Steven Brian Pennell was born on November 22, 1957 in Delaware, worked as an electrician, and lived with his wife and two children in New Castle County. Sources differ on whether he was born in Glasgow or Wilmington.
On November 29, 1987 Shirley Anna Ellis, a twenty-three-year-old nurse, left Wilmington Hospital in the evening and took a lift home along Route 40. Two boys found her body at the roadside. Her hands and feet were bound with adhesive tape. There was no sign of sexual assault, but she had been tortured with tools, a ligature had been tied round her neck, and she had been struck repeatedly on the head with a hammer. Investigators had no motive and no suspect, and for a time believed the killer was a passing lorry driver.
Catherine A. DiMauro, thirty-one, was seen walking along Route 40 late on the night of June 28, 1988 and was killed the same way. Michelle Gordon followed. Kathleen Meyer disappeared and has never been found.
He bought a van in June 1988 and fitted it with blue carpet. He carried tools in it chosen for what he did to the women he picked up, and the reporting on the case describes the van as a mobile torture chamber. The blue carpet was the mistake: fibres from it had been recovered from a victim.
Delaware had no experience of a case like this. State and county police built a task force of more than a hundred officers, spent about a million dollars, and brought in the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit; John Douglas gave evidence at the 1989 trial. What actually caught him was an undercover state police officer working Route 40 as a decoy. He stopped to pick her up, and she came away with fibres from inside the van. They matched. He was arrested on November 29, 1988, a year to the day after the first killing.
He was convicted on November 29, 1989 of the murders of Ellis and DiMauro and given two life sentences; the jury could not agree on a third count. He was re-indicted in 1991 over Gordon and Meyer, pleaded no contest on October 30, 1991, and was sentenced to death the next day. The sentence was what he had asked for. 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, aged thirty-four, the first person put to death in Delaware in more than forty-five years. He said nothing. He never told anyone where Kathleen Meyer's body was.
The prosecutor, Kathleen Jennings, kept a bouquet card she was sent after the trial. It read that it was from the women of Route 13 and 40, and that she had treated them like human beings.