The Alphabet Killer

On November 16th, 1971, a young girl was running down the side of a highway in upstate New York.

She waved her arms as she fled from a vehicle that was backing towards her in the shoulder. She was wearing nothing from the waist down. Hundreds of cars passed the scene and not one of them stopped.

Days later, police discovered the body of a 10-year-old girl in a gully nearby,

This shocking crime was only the first of the unsolved "Alphabet Murders," a string of child murders that occurred in Rochester between 1971 and 1973.

Each of the victim was a girl that was aged 10 or 11, and their first name started with the same letter as their surname. Each of their bodies were found in or near a town whose name also began with the sam letter as the girl's name.

Carmen Colón

Carmen Colón was the first victim of the Alphabet Murders.

Carmen's mother sent her to the local drugstore on the afternoon of her disappearance. She went to pick up a prescription for her mother, and after she spoke to a pharmacist, she stepped outside to wait for the prescription to be ready.

Carmen was only a block and a half away from her home, but she never returned to the drugstore or to her house.

Her family called the police, they swept the neighborhood searching for her. Two days later, two teenagers on bikes found a body near the Rochester suburb of Chili.

Within months, police ran into a dead end. Billboards were placed around the Rochester area that begged for information about Carmen's death, promising $6,000 as a reward. But, the crime remained unsolved.

Wanda Walkowicz

Police searched for Carmen's killer for over a year. And then, the murder of a second girl indicated a possible motive.

Wanda Walkowicz, 11-years-old, got sent to the supermarket to get some groceries for dinner on April 2nd, 1973. After she purchased $8.52 worth of groceries, Wanda disappeared.

"Back then we knew nothing about what can happen if you walk to the store," Wanda's sister Rita told the Democrat and Chronicle.

A day later, police discovered Wanda's body at the bottom of a highway embankment in Webster.

The two murders were startlingly similar. Both Wanda and Carmen had vanished in the afternoon and the two girls were strangled and raped.

Fear swept through Rochester, police continued to search for suspects. Reports started to pour in, including one that detailed a sighting of Wanda getting into a brown vehicle shortly after she left the supermarket. But, the Alphabet Murders case stayed open.

Michelle Maenza

On November 26th, 1973, six months after Wanda's murder, Michelle Maenza, 11-years-old, went missing. She was walking home from a shopping center when she disappeared. Two days later, her body was found in Macedon.

Reports were once again pouring in, one woman said that she spotted a girl that resembled Michelle at a fast food restaurant that day and Michelle's autopsy showed that she had eaten a hamburger before her death.

A man recalled that he saw a car stopped on the side of the road with a flat tire. He stopped to speak to the driver and saw a girl that resembled Michelle in the car. The driver of the car made it clear he did not want any help.

Witnesses described the suspect and police developed a sketch of the suspect. For weeks, police filtered through dozens of calls about the case.

"The man who killed Wanda Walkowicz is responsible for this murder," An officer said after Michelle's death, "There's a strong possibility that he's also responsible for killing Carmen Colón."

Police were also wrestling with the strange features of the case. All of the victims had alliterative initials. The bodies were all discovered in towns with the victims' initials. Did the pattern hold the key to solving the case?

Suspects and Theories

Who was the Alphabet Killer?

Police investigated multiple suspects, one included Carmen's uncle. Horrifically, during these investigations, police turned up multiple serial rapists and murderers in the Rochester area.

Dennis Termini, firefighter, committed over a dozen rapes in his garage. And once police had him cornered, he shot himself in the head.

Joseph Naso spent time in Rochester before he was sent to death row for killing six women, including four that had double initials. But no evidence connected him to the Alphabet Murders.

DNA from Wanda's murder ruled out those potential suspects, unless her murder was committed by a different killer.

Kenneth Bianchi, a serial killer, grew up in Rochester before he moved to California, where he was known as the Hillside Strangler. He remains a suspect, but he has repeatedly denied committing the Alphabet Murders.

Michael Benson, true-crime writer, who grew up in Rochester, believes that the killings were committed by multiple people.

"I believe Wanda and Michelle were killed by the same person, but Carmen was different," He told A&E.

There were subtle differences in the methods of killing, as well as witness's reports of spotting Carmen with two adults, this raises the possibility of a copycat killer.

The Murders Remain Unsolved

50 years after they began, the murders remain unsolved.

Robert Hetzke, a detective working on the case in 2009, weighed in on the case, "You have this aura of the initials," He told the Democrat and Chronicle, "Are they connected? Are they not connected? We don't know that."

It is possible that the double initials were just a coincidence, alliterative names were a trend when the victims were born.

Vague evidence also means that there are many possible suspects.

And in 2022, a Tiktoker posted that her grandfather may have been behind the murders. She said that he may have owned a brown car like the one the killer was suspected to have, and that he also owned a grocery store where cats prowled the basement for rats - white cat hair was found on all three of the victims' clothes.

Her grandfather also spoke to Wanda on the day of her disappearance and offered a reward when she went missing.

But with such vague clues and hundreds of Rochester-area men fitting the profile. Many of the original suspects being dead, the Alphabet Murders will likely remain unsolved.