York or Miami. And he had plenty of reasons to drive north. He spent Christmas in Vermont some years and his ex-wife Susan lived in Connecticut.
Michelle Marie Ashley grew up in the Connecticut River Valley. She was a tomboy who built tree forts with her cousin in the thick woods. Then, with her teens, she became interested in fashion and men. She met one and ran away with him. The next time the Ashleys saw Michelle, she had had a baby, but had left the child with its father. It was 1984, not long before she had met another man—Michael Nicholaou.
Her family were not impressed with her new beau. He was her mother’s age and they found him unsettlingly quiet and creepy when the couple visited Michelle’s mother and grandmother in Vermont. He had a deep voice and a thick New York accent. Her aunt, Chicki Merrill said that he would not let Michelle shave her underarms. He was possessive and seemed to follow Michelle about everywhere.
Undeterred, Michelle was soon pregnant again. She told her family they were married, though this could not be confirmed through public records. The couple moved in together in an apartment in Holyoke, Massachusetts, about 110 miles away from the family home down the I–91.
Michelle gave birth to Joy in August 1986 and Nick in January 1988, keeping detailed notes in their baby books. She wrote regularly to her cousin Julie Virgin, enclosing baby pictures. But then her letters slowed. At times she acted as if she wanted to confide in her family, Virgin said, but Nicholaou was always within earshot.
Finally, she told her mother that she was afraid of Nicholaou. She said that she planned to leave him after her sister’s wedding in November 1988. Nothing happened. Worried, her mother walked into the couple’s Holyoke apartment at the end of December 1988, looking for Michelle. The Christmas tree was up, but the presents were unopened and the refrigerator was full of spoiled food. The baby books were left incomplete. Michelle’s mother never saw her daughter again.
Carty tracked Nicholaou’s movements. In the years that followed, he visited his mother in Virginia, friends in Florida and Army buddies across the country, with the kids in tow. He told some that Michelle was dead; others that she had run off with a drug dealer. In the late 1990s, he met Aileen through a newspaper personal ad and they married.
A few days after reading that Nicholaou had killed his second wife and her daughter, Carty was on the Internet when she came across the unsolved Connecticut River Valley murders and noticed that all the victims had been dumped beside back roads along the I–91 in a stretch that straddled Vermont and New Hampshire.
Cary also noticed that several of the victims were nurses. She remembered hearing that Nicholaou’s first wife had been a nurse and that his mother had worked at a hospital. A note in one of Michelle’s abandoned baby book place her and Nicholaou at a hospital in Hanover, New Hampshire, hospital on Thanksgiving in 1986. A nurse from that hospital disappeared in January, a few miles from the Vermont home where the Nicholaous spent Christmas and the few weeks that followed.
Carty tracked down a phone number for Susan Nicholaou, who was a nurse in Connecticut when Nicholaou married her in 1978. The two divorced in 1982, a year after the first valley victim, Elizabeth Critchley, disappeared off I–91. Little was known of their short marriage, but Nicholaou took off with their daughter soon after she was born, infuriating his wife.
When Carty called, Susan was guarded.
“I’m not going to talk to you,” she said in a voice that shook. “I’m not going to talk about him.”
But Carty pressed on. What kind of cars did he drive? she asked. Susan said she barely saw him.
“I got away from him,” she said.
Had she been afraid of Nicholaou? Carty asked.
“What do you think?” Susan screamed.
Nicholaou’s mother denied knowing him until she learned that her name and phone number were noted in a Tampa Police Department homicide report.
“I threw him out years ago,” she said. “He stole my car and took off. I haven’t seen him or heard from him since.”
While she heard little from Nicholaou, FBI agents had contacted her three times in the past 15 years looking for him, she said. Once, they asked about Susan Nicholaou’s baby. The other times, they did not say why they wanted him.
Nicholaou had claimed that his mother molested him when he was young. His mother insisted that Nicholaou was never sexually abused, but admitted that her second husband, Rudy, had hit him. Nicholaou’s birth father, Edward Stafford, is a registered sex offender in South Carolina. He was a child molester. His mother divorced Stafford on grounds of “extreme cruelty” when Nicholaou was three years old. Otherwise Nicholaou had a relatively stable childhood on Long Island, New York, riding a motorcycle to high school in Farmingdale, in Nassau County, where he distinguished himself as a wrestler. He enlisted in the Army in Brooklyn in 1968.
When Cary studied the testimony of Jane Boroski, the pregnant woman who survived the attack, she discovered that the killer had used a martial arts grip during the attack. Nicholaou had a black belt in karate. Nicholaou also wore dark-framed glasses like those that appeared in the composite sketch of the Connecticut River Valley killer.
Michelle Ashley’s relatives had told Cary that they remembered taking Christmas gifts out of a station wagon with wood-panelled sides in the mid 1980s. Jane Boroski had told police her attacker drove a wood-panelled Jeep Wagoneer. This last attack was only four months before Michelle disappeared and Nicholaou left the area.
Carty contacted criminal psychologist John Philpin who, in the 1980s, had helped police profile the serial killer. He agreed Nicholaou could be the killer. She called New Hampshire State Police, who had not heard of Nicholaou before, but soon made him one of their three strongest suspects—the other two are still alive, so little more could be done in their cases without showing probable cause. However, the introduction of Nicholaou has now meant that the investigation can be opened up again.
Denver’s Down-and-Out Destroyer
Five homeless men have been found beaten to death in downtown Denver in 1999 in what was thought to be a murder spree by a thrill killer. Although police did not officially link the five deaths, the circumstances in the five killings appear too similar and they happened over too short a time to be coincidental. All five men were bludgeoned to death in September and they were all found within a six-block radius of Coors Field.
On 7 September the bodies of 62-year-old George Worth and 51-year-old Donald Dyer were found under a loading dock at 2460 Blake Street. Forty-seven-year-old Melvin Washington was found the following day on 18th Street. He had been severely beaten and died from his injuries in hospital a week later. On 26 September the battered body of 51-year-old Milo Harris was found in the South Platte River. The body of the fifth man, 42-year-old Kenneth Rapp, was not found until 22 October, when municipal workers cutting weeds in a field at Lipan and 19th Streets northwest of Coors Field stumbled across it. Investigators believe Rapp had lain there undiscovered for four to eight weeks—putting his murder in September. Like the others, he had died from blunt trauma to the head.
“However, not all the trauma has been the same,” said Denver Police Captain Tim Leary. Some of the victims appeared to have been beaten with a weapon, others with fists. Indeed Rapp had been completely decapitated, though his head was found.
Police have not been able to determine a motive.
The killings have scared many of the homeless who would normally spend their nights on the street into seeking shelter. In a survey in June 1998 there were 5,800 homeless people, but the city only had about 3,200 beds available. Due to the increased demand, the city advanced its winter policy allowing shelters and the rescue missions to take in more people than they are normally licensed for, and the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless began putting people up in motels. The Denver Rescue Mission was overflowing and continued to put up makeshift beds in the chapel. And an anonymous donor put up a reward of $100,000 for information leading to the apprehension of the killer.
Three homeless youths were charged with the murder of Melvin Washington and two of the suspects, along with four other homeless youths, have been charged with attempted first-degree murder in the beatings of two other homeless men.
Michael Leathers, aged 18, was charged with robbing and a non-fatal assault on a transient on 25
