On September 14, 1988, Officer Renee Lano of the Delaware State Police, later known as Renee Taschner, was working as a decoy on Route 40 in New Castle County, dressed as a prostitute and wearing a hidden microphone, when a blue van cruised past her seven times. She called in the tag and learned it was registered to Steven Brian Pennell. After she moved to a darker stretch, the van stopped and the driver motioned for her to get in. Decoys were not allowed to enter the men's vehicles; she stood at the open door and talked to him while other officers listened. He asked whether she was a police officer, and she said she was not. She saw that the inside of the van was covered in blue carpet, and, knowing that blue fibers had been found all over the body of one of the victims, she quietly pulled some from the door jamb. Pennell, about thirty, was an electrician, married with two children, with no criminal record.
The fibers mattered because of Catherine A. DiMauro, thirty-one, whose nude body was found at a construction site on June 29, 1988, covered in blue fibers, with two red fibers on her face and a piece of duct tape in her hair; she had died of multiple blunt-force injuries and strangulation, the same causes as the first victim. The Delaware Supreme Court described her as a known prostitute. After her death the police began the decoy operation along the highway corridor the victims were known to frequent, with female officers posing as prostitutes, and the FBI supplied a profile: a white man between twenty-five and thirty-five, probably in the construction or building trades, living near the crimes. In her conversation at the van, Lano drew out personal details that matched it.
The first victim was Shirley Ellis, twenty-three, whose body was found on November 29, 1987. The Delaware Supreme Court recorded that she was known to police as a prostitute; some later accounts describe her instead as a nurse, and the court's opinion is the record. She was wearing aqua blue pants and had black duct tape in her hair, ligature marks around her neck, hammer-type lacerations to the skull, wrist injuries suggesting she had been bound and patterned bruising to her breast. The medical examiner found she died of strangulation and blunt force to the head.
On August 22, 1988, Margaret Lynn Finner, twenty-seven, was reported missing after she was seen getting into a blue van with no side window and rounded headlights; she was later found murdered, but the court found insufficient evidence to link Pennell to her death, and at trial the jury heard only that a woman had been seen getting into such a van and had not returned when expected. On September 20 the body of Michelle Gordon, twenty-two, was found on rocks by the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal; because it had been in the water no cause of death could be determined, but her injuries closely resembled those of Ellis and DiMauro. On September 23 Kathleen Anne Meyer, twenty-six, disappeared after getting into a blue Ford on Route 40; her body has never been found.
Police put Pennell under surveillance and watched him cruise the same stretch of the corridor again and again. On September 30, 1988, they stopped him for a traffic offense, found a bloodstain in the van and took blue fibers and swatches of red cloth. Warrants followed for his trailer, shed, vehicles and person, and officers seized a buck knife from his pocket, eight pairs of pliers, a bag of unused flexicuffs and two rolls of duct tape; later accounts describe a fuller torture kit of whips, handcuffs, needles and knives. He was arrested on November 29, 1988, a year to the day after Shirley Ellis's body was found, and charged with the murders of Ellis, DiMauro and Gordon.
His trial began on September 26, 1989, and lasted more than two months. His defense was essentially alibi. DNA and fiber testing tied him to DiMauro; an aqua blue cotton fiber in his buck knife matched Ellis's pants, the duct tape in her hair was of a type sold only to the building trades, and pliers he owned were consistent with pinch-type bruises on her abdomen. John Douglas, director of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, testified that the injuries were so unusual that one person had committed all three killings. In closing, the prosecutor, Kathleen Jennings, stood in front of Pennell and told him he had murdered the three women; the judge struck the remark and told the jury to disregard it. In November 1989 the jury convicted him of murdering Ellis and DiMauro, could not reach a verdict on Gordon, and imposed two life sentences; the verdict date is given as November 23 and as November 29. On December 18, 1991, the Delaware Supreme Court affirmed, rejecting his claims that Lano's taking of the fibers was an illegal search, that Douglas should not have testified, that the evidence on Ellis was insufficient and that the prosecutor's remark required a mistrial. The case against him, the court wrote, was not close.
Afterward flowers arrived at the office of the prosecutor, Kathleen Jennings, with a card from the women of Route 40, and in another version Route 13 and 40, saying she had made them feel human again.
In 1991 he was indicted again, for the murders of Gordon and Meyer. He dismissed his lawyer, was allowed to represent himself, pleaded no contest on October 30, 1991, and asked to be sentenced to death, which the court did the next day. He maintained to the end that he was innocent and said he wanted to spare his family years of appeals. He was executed by lethal injection on March 14, 1992, at thirty-four, the first person put to death in Delaware in more than forty-five years. He made no final statement and never said where Kathleen Meyer's body was. He was born on November 22, 1957; accounts give his birthplace as Glasgow, Delaware, or Wilmington. He remains the only known serial killer in Delaware's modern history.