The Girls in the Garden
By the age of eight, Richard Biegenwald had a gambling and alcohol problem. But this was not the start of it. When he was only five, in 1945, he had tried to burn down his family’s home in the rural, southwestern Staten Island, town of Charleston. It was not the end of it, either. When he was 11, he set himself afire.
Biegenwald graduated from grammar school, from the eighth grade, at age 16, and had but a few weeks of high school. At 17, in 1958, he stole a car, drove north across the Island to the Bayonne Bridge and into Bayonne, New Jersey. In holding up a grocery store, he shot and killed Stephen Sladowski, the store owner and an assistant district attorney. Biegenwald and his partner in the crime took off for the South.
In Salisbury, Maryland he shot and killed a policeman. A little while later, he fired off a shotgun at Maryland state troopers who had pulled him over for speeding.
Convicted of killing Sladowski, Biegenwald received his first life sentence; he was released in 1974. In 1977 he stopped reporting to his parole officer and the system seemed simply to forget him.
In 1983, he would confide in one of his jailors that he had killed some 300 young women in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, all having long, dark hair. He lured the girls into his car by promising them pot, and then, at an isolated location, would shoot or stab them to death.
Jailhouse bragging, maybe so, but there were very many young girls gone missing in the years 1974 to 1983. Those were the years police would automatically assume runaway status and do little in the way of looking. Run off to California, maybe; got caught up in some devil worship cult, perhaps. She’ll come home when she’s hungry enough.
There must have been something attractive about the scar-faced ex-con. He managed to seduce a 16-year-old neighbor girl of good family. She was pretty, smart, and more than half his age. She was so smart she married him in 1980 inside the Brooklyn House of Detention, where he was being held on a charge of rape. The rape victim failed to identify him as her attacker; but he was back in prison on the parole violation in the murder of Stephen Sladowski, at least, for six months.
Released from jail, Biegenwald took a job as a maintenance man in Asbury Park, New Jersey where he set up housekeeping with his young wife. It was in his years at the Jersey Shore, 1980 to 1983, that Biegenwald earned the nickname, “Thrill Killer.”
Asbury Park in the 1980s was no longer the grand resort it had been 100 years earlier and it was not the hugely popular amusement park it was in the mid 20th century. It was down on its luck, but not out, as its reputation as a center for sex, drugs, and rock & roll spread among the young in the tri-state area. Like lemmings, they come to the Jersey Shore in summer, the long-haired girls of the Mid-Atlantic. Many of them came to Asbury Park in the early ’80s and some of them were dead when they left.
Biegenwald sometimes took his young wife along to the boardwalk trolling for victims and, sometimes, another woman, his wife’s friend. He showed her one dead body he’d parked in his garage and gave her a ring belonging to another. This she would later report to police, once the body of 18-year old Anna Olesiewicz, shot four times in the head, was found behind a restaurant near Asbury Park in 1983.
At this time, Biegenwald was living with a jailhouse buddy, Dherran Fitzgerald, in an apartment in Asbury Park. Police arrested both of them after finding in a search of the apartment the floor plans to several local businesses, pipe bombs, pistols, a machine gun, knockout drops, marijuana, and a live puff adder snake.
Fitzgerald soon sang like a canary about having helped Biegenwald bury girls’ bodies in his mother’s garden on the heavily wooded Sharrott’s Road on Staten Island. While Fitzgerald was burying one girl, he accidentally disturbed the remains of another. Both girls, hair long and dark, had gone missing from Point Pleasant, a few miles south of Asbury Park. Both girls were dismembered and their pieces buried in his mother’s garden.
Fitzgerald also pointed to the shallow grave in Neptune City, a town away from Asbury Park, of William Ward, an escaped convict with five bullets in his head. Biegenwald was also suspected in the murder-kidnap of a 17-year old girl, the daughter of a Jersey Shore mobster. The girl’s father issued a $100,000 price on Biegenwald’s head.
One wishes the hit had been carried off before the arrest. Biegenwald, sentenced this time to death, received, after two State Supreme Court reversals, life in prison. He has been removed from Death Row. The long-haired daughters of the Mid-Atlantic are once again safe at the beach, but for how much longer?
