A tragic trail of violence
The rampage that
ended in Joseph Palczynski's death was inevitable, say
the women who survived his abuse. He died the way he
lived.
By Linell
Smith, Reported by Smith, Patricia Meisol, Ann
LoLordo and Marego Athans - The Sun
July 2, 2000
Long before the
murderous rampage, long before the saga of fugitive love
and violence, long before the hostages on Lange Street,
Joe Palcyznski was known as a ladies' man.
He had GQ looks, a buff body, an
expensive sports car, money to burn and a questionable
past that clung to him like heady cologne. He was a "bad
boy," the type that always seems to attract women,
particularly young ones.
Imagine being a high school girl of
16, maybe 17. How can you not be flattered by the
attentions of this handsome guy who makes time to pick
you up from school in his Nissan 300 ZX? He shows you an
album filled with photographs of more than a dozen girls
he's known -- young, slim, glossy-haired, smiling. It's
clear he can have any woman he wants.
Instead, he chooses you. And it takes
your breath away.
In the beginning, dating "Joby" is
like starring in a romantic movie. He's 5-foot-8, 175
pounds of martial arts muscle, with sandy-brown hair and
hazel eyes. Endlessly polite. Clean-cut, almost preppie;
even his jeans are pressed. He has a job as a lifeguard
and friends who jump whenever he snaps his fingers. You
know he's calling when your pager flashes the number of
his hero: 007.
On your first date, he takes you to
meet his mom, Miss Pat, who is real pretty and couldn't
be nicer. Anyone her son loves, she says, she loves,
too.
Joby has seen a few things you'd
rather not know about. So you don't listen much when he
talks about making hit lists, buying weapons, being
locked up. You believe people can change.
You really tune it out when he blames
those other girls for getting him in trouble. You know
you're nothing like them.
He phones constantly. He buys you
flowers and gifts. Takes you horseback riding, arranges
picnic lunches in the park. You go out on his Jet Skis,
drive around like royalty.
He tells you how beautiful you are,
how special. He says he's going to be with you forever
-- no matter what.
It seems too good to be true.
It is.
The power of fear
On March 21, 2000, when police fired
27 bullets into Joseph C. Palczynski,his life reached
the violent ending he had long predicted. In his last
days, the 31-year-old man had followed through on a
persistent threat -- to harm the family of any
girlfriend who dared leave him -- and killed those who
got in his way.
Over a span of 13 years, he had lured
at least seven young women into a fantasy relationship.
And one by one, each had discovered the truth of Joby's
dangerously controlling personality.
Amie was 16 when he beat her and held
her captive in 1987.
Kimberly was 16 when he blackened her
eye, knocked her to her knees and threatened her with a
razor blade in 1988.
Sharon was 17 when he attacked her at
her school and threatened "to blow her brains out" in
1991.
A Gooding, Idaho, girl was 15 when
Joby assaulted her in 1992.
Michella was 17 when he choked her
and slammed her head against the shower tiles on
Christmas Day 1995.
Stacy had just turned 17 when Joe
grabbed her by the neck, shoved her against a wall and
threatened to throw her off a balcony in 1996.
Tracy Whitehead, the last of his
girlfriends, was also the oldest. She was 20 when she
met him. She was 22 when he murdered the couple
sheltering her, then kidnapped and terrorized her.
Joe Palczynski's story began to
unfold publicly on March 7. For two weeks, it held the
citizens of Baltimore -- and many beyond -- spellbound
in horror. But the unknown tale -- the lengthy pattern
of domestic abuse preceding Palczynski's rampage -- is
chilling as well. The women who shared their stories
with The Sun hope that their painful experiences can
serve as cautionary tales, demonstrating how difficult
it is to stop domestic violence.
"The scary thing," says Stephen E.
Bailey, assistant state's attorney of Baltimore County
and a prosecutor who faced Palczynski in court, "is that
the system worked fairly well."
To the former victims and their
families, there was never a question of whether Joby
would eventually kill someone. The only question was
when.
These young women did exactly what
they were supposed to: They left their abuser, sought
protective orders or filed charges. And each time, their
actions put them at even greater risk.
When he was no longer able to use the
power of love to control them, Joby turned to fear. He
knew how to cultivate his "badness," to make it a source
of influence. He kept his body looking like the lethal
weapon he claimed it was, boasted loudly about his dark
past and often predicted he would "die by the bullet."
