Sunday, March 10, 2013
Family received threatening phone calls after she went missing.
Amy L. Pugner chatted on the phone with her sister as she was painting her new apartment in Washington, Pa., where she had recently moved, on June 8, 2010. That was the last time Amy's sister spoke with her. Amy, a Latrobe native, had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and had a history of drug abuse. Her family considered the move a good thing—something that seemed to indicate that Amy, was getting her life together, leaving her demons behind and heading in the right direction. No one is sure when Amy was last seen, but likely it was June 9 or 10, 2010. Her family became alarmed when, a few days after that last phone call, a man used Amy's cell phone to make several threatening phone calls to them. He demanded money from them and told them…
Sunday, February 24, 2013
While it is widely believed that serial killer Edward Surratt is responsible for their deaths, he never admitted to the slayings nor was he ever charged in their deaths.
Richard Hyde, the principal of Fern Hollow Elementary School in Moon Township, was talking with a friend on the phone in the bedroom of his home he shared with his wife, Donna and two daughters. That was about 1 a.m. on Saturday, Dec. 3, 1977. During the conversation, he heard glass break in a window on the other end of his ranch home. After hanging up, he walked past a nightstand that contained a loaded gun and proceeded to the hallway, according to a story in the Beaver County Times. A 12-gauge shotgun blast ripped through his chest/abdomen area. He staggered to the kitchen, past his wife who was in a bathroom off the hallway, and died in a pool of blood on the linoleum floor of the kitchen. Donna, a beautician who had a shop in her home…
Saturday, February 16, 2013
She was last seen or heard from in June 2011, just after she moved back to Pittsburgh from Florida.
Amanda Marie Koller had moved back to the Pittsburgh area from Orlando, FL in May 2011. The 23-year-old did not establish or maintain a permanent address in the few short weeks after her return, according to her mother. On Sunday, June 12, 2011, she was stopped by Pittsburgh police and cited for operating a vehicle without a valid inspection and also without an emissions inspection. Her car, a purple 2005 Scion TC has a Pennsylvania license plate and also one from Florida, both of which expired in 2011. The license numbers are Pennsylvania GLH 0116 and Florida ANA 4580, according to the Pennsylvania Missing Persons website. She has not been seen nor heard from since. Amanda is described as 5-feet to 5-foot 5, about 100 to 150 pounds with …
Saturday, February 9, 2013
The man's death was ruled a homicide.
An Avella resident was hitchhiking on Old Route 40 in Donegal Township, Washington County, about 9:20 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 18, 1972 when he spotted the badly decomposed body of a man. The man was down an embankment, about 65 feet south of the roadway. His skeletal remains were found in a briar thicket, near a small trash dump, about two miles west of Claysville. It was estimated that he had been there for about 8 to 10 weeks. The man's death was ruled a homicide, according to the Pennsylvania Missing Persons website. The man had gunshot wounds in his left torso, possibly from a .22-caliber weapon. While details about the man's appearance and clothing are many, there are no clues as to who he was, where he came from or why he died. The man …
Saturday, December 29, 2012
The Wilkinsburg teen might still be in the Pittsburgh area.
Taylor Murphy, 17, has been missing from Wilkinsburg since Sept. 20. Authorities believe she could still be in the Pittsburgh area. She is classified by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as an endangered runaway. Taylor is described as 5 feet, 4 inches tall; 140 pounds; with black hair and brown eyes; and having a tattoo on her upper arm. She will turn 18 on Jan. 23. Despite its poor quality, he photo above is the only image available of the teen. Anyone having information about Taylor should contact the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children at1-800-843-5678 (1-800-THE-LOST) or call the Penn Hills Police Department at 412-473-3056. For more information about this and other missing person cases, visit …
Sunday, November 18, 2012
The murder of the 30-year-old secretary from Penn Hills has never been solved.
