Thomas Grasso of Tulsa, Okla., celebrated Christmas 1990 by strangling his neighbor, Hilda Johnson, 87. His weapon was a string of lights from her tree, and he finished her off by bashing her skull with an iron. He got her TV, $8 from her purse, and $4 in pennies.
On New Year's Day, Grasso and his wife, Lana, showed up at the Staten Island home of Linda Lewandowski, his first cousin, and settled in for a long visit with the family. That lasted until Tom and Lana started coming home drunk and some of Lewandowski's jewelry mysteriously vanished.
Cousin or no cousin, Lewandowski booted them out, and they settled into a rooming house in St. George, Staten Island. The couple quickly became neighborhood fixtures - the local grubby junkies, always poised to beg, borrow, or steal.
On July 3, Grasso celebrated Independence Day by liberating Leslie Holtz, 81, a quiet, well-liked retired gentleman, from his Social Security check and his life. Grasso strangled the old man with an electrical cord and then bashed his head in.
Cash for cocaine was the motive, but it was a prime cut of beef, bought with the stolen money, that gave Grasso away. Detectives investigating the murder on July 5 noticed an expensive sirloin sizzling on the stove in Grasso's apartment. Something about it didn't smell right; it was a meal too rich for a druggie whose main occupation was rummaging around for deposit cans.
Within two weeks, Grasso had confessed to both murders. Before a video camera, he first told investigators about the Staten Island killing, which he committed with the help of another junkie, Charles Johnson, 30 (no relation to the Tulsa victim), with whom Grasso had been sharing crack the afternoon of the killing.
Then, almost as an afterthought, Grasso fessed up to the Tulsa crime. He told how he met Hilda Johnson; she had given a golden retriever to his mother-in-law, who lived half a block away.
On the day before Christmas, Grasso knocked on Johnson's door, carrying a gift-wrapped bottle of perfume. Johnson opened the door, thinking she was getting a present. Instead, Grasso stepped inside and attacked. Johnson was a strong, feisty old woman, and she fought back with every bit of strength she could muster, giving him a bruised jaw and a fat lip.
Grasso pleaded guilty in New York to the Holtz murder, and on April 21, 1992, was sentenced to 20 years to life, with no chance of parole until 2011. His accomplice pleaded guilty to attempted murder, and was sentenced to 12 years.
It was then that Grasso became a wanted man, the center of a tug-of-war between two states and two ideologies.
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