There wasn't any rhyme or reason to it.
No motive, no nothing.
Just, let me go out and kill somebody.
I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff.
I'm Anastasia Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation.
Discovery's True Conviction.
And this is Anatomy of Murder.
As most prosecutors and detectives will tell you, the vast majority of murders, while tragic, are not like what you see in the movies.
The trail of random victims, the smoking gun.
You know that dramatic confession that is usually the stuff of your favorite TV show or podcast.
In fact, in the majority of homicide investigations, suspects are identified within 24 hours and arrests are made within the week.
And most often, it's just a rage-filled person with a grudge and a gun.
But every once in a while, we do encounter those stories that are the stuff of our nightmares.
And this is one of those cases.
And similar to many horror stories, it starts with a teenage girl who goes missing.
With us today is Jim Fagan, who at the time was an experienced trial attorney in the Monmouth New Jersey prosecutor's office.
I had tried a lot of cases prior to going with their office against them because I was a criminal defense attorney.
And then I went to the other side.
But you know, it gave me a real eye opener in terms of how I should handle things in a prosecutor's office.
That knowledge of the other side's perspective would prove invaluable, not only in helping to solve this case, but also in prosecuting one of New Jersey's most infamous killers.
Our story today takes us to Brick Township, a quaint spot on the Jersey Shore.
It's a leafy suburb that also has the beach.
It's October 31st, 1981.
That's right, Halloween.
It's about 6 p.m. and 17-year-old Maria Chialella borrows a dollar from her father.
Now, remember, this is 1981.
She tells him she's going out with friends and she will be back by midnight.
Now, based on the time frame, remember, it's 1981.
We don't have the luxury of checking her social media to get a true, or at least better, sense of who Maria was.
But we have taken a look at the original Facebook, her high school yearbook.
And Maria appears to be a typical high school kid athletic smart, with big brown eyes and long dark hair.
Now Maria's not in costume, but you can easily imagine a town filled with trick-or-treaters, Halloween decorations, more than a few scary masks.
It's already dark outside.
But midnight comes and goes, and Maria's still not home.
By morning, her dad does what so many worried parents would do.
He calls around to friends.
He flips between being angry and then scared, not sure what to think, and then finally calls police and reports his daughter missing.
Clearly, we know this is a parent's worst nightmare.
And we also know that teens don't always go off the radar because something terrible has happened.
But as you can imagine, that's where the minds of many parents go.
And I think the fact that the hours ticked by and night turned back to morning, and that's when her dad was, like you know, knowing his child and what was going on in her life that something just was very wrong.
This is one of the first questions I would ask somebody as a responding officer is you know?
Does your child have a pattern of leaving and even spending the night somewhere else, only to show up the next day?
Does she have a significant other?
Is there anybody else that we can reach out to or any other homes that we can go to that may know where Maria may have been?
But as it turns out, the father told officers she did not have a boyfriend.
She didn't have a love interest.
She had just vanished.
And so remembering that this is the early 1980s, this is also the days of...
No cell phones, which most of you out there listening can't even imagine.
But yes, many of us lived in those days.
There were no ATM cards or video surveillance or even social media to provide those clues or hints at her location.
And that really impacted and made it much more difficult for law enforcement to have anything to go on.
And really from the get go, Scott.
You know they just kept hitting nothing.
No clues as to where Maria had gone.
But Maria, you know, wasn't alone.
Just looking at the statistics for a moment.
While almost unimaginable, in the United States alone an estimated 460000 children are reported missing every year.
And Maria was now one of them.
And after several months with no leads, the case just went cold.
Now let's move to January of 1983, to a town just a 25-minute drive from Maria's house in Brick Township.
And our prosecutor, Jim Fagan, has just been called to a wooded area where some local children have made a gruesome discovery.
They were little kids playing back there behind this Burger King in Ocean Township.
Because it was January, there weren't any foliage or anything, so it came across a skeleton, basically.
A skeleton.
Police are called to the scene to secure it.
It's been there for at least a few months.
