It was July 1973. Richard Nixon was trying to contain Watergate; Marlon Brando had just won an Oscar for The Godfather; I had completed my junior year of high school. That month found me catching bullheads with my grandfather on Adirondack Lake, in Indian Lake. I’ll never forget the horrifying news and the palpable tension.
Robert Garrow was on the run. The 37-year-old who grew up in the Adirondacks hunting, fishing and trapping had left a trail of terror in the wilderness. Hundreds of police officers, guided by forest rangers and tracking dogs, swarmed the Hamilton County woods trying to find him. Garrow was believed to have committed rapes and murders, culminating in an assault on four campers near Speculator.
On July 29 Garrow surprised those victims—Phil Domblewski, Nick Fiorello, David Freeman and Carol Ann Malinowski—with a gun. He tied each to a tree, out of sight but within earshot of each other. Then he stabbed 18-year-old Domblewski, from Schenectady, repeatedly until he was dead. The others slipped their bonds and escaped. Authorities were alerted, and the greatest chase in Adirondack history was underway.
The most frightening thing about Garrow—and there were many—was that in addition to being bright and disciplined and violent, he was a skilled woodsman. Day after day, while teams scoured the region by foot, patrol car and helicopter, Garrow moved undetected.
Few felt safe. In Indian Lake, I remember the concerned looks and short tempers of adults as they feigned calm. Lovers of the outdoors stayed inside or ventured afield warily, often with firearms. The unease spread across the park, far from the scene of Domblewski’s murder. My Rochester friend Jim Alsina spent summers in Keene Valley. Then 17, he remembers fear permeating the village. “People were really on edge. Everyone had guns loaded and close by, afraid of a knock or a sound. There were cops everywhere.” Even the police got jumpy. Vonnie Liddle, 41, of lndian Lake, recalls that in North Creek there was a much-loved priest, Father Ashline, who “was going into Smith’s Restaurant and was taken down by the state troopers because he closely resembled Garrow. From what I have been told,” Liddle says, “they tackled him and had him in handcuffs before anyone could stop them.”
Walt Cuniff, 59, a former highway department worker in Indian Lake, drove an orange Volkswagen similar to Garrow’s. “I’d been away at a motocross race near Utica,” he says, “and I was coming downhill into Indian Lake when I hit the roadblock. I saw shotguns coming over the hoods of cars. Fortunately, most of the cops were local guys and knew who I was.”
Women home with children, particularly ones with husbands away night and day on the search, had added reason to be anxious. Gail Perryman, mother of four and wife of now-retired forest ranger Don Perryman Sr., lived with her family at Lake Durant, not far from the heart of the search. “That was a scary time for us. I hate to say it, but I kept a gun near the door,” she recalls. “My husband taught me to shoot it the first year we were married.”
In North River, 82-year-old Milda Burns remembers her husband saying, “At night, when the lights are on, he can see us, and we can’t see him.” During the manhunt, Burns let herself be talked into going fishing with her young son, Pete, and a friend near Schroon Lake. “It was a terrible, nerve-wracking day,” she says. “That’s not the way the Adirondacks are. They’re free, and they’re safe. You meet someone on the trail, and you talk to him. But that’s not the way it was with Robert Garrow on the loose.”
Pat Goodman, of North Creek, had worked all over the Adirondacks. The 94- year-old says, matter-of-factly, “I knew Garrow personally. I knew his father too.” Goodman had worked with the Garrows on construction jobs. I asked Goodman if he had witnessed cruelty by the elder Garrow toward his son (in court testimony, it came out that Robert Garrow had suffered brutal physical and emotional abuse from both parents). “No, I don’t know any of that. But I can tell you this. Bob was a big man. He was a very nice fellow to work around. He was very quiet. He had a set of eyes that would drill right through you.”
