Rest In Peace, Julia Campbell

From Oliver Mackson: She worked in St. Pete about 10 years ago, and she worked here (the Times Herald-Record) from 1992-94. She was a good friend back then, although I haven't spoken with her since about 2002. Yesterday, searchers found her body in a shallow grave in the Philippines, where she was a Peace Corps volunteer. She was 40, and she was a fierce, restless talent. (Her blog.)

BLOOD AND ROSES

Sunday, June 6, 1993

By JULIA CAMPBELL Staff Writer

PHILADELPHIA -- As darkness fell, the cemetery worker was lounging on his porch downing another beer. That's when he saw Tony Szadorski step onto Eveline Street.

Michael Flynn knew the cops were looking for Szadorski. They said he killed an elderly woman up in Sussex County, N.J. Flynn didn't want a killer on his block.

Made bolder by beer, Flynn bounded off his porch. ``You're the one,'' Flynn confronted Szadorski. ``You're the one the cops are looking for. You killed the old lady.''

Szadorski whipped open a switchblade. He swung and missed. Flynn tried to kick the knife away.

Szadorski took off running. Flynn bolted after him. At the A-Plus gas station one block away in this East Falls neighborhood where roofers and ironworkers try to raise families and fight off the edge of crime, Flynn tackled Szadorski. He punched him.

Then he grabbed a metal gas pump handle and raised it high above his head.

On behalf of the decent folk of Eveline Street, Flynn brought down his wrath on the twisted face of 20-year-old Tony Szadorski.

***

The first thing his mother remembers about the life of Anthony Francis Szadorski - charged last Saturday night with the murder of May Jane Dickson - is his father beating his head against the row house walls. The boy needed discipline, said the father's sister, Sophie Drobel.

But Tony screamed for protection. His mother was in no shape to rescue him. The kid struck back. He stole bills from his mother's wallet and jewelry from her dresser drawers. He was 4 years old.

Marie Szadorski found her son setting fires near the Schuylkill River by the time he was 6.

``Why you do this?'' asked the mother. He looked at her with vacant eyes and shrugged. Soon, he was stealing food stamps and selling them. The state wanted to put him away by age 9. No, said the mother, who had remarried, she could take care of her boy.

At 13, Szadorski's stepfather died. Tony robbed his mother's Philadelphia row house in a drug-induced fury. The widow had had enough. She had two other children to raise.

Marie Szadorski kicked her son out.

Tony seethed. He tried to come back to the house. He complained to everyone that his mother threw him out, that she didn't love him.

He dropped out of school in ninth grade. From time to time, the mother would hear that her son was in trouble with the law - theft, stealing cars, drug-dealing. The law placed him in a program for troubled juveniles at Norristown State Hospital. They said he was socially and emotionally disturbed.

Szadorski was shuttled from one psychiatric hospital to another. Northern, Southern, Eastern hospitals. Doctors gave him medication. They said it would help calm him. He told them he heard voices.

At 18, he had maxed out of youth detention centers. He landed in a foster home in Morris County, N.J., where he seemed to improve. His adult record had been clean until now. He dated a local girl, did some yard work for The George Inn in McAfee, and attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in Sussex.

At one of those AA meetings, Tony met May Jane Dickson. He would tell friends that the 76-year-old retired social worker became ``like a mother'' to him.

***

It was her nature to try to help others, says May Jane Dickson's brother, David. In the 1940s, May Jane Dickson left her small home town of Hillsboro,

Texas, for the Northeast, where troubled city kids ached for help. She earned her master's degree from Columbia School of Social Work and spent the next couple of decades working in New York City.

She adopted an optimism that the troubled children could be helped, their lives made better.

Well into her 70s, Jane, as her friends called her, had never married. But the retired social worker couldn't give up on a lifetime of helping others.

She was a volunteer for Helpline and AA in Sussex. She thought a young man named Tony showed promise. She wanted to give him a chance.

Miss Dickson had an idea. She spent hours weeding and pruning her rose bushes. But the heavy work, mixing peat moss, digging holes and moving heavy plants and garden tools, needed a pair of strong hands.

She hired Tony to help her tend her treasured garden. Tony came to work at Dickson's Vernon home on more than a dozen occasions beginning in the summer of 1991. She gave him a chance to talk. An amateur photographer, she took pictures only of the people she cared about. She took portraits of him.

Tony came close to living a normal life. It wasn't for him.

Sometime last year, his mother said Tony stopped taking his medication. He may have begun to use drugs again. He broke up with his girlfriend, quit his job.

As for his mother figure, May Jane Dickson, he would stay in touch.

***

East Falls is a neighborhood described in a Philadelphia guidebook as ``a contradiction of haves and have-nots.''

Mayor Edward Rendell lives there, as does Arlen Specter, the U.S. senator. Closer to the river, union workers and shopkeepers scratch out a decent living. The tougher set hang out on street corners.

In the fall of last year, it also became the home of Anthony Szadorski. He hung out on Eveline Street, a narrow roadway of brick row houses and two shade trees.

Szadorski drifted in and out of 3696 Eveline Street, living with Peyton Robinson, 19, and his girlfriend, Diana Jankiewicz, 18, and their two babies.

Brian ``B.B.'' Hinkle, 20, crashed there, too, having recently been released from a detention center in Camden, N.J. Diana's mother, Margaret, owned the home and offered them a place to sleep. She had tried to help other ``street kids'' who called her ``mom.''

When Tony moved back to the city, blocks from where he grew up, his mother couldn't resist the urge to help him. She gave him groceries. But she said that was that, she would help him no more.

