Viewers know Peter Thomas as the narrator of Forensic Files, but his career started long before anyone had heard of high-velocity blood splatter or age-processed clay busts. Some trivia from a long (1924 to 2016) and productive life:
1.Peter Thomas voiced the 1970 commercial that declared “Tang was chosen to go to the moon with the Apollo astronauts.”
2. He considered himself lucky that his voice didn’t change as he aged. He recorded a Gettysburg audio tour in 1974 and was able to add verbiage 30 years later. His voice matched.
3. As a favor to Johnny Carson, Peter Thomas officiated at the wedding of the talk-show titan’s son Cory Carson to a Naples, Florida, native Angelica D. Carson. Johnny (below) and Peter met when they worked for the The Morning Show on CBS in the 1950s.
4. Peter Thomas postponed his own vacation to help an audio technician save his job. The sound man had messed up a Tropicana commercial recording, so Thomas did it over and never told the guy’s superiors.
5. Of all the Nova episodes he narrated for PBS, “Iceman Murder Mystery” was his favorite.
6. Although Peter Thomas spoke perfectly unaccented North American English, he had foreign-born parents — a father from Wales, a mother from England.
7. He considered the greatest innovations in voice technology to be audio tape (which could be sliced up, so one mistake didn’t mean recording from the beginning again), DAT (digital audio tape), and teleprompters affixed to the camera (instead of off to the side).
8. Don “In a World” Lafontaine (left) and Peter Thomas are considered the two best male narrators of their generation. Apparently, they weren’t rivals and liked each other’s work.
9. He won the audition for an American Express card commercial because he could say the “American Express: Don’t leave home without it” spiel in under five seconds.
10. You needn’t bother searching for Peter Thomas in the bankruptcy court records of the once-rich-and-famous. He lived below his means, invested wisely, and left a well-endowed estate. One Florida property he bought for $1 million was worth $25 million toward the end of his life.
Naples, Florida
Read more about how Peter Thomas rose from the humble son of a schoolteacher and minister to the humble voice of countless commercials and TV shows.— RR
Peter Thomas’ voice has lured me away from all kinds of good intentions: organizing tax documents, cleaning between the sofa cushions with the Dirt Devil crevice tool, going to bed early.
Peter Thomas, seen here in a Lux commercial, did on-camera work in the early days of TV
It’s not easy to describe his voice, although I’ve listened to it for a minimum of 600 collective hours. Thomas was the narrator for Forensic Files, and he’s part of the reason fans like me can’t stop rewatching all 400 episodes of the true-crime series’ 1996 to 2011 run.
Toned up. I guess what’s so inviting about his narration is that his warm, assuring voice is devoid of affectation. He speaks smoothly, although not in a “you’ll get 150 sparkling silver gem studs absolutely free with your BeDazzler” manner. And like all voice artists, he has great diction — but it’s not so crisp as to make it alienating.
“Peter Thomas is the same guy who narrated school documentaries,” says Paul Dowling, executive producer of Forensic Files. “He’s not some sleazy guy from AM radio. He makes it okay to watch.”
Indeed, something about Peter Thomas’ narration enables me to see an episode about a college student who hacked his father to death with an ax — and sleep like a baby afterward.
Randy Thomas, a voiceover artist who narrates the Oscars and Tony Awards, also admires his work on Forensic Files.
“There are some voiceover actors who think they’re doing a good job just because they pronounce the words correctly,” she says. “Peter was different. He had an inquisitive nature about so much of life, and that transferred to whatever he narrated.”
Sunshine boy. My own dream of interviewing Peter Thomas someday — and having that voice all to myself for a little while — expired when he passed away last year, but I had fun researching a bit about his life.
Randy Thomas, narrator for the 2018 Oscars, says Peter Thomas imbued his voice work with a “different sense of wonder for each project”
Thomas was born in Pensacola, Florida, in 1924, to two people who enjoyed speaking aloud and enunciating well: an English teacher and a minister.
“His father told him to paint pictures with words,” says Randy Thomas (no relation, but the two were close friends).
Peter Thomas started acting in school plays as a child and, at age 13, picked up some voice work at a local radio station. A sponsor gave him flying lessons for free because he was too young to receive a real salary legally.
G.I.-normous. At 18, he took a detour, enlisting in the army and then fighting German gunfire in Normandy, France, in 1944. He earned a Purple Heart after suffering a shrapnel wound during the Battle of the Bulge.
After returning to the U.S. and marrying longtime girlfriend Stella Ford Barrineau, he worked at Memphis radio station WMC at night and went to college during the day.
His big break came when a Hamilton Watch Company executive heard Thomas’ voice on a Florida poetry program and invited him to New York City for an audition. He won the gig, and soon nationwide audiences got to hear his voice say: “The passage of time is beyond our control, but it passes beautifully when Hamilton marks the hour.”
No mere vapor. A tidal wave of offers followed. CBS hired Thomas as the New York City anchor of The Morning Show with Jack Parr. Thomas narrated medical shows and educational documentaries and did commercials for Estée Lauder, Coke, American Express (“Don’t leave home without it”), Visine, Listerine (“The taste you hate twice a day”), and Hewlett-Packard.
Thomas’ house in Florida — he returned to the state late in his career — had a recording studio
A 2004 Broadcast Pioneers documentary from Florida station METV recalled how — in the days long before TV assaulted viewers with Preparation H and Cialis commercials — Stella rebuked her husband for narrating a Vicks Mentholatum ad. She didn’t appreciate having to watch ointment rubbed onto an actor’s chest.
Plenty of more-serious work came his way. He snagged narration gigs for the PBS series Nova as well as for the History Channel — the holy grail for voice performers.
Didn’t phone it in. His association with Forensic Files began when the 30-minute docuseries was still in development. “I fell asleep on the couch one night and there was a World War II documentary on,” says show creator Paul Dowling, “and I heard this voice, and he was carrying the whole thing. It was mesmerizing.”
