Benson - The Devil at Genesee Junction: The Murders of Kathy Bernhard and George-Ann Formicola, 6/66

The Devil at Genesee
Junction

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham Boulder New York London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Benson, Michael.

The devil at Genesee Junction : the murders of Kathy Bernhard and George-Ann Formicola, 6/66 / Michael Benson.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4422-5233-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4422-5234-9 (electronic)

1. MurderNew York (State) 2. Cold cases (Criminal investigation)New York (State) I. Title.

HV6533.N7B46 2015

364.152'30974788dc23

2015018321

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

For Alice

This book is 49 years in the making. Some of it was first written when I was a kid. I was already chronicling the nightmare, even when it was fresh. Big chunks were written in the 1980s, then again in the 1990s, with the remainder written between 2011 and 2015.

Although this is a true story, some names and locations have been changed to protect the privacy of the innocent. Pseudonyms will be noted upon their first usage with an asterisk (*). When possible, the spoken word has been quoted verbatim. However, when that is not possible, conversations have been reconstructed as closely as possible to reality based on the recollections of those who spoke and heard the words.

In places, there has been a slight editing of spoken words, but only to improve readability. The denotations and connotations of the words remain unaltered. In some cases, witnesses are credited with verbal quotes that in reality only occurred in written form. Some characters may be composites.

Information based on a published source is endnoted. In some cases, articles have survived the years only in clippings, and original page numbers may be missing from those endnotes.

The Curious Farmer

Satanic ages last 1,458 years. The last one, where God was on top and Satan was cast down, started in A.D. 508. Consequently, the new satanic age began in 1966 and this time Satan is on top. 1966 was Year one, Anno Satanasthe first year of the reign of Satan. Anton Szandor LaVey, founder, Church of Satan

It was a sunny summer Wednesday around noon, and the Mortons* of Lester Street couldnt find their dog. The dog had run off to do its duty and hadnt returned. The Mortons lived in one of the houses that backed against the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks, between Ballantyne Road and the swimming hole. Francine Morton Wilson led a search party made up of her and her two much younger brothers. Crossing the tracks, they looked north toward the stone trestle and saw the poor dogs cadaver lying on the tracks.

You two run home, Francine said. She would investigate alone. At first she thought a train had hit him, but as she got closer she realized that the reality was much worse. Someone had neatly slit the dog down the middle, opened him up, and pulled out the innards. Who would want to do that to a little dog? It was just the sort of sick thing her husband Clint Wilson* would do, she thoughtif he had the guts.

Three hours later and two miles to the west, 43-year-old farmer Vincent Zuber was on his spinach-green John Deere tractor cutting hay along a dirt service road that ran parallel to the West Shore railroad tracks near the intersection of Archer and Beaver Roads.

That road, sometimes no more than two ruts in the weeds, was used at night as a lovers lane. Zubers family had been farming in Chili since 1882, and though the family recognized that teenagers getting steamy on their property was a potential problem, laissez-faire reigned, and no one yet had left the farmhouse to shoo away the passionate youngsters.

Follow those tracks a couple of miles east and you were behind my house. Go a few hundred feet further and you were at the Genesee Junction where the Pennsylvania crossed the West Shore track of the New York Central, only feet away from the swimming hole. Take those tracks even further east and you came out on Scottsville Road at the iron river trestle where my great-grandmother Mrs. Richard Watkins died at the age of 35 in October 1916, struck by a West Shore train as she crossed the Genesee River. (How did she get hit by a train? I asked my paternal grandma when I was little. She didnt look both ways, she replied.)

Zuber had a great view of his surroundings from his high perch atop the tractor. The air was cooler today. It had been a hot summer, and the heat had broken. Breathing deeply in appreciation, Zuber smelled what he later described as a very rich odor, unmistakably putrescence.

A cow mustve gotten out and died, he thought. Truth was, the death smell had been there a few days before, but hed thought it was a woodchuck and didnt investigate. Hed hoped it would dissipate. But the smell was getting worse. Zuber took a deep breath and drove toward the scent. He left the field and drove onto the dirt road, heading eastward. He stopped the tractor near a cluster of high bushes, south of the dirt road.

Zuber shut off the engine and climbed down. As he pushed his way through the weeds toward the bushes, he saw evidence of teenagers. There was a girls comb, a girls flip-flopwhat they called thongs back in those days, a cheap rubber sandaland then... well, then, searing into his memory, the nightmare, partially hidden in a thicket of elderberry bushes and high weeds, a human leg and foot, baked into brown suet.

The farmers mind clicked right away. The missing girls.

Zuberarms flailing, screaming, white as a ghostforgot about his tractor and ran in a cross-lots beeline to the home of a friend and neighbor, 42-year-old sheriffs sergeant Glenn J. Saile, who would know what to do. Saile served four years in the navy during World War II and became a deputy sheriff not long after his return to civilian life in 1946. Saile lived on Beaver Road Extension, about a quarter mile south of the railroad tracks.