Steven Brian Pennell was an electrician from Glasgow, Delaware, a married father of two who did not look like anyone's idea of a killer. In 1987 and 1988 women who worked along a stretch of Route 40 in New Castle County, south of Wilmington, began turning up dead. A jury convicted Pennell in November 1989 of murdering two of them, Shirley Ellis and Catherine DiMauro. In October 1991, representing himself, he pleaded no contest to the murders of two more, Michelle Gordon and Kathleen Meyer, and asked to be put to death. He was executed by lethal injection on March 14, 1992, the first person put to death in Delaware since 1946.
The case broke because of a few strands of blue carpet. An undercover police officer posing as a prostitute stood at the open door of his van one night in September 1988 and quietly pulled fibers from the door jamb. The Delaware Supreme Court later upheld what she did. Pennell never confessed. He told reporters he was innocent, and he never said where Kathleen Meyer's body was.
Little about Pennell's early life appears in the court records or in the reporting. The Philadelphia Inquirer described him in 1992 as a Glasgow, Delaware, electrician. The University of Delaware's student newspaper, The Review, called him a former Glasgow electrician when it reported his conviction in 1989. The Delaware Supreme Court noted that he was 32 at the time of his trial.
WHYY, the public broadcaster for the Philadelphia and Delaware region, wrote in 2014 that he was a local married man with children who worked as an electrician, and that he did not fit the public picture of a serial killer. United Press International reported in 1992 that he had a wife and two children. When a Superior Court judge later weighed whether he should die, the judge noted on his own, because Pennell offered no mitigating evidence, that Pennell had a supportive family and had been a substantial provider for them until these events.
The work mattered to the case. An FBI profile prepared during the investigation suggested a man in the construction or building trades, and the tape found on the first victim was a kind sold to people in those trades.
The four women whose deaths led to Pennell's convictions were young. Shirley Ellis was 23, Catherine DiMauro 31, Michelle Gordon 22 and Kathleen Meyer 26, according to WHYY. The Delaware Supreme Court described Ellis, DiMauro and Gordon as known prostitutes. UPI reported that he became known as the "corridor killer" because all the victims were picked up along the same stretch of highway.
They had families who followed the case to its end. Catherine DiMauro's mother spoke to reporters after the 1989 verdict. Michelle Gordon's mother testified at Pennell's 1991 penalty hearing about what her daughter's death had done to her family. A fifth woman, Margaret Lynn Finner, 27, was the mother of two sons; her father was raising them when Pennell was executed.
Kathleen Jennings, the prosecutor who tried Pennell in 1989, has spoken about the women more than once. In 2014 she told WHYY that she keeps reminders of the case in her office because they remind her of the victims. In 2018 she said that the victims' families and the survivors felt their lives mattered, and that this was probably the high point of her career as a prosecutor.
Shirley Ellis was found dead on November 29, 1987. She was wearing aqua blue pants. The state medical examiner found that she had died of strangulation and blunt force trauma to the head.
Two pieces of physical evidence from her case would matter later: the color of her pants, because a matching thread would be found in a knife Pennell carried, and the tape, which was of a type sold to people in the building trades.
On June 29, 1988, the body of Catherine DiMauro was found. The medical examiner found that she had died of multiple blunt force injuries and strangulation.
Investigators recovered blue fibers and other trace evidence.
In July 1988, according to the Delaware Supreme Court, police began a decoy operation along the highway corridor where the dead women had been known to work. Female officers posed as prostitutes and wore hidden microphones so that other officers could hear their conversations.
The FBI provided a profile of the man they were seeking. It described a white male between 25 and 35 years old, probably working in the construction or building trades, and living in the general area of the crimes.
On August 22, 1988, Margaret Finner, who also worked the corridor, was reported missing. A witness had seen her get into a blue van with no side window and rounded headlights. She was later found dead. The Inquirer reported that no evidence could be recovered.