Thomas turned down Medstar Television’s offer for the Forensic Files job at first because he was still earning a fortune from TV commercials and other one-offs. But after some persuading, he agreed.
His approach to the gig reaffirms one of my favorite truisms about life: No matter how talented the worker, there’s no such thing as an easy job. Thomas would spend six hours rehearsing each script at home. Stella would give him feedback.
“Forensic Files is on somewhere in the world at any given time,” says Randy Thomas. “There’s always the consistency of Peter Thomas’ voice behind the microphone, and he’s become the show’s brand.”
He also occasionally contributed to the show editorially.
Thomas (with Paul Dowling) at a ceremony honoring his work on behalf of WW II veterans
“If he didn’t like something I wrote, he’d say, ‘I don’t want to offend you, but can I change this?'” recalls Dowling. “And I said, ‘I can take all the help you can give.’ We never told him to just shut up and do the script, which is how most producers treat talent, and I didn’t find out until his funeral that we were the only ones who didn’t treat him that way.”
Thomas remained in demand for his work through age 90. He died at 91, on April 30, 2016, but his voice lives on — and not just on recordings. His sons, Peter Jr. and Douglas, followed him into the profession. — RR
Update: Read 10 fun facts about Forensic Files narrator Peter Thomas.
How did Forensic Files become the I Love Lucy of true-crime shows — with reruns on every day, everywhere from Montreal to Melbourne? The half-hour series has been compelling fans to procrastinate on their housework and homework and gym schedules for two decades.
Paul Dowling with his daughter, Brae
Since starting this blog last year, I’ve used it to answer lingering questions about specific Forensic Files episodes. With this post, I hope to solve some mysteries about the series as a whole.
Executive producer Paul Dowling, whose Medstar Television made all 400 episodes, allowed me to interrogate him during a phone call:
Forensic Files is shown in 142 countries — why are overseas viewers so interested in U.S. crimes? In many countries, cases aren’t covered in the media the way they are here.
Often the laws are different from American laws. In Great Britain, there is confidentiality until the case is decided. The crime files aren’t open the way they can be in the U.S. Same thing in Canada — you don’t learn about someone being arrested for rape or murder before the case is decided. And if he’s exonerated, you never know about it.
That can give people in other countries the wrong idea about the U.S. Brazil has a murder rate 3x higher than ours. Everyone has guns except for innocent law-abiding people, and when bad guys come to the door, they can’t defend themselves. And then they see American television and think the crime rate is much higher in the U.S.
There was a rape and murder in Brazil in front of 12 people and no one testified. People in Brazil asked me whether I’m afraid to walk the streets in the U.S. I said no, I’m afraid here.
When I was in Paris, I was told to dress like a bum [to prevent robbery].
How do you pack the whole story into 30-minute episodes?We have 22 minutes. It’s like a Broadway musical: Every line of that song has to move the story along.
As you are creating the story, you don’t think, “How will I write this?” You think, “How will I say this?”
You can tell a lot with the pictures you use. If we show a girl holding a fish [that she caught], it says something about who she was.
For every story we did, all 400, before the show aired, I sat down with three people and told them the story. It enabled me to see how the story worked. If their eyes glazed over, I knew the story was going too slowly.
It’s like campfire storytelling — if you want to keep boys and girls awake, you have to tell a good story.
How is it contending with the pressure for Nielsen ratings? Imagine you’re doing a Broadway musical and, at any moment, the audience can stay right in their same seats and have their choice of switching to 500 other musicals.
That’s TV.
TV producers are not evaluated on the value of their show — or how many people watch it. They are evaluated on how many viewers watch the ads during breaks.
You have to have a show that people are emotionally tied to so that they are afraid to get up.
Chloe (left, with pal Kimber) often visited the studio behind the scenes
How do you keep viewers in their seats?When I started the show on TLC in 1996, they wanted us to use teasers. I said no: The show should provide the incentive for viewers to come back. Toward the end of Jeopardy, when they come back from the break, Alex goes right into the Final Jeopardy question — there’s no recap. People don’t want to miss that question.
Viewers of Forensic Files want to know who killed that guy. That’s why you can’t open the show with any hint of who did it.
When we interviewed a killer on camera, we would go to the prison with our own [street] clothes for him to wear. That way, viewers don’t know yet that he did it.
We also use the passive tense in scripts, even though writers are taught not to in school. The passive tense lets you put information out there without saying who did it.
And we also don’t use big fancy words if there’s no need. A screenwriter had me look at a script once, and I said, “What does this word mean? I have two college degrees and I don’t know.” If you were at a picnic or dinner party and someone used that word, how would it make you feel?
Why do you interview the murder victims’ mothers and fathers separately — even if they’re still married? If you have two dogs in the house, there’s always one dominant one. Likewise, sometimes people say things in front of you they wouldn’t say in front of their spouse. There are interview tricks that work with one person but not two at the same time. People are often uncomfortable with silences, so sometimes they’ll blurt out something they wouldn’t [with a spouse present].
A lot of true-crime series show victims’ family members in tears. Why doesn’t Forensic Files? Because it’s manipulative. There are techniques TV producers use to make a person cry. And the viewer feels sorry for the person and gets mad at the TV show for subjecting that person to heartache.
And oftentimes it’s a year or more after the crime, so people are more composed.
We give murder victims’ families a cleaned-up version of the episode they’re in.
You mean a version without graphic footage of wounds, autopsies, etc.? Yes, we tell them that this is the version they’ll want to watch and show their friends.
You recently tweeted that your dog Chloe had passed away at age 15. How was she involved in the show? She used to come in the editing room with us, next to the editor. I was working so hard that I wasn’t home a lot, and my kids would come in with sleeping bags and pizza and the dog would eat pizza behind our backs.
Chloe was here when we did reenactments with German shepherd-style attack dogs. She started running in circles and getting bent out of shape.
