The Joseph Palczynski Story

Long before the murderous rampage, long before the saga of fugitive love and violence, long before the hostages on Lange Street, Joe Palcyznski was known as a ladies' man.

He had GQ looks, a buff body, an expensive sports car, money to burn and a questionable past that clung to him like heavy cologne. He was a "bad boy," the type that always seems to attract women, particularly young ones.

Imagine being a high school girl of 16, maybe 17. How can you not be flattered by the attentions of this handsome guy who makes time to pick you up from school in his Nissan 300 ZX? He shows you an album filled with photographs of more than a dozen girls he's known -- young, slim, glossy-haired, smiling. It's clear he can have any woman he wants.

Instead, he chooses you. And it takes your breath away.

In the beginning, dating "Joby" is like starring in a romantic movie. He's 5-foot-8, 175 pounds of martial arts muscle, with sandy-brown hair and hazel eyes. Endlessly polite. Clean-cut, almost preppie; even his jeans are pressed. He has a job as a lifeguard and friends who jump whenever he snaps his fingers. You know he's calling when your pager flashes the number of his hero:007.

On your first date, he takes you to meet his mom, Miss Pat, who is real pretty and couldn't be nicer. Anyone her son loves, she says, she loves, too.

Joby has seen a few things you'd rather not know about. So you don't listen much when he talks about making hit lists, buying weapons, being locked up. You believe people can change.

You really tune it out when he blames those other girls for getting him in trouble. You know you're nothing like them.

He phones constantly. He buys you flowers and gifts. Takes you horseback riding, arranges picnic lunches in the park. You go out on his Jet Skis, drive around like royalty.

He tells you how beautiful you are, how special. He says he's going to be with you forever -- no matter what.

It seems too good to be true.

It is.

The Power of Fear

On March 21, 2000, when police fired 27 bullets into Joseph C. Palczynski,his life reached the violent ending he had long predicted. In his last days, the 31-year-old man had followed through on a persistent threat -- to harm the family of any girlfriend who dared leave him -- and killed those who got in his way.

Over a span of 13 years, he had lured at least seven young women into a fantasy relationship. And one by one, each had discovered the truth of Joby's dangerously controlling personality.

Amie was 16 when he beat her and held her captive in 1987.

Kimberly was 16 when he blackened her eye, knocked her to her knees and threatened her with a razor blade in 1988.

Sharon was 17 when he attacked her at her school and threatened "to blow her brains out" in 1991.

A Gooding, Idaho, girl was 15 when Joby assaulted her in 1992.

Michella was 17 when he choked her and slammed her head against the shower tiles on Christmas Day 1995.

Stacy had just turned 17 when Joe grabbed her by the neck, shoved her against a wall and threatened to throw her off a balcony in 1996.

Tracy Whitehead, the last of his girlfriends, was also the oldest. She was 20 when she met him. She was 22 when he murdered the couple sheltering her, then kidnapped and terrorized her.

Joe Palczynski's story began to unfold publicly on March 7. For two weeks, it held the citizens of Baltimore -- and many beyond -- spellbound in horror. But the unknown tale -- the lengthy pattern of domestic abuse preceding Palczynski's rampage -- is chilling as well. The women who shared their stories with The Sun hope that their painful experiences can serve as cautionary tales, demonstrating how difficult it is to stop domestic violence.

"The scary thing," says Stephen E. Bailey, assistant state's attorney of Baltimore County and a prosecutor who faced Palczynski in court, "is that the system worked fairly well."

To the former victims and their families, there was never a question of whether Joby would eventually kill someone. The only question was when.

These young women did exactly what they were supposed to: They left their abuser, sought protective orders or filed charges. And each time, their actions put them at even greater risk.

When he was no longer able to use the power of love to control them, Joby turned to fear. He knew how to cultivate his "badness," to make it a source of influence. He kept his body looking like the lethal weapon he claimed it was, boasted loudly about his dark past and often predicted he would "die by the bullet." Joby believed he could make a girlfriend come back to him -- or drop charges -- if she was terrified by what would happen if she didn't.

Often he threatened to kill the girl's parents and leave her alive to suffer.

Joby liked people to be afraid of him, thrived on it, says George Coleman, who became a close friend when he was 14 and Joby was a high school senior.

Joby's male friends were almost always younger than he and easily impressed by cars and weapons. In that circle, toughness equaled status, and guns added to the equation. When Coleman first knew him, Joby had a rifle and a Magnum handgun. He played Russian roulette. He never possessed a high regard for life, Coleman says, and wanted to make sure everyone knew it.

Fear controls people, Joby told his last girlfriend. And when it didn't, when the young women persisted with their charges, Joby benefited from powerful cultural stereotypes about domestic violence and its victims: It's her word against his ... That's their private business ... He's always been so polite and well-mannered ... She doesn't look beat up to me ... She must have done something to provoke him.

In one sense, their collective efforts did work: Joby went to jail twice.

But when he was released, there was always another girlfriend, another victim.

And with each soured relationship and each trip to court, Joby grew more afraid of returning to jail. He would do whatever it took to force his victims to drop their charges. At one point, he masterminded a campaign of intimidation from inside the Baltimore County Detention Center.

For Joby, the stakes reached their highest in March, when Tracy Whitehead had him arrested for beating her. Another assault conviction would violate his probation and send him to jail for 10 years.

In the past, Palczynski's lawyers had claimed that mental illness was to blame for his actions. He was treated at mental health facilities almost a dozen times between the ages of 15 and 28. He had gone in and out of therapy, on and off medication. His diagnoses changed -- and were often contradictory. He was identified as hysterical, as depressed, as paranoid schizophrenic, as bipolar and as having personality disorders.

To some his behavior read like the textbook description of a chronic domestic abuser: manipulative, controlling, possessive, intimidating, physically violent. Ordered by the courts to attend a program for perpetrators of domestic violence, he was expelled because of his constantly disruptive behavior.

When it came to rehabilitation, he tried just about everything the criminal justice system had to offer.

But nothing, ultimately, could save George and Gloria Shenk, Jennifer McDonnel and David Meyers from Joby's most desperate hours. The four died in March during Joby's frenzied attempt to keep Tracy Whitehead from leaving him.

At that point, Joby felt he had nothing to lose.

"I can't live no more," he told his mother the day before he kidnapped his girlfriend. "I'm going to have to die."

Two Faces of Terror

Amie Gearhart was 15 when Joby surprised her with balloons on Valentine's Day. He wrote in her 1987 yearbook that he was wrapped around her little finger and loving it.

They met at Perry Hall High School: Palcyznski, the handsome senior, had rescued her from sophomore obscurity and a claustrophobic home life. Joby's old-fashioned politeness had even convinced Amie's parents that she was old enough for a "car date" in his shiny Mustang. That June, Joby took her to his senior prom. She wore a lacy pink dress; he sported a white tuxedo.

But the picture was far from perfect. During their five-month courtship, Amie had discovered another side to her boyfriend. Joby kept guns stashed under his bed and in his car. And once, he had held a knife to her throat.

He told her had two personalities: Joby No. 1 was calm and rational and Joby No. 2 was angry and strange.

But nothing could have prepared Amie for the Joby she would encounter on July 24, 1987. Almost 13 years later, she and other witnesses can still recall the events of that night.

She was hanging out with a group of kids on a parking lot near the beach in Ocean City, eating ice cream from a pint container. Spending the week in a condo with a friend and her family, Amie didn't expect to see Joby. But about the time she fed a bite of ice cream to another guy, she spotted her boyfriend coming toward her.

Without explanation, Joby knocked Amie to the ground. As friends tried to intervene, he began to kick and beat her.

When police arrived, he squeezed Amie's hand hard and whispered: Don't tell them nothing!

Stunned, she obeyed.

