Sick spree of the Mohawk Ripper
Takes coward’s way out after rape and murder of teen girls
John Hopkins lowered the curtain on his wasted life on March 11, 2000, in his cell at Great Meadow state prison east of Lake George.
He used a razor to carve deep gashes in the back of his legs, mining for a branch of his femoral artery, then slashed both wrists. He was chalk-faced and drained of life by the time officers found him.
At age 46, Hopkins had been locked up 21 years for sex murders.
Perhaps suicide was an act of contrition. More likely, he did the math. His earliest parole date, 38 years distant, would have been an 85th birthday present.
Hopkins was a scourge of the Mohawk Valley in the 1970s.
He was born in 1953 in Johnstown, where his father was a grease monkey. He was a skinny redhead with big, lopsided ears. He dreamed of joining the state police, but early-arriving psychopathy scotched that idea.
Friends said he cruised the Thruway in his Chevy Nova, wearing a felt cowboy hat and military coat, trying to pass as a trooper. He also “had a thing for knives,” and kin told authorities years later that his father once melted down one of Hopkins’ favorite blades because his son “had done something bad with it.”
Hopkins had many bad things notched in his knife sheath by the time comeuppance arrived.
A 15-year-old girl was abducted at knifepoint on Aug. 15, 1979, from a road in Northville. She was spirited 0 miles to a house in Johnsown, where she was bound etween two attic posts and aped.
The following day, the atacker drove the victim into he woods in nearby Palatine, intending to kill her. He stuffed a sponge in her mouth to muffle screams, knocked her in the head and stabbed her in the back.
But he attracted the attention of Patrick Boucher, a logger who was in the woods marking trees for harvest. The attacker scrammed, the victim survived and led police to her would-be killer: Hopkins.
In a midnight confession at the Loudonville state police barracks, Hopkins owned up to the attack on the teen and a series of rape-motivated Mohawk Valley murders.
“I have told you this because I know I’m ill and require professional help,” he said. “The pressure builds up in me…and I don’t want to hurt or kill anyone else. Please help me.”
He confessed to the unsolved July 1976 rape and murder of Cecelia Genatiempo, 17, abducted north of Johnstown in Gloversville after leaving a Main St. doughnut shop. Hunters found her body — punctured ad nauseam by Hopkins’ blade — that fall.
He also claimed the rape and knife murder of Sherrie Ann Carville, 17, of Broadalbin, who was kidnapped on Oct. 22, 1978, outside a bar near Johnstown. Her body lay undiscovered on his father’s land for nearly a year.
Hopkins was convicted in a series of trials in the early 1980s and sent away for 58 years to life.
But some believed he had not emptied his closet of secrets—for example, the unsolved murder of Ronkonkoma’s Katherine Kolodziej, 17, a Cobleskill college student who vanished outside a bar there in 1974. She was found stabbed to death in a field.
Despite years of trying, investigators failed to link Hopkins to that murder.
But in 2007, seven years after Hopkins killed himself, a young prosecutor in Oneida County suggested that the Johnstown ripper may have been responsible for an unsolved sex murder in Utica, at the western reach of the Mohawk Valley 60 miles from his hometown.
On Jan. 12, 1972, college student Joanne Pecheone, 19, was accosted on a wooded path used as a shortcut to her East Utica neighborhood. A boy passing by on a snowmobile spooked the assailant, who fled from the woods.
The boy was too late to save Pecheone, who had been gagged, bound with her shoelaces to a tree limb, raped and stabbed to death.
The Oneida prosecutor, Todd Carville, happened to be a cousin of Sherrie Ann Carville, Hopkins’ 1978 victim. He noticed that Pecheone’s killer followed the modus operandi Hopkins used on his cousin, Genatiempo and the 15-yearold survivor.
For one thing, he used his knife to slice open the brassieres of both Pecheone and the survivor at their breastbones. Abduction, rape, stabbing and bondage also linked the cases.
DNA evidence was inconclusive, but the DA’s investigator, James Helmer, interviewed friends and relatives of Hopkins, as well as the snowmobiler and a second witness who saw the killer flee in a car similar to Hopkins’ Chevy Nova. Footprints at the Pecheone crime scene matched the distinct B.F. Goodrich soles of Hopkins’ boots.
And a 1970 yearbook photo of Hopkins matched a Utica police sketch from 1972, including the lopsided ears.
“That’s John,” one relative told Helmer.
“There’s not one smoking gun,” Oneida DA Scott McNamara told reporters. "You just keep putting the pieces of the puzzle together until it’s clear what you have."
He acknowledged the cases should have been linked decades ago and blamed police territorialism. In February 2011, McNamara met with Pecheone’s surviving family to deliver overdue closure.
“It is our opinion that John Hopkins is the perpetrator of this crime,” he said. “We are therefore closing the case as solved.”