This troubling case draws its popular nickname from the matched initials of three young victims raped and murdered over a three year period. Eleven year old Carmen Colon was the first to die, in 1971. Wanda Walkowicz, age 10 followed a year later, and a 10 year old Michelle Maenza was the last. The “alphabet” angle was further emphasized when the killer dumped each Rochester victim in a nearby town whose name began with the same letter as the murdered girl’s first and last names: Colon in Churchville, Walkowicz in Webster, and Maenza in Macedon. Police not that aside from the similarity in age, all three girls came from poor Catholic families and each had recently suffered from trouble at school. Detectives thus suspected a killer employed by some social service agency, whose job gave him access to such information, but interviews with 800 potential suspects led nowhere.
In 1979 Rochester police named former resident Kenneth Bianchi as a suspect in the murder series. Better known to Californians as the “Hillside Strangler,” the confessed slayer (with cousin Angelo Buono) of 10 young women in Los Angeles, Bianchi was serving life for two more murders in Bellingham, Washington, and thus was unlikely to sue for slander. Authorities note that Bianchi left Rochester in January 1976, driving a car that resembled a vehicle seen near the site of one “alphabet” slaying. Bianchi has not been charged in the case, and the water were muddied further in December 1995, when an imprisoned killer claimed to know the “alphabet” murderer’s name. That tip, like the Bianchi lead before it, has thus far failed to solve the case.
THE CASE REMAINS UNSOLVED AND OPEN…