Meanwhile, Joby calmly told the officers he was looking for his watch and ring, which he had lost in the parking lot. After the police left, he walked Amie toward the ocean and ordered her friend's 14-year-old brother, Jason Whitekettle, to join them. I need a witness, he said.

On the beach, Joby forced the two teen-agers to hold hands and walk in front of him like prisoners, kicking and hitting them to keep them moving.

They walked to the Delaware line, at least half a mile, Joby screaming and blaming Amie for making him lose his ring, for ruining his life. He interrogated Jason and Amie about where the boys and girls slept in the condominium and who Amie had spent time with that week.

Finally he forced the two to sit on their hands, cross-legged on the sand, with their backs to a chain link fence while he paced back and forth, threatening to break their legs. He ordered Jason to hit Amie; when he refused, Joby grabbed Jason's hand and hit her in the chest with it three times.

At one point, Amie urged Jason, who was small and thin and no match for Joby, to run for help. He did. With Jason gone, Joby's rage found one focus. Choose your death, he told his girlfriend: drowning, choking or beating. Then he threatened to kill her family.

Amie pleaded with him, sobbing, as he pounded her chest, over and over, laughing. Then she spotted a group of men fishing at the water's edge and broke free. Grabbing their flashlight, she shone it on her face to show what her boyfriend had done.

It was the calm, reasonable Joby who caught up to her and reassured the fishermen: The couple would go up under the street light and talk things out. They didn't need to interfere.

In a daze, Amie went along with it. When Joby saw the extent of his handiwork, he began crying and apologizing, begging her to forgive him.

Later, X-rays and photographs taken at the medical clinic at 93rd Street showed Amie suffered contusions of the left eardrum -- she couldn't hear correctly for months -- lacerations and swelling of her cheek and nose, a contusion of the right eye that caused it to hemorrhage, and a bruised rib cage.

Although the teen-ager was reluctant to press charges, her mother insisted: Otherwise he'll keep on doing it. Amie's mother later recalled receiving a phone call from Joby's mother, who wanted them to drop their charges. Amie's mother refused. Your son's abusive, she told Pat Long. He's going to kill somebody someday.

That fall, Amie felt alarmed to see Joby with a 16-year-old named Kimberly. Soon, she sought out Amie for advice: Joby had given her a black eye, and she wanted to know how to get away from him.

Get a restraining order, Amie told her. Press charges. Because Kimberly -- and Joby's next victim, a 17-year-old named Sharon -- declined to be interviewed and were minors at the time of these events, their last names are being withheld. But their experiences with Joby are recounted in reports to police. Like Amie Gearhart, they came to know Joby No. 2.

From a charging document filed by Kimberly's mother: Oct. 18, 1987: "Joseph C. Palczynski searched through Kim's bedroom without permission when she was in the shower. While searching he found birth control pills. The discovery of these pills made Joseph very angry because he did not want her taking them. As a result, he began to slap Kim several times in the face with both an open hand and a back hand, resulting in a black eye [right] and bruising of the right and left cheekbones. After a series of slaps in the face, Joseph then punched Kim in the stomach, knocking her to her knees. He continued to threaten Kim, stating that if she didn't do what he said he would do it again."

Feb. 21, 1988: "Joseph pulled Kimberly into the bathroom at his house [owned by his grandmother] stating that he wanted to have sex with her. When she refused, he became very angry and very forceful. ... Joseph punched her with a closed fist causing multiple bruises along Kim's breastbone, then exited the bathroom ... went into a closet and got a razorblade. He then proceeded to threaten Kim saying 'If you don't come here and talk to me, I'll beat you some more whether my grandmom is here or not!' "

Palczynski was convicted of beating Kim and sentenced to two years of supervised probation. In January 1989, facing Amie Gearhart's charges, he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. A psychiatrist found him competent to stand trial, and he was later sentenced to four years in prison in Hagerstown. He served two, including some time for an attempted escape. He received regular counseling there and was described as having "deliberately [sought] out dangerous situations consistent with a fantasy identity as a 'Rambo' like hero."

Palczynski was 22 when he was released from jail in April 1991. He returned home to live with his mother and stepfather, worked part-time at an athletic supply store, took lifeguard courses and occasionally did construction work. According to mental health reports, life at home was strained: His parents disapproved of his dating high school girls, whom he would sometimes sneak into the house.

By August, he had moved into an apartment with two roommates. He was dating a 17-year-old named Sharon when, in September, less than six months after his release from jail, he was warned by the assistant principal not to trespass on the grounds of her school. Later, he was arrested for attacking Sharon there.

From her charging document:

Nov. 8, 1991: "We were arguing in front of [her school]. I proceeded into [the school]; he came running after me. He pushed me up against the wall. I pleaded with him not to hit me but the next thing I knew I was on the ground screaming. He has also threatened my parents. (To kill them and leave me living to suffer.) He said if he goes to jail he will kill me or get someone to hurt me! He has gotten people to come to my house before. This is not the first time he has hurt me, but before he only pushed me and pulled me by my hair."

Out on bail, Joby was ordered to have no contact with Sharon. But he phoned her repeatedly, she complained, threatening "to blow her brains out" if she didn't drop her charges against him. He also purchased an Inland M-1 .30-caliber rifle from Edgewater Pawn Shop, telling his friend George Coleman, who thought he was "just talking big," that he was going to use it to shoot people at Sharon's school.

Meanwhile, Sharon filed additional charges describing the threatening phone calls. Palczynski was arrested and held at the Baltimore County Detention Center.

When staff there decided his behavior called for psychiatric evaluation, he was sent first to Franklin Square Hospital and then to Spring Grove State Hospital.

At Spring Grove, he was initially diagnosed as having bipolar mood disorder and possible depression. But on Dec. 16, 1991, two days after arriving at the facility, he escaped and fled the state with the identification cards of a friend.

A month later, the fugitive surfaced in Gooding, Idaho, when a woman filed a complaint against him for assaulting her 15-year-old daughter and threatening to kill the girl's brother. Neither of them could be found for interviews. But a police report and a newspaper article gave the following account of events: While Gooding police were investigating the mother's accusation, Maryland State Police alerted their counterparts in Idaho that Palczynski was believed to be hiding out in Gooding. The man was unstable, they were told, and possibly armed with an automatic rifle, a 9 mm handgun and a shotgun.

On the morning of Jan. 17, the fugitive barricaded himself alone in an apartment and told police negotiators he would kill himself and shoot people in a nearby parking lot if police advanced. After nearly 16 hours, a SWAT team hit the apartment with tear gas. Palczynski was apprehended and eventually returned to Maryland.

Things looked pretty grim: Less than a year after leaving jail, he now faced charges of violating federal gun laws, of battering and threatening Sharon and of escaping from Spring Grove Hospital. Any conviction could return him to prison.

Unless he was judged legally insane.

Clearly his mental state was to blame for his actions, his lawyers argued. Palczynski was sent to the Federal Correctional Institution in Petersburg, Va., for a month's evaluation. His stay there was to set the tone for the next three years, a time he spent navigating -- some believe manipulating -- the federal mental health system.

In the course of his evaluation, Palczynski told the federal psychologist that he had illegally purchased the gun at the pawn shop to kill the "ninjas" who were trying to kill him. When he cut his wrist twice, once deeply enough to require stitches, he told the psychologist a voice told him to do it.

Later, Palczynski would boast to girlfriends that he had cut himself to fool the system. If so, his ploy worked: The federal psychologist diagnosed him with schizophrenia, paranoid type, and concluded he met the criteria of legal insanity, a decision that led to his being found not guilty on federal weapons charges.

Fifteen months later, after court-ordered treatment at a number of government facilities, Palczynski appeared to have made a complete recovery. According to another psychologist, the 25-year-old man's condition was now "extremely stable" with "no evidence of bizarre behavior or verbalizations which might be indicative of delusional thinking." He had not taken medication for more than a year.