Pennell was never charged with her death. The Delaware Supreme Court said plainly that the evidence did not link him to that crime. At his 1989 trial the jury heard only that a woman had disappeared after getting into such a van; it did not learn her name or that she had been killed. The court allowed the testimony, from her father and from a witness who saw the van, only to explain why the police focused on blue vans and launched the operation that followed. Her family remained convinced that he killed her.
On the night of September 14, 1988, Officer Renee Lano was working as a decoy on Route 40. A blue van drove past her seven times. She called in its tag number and learned that it was registered to Steven Pennell.
Eventually the van stopped and the driver, later identified as Pennell, motioned for her to come over. Lano did not get in. She stood at the open doorway and talked with him while her microphone carried the conversation to other officers. He asked whether she was a police officer, and she said she was not. In the course of their talk she drew out personal details from him that matched the FBI profile.
Inside the van she could see blue carpeting. Knowing about the blue fibers found on DiMauro, she removed some fibers from the door jamb. In WHYY's 2014 account of the case, the undercover officer, named there as Renee Taschner, recalled that she had asked him to turn on the light in the van so she could look at it, and that his eyes had seemed blank and cold to her, with no life in them. The fibers she collected were later found to match fibers on some of the victims.
On September 20, 1988, the body of Michelle Gordon was found. The medical examiner could not determine a cause of death. The Delaware Supreme Court wrote that the findings in her case were very similar to those in the Ellis and DiMauro cases.
According to the 1992 opinion, a witness who knew both Gordon and Pennell saw her get into his van two days before her body was found. Hairs matching hers were found in the van.
Kathleen Meyer was last seen alive on September 10, 1988, walking away from her home, according to the Delaware Supreme Court. An off-duty police officer saw a hitchhiker matching her description get into a blue van, and that van was registered to Pennell. Her body has never been found.
Evidence from the van also tied Pennell to her. Blood found in the van's carpeting was consistent with blood from a child of Kathleen Meyer's parents, the court wrote. That finding, along with testimony from a New Castle County Police sergeant, James R. Hedrick, and an FBI special agent, Harold A. Deadman, formed the core of the State's case on her death when it came to court in 1991.
After Lano's encounter, police placed Pennell under surveillance. Officers watched him drive the same stretch of the corridor again and again.
On September 30, 1988, they stopped him for a traffic offense. In the van they found a bloodstain, and they took blue fibers and swatches of red cloth. Search warrants followed for his trailer, a shed, his vehicles and his person. Among the items officers seized were a buck knife, pliers and two rolls of duct tape.
DNA and fiber testing tied Pennell to DiMauro. A thread matching Ellis's aqua blue pants was found in the buck knife. The duct tape found on Ellis was of a type sold to people in the building trades, and Pennell was an electrician. Pliers in his possession were also part of the evidence on her death.
Pennell was charged with three counts of first-degree murder, for the deaths of Ellis, DiMauro and Gordon. The State described the killings as serial murders.
The trial opened in Superior Court on September 26, 1989, before Judge Richard S. Gebelein, and lasted more than two months. Pennell's lawyer was Eugene J. Maurer Jr. His defense was essentially alibi.
Kathleen Jennings led the prosecution. She told WHYY in 2014 that Pennell was smart and well prepared and that he had rehearsed his story. Her aim was to show the jury who he really was. When he testified, she pulled him out of his comfort zone by having him step down from the witness stand to answer questions about his van, and his answers, she said, became spontaneous. She called it the biggest case she had ever tried. Speaking to the magazine Delaware Lawyer in 2019, Jennings said the case was the first time DNA evidence had been used in a court of law in Delaware.
The State's witnesses included John Douglas, director of the FBI's Behavioral Sciences Unit, who testified as an expert on serial murder. Based on his experience, he gave the opinion that Ellis, DiMauro and Gordon had been killed by the same person. WHYY reported that an expert in the case said sex was not important to the offender, and that the victims had not been sexually assaulted.
In her closing argument, Jennings stood in front of Pennell and told him, by name, that he had murdered Shirley Ellis, Cathy DiMauro and Michelle Gordon. The defense moved for a mistrial. Judge Gebelein struck the remark and told the jury to disregard it. The State later conceded on appeal that the comment was improper. It argued that Maurer had invited it by telling the jury in his opening that he stood behind his client, a phrase Maurer said referred only to where he was standing in the courtroom.