So you used real dogs and cats in the reenactments?Yes, and we had a trained squirrel and homing pigeons and a kangaroo once.
What about reenactments of vehicular accidents — did you use stock footage?No. Every crash you see on Forensic Files is something we created. We did a show about boat crashes, and we bought boats. We use cars that are the same model and color [as those in the real accidents]. Some movies edit crashes and fast-forward to a stock shot of the outcome. Forensic Files shows crashes without an edit.
With crashes, you can’t have gasoline in the cars — you don’t want explosions. So sometimes you have motorized pushers. But you have to be fair as far as the speeds used, so a defense attorney doesn’t come back and say to you, “Hey, the real crash was 30 mph, but the show’s was 70 mph.”
Doesn’t all that make accident reenactions awfully expensive?Yes, but there was never a budget limit for re-creations. I never wanted anyone to be hurt in an accident re-creation and to have the director say afterward, “Well, I only had $50,000.”
Were there any episodes that chilled you to the bone, that you couldn’t forget after you went home?Yes, if we hadn’t done one particular episode, three people would be in prison for something they didn’t do. It was for the Norfolk rape and killing of Michelle Moore-Bosko in 1997, and these three people didn’t do it. Someone else confessed to the crime, and the prosecutor wouldn’t act.
Tim Kaine was governor of Virginia then, and he saw the episode [“Eight Men Out,” 2001] and had the state police reinvestigate.
I read that “Bad Blood” — the story of a woman raped by a doctor (John Schneeberger) while she was unconscious — was your favorite episode of Forensic Files. Why? If a forensic hall of fame existed, that victim would belong in it.
The doctor’s DNA didn’t match the rapist’s. The victim was sure the hospital was being paid off to throw the tests or something. So she broke into the doctor’s things and got his Chapstick. She paid for a DNA test with her own money, and it matched the DNA from the rape.
It turned out the doctor had implanted a plastic tube into his arm with somebody else’s blood and was having that blood tested.
The doctor’s wife had been saying on TV that this woman was a slut. And then the wife’s daughter from another marriage who lived with them told her mother that the stepdad [Schneeberger] had been drugging and raping her.
Paul Dowling at the 2016 Mipcom trade show in Cannes. A German network licensed Forensic Files for 10 years because “there are people who aren’t born yet who’ll want to see it”
After talking to various people who watch Forensic Files, I haven’t really been able to identify a demographic pattern. Have you? One thing we know is that a lot of women watch the show for safety reasons — knowledge of safety they can pass along to their daughters.
Can you share any safety tips?We don’t get into victim-shaming, but we do show things that the victims shouldn’t have done regarding situational awareness.
Some girls and women don’t know that there are predators at bars and clubs casing them out. A predator will watch for things like two women walking in together late. He knows that later in the evening they will have parked farther away. So when they’re ready to leave, if one stays and the other goes out to get the car and drive it around, the predator will follow her out to the car.
I tell my daughter and her friends what the FBI says: When you go to your car, have your keys in your hand. If someone with a gun comes up and says to get in the car, throw your keys and purse in one direction and run in the other. The bad guy isn’t expecting this, so he thinks, “I can get the money and car instead of going after her.”♠
This week, instead of recapping an episode of Forensic Files, I’d like to explain a bit about the series itself and the genre it inhabits.
Forensic Files executive producer Paul Dowling
Despite that the show has been around for 20 years and is broadcast in 142 countries, a lot of prospective viewers mistakenly lump it in with other TV fare related to crime.
Forensic Files is a straight-up true-crime series as opposed to the wholly fictional crime dramas (such as CSI ) that dominate network TV.
It also differs from made-for-TV movies (Like Mother Like Son: The Strange Story of Sante and Kenny Kimes) that are based on real crimes but also may take dramatic license by making up dialogue and creating composite characters.
Classifying. True-crime shows feature interviews with the real-life investigators and lawyers who worked on the cases and friends and family members of the victims.
These series can’t pack in every element of the story, but they don’t fabricate any either. On the Case with Paula Zahn, 48 Hours Mystery, and certain Dateline NBC shows fall into this category.
Forensic Files belongs to the same genre, but there’s no Erin Moriarty or Keith Morrison hosting the show or appearing on camera during interviews.
Each 30-minute Forensic Files episode is a mini documentary told in a whodunit format with off-camera narration by Peter Thomas. It includes some re-creations of events, but they’re labeled as such and don’t take liberties.
Nothing tawdry. And the producers of Forensic Files have taken pains to make the shows tasteful. You won’t see any interviewees melt down and become hysterical on camera.
And the producers never make viewers wince through oversexualized reenactments with low production values.
“There’s something in TV called ‘permission to watch,'” Forensic Files executive producer Paul Dowling explained an interview with True Crime Truant. “We provide a show you can leave on if your 8-year-old daughter and her friends come in the room.”
If you’ve never seen Forensic Files, you probably haven’t been looking too hard. You can find it somewhere on any given day.
Netflix streaming, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Roku, Apple TV, HLN (which has regular marathon showings), and the Escape channel are a few of the outlets that carry the show. And most of the episodes have been uploaded to YouTube.
Media critic Robert Thompson is a Forensic Files fan
There are 400 episodes of Forensic Files produced from 1996 to 2011. The show is not going away anytime soon, in part because the producers avoided crimes involving celebrities.
“Most viewers don’t know what the cases are, so the Forensic Files episodes don’t get boring,” says Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television & Popular Culture at Syracuse University.
And speaking of gripping content, here’s some exciting news: Next week’s post will be a Q&A drawn from an in-depth interview that Forensic Files creator Paul Dowling gave to True Crime Truant.
Dowling divulges some behind-the-scenes secrets and discusses his relationship with the great and unpretentious voice-over artist Peter Thomas.
Cautionary words. And he offers some safety tips that I’ve never heard — advice that can help you remain a fan of true-crime shows rather than the subject of one.