Joby believed he could make a girlfriend come back to
him -- or drop charges -- if she was terrified by what
would happen if she didn't.
Often he threatened to kill the
girl's parents and leave her alive to suffer.
Joby liked people to be afraid of him,
thrived on it, says George Coleman, who became a close
friend when he was 14 and Joby was a high school senior.
Joby's male friends were almost
always younger than he and easily impressed by cars and
weapons. In that circle, toughness equaled status, and
guns added to the equation. When Coleman first knew him,
Joby had a rifle and a Magnum handgun. He played Russian
roulette. He never possessed a high regard for life,
Coleman says, and wanted to make sure everyone knew it.
Fear controls people, Joby told his
last girlfriend. And when it didn't, when the young
women persisted with their charges, Joby benefited from
powerful cultural stereotypes about domestic violence
and its victims: It's her word against his ... That's
their private business ... He's always been so polite
and well-mannered ... She doesn't look beat up to me ...
She must have done something to provoke him.
In one sense, their collective
efforts did work: Joby went to jail twice.
But when he was released, there was
always another girlfriend, another victim.
And with each soured relationship and
each trip to court, Joby grew more afraid of returning
to jail. He would do whatever it took to force his
victims to drop their charges. At one point, he
masterminded a campaign of intimidation from inside the
Baltimore County Detention Center.
For Joby, the stakes reached their
highest in March, when Tracy Whitehead had him arrested
for beating her. Another assault conviction would
violate his probation and send him to jail for 10 years.
In the past, Palczynski's lawyers had
claimed that mental illness was to blame for his actions.
He was treated at mental health facilities almost a
dozen times between the ages of 15 and 28. He had gone
in and out of therapy, on and off medication. His
diagnoses changed -- and were often contradictory. He
was identified as hysterical, as depressed, as paranoid
schizophrenic, as bipolar and as having personality
disorders.
To some his behavior read like the
textbook description of a chronic domestic abuser:
manipulative, controlling, possessive, intimidating,
physically violent. Ordered by the courts to attend a
program for perpetrators of domestic violence, he was
expelled because of his constantly disruptive behavior.
When it came to rehabilitation, he
tried just about everything the criminal justice system
had to offer.
But nothing, ultimately, could save
George and Gloria Shenk, Jennifer McDonnel and David
Meyers from Joby's most desperate hours. The four died
in March during Joby's frenzied attempt to keep Tracy
Whitehead from leaving him.
At that point, Joby felt he had
nothing to lose.
"I can't live no more," he told his
mother the day before he kidnapped his girlfriend. "I'm
going to have to die."
Two faces of terror
Amie Gearhart was 15 when Joby
surprised her with balloons on Valentine's Day. He wrote
in her 1987 yearbook that he was wrapped around her
little finger and loving it.
They met at Perry Hall High School:
Palcyznski, the handsome senior, had rescued her from
sophomore obscurity and a claustrophobic home life.
Joby's old-fashioned politeness had even convinced
Amie's parents that she was old enough for a "car date"
in his shiny Mustang. That June, Joby took her to his
senior prom. She wore a lacy pink dress; he sported a
white tuxedo.
But the picture was far from perfect.
During their five-month courtship, Amie had discovered
another side to her boyfriend. Joby kept guns stashed
under his bed and in his car. And once, he had held a
knife to her throat.
He told her had two personalities:
Joby No. 1 was calm and rational and Joby No. 2 was
angry and strange.
But nothing could have prepared Amie
for the Joby she would encounter on July 24, 1987.
Almost 13 years later, she and other witnesses can still
recall the events of that night.
She was hanging out with a group of
kids on a parking lot near the beach in Ocean City,
eating ice cream from a pint container. Spending the
week in a condo with a friend and her family, Amie
didn't expect to see Joby. But about the time she fed a
bite of ice cream to another guy, she spotted her
boyfriend coming toward her.
Without explanation, Joby knocked
Amie to the ground. As friends tried to intervene, he
began to kick and beat her.
When police arrived, he squeezed
Amie's hand hard and whispered: Don't tell them nothing!
Stunned, she obeyed.
Meanwhile, Joby calmly told the
officers he was looking for his watch and ring, which he
had lost in the parking lot. After the police left, he
walked Amie toward the ocean and ordered her friend's
14-year-old brother, Jason Whitekettle, to join them. I
need a witness, he said.
