The following is a transcript of the events regarding the investigation into the murder of Guy Goodman.
“Two deadly fugitives are on the run from justice. Authorities follow an electronic trail and chase the escaped convict and his partner from state to state. The suspects are moving fast, determined to avoid capture. The police and FBI must track them down before they take another life.”
In Pennsylvania, an inmate escapes with the help of his female accomplice. Following a trail of fraudulent credit card receipts and death, authorities track the pair, but always find themselves one step behind.
“I’m Jim Calstrom, former head of the FBI’s New York office. The FBI and police raced to capture the deadly couple who seem to be running with no direction, no sense of fear, and nothing to lose.”
September 25th, 1993. Friends of 74-year-old Guy Goodman contact the Palmyra, Pennsylvania police.
“How you doing?”
“Um, Mr. Goodman…”
They’re concerned because they have not heard from him in over a week, wondering where he is. Goodman’s landlord meets an officer at his rented house.
“You have a key for the door there?”
“I do.”
“Okay, let’s go check it out.”
“Okay.”
“You just want to step back there, all right.”
The officer observes shards of broken porcelain on the floor and dried blood on the floor and walls. Blood spatter trails down the hall and leads to the basement stairs. In a storage room, he discovers a body. The officer calls for assistance.
“Headquarters, code 3, code 3, requesting backup.”
“Are you clear, unit 1833?”
“Go ahead.”
Detective Paul Zechman of the Lebanon County Detective Bureau takes the lead in the investigation.
“I’m going 10-4, I’ll be in route to that location.”
The countywide bureau helps township police departments with major crime investigations.
“It was evident that the house had been ransacked. The kitchen drawers were open, things were strewn around on the floor.”
“Going down into the basement area, you could see drag marks lead from the stairway to a small storage room.”
The crime scene is gruesome. The victim’s hands and feet are tied behind his back. Several layers of plastic bags, sheets, and blankets shroud his head. Bindings are tightened at his neck with makeshift bindings. These items were either duct-taped or tied with electrical cords. The plastic bag was duct-taped over the cloth covering. Hoping to find a trace of the perpetrator, crime scene investigators carefully process the house. They dust every surface for latent fingerprints and collect a roll of duct tape left on a table, likely the same tape used in the bindings. With no witnesses, only the careful examination of every item can help the detectives understand this crime.
“We were trying to not only obtain the forensic evidence but we were also trying to determine if any of the property was taken from the residence. We were able to establish that Mr. Goodman’s wallet was missing.”
They find American Express charge statements, but the card itself is missing.
“Statement here… the account numbers… get that old in…”
In the bedroom, investigators discover an open box of checks. A series of checks from the middle of this box had been removed.
“We also knew that the vehicle of Mr. Goodman was also missing at this point.”
“What do you have to do out here yet?”
Guy Goodman seemed like an unlikely target for this type of attack. Like most of the Palmyra, Pennsylvania community, Chief Michael Weman knew of the victim.
“Guy Goodman was a retired florist. He was a lifelong resident of the Palmyra area, well-known within the community and liked by everyone in the community. It was apparent that either the motive for this crime was a robbery that had gone bad or that there was a robbery after the fact—after Mr. Goodman was assaulted and died.”
Palmyra, Pennsylvania is located in Lebanon County. This peaceful community sees fewer than three murders per year. In most cases, the victim knows the killer. At the autopsy, the victim’s face is unrecognizable. The medical examiner uses dental records to confirm it is Guy Goodman. Based on the body’s decomposition, he concludes Goodman has been dead for about a week. Although the victim was severely beaten, his wounds were not fatal. An examination of his respiratory tract reveals he died slowly from suffocation.
Latent prints recovered from Goodman’s house are processed at the lab. Examiners check the prints against local arrest records and find a match. When the forensics report arrives on Zechman’s desk, he isn’t surprised by the results.
“Fingerprints that we had obtained at the crime scene matched Bradley Martin.”
Zechman knows the name all too well.
“I just entered him as a wanted person, charging him with the escape from the county prison, so I knew he was on the run.”
Many of Lebanon County’s inmates are part of a work-release program. Bradley Martin, a repeat thief and drug user, is one of these work-release prisoners. Over a week earlier, Martin used a 2-hour pass, a weekly perk of the work-release program, to meet his new girlfriend, Carolyn King. 27-year-old King worked at a factory where she met the 21-year-old work-release prisoner. When Martin failed to return, prison officials launched a fugitive investigation. They called the Lebanon County Detective Bureau after obtaining a fugitive warrant for Martin. The detectives check Carolyn King’s apartment, concerned for her well-being, but King is not there and they find nothing to indicate where she is gone or even if she is with Martin.
