The Tire That Wasn't Flat by Accident - Episode 80

The Girl Who Ran But Nobody Came: The Alphabet Murders of Carmen Colon, Wanda Walkowicz, and Michelle Mayenza

A ten-year-old girl jumped from a moving car on a Rochester expressway in broad daylight while strangers watched from their own vehicles. Three witnesses called police. None of them stopped. Within hours, Carmen Colon was dead — and the man who took her was already gone. This homicide investigation would repeat itself twice more, with the same initials, the same age range, and the same unanswered question at the center.

In this episode, we explore the four-day delay that cost investigators their clearest witness to Michelle's abduction, a Good Samaritan who physically confronted the suspect roadside at dusk and lived to describe him in detail, and the serology test from 1979 that eliminated the strongest suspect and left the case without a direction. How does a killer take three girls with matching double initials, leave each body in a town matching that initial, and still remain unidentified more than fifty years later?

Case Details

Victim: Carmen Colon, 10, elementary school student; Wanda Walkowicz, 11, elementary school student; Michelle Mayenza, 10, elementary school student.

Date: November 1971 – November 1973.

Location: Rochester, New York (Monroe County), USA.

Case Status: Officially unsolved. No charges have ever been filed. DNA from Wanda's case has been profiled and entered into comparison databases, but as of 2023, all tested suspects have been eliminated.

Episode Key Points

- A witness saw Michelle crying inside a light-colored car on November 26, 1973, but her mother waited four days before calling police — a delay that pushed the composite sketch publication to December 3.

- The Good Samaritan who confronted the suspect roadside noted the driver's long, dirty fingernails — a detail that matched scratch marks found on Carmen Colon's body two years earlier.

- Dennis Termini, the strongest suspect for years, was eliminated in 1979 not by alibi but by serology: he was a secretor, and the killer was confirmed to be a non-secretor.

- The odds of three random victims each sharing double initials and each being found in a town matching that initial has been calculated at approximately 0.03 percent.

Carmen Colon, Wanda Walkowicz, Michelle Mayenza, Rochester New York murders, Monroe County homicide, Alphabet Murders 1971 1973, unsolved mysteries, true detective, forensic science, homicide, criminal minds, investigation, murder, true crime English.