On the beach, Joby forced the two
teen-agers to hold hands and walk in front of him like
prisoners, kicking and hitting them to keep them moving.
They walked to the Delaware line, at
least half a mile, Joby screaming and blaming Amie for
making him lose his ring, for ruining his life. He
interrogated Jason and Amie about where the boys and
girls slept in the condominium and who Amie had spent
time with that week.
Finally he forced the two to sit on
their hands, cross-legged on the sand, with their backs
to a chain link fence while he paced back and forth,
threatening to break their legs. He ordered Jason to hit
Amie; when he refused, Joby grabbed Jason's hand and hit
her in the chest with it three times.
At one point, Amie urged Jason, who
was small and thin and no match for Joby, to run for
help. He did. With Jason gone, Joby's rage found one
focus. Choose your death, he told his girlfriend:
drowning, choking or beating. Then he threatened to kill
her family.
Amie pleaded with him, sobbing, as he
pounded her chest, over and over, laughing. Then she
spotted a group of men fishing at the water's edge and
broke free. Grabbing their flashlight, she shone it on
her face to show what her boyfriend had done.
It was the calm, reasonable Joby who
caught up to her and reassured the fishermen: The couple
would go up under the street light and talk things out.
They didn't need to interfere.
In a daze, Amie went along with it.
When Joby saw the extent of his handiwork, he began
crying and apologizing, begging her to forgive him.
Later, X-rays and photographs taken
at the medical clinic at 93rd Street showed Amie
suffered contusions of the left eardrum -- she couldn't
hear correctly for months -- lacerations and swelling of
her cheek and nose, a contusion of the right eye that
caused it to hemorrhage, and a bruised rib cage.
Although the teen-ager was reluctant
to press charges, her mother insisted: Otherwise he'll
keep on doing it. Amie's mother later recalled receiving
a phone call from Joby's mother, who wanted them to drop
their charges. Amie's mother refused. Your son's abusive,
she told Pat Long. He's going to kill somebody someday.
That fall, Amie felt alarmed to see
Joby with a 16-year-old named Kimberly. Soon, she sought
out Amie for advice: Joby had given her a black eye, and
she wanted to know how to get away from him.
Get a restraining order, Amie told
her. Press charges. Because Kimberly -- and Joby's next
victim, a 17-year-old named Sharon -- declined to be
interviewed and were minors at the time of these events,
their last names are being withheld. But their
experiences with Joby are recounted in reports to police.
Like Amie Gearhart, they came to know Joby No. 2.
From a charging document filed by
Kimberly's mother: Oct. 18, 1987: "Joseph C. Palczynski
searched through Kim's bedroom without permission when
she was in the shower. While searching he found birth
control pills. The discovery of these pills made Joseph
very angry because he did not want her taking them. As a
result, he began to slap Kim several times in the face
with both an open hand and a back hand, resulting in a
black eye [right] and bruising of the right and left
cheekbones. After a series of slaps in the face, Joseph
then punched Kim in the stomach, knocking her to her
knees. He continued to threaten Kim, stating that if she
didn't do what he said he would do it again."
Feb. 21, 1988: "Joseph pulled
Kimberly into the bathroom at his house [owned by his
grandmother] stating that he wanted to have sex with her.
When she refused, he became very angry and very forceful.
... Joseph punched her with a closed fist causing
multiple bruises along Kim's breastbone, then exited the
bathroom ... went into a closet and got a razorblade. He
then proceeded to threaten Kim saying 'If you don't come
here and talk to me, I'll beat you some more whether my
grandmom is here or not!' "
Palczynski was convicted of beating
Kim and sentenced to two years of supervised probation.
In January 1989, facing Amie Gearhart's charges, he
pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. A psychiatrist
found him competent to stand trial, and he was later
sentenced to four years in prison in Hagerstown. He
served two, including some time for an attempted escape.
He received regular counseling there and was described
as having "deliberately [sought] out dangerous
situations consistent with a fantasy identity as a 'Rambo'
like hero."
Palczynski was 22 when he was
released from jail in April 1991. He returned home to
live with his mother and stepfather, worked part-time at
an athletic supply store, took lifeguard courses and
occasionally did construction work. According to mental
health reports, life at home was strained: His parents
disapproved of his dating high school girls, whom he
would sometimes sneak into the house.
