The Adirondacks

When young people start turning up dead or missing in New York state’s Adirondack Mountains in the summer of 1973, police have a suspect in their sights rather quickly. The motive behind the madman’s crime spree may never fully be known.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

  Hi, park enthusiasts. It's Delia. If you listen to Park Predators, you already know that sometimes the most beautiful places can hide the darkest secrets. But what happens when the danger isn't miles from civilization? It's in your community, and sometimes even in your own backyard. On Crime Junkie, hosts Ashley and Britt dive into real cases every week, from missing persons to unsolved murders, breaking down what we know, what we don't, and the details that still don't sit right. If you care about the stories behind the headlines and the victims at the center of them, you'll want to check out Crime Junkie. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia Diambra. And the case, or rather, cases I'm going to tell you about today occurred in the Adirondack Mountains, which are in the northeast part of New York State. According to New York's Department of Environmental Conservation, the Adirondacks are 6 million acres in size, bigger than Glacier, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, and Yosemite National Parks combined. So, a lot of land that is both private and public. And it's a space that offers ample opportunities for outdoor activities. A chunk of this land is what's called Adirondack Park, which state legislators have given the label "forever wild," a fitting name for the habitats, wildlife, and plant life

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  that exist there. That term "forever wild" could also be an appropriate name for the aspects of the human predator in today's episode. What he did and the impact his crimes had on multiple families and communities will never go away, or ever be fully understood. This is Park Predators.

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  On the afternoon of Monday, July 16, 1973, a young man named Pat Cadell was at his office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, busying himself with work for the day. But he was also worried. Two days earlier, his colleague, 23-year-old Danny Porter, and Danny's girlfriend, 21-year-old Susan Pets, had gone on a camping trip to the Adirondack Mountains, a distance of more than 250 miles each way, an eight hours or so round trip. But they'd not come back. Pat and Danny were both recent Harvard College graduates, who, along with another one of their friends, had launched a political polling company in Cambridge. Last thing Pat could recall, Danny was expected to come into their office after his weekend

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  trip, but it was Monday afternoon at that point, and his friend had been a no-call, no-show, which Pat knew was out of character for him. Around 4 o'clock that afternoon, Pat couldn't shake his growing concern for the couple, so he decided to call the New York State Forest Rangers, who quickly directed him to get in touch with New York State Police. Unfortunately, though, the state trooper who took Pat's call didn't think the situation was urgent enough to merit launching an immediate investigation. They suggested he wait a little longer before calling back. And then, that was that. Two days later, which would have been Wednesday, July 18, a man driving in Weavertown, New York, not far from a highway known as New York State Route 8, which winds through the

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  Adirondacks, saw a light blue car parked on the side of the road that he knew had been there since a few days earlier. It was a 1972 BMW sedan, and if his memory served him correctly, it hadn't moved an inch since the first time he'd spotted it. So, he phoned the state police to report it as abandoned. And a few hours later, two troopers responded to assess the situation. They discovered the car was locked, and the registration came back as a long-term lease for a business in Massachusetts called Cambridge Survey Research, Inc., which just so happened to be the company that Pat Cadell and Danny Porter had co-founded. It doesn't appear that the two troopers who initially responded to this car did much

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  more than see that it was there and look up who owned it. Journalist and author Jim Tracy wrote in his book, Sworn to Silence, that before leaving, the troopers wrote a note for two other troopers who were scheduled for the morning shift the next day to dig into the BMW more. And sure enough, a few hours later, when those troopers arrived, they reexamine the car and did a small search around it. But they didn't see anything outwardly suspicious or concerning. Like I said, the car itself was locked, and there was no indication that a disturbance or violent altercation had occurred. In fact, one trooper later told Jim Tracy that law enforcement's assumption at the time was that the owner would be coming back for it. The state police did eventually tow the BMW to an area service station and go through it.

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  They found equipment for camping, including sleeping bags, tents, and other gear. It doesn't appear that investigators' sense of urgency was very high at that point, but they did at least call Pat Cadell back and ask him some follow-up questions. You see, the same weekend he'd said Danny and Sue had gone to the Adirondacks, a large group of Boston University students had also set out in the same area for a long whitewater rafting trip. At the time, Sue went to BU, so it seems police made the assumption the couple could have been on that expedition. But Pat, of course, told the police that Danny and Sue weren't with that group because they'd told people they knew that they'd be home after spending just the weekend in the mountains. It was after this conversation with police that Pat's gut feeling that something was

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  really wrong became overwhelming. He got ahold of Sue's parents, who live near Chicago, but they didn't even know their daughter had planned to go to the mountains with her boyfriend that weekend. Still, by Thursday, the Petses had caught a flight to New York and filed a missing persons report for Sue. Same for Danny's parents. They'd traveled from Ohio to make sure New York authorities launched a formal investigation into their son's whereabouts. The law enforcement officer these families met with first was a detective named Henry McCabe. He was the senior investigator for the state police's Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Around that same time, Pat and some of Danny's other friends in Boston made their way to New York to help in any way they could.