Police are able to determine that the remains are likely a female in her teens, dressed in a black shirt and blue jeans, but no shoes and, most importantly, no identification.
So just picture this now crime scene for a moment.
These are human remains that have been out there for days, months.
So it is that much more difficult for investigators to piece things together to try to find any clues as to who this was and how she got here.
A crime scene like this becomes more of a forensic-type search because of the condition of the victim.
The collection and removal of the body is critical and all of the real clues on who and the cause of death would be confirmed during an autopsy.
However, at this crime scene, investigators would immediately notice an obvious answer.
They knew that the girl had been shot because there were bolts in her skull when we found the body.
So immediately here, the cause of death is pretty clear.
This female was shot in the head four times.
So it's homicide.
But now they need to put a name on what is left of these remains.
Brick township police are thinking this has got to be maria chialola.
She fits a description, the level of decomposition generally fits the timeline of a disappearance and it's pretty close to where she lived.
So before we all go there and immediately put maria's name to this crime scene, there are investigators from another nearby jersey shore community that say wait a second.
They think the remains could actually belong to someone else.
There was a detective in Asbury Park, Mike Dowling.
He was like a junkyard dog.
He'd get on something and he would just follow it up and follow it up.
He knew right away, he said, I bet you this is Anna Lesowitz.
So for clarity, remember, we have so far been talking about a missing 17-year-old Maria Chialoa.
But now there's a detective who thinks that this is somebody else.
Another teen, 18 years old, a young woman by the name of Anna Alesowicz.
So let's now shift to her.
Anna had been reported missing the previous August and she was last seen in jeans, a blue shirt and no shoes.
But investigators would also need something more concrete.
The obvious things are is there any property on or around the body that can help identify who this victim may be?
Nothing else was found there other than the bullets that were still in the skull.
Fortunately, they were left intact. and able to make that identification based on dental records.
How we identified her was through dental records.
And through those dental records they did confirm that it was not Maria Chialella but in fact, as the other detective had surmised, this was the body of Anna Alesiewicz.
But the description is incredibly similar to Maria.
Both teenage girls were dressed in a similar fashion, with Anna's remains found less than 30 miles from where Maria went missing.
So is this a coincidence or is the similarity of the two girls a possible clue to Maria's fate?
After the Olesowicz body was found, they had given me this case to look at.
I met with the detectives, Billy Lucia and Bobby Miller.
It was going to take a break in one case to shed light on the other, ultimately revealing a horrifying series of crimes, all pointing to one terrifying possibility —.
The Jersey Shore's very own Serial Killer.
A teenage girl disappears without a trace.
A year and a half later, the remains of a different girl, same age, similar build, same hair color, is discovered just a few miles away.
You know, and to you Adesiga, you know.
Is this just a coincidence, or were there enough similarities?
Here, the police would suspect that these cases are connected.
Now, you know, to me, we're not talking about a very large area.
Two similar disappearances, it raises the stakes for me a bit.
How about you?
You know Scott, of course I'd love to say that two teen girls killed, but don't live far from one another, that there should be an obvious connection because there should not be that many homicides.
But since unfortunately, that isn't the case, we have seen, unfortunately too often things like this that on their face, may share characteristics that have nothing to do with one another at all.
However, if they are connecting... then someone is targeting young women in this area.
And that is just a terrifying possibility.
But before we dive into that theory, let's learn a bit more about Anna Lisowitz.
She was 18 years old, slender, with pretty long dark hair.
She was last seen on Friday, August 27th 1982, walking the Asbury Park boardwalk with her best friend, Denise.
Asbury Park.
Some of you may know that it is the town made famous as being the hometown of Bruce Springsteen.
And what epitomizes the dirty shore is that it's famous for its beaches.
And yes, those of us from the tri-state area can say the accents and also nightlife and the boardwalk.
According to Denise, this was a typical summer night strolling along the beach, going in and out of local bars and really enjoying the last few days of summer.
In fact, it sounds kind of like a Springsteen song.