By August, he had moved into an
apartment with two roommates. He was dating a 17-year-old
named Sharon when, in September, less than six months
after his release from jail, he was warned by the
assistant principal not to trespass on the grounds of
her school. Later, he was arrested for attacking Sharon
there.
From her charging document:
Nov. 8, 1991: "We were arguing in
front of [her school]. I proceeded into [the school]; he
came running after me. He pushed me up against the wall.
I pleaded with him not to hit me but the next thing I
knew I was on the ground screaming. He has also
threatened my parents. (To kill them and leave me living
to suffer.) He said if he goes to jail he will kill me
or get someone to hurt me! He has gotten people to come
to my house before. This is not the first time he has
hurt me, but before he only pushed me and pulled me by
my hair."
Out on bail, Joby was ordered to have
no contact with Sharon. But he phoned her repeatedly,
she complained, threatening "to blow her brains out" if
she didn't drop her charges against him. He also
purchased an Inland M-1 .30-caliber rifle from Edgewater
Pawn Shop, telling his friend George Coleman, who
thought he was "just talking big," that he was going to
use it to shoot people at Sharon's school.
Meanwhile, Sharon filed additional
charges describing the threatening phone calls.
Palczynski was arrested and held at the Baltimore County
Detention Center.
When staff there decided his behavior
called for psychiatric evaluation, he was sent first to
Franklin Square Hospital and then to Spring Grove State
Hospital.
At Spring Grove, he was initially
diagnosed as having bipolar mood disorder and possible
depression. But on Dec. 16, 1991, two days after
arriving at the facility, he escaped and fled the state
with the identification cards of a friend.
A month later, the fugitive surfaced
in Gooding, Idaho, when a woman filed a complaint
against him for assaulting her 15-year-old daughter and
threatening to kill the girl's brother. Neither of them
could be found for interviews. But a police report and a
newspaper article gave the following account of events:
While Gooding police were investigating the mother's
accusation, Maryland State Police alerted their
counterparts in Idaho that Palczynski was believed to be
hiding out in Gooding. The man was unstable, they were
told, and possibly armed with an automatic rifle, a 9 mm
handgun and a shotgun.
On the morning of Jan. 17, the
fugitive barricaded himself alone in an apartment and
told police negotiators he would kill himself and shoot
people in a nearby parking lot if police advanced. After
nearly 16 hours, a SWAT team hit the apartment with tear
gas. Palczynski was apprehended and eventually returned
to Maryland.
Things looked pretty grim: Less than
a year after leaving jail, he now faced charges of
violating federal gun laws, of battering and threatening
Sharon and of escaping from Spring Grove Hospital. Any
conviction could return him to prison.
Unless he was judged legally insane.
Clearly his mental state was to blame
for his actions, his lawyers argued. Palczynski was sent
to the Federal Correctional Institution in Petersburg,
Va., for a month's evaluation. His stay there was to set
the tone for the next three years, a time he spent
navigating -- some believe manipulating -- the federal
mental health system.
In the course of his evaluation,
Palczynski told the federal psychologist that he had
illegally purchased the gun at the pawn shop to kill the
"ninjas" who were trying to kill him. When he cut his
wrist twice, once deeply enough to require stitches, he
told the psychologist a voice told him to do it.
Later, Palczynski would boast to
girlfriends that he had cut himself to fool the system.
If so, his ploy worked: The federal psychologist
diagnosed him with schizophrenia, paranoid type, and
concluded he met the criteria of legal insanity, a
decision that led to his being found not guilty on
federal weapons charges.
Fifteen months later, after court-ordered
treatment at a number of government facilities,
Palczynski appeared to have made a complete recovery.
According to another psychologist, the 25-year-old man's
condition was now "extremely stable" with "no evidence
of bizarre behavior or verbalizations which might be
indicative of delusional thinking." He had not taken
medication for more than a year.
If the patient had indeed suffered
from a major mental illness in 1992, he had fully
recovered by September 1994, psychologist M.A. Conroy
concluded. Her diagnosis: personality disorder, not
otherwise specified, with antisocial and borderline
features. She did not see any reason for further
psychiatric treatment or follow-up.
Later, Joby's lawyer would speculate
his client had "conned" the doctors into releasing him.
