Richard Delage

On July 29, 1960, 24-year-old Carole Sgritta, a schoolteacher who taught in Long Island, left her boarding house to go pick up her boyfriend in Mount Kisco so they could visit her grandparents in Stamford, Connecticut. Later that afternoon, Wallace "Wally" Tompkins, a motorist passing by the New Croton Reservoir noticed what appeared to be a tall, slender young man dragging a woman's body from a car and immediately called the police from a nearby payphone.[3] By the time they arrived and searched the area, however, the man had disappeared. Sgritta's body was found not long afterwards, having been shot four times in the head with a .32 S&W pocket revolver inside her own car.[4] Strangely, nothing had been stolen from her, indicating that robbery was not a motive for the killing.[3]

A search of the nearby area quickly recovered the murder weapon and a Stetson-like hat, but there was no possible clue leading to the killer. When questioned further, Tompkins claimed that the man he had seen was about 25 years of age; tall; slender; wore dark-rimmed glasses and a cowboy-type hat, and evidently had a revolver in his trousers.[4] Using this description, local authorities questioned numerous young men who fit the description and gathered correspondence from across the nation, Puerto Rico and even several foreign countries in an attempt to find a lead to Sgritta's killer. To their disappointment, they failed to locate any clues and the went unsolved for almost 15 years.[4]

On November 13, 1969, 23-year-old Paget Weatherley, a student at the University of Connecticut, failed to attend her classes, much to the surprise of her roommate, Diane Gorenstein.[5] Initially brushing it off as the possibility that she had gone to visit friends over the weekend, Gorenstein became concerned when a radio report on Sunday claimed that the body of an unidentified young woman had been discovered in Bolton.[5] She attempted to contact Weatherley's uncle, Donald Fitch, but as he did not respond, she instead relayed the information to Weatherley's physiology professor, Dr. Alan Brush, who immediately notified police. By that time, Fitch himself had learned of the discovery and traveled to Bolton, where he positively identified the young woman as his niece. Dental records later conclusively proved that it was her.[5] An autopsy determined that she had been shot three times in the chest.

While they were unable to discern a motive, local police narrowed down the time of death as either the late afternoon or early evening of November 13, the day Weatherley disappeared.[6] They also believed that she might have met her killer on the campus' restaurant, and due to this, they requested for assistance from the public in identifying anybody who was seen with Weatherley on that date.[6] Investigators eventually narrowed down the time-frame even further, but were troubled by a 45-minute timespan in which they were unable to trace Weatherley's whereabouts.[7]

While the police were gathering clues and witness testimony, Dr. James Brussel, a renowned psychiatrist involved with profiling offenders such as George Metesky and Albert DeSalvo, devised a psychiatric profile of the killer.[8] In his profile, Brussel suggested that the offender was a white male under 30 years of age; of average build and height; of normal intelligence and good education; likely shy around women and easily panicked; possibly acquainted with the victim and suffers from some kind of perversion that enables him to kill.[9] However, aside from the claim that shots apparently been fired in nearby Mansfield on the same afternoon as Weatherley's death, no usable new information surfaced in her killing.[10]