If the patient had indeed suffered from a major mental illness in 1992, he had fully recovered by September 1994, psychologist M.A. Conroy concluded. Her diagnosis: personality disorder, not otherwise specified, with antisocial and borderline features. She did not see any reason for further psychiatric treatment or follow-up.

Later, Joby's lawyer would speculate his client had "conned" the doctors into releasing him. Joby's mother would maintain that he had remained stable without medication only because he had been in a stress-free situation where no one provoked him.

In any event, the assessment brought him home. He no longer faced prosecution for beating Sharon because a judge had dismissed her charges. While he was institutionalized, his lawyer had argued successfully that his right to a speedy trial had been denied.

That same argument did not prevail with another judge, who reviewed his charges for escaping Spring Grove. In January 1995, Joby received a three-year suspended sentence with five years of probation.

He was free to choose his next victim.

Seeing Beyond the Surface

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.

The Lies Add Up

The first thing she noticed was the white 300 ZX. It was the summer of 1996, and 16-year-old Stacy Culotta was pumping gas into her car at the Royal Farm Store in Chase. The sports car that pulled up was a looker. So was the guy driving it.

I like the wheels on your car, the teen-ager said. The man introduced himself and told her he had a set of rims and tires that he was trying to sell. So Stacy went to Joe Palczynski's house to take a look. They exchanged phone numbers. Before long, he was courting Stacy, telling her everything she wanted to hear, making her feel grown up in a way no one else ever had.

On her 17th birthday, only two weeks after their first date, he showered her with gifts -- "expensive shirts from J.C. Penney's and Hecht's," Stacy recalls -- that she hid from her parents.

He just took her breath away, she told her friends. Joby, now 27, had recently received a suspended sentence for battering Michella Osborne, a girl who lived just a few blocks from the Culottas in Chase. He told Stacy he was 20, that he had "some bad stuff in his background."

People change, she figured. And anyway, she was head over heels.

Her parents were considerably less so. No way he was 20 with all those crow's feet, they told her. Why was he following her everywhere, making demands?

When they discovered he'd been in the county jail, Stacy had an explanation: A jealous girlfriend had lied, set him up. Her parents weren't buying it. They forbid her to see or even talk to Joe Palczynski.

So she sneaked around behind their backs. And Joby helped. He would pick her up in different cars so her parents wouldn't suspect anything; he persuaded friends to lie to the Culottas about where Stacy was.

One night, Stacy told her boyfriend that her father had found out some bad things about him.

"What does he know?" Joby asked, sounding unconcerned. "About the kidnapping? Assault weapons?" Her dad knew about three charges, Stacy said. He knew about assault, battery and kidnapping.

"Ho, ho, ho! I'll be lucky if that's what it is. Are you serious? Only that much?"

"Yeah."

"Hon, I got a record for real. In my entire life, I've, like, 40 charges. ... He didn't get no printout of my record. There's no way! ... I've had robbery, OK?"

"Uh-huh."

"I've got four, five, six assault and batteries," he continued matter-of-factly, as if checking off a grocery list. "Two or three counts of trespassing. Two counts of kidnapping. Three counts of false imprisonment, OK? Two counts of phone harassment. Two counts of intimidating state witness. One count of intimidating -- "

"Well, why did only three of them come up?"

"I have no idea! One count of illegal possession of firearms. One for fleeing and eluding. What else? Just all kind of sh--, hon, all kind of sh--. ... Now, as far as conviction: Three counts of assault and battery. ... We're going to move to a Phase Two. You got a tape recorder?"

The time had come, Joby told Stacy, to start taping her parents' phone conversations. He needed to find out how much they knew -- and what they planned to do about it.

"I'm going to find out your Dad's sources so he ain't pulling nothin' on me. He's gonna make me move to a Phase Three ..." Joby considered the possibilities: "He don't want me to do that. I'll know everything about him. I'll know where his mind's at ... I start putting him under surveillance." Joby was already watching Stacy constantly.

Possessive, he didn't want her to spend any time with friends. He often took her out of school just so he could be with her. And there was the rule about returning his calls: If he paged her, Stacy had better get in touch with him within two to three minutes or risk "severe consequences."

At times, she felt ambushed by his anger. Once Joby pulled a cigarette from her mouth, grabbed her by the neck and slammed her up against a wall. Another time, after a phone conversation in which Stacy said she didn't want to see him anymore, Joby tried to run her and a girlfriend off the road.

His mood shifts were sudden and unpredictable. Five minutes after slamming her against a wall, Joby would offer to make dinner. He'd prepare steak, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, light the candles.

And Stacy would begin thinking, Maybe I shouldn't have said what I said to him; that's why he pushed me against the wall. Maybe he really is sorry. She was solidly under his thumb.

But she had the luck of good timing. After a months-long battle with the Osbornes, Joby wouldn't have welcomed the prospect of another hostile family pressing charges. And Stacy had very nosy parents.

Every day, Diane and Vince Culotta would drive out of their housing development and see Joby standing on the corner, waiting and watching. Neighbors reported that he was parking down the street and running up to their house to peer in the windows, sometimes several times a day. As the sister of a police officer, Diane had few qualms about taking Joby to court -- and she felt confident she recognized him for what he was: an abuser.

She would later give her daughter a book, "The Gift of Fear," which described classic signs of a batterer, and underlined traits she thought applied to Joby: bullying; verbal abuse; intimidation; talking about getting married, having kids and being together forever shortly after their first meeting; battering women in previous relationships; stalking; police encounters; using money to control people; believing others are out to get him; liking violent films; having a fascination with weapons; minimizing any kind of abusive behavior.

In August, Vince Culotta told Joby to stay away from his daughter. In September, he filed a petition to prevent him from having any contact with her. In November, the Culottas got lucky: Joby went to jail. His convictions in the Osborne case violated the terms of his probation on the 1991 Spring Grove escape charges.

Judge John Fader sentenced him to serve three years. "This man is dangerous," he said. "He is out there hurting people. I can't believe any human being can make so many mistakes and be given so many chances and not appreciate it, and I do not feel, from what I hear, that the mental state is anywhere near as much an excuse as he tries to use it for a crutch."

But Stacy still believed they belonged together.

From jail on the Eastern Shore, Joby told his mother to hand-deliver a letter to Stacy at work. Pat Long stood in the aisle of the Safeway while the teen-ager read it, then took it back. She had promised her son Stacy's parents wouldn't get their hands on it.

In the letter, Joby promised Stacy he would never let her go. No matter what, they would be together some day, he wrote. And Stacy knew she could wait for him. When Joby finished his jail term, they would marry and move to Florida.

She felt hopeful. Until an acquaintance showed her another letter, a letter she was never meant to see. In it, Joby described his relationship with Stacy as "a big joke." She was just "another one under my belt," he told the male friend to whom he had written.

"If you tell a girl what she wants to hear," he continued, "you could -- all of them and that's what I was doing for the past 10 years. Oh it's not just what you tell them but how and where you tell them. The only hard part is remembering the lies. I'm sure you get the point. I added up all the girls I -- and I -- 142 girls and 38 of them were virgins!"

Devastated, furious, Stacy wrote Joby that it was over. She should have known better.

Strange cars began racing past her house. A guy in a green Mitsubishi, one of the cars Joby had borrowed to fool her parents, was waiting in the parking lot at night when she left work. Often, he followed her home.

She found notes on her windshield with cryptic messages and numbers meaningful only to her and Joby. She received hang-up phone calls.

Shortly after one of Joby's friends took her out to dinner to cheer her up, her new pager began receiving coded messages: "Watch your back, bitch" and "I'm coming back for you."

