The Joseph Palczynski Story

When the bulletin flashed across her television screen, 28-year-old Amie Gearhart couldn't stop reading it: Joseph Palczynski is dead. Joseph Palczynski is dead. Joseph Palczynski is dead.

Perhaps now the memories of the beating he had given her 13 years ago would fade. Perhaps now his ghost would vanish.

Gearhart could finally post her whereabouts on a Web site that helps people find their high school classmates. While Joby was alive, she had feared he would see her name and seek revenge; her charges had sent him to jail for the first time.

Gary Osborne, the 47-year-old man whose determination had put Joby in jail the second time, felt nothing but relief.

There were other victims, too. When she heard Joby was on the loose, 21-year-old Lisa Andersen had asked her mother if she could sleep in the same bed with her. At 17, she had followed Joby's orders and filed false charges against Osborne, a man she had never met, because she was terrified of what Joby would do to her and her family if she didn't.

Stacy Culotta had also suffered consequences from dating Joby. During their brief relationship, the 17-year-old girl was stalked, threatened and harassed by her boyfriend and his friends. As Stacy and her parents watched the final chapters of Joby's story unfold, they couldn't help but feel for Tracy Whitehead. Why couldn't this man have been stopped long ago? Why had this young woman endured such a nightmare? Why were four other victims forced to pay the final price for Joby's unchecked violence?

These questions continue to haunt lawyer Stephen E. Bailey, assistant state's attorney of Baltimore County, chief of the family violence unit and the last attorney to prosecute Palczynski.

"The scary thing about Joseph Palczynski is that the system worked fairly well," he says. "He was prosecuted on a number of occasions. He went to prison. He went to mental health facilities. ... He was placed on probation and ordered to stay away from people and he did comply with it. He was ordered into treatment which he complied with."

In 1996, Bailey represented Michella Osborne in her battery case before Judge John G. Turnbull II. In that case, Palczynski pleaded guilty and received a suspended sentence of 10 years. Bailey was also able to show that Palczynski had engineered a campaign of witness intimidation against his former girlfriend and her father, winning another conviction with a suspended sentence.

"Would I have liked to walk in and say, 'I want 10 years?' I would have loved to," Bailey says. "Joseph Palcyznski deserved 10 years back then."

But had he taken the case to trial, he fears he would have lost. As in many domestic violence cases, there were no 911 calls, no witnesses to the abuse of Michella. And in the witness-intimidation case, the woman who informed against Palczynski would have made a weak witness because she herself was guilty of perjury.

The prosecutor didn't want to risk having Palcyznski acquitted. At least his guilty pleas might force him to leave the Osbornes alone. And at best, he figured the convictions would send Palczynski back to jail for violating his probation on an earlier charge.

And they did: He served 20 months of a three-year sentence.

Palczynski's attorney, David Henninger, says his client was merely one of many men who have "difficulties in relationships with women." And whenever the man appeared in court, Henninger says, there were always several girls eager to testify that he was the nicest guy in the world.

Over the years, Henninger argued repeatedly that mental illness caused his client's violent behavior. Palczynski was treated by many mental health professionals who gave him diagnoses ranging from paranoid schizophrenia to personality disorder. Some believed he needed medication, others didn't. No one therapist treated him repeatedly over time. Mark Komrad, senior psychiatrist at Sheppard Pratt, calls this confusion typical of the public mental health system, which sends patients "in and out [of health care] from one provider to another," making accurate clinical diagnoses elusive.

In the end, it appears no one could have foretold the rampage on the basis of Palczynski's mental health - or criminal - records. But for a dozen years, young women and their families warned that he would kill someone.

"We're not going to be able to stop people like Joe Palczynski in the sense that we're going to be able to predict who they are and prevent them from doing something like this," Bailey says. "We obviously hope he is the exception in that he did not respond to jail, to probation, to counseling - to all those things."