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  On Friday morning, the state police took them to the road in Weavertown that Danny's car had been found abandoned on. The group quickly noticed that where the sedan had been parked was right past a sharp curve in the road, which obscured it from view of traffic on State Route 8. In other words, where Danny's car had been found was conveniently out of sight of others. And the longer his friends looked around, the more they realized this wasn't the kind of place he or Sue would have likely pulled off to camp. The terrain wasn't suitable for setting up a tent or going hiking, and in general, it just seemed so random. To learn more, the guys fanned out and began searching for clues themselves.

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  Sometime around 11:40 AM or so, one of the older men in the group clocked something white in the distance within the trees that caught his eye. It was about 25 feet from the road, and as he got closer, he realized what it was: a white Adidas brand sneaker. As his eyes tracked upward from the shoe, he saw Danny, lifeless and resting against a tree. His shirt was soaked in blood, and he was facing away from the roadway that his car had been found on. It was apparent right away that he was long gone. Still, his friend, seemingly in disbelief about what he was seeing, decided to pick up Danny's body and carry it back to the roadway to alert the other men in the group.

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  Pat and the other guys recognized, though, that life-saving measures were not possible for Danny. And shortly after that, one of them drove to the nearest payphone and reported what they'd found to the state police. Puzzlingly, Danny's other half, Sue, was nowhere in sight. Of course, because Pat and the other men had found Danny's body so quickly after authorities had already looked in the area, and their company just so happened to have a substantial life insurance policy for him, investigators were initially suspicious of them. Detective McCabe pursued this line of inquiry, even going so far as to dispatch troopers to visit Massachusetts and investigate the men's backgrounds and the polling company. But that lead led nowhere, and it became clear that none of Danny's friends or colleagues

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  were involved in his murder, or Sue's disappearance.

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  According to Jim Tracy's reporting in his book Sworn to Silence, as well as news coverage from the time, Danny's official cause of death was determined to be fatal hemorrhaging and shock from four stab wounds to his chest. Based on the state of his body and clothing when they were found, he'd been killed sometime on Saturday, July 14, six days before his friends found his body and just two days before Pat Cadell noticed he'd missed work. There was evidence that he'd been heavily rained on after being murdered, which I have to imagine was challenging to investigators as far as evidence preservation went. But not all hope was lost because on Friday, July 20, when Detective McCabe visited the crime scene and reviewed the contents of Danny's car,

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  he found several items he suspected were important to the case. For example, on the side of the road about 10 feet away from where Danny's BMW had been left, McCabe discovered a white nylon rope that appeared to be in good condition. It was laying in a path between where the road turned into woods and where Danny's body had been found. McCabe also discovered a brown shoelace at the scene, which happened to match a shoelace he later found inside Danny's vehicle. What the detective didn't see were signs of an altercation or anything that pointed toward a violent act having happened inside the car. The only fingerprints the state police could identify in the sedan belonged to Danny and Sue. And as far as I saw in the source material, in terms of other forensic evidence, there wasn't much.

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  There was also another glaring reality about what wasn't at the scene, any sign of Sue's pets. McCabe got her photo from her family and immediately issued her description to newspapers to get the word out. Sue was said to be just more than 100 pounds, stood 5'2" tall and had blue eyes and short, dark blond hair. She'd last been seen wearing jeans, a light top and sneakers. But the next few days passed and no trace of her surfaced. During that time, her parents returned to the Chicago area to be with their other daughter and wait for updates from police. By that point, Detective McCabe had learned quite a bit more about the couple's timeline, leading up to and on July 14.

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  According to Jim Tracy's book and coverage by The Post-Star, using a notebook of Danny's that investigators had either found on his person or in his vehicle, they were able to establish that he and Sue had left the Boston area around noon time on the 14th. While still in Massachusetts, they'd stopped at a supermarket and camping supplies store and then continued on toward New York State. Around 6:30 to 8 o'clock at night, they'd bought fuel at a service station and then it was believed they got onto State Route 8, headed north toward the Lake George area. No one, including authorities, knew for sure where their intended endpoint was going to be. But police suspected that whatever happened to them

