The Joseph Palczynski Story

In the summer of 1995, 42-year-old Gary Osborne was growing concerned about his teen-age daughter. There was something about the guy Michella was dating that he didn't trust.

Joe Palczynski was a nice-looking man with a fancy sports car. He was as polite as they come and seemed devoted to Gary's 17-year-old daughter and her baby. But he had no actual job that Gary could see. And right from the start, Gary thought the guy was older than he let on.

He was controlling, too. Gary often would see Joby hiding in the bushes outside the Osbornes' house in Chase, peering into the windows to see if Michella was talking on the telephone or smoking the cigarettes he had forbidden her.

Then one day he saw bruises on Michella. It was all he needed to know.

Roughing up women pressed all his buttons: His ex-wife, Diane, had been beaten to death in 1989 by her boyfriend. Now, as Gary questioned Michella about Joby, father and daughter argued. It turned out Joby was 27, not 23 as he'd claimed. And the bruises? Michella tried to explain them to her father by saying she'd fallen off a ladder helping Joby's mother with her cleaning business. But Gary suspected Joby. One day in July, when Gary ordered Joby out of his house, a fight ensued. Gary, a slender 125 pounds, went to the hospital with four broken ribs and a split lip requiring stitches.

He didn't press charges -- he didn't want any more trouble. But he would change his mind after Joby beat his daughter on Christmas night.

In a recent interview, Michella gave this account:

She had spent the holiday with Joby, visiting his family as well as hers. At the end of the day, tired, she said she wanted to spend the night in her dad's house instead of Joby's apartment. Stung, he argued with her and things quickly got out of hand.

He choked her and slammed her head against the shower tiles. Michella scratched his face, staining with blood the white sweatshirt she had given him. Joby yelled that she had 10 minutes to remove the blood or he would give her the beating of her life.

Desperate, Michella soaked the sweatshirt in cold water, rubbed the stain with ice. It wasn't enough, though, and when the time was up, Joby made good on his threat.

After beating her, he ordered her to go into the kitchen and pick up a knife. Then, putting a cloth over his own hand, he took the knife from her. I could kill you right now, he threatened. My fingerprints ain't on it, yours are. All I have to do is tell the police you tried to kill me with this knife and I killed you in self-defense.

Later, his anger spent, Joby fell into bed exhausted. Michella lay beside him shivering, certain that he would kill her if she moved to get away.

The next morning, when he seemed calmer, Michella begged to go to work. She told him, over and over, how much she loved him, how she would never leave him, how she would never go to the cops. Then she reminded him she was the one with an income.

Joby drove her to the video store where she worked, then watched her from his car for a while. When he left, Michella took a cab to her father's house.

After Gary Osborne and his daughter went to police to report the incident, Joby's mother begged them to drop the charges. Joby, on probation for his 1991 escape from Spring Grove Hospital, would undoubtedly go back to jail if he were convicted.

But Gary refused to be swayed. It was a fateful decision.

Awaiting trial in the Baltimore County Detention Center, Joe Palczynski made a plan. He was determined to change Gary Osborne's mind. And he had friends who could help. A jailhouse scheme

Joby rarely -- if ever -- dated just one girl, and he never lacked female friends. If one girlfriend filed assault charges against him, two or three other women were ready to testify that she had made up the whole thing: The Joby they knew would never do something like that.

In the fall of 1995, when things with Michella were strained, Joby struck up a friendship with a starry-eyed teen-ager from Pasadena. Lisa Andersen was 17, a junior at Chesapeake Senior High. He was 22 -- or so she thought.

"When I first met him he said, 'You have a beautiful smile.' I'd think, 'Whoa! I've never had anyone say that to me!' He was like, 'You've got gorgeous eyes and pretty hair.' He treated me with the utmost respect and dignity. ... He was something I had never experienced before."

Suddenly, though, Lisa's new love was whisked away to the Baltimore County Detention Center. He'd been taken there on false charges, he told her. Michella Osborne had been cheating on him, he explained, and when he found out, he pushed her. But that was all.

Lisa believed him and devoted herself to keeping up his spirits.

