Reason First: The Route 40 Killer Part I- They Called her ‘Tinker’

In 1987, long before Joe Biden became president-elect, a vicious string of crimes attracted signficant media attention to the diminutive state of Delaware. On a stretch of road known as Route 40, or Pulaski Highway, a brute dispatched five women in sadistic fashion. The first to die, Shirley A. "Tinker" Ellis, had worked as a prostitute, but had aspirations of becoming a nurse. She wished to visit a friend in Wilmington who had contracted AIDS. Before Ellis died, her killer brutally tortured her using electrical equipment like tape, wire, sharp pliers, and a hammer-like tool.

Delaware State Police arrived on the scene that a couple had tipped the officials to investigste. Ellis’s body, abandoned at the side of the road in the Old Baltimore Pike Industrial Park, laid there in the pouring rain. Assigned to his first-ever murder case after serving seven years on the force, Detective Joe Swiski called the case “surreal.” Nothing seemed to add up. Swiski and his fellow investigators looked up, down and around in order to find more shreds of evidence to support their tracking skills. The victim appeared in a bad way. Her chest was exposed, and her sweatpants were pulled down around her knees, but they found no weapon, and no other evidence tying the crime to a scene or suspect. All Swiski and his team could do was scour the immediate area where the body was found, hoping to find something, anything that could lead them to find out who had committed this horrific crime. This police activity yielded little to no credible evidence. But Swiski and his team kept going.

Swiski assumed Ellis had resisted her attacker’s advances and forensic examination of the body yielded no evidence of rape or sexual assault. The ideas swirled in the detective’s mind and the other investigators wondered exactly where to go with this case. He also wondered if the rain had washed away all hope of finding Ellis’s killer, until the same examination of her corpse turned up a small, but vital clue: the murderer was sloppy, and left a small piece of electrical tape in Ellis’s hair. This detective’s doggedness permitted him to continue the search and try to produce a murderer.

Steven Pennell, the killer in question, was a husky 6'5" nearly 300 pound white male who likely had no difficulty overpowering Ellis who stood a considerably smaller 5'6" tall, 168 pounds. An electrician, who reportedly told people he had hopes of becoming a police officer someday, Pennell instead chose to use the tools of his trade to take rather than protect the lives of others.

He had picked up Ellis who was hitchhiking one night. Tragically, Ellis only put her thumb in the air that dark and dreary night because her stepsister, Cindy Miller, feared driving the 17 miles into Wilmington in the rain. Miller had recently earned her driver’s licence and didn’t want to take a chance with her novice skills.

Detective Swiski endeared himself so much for looking into clues that the victim’s mother fashioned a toy for the detective’s daughter. Swiski knew that he was dealing with a cold-blooded killer who could be lurking anywhere in Delaware. He employed reason to bring to justice whoever this figure, creeping in the night on this particular highway, was. His persistence had been met with frustration but he forged on with the investigation as a lead investigator. He had ensured that he would do everything to capture this predator. Swiski joined a team of agents who questioned those closest to Ellis, friends of the family and others, knowing that the killer usually is acquainted with the victim. Swiski found the case to be cold and it drove him and the other detectives into icy territory with every dead lead. This would happen for over seven months. And then the case began to thaw.