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  had occurred sometime between 8:30 PM and 10 PM on the night of the 14th. For the next week, the state police conducted a massive search for Sue, which involved many troopers as well as resources and personnel from other law enforcement agencies. Authorities canvassed homes, bars, motels and businesses looking for her or people who might have seen her or Danny the weekend in question. But nothing materialized. Newspapers from all over the country published stories about the case and it's clear from what I read in the source material that law enforcement was feeling the pressure to make headway. I mean, summer in the Adirondacks is peak tourist season. A murdered man and a missing woman with a suspect on the loose

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  were not the kind of headlines that would entice visitors to flock to the area. News coverage also detailed Sue's life. She was on track to earn a bachelor's degree in journalism from Boston University. At the time of her disappearance, she'd been volunteering as a reporter and photojournalist for a local news service. People who knew her described her as an easy-to-like, passionate person with a lot of ambition and drive. Her roommate at the time told The Boston Globe that Sue had found a way to take enough summer classes so that she could complete her degree in three years instead of four. While the search for her was happening, Danny's loved ones laid him to rest and Detective McCabe continued to field questions from reporters about what was going on with the progress of his investigation.

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  At the time, he offered up his working theory. He said he believed that Sue had been kidnapped at the same time Danny was murdered and she was likely still alive somewhere but being held against her will. He didn't have solid evidence to back that theory up, but he emphasized that it was the most likely scenario, given everything his team had gathered up to that moment. By the last few days of July, though, with Sue missing almost two weeks by that point, the situation was not looking good. Authorities chased leads in various directions and even apprehended one man who claimed he'd kidnapped Sue and dumped her body in a swamp. However, that turned out to be a bogus confession. While investigators were doggedly working the case, some visitors continued to make their way into the Adirondacks,

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  despite the fact that news of the crime had gone national. Jim Tracy wrote in his book that there were some folks who'd come into the area either unaware of what had happened or were undeterred by the events, which in hindsight proved disastrous for one particular group of friends who set up camp less than an hour away from where police were crawling around Danny and Sue's crime scene.

• 15:06Speaker 00

  When an intruder approaches a home, they expect a camera. What they don't expect... Stop. This is SimpliSafe. Police are on the way. Using smart AI cameras, live US-based agents help deter intruders in under 30 seconds. Don't just record a break-in, stop it from ever happening. Plans starting around $1 a day. Right now, get 60% off your new system with professional monitoring at simplisafe.com/truecrime.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  30 seconds response time requires monitoring plan with outdoor protection starting at $49.99 a month. Visit simplisafe.com/licenses for alarm license information.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  One day last year, detectives knocked on the door of a multimillion-dollar mansion in Los Angeles County. Inside, they found a strange scene. A dining area converted into classrooms with children and toddlers seated at rows of desks. The couple that lived there had 21 kids.

• 15:58Speaker 03

  It's a house that looks like a castle, but it's under investigation for being a possible factory, a baby factory.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Where had these children come from? Almost all of them were born through surrogates. But those surrogates had been deceived.

• 16:13Speaker 04

  Me and my coworker, we named her the surrogate pimp. That's the one time that we called the cops because she was screaming.

• 16:18Speaker 05

  And then he pulled out a gun. I started crying. I was like, what the heck did I just get myself into?

• 16:26Speaker 01

  I'm Ava Kaufman. The Journey is a new series from In the Dark and The New Yorker. Find it now in the In the Dark feed, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  On the morning of Sunday, July 29, in a grass clearing next to State Route 8 near the village of Speculator, New York, four friends woke up after spending their first night camping together in the Adirondacks. The spot they'd picked to hang out in was tucked away from most traffic, adjacent to a nearby river and surrounded by trees on three sides. The group included 19-year-old Dave Freeman, his fiancee, 23-year-old Carol Malinowski, and Dave's buddies, 22-year-old Nick Fiorello and 18-year-old Phil Dombrowski. For their trip, this crew had driven two cars into the mountains, Carol's Chevy Camaro and Nick's Ford Maverick. That Sunday morning, Phil and Nick woke up and left the campsite to get breakfast

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  and go fishing while Dave and Carol slept in until about 9:00 AM. While the couple lounged, they heard a sound outside their tent and then a few moments later, a middle-aged white guy with glasses who was wearing a fedora and holding a rifle flipped open the front flap to their tent. He squatted down and looked at them. And naturally, Dave and Carol were stunned by the intrusion. The stranger told the couple he'd run out of fuel and needed to siphon some gas from one of their two vehicles. Dave and Carol quickly gathered themselves, but right as they were about to exit the tent, the stranger motioned for them to stay put because it appeared his attention had been drawn to people walking up to the tent. Those people, as it turned out, were Phil and Nick, who were returning from their morning fishing trip.