A Showboating Ax Murderer
(“Family Ties,” Forensic Files)
Last week’s post recapped “Family Ties,” the Forensic Files episode about Christopher Porco, whose flights of fancy and financial misdeeds compelled him to plot the murders of his parents.
Long before the tragedy: Joan and Peter Porco with their sons, Christopher on the left, in the 1980s
A jury convicted Christopher, an academically derelict University of Rochester student from Bethlehem, New York, of attacking Joan and Peter Porco with an ax as they slept on November 15, 2004. The tall, nice-looking 21-year-old had hoped to bail himself out of his financial problems and cadge some disposable income via his mother and father’s life insurance payout.
But, ironically, the lack of diligence that sullied Christopher’s scholarly pursuits also hindered his get-rich-quick plan. His father did not die immediately but rather lived for a few hours after the assault, and his mother survived her wounds and is alive today.
Strange functionality. This week, I’d like to focus on three of the intriguing aspects of the case. First and foremost, the medical one.
After being struck 16 times with an ax and lying unconscious as his son sneaked away from the suburban charnel house, Peter Porco arose from bed, put on clothing, ambled downstairs to get breakfast, went outside to retrieve the newspaper, realized he’d locked himself out, found a spare key in its hiding place, let himself back inside, and died of blood loss.
As Forensic Files explained it, an injury can damage the brain’s neocortex, which controls reasoning, but leave intact the underlying paleocortex, which guides second-nature habits.
“The neocortex is especially vulnerable to external injury,” according to the Handbook of Affective Sciences (Oxford University Press, 2003). “Wounds or other injury may sometimes destroy a [neo]cortical region without damaging deeper brain structures.”
In other words, Peter Porco’s fleeting transformation into a real-world ghost was haunting but not particularly mysterious.
The book also noted that the neocortex “segregates functions especially well across spatial regions” and that “lesions to the neocortex are more likely to be localized to a single region than are subcortical regions.”
I think all of that means it’s possible Peter Porco had a little help from the reasoning part of his mind post-trauma, but the subsection that enables people to self-identify as injured and in need of help was destroyed.
TV movie. On to the gossipy part of the saga. The Lifetime channel made a movie based on the crimes, Romeo Killer: The Chris Porco Story, in 2013. It starred Lolita Davidovich as Joan Porco and Eric McCormack as “Detective Sullivan” — presumably a composite character representing police who worked on the case.
Up-and-coming actor Matt Barr played Christopher Porco in the Lifetime movie about the case
I was surprised to read that Romeo Killer portrayed Christopher Porco as a charming ladies man with lots of friends. The Forensic Files and 48 Hours Mystery episodes about the case didn’t play up that angle.
The movie got passing marks from reviewers, but the reader comment section was where the really interesting critiquing was going on.
Of the 40 comments posted to writer Nellie Andreeva’s Deadline Hollywood review of the movie, more than a dozen came from readers who identified themselves as neighbors or classmates of Christopher Porco — and disputed the notion of his popularity. A couple typical ones:
Leah Blodget: “Romeo? He was not. I grew up in the ‘small town of Delmar, NY’ and the guy was a clown.”
Josh: “I live [in] Delmar and go to Bethlehem High School [and] teachers who had him said he was insane. Mrs. Porco still lives here and she’s so nice. I feel bad for her that this whole thing is being brought back up.”
Benny1311: “I was a year above Porco in school. I had some classes with him and knew one of his girlfriends well. And I must say [she] along with most of his classmates, believe him to be guilty. Chris has a small group of peer supporters – all female – many younger- who seem to have had ‘relations’ with him. His frat brothers and male friends do not back him.”
So, apparently he did have at least some girlfriends but wasn’t necessarily a full-on JFK (Jr. or Sr.) with the ladies.
Where is he now? Finally, I looked around for the latest news on Christopher Porco’s efforts to get out of jail via a new trial or overturned conviction.
He noted that there were no lights on Brockley Street, where the Porcos lived, casting some doubt on a neighbor’s account of spotting Christopher’s yellow Jeep in the driveway the night of the ax attack.
The behavior of the Porco’s dog, which the prosecution had used as evidence, was also disputed in the appeal. Police had theorized that no neighbors heard Barrister bark that night because the killer was someone (presumably Christopher) that the Labrador retriever already knew.
Kindlon, however, argued that Barrister was known for not barking at visitors, whether friends or strangers.
Sarah Fischer, a Fairfield University senior who was Christopher Porco’s girlfriend, testified at the trial.
The lawyer also noted that Peter Porco sometimes deactivated the burglar alarm when letting the dog out at night and then forgot to turn it back on — another challenge to the prosecution’s assertion that Christopher punched in the code the night of the murder and attempted murder.
Another contention — one that makes sense — was that Joan Porco’s alleged nod in answer to the question of whether or not it was Christopher who had attacked her was unreliable evidence because of her severe brain injuries.
But jurors interviewed by 48 Hours Mystery said that they had dismissed the testimony about the nod for precisely that reason and had instead relied on the prosecution’s crime timeline as proof of guilt.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Christopher’s case in 2012. He also lost an appeal in 2014, when an appellate court rejected claims that he was denied effective assistance of appellate counsel. (In fact, a number of reader comments posted to the aforementioned website articles blasted Terence Kindlon and Laurie Shanks for defending Christopher so vigorously in court.)
As of this writing, Christopher, 33, is prisoner #O6A6686 at New York state’s Clinton Correctional Facility, commonly known as Dannemora. He’ll be eligible for parole in the year 2052.
That’s all for this week. Until next Thursday, cheers.—RR
A College Kid Turns Homicidal
“Family Ties” (Forensic Files)
This week, it’s back to Forensic Files, with “Family Ties” (no relation to the 1980s sitcom of the same name).