He might have wanted the money for drugs. Neighborhood kids said Szadorski used Angel Dust, a powerful hallucinogen. It made him jump up and down and make funny faces.

He fit right in at 3696 Eveline Street, neighbors said. The place buzzed with rowdy chatter into the early morning hours. They began to see expensive cars coming and going. Car stereos and cars were offered for sale. Garbage from the home spilled out onto the turf-covered porch and

down onto the sidewalks.

This didn't go down well elsewhere on the block. Neighbors talked of a ``neighborhood lynching,'' forcing them out with

signed petitions. Sometimes, the neighbors said, the young rowdies would disappear. They took off on ``road trips,'' leaving at night and returning early the next morning with new wares to sell. Szadorski, sporting his shoulder-length

hair, cowboy hat and vest, would tell neighbors he had been away to get money.

He always seemed to need more.

***

It was just another road trip that brought Szadorski and two friends to May Jane Dickson's home one cold night last February.

Miss Dickson thought it odd. Just passing through? She questioned their explanation. The sleepy suburban town of Vernon was more than 100 miles from their Northwest Philly neighborhood.

But snow had started to fall, so she welcomed them inside anyway. Miss Dickson pulled out photographs of Szadorski and showed the young people, Robinson and Jankiewicz, his work in the garden. He had worked hard for her two summers ago.

She didn't want to turn them away. She offered Szadorski money. He said they didn't need any this time.

It was an awkward visit. The conversation soon stalled and they left.

For Tony Szadorski, the next several months would mean nights of hanging out, road trips and some say, doing Angel Dust.

Marie Szadorski tried again to set him straight. Just two weeks ago, she arranged a $300-a-week job for her son delivering for her uncle's city bakery. Two days on the job, said his mother, and he stole $800 from his

uncle's office.

That was it, she said. His mother told him she would never help him again.

He went back to May Jane Dickson. This time, Szadorski brought his housemate Hinkle with him to Vernon. She didn't invite them in. She had begun to worry about his unannounced

visits. Something made her uneasy.

The lady he sometimes called mom turned him away, too. Before they left, he handed her a business card that said

``Bountyhunters.'' It had Szadorski's name on it.

***

One week later on Monday night, May 24, May Jane Dickson was talking on the phone. She said goodbye about 10 p.m.

She had to get up early the next morning to meet a friend.

Back in Philadelphia, housemates Szadorski, B.B. Hinkle, Peyton Robinson and Diana Jankiewicz had piled into Robinson's car. They planned another road trip - back to Dickson's neighborhood in Vernon.

Szadorski told Robinson he wanted to borrow money and a car. Dickson had helped him before and he could count on her again, Szadorski told his friends.

The young couple dropped Szadorski and Hinkle off at a Mobil station in Vernon, a half-mile from Dickson's home. They turned around and headed back to Philadelphia.

The next morning, Szadorski and Hinkle pulled into Eveline Street in a red 1985 Ford Escort station wagon. Neighbors say they ripped off their soiled blood-stained clothes and

sneakers, and tossed them over a fence into an alley next to the row house.

They unloaded stereo equipment, a pair of head phones and cash. They put the stereo equipment on the front porch of 3696 Eveline Street.

Hinkle tried to sell the head phones, telling neighbors they could get a real ``head rush.''

Szadorski tried to sell neighbors the red Ford Escort for $150. They refused. The neighbors say Szadorski then boasted to two terrified teen-agers that

he had a story to tell:

It was dark at May Jane Dickson's two-story home. New spring growth hid the house from sight on the gravel road. Dickson lay sleeping in her upstairs bedroom.

Szadorski saw Dickson sleeping and something snapped. Szadorski told the teens he was ``tired'' of the old woman. ``I wanted to slice her up.''

Szadorski told them he plunged a blade into Dickson's face while she slept. He continued the slashing until she was lifeless.

Szadorski told them he wasn't worried about doing time. He had been in and out of mental hospitals. He'd get away with it because he was schizophrenic.

The teen-agers were at first too frightened to talk. It was a couple of days before the story began filtering around the neighborhood.

The rest of the week, neighbors said Szadorski went on as if nothing had happened. He stopped by Michael Flynn's porch to bum a couple dollars for cigarettes. Flynn gave him a beer and they drank it together.

***

Ann Hargreaves, Dickson's friend of 43 years, found the bloodied body under a heap of sheets and quilts near the foot of her bed. She put one hand on her neck to check for a pulse. The other hand, she put on her chest to see

if the heart somehow continued to beat.

Police pursued a lead about a one-time gardener of Dickson's named Tony Szadorski. Detectives began to put the pieces together. They came to believe Szadorski had murdered May Jane Dickson while Brian ``B.B.''

Hinkle robbed the house downstairs. Because he was at the scene of the crime, Hinkle, too, would face murder charges.

Only Szadorski, if convicted, could face a death sentence.

Back in East Falls, word leaked out that police were searching for Szadorski in connection with the murder of an elderly woman.

That's when Flynn saw Szadorski walking onto Eveline Street. He wanted to nail him.

***

Down the street at A-Plus, the pump came down hard on

Tony Szadorski's head. Three city cops stood by. They watched as Flynn inflicted blow after blow, finally knocking Szadorski out cold. Blood dripped from the suspect's face.

And when he came to, they clamped Szadorski in handcuffs and put him in a car.

``How does it feel, man, to kill an old lady?'' Flynn seethed at Szadorski.

Szadorski licked the blood from his chin and said ``Yea, yea, yea!! I liked it, I liked it!''

They took him away.

Szadorski made a phone call from jail. He spoke to his housemate Diana Jankiewicz. He pleaded with her: ``Tell my mother.''