Diane Culotta wrote the victim notification services of the state's division of correction:

"How does he talk people into doing this crazy stuff? They follow her, leave notes, call our house, what else is next? I'm afraid to ask. ... He's a very strange, manipulative person ... I'm afraid if he's this obsessed about her now, what will it be like when he gets out of jail?"

Stacy's mom collected names, license tag numbers, dates, incidents and scraps of paper, amassing evidence of intimidation that would stand up well in court. She also wrote the parole board requesting to be informed before Joby's release: "I do not want to look up one day as I'm driving, as I have done several times before, and be startled to see him in my rear-view mirror."

She need not have worried. When Joe Palczynski was released from prison on June 20, 1998, Stacy joined the ranks of former girlfriends, her photo just another among many.

Soon, Joby had a new sports car, a Mazda RX7, and was romancing a young woman he had met in the check-out line at Super Fresh, 20-year-old Tracy Whitehead.

Part II: Prologue

As Joseph Palcyznski neared the violent end he had predicted, two women loomed largest in his life: the one he asked to marry him and the one who gave him birth.

Tracy Whitehead was 20 when she met the man she knew as "Joby." She was older than his previous girlfriends, and their relationship would last the longest, 18 months. By the time his violent jealousy finally drove her away, Tracy had suffered his abuse but had not forgotten his generosity. Joby was the one who helped her find a better life, Joby was the one who believed in her.

And Pat Long was the one who believed in him.

Before Joby met Tracy, his mother often packed his lunch and left it in his mailbox. She helped him buy the flashy cars, Jet Skis, designer label clothes - "the finer things"- that attracted people to him. And when trouble started, as it often did, she tried her best to make things right between her son and his girlfriends.

Whoever Joseph loves, I love, she would say.

More than anyone, Pat knew her son's moods. When his yelling and belittling progressed to a slap or a punch, her instinct was to defend him. Over the years, he had been convicted three times for beating teen-age girlfriends. Pat blamed the behavior on mental illness. Joseph was "bipolar," she'd say - but something had to trigger him. A girl's half-serious kick, throwing a pillow at him - even little things could "make them kind of people snap."

Tracy knew Joby had mental problems. She knew he had gone to jail for assault. But she believed him when he said he would never hurt her.

And she believed him when he said he would never hurt her again.

When Tracy finally left him last March, Joby's pursuit of her triggered a rampage in which he killed four people and took her family hostage. His life would reach the tragic ending he had long predicted - and that his mother had spent years trying to prevent.

The day her son was arrested for beating his girlfriend, Pat Long had begged Tracy to change her story and warned police: If you charge him, you're going to read about him in the paper!

Both women knew Joe Palcyznski's temper was explosive. They knew he would do almost anything to stay out of jail. And they knew how much he hated to be alone.

But one had to leave him.

The other would never let go.

From Kindness to Rage

On their first date, in the summer of 1998, Joby brought Tracy home to meet his mother. His new girlfriend was 20 years old but so thin that she looked younger. Her long arms and legs made her seem taller than her 5-foot-5 frame; her brown hair fell in a cascade of gold-tinged curls. Self-conscious, nervous, Tracy could see Joby came from a prosperous household.

Pat Long's house in Chase had a swimming pool in the back yard and woods that ran down to the river. Proud of her housecleaning business, Long kept her own home immaculate. She decorated in pastel colors, collected pretty soaps and sweet-smelling candles and displayed photographs of her four grown children. Petite and blonde, "Miss Pat" was energetic and openly affectionate, a woman who believed in lots of hugs.

Tracy was starved for attention. Pregnant at 15, she had dropped out of school to care for her baby and eventually slipped into drugs. She decided her son would be better off living with his paternal grandmother while she tried to get clean.

When Joby came into her life, she was still fighting her addiction to heroin. Needing cash, she went into the Super Fresh in Middle River one day in July. As she asked the cashier where she could get a refund for medicine she was returning, she noticed a customer watching her. Later, when she waited outside for a cab to take her to Dundalk to buy drugs, the man cruised up in his sports car. He teased her for interrupting him at the register. They chatted; he got her phone number.

Then he began calling every day.

Joby was tan, good-looking, had a Mazda RX7 sports car, Jet Skis and a good job as an electrician's helper. He was so clean-cut he didn't even smoke cigarettes. He took her on picnics, sang ballads to her at karaoke bars and accompanied her to Narcotics Anonymous meetings. He drove her wherever she needed to go; with no money to buy a car, Tracy had never gotten her driver's license.

She knew he'd been in jail, but she certainly didn't hold it against him - not with the struggles she'd had.

And Joby seemed as determined as she was to get her life on track. He had never loved anyone as much, he told her. Soon, they were sharing an apartment. With his encouragement, Tracy didn't miss a day of work at Dante's Frozen Pizza for a whole year.

She had no doubt she was stepping up in the world.

When things were good, they were very good: Tracy gained weight, saved money from her job to shower her family with Christmas gifts. Before long, she'd been drug-free for six months, then a year. Joby took her on outings with her 5-year-old son, praised her spaghetti sauce, played bingo with her at North Point Flea Market. He gave her a ring and bought her a necklace with "No. 1 Mom" on it for their first Christmas.

Months later, in a fit of anger, he would rip the necklace from her neck. Tracy had discovered that along with Joby's kindness came jealousy and rage.

Sometimes without warning, he would put down her family, taunt her about her past. She learned never, ever, to tell him of even the slightest compliment from a man. He would accuse her of egging men on - even a friendly stranger who said she reminded him of his daughter. When she walked through the mall with Joby, it was easier to stare at the ground than to hear him complain that she was looking at other men.

As she continued to turn her life around, gaining confidence and starting a new job as a cashier at a discount store, Joby grew more insecure. If she fixed her hair a new way or wore a nice outfit to work, he was suspicious: Who are you trying to impress?

Sometimes he would spit on her, douse her with soda. A lie earned her a black eye and a split lip. And once, soon after they'd met, when she had slipped back into drugs, he knocked her unconscious. A few times, he threatened that if she left him he would kill her family and leave her alive to suffer.

Early on, a counselor told her the relationship didn't sound healthy, that she should get out of it. And Tracy did leave - five, maybe six times. But Joby always found her, promised to reform and pleaded with her to come back. She did: She had no better place to go, and Joby was different from anyone she'd ever met.

"He built my self-esteem up a lot and he made me feel good about myself and he cleaned and cooked and he was just like the kind of guy you could spend the rest of your life with," she says. "If only he didn't have those moods."

Part of the problem, she learned, was Joby's concern about his appearance. Accustomed to telling people he was younger than he was - most of his previous girlfriends were in high school when he dated them - Joby's lies were becoming less believeable as he aged. He had told Tracy he was 25 a few months before he turned 30. He talked about getting cosmetic surgery for the wrinkles under his eyes. And last year he had refused to attend his own birthday party when, even with the help of hair plugs, he couldn't cover his bald spot.

Tracy had seen the photographs Joby kept of previous girlfriends, knew many of them by name. She also learned she wasn't the only woman he had picked up at the supermarket. When one such woman called, saying he'd given her his number, Tracy left. Joby cried, begged her to return, swore he hadn't done anything wrong. After that, though, she checked receipts in his pockets, questioned him if he went to the supermarket at odd hours.

One night last February, during an argument, Joby told her he had cheated on her. She stormed out of their apartment, after declaring that she, too, had cheated on him. Later she called from a bar to taunt him with another story she'd made up: She'd met this guy, someone who also loved kids, who had a good job and three cars and was much younger than Joby.

When she finally returned home that night, she found her shirts, dresses, underwear slashed to bits all over the apartment. Joby had even cut up her tennis shoes.

She decided to leave - for good.