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  When the gruff man, wearing the fedora, who'd been talking to Dave and Carol, realized that Phil and Nick were with them, he ordered everyone in the group to start walking down the road and into the woods. He announced he was going to be taking fuel from their cars and that he didn't want anyone else to find out that's what he was up to. As the four friends marched in front of the gunman, Nick and Phil tried to tell him they'd gladly just give him gas, but the man ordered them to be quiet and to keep walking. Jim Tracy wrote in his book that the stranger stated, quote, "Don't try anything or I'll blow a hole in you. I've killed before and I'll kill again," end quote. Not long after that, he made the young people turn off the roadway and walk a few hundred feet into the woods.

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  One by one, he made them tie each other to different trees, which were out of sight of one another and about 40 feet apart. The stranger forced Dave to bind Phil first, then Nick, and then he instructed Carol to tie up Dave before he himself bound her. After being left alone, Carol heard and saw their captor go over to Phil, kneel down in front of him and start talking with him. Then she suddenly heard her friend start making a retching sound, like he was vomiting. Phil continued to make that sound for about 30 seconds to a minute. Carol called out to him to see what was wrong, but he didn't respond. According to Jim Tracy's book, Phil's killer had stabbed him in the chest several times. Some of the punctures were shallow, some were deep.

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  Ultimately, Phil bled to death from large stab wounds to one of his lungs.

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  Right away, Dave, Nick, and Carol knew something was wrong. And as quickly as the guys could, they got out of their bindings and ran through the woods. Nick took off in one direction, and Dave headed for Carol. On his way, though, the man with the gun caught up to him and ordered him to help him track down Nick so that he wouldn't alert authorities. Unable to do anything but comply with the stranger, Dave walked through the woods with him to try and find Nick. But Dave didn't intend to actually help the madman. Instead, he just pretended to find Nick. That way, he could buy his friend more time to hopefully get to safety and notify police about what had happened. While Dave and the gunman were off in the woods, Carol was able to slip out of her bindings and immediately sprinted over to check on Phil.

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  When she got to him, she quickly recognized that he was dead. Then she turned tail and ran for help. When she made it back to the roadway, she hailed a passing car. The guy driving that vehicle was with two boys and one of his cousins, and they all immediately agreed to help her. After she hopped in, the group sped out of the area and headed to the village of Speculator so she could alert law enforcement. Simultaneously, Nick had already made it back to his car and sped off toward a nearby town called Wells, New York. When he arrived, the first place he pulled into was a local restaurant. But instead of going inside, he frantically climbed the roof and started shouting for help. The owner of that restaurant heard him and came outside to try and calm him down, but the things Nick was saying confused the owner.

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  He wasn't sure if the young man was unwell, was experiencing a bad drug trip, or what. Still, he got in touch with New York State Police to let them know what Phil was claiming. While waiting for officials to arrive, the restaurant owner decided to rally a few local guys to go up to State Route 8 and investigate the area Nick said he'd run away from. And sure enough, when that group got to the campsite clearing Nick told them about, they found signs of recent activity. And not too far away, there were two men laying in a ditch. The guy in the group who initially spotted the pair approached them, but then ran back to tell the others. All of a sudden, though, one of the guys jumped up and rolled behind a car for cover. He said his name was Dave, and then pointed to the other man and exclaimed that he believed that guy was going to shoot him.

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  However, before the restaurant owner and group of guys from town could act, the stranger with the gun disappeared into the woods. After law enforcement became aware of the situation, roadblocks quickly went up, and a manhunt ensued. Other campers who were in the area were asked to leave, and it became very clear that it was an all-hands-on-deck kind of situation to find whoever was involved in Phil's murder. Investigators escorted by Nick traveled to the spot in the mountains where Phil's body was. They examined the crime scene and interviewed Carol and Dave to get more information about the guy who kidnapped them. Through those conversations, investigators developed a composite sketch of the perpetrator. But if you remember, this was all happening very close to where the state police were

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  already searching for Sue Pets. So naturally, Detective McCabe, who was with the state police, was very interested in the situation, and he got involved right away. The description the survivors and other witnesses gave about the gunman's car was that it was orangish or light brown, and may have been a Chevy Vega or similar model. Aerial resources and K-9 teams that had been utilized in the search for Sue were brought over to help in this manhunt. But it quickly became clear that whoever the perpetrator was, he was smart enough to know how to evade law enforcement during the first few hours. But early in the morning on Monday, July 30th, his luck ran out. Two troopers keeping watch at a roadblock near State Route 8 spotted a man in a fedora

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  driving a vehicle that loosely fit the fugitive's description. After seeing that car, a short chase ensued, but the driver managed to slip away after abandoning his vehicle in the woods and taking off on foot. The car he left behind, though, turned out to be a pivotal clue. Because it came back as belonging to a 37-year-old man from Syracuse, New York, named Robert Garrow, Sr. And Robert, as it turns out, had a lengthy criminal history dating back to the late 1950s. One look at his driver's license photo told New York State Police investigators all they needed to know. He was a dead ringer for the composite sketch Dave, Carol, and Nick had helped develop.

