Liz was the oldest sibling of five children.
January 13, 1991
AN UNCONVENTIONAL WOMAN AND HER UNTIMELY DEATH LIZ FALCO WAS LAST SEEN ALIVE ABOUT 1 A.M. ON SEPT. 14, PEDALING A BICYCLE TOWARD HER CENTER CITY APARTMENT.
Author: Jeff Gammage and Thomas J. Gibbons Jr., Inquirer Staff Writers
When Liz Falco disappeared in September, there was plenty of speculation on where she had gone. One report had her leaving town to follow the Grateful Dead. Another placed her in Camden. A third theory had her headed for Italy.
By December, there was no question what had happened to Liz Falco. The only question was who did it.
Her body, clad only in her black, high-top Reeboks, was found near Philadelphia International Airport, lying in a grassy area off Tinicum Avenue. Someone had shoved her partway into a green plastic trash bag. Medical experts who examined the near-skeletal remains believe that she was strangled. Since then, her family and friends have been tortured with questions. Questions about where she was and whom she was with when she vanished. "The whole thing is fishy," said Nathan Sonnheim, Falco's friend and former therapist. "To me it's really mysterious." The man trying to solve that mystery is Philadelphia Homicide Detective Lt. Kenneth Coluzzi. "We're looking at all the possibilities," said Coluzzi, who leads the investigation into Falco's death.
Because of the decomposition of the body, authorities were unable to determine whether Falco, 25, had been raped. Nor could they determine the exact cause of death. Although police and family members said Falco had been known to use drugs, no evidence of drugs was found in an autopsy. Elizabeth Jane Falco grew up in Cherry Hill, where she devoted much of her time and energy to the care of her younger brothers. She moved to Philadelphia about a year ago and was out of work when she died. Her life was unremarkable. Her death drew the attention of the medical examiner, several police detectives and an FBI agent. But all that lay ahead on Thursday, Sept. 13.
Falco spent that Thursday evening at the Bank, a popular nightspot in a converted bank building at Sixth and Spring Garden Streets. It's an old building of stone and wrought iron, with two snarling gargoyles guarding the front doors. They fit the neighborhood, where discarded newspapers and beer bottles litter the bushes and rats scurry across the sidewalks. Falco was last seen about 1 a.m. that Friday, pedaling her boyfriend's bicycle toward their Center City apartment. "I knew immediately that something bad had happened," said Joanne Falco, Liz's mother. " . . . I had this terrible feeling that I had to talk to her, but I couldn't reach her on the phone." Because she couldn't reach her daughter,
Joanne Falco went to Philadelphia and to her daughter's apartment on Race Street. It was unsettling, she recalled. There sat Liz's jar of face cream, which she used once a day, every day. If her daughter had deliberately left town, Falco said, that jar would have gone with her. She called the police to report Liz missing. Meanwhile, her sons posted fliers across South Jerseyand Philadelphia, offering a $2,000 reward for information on Liz's disappearance.
A Philadelphia FBI agent, acting on a request from a family friend, also made some checks. Nothing panned out. The bike was never found. "At first I wasn't too sure - I kind of thought she could have took off," said her brother John, 19. "In a week or so . . . I realized she would have at least gotten in touch with us." Paul Falco, 13, said he knew on Oct. 13 that his sister was dead. That was his birthday, he said, and he was sure she would have phoned if she were alive. A week before Thanksgiving, Joanne Falco called Robert Kane, a private detective with Joseph Brignola Inc.,
Investigators & Consultants in Philadelphia. "I felt from the get-go that something had happened to her," said Kane, who spent 13 years as a city homicide detective. Liz had left behind her jewelry, including expensive gold chains. Her credit cards hadn't been used. She had filed forunemployment benefits but had never finished the paperwork so she could collect.