Joby's mother would maintain that he had remained stable
without medication only because he had been in a
stress-free situation where no one provoked him.
In any event, the assessment brought
him home. He no longer faced prosecution for beating
Sharon because a judge had dismissed her charges. While
he was institutionalized, his lawyer had argued
successfully that his right to a speedy trial had been
denied.
That same argument did not prevail
with another judge, who reviewed his charges for
escaping Spring Grove. In January 1995, Joby received a
three-year suspended sentence with five years of
probation.
He was free to choose his next victim.
Seeing beyond the surface
In the summer of 1995, 42-year-old
Gary Osborne was growing concerned about his teen-age
daughter. There was something about the guy Michella was
dating that he didn't trust.
Joe Palczynski was a nice-looking man
with a fancy sports car. He was as polite as they come
and seemed devoted to Gary's 17-year-old daughter and
her baby. But he had no actual job that Gary could see.
And right from the start, Gary thought the guy was older
than he let on.
He was controlling, too. Gary often
would see Joby hiding in the bushes outside the Osbornes'
house in Chase, peering into the windows to see if
Michella was talking on the telephone or smoking the
cigarettes he had forbidden her.
Then one day he saw bruises on
Michella. It was all he needed to know.
Roughing up women pressed all his
buttons: His ex-wife, Diane, had been beaten to death in
1989 by her boyfriend. Now, as Gary questioned Michella
about Joby, father and daughter argued. It turned out
Joby was 27, not 23 as he'd claimed. And the bruises?
Michella tried to explain them to her father by saying
she'd fallen off a ladder helping Joby's mother with her
cleaning business. But Gary suspected Joby. One day in
July, when Gary ordered Joby out of his house, a fight
ensued. Gary, a slender 125 pounds, went to the hospital
with four broken ribs and a split lip requiring stitches.
He didn't press charges -- he didn't
want any more trouble. But he would change his mind
after Joby beat his daughter on Christmas night.
In a recent interview, Michella gave
this account:
She had spent the holiday with Joby,
visiting his family as well as hers. At the end of the
day, tired, she said she wanted to spend the night in
her dad's house instead of Joby's apartment. Stung, he
argued with her and things quickly got out of hand.
He choked her and slammed her head
against the shower tiles. Michella scratched his face,
staining with blood the white sweatshirt she had given
him. Joby yelled that she had 10 minutes to remove the
blood or he would give her the beating of her life.
Desperate, Michella soaked the
sweatshirt in cold water, rubbed the stain with ice. It
wasn't enough, though, and when the time was up, Joby
made good on his threat.
After beating her, he ordered her to
go into the kitchen and pick up a knife. Then, putting a
cloth over his own hand, he took the knife from her. I
could kill you right now, he threatened. My fingerprints
ain't on it, yours are. All I have to do is tell the
police you tried to kill me with this knife and I killed
you in self-defense.
Later, his anger spent, Joby fell
into bed exhausted. Michella lay beside him shivering,
certain that he would kill her if she moved to get away.
The next morning, when he seemed
calmer, Michella begged to go to work. She told him,
over and over, how much she loved him, how she would
never leave him, how she would never go to the cops.
Then she reminded him she was the one with an income.
Joby drove her to the video store
where she worked, then watched her from his car for a
while. When he left, Michella took a cab to her father's
house.
After Gary Osborne and his daughter
went to police to report the incident, Joby's mother
begged them to drop the charges. Joby, on probation for
his 1991 escape from Spring Grove Hospital, would
undoubtedly go back to jail if he were convicted.
But Gary refused to be swayed. It was
a fateful decision.
Awaiting trial in the Baltimore
County Detention Center, Joe Palczynski made a plan. He
was determined to change Gary Osborne's mind. And he had
friends who could help.
A jailhouse scheme
Joby rarely -- if ever -- dated just
one girl, and he never lacked female friends. If one
girlfriend filed assault charges against him, two or
three other women were ready to testify that she had
made up the whole thing: The Joby they knew would never
do something like that.
In the fall of 1995, when things with
Michella were strained, Joby struck up a friendship with
a starry-eyed teen-ager from Pasadena. Lisa Andersen was
17, a junior at Chesapeake Senior High. He was 22 -- or
so she thought.