Tracy had just been promoted to assistant manager at work. She had also been drug-free for a year and a half - an achievement Joby was always taking credit for. Finally, she could afford to live on her own. Just as Joby feared, she had built up her confidence - and outgrown their abusive relationship.

For the next three weeks Tracy saved her paychecks and combed rental notices until she found an apartment she could afford. When she realized the place would not be ready for a week, she confided to her manager at work, Gloria Shenk, that she worried Joby would flip if he discovered she was leaving.

Shenk was also concerned. She had remained in a bad relationship too long, she told Tracy, and didn't want her to make the same mistake. Why don't you stay with me this week? the 50-year-old woman advised. Tracy walked home to pack while Joby was at work. That, she recalls, was when the nightmare began.

She was in the apartment only a short while when the phone rang: It was the store, calling to alert her that Joby was looking for her. She could hear his voice in the background. He was right around the corner, a minute away.

Grabbing two bags, leaving the door open, she hid underneath the front steps. A split second later, as she crouched there, shaking, he came toward the steps screaming her name: Tracy, Tracy!

Where are you going? he demanded as he found her cowering.

Got my own place.

Where at?

Tracy didn't want to tell him, and quickly changed her story. She was staying with Gloria, she said.

Get in the car, he ordered. We'll go ask Gloria if it's true. She rode in the back, her hand on the door handle, prepared to jump out when the car slowed. Joby stopped in front of his mother's house in suburban Chase.

Sometimes when there was trouble, Joby asked his mother to "referee." Over the past few months she had suggested that Joby and Tracy let a therapist help them work through their problems. This time, however, she wasn't there to assist. Joby dragged Tracy inside by her long hair.

Locking the doors, he hit her in the face, kicked her in the ribs, and beat her, screaming: You're not going nowhere! He told her to call work and say she wouldn't be back that day.

On the other end of the phone, Gloria Shenk wasn't fooled: Are you OK?

No.

Want me to call the police?

Yes.

When the officers arrived, Tracy ran outside.

He's going to kill me!

She was in the back of a police car giving her statement when Joby's mother drove up. Miss Pat asked to speak to Tracy privately. Joby was already on probation for beating an earlier girlfriend. New assault charges would violate the terms of Joby's probation, possibly sending him back to jail.

Why don't you just forget him? Long pleaded. I'll put you ... on the bus and you can go to Florida and relive your life. ... Just don't charge him because he's got 10 years over his head.

Tracy refused, and Joby was arrested. But a day later, he was out on $7,500 bail, thanks to his mother. Pat Long came to see Tracy again.

During the past two years, the women had developed a close and complicated relationship. Miss Pat was the sweetest woman Tracy had ever met, routinely dropping by their apartment with food and supplies. When Tracy had turned 21, Miss Pat threw her a party. They shared the kinship of women who love an abusive man; Pat often argued with Joby on Tracy's behalf - and Tracy looked up to her as a kind of role model.

Now, Miss Pat was desperate. Joseph isn't doing real well, she said.

It had taken courage for Tracy to come this far - and now she would only go forward. She refused again to change her story.

I have no sympathy for him at all, she told Miss Pat.

A Protective Mother

Her son was facing serious time in jail, and this time Pat Long didn't know how to help.

Of all the women in Joe Palczynski's life, none had struggled harder to give him a future. Over the years, the 56-year-old woman wrote judges begging for leniency. She pleaded with prison wardens. She asked the girls Joe abused - and their parents - not to file charges, not to set his life back one more time.

Long knew what it was to come from behind. After becoming pregnant in high school, she dropped out to marry Joseph Palczynski Sr., a construction worker. They had two daughters and two sons. When Joseph, their third child, was 5, Long left her husband. She eventually married again: John Long was a budget analyst with Baltimore Gas & Electric Co.

One of the marriage's first challenges was finding the right school for Joseph. He failed early grades at several schools before the Longs found a special education program that would work for a child later diagnosed as having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. But his behavior continued to get him into trouble.

When he was 15, Joseph was charged with stealing a friend's gun. Then, in 1985, after his older sister Karen died in a car accident, the 16-year-old fell into a depression and spent most of the summer being treated in the Walter P. Carter Center psychiatric hospital. He had threatened to kill both his stepfather and his biological father, according to mental health reports.

By then, he had also acquired the habit of telling people he was "going to die by the bullet."

His grieving mother knew she had her hands full with Joseph - she never used his nickname "Joby" - and would do anything not to lose another child. Determined to show her son there were plenty of reasons to live, she helped him buy cars, motorcycles and Jet Skis, made sure he had cash. She drove girls from the neighborhood to visit him when he was in jail, brought him a book on electronics so he could learn a skill. She even set aside money to help him when he was released.

But she also criticized the way he treated women.

Pat Long says she grew up in a home where her father beat her mother. She says she was the victim of abuse herself. That kind of damage you can't repair, she told her son.

If you touch her, you might as well leave her, she remembers saying.

But she spit at me, Mom!

So? You're a man. Walk away.

So why don't they walk away?

She knew her son's violent outbursts firsthand. Once, when she washed his jeans and forgot to remove a special black address book from the pocket, he threw a heavy statue of a seahorse past her and hit the living room wall.

"He said, 'I ought to set the house on fire while I'm at it.' I didn't know what to do. He said 'Don't you call anybody, don't you dare.' ... After it was all over, he goes, 'I would never hurt you, don't you know that?'$"

Long says her son was a fun-loving guy. "But at times he got angry. You know why? I carried him angry," she says, referring to her pregnancy during her troubled marriage. "I knew that went into Joseph. It was hate. Hate. I had hate inside me."

Long considered her son's anger uncontrollable, a result of mental illness or perhaps the head injury he received in a minor school bus accident at age 14. Although never condoning his behavior, she believed the girls he dated, girls who said they loved him, should have known better than to provoke his rage.

Joseph treated his girlfriends well, was kind and generous to their children, helped them overcome their problems, she says. But he also chose to date girls who were young - girls who were compassionate enough, or naive enough, or down and out enough not to judge him by his past. The more they blossomed, the more jealous and possessive he became.

"Joseph always thought he could help the poor [ones]," Long says. "He had to relate to that poor stuff, those nothing girls, because he wanted to feel special. ... Tracy had nothing until she met Joseph. He made her into someone new, into a nice young lady. He didn't want someone else to have Tracy."

Long once saw him hit the young woman, but she felt there was little she could do except urge her son to get medication and keep her own lines of communication open.

When Joseph punched a hole in her living room wall last year, Long blamed herself. She apologized for making him snap at a time when he was grieving the death of his stepfather, John Long. In 1997, after surviving surgery and treatment for melanoma, Pat Long had decided to leave her husband. She filed for divorce. Last December, he killed himself.

Now, less than three months later, her son was facing new charges. Long dreaded the likelihood that he would return to jail, a place where he said he had been sexually assaulted. She was certain he would do almost anything not to go back. It was impossible not to feel despair.

On March 6, when Joseph dropped by, Pat told him how she felt.

She said she felt like dying.

He asked if she wanted to buy a gun. Together, he said, they could "join John and Karen." Long refused to kill herself. But her son felt otherwise.

I'm going to die, he told her. I can't live no more. I'm going to have to die.

Later that day, Joby persuaded one of his mother's neighbors to buy him a 12-gauge shotgun and a .22-caliber rifle. He needed them, he told her, for target practice.

The Rampage Begins

On March 7, Tracy Whitehead had completed her first day as an assistant store manager at D. E. Jones and paid a visit to the tanning salon. She was walking back to Gloria Shenk's apartment in Bowley's Quarters when a car pulled up beside her. It was Joby in his mother's Plymouth Voyager.

Tracy, I love you. Please, can we talk? Joby said.

I'm through with you, she replied. Leave me alone.

