One Teacher Sabotages Another
(Forensic Files, “Sealed with a Kiss”)
Note: Updated with information from fall 2024
The “Sealed with a Kiss” story differs from most other Forensic Files episodes in that it involves no violence.
If fact, no one touched anyone or stole anything during the extended course of the criminal activity.
Bad Barbie. But it’s a sordid case just the same, and the episode features on-camera interviews with both the accused and the victim, who ultimately trade places.
The drama kicked off when someone began menacing Joanne Chambers — a teacher admired for her warm, unconventional approach to her job — with threatening letters, offensive photos and, yes, a voodoo Barbie doll.
The episode was produced back in 1997, when Forensic Files still went by the name Medical Detectives, so for this week, I looked around to find out what happened to Joanne Chambers and whether she’s retained any of the respect she earned as a teacher before things got weird.
So, let’s get going on the recap of “Sealed with a Kiss” along with extra information from internet research.
Positive reinforcement. In 1993, Joanne Chambers and Paula Nawrocki both taught first grade at the Coolbaugh Learning Center, which sounds like a for-profit tutoring business, but was actually a public school in Pennsylvania’s Poconos region.
Joanne, 41, lived in Carbondale with her husband, who owned a painting business, and her 10-year-old son.
She taught first-grade reading and liked to make school fun and nurturing. Joanne did entertaining things like dressing up pillars to look like palm trees. She ended each class with the words, “You are wonderful and beautiful. You make my heart happy,” according to Redbook magazine.
Students and parents loved her.
Poison pen. Paula Nawrocki, who had started working for the district in 1975, was stricter and more formal in her teaching but was well-respected, too. The Allentown Morning Call would later write that Paula “had a record as clean as a new chalkboard.”
That seemed to change when the principal of the school where both women worked started receiving anonymous letters trashing Joanne. Pretty soon, Joanne herself began getting the disturbing missives and other teachers did, too.
So started a strange and upsetting period lasting 18 months.
Tawdry collages. All the letters disparaged Joanne. At first, they simply mocked her, criticizing her for wearing jeans at school and organizing a faculty water fight.
They progressed to calling the soft-spoken Joanne a bitch and claiming she smoked marijuana.
Other letters accused Joanne of child molestation and threatened to drag her into the woods and torture her to death. The tormenter pasted Joanne’s face on nude pictures in sex scenes, then sent them to parents and posted them out in the open.
Someone planted a whiskey bottle in her desk drawer.
J’accuse. Joanne told police that she cut her hand after the anonymous evildoer placed a razor blade under her car door handle — and later sent her a typed note saying, “You’re sliced.” She needed eight stitches to close the wound on her right middle finger.
As the campaign of terror waged on, Joanne received sympathy and concern from her colleagues.
Perhaps a bit overzealous in their efforts to find the culprit, officials called a faculty meeting in March 1994 and told teachers that the menacer “is someone sitting in this room.”
Secret audio. Soon, a solid clue came to light when video footage caught Paula Nawrocki entering Joanne’s classroom and removing Joanne’s mug, which immediately made her a suspect because the anonymous letter-writer had threatened to poison Joanne’s coffee.
When questioned, Paula explained that Joanne had asked her to retrieve the mug. She also allegedly said something to the effect of “You’ll never prove it’s me.” That sounded fishy to Coolbaugh Township Police Chief Anthony Fluegel.
The police wired up Joanne and had her talk to Paula about the terror campaign in hopes that something incriminating would slip out.
Lie detector. But it didn’t work. Paula said nothing incriminating on the tape, and in fact expressed sympathy: “Joanne, I can’t, I can’t imagine how this person can do what they’re doing,” Nawrocki said on the recording. “We are all amazed, Joanne, that you can be surviving through the whole thing.”
But when both women took polygraph tests, Paula failed. Joanne passed.
Next up, Paula consented to having her house searched. That helped her a little. Examination proved that her typewriter wasn’t the one used to send the frightening letters.
Domestic melodrama. Meanwhile, the school had received the aforementioned Barbie, which someone had dressed and coiffed to look like Joanne, then stuck a razor blade in the neck and drizzled with red paint.
“I said good-bye to my husband like I wanted him to remember me saying good-bye,” Joanne told Forensic Files. “I lived every day thinking that it was truly possible that it could be my last.”