"When I first met him he said, 'You
have a beautiful smile.' I'd think, 'Whoa! I've never
had anyone say that to me!' He was like, 'You've got
gorgeous eyes and pretty hair.' He treated me with the
utmost respect and dignity. ... He was something I had
never experienced before."
Suddenly, though, Lisa's new love was
whisked away to the Baltimore County Detention Center.
He'd been taken there on false charges, he told her.
Michella Osborne had been cheating on him, he explained,
and when he found out, he pushed her. But that was all.
Lisa believed him and devoted herself
to keeping up his spirits.
At first, Joby called collect every
other day from jail. Then he began calling more often,
in the morning, at midday and in the afternoon. Lisa
began cutting school so she could spend the day talking
to Joby. He was 007; she was 00 -- "his sidekick,
partner in crime."
It wasn't long, Lisa says, before she
dropped out of school and moved in with Ramona Contrino,
a friend of Joby's. Contrino was using his 300 ZX while
he was in jail and would often drive the teen-ager there
to see him.
During those visits, Joby sometimes
ridiculed Lisa's makeup or clothes. But then he'd
apologize: I'm sorry, baby. She attributed his behavior
to the stress of jail. It only made her want to help him
even more.
Joby began his campaign to intimidate
the Osbornes into dropping Michella's charges against
him. He accused his former girlfriend of theft,
identifying her as an adult on his charging document to
get her locked up. The attempt failed. Then he filed
charges against Gary Osborne over the fight the summer
before, claiming Gary had threatened to "kill my family
and blow my house up and cars."
Gary responded by filing charges
against Joby for the same incident. Shortly afterward,
he awoke one morning to discover his pickup truck
vandalized. All four tires were flat. There were deep
scratches in the paint on the driver's side, and 10
pounds of sugar had been poured into the gas tank.
When the Osbornes still did not drop
their charges for the beating of Michella, Joby upped
the ante. He asked Lisa Andersen to accuse Gary Osborne
of threatening to blow up her house and kill her if she
dared to testify on Joby's behalf.
Lisa was horrified. She wanted no
part of it.
Leese, you're going to do it, and
you're going to do it NOW, she recalls Joby yelling over
the phone one afternoon. You have my car, and you're
riding around in it. You do it now, or I'm gonna kill
you. You have 15 minutes to go down there, pick up the
papers and call me.
The teen-ager decided to pretend she
had filed charges. Faking an official's signature on
charging documents, she wrote down what he had told her
and mailed it off to him.
Joby saw right through it.
"He said, 'Who do you think you're
playing with? You lied to me! Do you think this is a
game?' " Andersen recalls. "He said, 'If you don't do
this, I'm going to kill your family.' "
On April 9, 1996, the 17-year-old
drove Joby's car to district court to file charges
against a man she had never met. As a minor, Andersen
could not legally file charges by herself. But no one
asked her for identification. Her charging document
stated: "Sunday, March 31st 1996 at approx. 12:00 p.m. I
received my first phone call from the Defendant Gary
Osborne he said 'hey you little bitch go ahead and
testify for Joe,' then I replied with 'Who's this' he
responded with 'this is Gary Osborne, Michella's ------
father.' ... Later that afternoon I received another
phone call ... and he said 'Go ahead and mess with my
family Bitch. I'll ------ kill you, And blow up your
------ house so go ahead bitch and then it's all over
for you.' "
Police arrested Gary Osborne on April
18. Charged with making bomb threats and obscene
comments over the phone, he was handcuffed and driven to
the Essex police station, where he stayed until his wife
could post bail.
Three more times that month, he was
arrested on similar charges filed by Ramona Contrino's
sister, Carla. Each time, neighbors watched as he was
handcuffed and taken away. Each time, the family had to
raise the bail money. At one point, while being held in
the Baltimore County Detention Center, Gary wore a badge
alerting guards to keep him away from another prisoner:
Joe Palczynski.
Michella pleaded with her father to
let her drop the charges, but Gary Osborne held firm.
"Joby wanted Gary bad," Lisa Andersen
recalls. "He wanted to make Gary's life a living hell.
Gary was controlling Michella, but Joby wanted to
control Michella. Joby couldn't handle it when somebody
else was controlling something he considered his."
The false charges against Osborne
were dismissed after Carla Contrino admitted she lied
and tape-recorded a conversation that also implicated
Lisa Andersen.