Long Road in Penn Hills gets a fair amount of morning rush hour traffic: school and Port Authority buses, along with commuters leaving their homes and heading for their jobs in Pittsburgh. Weekday mornings, at the end of Long Road, cars often form a line waiting to make a left hand turn at the Churchill Valley Country Club onto Beulah Road. As they drive up the hill, they pass the Blackridge Civic Association clubhouse and then, at the top of the hill, intersect with the Parkway East or Penn Avenue toward Wilkinsburg. When Barbara Jean Lewis graduated from Penn Hills High School in 1964, she had her eye on a secretarial career. Her dream to enter the business world came true. She was a secretary at the downtown Pittsburgh offices of …
Saturday, October 20, 2012
In July 1979, Carol Jursik picked up some groceries on her way home from jogging but vanished just 10 houses from her front porch.
Life seemed like it was on the right path for Carol Jursik that July evening in 1979 as she jogged with a housemate. A nationally ranked college woman fencer and possible contender for the 1980 U.S. Olympic team, Carol, 24, was a Penn State graduate student working for the summer at the U.S. Steel Corp. in Monroeville through a cooperative job program. Carol and a friend, Michael Pierce, had jogged 15 miles together the night of July 30 before they separated at roughly 9:15 p.m. about one mile from the home, which had been converted into apartments, on Murrayhill Avenue (also spelled Murray Hill) in Squirrel Hill they shared with four other friends. Carol continued on to the Squirrel Hill Giant Eagle supermarket on Murray Avenue at …
Sunday, October 14, 2012
A woman's body was discovered in the river at Fox Chapel in 2003, but she has never been identified.
The Allegheny River is pretty in the fall—the colors of the leaves reflect off the water and when the sky is blue, it can look like a picture postcard. But sometimes all that's pretty from a distance isn't as beautiful up close and under the surface. Sometimes the Allegheny River carries litter, tree limbs and other debris from far upstream. A worker saw something in the middle of the river channel off Old Freeport Road, near the Fox Chapel Yacht Club in O'Hara Township, on Oct. 23, 2003 that at night looked like garbage. The next day, at approximately 10 a.m., the debris came closer to shore. At that point, a worker suspected that it might be a body and called 911. A woman's body, wrapped in a blue blanket and bound with duct tape, was …
Saturday, September 29, 2012
The 22-year-old Dormont woman was killed in 1989 on her way home from a party in Mt. Lebanon—her mutilated body found in the backyard of a house on Voelkel Avenue near the light rail transit tracks.
Today, 23 years after her death, people inDormont are still talking about what happened to Catherine Corkery. The 22-year-old left a party in Mt. Lebanon at the Academy Avenue home of Sam Amado on July 22, 1989 and headed home to the apartment she shared with a boyfriend, Tim Rooney, on Ordinance Avenue. But she never made it. Somewhere along the light-rail transit tracks where the "T" runs, Corkery met her attacker. She was just 5 feet 1 inch tall and weighed just 100 pounds. That person twisted a rope-like restraint around her throat and pulled her to the tracks, splitting her head open when it struck a rail, the Tribune-Review reported. In a 1997 story, the newspaper quoted Allegheny County Homicide Sgt. Nicholas Bruich, the lead case …
Saturday, August 18, 2012
In 1991, the 28 year old returned from a date, went back out and was never seen again.
Terry Slaugenhoupt, 28, came home from a date to the East Liberty apartment vicinity of the 1400 block of North St. Clair Street that she shared with a roommate. There are two versions of what happened next. One is that she got a phone call and told her roommate she was going out again. The other is that she told the roommate she was going out to make a phone call. No one knows who the call was to or from and where she was headed—and two decades ago, tracking calls wasn't as easy as it is today. That was the last time Terry was seen and she was never heard from again. She would be 50 years old today. At the time of her disappearance, on Jan. 6, 1991, she was 5 feet, 2 inches tall, and weighed between 105-120 pounds. She had long, curly …
Jack Neville
2:21 pm on Friday, May 3, 2013
Surratt is an evil man, only he knows we're the bodies were left after raping and torturing them! more ›