals in the interest of justice for lacking criteria that would allow meaningful review, and invited the Legislature to act.
The ethics side was resolved separately. In 1978 the New York State Bar Association's Committee on Professional Ethics dismissed a complaint against the two lawyers, a complaint that, according to the paralegal association NALA, had been filed by the family of one of the victims. The committee reasoned that clients need assurance of confidentiality so that they will speak fully to their lawyers, even when what they say reveals past crimes. The ABA Journal gave the opinion as Opinion 479.
The personal cost was long. Belge left the practice of law, moved to Florida and died in 1989 at 63, the Glens Falls Chronicle and the Daily Gazette reported. Armani was alive at 93 when the Gazette wrote in 2021. Syracuse University held a panel with him and Norman A. Mordue, the lead prosecutor at the trial, on November 4, 2010, the first time the two had discussed the case together since 1973.
Garrow was first held at Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora and then at Auburn. The Chronicle's review reported that in August 1976 corrections officials refused his request to be moved to the elderly and handicapped unit at Fishkill, and that an Auburn physician then described him as an invalid confined to a wheelchair and bed, after which he was transferred. The Daily Gazette reported that many officers doubted his claim of paralysis.
On September 8, 1978, Garrow left Fishkill Correctional Facility. The New York State Archives holds a 1978 State Police film of the interviews and highway stops carried out during the search for him, which lasted three days.
Robert Garrow died on September 11, 1978, near the prison walls, killed by correction officers, the Washington Examiner and WBEN reported. He was 42. After the escape, Armani gave police information that he had received from Garrow and that police used to find him, Law Times reported. At the 2007 panel, Armani said he had felt relief at the death and described himself as no hero.
He died before any trial on the other deaths attributed to him, and no court has ruled on them. No charge for the escape is on record.
Several claims about Garrow go beyond what a court decided.
The map from his car. Adirondack Life described 26 red dots marking unsolved murders and disappearances, and suggested more victims than the trial cited. CBC counted 27 marked locations. No court examined what the map meant, and the dots are not evidence of any particular killing.
The Ontario case. On May 15, 1973, Adele Komorowski, 26, in Hamilton, Ontario, was killed, and her death was never solved. CBC Hamilton reported that two retired Hamilton detectives who had led the original inquiry now considered Garrow their strongest suspect, an idea first raised by Jim Tracy, a New York writer researching a book. CBC said the suspicion came from retired investigators and a researcher and that there was no official finding. Hamilton-Wentworth Regional Police said that DNA testing had been done on some evidence and that they were checking whether anything had been missed. No one was charged, and Garrow was never convicted of the killing.
The number of victims. Garrow was convicted of one murder. The accounts describe him as admitting to three deaths in 1973 or to four, depending on whether Porter's is counted, and CBC reported that he was suspected in other killings. The record does not support a larger figure.
The terms of the lawyers' plea offer are uncertain. Spellings also vary: Susan Petz appears as Pelz, and Hauck as Houck, in some accounts.
The Lake Pleasant case entered legal ethics teaching. Syracuse University's College of Law used it in its professional responsibility curriculum, and in 2007 a panel at the American Bar Association's national conference on professional responsibility, published in the journal Professional Lawyer, revisited it. NALA's 2018 article said the case may have contributed to the later addition of an exception to confidentiality for death or serious bodily harm in the ABA Model Rules. The article gave that as a view.
In 2021 Jim Tracy, a former Glens Falls Post-Star reporter, published a book on the case, Sworn to Silence, through Post Hill Press. Adirondack Life wrote in 2024 that those who lived through the summer of 1973 remained, in a quiet way, wary.
1936: Robert Francis Garrow Jr. born in Dannemora, New York; raised in Mineville.
1961: Convicted of rape (accounts differ on the details).
1968: Released; moves to Syracuse and works at a bakery.
Spring 1973: Facing separate charges in Onondaga County; court date set for July 12.
July 11, 1973: Death of Alicia Hauck, 16, in Syracuse (never charged; admitted in testimony).
July 14, 1973: Daniel Porter and Susan Petz die in the Wevertown area; Porter's death attributed in accounts of the case, with no charge on record; Petz's death admitted in testimony.
July 29, 1973: Philip Domblewski, 18, dies near Wells; manhunt begins.
August 9, 1973: Garrow injured and taken into custody near Mineville; 41 days at a Plattsburgh hospital.
Summer 1973: Armani and Belge assigned; Garrow tells them of two deaths he is not charged with; they keep the confidence.
June 1974: Trial in Hamilton County Court at Lake Pleasant; insanity defense; guilty verdict on one murder charge.
July 1, 1974: Sentence of 25 years to life reported (one account gives 35 years to life).
September 12, 1974: Onondaga County Court decision in a grand jury matter concerning Armani.
August 1, 1975: Indictment against Belge dismissed in People v. Belge.
December 20, 1976: New York Court of Appeals affirms the dismissal.
1978: State Bar ethics committee dismisses a complaint against the two lawyers.
September 8, 1978: Garrow leaves Fishkill Correctional Facility.
September 11, 1978: Garrow dies near the prison, killed by correction officers.
2021: Sworn to Silence published.