Tracy knew Joby was furious she had gotten him locked up. But when she'd left before, he had never followed through on threats to harm her or her family. As long as they weren't alone together, she wasn't afraid of him.

Less than two hours later, Tracy was watching "Walker, Texas Ranger" with Gloria and George Shenk when Joby, armed with two guns, entered through the unlocked sliding glass door.

Tracy, you are coming with me!

Stunned, Tracy froze, then dropped to the ground. She was looking down when Joby shot Gloria. She didn't see him shoot George, either. But the screams of two children visiting the couple filled her head as she crawled toward the door.

Don't touch the doorknob! he yelled.

Joby dragged her barefoot, by the hair, into the cold night, where her screams attracted a neighbor. When David Meyers tried to stop Joby, he was shot , too. Oh, my God! she heard the man say before Joby shoved her into his mother's van and drove off.

He ordered her to put on combat boots and a black jacket and cap. Then he parked the van and took her into the woods, where he punched her in the nose and told her to lie on the ground. He held a gun to the back of her head.

I should kill you right now.

Tracy begged Joby to let her live long enough to tell her son she loved him. Instead, he began to describe the tortures he planned: He would blow away her arms and legs and leave her to live in a wheelchair. He would pull out her teeth, one by one.

Please kill me. Please just kill me, she pleaded.

He told her to get up, then hit her in the chest with the rifle. Hands over her head, gasping for air, Tracy walked on through the mud and brush.

Are you going to kill me?

Hurry up!

Finally they stumbled upon a vacant camper. Shaking, freezing and thirsty, Tracy collapsed inside on a blue blanket. Joby pulled down her pants.

At daylight, when he woke her, his anger was gone. He fashioned a bed under a tree with the blanket.

Come on, let's pray, Tracy told him. Ask God to forgive you for what you've done.

Joby told her he loved her so much because she was down-to-earth, the kind of girl he didn't have to impress. He said he always did want to marry her, though he had never really come out and asked.

Now, on that blanket, under the tree, it was time. He had brought the wedding band that matched the ring he had given her.

"He put the ring on my finger," Tracy recalls. "He said he knew it wasn't good timing, and it ain't never going to happen, but he wanted to ask me anyway, and I said yes, that I would, and I cried ..."

Then he took off his necklace with the golden baby ring that had been intended for their first child and put it around her neck. And he asked Tracy to tell his mom that he loved her.

On the blanket they had sex again. Numb, certain he would soon kill her, Tracy prayed silently, over and over: Please, God, I'm not ready to go. Please, God, spare my life.

Joby said he was afraid to go back to jail. He would rather be dead.

You wouldn't have gotten much time and I would've visited you, Tracy told him. But now you done killed three people - and it's over.

No. You would've married somebody else and gone on with your life.

At nightfall, Tracy convinced Joby to leave the woods to find food. They were drinking from a hose behind a house in Chase when the owner drove up. After Joby pulled out his gun, the man ran to the street and began waving down cars for help.

Joby pushed Tracy into the homeowner's car. Later, he ditched it and stole another. They stopped at a drive-through window at a McDonald's, then went to the El-Rich Motel on Pulaski Highway.

The clerk didn't recognize Joby when he paid $40 for the room. It was just after 11 p.m. when they turned on the television. On the news were pictures of the people he had killed. Tracy put down her head and cried. Joby smiled, then grew fearful: We've got to get out of here!

The guns were in the car. As they walked toward it, Joby stopped abruptly: A police cruiser was in the parking lot.

No, Tracy! he cried as she ran toward the police car. Then he bolted in the opposite direction.

'You Can Do This'

Pat Long was beside herself. Police and FBI agents were everywhere, looking for her son. Where was he?

Long didn't like to think of him out in the woods by himself; she knew how much he hated to be alone. She couldn't fathom the pain and destruction her child had caused in his murderous rampage. She could, however, imagine the degree of his desperation. And she shivered at the thought of what he might do next.

She went on television to beg her son to surrender: "When you hurt people, you hurt me. You can't do this to me anymore!" She also left a message on her answering machine:

"Joseph, this is Mom. Please don't do anything wrong anymore, please. I don't want you killed. I don't want to see you die, and I know you said you'd kill yourself before you'd get back. ... Turn yourself in. Please, Joseph, please."

Hundreds of law enforcement officers with bloodhounds and a robot searched woods and storm drains in what would become Baltimore County's most extensive manhunt. Police advisers were trying to predict Palczynski's next move, and citizens flooded a special hotline with sightings of the fugitive. People were buying baseball bats and extra ammunition for their guns. Some parents kept their children home from area schools. The search was making national and international news. And the longer it went on, the more it acquired the mythic sheen of the hunt for Eric Rudolph, the anti-abortion bombing suspect who since 1998 had eluded capture with his survivalist skills.

But those who knew Joby knew better. Despite his public persona as a rugged guy, Palczynski's camping experience was basically confined to sleeping in a tent in the woods on his mother's property. He was less likely to hide in the great outdoors than in the bushes of suburban ranchers. He knew how to track people, how to accost them unexpectedly.

With Palczynski on the loose, police offered protection to several families who worried he might come after them. Among them was Gary Osborne. In 1996, Palczynski was convicted of beating Osborne's daughter, Michella, but only after months of harassing her father. Trying to force the Osbornes to drop their charges, he had persuaded friends to file false reports resulting in Gary Osborne's arrest.

Now Michella's father predicted what Palczynski might do next: When Joby can't get the girl he wants, he told police, he goes after the parents.

Waiting for the End

For nine days after Tracy escaped, Palczynski eluded police.

At first, the young woman went with her family to stay at her aunt's home in East Baltimore. She checked and double-checked the doors to make sure they were locked. Crying in her sleep, she would be awakened by her mother and momentarily imagine Joby was in the room.

Three days after her escape, on March 11, she learned Joby had stolen guns in Virginia and forced a man to drive him back to Baltimore. Police asked her to write Joby a letter, an appeal they would make public.

"You told me you never loved anyone like you love me," she wrote. "If you really love me, show me by turning yourself in."

Police placed Tracy under 24-hour guard at the Holiday Inn in Timonium. There was little to occupy the time except to watch the constant television coverage of the search.

Each time Tracy saw the televised faces of Gloria and George Shenk, she cried. They had been like parents to her. They had offered her refuge in their home, encouraged and applauded her for taking action, for leaving Joby and that abusive relationship behind. Tracy sent a card to the funeral home for their services. It was she who should have died, she told the officers protecting her, not them.

Suddenly one day, police told her they were cutting off her contact with the outside world: No more TV or radio, no more phone calls to family and friends. The replaying of events, they said, was upsetting her. She would be better off this way.

Two more days passed before Tracy was awakened at 3 a.m. by a phone call from the FBI. The agents quizzed her about the health of her mother, her mother's boyfriend and her young stepbrother.

"What's wrong?" she cried. They wouldn't say.

The next morning, two counselors came to tell her Palczynski had taken her family hostage.

On Friday evening, March 17, he had stormed the house on Lange Street where Tracy's mother lived with her boyfriend and his son. Immediately, Joby had reached police on the phone.

"Give me Tracy, I'll give you the hostages," he ordered. "If you don't have her here in 25 minutes, they'll die."

Later, he demanded Tracy be brought to the phone. But police would not allow it. They feared he would torture Tracy by using the occasion to kill her mother.

For four days, the hostages contended with Palczynski's threats and suffered his mood swings. Negotiators tried to soothe him, flattering him by marveling at his skills as an outdoorsman and meeting his requests for food.

When he asked for pizza, not just any pizza would do. It had to come from his favorite place on Eastern Avenue. The more Palczynski felt in control, negotiators advised, the less volatile he was.