Guide Joe Hackett, of Ray Brook, was a 17-year-old lifeguard at Lincoln Pond during the search. “We closed the campground and beach, he says. It was too dangerous. Garrow sure put a crimp on tourism that summer.”
As campgrounds emptied and people all over the park kept close watch on their loved ones and strangers, searchers sifted the woods. According to Dave Larrabee, 70, then district ranger in Wells, “We were out tracking him, following streams. Once we heard splashing and someone running just ahead of us. He had the edge. He had a gun, and we didn’t know where he was going.”
Gerry Husson, 83, was a forest ranger in Indian Lake. I asked if he feared for his own life, knowing the murderer might be near. “I was in the Marine Corps in World War II,” he says, “so I wasn’t scared of Garrow. I was just hoping to get a shot at the SOB.”
Retired ranger Don Perryman Sr., 72, of Saranac Lake, also among those in the woods, explains, “Susan Petz had not been found yet, and they didn’t want us to kill him in case she was still alive somewhere.” The 20-year-old from Skokie, Illinois, and her boyfriend, 23-year-old Harvard student Daniel Porter, had been attacked by Garrow on a back road in Wevertown. Porter’s body was discovered along nearby Waddell Road on July 20, but Petz remained missing. Garrow abducted, raped and killed her, then threw her body down a Mineville mine shaft.
The killer’s audacity stunned everyone. Following the Domblewski stabbing, Garrow shot through a barricade, swerved off Route 8 onto the old state highway, ditched his car near a creek and vanished.
He eluded bloodhounds, rangers and police. He traveled six miles or more through dense forest until, north of Speculator, he stole a white Pontiac Tempest. Days passed. Then on August 7, eight days after slicing through his first roadblock, he charged through another. This one spanned Route 28, just east of lndian Lake. Heading toward North Creek, Garrow sped through the night.
Inlet forest ranger Gary Lee, now 66 and retired, was at a Route 8 roadblock near Speculator when a radio bulletin reported Garrow’s breach. Shortly after, a second message told of the breakdown of the state police car pursuing him. Lee knew the roads well and proposed racing up Route 8 to intercept the fugitive, but the policeman he was paired with had orders to stay put. Again, Robert Garrow slipped away.
Two days later, on August 9, state police, suspecting that Garrow had found his way to Witherbee and was getting food from relatives there, organized a search. Conservation officer Hilary J. Leblanc Jr., from Long Lake, spied a man fleeing and ordered him to stop. He continued to run. Leblanc fired his shotgun. It took two blasts to bring Garrow down.
Adirondackers breathed more easily. Garrow was locked up, injured but alive. He was tried in Lake Pleasant the following June, found guilty of Domblewski’s murder, confessed to killing 16-year-old Alicia Hauck (who disappeared on her way home from school, in Syracuse), Petz and Porter as part of a plea bargain, and was sentenced to 25 years to life. A map found in his Volkswagen, marked with 26 red dots that corresponded to unsolved murders and disappearances, suggests that Garrow’s victims may be more numerous than those cited in the trial.
Because he feigned paralysis after the shooting, Garrow was transferred from Dannemora prison to Fishkill Correctional Facility in the Hudson Valley. In the building for handicapped inmates, security was less than tight. On September 8, 1978, Garrow stood up from his wheelchair, walked out, scaled a fence and dissolved into the woods. He carried a pistol that his son had smuggled into his cell in a bucket of fried chicken. For two days he couldn’t be found. Old fears flared. How far would he go this time?
On the third day, a correction officer searching the prison perimeter spied movement. Garrow had scooped out a depression and was hiding in it. Discovered, he opened fire. The officer fell with an injury to his hip, but others let loose a fusillade. When the gunsmoke cleared Robert Garrow lay dead.
More than three decades later, it’s business as usual in the Adirondacks. Hikers greet strangers warmly along the trail, campers sleep soundly, and a great many windows and doors are never bolted. Still, all who remember the summer of 1973 remain, in a quiet way, wary.