Christopher Porco
The episode was produced in 2009, toward the end of Forensic Files’ run, and delves into the ax attack on Joan and Peter Porco, a couple from Bethlehem, New York.
The story is something of a middle-class version of the Menendez brothers saga.
Flights of fancy. In the case of the Porcos, there was only one bad son, Christopher, a 21-year-old University of Rochester student. His brother, Jonathan, 23, was on a nuclear submarine at the time of the crime and not implicated.
In the years leading up to the assault on his mother and father, Christopher Porco had told his school friends tall tales about having a wealthy family with extensive real estate holdings and vacation homes. He also committed a number of financial crimes against his parents.
He used ill-gotten loans to pay for a $16,450 yellow Jeep Wrangler and whatever other accoutrements one needs to impersonate a scion of landed gentry.
And he neglected to tell his parents that the university had suspended him because of poor grades and he had wasted his $30,000 in tuition money. He needed another $30,000 once Rochester let him back in.
A way out. All in all, Christopher was in the hole for at least $50,000 — a lot of debt, but not insurmountable.
Instead of working out a plan to repay his parents, he tried to avoid them, then decided to kill them. He had his eye on their $1 million life insurance payout, authorities believe.
The victims as a young couple: Joan Porco, a school speech pathologist, and her husband, Peter, a lawyer, were married for 30 years
Here’s a recap of the Forensic Files episode plus some additional facts about the Porco case drawn from Crime Library, 48 Hours, and Albany’s Times Union newspaper.
On November 15, 2004, law clerk Peter Porco, 52, didn’t show up for work, so his colleague Michael Hart stopped by his house on Brockley Drive to check on him.
Peering in the front-door window, Hart saw Peter’s body sprawled on the floor amid a huge amount of blood.
The authorities would later determine Porco had been struck with an ax 16 times.
Apparent burglary. The police found Joan Porco, 54, in the bedroom. Like her husband, she had been hit with an ax, but only three times. The assault had broken her jaw, destroyed one of her eyes, and penetrated her skull deeply enough to expose her brain.
But she was alive and conscious.
Before paramedics took her to the hospital, Detective Christopher Bowdish questioned her about the attacker. In the presence of Bowdish as well as paramedics on the scene, she nodded yes when asked whether it was her younger son.
Police found that someone had smashed the house’s burglar alarm, snipped the phone line, and opened a window and cut a hole in the screen.
The crime scene in Bethlehem, New York
A newspaper reporter first informed Chris Porco about the murder, and he rushed home from Rochester to see his mother in Albany Medical Center, where she had undergone 12 hours of surgery. He told police he was sleeping in the lounge of his dormitory, Munro House, during the time of the attacks.
Mob link. Investigators had a few leads on other suspects. One, an unhappy litigant in a custody case, had vowed revenge against Peter. But the man had a good alibi.
There was also a theory involving organized crime. Perhaps a former loan shark named Frank “Frankie the Fireman” Porco — a great uncle of Peter’s — had been considering ratting out his mob associates, and they killed Peter as a warning not to.
But Frankie was in jail specifically because he refused to cooperate, so that theory evaporated.
Investigators discovered more-compelling evidence against Christopher Porco.
For one, someone had burglarized the Porco’s house in 2002 and 2003, and Christopher was the No. 1 suspect. He used eBay to sell computer equipment stolen from his parents and a veterinary hospital where he worked part time.
Surveillance cameras. Investigators found surveillance video of a yellow Jeep that supported their contention that Christopher traveled 232 miles from Rochester to the Porco’s house the night of the attack, assaulted his mother and father with an ax, and high-tailed it back to Rochester.
Police couldn’t find any New York State Thruway E-ZPass data on the yellow Jeep, but toll booth attendants at the cash-only lanes said they thought they remembered seeing the car with Christopher in the driver’s seat.
Police found Christopher’s E-ZPass on the floor of his Jeep. He removed it to avoid leaving a digital record on the night of the crime, authorities believe
The video evidence came from the university. It had footage of the yellow Jeep leaving and returning to campus at an interval that fit a realistic timeline for commission of the crime:
• 10:30 p.m. Jeep left Rochester campus • 2:14 a.m. Burglar alarm deactivated at parents’ home • 4:59 a.m. Phone line cut (this was 2004, when land lines were relevant) • 8:30 a.m. Jeep returned to campus
Police believe Christopher cut the hole in the window to make it look like a burglary. Nothing was stolen from the house.
Windfall expected. Jonathan Porco, an officer in the U.S. Navy, said that his brother was one of a handful of people who knew the alarm’s four-digit deactivation code. Christopher smashed the alarm box in a failed attempt to mask the fact that someone had punched the correct code in, investigators theorized.
There was more: Christopher had sought financial advice shortly before the ax attack. He told an investment professional he was coming into some money, investigators discovered.
And of course, they found the evidence about those loans that Christopher had taken out fraudulently — using his parents as cosigners without their knowledge.
Investigators also thought Christopher chose an ax as his weapon in the belief it would divert all suspicion to his mob-involved relative “Frankie the Fireman.”
Buddies no help. The trial took place in July of 2006 with Chief Assistant District Attorney Michael P. McDermott leading the prosecution and lawyers Terence Kindlon and Laurie Shanks defending the accused.
The prosecution had no forensic evidence, except for a New York Thruway ticket that allegedly carried Christopher’s mitochondrial DNA. Investigators theorized he wore scrubs from the veterinary office during the assault and then destroyed or hid them.
A colleague testified that Christopher had experience cleaning up after surgical procedures.
Nine of Christopher’s fraternity brothers refuted his story that he was asleep in the lounge at Rochester, and a neighbor driving by the Porco’s house claimed he glimpsed the Jeep in the driveway on the night of the attacks. Still, there were no eyewitnesses placing Christopher directly at the crime scene inside the house.
Here’s the heart-breaking aspect of the trial: Joan Porco stood by her son through everything. She accompanied him to court and testified for the defense.
