Kill for Thrill by Michael W. Sheetz Read Free Book Online Page A

pursuers were upon him. Pinned against the tree, Peter’s killers had left him nowhere to go. As they towered over his crouching, freezing body, Michael Travaglia gripped the knurled handle of a .22 and aimed for the middle of Peter’s body.

    The staccato report from the gun startled all three men as tiny orange flames lit up the leafy ground around their feet. When the bullet struck Peter Levato in the chest, it instantly dropped him to his knees. The relentless searing-lead torpedo tore through his chest and into the flailing, faltering muscles of his heart. They seized instantly. He crumpled to the ground in a lifeless mass.
    Michael was obviously not satisfied. He walked deliberately and confidently toward Peter Levato’s motionless body and quickly fired two more shots. Bang! Bang! Both struck Levato’s lifeless body in the top of the head and bored down into his now vacant brain.
    For all the deafening commotion of the past two minutes, the banks of the Loyalhanna Creek were now eerily silent—deadly silent. Peter Levato was dead. Michael Travaglia and John Lesko had begun their seven-day reign of terror. The kill for thrill had begun.

P ART II
E DWARD W OLAK F INDS THE B ODY
    On Friday, December 28, 1979, an event so innocuous that it would go unnoticed for two days occurred. Yet it was an event so profound that when Sergeant Tom Tridico later heard of it, it would prove to be the first link in a chain of evidence that would lead Michael Travaglia, John Lesko and Tom Tridico into a head-on collision.
    Without fanfare and with little more than routine police effort, officers of the Penn Township Police Department had stumbled on the stubbly stalks of a quiescent cornfield in a remote part of the outskirts of Delmont, Pennsylvania. Located behind Joe’s Steakhouse on Route 22 near the interchange for Pennsylvania’s Turnpike, the snow-draped field had rested in undisturbed winter slumber until, shortly after executing Peter Levato, Michael Travaglia and John Lesko dumped his 1975 gold Ford Grenada among the field’s spent husks.
    When the Penn Township Police discovered Peter’s car abandoned and unoccupied, officers did what any member of a respectable municipal police department would do with an abandoned vehicle—they checked the license plate to see if it had been reported stolen. It had not. Without a crime to investigate, the police followed the next step in the procedure for dealing with abandoned vehicles—they towed it to an impoundment facility.
    For Sergeant Tom Tridico, the discovery of Peter Levato’s Grenada by the Penn Township Police would normally be nothing more than a tiny bump in the workday life of an investigative supervisor for the Pennsylvania State Police. In fact, chances are, had it not been for the events of the next few days, Tom Tridico might have finished the remainder of this thirty-three years with the state police having never even heard Peter Levato’s name.

    Tom Tridico grew up in Warren, Pennsylvania, a small town about forty minutes southeast of Erie and about five minutes from the New York—Pennsylvania state line. Tom’s father was the fire chief in Warren, and from an early age, he was attracted to police work. Growing up near the state police barracks in Erie helped, and shortly after ending his three-year naval enlistment, Tom signed up for the Pennsylvania State Police.
    In 1947, he graduated from the State Police Academy in Hershey, Pennsylvania. He had finally realized his dream. He was a cop. Tom was assigned the rank of private. Over the course of his career, Tom Tridico would serve in a number of capacities; however, the one for which he would become most well known was his position as the supervisor of criminal investigations for the Troop A barracks of the Pennsylvania State Police in Greensburg, Pennsylvania.
    In this capacity, Tom oversaw the criminal investigation of his troop. He reviewed their cases, assigned them to investigations and, when cases