2023 ends with John Lesko still on Pennsylvania’s death row, 43 years after he and partner Michael Travaglia murdered four people at the end of 1979 and beginning of 1980 in a “Kill for Thrill” spree.
Lesko lost another appeal in federal court in May of 2022 and an execution order was signed by Department of Corrections Acting Secretary George Little that November setting December 29th of last year as the date, but it’s still not been carried out. Former Governor Tom Wolf ordered a moratorium on executions during his term and the policy has carried through with the new administration of Josh Shapiro. Lesko has had five execution warrants signed by three governors. Travaglia died of natural causes in prison in 2017.
On December 27th, 1979, Lesko and Travaglia tortured and fatally shot Peter Lovato near the Loyalhanna Dam in Westmoreland County. Four days later, they were picked up while hitchhiking by Marlene Newcomer, a Fayette County woman they killed and whose body they left in a parking garage in Pittsburgh. Then they kidnapped Mount Lebanon church organist William Nichols, whom they tortured and bound, driving him to Blue Spruce Lake in Indiana County, weighing him down with rocks and tossing him into the water, where he drowned. Finally, eight days after the first murder, they killed Apollo police officer Leonard Miller after luring him into chasing and pulling them over on the Apollo Bridge, which was torn down years later and replaced by a new bridge that now bears Miller’s name.
The last death sentence carried out in Pennsylvania was during the administration of Governor Tom Ridge in 1999.
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