|
The first thing she noticed was the white 300 ZX. It was the summer
of 1996, and 16-year-old Stacy Culotta was pumping gas into her car
at the Royal Farm Store in Chase. The sports car that pulled up was
a looker. So was the guy driving it.
I like the wheels on your car, the teen-ager said. The man introduced
himself and told her he had a set of rims and tires that he was trying
to sell. So Stacy went to Joe Palczynski's house to take a look.
They exchanged phone numbers. Before long, he was courting Stacy,
telling her everything she wanted to hear, making her feel grown
up in a way no one else ever had.
On her 17th birthday, only two weeks after their first date, he
showered her with gifts -- "expensive shirts from J.C. Penney's
and Hecht's," Stacy recalls -- that she hid from her parents.
He just took her breath away, she told her friends. Joby, now 27,
had recently received a suspended sentence for battering Michella
Osborne, a girl who lived just a few blocks from the Culottas in
Chase. He told Stacy he was 20, that he had "some bad stuff
in his background."
People change, she figured. And anyway, she was head over heels.
Her parents were considerably less so. No way he was 20 with all
those crow's feet, they told her. Why was he following her everywhere,
making demands?
When they discovered he'd been in the county jail, Stacy had an
explanation: A jealous girlfriend had lied, set him up. Her parents
weren't buying it. They forbid her to see or even talk to Joe Palczynski.
So she sneaked around behind their backs. And Joby helped. He would
pick her up in different cars so her parents wouldn't suspect anything;
he persuaded friends to lie to the Culottas about where Stacy was.
One night, Stacy told her boyfriend that her father had found out
some bad things about him.
"What does he know?" Joby asked, sounding unconcerned. "About
the kidnapping? Assault weapons?" Her dad knew about three charges,
Stacy said. He knew about assault, battery and kidnapping.
"Ho, ho, ho! I'll be lucky if that's what it is. Are you serious?
Only that much?"
"Yeah."
"Hon, I got a record for real. In my entire life, I've, like,
40 charges. ... He didn't get no printout of my record. There's no
way! ... I've had robbery, OK?"
"Uh-huh."
"I've got four, five, six assault and batteries," he
continued matter-of-factly, as if checking off a grocery list. "Two
or three counts of trespassing. Two counts of kidnapping. Three counts
of false imprisonment, OK? Two counts of phone harassment. Two counts
of intimidating state witness. One count of intimidating -- "
"Well, why did only three of them come up?"
"I have no idea! One count of illegal possession of firearms.
One for fleeing and eluding. What else? Just all kind of sh--, hon,
all kind of sh--. ... Now, as far as conviction: Three counts of
assault and battery. ... We're going to move to a Phase Two. You
got a tape recorder?"
The time had come, Joby told Stacy, to start taping her parents'
phone conversations. He needed to find out how much they knew --
and what they planned to do about it.
"I'm going to find out your Dad's sources so he ain't pulling
nothin' on me. He's gonna make me move to a Phase Three ..." Joby
considered the possibilities: "He don't want me to do that.
I'll know everything about him. I'll know where his mind's at ...
I start putting him under surveillance." Joby was already watching
Stacy constantly.
Possessive, he didn't want her to spend any time with friends.
He often took her out of school just so he could be with her. And
there was the rule about returning his calls: If he paged her, Stacy
had better get in touch with him within two to three minutes or risk "severe
consequences."
At times, she felt ambushed by his anger. Once Joby pulled a cigarette
from her mouth, grabbed her by the neck and slammed her up against
a wall. Another time, after a phone conversation in which Stacy said
she didn't want to see him anymore, Joby tried to run her and a girlfriend
off the road.
His mood shifts were sudden and unpredictable. Five minutes after
slamming her against a wall, Joby would offer to make dinner. He'd
prepare steak, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, light the candles.
And Stacy would begin thinking, Maybe I shouldn't have said what
I said to him; that's why he pushed me against the wall. Maybe he
really is sorry. She was solidly under his thumb.