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  Later that morning, the survivors confirmed he was the guy who'd kidnapped them and killed their friend. So with the ID confirmed, close to 200 law enforcement officers flooded the area in the Adirondacks where Robert had ditched his car and began scouring the landscape for him. Officials held a press conference and formally released his name to the media. The description that went out about Robert stated he was nearly six feet tall, balding with some brown hair on the sides of his head, was very muscular, and had blue eyes. His wanted poster featured his DMV photo next to a prior mugshot of him. Beneath the images was a paragraph that explained he usually wore brown-rimmed glasses, had a clean-shaven face, had several distinct tattoos, and preferred wearing hats.

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  He had prior convictions for attempted robbery, burglary, grand larceny, and a number of sex crimes, including sexually assaulting children. A theory that Detective McCabe had early on was that because of the close proximity and similarities between Danny Porter's murder, Sue Pets's disappearance, and Phil Dombrowski's slaying, Robert was most likely responsible for all of those crimes. To learn more about his prime suspect, McCabe did a deep dive into Robert's current life and criminal history. What he discovered was that he had a wife named Edith and two teenage children who all lived in the family's home in Syracuse. Robert himself, though, wasn't a city guy. He'd grown up in the Adirondack Mountains, in Mindville, to be exact.

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  He had relatives there as well as in other parts of New York State. He had a prior conviction from 1961 for sexually assaulting a teenage girl and battering her boyfriend. For that offense, he'd been sentenced to 20 years, but only incarcerated for seven due to good behavior. As part of a deal, he'd also confessed to kidnapping and sexually assaulting two young girls earlier in 1961, but he was never prosecuted for those crimes. In July 1973, when news publications reported that he was a fugitive on the loose in the Adirondacks, suspected of at least two murders, visitors who'd remained in the area finally decided to leave, likely out of fear they would become victims themselves.

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  Detective McCabe decided another potentially useful source of information about Robert would be his former defense attorney, a guy named Frank Armani. Armani had defended Robert in two separate criminal cases earlier that year. In November 1972, which was several months before Danny and Phil's murders, Robert was arrested and accused of kidnapping two Syracuse University students. He'd picked them up while they were hitchhiking and then threatened them with a gun. The students eventually escaped, but one had unknowingly left behind cannabis in Robert's car. By April 1973, Frank Armani had successfully gotten Robert's charges dismissed in that case. A few months later, in early June 1973, Robert got arrested again, this time for showing

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  a firearm to two young girls and then taking them into the woods where he sexually assaulted them. At the time of Danny and Phil's murders, the court proceedings for that case were still pending in Onondaga County, New York. According to Jim Tracy's book, Robert was due back in court for that case on July 26, 1973, but he never showed up. And his attorney couldn't explain to the court why he didn't know where Robert was. When Frank Armani got all the details from Detective McCabe about what was going on in the mountains, the murders, the manhunt, everything, he felt duped by Robert and concerned for Sue Pets. He agreed to a televised interview with a CBS station in Syracuse to publicly plead with his client to turn himself in.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  During that broadcast, Armani said in part, quote, "I was hoping to say to Robert, if he sees this or hears this, he should get rid of the gun, if he has any weapons, and get himself into a public place and call me, or call state police. Best thing he can do is give himself up, so I can help him, or someone can help him." End quote. But that didn't happen. Robert remained at large, despite his wife Edith and his children pleading for him to come out of hiding. Meanwhile, Phil Dombrowski's loved ones held his funeral service in his home city of Schenectady, New York. He was just 18 years old when he was killed and had recently finished high school.

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  Many people who remembered him from his time delivering newspapers in their neighborhoods were deeply saddened by his senseless murder.

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  The manhunt for Robert was said to be the largest in New York state history at the time, and the most costly. Because of his familiarity with the Adirondack Mountains, he managed to stay one step ahead of investigators by carefully planning his movements, traveling at night, and breaking into vacant properties to steal food, drinks, and even a car along the way. Authorities kept his wife, kids, parents, and other relatives under surveillance, but despite law enforcement's vigilance, Robert still managed to make it to his sister's home undetected, and spent a few hours there before taking off again. During that visit, his sister had phoned Robert's wife Edith and conveyed a message from him asking her to send a spare pair of eyeglasses to his hometown of Mineville.