I just painted her as some kid, just like anybody else's kid that would come down to the Jersey Shore for the weekend and enjoy themselves.
And apparently, from listening to her girlfriend, they were, you know, looking to get some marijuana from somebody.
And, you know, sweet kid.
You know, I just felt like I want to meet this girl and have her show us where Anna was the last time she meaning the girlfriend saw her.
But according to Denise, their typical beach weekend had taken a dark turn a little after midnight.
So I remember we went with her.
We took her to the Asbury Park boardwalk.
We had her show us where she left Anna and where she went.
At some point Denise had left Anna on the boardwalk while she ran to her nearby uncle's house, where she was staying, to use the bathroom.
When she returned, Anna was gone.
And you can just picture this, because at that point Denise figured out that the friends had just gotten separated.
Remember, they are late teens and they're out and about like so many others were that night.
And as you know, sometimes friends get separated and nothing fortunately is wrong.
It's Friday night.
But when she never turned up the next day, that's when Denise went to police and reported her friend missing.
So you have to ask yourself does this even make sense, that a girlfriend would travel so far off the boardwalk where there are bathrooms, basically leaving her friend alone?
And investigators were thinking the same thing.
Is this really the way it happened?
A couple of the other detectives just found it very odd that she would not use a bathroom right there and walk a mile or so to her family's house to go to the bathroom.
There were a number of people that thought that, you know, this is a prime suspect.
This was the last person who saw her alive.
They went to her house and, you know, they were questioning her.
And then inside her closet, there were bags of vomit.
She was bulimic.
I remember she just didn't look like somebody that was going to shoot her girlfriend in the head two or three times.
You know, that didn't make any sense.
And it didn't make any sense to Billy.
I said to Billy, I talked to my wife about this, Billy.
And she said she didn't think that was odd at all.
There was no way she would use that public bathroom in Asbury Park.
And Billy said, you know, I spoke to my wife.
His wife, we're friends, of course.
His wife, Cookie, said there's no way I would use that bathroom.
I would have walked home.
Boardwalk, bathroom.
Plus, we factor in a potential eating disorder, bulimia.
So walking Homer into a safe space does start to make a lot of sense.
So despite finding her remains, police were really no closer to finding out who killed Anna.
And it took another year before there was another break in Anna's murder case.
And it came as a result of a tip.
And this is one of those things that we see all the time is that, while time is extremely difficult for families that want and really need those answers, it can certainly be an investigation's best friend, because circumstances changes or things change, things rise to the surface.
And sometimes you get that phone call or a tip in one form or the other that all of a sudden now gives investigators something to go on.
You know, we always talk about this balance Anastasia, about whether police should give information out on a homicide case or they should hold it close to the vest.
And as you know, we do both.
Right.
But there are certain times when you want to release information because you're really desperate for answers, to kind of find out what people may know.
And would they pick up the phone and give you the tips?
And investigations often fail. are solved by the public, especially in cold cases.
And that proved to be true in this case.
Once the body was found, you know, of course it made the newspapers.
Not, you know, nationwide newspapers, but it made the Asbury Park Press and local newspapers.
Eventually, the news of a teenage girl's remains being discovered in Ocean Township reached a woman by the name of Teresa Smith.
And it turned out that Teresa had been keeping a big secret.
And this is where the story gets a bit like the old game of telephone.
Teresa told her boyfriend that she was living in Asbury Park the summer that Anna disappeared.
And she might have crucial information about Anna's murder.
Crucial really being an understatement.
Teresa Smith was dating a guy by the name of George Susco.
And Teresa Smith confides with George Susco saying, I know who did this and I saw the body.
Well, Teresa's boyfriend told his ex-wife and the ex-wife told her new boyfriend.
And that boyfriend just happened to be a New Jersey detective.
We take Teresa Smith down to police headquarters and we start questioning her about it.
She told us the story about she was living with these people in a house on I believe it was 4th Avenue in Asbury Park.
From there, we develop a lot of information about this guy Bagenwald.
Richard Bagenwald, to some of you, the name may sound familiar.