At the Holiday Inn, Tracy cried and slept. She played Yahtzee with an officer to keep her mind off the uncertainty of what was happening. And she waited.

In the end, the hostages plotted their own escape. Tracy's mother, Lynn Whitehead, spiked Palczynski's iced tea with crushed tablets of Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug. When he fell asleep, she and her boyfriend, Andy McCord, escaped through a window, leaving his 12-year-old son Bradley behind. A SWAT team burst in and shot Palczynski while other officers rescued the boy.

Late on the night of March 21, an officer interrupted Tracy's Yahtzee game with the news: Her family was safe.

And Joby?

Joby was dead.

Relief & Regrets

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."

A Survivor's Resolve

Tracy Whitehead is working hard, learning how to drive, determined to keep her life moving forward. September will mark her second anniversary off drugs, she says.

She continues to wear the necklace Joby gave her in the woods as well as the ring - but not the wedding band.

No man will ever mistreat her again, she vows.

When she cleaned out the apartment she and Joby had shared, she took the karaoke machine and the camcorder. Her son wanted the Michael Myers "Halloween" mask and a photo of Joby posing behind a cut-out of a soldier shooting a bazooka. She left behind Joby's prized collection of porcelain wizards and dragons and a family picture with the note: I love u Miss Pat.

Pat Long has struggled with her grief, her guilt about the lives her son took and her memories of his bullet-ridden body. But there have also been moments of comfort when she has sensed her son's presence, such as the time Joseph's birth date turned up as the winning lottery numbers.

On a recent day, Tracy dropped by Pat's house unexpectedly. Before Joby died, she had seen Miss Pat almost constantly for two years. She'd been thinking about her a lot, wondering how she was doing.

Pat had been worried, too, hoping the trauma of all this wouldn't send Tracy back to drugs. They were both going through hell - and she didn't blame Tracy for it. Joseph knew his time was coming, Pat told her.

The young woman gave Miss Pat her new phone number. Pat showed Tracy her son's death certificate and his last letter, written March 17 in the house where he hid before seizing his hostages on Lange Street:

Dear Mom:

It's 3:15 p.m. and I just broke into another person's house. I've got a .357 Magnum and a Ruger 10-22 and a few other guns (I'm sure you don't want to hear that Mom). Please don't be upset with me considering I made the choice, yeah, I had sooo much to look forward to - I know. I've been sleeping in the woods and it's been cold - especially when it rained and I was all wet. Mom, I didn't mean to shoot Gloria and George, if only they kept sitting down I wouldn't have shot them. I feel bad for these family's. The other guy surprised me and out of reaction I shot him ...

Mom, when Dad killed himself, something inside me changed. Then when Tracy left - that's all it took. Well I'm sure someone will write a book, make a movie about me. Mom, please tell the family I'm sorry about this mess. I really am.

I know living without me in your life will be difficult but try to live it ... I don't mean to hurt you. Please forgive me . . . . I know a lot of people who love me are disappointed. I'm sorry. Well, I love all of you.

Love, Joseph 007

The two women stood there together with the letter. When one began crying, so did the other. Then Pat Long hugged Tracy Whitehead so hard she could feel both their hearts beating.

2001 Dart Award Acceptance Speech

I am very honored to be here to accept an award that honors not only the Baltimore Sun but also the determination of the group of brave women we interviewed - Tracy Whitehead, Michella Osborne, Lisa Anderson, Stacy Culotta and Amie Gearheart. These women all cared enough about raising public awareness of domestic violence to share their own private moments of terror and humiliation as its victims. Such honest and heartfelt accounts make domestic violence personal and impossible to ignore. I would also like to acknowledge the other members of the team who worked so hard to bring this complicated and nuanced story to light. The talented reporters, editor, photographer and designer are Pat Meisol, Ann LoLordo, Marego Athans, Jan Winburn, Doug Kapustin and Joannah Hill.

And I would like to thank the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma for having the wisdom and compassion to recognize coverage of the often forgotten victims of violence.

Now I would like to tell you a bit more about how these brave young women entrusted their stories to us.

Roughly a year ago, Baltimoreans were swept up in the grim drama of fugitive Joseph Palczynski. The 31-year-old man had kidnapped the girlfriend who fled his abuse, then killed the couple who was sheltering her as well as two other bystanders. After Tracy Whitehead escaped him again, Palczynski took her relatives hostage. The tense stand-off lasted several days before police sharpshooters killed him.

At the time this story was unfolding, I was reading about it several states away in the middle of a family vacation. I imagined the desperation and fear of the young woman Palczynski had abused and kidnapped, never dreaming that I would soon be writing about her nightmares as well as those of the women who came before her.

When I returned, my colleagues and I began investigating Palczynski's record of domestic abuse. Through weeks of reporting and researching, we found that at least seven young women had filed charges against him. We were able to find and talk to most of them. And the details we heard about their seduction and victimization began to sound familiar and chilling.

Through their reports - and those of their families - Joseph Palczynski emerged as the archetypal domestic abuser. His rampage became the ultimate expression of domestic violence: He had finally made good on all of his threats to regain control of his girlfriends.

As we interviewed these women, we discovered many of the stereotypes about domestic abuse were still firmly in place when they pressed charges:

What did she do to provoke him?

If he hurt her so bad, where are the bruises?

If he beat her up like she says, then why did she go back with him? Maybe she was lying because she was jealous.

After hearing each woman's harrowing tale of being beaten and threatened, such widespread misconceptions made me furious. Who were these sexist idiots, I wondered.

Then I found that even my own friends were suspicious about the victims we had interviewed.

What did all those women see in that guy? They'd ask, thinking of the prison mug shot they knew from TV. How could anyone in her right mind go out with him? These women must have been real losers to begin with.

Their comments stuck in my mind. This blame-the-victim perception became the most persistent stereotype in a story riddled with cultural biases.

And it determined how I structured the story.

I wanted readers to know these victims as the attractive, starry-eyed teenagers they were when they first met Joseph Palczynski. His victims were mostly 16 and 17 year old girls who were longing to be treated as grownups. They were pretty, passionate, and vulnerable. And they all believed in giving people second chances.

The lead of the story became their vision of Palczynski, a vision they almost completely agreed upon. He was a handsome, cleancut young man who opened doors for them and was polite to their parents. He brought them flowers, picked them up from school in his sports car. He took them to meet his mother. He spent lots of time listening to them ... then he actually remembered what they had said.

In short, Palczynski was everything their parents had always told them they deserved. No one had ever made them feel that special, they told us.

Were these women losers? No. Like so many battered women, they were young girls who had fallen deeply and completely in love with a man who would first use their love to persuade them, then twist it to hurt them.

More than anything else, I wanted to reveal the truth about the manipulative nature of domestic abuse - and about how anyone can be susceptible to it.

Palczynski often boasted that he could con judges and shrinks. And it was his ability to turn on the charm, to persuade people to see things the way he wanted them to, that convinced many authorities to treat him more leniently. The series showed that each time that happened, his victims suffered more. Each time he was let off the hook, his victims were led to feel somehow responsible for his violence against them.

I hope this series set the record straight on Palczynski's intentions and powers of manipulation. However, his victims have not yet recovered. And their pain and troubles continue to haunt me.

The most difficult part of this story for me was discovering how many of the women are still grappling with the after-effects of Palczynski's physical and psychological torment - despite good support systems. Several women have abused drugs and have been treated for clinical depression. One is afraid to take a walk by herself. Another will not sleep alone at night. All have struggled, some unsuccessfully, to establish healthy relationships with men. And the victims' families, of course, have suffered with them.

I am grateful to the Dart Center for calling attention with this award to the plight of the victims of domestic violence - and to the work that remains to be done on this important, misunderstood subject.

Thank you.