At first, Joby called collect every other day from jail. Then he began calling more often, in the morning, at midday and in the afternoon. Lisa began cutting school so she could spend the day talking to Joby. He was 007; she was 00 -- "his sidekick, partner in crime."

It wasn't long, Lisa says, before she dropped out of school and moved in with Ramona Contrino, a friend of Joby's. Contrino was using his 300 ZX while he was in jail and would often drive the teen-ager there to see him.

During those visits, Joby sometimes ridiculed Lisa's makeup or clothes. But then he'd apologize: I'm sorry, baby. She attributed his behavior to the stress of jail. It only made her want to help him even more.

Joby began his campaign to intimidate the Osbornes into dropping Michella's charges against him. He accused his former girlfriend of theft, identifying her as an adult on his charging document to get her locked up. The attempt failed. Then he filed charges against Gary Osborne over the fight the summer before, claiming Gary had threatened to "kill my family and blow my house up and cars."

Gary responded by filing charges against Joby for the same incident. Shortly afterward, he awoke one morning to discover his pickup truck vandalized. All four tires were flat. There were deep scratches in the paint on the driver's side, and 10 pounds of sugar had been poured into the gas tank.

When the Osbornes still did not drop their charges for the beating of Michella, Joby upped the ante. He asked Lisa Andersen to accuse Gary Osborne of threatening to blow up her house and kill her if she dared to testify on Joby's behalf.

Lisa was horrified. She wanted no part of it.

Leese, you're going to do it, and you're going to do it NOW, she recalls Joby yelling over the phone one afternoon. You have my car, and you're riding around in it. You do it now, or I'm gonna kill you. You have 15 minutes to go down there, pick up the papers and call me.

The teen-ager decided to pretend she had filed charges. Faking an official's signature on charging documents, she wrote down what he had told her and mailed it off to him.

Joby saw right through it.

"He said, 'Who do you think you're playing with? You lied to me! Do you think this is a game?' " Andersen recalls. "He said, 'If you don't do this, I'm going to kill your family.'"

On April 9, 1996, the 17-year-old drove Joby's car to district court to file charges against a man she had never met. As a minor, Andersen could not legally file charges by herself. But no one asked her for identification. Her charging document stated: "Sunday, March 31st 1996 at approx. 12:00 p.m. I received my first phone call from the Defendant Gary Osborne he said 'hey you little bitch go ahead and testify for Joe,' then I replied with 'Who's this' he responded with 'this is Gary Osborne, Michella's ****ing father.' ... Later that afternoon I received another phone call ... and he said 'Go ahead and mess with my family Bitch. I'll ****ing kill you, And blow up your ****ing house so go ahead bitch and then it's all over for you.'"

Police arrested Gary Osborne on April 18. Charged with making bomb threats and obscene comments over the phone, he was handcuffed and driven to the Essex police station, where he stayed until his wife could post bail.

Three more times that month, he was arrested on similar charges filed by Ramona Contrino's sister, Carla. Each time, neighbors watched as he was handcuffed and taken away. Each time, the family had to raise the bail money. At one point, while being held in the Baltimore County Detention Center, Gary wore a badge alerting guards to keep him away from another prisoner: Joe Palczynski.

Michella pleaded with her father to let her drop the charges, but Gary Osborne held firm.

"Joby wanted Gary bad," Lisa Andersen recalls. "He wanted to make Gary's life a living hell. Gary was controlling Michella, but Joby wanted to control Michella. Joby couldn't handle it when somebody else was controlling something he considered his."

The false charges against Osborne were dismissed after Carla Contrino admitted she lied and tape-recorded a conversation that also implicated Lisa Andersen.

Later, Gary Osborne would sue them both. But in the summer of 1996, he had more to worry about than the money he had lost from missing work, posting bail and paying attorneys. His biggest worry was that Joby was free.

When prosecutor Steve Bailey decided against trying the case before a jury -- there were no reliable witnesses -- Joby pleaded guilty to the charges of battery and witness intimidation and received suspended sentences from Judge John G. Turnbull II.

The court put him on probation and ordered him to stay away from Michella Osborne and her family.

Gary Osborne cut down all the bushes around his house.

He didn't want any more surprises.