The Story Of The Serial Killer Who Terrorized This Small Delaware Town Is Truly Frightening

It began on a chilly November night when Shirley Ann Ellis was bringing a Thanksgiving dinner platter to an AIDS patient at Wilmington Hospital. She was hoping to hitchhike, rather than walk the 14-mile journey. A car pulled up and offered her a ride — but her body was found less than three hours later. The autopsy revealed torture and mutilation. The small New Castle County town was immediately on high alert.

Two other victims were identified as being picked up along Route 40, in Bear, and their bodies were later found tortured in the same way as Ellis's. Work tools were identified as being used to mutilate the bodies. There were no common links between the victims, but detectives were given one clue by the second body found.

An undercover policewoman had been conducting investigations along route 40, posing as a prostitute. One night, she was approached by Steven Pennell in a blue Ford panel van — the same vehicle that was spotted picking up a previous victim. The detective was able to subtly pull some fibers from the van's interior blue carpet before Pennell got suspicious, and sped off. The fibers were found to match those on the victims.

Steven Pennell was arrested November 29, 1988, and convicted of the November 1987 murder of Shirley A. Ellis, and the June 1988 murder of Catherine A. DiMauro. Eventually, he pled no contest to the September 1988 murders of Michele A. Gordon and Kathleen Anne Meyer. He was also suspected of the August 1988 murder of Margaret Lynn Finner, though her body was found in such a decayed state that conclusive evidence was impossible to find.

Pennell defended himself in Delaware's superior court and requested that he be executed by lethal injection. He did deny his crimes, but requested execution for the sake of his wife and family, whom he did not want to burden by spending life in prison.

Delaware hadn't executed a prisoner since 1946, but the state also had no criminals quite like Pennell. In the years following Pennell's execution, Delaware's stance on capital punishment softened, and sixteen other convicted murderers were put to death at the correctional center in Smyrna. In 2016, the Delaware Supreme Court ruled capital punishment unconstitutional, thus shutting down the program in the small state that had the third highest number of executions per capita.