The jury was sequestered at a hotel during its deliberations, which ran seven days, an unofficial record according to The Review. On a Thursday, The Review reported in its November 28, 1989 issue, the jury told Judge Gebelein that it had reached a verdict on one count and was deadlocked on the other two. Given a few minutes to consider whether more time would help, the jurors came back with unanimous verdicts on two of the three counts. WHYY reported that the verdict came on Thanksgiving Day 1989.
Pennell was convicted of the first-degree murders of Shirley Ellis and Catherine DiMauro. The jury could not agree on the Gordon count, and a mistrial was declared on it. After the verdict, DiMauro's mother told reporters she had been determined that God would show the world that this man really had murdered her daughter.
The penalty phase began the next day, with the jury choosing between death and life imprisonment without parole, The Review reported. The jury could not agree on death, and Pennell received two life sentences. The Delaware Supreme Court later noted that a deadlocked jury could not be treated as a recommendation of life. WHYY dates the life sentences to 1990; the exact date they were formally imposed was not reported.
Pennell appealed the two convictions. On December 18, 1991, the Delaware Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Moore, affirmed them. It addressed five claims.
On the prosecutor's closing remark, the court found no prejudice that required a mistrial. It weighed how close the case was, how central the issue was, and what the trial judge had done to cure the error. "The case against Pennell was not close," the court wrote, and the judge had struck the remark and instructed the jury.
On the Finner testimony, the court held that it was not evidence of another crime. It explained why the police had started their operation, and the jury never learned her name or that she was dead.
On Lano's taking of the fibers, the court applied the plain view doctrine. Pennell had invited her to the open doorway, so she was lawfully where she stood, and her deception about being a police officer did not make her presence unlawful. The DiMauro fibers, the match between the van and the description, and the FBI profile gave the officers probable cause.
On John Douglas's testimony, the court held that the rules for scientific tests did not apply because his opinion rested on experience, and that it was admissible expert testimony under Delaware's rules of evidence. A reference in his testimony to an offender who was "not youthful" referred to criminal experience, not age.
On the sufficiency of the evidence in the Ellis case, the court held that the thread in the knife, the tape, the pliers and the expert opinion that the same person killed Ellis and DiMauro were enough.
The Gordon count had ended in a mistrial, and Meyer's death had never been tried. In 1991 a grand jury indicted Pennell on two counts of first-degree murder, for the deaths of Michelle Gordon and Kathleen Meyer. United Press International reported that the new charges rested in part on a bloodstain in his van that had earlier been overlooked. He was arraigned on August 30, 1991, and, with the help of appointed counsel, pleaded not guilty.
By then Pennell wanted to run his own defense. At a hearing on August 20, 1991, he asked to represent himself, and the Superior Court ordered an independent psychiatric evaluation. The psychiatrist reported on September 10, 1991, that he was competent to stand trial, to represent himself and to enter a plea. On October 11, 1991, the court granted his request, finding that he had knowingly, intelligently and voluntarily given up his right to a lawyer. It appointed standby counsel in case he later wanted help, and a separate lawyer for the limited purpose of handling pretrial motions about the DNA evidence.
On October 21, 1991, Pennell asked the court to let him change his pleas to nolo contendere, a plea in which a defendant does not admit guilt but does not contest the charge. The Superior Court questioned him about the pleas on October 30, 1991, and accepted them. The State then presented its evidence: the record of the 1989 trial, along with live testimony about Meyer. The court found a factual basis for the pleas and found Pennell guilty of both murders.
The penalty hearing was held the next day, October 31, 1991. Pennell gave up his right to have a jury decide his sentence, so the decision fell to the judge. The State relied on two statutory aggravating circumstances. The first, which applied to both murders, was a course of conduct that resulted in the deaths of two or more people. The second, which the judge found only in the Gordon case, was that the murder was "outrageously or wantonly vile, horrible or inhuman." Michelle Gordon's mother testified about the effect of her daughter's death on her family.
