The North Country Murder of Irene Izak: Stained by Her Blood
128
The North Country Murder of Irene Izak: Stained by Her Blood
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Overview
It was the summer of 1968, and she had been driving for days. Irene Izak, a young French teacher from Scranton, Pennsylvania, was headed toward a new job and the promise of a new life in Quebec. She never reached the border that early June morning. Savagely bludgeoned, her face and head pummeled with rocks, Irene's body was discovered in a ravine by a state trooper patrolling Route 81 in Jefferson County, New York. Blending suspense with true-crime reporting, author Dave Shampine investigates the brutal murder that shook the communities of northeast Pennsylvania and New York's North Country. Join Shampine as he tells the story of this vicious and confounding killing that has remained unsolved for four decades.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609491192 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Arcadia Publishing SC |
| Publication date: | 12/10/2010 |
| Series: | True Crime |
| Pages: | 128 |
| Sales rank: | 945,572 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.30(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A BRIDGE SO CLOSE, SO FAR
The cold bit through us as we gathered at St. Vladimir's Cemetery on a hill overlooking the southern edge of Scranton, Pennsylvania. With a thirty-mile-per-hour wind swirling the previous night's snowfall about us in temperatures bottoming out at five degrees, we were wrapped in sadness, hope and, yes, even curiosity.
Sadness because, well, "nobody should be put through this," said my wife, Lucille, who was close to tears for a family she was just now meeting. Hope that a coffin might hold some shred of evidence that could finally bring a killer to justice. And curiosity: what might remain of a body interred three decades ago?
A contingent of New York State Police, along with a representative detail of their counterparts from Pennsylvania, had arrived on this morning of December 30, 1998, with heavy equipment to commence an exhumation. The state police investigators looked at me and a private detective, Augustine Papay, as if to ask, "What the hell are you doing here?" Indeed, that is exactly what they wanted to know, I would be told a couple weeks later.
Helen Ewasko had asked me to come. Helen, of nearby Dalton, Pennsylvania, and Luba Boyko of Conklin, New York, near Binghamton, were finally seeing the cops from New York State make a new effort to solve the long-unexplained murder of their sister, Irene Izak. While many murders go unsolved, this was a case in which the family felt they had been forgotten or perhaps ignored. As the none- too-shy Papay strongly suggested in his sharp-tongued Hungarian accent, maybe the state police did not want to solve it; maybe the case was an embarrassment to them. After all, a suspect in the investigation was one of their own: a state trooper.
As I joined Papay and the many family members who flanked Helen and Luba that morning at St. Vladimir's Cemetery, I admit I probably had a feeling of achievement, knowing that a two-part story that I had written for the Watertown Daily Times in northern New York contributed to bringing about this day's events. But I also feared that this might be an exercise in futility, one that would only bring more heartbreaking disappointments to a family who had had more than their share since that tragic day of June 10, 1968, when their "Lialia" Irene was bludgeoned to death on a New York island on the St. Lawrence River.
She was on her way to Canada. The attractive twenty-five-year-old, small-framed schoolteacher from Scranton was on the road after spending a week with relatives in Cleveland, Ohio.
A night or two before Irene began her final journey, she might have been warned in a dream of the fate that awaited. Screams in the middle of the night awakened Myron and Stefania Kowalsky in their Cleveland home. They rushed into the guest room and found their niece holding her head, weeping about her too realistic nightmare.
"Somebody was hitting me on the head," Irene cried.
When Irene set out in her Volkswagen on the afternoon of June 9, 1968, she was looking forward to a job interview in the province of Quebec, where she could use the French language that she had learned to love. But there was more on her mind than that.
"I want my freedom back, my old way of living," she wrote in a letter only two days before her fateful encounter.
The French language was not her only draw to Quebec. This was where she had suffered heartbreak from a severed relationship. Was she hoping to win him back?
In her childhood, Irene had been a refugee from the tyranny that embraced her Ukrainian homeland behind what became known as the Iron Curtain. Her upbringing was in a strictly religious home. Her father was a Catholic priest, one who could be married since he was of the Byzantine Rite.
