At 4:20 in the afternoon on November 16, 1971, ten-year-old Carmen Colón, a Puerto Rican girl, walked into a pharmacy on West Main Street in Rochester, New York, to collect a prescription for her grandmother. It was not ready. "I got to go. I got to go," she told the owner, Jack Corbin, and witnesses saw her get into a car parked nearby. About fifty minutes later, dozens of drivers on Interstate 490 saw a child, naked from the waist down, running from a reversing car, believed to be a dark Ford Pinto hatchback, waving her arms and shouting for help. At least one saw her led back to it. No one stopped. She was reported missing at 7:50. Two days later two teenage boys found her body in a gully near the village of Churchville, about twelve miles from where she was last seen. She had been raped, her skull and a vertebra fractured, and she had been strangled by hand. Her body was covered in fingernail scratches.
Both her death and the drivers who passed her by caused public fury. The Times Union and the Democrat and Chronicle offered a reward that grew with donations past six thousand dollars, and in early 1972 five billboards along Rochester's expressways carried her picture beneath the words "Do You Know Who Killed Carmen Colón?" Several suspects were questioned, among them her uncle, and by December 21 only three investigators were still on the case full time.
At about five on the afternoon of April 2, 1973, eleven-year-old Wanda Walkowicz bought groceries at a delicatessen on Rochester's east side and started home alone along Conkey Avenue. Classmates saw her bracing the heavy bag against a fence as a brown car drove by; another witness saw her talking to the driver of a large brown vehicle two-tenths of a mile from home. At 10:15 the next morning a police officer found her, fully clothed, at the foot of a slope beside an access road to State Route 104 in Webster, about seven miles away; she seemed to have been thrown from a moving car. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled from behind with a ligature, probably a belt, had fought back, and had been dressed again after death. There was semen on her body, and white cat hairs on her clothes, though her family had no such cat.
On November 26, 1973, eleven-year-old Michelle Maenza walked from school toward a shopping plaza to fetch a purse her mother had left there. About ten minutes later a witness saw her crying in the passenger seat of a beige or tan car speeding along Ackerman Street. At 5:30 a motorist on Route 350 in Walworth stopped to help a man with a flat tire on a large beige car who was holding a girl by the wrist; the man pushed her behind his back, hid the license plate and stared so menacingly that the motorist drove on. She was found face down in a roadside ditch in Macedon on the morning of November 28. She had been beaten, raped and strangled from behind with a ligature, and leaves from the site in her clenched hand showed she died there. There were white cat hairs on her clothes, a partial palm print on her neck and semen from one man. She had eaten a hamburger with onions about an hour before she died, consistent with sightings of her with a dark-haired white man at a fast food restaurant in Penfield.
Each girl came from a poor Catholic family, had few friends and was something of an outcast at school, and investigators have not ruled out that the killer found them through a social service agency. Each was found near a place beginning with the letter of her initials: Colón near Churchville, Walkowicz in Webster, Maenza in Macedon. Whether that was deliberate has been argued for fifty years. All three were buried in Rochester's Holy Sepulchre Cemetery. "She was a sweet little girl. She didn't fight much," Michelle's father, Christopher, said after her funeral.
More than eight hundred people were questioned, and no one was charged. Carmen's uncle, Miguel Colón, had bought a car closely matching the one on the interstate weeks before; when police searched it, it had been scrubbed and the trunk washed with strong cleaner. He told a friend he had done something wrong in Rochester, left for Puerto Rico four days after the murder, fled when the San Juan papers announced police were coming, and surrendered on March 26, 1972. He had no credible alibi, but no physical evidence tied him to her. He killed himself in 1991, at forty-four, after shooting and wounding his wife and brother.
Dennis Termini, a twenty-five-year-old Rochester firefighter known as the Garage Rapist, committed at least fourteen rapes of girls and young women between 1971 and 1973, owned a beige car and lived on Bock Street near where Michelle Maenza was last seen. On January 1, 1974, pursued by police after an abduction, he shot himself. White cat hair was found in his car. In January 2007 his body was exhumed, and his DNA did not match the semen from Wanda Walkowicz; nothing survives from the other two girls to test. Kenneth Bianchi, later one of the Hillside Stranglers, worked in Rochester as an ice cream vendor at the time and drove a car of the same color and model as one seen near an abduction site; he has denied any part and has never been charged. Joseph Naso, a Rochester native later convicted of four California murders of women with matching initials, was excluded by the Walkowicz DNA.