2001 Dart Award Judges

2001 Preliminary Judges

David Boardman is an Assistant Managing Editor of The Seattle Times, with oversight of investigative and computer-assisted reporting, the Sports and Business departments, news research and the newspaper's legal matters. He has directed two Pulitzer Prize-winning team projects: an investigation of abuses in the federal tribal-housing program (1997 Pulitzer for investigative reporting), and coverage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill and its aftermath (1990 Pulitzer for national reporting); three other stories he edited were Pulitzer finalists. Boardman has received other major national awards, including the Goldsmith Prize in Investigative Reporting from Harvard University, the Worth Bingham Prize in Investigative Reporting, the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award, and the Associated Press Managing Editors Public Service Award. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Investigative Reporters and Editors. Boardman graduated from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, and has a graduate degree from the University of Washington.

Jason Cubert is a second year Master's student at the University of Washington School of Communications. It is also his second year as a Research Assistant for the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma. While his personal scholarship concerns itself with alternative media, identity, and cultural studies, Jason's work with the Dart Center has focused primarily on newspaper coverage of domestic violence fatalities in Washington State, following up that study by questioning journalists about their approaches to DV coverage. Cubert is currently interested in shedding light on the oft-ignored phenomenon of domestic violence in same sex relationships.

Mike Henderson has been a lecturer at the University of Washington School of Communications since 1994. He teaches journalism-skills courses and is director of the School's News Lab student news bureau. Prior to arriving at the UW, Henderson was an editor and columnist at The Seattle Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Everett Herald, Eugene Register-Guard and Anchorage Daily Times. He continues to publish newspaper articles and reviews. Among the publishers of his approximately 4,500 articles are Newsday, the Los Angeles Times and others. He also is co-author of several books, including "Why I Am an Abortion Doctor" (Prometheus, 1996). Henderson's awards include a 1991 humor-writing honor from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. He is anthologized in "The Best of the Rest," featuring columns by American newspaper writers.

Phuong Le is a reporter at the Seattle Post Intelligencer, covering neighborhoods and civic issues for the past two years. She has also worked for the San Jose Mercury News, reporting on education, and has covered crime and courts for the Chicago Tribune. Phuong Le grew up in California, and holds a BA in English at UCLA and an MA in Education at the University of Michigan.

Cindi Sinnema was victim advocate and Program Coordinator for Separation and Loss Services at Virginia Mason Medical Center (1992-1998). Her primary responsibility was contacting families following homicides in King County, and providing assistance with Crime Victim's Compensation, the criminal justice system, and media interaction. She also facilitated support groups for survivors, as well as education and support services to workplace, church, school, or community groups following a violent death. Prior to that job, Sinnema was Outreach Coordinator for Families and Friends of Violent Crime Victims (1990-1992), and held an Internship with the Seattle Police Department Victim Witness Unit. She is a 1990 University of Washington graduate.

2001 Final Judges

Betty Winston Baye is an editorial writer and nationally syndicated columnist for The Courier-Journal in Louisville, KY. Other positions she has held since 1984 include metro reporter, assistant city editor, and assistant neighborhoods editor. Previously, she covered urban affairs for the Daily Argus in Mount Vernon, NY. Baye holds a masters degree from Columbia University School of Journalism. She was a 1990-91 Nieman Fellow, and has taught at Hunter College and at the Poynter Institute. Among her honors are Best of Gannett (column-writing), NABJ Region VI Hall of Fame Award, and Black Achiever of the Chestnut Street YMCA. A former off-Broadway actress, Baye has hosted and produced a public affairs and African American cultural showcase, “The Betty Baye Show” since 1995. She is the author of the novel, The Africans (1983) and Blackbird (August Press, 2000), a collection of columns and original essays. Baye is past national vice president of the National Association of Black Journalists, a charter member of The William Monroe Trotter group (a collective of African American opinion writers), and is founder of the Black Alumni Network at Columbia University School of Journalism.

John Briere, Ph.D. is president-elect of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. He is Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Director of the Psychological Trauma Clinic at LAC-USC Medical Center, and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association. Briere is author of a number of books, articles, and chapters in the areas of child abuse, psychological trauma, and interpersonal violence. Recent books include Psychological Assessment of Adult Posttraumatic States (American Psychological Association), Therapy for Adults Molested as Children: Beyond Survival, Second Edition , and Child Abuse Trauma: Theory and Treatment of the Lasting Effects . He is co-editor of the APSAC Handbook on Child Maltreatment , and author of two standardized psychological tests, the Trauma Symptom Inventory and the Trauma Symptom Checklist for Children, as well as four new tests in progress with Psychological Assessment Resources. Briere is a recent recipient of the Laufer Memorial Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, and the Outstanding Professional Award from the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children. He provides consultation on clinical, forensic, and scientific issues to various groups and governmental agencies.

David Handschuh is President of the National Press Photographers Association. He has been a staff photographer at the New York Daily News for 14 years. Before that he was on staff at The New York Post and freelanced for the Associated Press, The New York Times, and other daily and weekly publications. Handschuh has been nominated three times for a Pulitzer Prize, and has received numerous awards for photography from the Pictures of the Year Competition, The New York Press Photographer's Association, The New York Press Club, Society of Silurians, and many police, fire and EMS organizations. Handschuh was a 1999 Dart Fellow, and continues to work with that group to formulate a Critical Incident Response Team for Photojournalists exposed to work-related traumatic situations. He is an adjunct professor at New York University, and co-author of The National Media Guide for Disaster and Emergency Incidents. Handschuh lectures often to photography and civic groups and to public safety agencies on photojournalism, news and feature photography, and on ways to improve the relationship between the media and public safety providers.

Sonia Nazario is urban affairs writer for the Los Angeles Times. She previously worked for the Wall Street Journal as a staff reporter covering social issues and Latin America, as a summer intern for The Washington Post, and as a reporter for El Pais (Madrid, Spain). Nazario received a 1994 (team) Pulitzer Prize for local reporting of spot news, presented to the staff of The Times for coverage of the first day of the Los Angeles earthquake. She was a Pulitzer finalist in 1998 for “Orphans of Addiction,” a series for which she received a National Council on Crime and Delinquency PASS Award, a Greater Los Angeles Press Club-40th Annual Southern California Journalism award for feature reporting, first place for Investigative and Enterprise reporting from the California Newspaper Publishers Association, and a Times Mirror Chairman's Award, among others. In 1997-98, for “Suicidal Tendencies: When Kids See Death as an Answer,” she received a Life-Time Award and a commendation from the American Psychiatric Association. Others include a 1996 Los Angeles Times Editorial Award for “Driven to Extremes: Life in the Antelope Valley,” and a George Polk Award for Local Reporting in 1994 for “The Hunger Wars—Fighting for Food in Southern California.” Nazario has a master's degree in Latin American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

Susan Russell is Project Coordinator with Vermont Victim Services 2000, a national demonstration project to improve the range, quality, and accessibility of services to all crime victims in the state. A survivor of violent crime, Russell has been active in victim services since the mid-1990s. She was a Victim Advocate at Addison County Women in Crisis, served as Chair of the Sexual Violence Task Force of the VT Network Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault, and currently serves as a consultant to the Office for Victims of Crime (OVC). In 1998 she was appointed by Governor Howard Dean to serve as the victim representative on the Vermont Center for Crime Victim Services' Victim Compensation Board; she has also served on the Vermont Network Legislative Committee (1996-1999) and was appointed by the Commissioner of Corrections to the Addison County Reparative Probation Board (1998-1999). Russell has spoken at workshops and conferences in Vermont, Toronto, Hawaii, and at the U.S. Department of Justice. In 1995 she was awarded Outstanding Victim Advocacy and Awareness by the Vermont Center for Crime Victim Services and the VT Network. Russell holds an M.A. in Public Policy from Norwich University.