Mother’s love. She told the jury she didn’t recall implicating Christopher the night of the attack and that her child would never commit a heinous crime like the one that killed her husband and disfigured her.
She maintained that while Christopher’s financial misdeeds angered her and Peter, they all loved one another and wanted to work on their relationship.
In fact, after Christopher’s 2005 indictment for second-degree murder and attempted murder, Joan had scraped together $250,000 for his bail. The two walked to court with their arms linked.
Joan Porco, seen here offering support to Christopher at the trial in 2006, remembered nothing about the attack. She declined to be interviewed for a “48 Hours” report on the case
None of that helped. A jury quickly convicted Christopher on the strength of the timeline the prosecution constructed.
He got 50 years to life and is at the Clinton Correction Facility in Dannemora, New York.
That’s all for this week’s post, but I’d like to continue next Thursday with a look at some of the other interesting parts of the Christopher Porco drama, including the way his doomed father “woke up” after the attack, the conflicting tales about whether Christopher deserved the “Romeo Killer” nickname a made-for-TV movie gave him, and his recent efforts to exit his maximum-security residence.
Intellectual Thrill Killers A New Crime Library Find
The last post featured instructions for mining content from the Crime Library and gave links to three favorite articles. This week, I’d like to concentrate on a fourth Crime Library gem, Leopold and Loeb.
Loeb (left) was considered the handsome, confident half of the pair, while Leopold was described as socially awkward
Ninty years before affluenza, the trial of two privileged 19-year-old murderers captivated the public.
Richard Loeb and Nathan Lepold both finished high school by age 15 and came from fabulously wealthy families. Loeb’s father was a lawyer and Sears Roebuck executive, and Leopold’s owned a box-manufacturing businesses.
As sometimes happens when you have teenagers with high IQs and few responsibilities, Leopold and Loeb latched onto the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. The two decided that they fit the German philosopher’s definition of infallible supermen unfettered by conventional morality.
To prove it, in 1924, Leopold and Loeb plotted to carry out a murder with impunity. They kidnapped Bobby Franks, 14, a cousin of Loeb’s who lived in Kenwood, the same Chicago neighborhood of mansions that the duo called home.
The killers lured Bobby Franks into their rental vehicle by telling him they wanted to talk about tennis
They suffocated Bobby and secreted his body in a culvert, then sent a note to his parents soliciting $10,000 in exchange for his safe return. (Leopold and Loeb didn’t need the money; the demand was part of their game.)
But Bobby’s body was discovered and identified before the Franks paid any ransom. The killers had left one of his limbs protruding from the culvert. Investigators traced a pair of eyeglasses accidentally dropped at the scene to Leopold.
At first, Leopold and Loeb tried out some phony alibis, most notably that they had picked up a couple of girls (it was the Roaring Twenties, after all) and were cruising around with them at the time of the murder.
Then the two suspects cracked, admitted to the crime, and shocked the world by explaining the methodology and reasoning behind it.
Newspaper readers feasted on the story of Loeb, who received a monthly allowance of $250 and had tennis courts in his backyard, and Leopold, who had a chauffeur and, despite his young age, was an authority on ornithology.
Loeb’s parents engaged Clarence Darrow to defend their son, and he persuaded the jury that the teenagers were undeserving of capital punishment. A snippet from Darrow’s closing statement:
“It was the senseless act of immature and diseased children, as it was; a senseless act of children, wandering around in the dark and moved by some motion, that we still perhaps have not the knowledge or the insight into life to thoroughly understand.”
After his release, Leopold was law-abiding. He wrote an autobiography, “Life Plus 99 Years“
Both received life sentences. Loeb promptly died at the hands of a fellow inmate in Stateville Prison in Joliet, Ill., but Leopold got out alive after 33 years.
Writer Marilyn Bardsley’s 25-page Crime Library piece on Leopold and Loeb is a nice read and includes many vintage photos of the cast of characters as well as accoutrements such as the Hammond Multiplex typewriter used to compose the ransom note. — RR
Befriend the WayBack Machine Using Internet Archive to dig up a gem
My favorite true-crime website was itself killed off.
The Crime Library had an advantage few blogs can hope for: corporate ownership. In other words, a total budget way larger than the $52.95 a year I pay Host Gator for True Crime Truant.
The website logo lives on. It’s just harder to find
TruTV provided the Crime Library with editorial staff, IT people, and designers — who all got paid for their work. (What’s up with that?)
But what Corporate America gives, it can also take away.
Marginalized. According to a Reddit post by a former Crime Library editor, TruTV began to turn away from its true-crime roots and instead produce shows like Impractical Jokers.
The network got less comfortable with having serious murder-related subject matter as part of its brand, and gradually cut back on Crime Library’s resources until one day it sentenced the site to death.
It’s a shame because long-form true-crime pieces written for websites are in short supply.
Excavating. Fortunately, all the Crime Library content still exists online; it’s just a bit more work to dig it up. The Internet Archive makes it available via the WayBack Machine. Try following these steps:
2. In the “WayBackMachine” field at the top center of the page, type in “crimelibrary.com.” Hit return.
3. Wait patiently for it to load.
4. This is the step that can throw you off. You’ll see a horizontal time line of years above a month-by-month calendar. Scroll right to 2014, and click on it. Next, click on the blue circle around January 1 on the calendar.
5. It’ll take you to a Crime Library landing page with one or more promoted stories accompanied by photos; ignore this content. (It’s from the site’s later days, when corporate owners were pushing the editors to create lightweight items.)
6. On the righthand side of the page, use Categories to click through lists of older, more substantial pieces.
Some good ones:
• An American Tragedy: The Murder of Grace Browntells the true story behind Theodore Dreiser’s novel An America Tragedy and the movie A Place in the Sun with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift: In 1906, a social-climbing young executive named Chester Gillette killed his pregnant working-class girlfriend, Grace Brown. The highly publicized trial was a precursor to the Lindbergh and OJ circuses.