From Philadelphia Detective Neal Aitken, Kane learned of a body that had been found Nov. 14 by a man walking his dog. Kane checked its height and hair color, and got a description of the clothing found nearby, which included a jacket with the logo "Bad Boys Club." "I called Mrs. Falco," Kane said. "Without me even telling her, she asked if it had 'Bad Boys Club' on it. I knew this was the right girl." Kane rounded up Liz's dental charts, took them to the Medical Examiner's Office and then to a forensic dentist in Bricktown, N.J., who confirmed his suspicions. Then he drove to Cherry Hill to inform the Falco family, his investigation over. "I was hired to locate her," Kane said, "and she was located." * When people describe Liz Falco, they almost invariably use the word unconventional. She was strong-willed, friendly and upbeat. She didn't hesitate to express her honest opinion, even when silence might have been more politic. Such frankness could anger, said those who knew her, but they said she also had a knack for delighting people with unexpected gifts and birthday cards. She was devoted to the Grateful Dead, catching two of the group's Philadelphia concerts the week she disappeared.
When she was 17, she had followed the band from town to town. That had been one of some rough years that she went through as a teenager and a young adult. Her parents had divorced, and there wasn't much money. Paul remembers his sister's helping so much that she was almost a second mother, fixing him dinner and buying him clothes. Meanwhile, the family was being ravaged by cancer, which killed eight relatives in nine years. The stress was awful. In fact, Liz and her mother served as panelists at a 1988 seminar on stress management sponsored by the Family Service of Burlington County. Liz told the audience of 340 that the hardest thing for her was seeing her mother in so much emotional pain. "She really did a lot to hold the family together," her friend Nathan Sonnheim said. Sonnheim, who with his wife, Barbara, runs Sonnheim Counseling in Cherry Hill, had known Liz since she was a girl. She had come for help during the divorce and cancer deaths, and he later hired her as a secretary. The counselors remember Liz as bright and friendly, trusting to the point of naivete. She never thought anyone would hurt her, they said. But the Sonnheims said she
had a recurring dream that she would die violently. She often spoke to them of becoming a therapist, or maybe even a lawyer, so she could right society's wrongs.
Yet Liz was unemployed when she died, fired from her job as a legal secretary. "It was such a bizarre year with her," said her former boss, lawyer Steve Dicht of Dicht & Horn. That year began when Dicht walked into a For Eyes glasses store where Liz was working behind the counter. They chatted, and the lawyer mentioned that he was looking for a new secretary. Falco started work in June. She wasn't a bad secretary, Dicht said. But she often was late or absent, and her forthrightness sometimes caused friction. She argued to keep her bike inside the law office, though Dicht wanted it parked outside. There were more arguments when Falco wanted time off to see the Grateful Dead. And they disagreed over job benefits. For example, Dicht said he had paid Falco's tuition at Rutgers University in Camden, where she took a class in Russian culture. But when classes ended, Falco believed that the tuition payments should continue as part of her salary, Dicht said. Finally he had enough. "I would hear I'm an ogre, I'm so bad. And then when it comes (to dismissal), I'm not so bad, and can't I keep my job?" Dicht said. "I made a business decision. It was something that had to be done."
Falco then moved in with her boyfriend and two young women on Race Street, unable to afford her own apartment. Her boyfriend, Chris Bender, did not return phone calls for this article. "She was real friendly, real outgoing," recalled one of Falco's roommates, Katherine Kelly. "She had a lot of friends. A lot of people cared about her." Kelly said she had last seen Falco around dinnertime the day before she vanished. If she was upset or in trouble, Kelly said, she didn't show it.
Joanne Falco last spoke with her daughter a few days before she disappeared. She's been frustrated in trying to find out what happened. And she's upset that the police seemed reluctant to search for Liz. "They didn't even want to take the report at first," Joanne Falco said. The detective she spoke to "made it clear they don't look for missing persons. So many are missing because they want to be missing. But I knew in my heart that wasn't true in my daughter's case."
The questions surrounding Falco's drug use - and whether it may have contributed to her death - remain open. Because of the valuables and credit cards Falco left behind, Kane doubts that she was a serious drug user. "It's not the sign of a person that is really heavy into drugs," he said. ''She had a Penney's charge card. She would have run it to the hilt and sold everything (to get money for drugs)." Kane said that he didn't have any suspects in the case but that he had a theory about how Falco was killed. "Whoever did this knew her," the detective said. "Somebody wanted to get next to her and she wasn't going for it. So she was raped and murdered, and then dumped.
Copyright (c) 1991 The Philadelphia Inquirer Record Number: 9101030418
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Updated 07/06/05