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  Investigators didn't find out about this visit, though, until the following day, and, to my surprise, never arrested Robert's sister or any member of her family for failing to report he'd come by. Her son, Robert's nephew, was later caught trying to bring him food and subsequently charged with felony hindering prosecution, but those charges were later dropped. It wasn't until August 9th, about a month into the police's investigation and some 11 days after Robert fled, that authorities finally caught up to him and took him into custody. He was apprehended after running from a Department of Environmental Conservation officer who'd spotted him in the woods and shot him. During that confrontation, Robert was badly injured in his left arm.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  After his arrest, he was transported to a hospital in Plattsburgh, New York, and investigators jumped right into interrogating him along that ride. According to what Jim Tracy wrote in his book, Robert remained hospitalized but was kept under 24-hour police watch for 41 days until he was cleared to be transferred to jail. When word of his arrest made it to Phil Dombrowski's relatives, his sister told the press she was glad Robert had been captured, and it seemed like the community as a whole took a sigh of relief that Robert was no longer on the lam. Some additional evidence that law enforcement had discovered while on the hunt for him, which Detective McCabe believed linked Robert to multiple crimes, was a map of New York that was found inside a plastic bag

• 30:52Speaker 01

  tucked into a compartment in the wheel well of his car. McCabe had uncovered the map while searching the vehicle, and all these pencil lines and notes on it that indicated Robert had traced routes between various places, including where Danny Porter had been killed. There were also five areas marked next to specific cities and towns on the map, including Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, and so on. One marking in particular was a question mark scribbled next to the city of Hamilton, Ontario in Canada, and alongside it was the pound sign symbol and the number 13, which McCabe had no idea what to make of at the time, but it certainly caused him to speculate whether the map was a ledger of some kind,

• 31:37Speaker 01

  perhaps pointing to other crime scenes or victims Robert could be involved with. You see, there had been a vicious murder of a young female college student in Hamilton, Ontario in May 1973 that was still unsolved, and a rather curious disappearance of a teenager in Syracuse who hadn't been seen since July 11, 1973, mere days before Danny Porter's murder and Sue Petz's disappearance. It was that latter case, the missing teenager, that was particularly interesting to police.

• 32:13Speaker 00

  When an intruder approaches a home, they expect a camera. What they don't expect... Stop. This is SimpliSafe. Police are on the way. Using smart AI cameras, live US-based agents help deter intruders in under 30 seconds. Don't just record a break-in, stop it from ever happening. Plans starting around $1 a day. Right now, get 60% off your new system with professional monitoring at simplisafe.com/truecrime.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  30 seconds response time requires monitoring plan with outdoor protection starting at $49.99 a month. Visit simplisafe.com/licenses for alarm license information.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  One day last year, detectives knocked on the door of a multimillion-dollar mansion in Los Angeles County. Inside, they found a strange scene: a dining area converted into classrooms with children and toddlers seated at rows of desks. The couple that lived there had 21 kids.

• 33:05Speaker 03

  It's a house that looks like a castle, but it's under investigation for being a possible factory, a baby factory.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  Where had these children come from? Almost all of them were born through surrogates. But those surrogates had been deceived.

• 33:20Speaker 04

  Me and my coworker, we named her the surrogate pimp.

• 33:22Speaker 06

  That's the one time that we called the cops, because she was screaming. And then he pulled out a gun.

• 33:27Speaker 05

  I started crying. I was like, what the heck did I just get myself into?

• 33:33Speaker 01

  I'm Ava Kaufman. The Journey is a new series from In the Dark and The New Yorker. Find it now in the In the Dark feed, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  According to the coverage in this case, when a 16-year-old girl named Alicia Howe vanished after attending a summer school class in Syracuse in July 1973, there were few clues as to where she went. Some folks speculated that she might have run away, but Alicia's parents and friends insisted something worse had happened to her. A $1,000 award was offered and large searches took place, but for weeks, the case stalled. Her family had a lot of people rally around them, but the burden of having no answers took a toll on her parents and three younger siblings. After Robert Garros Sr. was arrested following Danny and Phil's murders, though, Syracuse PD detectives asked State Police Detective McCabe

• 34:32Speaker 01

  if they could interview Robert regarding Alicia's disappearance. It's unclear if they ever got the chance to do that, though, because Frank Armani, Robert's attorney, got involved shortly after he was taken into custody. At that point, cooperation between Robert's attorney and Detective McCabe pretty much ceased, and McCabe realized he wasn't going to get any further information from Robert, including where Sue Petz was. Meanwhile, Frank Armani and another attorney he'd had join the defense team put Robert under hypnosis. They did this to help him recall his actions and whereabouts during the summer of 1973. They also interviewed him at length and spent six days recording admissions he made. What they learned chilled the two attorneys to the bone