• Dr. Jeff MacDonald is about the Mr. Everything That’s Great About America surgeon convicted of the 1970 murders of his wife and two small children. The story remains relevant because MacDonald still has advocates working to get him out of prison. Crime Library writer John Boston argues the case for his innocence, a none-too-popular stance since the book Fatal Vision by Joe McGinniss pretty much locked him in as guilty in the minds of the public. But it’s definitely worth reading the Crime Library’s take on the matter, particularly since MacDonald does have a few heavy hitters, including New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm, on his side.
• John List, the accountant who executed his family in 1971, has never stopped fascinating true crime fans. He left a note explaining that he shot his mother, wife, daughter, and two sons to save their souls. Then he disappeared for two decades. His gigantic Victorian house in Westfield, New Jersey, remained empty, spooking neighborhood kids (scavenger hunts would require players to retrieve something from the property) and then mysteriously burning down. The Crime Library piece by Katherine Ramsland provides details I never read or saw anywhere else, including in the Forensic Files episode “The List Murders.”
Please leave a comment to let me know whether you find the WayBack Machine instructions useful — and whether you discover any other treasures in the Crime Library. There are surely many more to be recovered and reexamined. Cheers.— RR
We Americans sure do like women who kill. That is, we like to watch them and read about them.
To market tawdry books based on real crimes, publishers used romanticized drawings, like this one of Belle Gunness in the early 1900s. See below for a photo
It’s not just a recent phenomenon. A century before Casey Anthony and Jodi Arias delivered ratings for HLN, the story of Belle Gunness, a Norwegian-American who killed her suitors, husbands, and even her own offspring, sold fanciful paperbacks for enterprising publishers.
Genuine evil. Forensic Files has brought us many a memorable modern-day murderess, including Stacey Castor, who poisoned her husband and then tried to blame the crime on her daughter. And Sharon Zachary, who beat to death the old man she was paid to take care of; she was in his will and couldn’t wait. Sixteen-year-old Idaho resident Sarah Johnson, who shot her parents to silence their objections over her relationship with an older boy, was another memorable one.
And Dante Sutorius, the newlywed who seemed charming until she got greedy and executed her husband for life insurance money, made a colorful subject for “A Second Shot at Love.”
Not that the media coverage these types of crimes receive has ever fooled viewers into thinking that women are going berserk out there, mowing down anyone standing in the way of their ambitions. Most homicides are committed by men. But I got curious about exactly how the numbers break down by gender.
Below, the results of a little research.
Relative trouble. Only 20 percent of people who killed family members were female, according to the most recent (2005) numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Narrowing it down to spouse murderers, women committed just 17 percent of those crimes. Of those Americans who killed a boyfriend or girlfriend, women were slightly more heavily represented, at 25 percent. Most spouse murderers — of either gender — were over 35 years of age. (Maybe it takes a while to build up homicidal fury.)
Men committed 90 percent of murders overall — that is, any homicides, regardless of whether the victim was a stranger, acquaintance, friend, love interest, or spouse.
Getting quantitative. Recent statistics on male vs. female convictions for spouse homicide were hard to come by, but a 1995 BJS study of cases in the 75 most heavily populated U.S. counties reported that women were five times more likely to beat murder raps. Juries acquitted 31 percent of wives, but only 6 percent of husbands.
Brawny Indiana farmer Belle Gunness, seen here with her children, got away with dozens of murders from 1884 until authorities caught on in 1908
Please leave a comment if you find any other interesting homicide stats or have a theory about why women commit way fewer murders (and are more likely to escape conviction when they do) than men. — RR
Q&A with an Advocate for Trauma Victims (“Tourist Trap,” Forensic Files)
Amid the violence of the Miami tourist-robbery epidemic, Helga Luest’s case stands out as something of an anomaly. As recapped in the November 10th blog post, Luest and her mother faced attackers in stereo, one on either side of their car.
Helga Luest in 2016
The unusual part was that Stanley Cornet and his accomplice seemed caught up in brutality for brutality’s sake. “We offered to give them everything to leave us alone,” Luest recalls, “but they said they were going to kill us.” The pair either forgot, or never intended, to steal anything from the women.
Instead, Cornet and an unidentified associate pummeled them. Cornet bit down on Luest’s arm, piercing the muscle.
Luest subsequently appeared on “Tourist Trap,” the Forensic Files episode that told the story of the early-1990s South Florida crime wave that shocked the world. At the time, nightly newscasts were reporting story after story about brazen thieves ambushing travelers in daylight, smashing the windows of their rental cars, and occasionally killing those who resisted and some who didn’t.
Today, Luest lives in the Washington, D.C., area and is a senior manager at research and consulting firm Abt Associates. “Tourist Trap,” filmed in 2003, briefly mentioned the other work she started, as an advocate for people living with the effects of trauma.
To catch up on her work on behalf of victims since then, I spoke to Luest last month. She also discussed the Florida robbery epidemic, the assault by Cornet, and her efforts to ensure he stays tucked away in prison forever. Edited excerpts of our conversation follow.
One theory said that assailants made the South Florida robberies so violent to make victims afraid to revisit the crimes by working with investigators, testifying, etc. Do you think that’s valid? I know that in my case, the nature and intensity of the violence was largely due to the assailants’ being on drugs.
But yes, tourists were specifically targeted because they were less likely to come back to prosecute. The theory was that tourists were targeted because they would be so traumatized that they would go back home and stay there.
How much time was there between the attack on you and your mother and the jailing of Stanley Cornet? It was a matter of a week or two weeks because he was apprehended while attacking a police officer’s mother — whom Cornet was robbing and assaulting [including a biting]. It’s very unusual for a victim to be bitten during a crime, so that made the link to our robbery stronger. They flew me to Florida to do an in-person ID of photographs, and I identified Stanley Cornet.