Irene was anything but a rebellious student in an era of protest and violence, particularly on college campuses. Her entry into adult life was at a small Catholic college for women in Scranton. At Marywood College, where some one thousand young women were under the guidance of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, she was somewhat sheltered from the goings-on that rocked many campuses. Her demeanor was as might be expected of a young woman attending to her future at a religious institution.
Irene made her teaching debut in Binghamton, New York. Next came a teaching position in Rochester, New York. But that was behind her as she saw her future across a bridge, and the bridge was within sight at the very moment she was robbed of that future.
Along the road, she met New York state trooper David N. Hennigan. He was on patrol in a dark blue "concealed identity" car, scrutinizing Interstate 81 traffic in New York's Jefferson County for motorists who dared exceed the sixty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit.
David Hennigan was born in Watertown, the only child of a crushed stone company foreman. He attended Watertown High School, where he involved himself in few extracurricular activities. During his high school years, he worked as an orderly in Watertown's House of the Good Samaritan Hospital. When he graduated in 1957, the school's yearbook staff said of him, "He makes you laugh just like a clown; when he's around, you'll never frown."
Following graduation, he entered the army, which assigned him to Camp Leroy Johnson in Louisiana. He learned the skills of a medic, but his final tour of duty was as a military police officer at Camp Drum, on the outskirts of his hometown. From there, he stepped into the civilian police world, joining the New York State Police.
When he made his debut as a state trooper in 1962, a wire service photo appeared in his hometown paper, the Watertown Daily Times, showing him shaking hands with New York governor Nelson A. Rockefeller.
Trooper Hennigan was only a few days away from his sixth anniversary as a traffic cop when he came upon a woman driving alone in a tan 1965 Volkswagen, heading north on Interstate 81. Pulling the car over north of Watertown, the twenty-nine-year-old brown-eyed cop, married and the father of three, notified his desk sergeant, Gerald A. DeGroot, at 1:50 a.m. on Monday, June 10, that he was making a speed stop.
Nervously, Irene looked up at the six-foot-tall man in gray uniform, his Stetson hiding a thick crop of dark black hair and shadowing a ruggedly handsome face.
State police files are confidential because of the ongoing investigation, but later that year Jay Ettman, writing for True Detective magazine, suggested the conversation that transpired in that morning's darkness.
"You were exceeding the speed limit, Miss."
As Irene dug for a hand-sized plastic folder in her purse, the trooper said, "Just the license and registration."
"Was I really going fast?" she might have said.
As he compared the driver's appearance to the description on her license — blue eyes, five feet tall and 103 pounds — he asked her address. When she said Scranton, he noted the New York tags on her car and a Rochester listing on her documents.
"I taught school in Rochester," she said.
He asked her destination.
"I'm on my way to Laval University in Quebec City."
Handing back her documents, the trooper dismissed her.
"I won't give you a citation this time," the Ettman article suggested Trooper Hennigan said. "Just a warning. Drive at the posted rate of speed, Miss. No faster."
The woman and the trooper both pulled away and continued north, never that far apart, with both proceeding all the way to the Thousand Islands Bridge, the first of three spans leading to Canada. Several minutes later, Irene reached the tollbooth for the bridge. At the far reach of the arched span lay Wellesley Island, destined to be Irene's final stop.
As Trooper Hennigan's car proceeded up the bridge at 2:09 a.m., Irene paid her one-dollar toll, talked briefly to the collector and then continued on her route. At the north end of the island, she anticipated reaching a second small bridge, which would take her across the international border onto Hill Island in the Canadian province of Ontario.
Trooper Hennigan, according to police, reported that he made rounds on Wellesley Island, doing property checks. He then backtracked before proceeding along the two-lane island road, called the Route 81 extension, that led traffic to the second span. The trooper came upon a wide pull-off, or rest area, that was just past the entrance to DeWolf Point State Park, a popular campground providing direct access to the river for fishermen and swimmers.
