Detective: Killings
in N.Y., N.J. identical
BY KATHLEEN HOPKINS,
app.com from the Web, September 22, 2005
TOMS RIVER, NJ -- It was about
10:30 a.m. on July 31, 1993, when a hot dog vendor on Route 9 West in
Haverstraw, N.Y., made a grisly discovery: a head and two arms in a trash
bag in the 55-gallon garbage can by his stand.
About 3 1/2 hours earlier, a man known to collect bottles and cans along Route 9
West had made another find: the clothing and personal papers of Michael
Sakara — a 55-year-old typesetter from Manhattan — placed on top of a trash bag
in that same garbage can, a Rockland County, N.Y., detective recalled Wednesday.
The discoveries would prompt formation of a task force that came to include
eight police agencies from New York and New Jersey to investigate a series of
killings, highly publicized in Manhattan's gay community, of gay and bisexual
men whose body parts were found discarded in trash bags along major roadways in
both states in the early 1990s, said Detective Steven Colantonio of the Rockland
County District Attorney's Office.
Colantonio was called to testify in Toms River Wednesday to convince a judge
that evidence of Sakara's murder, although apparently committed in New York,
should be introduced at the New Jersey trial of the man accused of two murders
in this state. The victims were two men whose body parts were discovered
along roadways in Ocean County in the early 1990s.
"It was the opinion of the investigators, the opinion of the medical examiners,
that there were such similarities in (the murders) ... that if you found the
person who did one of them, you would find the person who did all three of
them," Colantonio told Superior Court Judge James N. Citta.
The N.J. murders
Colantonio was called by William J. Heisler, chief trial attorney for the Ocean
County Prosecutor's Office, who wants a jury to hear evidence of three
out-of-state killings when Richard Rogers, 55, of Staten Island stands trial for
the murders of two men whose body parts were found in New Jersey. Rogers
so far is only charged in the New Jersey cases.
Once the judge rules, Rogers, who worked as a surgical nurse at Manhattan's
Mount Sinai Hospital, will stand trial for the murders of Thomas Mulcahy, 57, a
married bisexual businessman from Sudbury, Mass., and Anthony Marrero, 44, a
homosexual prostitute from Manhattan.
Mulcahy's body parts were found July 10, 1992, along a roadway in Woodland,
Burlington County, and in a trash barrel at a rest area along the Garden State
Parkway in Stafford.
Marrero's body parts were found in bags on a dirt road in Manchester on May 10,
1993.
Colantonio, who responded to the scene of the discovery of Sakara's head and
arms, and to the discovery of Sakara's legs and upper and lower torso eight days
later about 10 miles north on the same road, summarized the investigation
Wednesday.
He said a teletype sent to other police agencies seeking similar cases quickly
brought a response from the New Jersey State Police, who were trying to solve
Mulcahy's murder. Meanwhile, the Sakara investigation had led detectives
to the Five Oaks Bar in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, where Sakara had last
been seen talking to a man who had identified himself as a nurse. Eight
years later, the barmaid, Lisa Hall, identified Rogers out of a photo array as
the man Sakara had been talking to, Colantonio said.
Among the similarities in the cases of Sakara, Mulcahy and Marrero were that all
the victims were middle-age men, either homosexual or bisexual, and last seen
alive in gay bars in Manhattan, he said. Each was dismembered similarly
and discarded in similar trash bags, he said. In each case, the killer
made no attempt to mask the identity of the victim, he said.
"It was almost as if you were looking at the same case, but they were
different," Colantonio testified.
Medical examiner testifies
Dr. Fred Zugibe, retired as Rockland County's chief medical examiner, detailed
his findings in Sakara's autopsy. The victim had been decapitated at the
easiest point in the vertebrae to sever a head but had died prior to that from
head trauma inflicted by a heavy, sharp instrument, Zugibe said. The arms
and legs had been sawed off from the torso beneath their ball joints, he said.
By Thanksgiving 1993, the three cases had grown cold, Colantonio said.
They were reopened in the late 1990s at the behest of Mulcahy's widow, he said.
By then, investigators — assisted by newer fingerprint technology — were able to
develop latent fingerprints on the plastic bags in which Mulcahy's body parts
were discarded, he said.
The fingerprints matched prints left on bags containing Marrero's body parts and
were subsequently found to match prints left on a garbage bag containing the
mutilated body of Peter S. Anderson, 54, a homosexual investment banker from
Philadelphia, found May 5, 1991, in a trash barrel along the Pennsylvania
Turnpike.
In May 2001, after investigators made personal pleas to state police agencies
throughout the country, Colantonio said, he learned that the fingerprints
matched a set on file in Maine. Those prints belonged to Rogers, who had
stood trial there for the 1973 murder of his roommate.
The roommate, Frederick Spencer, was struck with a hammer, smothered with a
plastic bag and left in a wooded area. Rogers claimed self-defense and was
acquitted.
Witnesses today are expected to testify about the murder of Anderson.
Kathleen Hopkins: (732) 557-5732 or
Khopkins@app.com
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