Mall Rat: A young mother and her toddler go missing from a shopping mall. What happened to them is the stuff of nightmares.
Taken by Wolves: A woman arriving at the train station after a day at work; a group of miscreants lurking. They’re looking for someone to abduct. She’s it.
Love You to Death: He was the handsome PhD advisor. She was his brightest student. She was also his lover... until she wasn’t. Then things got ugly.
The Cruelty of Strangers: Two abused boys are placed in foster care on an idyllic farm. They think they’ve landed in heaven. Actually, its hell.
Dear Diary: Far from home and family, a Harvard student takes to writing in her journal for comfort. Her writings record a slow descent into madness.
Poking The Bear: Messing with a man’s wife is never a good idea, especially when that man has a gun in his hand.
Don’t Stop: A young woman driving alone is pulled over by a cop. Then she vanishes. The investigation unearths some troubling clues.
Mortal Harm: Down in the hospital basement, down where the dead rest, away from prying eyes, something deeply unsettling is going on.
Murder Most Vile Volume 57
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isa Manderach was the kind of woman who turned heads. Petite and pretty, with a mane of dark hair, she could easily have graced the pages of a fashion magazine. Not that Lisa saw herself that way. She was happy being a wife to Jimmy, a mother to 19-month-old Devon. And Lisa worked a job that was totally out of step with her glamorous image. During the work week, you’d find her behind the controls of a forklift at Fleming Cos., a food distributor in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.
On the afternoon of September 10, 1995, Jimmy Manderach sat himself down in front of the TV to watch the Sunday football game. Lisa, who had little interest in sports, found herself at a loose end. Then she remembered seeing a newspaper ad for a new store that had opened at the nearby Collegeville Shopping Center. Your Kidz & Mine advertised itself as a boutique for toddlers and Lisa thought it would be her fun trip for her and Devon. At around 3:00 p.m., she told Jimmy that she was driving to the mall to check it out. She wouldn’t be long, she added. Then she carried Devon out to her 1988 Pontiac Firebird and strapped her into her car seat. Jimmy looked up from the TV as the car reversed down the driveway.
The drive to the mall was fifteen minutes each way. Add in a couple of hours for shopping and Jimmy expected his wife home by 5:30 at the latest. But 6 o’clock came and went and there was still no sign of them. Jimmy was getting anxious, going to the window to peer out every few minutes, straining his ears for the familiar rumble of Lisa’s car. Eventually, he called his brother, John, and asked what he should do. John told him to calm down. He was overreacting. Lisa would be home soon. Jimmy then called his sister. She gave him the same advice.
Only, Jimmy wasn’t calm. A terrible sense of dread had crept into his bones. Something was wrong here. By 8:00 p.m., he could stand it no longer. He picked up the phone and called the police. They dispatched an officer who asked a lot of questions about the state of his marriage. Jimmy assured him that it was solid. Lisa had not walked out on him. The officer then conducted a quick search and noted that Lisa had taken nothing with her, not a stitch of clothes for her or Devon, not her toiletries or extra diapers for the baby. That was when the police started taking the report seriously. A unit was sent to the Collegeville mall. There, in the near empty parking lot, stood Lisa’s Firebird, locked and abandoned. Of mother and daughter, though, there was no sign.
What the officers didn’t know just yet, was that Devon Manderach had already been found. Late that afternoon, a group of hikers had been walking a trail in Valley Forge National Park when they made a horrific discovery. The corpse of a baby lay on the ground, halfway down an embankment. The child was fully clothed and had severe bruising to her neck. It appeared she’d been tossed from a car, parked on the roadside above. The connection between this tragedy and the missing person case was made later that evening.
Jimmy Manderach was asked to come down to the morgue to make an identification. But Jimmy was in no condition to do that. The police weren’t sure yet that it was Devon, but Jimmy knew in his heart that it was. He couldn’t bear to look at his beloved daughter, dead and laid out on a cold steel table. His brother, John, went in his stead. It was he who identified Devon. The autopsy would show that the little girl had been strangled.
So now the police had a homicide on their hands. And as is usually the case in these circumstances, suspicion fell on the husband. Those who knew Jimmy assured them that Devon and Lisa were his life. He would never have hurt them. But the police don’t deal in assurances. Jimmy’s refusal to view his daughter’s body seemed suspicious to them. Any parent could have told them why Jimmy had refused. In the end, though, the police had to strike Jimmy from their suspect list. Neighbors told detectives that his car had been in the drive all afternoon. He had not left the house.
Meanwhile, the search for Lisa continued. Officers descended on Valley Forge National Park, assisted by bloodhounds and with a helicopter providing support from the air. Other investigators were working the Collegeville Shopping Center, going store to store, asking staff if they’d seen Lisa and Devon the previous day. While they were doing so, a woman approached and said that she had seen them inside the baby boutique, Your Kidz & Mine. She had been leaving the store when Lisa entered with Devon. It was just before closing, she said, and they were the last customers in there.
Jimmy had, of course, told the police that his wife planned on visiting this store. However, they seem to have ignored this, possibly because they regarded Jimmy as a suspect. Now, they had corroboration from a third party. Your Kidz & Mine was owned by a woman named Ruth Fairley, who told them that her son, Caleb, had worked alone at the store that Sunday. She got Caleb on the phone, then handed the receiver to a detective who asked if he’d had a customer matching Lisa’s description. Caleb said that he had not. The detective asked if he’d come down to the station to look at some photographs. He said that he would.