But to the New Jersey police in 1983, he was unknown.
Just a normal Joe working odd jobs on the boardwalk.
And what she went on to tell investigators was so much more than what they had bargained for.
She was just living there with Beganwald and his wife.
I suspect there was, you know, a sexual relationship.
But, you know, like I said, Beganwald was married.
His wife was there.
She told us that there were all kinds of guns there, weapons, a poisonous snake.
Teresa Smith describes how Richard Bagenwald not only bragged about killing people, he even tried to recruit her to help lure young women to his house.
He came to her.
She was living in the house with them and brought her into the garage and there was a body there and he wanted her to touch the body and get the feel of the body.
It was the lifeless body of a teenage girl with a plastic bag around her head.
This young girl had dark hair and was wearing jeans, a dark shirt, and no shoes.
She was cooperative.
She really wasn't evasive.
We all realize how huge this is and likely what a macabre moment in this case.
Did she scream or run?
No.
The question is, did he have some kind of hold on her?
Was she scared of him?
Or was she somehow involved?
I mean, this is bizarre upon bizarre, right?
It's obviously horrible.
Just think about seeing someone who is deceased, who has clearly been murdered, let alone being brought in to see them, and then staying.
It's just you have to wonder what is going on here.
There is definitely something more than what is at least on the surface.
The thing that I remember the most was the coldness of it.
She showed no emotion at all in terms of telling this story.
I mean, there were no tears.
She was, yeah, I touched the body.
He told me he shot her.
Not like you'd expect anybody to be, that's for sure.
She wasn't emotional at all.
It was almost like a Charlie Manson type of thing.
So obviously, Anastasia, this raises so many questions.
She came forward, but why and why now?
Teresa's story doesn't sound like your typical tip from a concerned citizen.
It was basically an admission to being an accomplice, potentially to murder.
I mean, why didn't she go to police before this?
You know, even before Jim said that it was like a Charles Manson type thing.
That's all I could think of when I heard it.
Right.
Is that remember?
Charles Manson was a serial murderer and he seduced women who became basically followers that would do his bidding.
Right.
And he would groom people based on their need to connect.
He was a master manipulator.
And if this woman is following Beacon Wall's lead, all I could think about is she someone who is either being groomed by him herself or he is using her and using her.
Need for some connection.
It's just, I don't know.
It's honestly what I thought of the second that I started to see this very bizarre scenario that she laid out.
But it also leads to another question, which is perfect for you.
If she's going to be a witness in this case, how reliable would her words be, based on the fact that she was there?
And that is going to be the huge but.
First of all, like you said, Scott, was she involved?
And if she was, to what extent?
And we know that yes, you still can make deals and they happen all the time with someone who had some responsibility, some role for something, because you get something much more, which you already know.
That definitely she is going to be needed here, if what she's saying is true.
But I really think it comes down to prosecutors putting it all out on the table for the jury, being honest with them, like being open about the fact, like you're going to tilt your head when you hear what this woman has to say.
And you should.
You're supposed to be critical.
But when you look at the other pieces, do they all fit?
And that is how you will have to decide whether she is credible or not.
And I'm sure that's what investigators and Jim Fagan were thinking about this, too.
So let's remember, this wasn't like a formal tip to police.
Wasn't like she dialed 911 and said, I have information about a homicide.
I just touched a body.
This is a conversation that she had that ended up making its way to a detective.
The question about her whether she's telling the truth is something that investigators really need to figure out.
She had had issues too.
I mean, she'd run away, you know, you take your witnesses as they come.
You hope that you haven't none, but she was far from that.
I believed her, but of course I had to be satisfied by checking this guy Begenwald, who this guy was.
Once we confirmed that yeah, he lived here, and then when we did his background, it made a lot of sense.
Turns out there was a lot more in Bagan Wall's background than they bargained for.
There has been so much research in the last few decades on violent criminals from the perspective of the psychology.
What motivates them?
Whether their urge is the result of nature or nurture?
But back in 1984, that kind of criminal profiling was basically still in its infancy.
