BATH TUB KILLER
TWO WIVES, TWO MURDERS − HOW COULD HE DO IT?
Maryann Fullerton thought she had met the man of her dreams when she bumped into Tim Boczkowski at a dance. Little did she know she had met a murderer who not only killed his first wife but would later go on to viciously kill her.
Boczkowski, a 36-year-old widower, had recently moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania after the tragic death of his first wife Elaine.
He was making a fresh start after his business in North Carolina had gone bankrupt.
Boczkowski was trying to juggle his new career making crowns and bridges for local dentists, while also raising his two sons, Randy and Todd, and his daughter, Sandy.
It was love at first sight when Maryann met the young widower.
“She met him at a dance,” Ruth Schumann, Maryann’s aunt, explains.
“She came home all excited saying she met the most wonderful man at the Catholic singles’ club that night.
“All her friends figured they hadn’t seen her that excited in a while and he just might be the person.”
Maryann also fell in love with Boczkowski’s children and when the couple married soon after, she included them in the wedding ceremony.
But the children would soon lose their second ‘mother’ in four years when Maryann, 35, was found unconscious in the family’s hot tub.
One November night, 18 months after he married his second wife, Boczkowski called for an ambulance.
On the phone, he sounded like a frantic husband desperately trying to save his wife’s life.
“Is the patient conscious right now? Is she breathing?” the emergency dispatcher asked.
“I don’t think so,” Boczkowski said. “I’m trying to get her out of the water.”
It was too late.
When Maryann was rushed to the hospital that night, she was pronounced dead on arrival.
Strangely enough, she had a lot of bruises, mostly on her face and neck, investigators noted.
Boczkowski told police that he got into the hot tub with his wife around 11pm that night.
After a while Boczkowski left his wife and went to take a shower. He told police that when he came back 20 minutes later, he found her lifeless body floating in the water.
Initially the police believed Boczkowski’s story.
On the surface it seemed that Tim Boczkowski had lost both of his wives through an unfortunate coincidence.
But when police pieced together the evidence at the crime scene, they started to question if Maryann’s death was a freak accident – or was it murder?
Back in Greensboro, North Carolina, detectives were still uncomfortable about the circumstances of 34-year-old Elaine’s death in 1990.
AS HIS WIFE’S LIFELESS BODY WAS BEING TAKEN AWAY, HE SAID: “I HOPE THEY DON’T TRY TO PUT THIS ON ME”
Boczkowski explained away the accident, saying his wife had come home from a church social function where she had been drinking.
He then went to bed, while Elaine went to take a bath.
According to Boczkowski, the bathroom door was locked and he had to use a screwdriver to force it open.
He says he found his wife, lying on her back in the bathtub, unconscious and submerged in water. Boczkowski says that he pulled Elaine out of the tub, placed her body over the shower door tracks and tried to revive her. Paramedics rushed Elaine to the hospital and she was pronounced dead on arrival. The coroner ruled the cause of Elaine’s death as ‘undetermined’. Meanwhile Cyril Wecht, the Allegheny County Coroner in Pennsylvania, was trying to find out how the second Mrs Boczkowski died.
Dr Wecht found 53 internal and external bruises on Maryann’s body – on her upper arms, her back and upper neck.
All of these bruises on Maryann’s body painted a macabre picture. Maryann
Boczkowski didn’t drown in the hot tub – she was strangled.
Dr Wecht ruled that she had died of asphyxiation due to compression of the neck.
This prompted police in North Carolina to look at Elaine’s case again.
If Boczkowski had killed his second wife, perhaps he killed the first one too, they thought.
To add to the sinister picture, in each marriage, Boczkowski had taken out a substantial life insurance policy on his spouses.
Interviews with Elaine’s family and friends also revealed there was trouble in his first marriage.
One of their children revealed their parents had an argument on the night Elaine died.
Police concluded that before Elaine got into the shower, Boczkowski forced her over the edge of the tub and held her there for four or five minutes, preventing her from breathing and the bruises found on Elaine’s body suggest she suffered a violent death.
Boczkowski was also having trouble with his second wife, who wanted children of her own. Pittsburgh prosecutors believe that the couple bickered while they were in the hot tub.
Boczkowski quickly overpowered Maryann and possibly used the wet beach towels to muffle her screams.
She fought for her life – splashing water on to the deck and scratching her husband’s back.
Officers made note that as his wife’s lifeless body was being taken to an ambulance, Boczkowski said to an officer: “I hope they don’t try to put this on me.”
With this evidence in place, police arrested and charged Tim Boczkowski with the firstdegree murder of both his wives – Elaine and Maryann.
Found guilty of both murders, today Boczkowski, 63, sits behind bars at the State Correctional Institution at Greene in Pennsylvania.
He is serving a life sentence and will never be released.