Kill for Thrill (6 page)

In the middle of nowhere, surrounded by darkness and pine trees, Michael Travaglia expertly guided the speeding car northward on Route 981 toward Loyalhanna. Conversation was sparse between him and John, and what was unspoken was as telling as what was spoken. Michael knew that John knew what had to be done.

Route 981 gently curved to the right, and Michael slowed. Two hundred yards farther on, invisible in the coal black night, Michael knew that Loyalhanna Dam Road lurked ahead. He slowed the car, jerked the wheel to the left, turning onto a two-lane road, and then accelerated.

The tiny towns and white-sided churches zipped by as he sped into the night. Tiny homesteads, the occasional farm and diminutive one-horse towns appeared and disappeared along the roadway outside his window. The winding stretch of road leading up to the dam’s spillway was desolate. The clear northern sky, cloudless and velveteen, hung over the frosted fields that blanketed both sides of the roadway, and Michael aimed the stolen Ford down the middle. Dodging in and out of the thick, coniferous forests surrounding the dam, the winding two-lane road carried Peter Levato closer to the dark waters of the reservoir with each passing mile. Fifty yards farther ahead, an opening emerged where Loyalhanna Dam Road crossed over Loyalhanna Creek. Michael knew they were close.

The fifty-yard-wide bridge sat twenty feet above the swiftly running waters of Loyalhanna Creek, which left the dam and wended its way to meet its larger sister, the Conemaugh River, at Saltsburg.

Skidding to a stop on the southwest side of the bridge, Michael threw the car into park and shut off the ignition. Instantly, the dark, still silence of the steep, wooded hillsides enveloped both men. Even the rushing headwaters of the spillway were distant, faint whispers as they escaped the Loyalhanna Dam and rolled down through the limestone rock and the crispness of the frozen world. In the stillness of the wintry night, the river swallowed up even their thoughts. Michael moved first and stepped out onto the bridge.

The metallic chatter of keys pierced the silence. The sharp
thunk-click
of the trunk lock and then the rusty creak of the Grenada’s trunk lid hinge rattled through the leafless trees along the riverbank. It startled a family of opossums that were innocently foraging for grubs under the concrete abutment, and they quickly dove beneath some rocks near the creek’s edge.

Michael looked down at Peter Levato’s cold, motionless body. It looked stiff from the nearly hour-and-a-half ride out of the city. Peter began to stir. Startled by his sudden movement, Michael raised the revolver over his head and viciously crushed it down onto Peter’s skull. Tiny rivulets of blood trickled down Peter’s forehead. Shoving the gun into his waistband, Michael motioned to John and then grabbed the dazed Levato and began to hoist him from the trunk.

Both men struggled with opposite ends of Peter Levato’s wriggling body. They maneuvered him from the well of the trunk and carried him to the concrete retaining wall that separated them from the icy creek twenty feet below. Unceremoniously, they hurled his bruised and dazed body over the edge. Michael thought to himself how easy it had been as he listened to the splash echo off the valley walls and dissolve into the night. The silence once again overpowered the night air.

Suddenly, a commotion erupted from under the bridge. A cacophonous barrage of splashes and screams echoed from under the concrete piling. Peering over the edge, Michael could see nothing in the darkness. Peter Levato’s screams of pure desperation grew louder and more frantic.

Determined not to go quietly into the night, Peter pulled his hands from the ropes and began to swim to shore. Although fewer than one hundred yards wide at the bridge, the ice cold temperatures made an otherwise routine swim across the creek nearly impossible. As he struggled against the cold and swift current of the creek, Peter’s flailing alerted John and Michael, who were standing above him staring down into the swirling water beneath the bridge. They didn’t react. Maybe they didn’t see him, Peter thought.

Moments later, with frantic, irate energy, Michael and John sprinted to the west end of the bridge and scrambled down the embankment. Sliding on the leaf litter and broken branches that had collected over the past autumn, they reached the riverbank in seconds.

The men paused and listened. The sounds of snapping twigs and crunching leaves followed Peter as he reached the shore and raced headlong down the riverbank and into the woods. Peter could hear his pursuers as they carefully picked their way along the thick, tree-lined river’s edge after him.

Peter’s swim and subsequent flight had left him gasping for breath. Cold, exhausted and disoriented, miles from the nearest building and entirely dependent on himself for salvation, his body commanded that he rest—just for a minute. He slipped behind the largest tree he could find. Carefully, he maneuvered to put the tree between his pursuers and himself, and then he listened. There was no sound. The snapping of twigs and crunching of leaves had stopped.