But when we looked at some of the things that police learned about Richard Bagenwald, with what we know right now, he sounds like the classic profile of what some people would consider a homicidal psychopath.
What I knew is he was basically an abused kid who had a rotten father who treated him like crap.
They sent him to a mental institution early on in his life.
He had electric shock treatments, and it was terrible.
He started out as any sociopath would starting fires, killing animals, you know, working his way up.
You know beyond even what Jim Fagan talks about.
Various things that I have read about what happened to Faganwald as a child are more than we should be able to imagine.
And after the various abuse, by the time he was 10, he had already set his home on fire.
At 11, he set himself on fire.
By 18, he had committed robberies and a murder of a store owner in New Jersey.
And for that, he was sent to Trenton State Prison.
I felt sorry for the way he was brought up and reared.
You wouldn't wish that on anybody.
This was a cold guy.
He's having a shootout at 18 years of age with state troopers, and this is like John Dilliger's type of stuff.
He was the coldest person I've ever run into, and I'd run into a ton of them.
And everybody I talked to that ever had any dealings with them.
Bad guys or not, they were afraid of him.
But after serving 17 years of a life sentence, Baganwald was released from prison in 1975.
And by 1980 he was living with his wife in the house in Asbury Park, along with his old jailhouse buddy named Darren Fitzgerald and, of course, Teresa Smith.
Once we got her statement, we got an arrest warrant and we got a search warrant to go to the house in Asbury Park.
We knew that there were weapons in the house and there was a guy that lived in the apartment next to it, Darren Fitzgerald.
She was very descriptive with the house and Darren Fitzgerald, who had a false room in his apartment.
It was probably a six foot long mirror.
You could lift it up and there was a room back there and there were weapons back there.
You know, hearing about this secret room, like that is stuff right from the movies.
But this room was very real.
So, you know, Scott, let me just throw this to you for a second.
You hear about this suspect that may be heavily armed, potentially dangerous.
I mean, you can't just barge into that house and risk multiple people getting killed.
Yeah, planning would be really crucial on this.
This arrest team would need to be really briefed in the best way they could by Teresa Smith herself, because she knew the layout of the home.
You just don't want to barge into the house and risk really the danger to anyone on your team and clearly anyone still in the home.
So you have to come up with some interesting ways to lure a suspect out.
And I'm sure we've all talked about various different ways, tricks of the trade, so to speak, about how investigators plan on removing a suspect from a home to take the tactical advantage in this takedown.
And I love to point out the ingenuity that was used in this specific case, because I think it was ingenious.
They had one officer who posed as a potential burglar and they had some police officers that caught him and they knocked on Bagan Hall's door and said you know, we found this guy prowling around.
You know him.
And then they took Begginwald down immediately as soon as he came out.
His wife was still there.
We arrested her and got her out.
And then we had to locate Fitzgerald.
And we went into Fitzgerald's apartment and there was a young lady there and she had a young kid with her.
And we arrested her, took care of her young kid.
And then we couldn't find Fitzgerald.
One of the detectives said, well, let's try this secret room.
And sure enough, we opened it up and there was Fitzgerald.
And then once the house was secured, the search began.
We were looking for a weapon that hopefully, forensically would match the weapon utilized in the shooting of Anna Olesewicz, which we did recover along with some other guns.
There was a snake there, and it was a poisonous snake.
That was the idea, to get poisonous venom and, you know, utilize it to kill people.
A poisonous snake to get venom to use that to kill people?
You know, when you think about lethal weapons, that one is definitely a first, and one I have not heard before.
But they also found things like homemade bombs, cigarette lighters that had been turned into 22 caliber weapons, fully loaded semi-automatic weapons, pipe bombs and the date rape drug Rohypnol you may have heard called Roofies.
Yeah, I thought I've heard it all.
But they did find a 22 caliber gun and ammunition that were an exact match to the bullets found in Anna's skull.
So there we have a direct connection between that weapon and that murder.