But she had the luck of good timing. After a months-long battle
with the Osbornes, Joby wouldn't have welcomed the prospect of another
hostile family pressing charges. And Stacy had very nosy parents.
Every day, Diane and Vince Culotta would drive out of their housing
development and see Joby standing on the corner, waiting and watching.
Neighbors reported that he was parking down the street and running
up to their house to peer in the windows, sometimes several times
a day. As the sister of a police officer, Diane had few qualms about
taking Joby to court -- and she felt confident she recognized him
for what he was: an abuser.
She would later give her daughter a book, "The Gift of Fear," which
described classic signs of a batterer, and underlined traits she
thought applied to Joby: bullying; verbal abuse; intimidation; talking
about getting married, having kids and being together forever shortly
after their first meeting; battering women in previous relationships;
stalking; police encounters; using money to control people; believing
others are out to get him; liking violent films; having a fascination
with weapons; minimizing any kind of abusive behavior.
In August, Vince Culotta told Joby to stay away from his daughter.
In September, he filed a petition to prevent him from having any
contact with her. In November, the Culottas got lucky: Joby went
to jail. His convictions in the Osborne case violated the terms of
his probation on the 1991 Spring Grove escape charges.
Judge John Fader sentenced him to serve three years. "This
man is dangerous," he said. "He is out there hurting people.
I can't believe any human being can make so many mistakes and be
given so many chances and not appreciate it, and I do not feel, from
what I hear, that the mental state is anywhere near as much an excuse
as he tries to use it for a crutch."
But Stacy still believed they belonged together.
From jail on the Eastern Shore, Joby told his mother to hand-deliver
a letter to Stacy at work. Pat Long stood in the aisle of the Safeway
while the teen-ager read it, then took it back. She had promised
her son Stacy's parents wouldn't get their hands on it.
In the letter, Joby promised Stacy he would never let her go. No
matter what, they would be together some day, he wrote. And Stacy
knew she could wait for him. When Joby finished his jail term, they
would marry and move to Florida.
She felt hopeful. Until an acquaintance showed her another letter,
a letter she was never meant to see. In it, Joby described his relationship
with Stacy as "a big joke." She was just "another
one under my belt," he told the male friend to whom he had written.
"If you tell a girl what she wants to hear," he continued, "you
could -- all of them and that's what I was doing
for the past 10 years. Oh it's not just what you
tell them but how and where you tell them. The only
hard part is remembering the lies. I'm sure you get
the point. I added up all the girls I -- and I --
142 girls and 38 of them were virgins!"
Devastated, furious, Stacy wrote Joby that it was over. She should
have known better.
Strange cars began racing past her house. A guy in a green Mitsubishi,
one of the cars Joby had borrowed to fool her parents, was waiting
in the parking lot at night when she left work. Often, he followed
her home.
She found notes on her windshield with cryptic messages and numbers
meaningful only to her and Joby. She received hang-up phone calls.
Shortly after one of Joby's friends took her out to dinner to cheer
her up, her new pager began receiving coded messages: "Watch
your back, bitch" and "I'm coming back for you."
Diane Culotta wrote the victim notification services of the state's
division of correction:
"How does he talk people into doing this crazy stuff? They
follow her, leave notes, call our house, what else is next? I'm afraid
to ask. ... He's a very strange, manipulative person ... I'm afraid
if he's this obsessed about her now, what will it be like when he
gets out of jail?"
Stacy's mom collected names, license tag numbers, dates, incidents
and scraps of paper, amassing evidence of intimidation that would
stand up well in court. She also wrote the parole board requesting
to be informed before Joby's release: "I do not want to look
up one day as I'm driving, as I have done several times before, and
be startled to see him in my rear-view mirror."
She need not have worried. When Joe Palczynski was released from
prison on June 20, 1998, Stacy joined the ranks of former girlfriends,
her photo just another among many.
Soon, Joby had a new sports car, a Mazda RX7, and was romancing
a young woman he had met in the check-out line at Super Fresh, 20-year-old
Tracy Whitehead.
|
