Serial Killer Who Used to Torture Victims Nurse Them Back to Health Snd Then Torture Them Again

It happened again seven months later. According to court documents, Catherine DiMauro was walking along Route 40 around 11:30 p.m. on June 28, 1988. The 31-year-old divorcee had a history of prostitution arrests, but it's unclear if she was working that night when she accepted a ride from a stranger in a blue van.

Workers building the Fox Run apartment complex found her body at 6:25 the next morning. DiMauro was found completely naked—that was the only difference. Everything else was the same. Her wrists and ankles were bound, and she was silenced with duct tape.

Again, there were no signs of sexual activity, but the victim was tortured and mutilated with work tools. She was also strangled with a ligature and bludgeoned with a hammer. "Everything was consistent with the Ellis case," recalls James Hedrick, a former New Castle County Police captain and a member of the task force that captured Pennell. "We felt that the same person was responsible for both murders."

This time, however, the killer left a clue: DiMauro was covered head to toe in blue carpet fiber.

A week later, officers from the Delaware State Police and the New Castle County Police Department sprang into action. A task force was formed, complete with its own headquarters near the New Castle County airport. With roughly 60 members, it was the state's third-largest police department for a time. "We had access to an airplane, helicopters and rental vehicles," Hedrick says. "Money wasn't an issue. I don't know anyone who has ever worked for a government agency where money wasn't an issue. We had an unlimited budget."

Task-force members met with the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico, Virginia. The bureau concluded the unthinkable: A serial killer had come to Delaware. Route 40 was the only connection between the two victims. Soon, undercover female officers dressed as prostitutes walked the stretch of highway looking for clues. They would engage in flirty banter with the men who stopped, but they never got into a vehicle. Meanwhile, other task-force members were trying to identify the strange fibers found on DiMauro.

On Aug. 22, a prostitute named Margaret Lynn Finner went missing. She was working the streets along U.S. 13. Witnesses last saw her leave in a blue Ford panel van with round headlights driven by a white male.

Roughly three months later, Finner was found dead near the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal, her body in such an advanced state of decay that a cause of death couldn't be determined. No one was ever charged.

Renee Taschner was a 23-year-old New Castle County police officer when she came face to face with evil on Sept. 14, 1988. She had been walking Route 40 disguised as a prostitute in an effort to turn up anything that could solve the murders.

Just as on previous stakeouts, men routinely approached Taschner. "We had a gamut of people stop for her," says Hedrick."Doctors, lawyers, schoolteachers. At one point, there was a line of five or six vehicles with men waiting to talk to her."

A blue Ford panel van with round headlights drove past. It stopped a little farther down the road, stopped again and turned around. Taschner estimates the van drove past her seven times in 20 minutes.

She walked to a more secluded area. The van stopped. A white male opened the side panel. Taschner immediately saw the blue carpet covering the van's interior. She also noticed the driver's coldness. "He was different than any other person who stopped for me," she recalls. "It was hard to get into a conversation. He wasn't in the moment. He was looking right through me."

The young officer was prescient enough to playfully rub her hand against the carpeting on the van's floor, pulling out blue fibers for testing. The driver demanded that Taschner get in the van. She refused. He asked again. She made up a story about being tired from partying all day and needing to sleep. The driver became suspicious and drove off.

While Taschner was engaged in small talk, Hedrick ran the van's plates. It was registered to Steven Brian Pennell, a Delaware electrician with no criminal record.

In the weeks that followed, both the killer and the task force accelerated their activities. The blue fibers were sent to a lab for testing, and a search warrant was secured to follow Pennell.

This time, however, police caught a break. The lone witness to the abduction knew both Gordon and Pennell. She immediately identified the vehicle.

Kathleen Meyer's body was never found.

He struck again. Michelle Gordon, a 22-year-old New Castle resident, disappeared on Sept. 16, 1988. Known as a prostitute to local authorities, Gordon was last seen on Route 40, hopping into the passenger side of a blue Ford panel van.

Gordon's body washed up on the rocky banks of the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal on Sept. 20. A cocaine addict, she was the only victim who died while being tortured. The medical examiner testified that the drugs in her system made her heart incapable of withstanding the shock of her beating.

Three days later, Kathleen Meyer, another Brookmont Farms resident, was last seen alive hitchhiking along Route 40 around 9:30 p.m. An off-duty police officer spotted the 26-year-old accepting a ride from a stranger in a blue Ford van. Aware of its connections to the murders, he jotted down the plate number. It was registered to Pennell. Meyer's body was never found.

By this point, the task force was monitoring Pennell's every move. Taschner even sat next to Pennell at a Moody Blues concert. She also recalls a heartbreaking encounter with his daughter, who approached the officer during a stakeout and asked for a donation to a school fundraiser. "She was a kid, and you never want any child to experience what was happening," says Taschner.

Delaware Attorney General Charles Oberly approved a search warrant for Pennell's van. The suspect had been pulled over for a routine traffic violation and was immediately hauled into court to pay his ticket—an infrequent but legal method for the police to detain a suspect.

Police searched the vehicle, which spoke to them in ways the victims could not. They discovered carpet fibers matching those on the victims, along with hair, blood and the same brand of duct tape used on DiMauro. There was the so-called "torture kit"—pliers, a whip, handcuffs, needles, knives and restraints.

An arrest warrant was issued, and on Nov. 29, 1988, a year after he'd claimed his first victim, Pennell was in handcuffs. Charged with the murder of DiMauro, Gordon and Ellis, he exercised his right to remain silent.

"He was your typical, all-American person," the task force's Hedrick says of his interview with Pennell. "He came across as a totally normal married father with no criminal record. No one would ever look at his background and see signs that this could happen. No one would ever suspect him of anything."

Prior to Pennell's trial, his defense attorney vigorously attacked the fiber evidence, arguing that Taschner didn't have the authority to seize the strands. Superior Court Judge Richard Gebelein denied Maurer's claims, concluding that the carpet was in plain view once Pennell opened the door to invite Taschner inside the van.

"The fibers led to everything else," says Oberly. "If that was ruled inadmissible, everything else would've been kept out under the 'fruit of the poisonous tree' legal doctrine. That could've been devastating."

But Jennings planned to introduce more than blue fibers at Pennell's September 1989 criminal trial. She had DNA evidence.

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Source: https://delawaretoday.com/life-style/route-40-delaware-serial-killer/

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