Investigators arrested both Bagenwald and Fitzgerald for the murder of Anna Alesiewicz, but they knew that their work was just beginning.
Bill and I had decided that this guy probably has killed other people.
And that's where he gets off on, is just killing people.
So we decided to get the names of these people and check it out.
We checked where he lived before he moved to Asbury Park.
We checked to see where he lived before then through parole.
He was living in Foreman Avenue in Point Pleasant for various periods.
And we just started saying, are there any missing persons there?
They give special attention to those that match Anna's profile.
When they begin to put pins in a map.
They discovered three missing teenage girls, all with dark hair, who disappeared from the Jersey Shore area between 1981 and 1983.
That list included 17-year-old Maria Chialella, and we started this podcast by talking about her.
So who are the other young women and could they also be his victims?
Now, without finding their remains, there might never have been a way to find out.
But fortunately, as it happens often in the case, we have a cooperator in the bunch.
We have...
Bagan Waller's jailhouse friend and accomplice, who was all too willing to trade his testimony for a little leniency in his sentencing.
And what he tells police not just helps solve several unsolved cases, but it would also shock a nation.
Darren Fitzgerald winds up being represented by a guy by the name of John Steiger through the public defender's office.
And Steiger and I were very friendly at the time.
As a matter of fact, he was my daughter's godfather.
And John calls me up and says, I'm representing Darren Fitzgerald.
I got some news for you.
What's that, Jaron?
He says I know where this body's stashed and my client would like to share that information with you with a plea agreement.
Not only had Fitzgerald helped dispose of Anna's body in 1983 in that wooded lot behind the Burger King, he also claimed that in the spring before 1982 that he assisted Bagenwald in dismembering and disposing of another female's body and driving her remains to Bagenwald's mother's home on Staten Island.
Not only that, Fitzgerald claims that while digging a hole in the backyard, they came across the remains of another victim that Bagan Wall bragged about killing years before.
Fitzgerald also claimed to have knowledge of two more victims an alleged drug dealer who was buried in a cemetery and another young teen that Bagan Wall abducted, killed and buried in a remote area in a nearby town.
And so Scott, from an investigator's standpoint, I mean, am I assuming correctly that you're obviously going to look to see?
Is there any connection between any of these now victims?
I almost have to say, how could there not be, in a sense?
You have a cooperating witness, Fitzgerald, who was in the home of Bagenwald, was a party to the burial of some of your victims, and who was taken to a specific area where police made a fine in, let's just say, where it's Staten Island, where the NYPD is involved in this unearthing of these remains as well.
So, you know, there has to be so much connective tissue here.
I mean, for me, it's a slam dunk.
But while investigators tried to see if there was any connection between each of these victims, what they ultimately found is that there was none but for one.
And that connection was that they had all at some point come into contact with Richard Bagenwald.
When there's a murder, the first thing they look for is, you know, some relationship with somebody.
When there is absolutely no relationship to the victim and the perpetrator, that's tough, man.
That's really tough because you've got no motive.
You've got nothing.
In all, Fitzgerald had knowledge of five separate homicide victims.
If he was telling the truth, what he was describing was not just the work of a career criminal, but a serial killer.
And by the time the news broke of his crimes, Bagenwald even had his own nickname, the Jersey Shore Thrill Killer.
Fitzgerald said there were a couple of bodies buried in his mother's backyard in Staten Island.
And there's another body buried in a graveyard in Neptune.
Neptune was another township in the area known as the Jersey Shore in New Jersey.
But how much of what Fitzgerald was saying was the truth?
Again, we're dealing with the issue of the reliability of a witness.
After all, he was essentially Beganwald's accomplice.
He was a career criminal, basically.
Robberies, burglaries, that type of stuff.
And he met Beganwald in prison.
You know, they became friends.
And he's clearly a guy looking for a deal to help himself.
And that is a pretty big need that he has.
Remember, he's inside the room that has weapons and things.
So, I mean, that's kind of like game over as far as any prosecution against him.
So it is going to come down to how much he is telling the truth when he talks about what Bagenwald did.
