Isabella Mueller (crime writer)
Richard Fran Biegenwald, better known as the Thrill Killer, was a notorious American serial killer. Between 1958 and 1983, he killed at least nine people in Monmouth County, New Jersey. However, Biegenwald’s dark history is much more than just an anecdote about a handful of murders—it is the story of a life full of violence and cruelty. Richard Fran Biegenwald was born on August 24, 1940, in Rockland County and grew up in an environment marked by violence. His alcoholic father regularly abused him physically from birth. This led to Biegenwald struggling with mental health issues from an early age. At the age of five, he set his home on fire and was subsequently placed under observation at the Rockland County Psychiatric Center. By the age of eight, he was already addicted to alcohol and had started gambling. When he was nine, he underwent electroconvulsive therapy at Bellevue Hospital in New York. These traumatic experiences led to Biegenwald eventually being admitted to the State Training School for Boys in Warwick, a reformatory for boys. Here, his criminal behavior continued as he stole and incited other inmates to escape. During his visits to his mother, he stole her money. At the age of eleven, Biegenwald committed another act of self-destruction by setting himself on fire in his mother’s house. Despite his impulsive and self-destructive nature, he managed to complete eighth grade at the age of sixteen and was released from the training school to attend high school. However, he dropped out after a few weeks and once again escaped the shackles of conformity. After leaving school, Biegenwald moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where he stayed for two years and eventually stole a car. Federal agents arrested him in Kentucky as he was transporting the stolen vehicle across state lines. After returning to Staten Island in 1958, he stole another car and drove to Bayonne, New Jersey. This is where his murderous career began. On December 18, 1958, he and his accomplice Frank Spardoff entered a grocery store to rob it. In the process, he killed the owner, Stephen Sladowski. Two days later, after a shootout with the police in Salisbury, he was arrested and taken back to New Jersey, where he was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder. After 17 years, he was released on parole in 1975. After his release, Biegenwald initially worked in various odd jobs and kept a low profile. However, his dark past caught up with him again. In 1977, he was suspected of sexual assault and sought for violating his parole conditions. Although he was arrested in Brooklyn in 1980 for raping a young woman, the victim failed to identify him and he was released. While at large between 1978 and April 1982, he committed three more murders, but these were not linked to him until much later. One of these was the murder of John P. Petrone, an ex-convict and former police informant, in June 1978. Petrone was shot dead at a disused airfield in Flemington. On November 1, 1981, he murdered Maria Ciallella, whose body he buried on his mother’s property. On April 8, 1982, he stabbed Deborah Osbourne to death and buried her body on top of Ciallella’s. Between these murders, Biegenwald married and moved with his wife to Asbury Park. Here he made contact with Dherran Fitzgerald, who played a significant role in his future crimes. A year later, in January 1983, a group of children playing discovered the body of 18-year-old Anna Olesiewicz in a wooded area behind a Burger King restaurant in Ocean Township. The young woman had been shot four times in the head. Biegenwald had approached the young girl on the boardwalk in Asbury Park and lured her into his car. Biegenwald was also suspected, but never charged, with the murder of 17-year-old Virginia Clayton. She was abducted and murdered on September 8, 1982. Her body was discovered three days later, four miles from where Petrone’s body was found. But despite being a suspect, Biegenwald was never charged. Everything came to light when a friend of his wife went to the police after Biegenwald showed her another female corpse hidden in his garage. On January 22, 1983, the police surrounded Biegenwald’s house. Using a ruse, they managed to lure him out of his house and arrest him. Fitzgerald was also arrested that day. A large quantity of weapons and illegal drugs were found in the house, including pipe bombs, handguns, rifles, shotguns, a machine gun, Rohypnol, chloral hydrate, marijuana, a live puff adder, a venom extraction device, and plans of several prominent buildings and businesses in the area. During questioning, Fitzgerald revealed to the police the existence of a third body that Biegenwald had shown him in his garage. Fitzgerald also stated that he had helped dispose of another body that Biegenwald had previously buried in the basement of his mother’s house on Staten Island. During the investigation, police eventually found a total of nine victims, including William Ward, a prison escapee whom Biegenwald had shot four or five times in the head and whose body was found in a shallow grave in Neptune City. Since the evidence was only sufficient for five murder charges, Biegenwald was ultimately charged with five counts of first-degree murder. Fitzgerald converted his statements into a confession and cooperated with the authorities. Biegenwald was sentenced to death. This sentence was later commuted to four life sentences without the possibility of parole. On March 10, 2008, Biegenwald was transferred from prison to St. Francis Medical Center in Trenton, where he died of a combination of respiratory and kidney failure. This finally brought this dark chapter in American criminal history to a close. Yet to this day, the story of Richard Fran Biegenwald remains one of unparalleled malice and insanity, as well as a lasting reminder of the darkness that can lurk behind human masks.
