JUSTICE STORY: Boy-crazy teen daughter of New Jersey pastor was victim of a brutal murder – New York Daily News
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Some people thought of Wanda Dworecki, 17, as a shy girl who loved to do church work, seldom went to parties, and had no steady.
To others, she was Wild Wanda, so boy-crazy that she had become an embarrassment to her widowed father, a Baptist minister, and a danger to herself.
By Aug. 8, 1939, opinions about the 5-foot-2-inch teen’s personality no longer mattered. Wanda was dead.
A truck farmer found her muddy corpse in a clump of weeds near the Camden High School tennis courts in New Jersey. She wore a necklace of red beads, a diamond ring, and a black coat with a large corsage of red and white roses.
Despite disfiguring facial bruising, detectives quickly recognized the victim. Her father, the Rev. Walter Dworecki, 42, the pastor of the Congregation of Christ Baptist Church, had reported her missing the night before.
Wanda, who lived eight blocks from the crime scene, was well-known to local police because of a series of bizarre attacks in the seven months before the final fatal encounter.
The first happened on Valentine’s Day when Wanda and an 11-year-old friend were walking to a movie. A stranger in a car offered them a lift and they foolishly accepted.
Instead of the theater, they ended up on an isolated road fending off his attacks. Somehow, the girls managed to claw their way to freedom. A police officer spotted them running down the road and drove them home. The assailant was never found.
In early April, Wanda told her siblings, Mildred, 14, and Alfred, 16, that she was going to walk to the drugstore. On the way, two men lured her into their car. After driving for miles and attempting to rape her, they tossed her into a ditch and vanished.
On Aug. 1, there was another mysterious, troubling encounter. A young man showed up at the Dworecki home six times, demanding she accompany him to the drugstore to answer a phone call.
She knew there was no phone at the store, so she refused. “You’d better answer the phone — or else,” the stranger yelled as he left.
Police warned her father that he had to keep an eye on her. But he couldn’t watch her all the time.
On the evening of her murder, the pastor had gone to Philadelphia to comfort a dying woman. The last time he saw his daughter alive, she was heading out to buy ice cream and stockings. The next time he saw her was in the morgue.
“Oh my Lord,” he sobbed when he looked into her battered face. Then he fainted.
Police searched the family home for clues to her killer’s identity.
Love letters from local boys were of interest. But more intriguing were some of her father’s documents — insurance policies on Wanda’s life, totaling nearly $14,000 (about $310,000 today). The reverend had purchased them five months before Wanda’s death.
A year earlier, Dworecki had collected $2,500 on a similar policy. That one was for his wife, Theresa, who died at the breakfast table one morning. Pneumonia was the official cause of death. Investigators suspected foul play and took a close look but found nothing.
Probes into the reverend’s past revealed some troubling details. He had arrived in the U.S. from Poland in 1913, and by 1926, he had established his own church. But he also had a criminal record for passing counterfeit bills and arson, and had a reputation as a womanizer.
Nothing came together until detectives zeroed in on a boyfriend, Peter Shewchuk, 20, a one-time circus roustabout. He had been spotted with Wanda the night she died.
Shewchuk was tall, strong, a bit slow, and had a criminal record for theft. He had been boarding in the Dworecki home and was dating Wanda.
The youth confessed to killing her, but offered a shocking explanation of why he strangled a girl he said he loved. The murder was planned by the victim’s own father, who offered Shewchuk money to bump off his spirited child.
Dworecki convinced the impressionable youth that Wanda was carrying Shewchuk’s baby. (The medical examiner found no sign of pregnancy.)
“He told me I had to kill Wanda,” Shewchuk said during his testimony at Dworecki’s trial. He described, in chilling detail, her last moments along a lovers’ lane.
“I grabbed her around the neck and squeezed tight. She fought, then went limp,” he said. He finished the job by smashing her face with several blows from a large rock.
He remembered to carry out the final instructions from the pastor: “Listen to her heart. Make sure she is dead.”
Shewchuk said Dworecki had offered $100 to do the job, but he said he never saw any of that money. All he got was 50 cents to take Wanda on her last date.
Another prosecution witness — John Popollo, 41 — said the pastor had offered half of a $2,000 insurance policy to murder his daughter. He said she was becoming an embarrassment to him.
“Just grab her by the neck and choke her, and you will get $1,000,” Popollo quoted the bad dad as saying.
Despite offering six confessions after his arrest, Dworecki insisted on the stand that the murder was Shewchuk’s idea.
The jury found him guilty and sent him to the electric chair. In a separate trial, Shewchuk was also convicted but he got a lighter sentence of life in prison. He was released in 1958.
On the pastor’s execution day, March 28, 1940, he bid his children farewell in the death house. “Follow in the footsteps of God,” he told them.
Strapped in the chair, he murmured, “Holy Father, save my soul,” before four jolts ended his life.
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