Later, Gary Osborne would sue them
both. But in the summer of 1996, he had more to worry
about than the money he had lost from missing work,
posting bail and paying attorneys. His biggest worry was
that Joby was free.
When prosecutor Steve Bailey decided
against trying the case before a jury -- there were no
reliable witnesses -- Joby pleaded guilty to the charges
of battery and witness intimidation and received
suspended sentences from Judge John G. Turnbull II.
The court put him on probation and
ordered him to stay away from Michella Osborne and her
family.
Gary Osborne cut down all the bushes
around his house.
He didn't want any more surprises.
The lies add up
The first thing she noticed was the
white 300 ZX. It was the summer of 1996, and 16-year-old
Stacy Culotta was pumping gas into her car at the Royal
Farm Store in Chase. The sports car that pulled up was a
looker. So was the guy driving it.
I like the wheels on your car, the
teen-ager said. The man introduced himself and told her
he had a set of rims and tires that he was trying to
sell. So Stacy went to Joe Palczynski's house to take a
look. They exchanged phone numbers. Before long, he was
courting Stacy, telling her everything she wanted to
hear, making her feel grown up in a way no one else ever
had.
On her 17th birthday, only two weeks
after their first date, he showered her with gifts -- "expensive
shirts from J.C. Penney's and Hecht's," Stacy recalls --
that she hid from her parents.
He just took her breath away, she
told her friends. Joby, now 27, had recently received a
suspended sentence for battering Michella Osborne, a
girl who lived just a few blocks from the Culottas in
Chase. He told Stacy he was 20, that he had "some bad
stuff in his background."
People change, she figured. And
anyway, she was head over heels.
Her parents were considerably less
so. No way he was 20 with all those crow's feet, they
told her. Why was he following her everywhere, making
demands?
When they discovered he'd been in the
county jail, Stacy had an explanation: A jealous
girlfriend had lied, set him up. Her parents weren't
buying it. They forbid her to see or even talk to Joe
Palczynski.
So she sneaked around behind their
backs. And Joby helped. He would pick her up in
different cars so her parents wouldn't suspect anything;
he persuaded friends to lie to the Culottas about where
Stacy was.
One night, Stacy told her boyfriend
that her father had found out some bad things about him.
"What does he know?" Joby asked,
sounding unconcerned. "About the kidnapping? Assault
weapons?" Her dad knew about three charges, Stacy said.
He knew about assault, battery and kidnapping.
"Ho, ho, ho! I'll be lucky if that's
what it is. Are you serious? Only that much?"
"Yeah."
"Hon, I got a record for real. In my
entire life, I've, like, 40 charges. ... He didn't get
no printout of my record. There's no way! ... I've had
robbery, OK?"
"Uh-huh."
"I've got four, five, six assault and
batteries," he continued matter-of-factly, as if
checking off a grocery list. "Two or three counts of
trespassing. Two counts of kidnapping. Three counts of
false imprisonment, OK? Two counts of phone harassment.
Two counts of intimidating state witness. One count of
intimidating -- "
"Well, why did only three of them
come up?"
"I have no idea! One count of illegal
possession of firearms. One for fleeing and eluding.
What else? Just all kind of sh--, hon, all kind of sh--.
... Now, as far as conviction: Three counts of assault
and battery. ... We're going to move to a Phase Two. You
got a tape recorder?"
The time had come, Joby told Stacy,
to start taping her parents' phone conversations. He
needed to find out how much they knew -- and what they
planned to do about it.
"I'm going to find out your Dad's
sources so he ain't pulling nothin' on me. He's gonna
make me move to a Phase Three ..." Joby considered the
possibilities: "He don't want me to do that. I'll know
everything about him. I'll know where his mind's at ...
I start putting him under surveillance." Joby was
already watching Stacy constantly.
Possessive, he didn't want her to
spend any time with friends. He often took her out of
school just so he could be with her. And there was the
rule about returning his calls: If he paged her, Stacy
had better get in touch with him within two to three
minutes or risk "severe consequences."
At times, she felt ambushed by his
anger. Once Joby pulled a cigarette from her mouth,
grabbed her by the neck and slammed her up against a
wall. Another time, after a phone conversation in which
Stacy said she didn't want to see him anymore, Joby
tried to run her and a girlfriend off the road.
His mood shifts were sudden and
unpredictable. Five minutes after slamming her against a
wall, Joby would offer to make dinner. He'd prepare
steak, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, light the
candles.