Or would a jury question whether Fitzgerald had more to do with this than he said?
Fitzgerald had firsthand knowledge of multiple murders on Bagan Wall robberies, kidnappings and all sorts of mayhem, where he knew where all the bodies were buried.
But in this instance, this was one way to prove that Fitzgerald was telling the truth.
New Jersey investigators traveled to Bagan Wall's mother's home on Staten Island and start digging.
They were looking at us like we were nuts, you know, some kind of body.
You know, you guys come down from Monmouth County thinking there's a body in the backyard.
Now Scott, we know that working with different jurisdictions sometimes it goes more smoothly than others because basically, the prosecutors from New Jersey need to convince the NYPD to basically help them go into this older woman's backyard and dig it up, based on the word of an admitted, at least after the fact accomplice.
I would say, you know, I understand how crazy of a story this is.
You won't believe what we found in his house.
But give us an opportunity to dig, and I do think we will uncover some bodies here.
And I think you're exactly right, because while it is this unbelievable alignment of the stars through this telephone game of tips that led to confessions, but they already have found evidence of crime.
And as you pointed out, murder.
And while you don't want to miss anything, you want to give every family answers that you can.
Well, the NYPD wants that, too.
And sure enough, they went with what they were told and they went and they dug up that backyard.
Police removed the remains of two female victims.
Both had been shot with a .22 caliber pistol.
One had been decapitated and cut into multiple pieces.
The ME in New York said, you can't take these bodies out of New York.
You've got to take them to the ME's office in Manhattan.
I go, oh, Jesus Christ, really?
The ME's office in New York took it over.
We got the dental records, and it matched two girls that we had suspected might be the victims.
Dental records confirmed the identities as another teen, 18-year-old Deborah Osborne, and another teen, 17-year-old Maria Chialella, the high school senior who had disappeared on that Halloween night in 1981.
Later, police would recover the body of 17-year-old Betsy Bacon from a shallow grave in nearby Tintin Falls, New Jersey.
Then the body of 20-year-old William Wall in a cemetery, both exactly where Fitzgerald said they'd be.
Jury selection of the highly publicized trial of the Jersey Shore thrill killer, Richard Bacon Wall, began November 14th 1983.
So I guess the first question I see is, with so much forensic evidence here and cooperating witnesses, right?
We've got Began Wall's two roommates, Teresa Smith and Darren Fitzgerald.
How do you feel walking in prosecuting this case?
This story is all about the picture that the prosecutor's painting, right?
Think about it.
You have this killer who is stalking young remember teen victims at night, luring them to his car with promises of a ride and then executing them one by one, seemingly for no other reason than the thrill of the kill.
And while you have less than... pristine witnesses.
And what I mean by that is just people who the jury will have to assess critically, right?
You have someone who was certainly part and parcel.
Fitzgerald has admitted his involvement, at least post.
And the same thing with Teresa Smith.
She says that he was grooming her and that she was supposed to kill someone.
And she almost did, but for she couldn't go through with it.
So they do need to be critical.
But as Scott, you pointed out, their words have been corroborated.
So as the prosecutor, I'm feeling that you have a pretty strong case going in.
I do love the witnesses in the case, but you know what I love more?
Having the actual .22 caliber weapon and the bullets that match those used to murder the victims.
And I say, really solid case.
But the question that is usually in the minds of jurors is, what is the motive?
I mean, yes, as you know, Anastasia, you don't have to prove that in court.
But people are still thinking about it.
When we would talk to Teresa Smith, why did he do this?
There was no answer to it.
There wasn't any rhyme or reason to it.
No motive, no nothing.
Just let me go out and kill somebody.
There was never any evidence of any sexual assault, no prior relationship between them.
Best I could gather is every once in a while he would get an urge, and this is what he did to fulfill that urge.
I went to the grand jury as soon as I could on the Olesiewicz case.
And at that time, New Jersey had just passed a death penalty, and I think it was 82.
I indicted him on a death penalty case.
The question might be, so what type of a defense are they going to put forth?