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  and put them in an unprecedented legal and ethical dilemma. According to Jim Tracy's book, Robert fully confessed to murdering Danny Porter, Phil Dombrowski, Sue Petz, and 16-year-old Alicia Howe. He also admitted to committing several sexual assaults that had not been solved. When his attorneys pressed him for details, he drew a map pointing them to the specific locations he'd hidden Sue and Alicia's remains. But skeptical that Robert might be lying, the attorneys didn't take his word as gold until they investigated his claims for themselves. But sure enough, when Armani and his colleague went to the place where Robert said he'd put Sue in a mineshaft,

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  they realized it was actually located in his hometown of Mineville, in the heart of the Adirondacks, right near where he'd grown up and where his parents still lived. There, in a vent hole at the foot of a mountain, the attorneys found Sue Petz. She was recognizable because cold air within the shaft had kept her body mostly preserved for the several months that she was there. The attorneys photographed her lifeless body and then left. Due to attorney-client privilege and their duty to represent their client and keep his secrets, the men discussed the conundrum they were in. On one hand, they just found the body of a young woman whose family and the police were still searching for,

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  and now they knew she'd been killed by their client. On the other hand, though, they couldn't report anything to police because Robert had not given them explicit permission to share his confession with authorities. If the attorneys reported what they knew without Robert's consent or even tried leaking what they knew about Sue's final resting place to police or the press, it could make securing a conviction difficult, not to mention a possible violation of Robert's constitutional rights. And from there, things only got worse. The defense attorneys followed Robert's map to the decomposed remains of Alicia Howe, who'd been left in a tangle of brush behind a maintenance shed at a local Syracuse park and cemetery.

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  It was later determined she'd been sexually assaulted and strangled. When the case against Robert for Phil's murder headed toward trial, Frank Armani and his associates spent the remaining months of 1973 and early part of 1974, knowing the horrible crimes their client had committed and where his victims' bodies were. But they didn't say a thing. Their game plan at trial was to present an insanity defense and claim that Robert was incapable of understanding what he'd done as it related to Danny and Phil's murders. While awaiting trial, it was reported that Robert attempted to die by suicide, and trouble arose between his wife Edith and his two attorneys regarding how the Garros planned to pay for his legal representation.

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  Then, in late November 1973, things took a turn.

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  Two young boys stumbled upon Sue Petz's remains, and one of them told his mom about the discovery. But his mother didn't believe him. She dismissed her son's story, thinking he was making it all up. However, word spread around Mindville that a body was in fact hidden in an abandoned mine at the base of a mountain. And yet, still, people wouldn't believe it. Finally, though, on December 1st, one of the boy's mothers went with her son to check the mine out, and that's when she saw with her own eyes what her son had been claiming the whole time was actually true. Not long after that, Detective McCabe and other troopers with the state police showed up in Mindville and officially located Sue Petz.

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  One week after that, a young man walking in Syracuse discovered Alicia Howe's bones, which obviously neither he nor police knew was her at the time. But after identifying a ring from one of her fingers and comparing her dental records, it was confirmed the skeletonized remains were in fact her. What's wild to me, though, is that authorities said they'd searched the area she was found in after she first disappeared, but apparently thick vegetation had concealed her from view. Of all these cases, though, Robert's trial for Phil Dombluski's murder was the one that took place first, and it occurred in Hamilton County, New York, in late spring 1974. It was just shy of a year after his crime spree in the Adirondacks had come to a close.

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  The defense's objective was to convince jurors that Robert was temporarily insane at the time of Phil's murder. Their argument was that traumatic events from Robert's childhood, debilitating headaches, and other events in his life had incited him. Interestingly, though, people who'd been interviewed about Robert shared very different descriptions of what he was like, as well as their impression of his nuclear family as a whole. Some friends and neighbors in Syracuse described him as helpful, nice, and pleasant, and they believed that the Garrows seemed like the ideal American family. Robert was the second eldest of six children, and according to Jim Tracy's book, he grew up in a tumultuous and abusive home.

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  He was described as a difficult child to the point where, as a youngster, his parents sent him to live with another family who owned a farm. As a young adult, he'd served for a period of time in the US Air Force, but received a medical discharge for an ongoing issue with wetting the bed. A physician in Albany who conducted a psychological evaluation on Robert after he was released from the military determined that in addition to having personality disorders, he was also quick to be unsatisfied, lacked empathy for others, was insensitive, callous, and got frustrated easily. The doctor noted that due to all those factors, plus Robert's large physique, he could pose a danger to others.