When 21-year-old Caleb Fairley showed up at the police station that afternoon, detectives were immediately struck by the thick, poorly applied makeup he was wearing. Fairley was sent to the bathroom to wash it off. When he returned, it was clear what the makeup was intended to hide. The pudgy young man had several deep scratches on his face. Asked about this, Fairley said that he had received the injuries in a mosh pit at a Philadelphia nightclub called The Asylum. To the detectives, that sounded too convenient. Caleb Fairley had just become their prime suspect. That same day, they obtained warrants for the Fairley residence and for the boutique.
And those searches would only deepen their suspicions. At the house, they found an extensive collection of pornographic material, some of it disturbing in nature. They also found various vampire paraphernalia and items that were listed in discovery as “strange sexual devices”. In addition, there was a t-shirt that caught their attention. It featured a beautiful young woman being groped by two vampires. The woman in the picture bore a startling resemblance to the missing Lisa Manderach.
The items found at the Fairley residence painted Caleb Fairley as a pervert with a vampire fetish. There would be further evidence of this when officers searched the children’s boutique and found peepholes drilled in the dressing room walls. Presumably Fairley was using this to spy on his young customers as they disrobed. He also had some of his extreme porn collection here, stashed in a space where parents came to shop with their young children.
But none of this made Caleb Fairley a killer. To prove murder, the police would need forensic evidence. They found it in saliva lifted from the floor (later matched to Devon). They found it in strands of long, black hair retrieved from a vacuum cleaner (matched to Lisa). They found it in semen traces on the carpet that were a match to Caleb Fairley.
Caleb Fairley, the chubby loser who’d never had a girlfriend in his life, was looking at a double murder wrap. And with a toddler among the victims, there was going to be public and political pressure on the D.A. to make this a death penalty case. Fairley’s public defender undoubtedly knew this because he convinced his client to come clean and ask for a deal. The proposal was this. Fairley would reveal the location of Lisa Manderach’s body if the death penalty was removed from the equation. After due consideration, the D.A. agreed.
On September 12, 1995, two days after her ill-fated trip to the mall, Lisa’s battered corpse was recovered from some woods behind an industrial park in King of Prussia. She was nude, save for a black lace top that had been pulled up to expose her breasts. The body was posed in a sexually suggestive manner, with her legs splayed. Bruised hands and broken fingernails spoke of the fight Lisa had put up. She’d sustained other injuries too, including five broken ribs. In the end, the petite woman had been no match for her overweight attacker. She’d died with his pudgy hands clamped down on her throat.
But Lisa’s fight had not been entirely in vain. Her nails had raked furrows across Fairley’s face, removing a layer of skin. Those skin cells contained DNA, providing further evidence of his guilt. Fairley was arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree murder. He entered not guilty pleas at his arraignment. That may seem surprising given the evidence against him, but Fairley’s lawyer had a trick up his sleeve, a plan to get his client off with minimal jail time.
The trial began on April 10, 1996, with Fairley facing charges of aggravated assault and abuse of a corpse in addition to the two counts of murder. The prosecution opened by describing Fairley as a porn-addicted pervert who saw in Lisa Manderach the woman of his sexual fantasies. Had he left it at that, then this tragedy would never have happened. But Fairley decided to take things further. While Lisa was distracted with browsing the racks, he snuck around to lock the front door. Then he waited until she was near the back of the store before launching his attack.
Lisa was knocked down and dragged to the changing rooms. There, Fairley pinned her to the ground by kneeling on her, breaking her ribs in the process. His intention was rape, but he had not expected her to put up such a fight. Lisa flailed with her nails, scratching him. That enraged Fairley and he got his hands on her throat and started squeezing. He did not release his grip until she lay limp and lifeless beneath him.
Having snuffed out the life of an innocent woman, Fairley now committed an act of even greater depravity. Baby Devon was likely confused and crying when he turned on her, ending her young life with his strangling hands. He then tried to commit an act of necrophilia on Lisa’s corpse but was unable to do so. Instead, he masturbated over the body. Then he waited for the mall to empty before carrying the bodies out to his car. Devon’s tiny corpse was callously tossed down an embankment at Valley Forge National Park. Lisa was driven to the industrial park in King of Prussia, where Fairley committed his final perversion by posing her body.
Thomas Egan, Caleb’s court appointed attorney, made no attempt to deny Fairley’s involvement in the killings. “I will take away some of the mystery in this case,” he told the court. “Mr. Fairley did commit those killings.” He argued, however, that Fairley was not guilty of first-degree murder, because the killings were not premeditated. The appropriate charge, Egan argued, was third-degree murder.
This was a quite outrageous stance. It was also one that the jurors were never going to entertain, not in a case of this nature. After deliberating for just three hours, the jury was back with a verdict. Caleb Fairley was guilty on two counts of first-degree murder and one count of abusing a corpse. Judge William Carpenter subsequently handed down the maximum penalty, two life sentences with no possibility of parole.
For Jimmy Manderach, for the rest of Lisa and Devon’s family, this was a hollow victory. Justice had been done. A killer was behind bars, but at such a cost. How does something like this even happen? How does a mother take her toddler shopping on a Sunday afternoon and end up savagely murdered along with her child? It almost defies belief.
Caleb Fairley is currently an inmate at the State Correctional Institution Fayette in La Belle, Pennsylvania. He has filed a number of appeals, all of which have been denied. Fairley will be well advised to watch his back at Fayette. Prison is full of tough, uncompromising men. And they have no love for baby killers.
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