Pennell offered no mitigating evidence. In his closing statement he asked for death and quoted from the books of Numbers and Genesis. The judge said clearly that his decision did not rest on that request, and sentenced Pennell to death by lethal injection for each murder.
In interviews, Pennell kept saying he was innocent. He told reporters he wanted to die to spare his wife and two children further pain, UPI reported. The Inquirer wrote that, while insisting on his innocence, he had rejected the help of defense lawyers, made his pleas conditional on a speedy execution and given up all appeals.
Delaware law required the state Supreme Court to review every death sentence, whether or not the defendant appealed. Pennell did not want the review. In a letter dated November 3, 1991, he told the court he would take no action against his conviction or sentence and objected to having any lawyer but himself. A stay of execution was entered on November 4 and amended on November 6, 1991.
The Superior Court held another hearing on December 19, 1991, and found again that his choice to act as his own lawyer was knowing and voluntary. The Supreme Court adopted that finding on January 7, 1992. When Pennell asked the court to affirm his sentences without full review, it refused on January 16, because the law made its review mandatory, but it sped up the schedule. The State filed its brief on January 24 and Pennell his reply on January 28.
On February 11, 1992, Pennell argued his own case before the five justices, with a standby lawyer, Joseph Bernstein, beside him. Richard E. Fairbanks Jr. argued for the State. Both sides asked the court to affirm. "I do not oppose the death penalty in this case," Pennell told the justices. He said the decision had been his own, that the court had checked it, and that he was competent and intelligent enough to waive his rights. He wanted to proceed as quickly as possible.
The court ruled on February 18, 1992, in an opinion by Justice Holland. It found that the evidence supported at least one aggravating circumstance for each murder. The course of conduct finding rested on the no contest pleas and on the final convictions for Ellis and DiMauro. The finding on Gordon rested on the medical examiner's testimony. The sentences, the court held, were not imposed arbitrarily, and the trial judge had made clear that Pennell's own request played no part.
The court also compared the case with the other Delaware first-degree murder cases that had reached penalty hearings. It acknowledged that an exact comparison was almost impossible, and it noted that the earlier jury had deadlocked on death for Ellis and DiMauro. But it held that the facts were so clear and convincing that virtually no reasonable person could differ, and that the Gordon and Meyer murders would support death even without the earlier convictions. It affirmed the judgments and the death sentences and lifted the stay once its mandate issued.
Judge Gebelein set the execution date. In the last days, the American Civil Liberties Union went to court on behalf of Pennell's wife. It argued that he was in effect attempting suicide and asked the state to stop him. The U.S. Supreme Court denied a final request for a stay early on the morning of March 14, before 9 a.m.
He was not sedated beforehand. At about 9:15 a.m. he was walked from a holding cell to the injection table in a windowless trailer at the Delaware Correctional Center near Smyrna. Two clergymen held his shoulders and read from the Bible and a prayer book. About 15 state officials and law enforcement officers and seven reporters watched. Asked for any last words, he shook his head. Three drugs were injected, and he was pronounced dead at 9:49 a.m. He was 34.
The corrections commissioner, Robert Watson, said the execution went smoothly and that a word from Pennell would have stopped it. Telephone lines to the judge, the governor and other officials stayed open until the injection began.
It was the first execution in Delaware since 1946 and, the Inquirer reported, the first in the three-state region in 29 years. Several dozen people opposed to the death penalty gathered outside the prison, one of them holding an Amnesty International banner, while others outside celebrated. Amnesty International issued a statement three days later regretting that Delaware had resumed executions after 46 years without one.
Michelle Gordon's mother had been refused permission to watch the execution. Afterward she told the Inquirer, in blunt language, that they had finally gotten him. Margaret Finner's father, who was raising her two sons, said, "We finally have reached justice," and that he hoped it would mark the beginning of a time of healing. In 2014 Finner's stepfather told WHYY that he believed Pennell had murdered her and the other four women. He never confessed, and he never revealed where Kathleen Meyer's body was.