So the fact that the police caught him in the commission of another crime helped to speed along your case? Yes, if not, it would have been just my word against his. With the bite mark evidence, it was more difficult for him to claim he didn’t do this and to be believed by the jury.
You were originally a TV producer. How did the attack change your career path? My career changed completely. Because of my physical injuries, I could no longer carry gear in the field when I was producing news stories — so I knew I had to make a change. I came to see my life’s work as helping to prevent violence wherever possible and making sure victims have the support they need to heal and live well again.
What happened gives me insight into the nature and impact of trauma and how trauma affects whole health. When someone is traumatized, the effects are not just physical and mental but also spiritual and economic. It can lead to workplace presenteeism [difficulty focusing because of the trauma, so your productivity is affected].
I believe the final stage of the healing process is when you can take the dark cloud of what happened to you and make it something positive. I’m serving on the Governor’s Family Violence Council in Maryland. I use my experience to try to better inform programs and use what I know as a survivor to inform and help other people. What was once a senseless incident that happened to me became something I could turn into actions with a positive purpose.
I manage two groups, on Linkedin and Facebook. The Facebook “Trauma Informed” group has more than 1,300 members (with 3 to 5 new members daily) and is more conversation-oriented. It includes people from as far away as China and Australia. The LinkedIn group has more than 700 members.
What’s the first thing you should do if you’re the victim of a crime?First and foremost, is safety — get with people who can support you. If it’s a rape, go to the hospital. If it’s something else traumatic, report it. More people regret not reporting a crime than reporting it.
How long does it take to overcome the effects of trauma? Everyone heals differently. Sometimes after a year a two, it can seem that everything is back to normal, but then a life change — like getting married, losing a parent, starting a new job, having an illness — can unearth pieces of healing that you weren’t ready to explore earlier. People heal along their lifespans and in their own time and in their own way.
Is counseling generally effective? I believe counseling can be good, but victims also benefit from connecting with other trauma victims and those who can relate to their experience.
How do victims find one another? When I was attacked, there really weren’t any groups for crime victims.
Now with social media, it’s easier. Sometimes a victim can use a different name to protect privacy. We now have a deeper understanding of the nature of trauma. I see more state and grass-roots level opportunities to have discussions on crime and trauma in the community, so that heightens awareness.
Does it take longer for children to recover? It can be different for kids and adults. Kaiser and the CDC did an Adverse Childhood Experiences study some years ago. We know from the study that, although one event can have a big effect, children can be resilient. But if it’s happening again and again, it can ultimately affect a person’s life span.
How can children heal from trauma? They need at least one supportive and safe person and a safe space to heal. The research has really informed what’s being done with schools. For example, 15 years ago, if a child wouldn’t sit in her chair, it was because she’s a bad child. Now, we’re not asking about what’s wrong with this kid but rather what’s happening with this kid and what are they trying to tell me. If things are volatile at home, it makes sense that school would be a place a child would let it out. This is where we would see the school-to-prison pipeline. Now we’re in a different place and can use trauma-informed approaches to help and provide interventions.
What’s the most common effect of trauma on victims?The feeling that so much is out of their control. When an assailant is caught, he has Miranda Rights. But you as a victim don’t have a right to a speedy trial. No one tells you how long the process is or when VINE (Victim Information and Notification Everyday) is going to contact you. It really is a long-term commitment.
The forensic dental expert lost the photo of the bite wounds I sustained [from Stanley Cornet]. And I called every week for years to ask where the photos were, if they’d been found. Also, Cornet’s cap came off in the attack, and I gave it to police but it was never registered into evidence. I’m wondering: Will this ever go to trial? Will this ever be over? These are things you would never know until you have experienced it.
Forensic Files also didn’t show that Cornet found a loophole in the prosecution process. In 2001, I got a call from VINE notifying me that he was transferred back to Miami for a hearing. They resentenced the case, so I went back down to Florida and testified again.
Stanley Cornet sat there and smiled at me during proceedings — now, for a second time — as he heard what I went through physically and emotionally. The court saw that he was not remorseful. This judge sentenced him to life in jail without parole.
Your mother didn’t appear on Forensic Files. How did she contend with the aftermath of the robbery? My mother didn’t testify or come back to Florida to see the case investigated or prosecuted. Every survivor has a different process of dealing with that kind of thing. It happens along the survivor’s own timeline and in their own way — and it’s important to understand and respect that.
So she didn’t want to relive it? Yes, it was hard for my parents to even hear about what happened to me.
Do you still have physical effects from the beating? Yes. I don’t have feeling on one side of my face. I’ve had chronic back issues, although now I’m back to running — and now I’m running marathons. I also have scars, but I’ve become more comfortable with them as part of my body.
I’m a big fan Forensic Files. Did you have a good experience with the show?I felt that they did an accurate portrayal. It was difficult for me to see the reenactments. The producer and crew were very respectful, though, and I appreciated their including information about the nonprofit I founded. [Luest now works with Trauma Informed.]
Do you feel incidents that cause trauma are on the downswing?As we’re changing administrations, the US is in an unusual place where violence and threats of violence are increasing. I work with the National Bullying Prevention Initiative and have been tuned into news reports of increased bullying and hate crimes in school. The NEA recently said these incidents are rising. We’re seeing more bullying in schools. We need to set the right example, build empathy, and pay attention to what can cause kids lifelong problems.♠
career started long before anyone had heard of high-velocity blood splatter or age-processed clay busts. Some trivia from a long (1924 to 2016) and productive life:
with the Apollo astronauts.”
4. Peter Thomas postponed his own vacation to help an audio technician save his job. The sound man had messed up a Tropicana commercial recording, so Thomas did it over and never told the guy’s superiors.
8. Don “In a World” Lafontaine (left) and Peter Thomas are considered the two best male narrators of their generation. Apparently, they weren’t rivals and liked each other’s work.
of older, more substantial pieces.