The Volkswagen that Trooper Hennigan had stopped on the mainland about forty-five minutes earlier, about twenty miles down the road, was now parked in the rest area. He reported that he found the car unoccupied.
Grabbing his flashlight, he inspected the car and its surroundings. Trooper Hennigan later told investigators that he spotted Irene's tinted anti-glare glasses in the gravel, just below the rear bumper of the Volkswagen. He called out her name and got no answer. The officer climbed down into a ten-foot-deep, shrubby and rock-studded ravine and searched "for several minutes," according to the Ettman account.
And then he found her. At 2:35 a.m., twenty-six minutes after he had passed the bridge tollbooth, Trooper Hennigan was on his car radio, notifying Sergeant DeGroot that he had discovered a homicide.
Police told the Watertown Daily Times that Irene's body was found facedown in a pool of blood. Fresh blood matted her light brown, shoulder-length hair. Her skull had been bludgeoned with several rocks with such force that her face had been driven two or three inches into the dirt.
The victim, clad in a dark pink sweater, beige slacks and leather sandals, had not been raped or sexually assaulted, the Jefferson County medical examiner in Watertown, Dr. Richard S. Lee, determined.
Death had occurred in a matter of a few minutes, the doctor said. "Multiple trauma to the cranium," caused by "blunt weapons — rocks," had resulted in "severe brain injury and hemorrhage," he noted in his autopsy report.
Police said the woman had not been robbed. Her purse appeared undisturbed in her car and still contained fifty-one dollars in cash and travelers' checks, as well as a credit card. Her class ring from Marywood College remained on her hand, and her watch was still on her wrist.
The keys to her car were on the ground near her body.
Meanwhile, as a fine drizzle and temperatures in the mid-fifties readied the approach of dawn, Trooper Hennigan explained to his colleagues that when he found the woman, he raised her head, trying to find traces of life. In doing that, he claimed he had stained his uniform with her blood.
State police in Jefferson County are members of a troop headquartered nearly one hundred miles away in Oneida, near Utica, New York. A few days after giving his account at the murder scene, Trooper Hennigan was summoned to Oneida to provide a more thorough statement of his encounters with Irene that night. The interview was never completed, at least not to the satisfaction of one of the investigators, Raymond O. Polett. The trooper's wife of nearly ten years, Beverly A. Sherlock Hennigan, rushed into an interrogation room and marched her husband away, according to Polett.
The trooper submitted to two polygraph tests, police say. The first was inconclusive, but he passed the second, according to Polett.
Months passed, turning into years, and the murder of Irene Izak remained unsolved. The investigation, by all appearances, sank deeply into dormancy.
More than two decades later, a woman in Taylor, Pennsylvania, who retained childhood memories of her Aunt Irene, started asking questions. Lisa Ewasko Caputo wanted to know what state police were doing, if anything, to bring this case to closure. The official responses gave her no satisfaction.
And then I stepped into the picture, unaware of Mrs. Caputo's search for the truth. The Izak case had shadowed my twenty-seven years of crime reporting in Jefferson County, and finally some state police members, both retirees and active personnel, were being more open with me about their suspicions. Investigators who now had the case file in their hands said they needed to talk to the one man known to have last seen Irene alive. But they doubted they would have the opportunity.
David Hennigan, now retired from the police world, had become a deacon in the Roman Catholic Church. He had taken the move to his second career while he was still a trooper, twelve years after his unforgettable experience on Wellesley Island.
Both intrigued and inspired by the candid comments from the veteran police officers, I interviewed by telephone Helen Ewasko; her brother, Zenon George Izak, of Warminster, Pennsylvania; and Ray Polett, who had retired to a beautiful waterfront property near Auburn, Pennsylvania.
And I tried to interview Deacon Hennigan, also by telephone. That was a mistake, since I could have tried visiting him. In my two attempts, I received no comments and a hang-up.
My two-part series about the murder of Irene Izak, based heavily on Polett's recollections and his first-time publicly expressed sentiments, appeared on June 10 and June 11, 1998, in the Watertown Daily Times.