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  A detective who was assigned to monitor Robert while he recuperated in the hospital later stated that the former convict was not only polite, but at times downright friendly. The detective said Robert never uttered a curse word, and it was apparent he was, as the detective put it, quote, "like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," end quote. At the trial for Phil's murder, after the prosecution presented its case to the jury for several days, one of Robert's attorneys decided to have him testify in his own defense, and it did not go well. While under oath, Robert ended up admitting to details about Phil's murder, as well as other crimes that he wasn't even on trial for.

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  He also detailed his recollection of killing Alicia Howe, killing Danny Porter, and kidnapping Sue Petz, sexually assaulting her, and then holding her hostage for a few days before ultimately killing her after she attempted to escape. During Robert's time on the witness stand, which lasted two and a half days, it was revealed that his attorneys had known for far longer than anyone else where he'd left Sue and Alicia's remains. So the press had a field day with that information, and naturally, the public had a hard time understanding how his attorneys had even legally been allowed to keep that information a secret. The defense attorneys took major heat for this. Threats were made against them, and their families lived in fear after their vehicles were vandalized.

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  At the end of the day, Robert's defense failed. Jurors only deliberated for a few hours before coming to a verdict. They found him guilty of Phil's murder and sentenced him to 25 years to life in prison. He was never formally tried for Danny, Sue, or Alicia's murders, because by March 1975, he ended up pleading guilty to those killings. After his conviction for Phil's murder, Sue's father had remarked that he didn't think it was necessary Robert be tried for his daughter's death, so long as Robert's conviction for Phil's case wasn't overturned. According to the coverage in this case, each of Robert's attorneys went on to face significant backlash and scrutiny for not immediately reporting the location of Sue and Alicia's bodies.

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  However, Frank Armani was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing for his actions, and his co-counsel, who'd been indicted on criminal charges for not reporting human remains and preventing a decent burial, got his case dismissed. In early September 1978, Robert escaped a minimum-security prison for a period of time after a fellow inmate's wife provided a gun to Robert's son, who helped him smuggle it into prison. In the five years or so since his conviction, Robert had been using a wheelchair while incarcerated, but amidst his escape, it became apparent he'd been faking an injury that entire time. His former attorney, Frank Armani, told the Adirondack Daily Enterprise, quote, "The Department of Corrections should give Garrow the Actor of the Year Award.

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  You know he was a great actor. He can be different people and play roles," end quote. Authorities ended up catching Robert a few days after his prison escape and ultimately got into a gunfight with him. He was shot several times and died at the scene. His son, Robert Garrow Jr., was later charged with promoting prison contraband and pleaded guilty to that offense. He was given a lenient sentence, which didn't require him to serve time in prison. The couple who'd helped him get a hold of the gun that he provided to his father were also later criminally charged, prosecuted, and served some time behind bars. It's difficult, perhaps even impossible, to understand why Robert Garrow Sr. committed

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  the crimes he did. As I researched this story, I quickly realized that the sheer volume of coverage about his known offenses is massive. It truly felt like the source material never ended. There are dozens and dozens of old news articles, a TV program, a film adaptation, and of course, Jim Tracy's book, Sworn to Silence: The Truth Behind Robert Garrow and the Missing Bodies Case, which was published in 2021. That piece of source material was immensely helpful because it compiled so much information and interviews about the crimes in one place. It also goes into way more detail than I could cover at length in this format. I definitely recommend getting a copy if you want to learn more about this story at a deeper level.

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  Something I don't want to be lost in all of this, though, are the people Robert's actions affected most during his rampage of criminal activity. Danny Porter, Sue Petz, Alicia Howe, Phil Dombluski and his friends, not to mention all the other people who were related to or loved those young people, as well as the other girls that Robert abducted and sexually assaulted, the Syracuse University students he terrorized. None of those people should be forgotten. They were real people with real hopes and dreams and lives ahead of them. If you find yourself visiting Syracuse or the Adirondacks anytime soon, I hope you remember them. Take a deep breath of mountain air, smell the forest, and blaze a trail they would

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  be proud of. A trail they would have likely blazed themselves if not for Robert Garrow Sr. Park Predators is an AudioChuck production. You can view a list of all the source material for this episode on our website, parkpredators.com. And you can also follow Park Predators on Instagram, @parkpredators. I think Chuck would approve. In the dark, even the most familiar trail can feel like it leads somewhere else.

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  Every rustle becomes a warning, every shadow, a doorway. In Full Body Chills, those doorways open into worlds pulled straight from your nightmares. This spooky season classic returns with chilling new tales, immersive sound, and no promise that you'll find your way back. So step off the familiar path if you dare. Listen to new episodes of Full Body Chills every week, wherever you get your podcasts.