And Stacy would begin thinking, Maybe
I shouldn't have said what I said to him; that's why he
pushed me against the wall. Maybe he really is sorry.
She was solidly under his thumb.
But she had the luck of good timing.
After a months-long battle with the Osbornes, Joby
wouldn't have welcomed the prospect of another hostile
family pressing charges. And Stacy had very nosy
parents.
Every day, Diane and Vince Culotta
would drive out of their housing development and see
Joby standing on the corner, waiting and watching.
Neighbors reported that he was parking down the street
and running up to their house to peer in the windows,
sometimes several times a day. As the sister of a police
officer, Diane had few qualms about taking Joby to court
-- and she felt confident she recognized him for what he
was: an abuser.
She would later give her daughter a
book, "The Gift of Fear," which described classic signs
of a batterer, and underlined traits she thought applied
to Joby: bullying; verbal abuse; intimidation; talking
about getting married, having kids and being together
forever shortly after their first meeting; battering
women in previous relationships; stalking; police
encounters; using money to control people; believing
others are out to get him; liking violent films; having
a fascination with weapons; minimizing any kind of
abusive behavior.
In August, Vince Culotta told Joby to
stay away from his daughter. In September, he filed a
petition to prevent him from having any contact with her.
In November, the Culottas got lucky: Joby went to jail.
His convictions in the Osborne case violated the terms
of his probation on the 1991 Spring Grove escape charges.
Judge John Fader sentenced him to
serve three years. "This man is dangerous," he said. "He
is out there hurting people. I can't believe any human
being can make so many mistakes and be given so many
chances and not appreciate it, and I do not feel, from
what I hear, that the mental state is anywhere near as
much an excuse as he tries to use it for a crutch."
But Stacy still believed they
belonged together.
From jail on the Eastern Shore, Joby
told his mother to hand-deliver a letter to Stacy at
work. Pat Long stood in the aisle of the Safeway while
the teen-ager read it, then took it back. She had
promised her son Stacy's parents wouldn't get their
hands on it.
In the letter, Joby promised Stacy he
would never let her go. No matter what, they would be
together some day, he wrote. And Stacy knew she could
wait for him. When Joby finished his jail term, they
would marry and move to Florida.
She felt hopeful. Until an
acquaintance showed her another letter, a letter she was
never meant to see. In it, Joby described his
relationship with Stacy as "a big joke." She was just "another
one under my belt," he told the male friend to whom he
had written.
"If you tell a girl what she wants to
hear," he continued, "you could ---- all of them and
that's what I was doing for the past 10 years. Oh it's
not just what you tell them but how and where you tell
them. The only hard part is remembering the lies. I'm
sure you get the point. I added up all the girls I
------ and I ------ 142 girls and 38 of them were
virgins!"
Devastated, furious, Stacy wrote Joby
that it was over. She should have known better.
Strange cars began racing past her
house. A guy in a green Mitsubishi, one of the cars Joby
had borrowed to fool her parents, was waiting in the
parking lot at night when she left work. Often, he
followed her home.
She found notes on her windshield
with cryptic messages and numbers meaningful only to her
and Joby. She received hang-up phone calls.
Shortly after one of Joby's friends
took her out to dinner to cheer her up, her new pager
began receiving coded messages: "Watch your back, bitch"
and "I'm coming back for you."
Diane Culotta wrote the victim
notification services of the state's division of
correction:
"How does he talk people into doing
this crazy stuff? They follow her, leave notes, call our
house, what else is next? I'm afraid to ask. ... He's a
very strange, manipulative person ... I'm afraid if he's
this obsessed about her now, what will it be like when
he gets out of jail?"
Stacy's mom collected names, license
tag numbers, dates, incidents and scraps of paper,
amassing evidence of intimidation that would stand up
well in court. She also wrote the parole board
requesting to be informed before Joby's release: "I do
not want to look up one day as I'm driving, as I have
done several times before, and be startled to see him in
my rear-view mirror."
She need not have worried. When Joe
Palczynski was released from prison on June 20, 1998,
Stacy joined the ranks of former girlfriends, her photo
just another among many.
Soon, Joby had a new sports car, a
Mazda RX7, and was romancing a young woman he had met in
the check-out line at Super Fresh, 20-year-old Tracy
Whitehead.