Within a few days, Lisa Caputo introduced herself to me in a telephone call. Her family was retaining a private detective to seek answers, she said, and she asked for my assistance. My hope that my humble journalistic effort might spark movement in this old case was being fulfilled.
Little more than a month after my Izak series ran, I was meeting Gus Papay and his wife, Elizabeth, at a McDonald's restaurant in Watertown. I took him to the murder scene, and from there we teamed up in an effort to learn more about the investigation. Papay's goal was to motivate state police into reviving their investigation. And a motivator Papay was. Unafraid to step on toes, this retired New York City cop pushed Lisa's family, me and ultimately the governor of New York, George E. Pataki, to action.
A lengthy letter, signed by survivors of Irene Izak but actually written by Papay, urged Governor Pataki to reopen the investigation. The letter was passed on to state police superintendent James W. McMahon, and the effort that Lisa Caputo and I had separately hoped for was now a realization.
Finally, here we were on a wind-chilled cemetery hill, witnessing the first stage of what was to become an eight-month roller coaster ride of anticipations and letdowns. State police, reaching out to advances in police science, would never confirm that their focus was David Hennigan. But that became obvious to the church deacon on a June or July day in 1999, when state police pulled his car over on Interstate 81 near Watertown, inviting him to join them at a neutral location, a motel room, for a discussion.
He remained aloof to their investigation, refusing to talk to them, just as he had declined my request for an interview a year earlier.
His only public comment came when a New York City television reporter, Mary Murphy, did what I should have done, paying a surprise front door visit to his home near Dexter, New York, off shore of Lake Ontario.
"I had nothing to do with her death," Hennigan said in a filmed report that aired on August 19, 1999, on WB11 TV of New York and New Jersey.
But Irene Izak's blood, which had stained the trooper's uniform on a damp June morning in 1968, continued to stain the deacon's reputation more than three decades later.
CHAPTER 2IN SEARCH OF FREEDOM
A land in chaos greeted the newborn Irene Juliana Izak. She gasped her first breath and cried her first tears on July 22, 1942, in the Ukrainian village of Bolotnia, in the county of Peremyshl, a picturesque small community "surrounded by mountains on three sides as if they wanted to guard it against an enemy attack which was creeping from the east," as her father, Reverend Bohdan Izak, described in a letter.
Father Izak was thirty-four when, in April 1942, he arrived in Bolotnia to assume responsibility of his new Byzantine Catholic parish. He brought with him his pregnant wife, Maria Kowalsky Izak, two sons and two daughters. The firstborn, Andreey Ivan, was approaching his tenth birthday. Zenon Yuri was eight, Lubow Sophia Anna was about to turn seven and the youngest was four-year-old Olena Lydia.
It was not uncommon for a priest of the Byzantine Rite to be married if he took a wife before being ordained. Bohdan had been married five months prior to his 1932 ordination.
This was a family reunited. In 1939, Father Izak had been forced to tear his wife and children away from another village, Dobropole, where he was the parish priest, in order to escape religious persecution by the atheistic Bolshevik regime that ruled the land. Although she was only four at the time, his daughter Lubow, later anglicized to Luba, never forgot that dreary Sunday afternoon when she heard screams and cries:
I ran to the window and I saw people being forced onto wagons. I knew more or less what was going on, but I asked my mother anyway. She drew me away from the window, and she said not to watch. But these people, these Ukrainians, were being arrested and being taken to cattle cars and were being sent to Siberia.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The North Country Murder of Irene Izak"
by .
Copyright © 2010 Dave Shampine.
Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword Raymond O. Polett 9
Acknowledgements 11
Introduction Paul Ewasko Lisa Caputo 13
A Bridge So Close, So Far 15
In Search of Freedom 23
Safe in America 35
A Drive to Darkness 45
Investigation to Nowhere, Part I 57
A Niece, a Reporter and a PI 77
Investigation to Nowhere, Part II 91
Epilogue 111
Appendix A Family Letter to New York Governor George E. Pataki 115
Appendix B Letters to David Hennigan 121
About the Author 127