Next up, Joanne told police that Paula Nawrocki had tailgated her and tried to run her off the road on I-380.
Press picks it up. That alleged offense was enough for authorities to arrest Paula for the entire horror campaign — 100 counts, including making terroristic threats, stalking, and recklessly endangering life.
Paula’s husband, Leonard Nawrocki, who worked as an inspector for the Department of Environmental Protection, would years later tell the Morning Call of his shock at seeing news of the arrest in the paper just one day later. According to the Morning Call, the Nawrockis suddenly felt like the subjects of a witch hunt fueled by overeager investigators and journalists:
“When a reporter seeking a comment phoned their home in Moscow, Lackawanna County, [Leonard] told him, ‘She’s not talking to anybody.’ He said the reporter noted in his story, ‘A man answered the phone at the Nawrocki residence and said, ‘She’s not talking to anybody.”‘
Suddenly pariahs. “Basically we were isolated people,” Leonard Nawrocki, father of the couple’s son, Kevin, told Morning Call reporter Mike Frassinelli. “We felt like there wasn’t a friend in the world.”
Leonard also said that other teachers ignored Paula at lunch and administrators snubbed her at a basketball game.
The parents of one student asked the school to remove him from Paula’s class. She was suspended with pay shortly afterward.
Harassment stops. Fluegel later told Dateline NBC that at least 10 teachers he spoke to said they suspected Paula Nawrocki as the party behind the terror campaign against Joanne.
After Paula’s arrest, the menacing behavior toward Joanne stopped.
But the FBI couldn’t find forensic evidence to help build a case against Paula.
Past comes to light. The private investigator and lawyer who Paula Nawrocki hired had better luck. She paid $7,000 to have some of the threatening letters tested for her DNA. The lab found a small number of epithelial cells under one set of stamps and an envelope flap.
None of them matched the DNA from Paula or Leonard. But those forensics weren’t enough to clear Paula.
Fortunately, some circumstantial evidence materialized. Police from Carbondale, Pennsylvania, told Paula’s defense team that, going back years, Joanne had a history of reporting suspicious incidents such as fires and burglaries. Colleagues from Joanne’s prior employer, the Lackawanna Trail School District, near Scranton, testified that Joanne had said that other teachers had threatened to torch her house.
Compulsive complainer. Some of her ex-coworkers from the previous school said that Joanne liked to cause trouble for other teachers and that her arrival made waves in what had been a harmonious workplace.
In a precursor to what happened at Joanne’s Coolbaugh job, at the Lackawanna school, a superintendent had called a meeting of teachers to disclose the alleged threats made against Joanne — and announced that the guilty party “is someone sitting in this room.”
“Every crime she said she was a victim of had some weirdness attached to it,” Paula’s private investigator, Jim Anderson, said in one of my favorite Forensic Files quotes.
Garbage comes in handy. And like most compulsive liars, Joanne didn’t keep her stories straight. She told one teacher that she broke her leg jumping from a burning building at Marywood College and another that it happened when she jumped to escape evil nuns trying to keep her in a convent against her will, according to a Morning Call story from Jan. 21, 1996. (A couple of newspaper articles referred to Joanne as a former nun or student nun, but it’s not clear whether or not that was one of her tall tales.)
Anderson retrieved some items from Joanne’s trash with DNA. One the samples matched DNA from the stamps and the envelope flap.
Joanne’s explanation was that the stamps from the threatening letter came off — she was alone with them in some type of evidence room, she said — and she licked them to reattach them.
Prolonged trauma. At the trial in 1996, which Dateline NBC covered, Coolbaugh’s principal and some of its teachers testified that they suspected Paula Nawrocki of creating the terror campaign against Joanne Chambers. Paula had started acting jumpy and nervous around the time the incidents began.
The courtroom presentation of the hate letters and threats initially put the jurors in Joanne’s corner.
“I felt so bad for this woman, this poor thing, to have had to go through all these terrible things,” one juror later told Dateline NBC, which broadcast a segment about the case on Aug. 25, 1997.
But Paula’s lawyer Phil Lauer managed to turn the tables.
Revelations from the past. Some former colleagues of Joanne Chambers from a different school testified that Joanne had a history of complaining about anonymous threats.