Crouched against the tree, Peter struggled for breath and willed his heart to slow and his hands to stop shaking. Whether from the cold, fear or exertion, his whole body was quivering uncontrollably. No matter how hard he tried, he could not make it stop.

Peter still didn’t hear anything. He saw even less. Squinting his eyes in the velvet black darkness, he searched and searched. He still saw nothing.

A shadow darted in front of him. Instantly, both his pursuers were upon him. Pinned against the tree, Peter’s killers had left him nowhere to go. As they towered over his crouching, freezing body, Michael Travaglia gripped the knurled handle of a .22 and aimed for the middle of Peter’s body.

The staccato report from the gun startled all three men as tiny orange flames lit up the leafy ground around their feet. When the bullet struck Peter Levato in the chest, it instantly dropped him to his knees. The relentless searing-lead torpedo tore through his chest and into the flailing, faltering muscles of his heart. They seized instantly. He crumpled to the ground in a lifeless mass.

Michael was obviously not satisfied. He walked deliberately and confidently toward Peter Levato’s motionless body and quickly fired two more shots.
Bang! Bang!
Both struck Levato’s lifeless body in the top of the head and bored down into his now vacant brain.

For all the deafening commotion of the past two minutes, the banks of the Loyalhanna Creek were now eerily silent—deadly silent. Peter Levato was dead. Michael Travaglia and John Lesko had begun their seven-day reign of terror. The kill for thrill had begun.

On Friday, December 28, 1979, an event so innocuous that it would go unnoticed for two days occurred. Yet it was an event so profound that when Sergeant Tom Tridico later heard of it, it would prove to be the first link in a chain of evidence that would lead Michael Travaglia, John Lesko and Tom Tridico into a head-on collision.

Without fanfare and with little more than routine police effort, officers of the Penn Township Police Department had stumbled on the stubbly stalks of a quiescent cornfield in a remote part of the outskirts of Delmont, Pennsylvania. Located behind Joe’s Steakhouse on Route 22 near the interchange for Pennsylvania’s Turnpike, the snow-draped field had rested in undisturbed winter slumber until, shortly after executing Peter Levato, Michael Travaglia and John Lesko dumped his 1975 gold Ford Grenada among the field’s spent husks.

When the Penn Township Police discovered Peter’s car abandoned and unoccupied, officers did what any member of a respectable municipal police department would do with an abandoned vehicle—they checked the license plate to see if it had been reported stolen. It had not. Without a crime to investigate, the police followed the next step in the procedure for dealing with abandoned vehicles—they towed it to an impoundment facility.

For Sergeant Tom Tridico, the discovery of Peter Levato’s Grenada by the Penn Township Police would normally be nothing more than a tiny bump in the workday life of an investigative supervisor for the Pennsylvania State Police. In fact, chances are, had it not been for the events of the next few days, Tom Tridico might have finished the remainder of this thirty-three years with the state police having never even heard Peter Levato’s name.

Tom Tridico grew up in Warren, Pennsylvania, a small town about forty minutes southeast of Erie and about five minutes from the New York—Pennsylvania state line. Tom’s father was the fire chief in Warren, and from an early age, he was attracted to police work. Growing up near the state police barracks in Erie helped, and shortly after ending his three-year naval enlistment, Tom signed up for the Pennsylvania State Police.

In 1947, he graduated from the State Police Academy in Hershey, Pennsylvania. He had finally realized his dream. He was a cop. Tom was assigned the rank of private. Over the course of his career, Tom Tridico would serve in a number of capacities; however, the one for which he would become most well known was his position as the supervisor of criminal investigations for the Troop A barracks of the Pennsylvania State Police in Greensburg, Pennsylvania.

In this capacity, Tom oversaw the criminal investigation of his troop. He reviewed their cases, assigned them to investigations and, when cases like the Travaglia and Lesko one arose, he would coordinate the investigation. Supervising men such as Charles Lutz, Richard Dickey, Curtis Hahn, Robert Luniewski and countless others, Tom Tridico would eventually call upon them to bring Michael Travaglia and John Lesko to justice.

By Tridico’s own count, he has handled thousands of criminal investigations and well over two hundred homicide investigations. Nevertheless, the Travaglia and Lesko case has most affected him. Probably in part because of Leonard Miller and in part because, as the years have dragged on, the criminal justice system has called on him to repeatedly recount for jurors and jurists alike the soul-robbing events that began for him on the cusp of the New Year in 1980. In 1979, Tom Tridico did not know Edward Wolak. Tom Tridico did not know Peter Levato. Soon, however, Edward Wolak would know both Peter Levato and Tom Tridico.