Pennell's execution opened a new period in Delaware. Delaware Public Media, in a 2011 history of the state's death penalty, recorded that he was the first person executed in the state since 1946 and that the state had renovated its lethal injection chamber before his execution. Others followed in the 1990s, including a hanging in 1996. The Death Penalty Information Center lists 16 executions in Delaware after 1976, with Pennell's the first.
The state no longer has a death penalty. On August 2, 2016, the Delaware Supreme Court ruled in Rauf v. State that the capital sentencing statute violated defendants' right to a jury trial, and in December 2016 it held that the ruling applied to the 13 prisoners then on death row. In 2024, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, Delaware formally removed the death penalty from its statutes.
The prosecutor who tried him later sought public office. Kathleen Jennings ran for state attorney general in 2018, and WHYY's profile of the candidates noted that she had tried the Pennell case. She kept a courtroom sketch of herself cross-examining Pennell and a photograph of the van in her office. She also kept a card from flowers sent after the trial by the women who worked Routes 13 and 40. As WHYY reported it in 2014, the card thanked her for treating them like human beings; in 2018 she recalled that the women thanked her for treating them with dignity and respect. In a 2019 Delaware Lawyer roundtable she described the case as the investigation and conviction of Delaware's only serial killer.
Margaret Finner. Finner's family believed Pennell killed her; her stepfather told WHYY in 2014 that he believed Pennell murdered her and the other four women. He was never charged. The Delaware Supreme Court wrote that the evidence did not link him to her death, and the Inquirer reported that her body was too decomposed to yield evidence. Her death is unsolved in the legal record.
How many women. The court record supports four murder convictions: two by jury verdict and two on no contest pleas. A 2018 Delaware Public Media profile of Jennings said Pennell murdered five women; that figure includes Finner, whose death was never charged.
His guilt in his own words. Pennell never admitted any of the killings. His no contest pleas did not admit guilt, though the court found him guilty on them. At the February 1992 argument he did not dispute the findings and said he did not oppose the death penalty.
Kathleen Meyer. Her body has never been found. The case against Pennell for her death rested on a sighting of a hitchhiker matching her description getting into his van and on blood in the van consistent with her family's.
Reporting errors at the time. Wire reports at the time of the execution mixed up details. One UPI story said Gordon's body had never been found; the court records show it was Meyer's that was never found. The same story said a jury sentenced Pennell to death in 1991; he waived a jury, and the judge imposed the sentence.
November 29, 1987: Shirley Ellis, 23, found dead in New Castle County.
June 29, 1988: Catherine DiMauro, 31, found dead.
July 1988: Police begin a decoy operation along the highway corridor; the FBI provides a profile.
August 22, 1988: Margaret Finner, 27, reported missing after getting into a blue van; later found dead. Never charged.
September 10, 1988: Kathleen Meyer, 26, last seen alive.
September 14, 1988: Officer Renee Lano, working as a decoy on Route 40, removes fibers from Pennell's van.
September 20, 1988: Michelle Gordon, 22, found dead.
September 30, 1988: Police stop Pennell for a traffic offense and examine his van; search warrants follow.
September 26, 1989: Trial begins in Superior Court before Judge Richard S. Gebelein.
November 1989: Jury convicts him of the Ellis and DiMauro murders after seven days of deliberation; mistrial on the Gordon count. The penalty jury deadlocks, and he receives two life sentences.
1991: Indicted for the murders of Gordon and Meyer; arraigned August 30.
October 11, 1991: Allowed to represent himself.
October 30, 1991: No contest pleas accepted; found guilty of both murders.
October 31, 1991: Sentenced to death by the Superior Court judge after waiving a jury.
December 18, 1991: Delaware Supreme Court affirms the Ellis and DiMauro convictions.
February 11, 1992: Pennell argues his own death penalty review before the Delaware Supreme Court.
February 18, 1992: The court affirms the death sentences.
March 14, 1992: Executed by lethal injection near Smyrna, pronounced dead at 9:49 a.m.; the first execution in Delaware since 1946.
August 2, 2016: Delaware Supreme Court strikes down the state's capital sentencing statute in Rauf v. State.