Michael Travaglia died on Monday at age 59, still on Pennsylvania’s Death Row but having evaded the executioner. The state Corrections Department says he died from natural causes at Washington Hospital in Washington, PA, where he’d been a patient since August 22nd. He was living at SCI Greene County.
Travaglia and John Lesko were sentenced to death in 1981 for the murder of rookie Apollo police Officer Leonard Miller, one of four people who lost their lives in what came to be known as the “Kill for Thrill” murders. The two convicted murderers have used the slow-moving state and federal appeals process for decades to avoid execution.
On December 27th, 1979, they tortured and fatally shot Peter Lovato after meeting him at a Pittsburgh strip club and driving him to 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 Miller after luring him into chasing them 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.
Both Travaglia and Lesko have been re-sentenced to death, Travaglia in 2005 and Lesko in 1995, and both were sentenced to life in prison for the other three murders. Lesko continues to appeal the death penalty as he sits on Death Row at SCI Graterford, outside of Philadelphia.