The detectives enter Martin in NCIC, the National Criminal Information Center. Once the murder of Guy Goodman is discovered, there is a greater urgency to find Martin and to determine if Carolyn King is unharmed. The detectives interview Martin’s friends and co-workers. What they learn surprises them.
“Through interviews, we were able to establish that Bradley Martin and Carolyn King were together several days after Guy Goodman was murdered. We were able to establish that they were together in the Palmyra area, and then it was just blank.”
Detectives face the possibility that Carolyn King may be Martin’s accomplice. Earlier, when Detective Zechman ran a statewide background check on King, she came up clean. He tries again, this time using a national database. He learns she has a long criminal history including theft and check forgery. She has outstanding warrants for her arrest and is also a suspect in two murders in Virginia. The detectives have no idea where the two suspects are. If they left town right after the Goodman murder, they have more than a week’s head start. Detectives hope to track the suspects using the American Express charge card and the checks stolen from the victim’s home.
“Okay, let me call the guy at the American Express security department.”
“That’s great.”
Detective Weman asks American Express Global Security in New York to help. Joe Ganon, a chief investigator in AMX security, works to assist the police.
“I’ll be back to you as soon as I can.”
“Got it, thanks.”
“We flagged Mr. Goodman’s account because he was the victim of a homicide, and the chances were that the perpetrators of that homicide were in possession of that card.”
A review of Goodman’s account shows purchases made after Goodman’s death. The transactions leave a trail that may…
“And FBI cooperator Perro Vuchas agents arrest Sachich for conspiracy under RICO, the federal racketeering statute.”
“He was advised of his rights, and, uh, he refused. He wasn’t being very cooperative.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
Four days later, FBI agents and police raid the Bridgeport, Connecticut, home of Vaua Ulich.
“Towards the window, what is all the window?”
Ulich provided Dreven with the bomb earmarked for the dance studio.
“We have a warrant to search the premises.”
A bomb tech, as he moved some clothes observed there on the floor in a bag, observed a considerable amount of dynamite, and sitting on top of the dynamite were electric blasting caps—live electric blasting caps.
“Agents arrest Vaua Ulich.”
“You worry about it, we’ll take care of it from here.”
“Special Agent Cross.”
They call Special Agent Cross in New York to inform him they have found one of Otpor’s primary bomb makers.
“Special Agent Cross.”
Cross again questions Stephan Sachich, asking him if he knows a man by the name of Vaua Ulich.
“You know a guy from Bridgeport?”
“Yeah, a little. I do.”
“You’re going to have… you got some problems. And we’ve just arrested him. He had a large quantity of explosives and caps and weapons in his house.”
Sachich still refuses to talk.
“There you are.”
New York investigators call in Special Agent Bob Gore from San Francisco to question Ulich. The former Otpor member turned confidential informant accompanies him.
“Let’s hope.”
Late in the afternoon, with the moral support of the Croatian cooperator, Ulich finally begins to open up.
“He wanted the feeling that a fellow Croatian believed in him, trusted him, and he wouldn’t be entirely alone. And when he finally got the courage up, he said, ‘Yeah, I want to talk about it.’ And of course, that was the lynchpin of the whole case.”
Vaua Ulich tells investigators how other Otpor members convinced him to kill a Croatian community leader in California two years earlier.
“After drinking all one evening and into the morning, he decided he’d strike a blow for Croatian freedom and go kill this enemy of the people. So he did. And later on, he realized that what he’d done was not advancing the Croatian cause but really was harming it.”
“He was one of the few people that I firmly believe regretted what he did.”
Ulich agrees to testify against Sachich, Dreven, and the other Croatian terrorists.
“I killed.”
This is the key testimony prosecutors need to take down the entire terrorist ring.
“His cooperation in this case was instrumental in breaking the back of an organized crime organization, wherein in four cities we literally took out the godfathers of four families.”
The RICO statute, originally enacted to stop organized crime, is used for the first time to fight terrorism. Within two years, 11 members of the Otpor organization are convicted and sentenced to up to 40 years in prison.
“If you’re going to achieve any kind of success in terrorism, you have to be able to bring to the playing field the right kind of players, the right kind of knowledge, and the right kind of resource, if you even hope to put a dent into it. The Rambo approach is not going to win over terrorists. Terrorists are motivated by extreme sense of nationalism, and if you’re going to deal with them, you’ve got to get into their hearts and minds. Otherwise, you may stop them on a particular incident, but you haven’t changed their minds. If you don’t change their minds, they’ll do it again.”
For the FBI and law enforcement nationwide, dismantling Otpor was a vital achievement. Terrorists operating inside US borders were stopped dead in their tracks.