And remember, a defendant never has to put forth a defense.
But you have guessed it correctly if you said well, it's going to be something to do with his mental capacity, like an insanity defense.
And that's exactly what it was.
And initially they had said they were going to, claimed that he was not responsible based on this various disorders that he had been diagnosed with as a child.
He was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
He was also, in my reading, found to have antisocial personality disorder.
But they pulled that back before the trial and then it got confusing, quite honestly, because I was reading the court papers last night and it seems like they went back to it to say that because of his background and his mental capacity, that he did not know that what he was doing was wrong.
The defense.
They had the doctor come in and testify a psychiatrist, all the stuff that Richie went through and I'm sure some of the jurors considered it.
But at the end of the day, I just simply asked the doctor.
I said what it sounds like you're talking about is somebody who really kills somebody and doesn't care about it.
Eventually, the doctor said, well, yeah.
After five hours of deliberation, the jury handed down their decision.
Guilty.
At the sentencing trial, Jim Fagan didn't mince words as he asked the jury to sentence Bagenwald to death.
You know, that's what I'm looking for.
I think the facts support it.
I think his prior conviction supports it.
And I'm asking you to bury him.
And that's more than he did for Anna Olesiewicz.
He just dumped her body and I just sat down.
Baganwald became the second person ever in the state of New Jersey to be sentenced to death by lethal injection.
In September of 1984, he would plead guilty to the murders of both Maria Chialella and Deborah Osborne and received two more 30-year prison terms.
In the years following, Baganwald's death sentence was overturned, reinstated and overturned again, the case becoming a flashpoint for controversy over the death penalty.
I tried him again.
I go up to the state Supreme Court because of course they appealed it got the death penalty again.
After another trial.
Then New Jersey takes the death penalty out of the books and makes it retroactive.
So he dies in prison.
Bagenwald would end up dying in prison of natural causes at the age of 67 in March of 2008.
In the nearly 25 years of his incarceration, Richard Bagenwald would never express remorse for any of his crimes.
He never talked to a reporter, a fellow inmate, no one.
So the question is, if you're Maria's family, does this feel like justice?
The impression I got from the father was I'm glad he's dead, but it doesn't help me with my daughter.
You know I'm glad you got him and convicted him and he's going to get the death penalty, but it didn't help with his grief.
In total, Richard Bagenwald is responsible for murdering nine known victims, which would already make him one of the most prolific serial killers in New Jersey's history.
But the truth is, no one knows how many people Bagan Wall may have murdered and how many shallow graves he left in his wake.
Before the start of the first trial, you know, his attorney comes up to me and says you know, I'll give you, you know, 75 bodies.
I said, 75 bodies?
I went to the prison with Dowling and I said to him look, I won't charge you with any people that you uncover.
I just want to give some families some rest.
That's all.
But you will not be charged.
I promise you that.
I'll put it in writing, whatever you want.
And, you know, he just laughed.
I remember walking out of there and Mike says you know, I knew that he was in the room because it felt to me like the temperature dropped.
And I said, yeah, it sure did.
It sure did.
It took two days for investigators to fully dig up Bagenwald's mother's backyard.
All the while, his 68-year-old mother watched as investigators removed garbage bags full of the remains of some of her son's victims, including Maria's.
Local reporters asked Sally Bagenwald for a comment, to which she said, quote Only God in heaven knows what he's done or the reason for it.
But he's still my son and I will care for him and I will visit him, because I am his mother after all.
You know, in looking at this as a whole...
And we just think about culture and what we're talking about here, a serial killer.
Something that often gets missed with our culture's fascination with these crimes is that the victims are real people.
Every victim had a name, a life fathers mothers sisters brothers friends, family members that searched for them, stayed up sleepless nights, cried countless tears and had their lives torn apart.
All these stories?
The reason we tell these stories is because they are about people that were lost well before their time.
His victims were the young women and men that he killed, but also the very many lives those tragedies touched.
So, what do you think, Chuck?
Do you approve?
No!
No!