Jim Anderson discovered that Joanne had reported about a dozen fires and burglaries on her property — more proof, the defense contended, that she liked playing the role of victim.
After five days of testimony and two hours of deliberation, the jury reached a not guilty verdict. Paula cried with relief, and some of the jurors hugged her outside the courtroom. One said, “Our hearts are with you.”
Reinstated at last. Paula commented that Joanne “needs help.” (Before the trial, Fluegel had said Paula needed help.)
In 1997, Paula faced another hearing of sorts when the Pocono Mountain School Board investigated her for “immorality” based on other aspects of Joanne Chambers’ accusations.
Nawrocki was cleared again and allowed to resume her $55,000-a-year job “after months of school board hearings that were peppered with audience cheers for Nawrocki and jeers for Chambers,” the Morning Call reported.
Six-figure compensation. Joanne lamented that the polygraph evidence couldn’t be used in court but ultimately said she just wanted to get on with her life.
Paula agreed to appear on the Dateline segment about the case but later said she found it tedious. She also gave an interview to Redbook magazine but soon regretted it, feeling the resulting article cast some doubt on her innocence.
She filed a $9 million lawsuit against the school, Joanne Chambers, and the police. In 2000, she received a $600,000 settlement from the school plus $25,000 from Chambers. (Joanne’s lawyer, John E. Freund III, said that she settled only because she wanted to avoid the cost of defense.)
No payday from us. Paula sued Police Chief Anthony Fluegel as well, but Fluegel went to trial instead of settling and won the case. Court papers from 2002 noted, in Fluegel’s defense, that other teachers passed lie detector tests. Only Nawrocki failed, so Fluegel had reason to make her the prime suspect.
“I thought from the beginning I was just doing my job,” Fluegel later said, calling the Nawrockis’ allegations against him baseless.
None of the authorities who Nawrocki accused of malicious prosecution ended up paying any damages to her — and rightly so, considering that they had evidence against Nawrocki that seemed credible. The fault lay with Joanne Chambers for lying, not those who had every reason to believe her.
Under the radar. A note from the producers at the end of the episode said that Paula spent $100,000 in her defense, and mentioned that both women still taught in the Pocono Mountain School District but at different schools.
But that was back in 1997. What’s happened since then?
Well, Paula Nawrocki has kept a low profile since 2002, after she lost her suit against the police. She has no presence on social media and no longer speaks to journalists.
Her husband, Leonard Nawrocki, gave an interview to the Times-Tribune in July 4, 2012 — but the article was about a rally featuring then-Vice President Joe Biden that Leonard attended.
On Oct. 19, 2015, a Morning Call obituary for a local woman who died at age 96 mentioned that Paula Nawrocki was “like a daughter” to her. So, it sounds as though Paula stayed in the area.
Back on the job market. As for Joanne Chambers, she retired in June 2015 after having received the prestigious National Board Certified status.
But just three months later, on Sept. 25,2015, an article titled “Scandalous past gives school board pause” appeared in the Hazleton Standard-Speaker.
The story noted that the Hazleton Area School Board was ready to hire Joanne Chambers as a Wilson reading specialist — that is, an educator who teaches dyslexic kids.
The Pennsylvania Wilson program officials highly recommended Joanne.
Supporter speaks out. But just in time to spoil the party, the Barbie doll reared its ugly head. Some parents put her name in Google and reported the resulting intelligence about the terror complaints, decoupage porn, etc., to the school board, which tabled the decision to hire her.
Still, Joanne has at least one fan of her professional accomplishments.
A former colleague named Jamie Schweppenheiser from the Pocono Mountain School District wrote a letter to the editor praising Chambers as a professional who “helped countless children and young adults learn how to read” and saying “what a shame for the teachers and students of the Hazleton Area School District to miss out on the opportunity to be mentored by Joanne Chambers.”
In other words, Joanne Chambers remains a divisive and contradictory figure, someone who allegedly created an absolute nightmare for one woman but also gave many children the gift of better reading skills, higher self-esteem, and a sense of accomplishment that will make them happier, more productive adults.
Update: Joanne Chambers died at the age of 76 on November 1, 2024. Her obituary mentions that her husband predeceased her and that a son survives. Thanks to reader Laur C. for writing in with the news.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. – RR
Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube
