Gary Felasco
Action Date: September 29, 2005
Location: New Castle, PA
On September 29, 2005, Gary Felasco, the treasurer of Lawrence County, Pennsylvania, was ordered to stand trial on charges he pocketed about $47,000 in tax payments. Felasco was charged with theft by failure to make required disposition of funds received, embezzlement, misapplication of entrusted property and violating the state's ethics act. Felasco allegedly diverted tax money to his personal use and hid the thefts by preventing delinquent property-tax notices from being sent to the people whose payments he stole. The state Attorney General's Office said Felasco used some of the money to pay his own delinquent taxes, buy a van and rent hotel rooms in a neighboring township where authorities have said they received complaints about a sex club Felasco allegedly helped organize.
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Deaths believed tied to drugs, prostitution
2 women might have been killed by someone stalking drug dens
NEW CASTLE, Pa. -- Women so desperate that they will climb into a stranger's car for $20 are getting extra attention from detectives and beat cops.
 |  John Beale, Post-Gazette |
| New Castle police Chief Thomas Sansone says his department raided this former crack house at 421 Waldo St., which doubled as a place of prostitution. His officers also have stepped up neighborhood patrols since the August homicides of two women who may have been prostitutes. |
The high alert began around Labor Day, after the bodies of two women were found 60 yards apart in a wooded area of Taylor, a New Castle suburb. Pennsylvania State Police have labeled both women, Mandy Sue McLaren, 24, and Tammie K. Mullins, 36, as prostitutes who became homicide victims.
Dr. Karl E. Williams, a forensic pathologist who performed autopsies on McLaren and Mullins, said neither was shot or stabbed.
But he agreed with the police assessment that the dumping of their bodies, like litter in the brush, seemed to be the work of a killer. Williams said he was doing further testing on tissues to determine how the women died.
In New Castle, McLaren and Mullins were well-known to city police. Both had been accused this year in theft cases. Mullins struggled with drug addiction. McLaren had a felony record, having served five years in jail for third-degree murder in the starvation of one of her twins. The 8-month-old boy died when McLaren was 17.
Despite those troubles, neither woman had a record for prostitution or related crimes, such as loitering. Given this history, New Castle police Chief Thomas Sansone said, he was puzzled by the state's assertion that they were selling themselves on the streets.
"We never arrested either of them for prostitution," he said. "I can't speculate why the state would say that."
Though Sansone said he was not convinced that the women were prostitutes who were killed by a customer, neither could he dismiss the possibility. So he has ordered his 35-member department to spend more time in neighborhoods where the drug and sex trades converge.
"If they were prostitutes, and if customers were picking them up, it's certainly a possibility that they were killed that way," Sansone said.
Pennsylvania State Police officers said street-level sources described McLaren and Mullins as prostitutes who frequented the Big Run apartments, a public housing complex on New Castle's South Side. Neither woman was ever a public housing tenant, said Robert Evanick, executive director of the Lawrence County Housing Authority.
But investigators said McLaren might have stayed for a time in a publicly subsidized apartment that was the listed address of a woman named Stacy Lynn Kendall. Kendall, 19, received a wave of media attention in July after her arrest on suspicion of selling herself to men who were 83 and 71 years old. Police said she charged them $6 and $4.
Perhaps 10 to 15 women in this town of 25,300 people regularly sell their bodies to pay for their next hit of crack or heroin, Sansone said. Most of the prostitution trade is tied to crack houses, which New Castle police were focused on even before the deaths of McLaren and Mullins.
Sansone said his officers had raided four crack houses in the past 30 days. Each building was boarded up after city inspectors hit the owners with building-code violations.
One of those crack houses was at 421 Waldo St., where a prostitute says a customer raped her in April or May. The woman did not report the alleged assault until Aug. 31, the day the bodies of McLaren and Mullins were discovered in the woods south of the city.
State police have arrested Michael R. Tackett, 34, of West Pittsburg, a New Castle suburb, in the rape case.
State Trooper Joseph J. Vascetti filed an affidavit outlining the allegations against Tackett. It says Tackett cruised Long Avenue in his silver pickup truck early one spring morning and met a 31-year-old woman. He told her to follow him to the house on Waldo Street, where he would pay her for sex. She agreed.
But, the woman told police, she reneged when Tackett insisted on anal sex. She said Tackett threw her face-down onto a couch and forced himself on her. At various points during the rape, she said, he pulled a handgun and put her in a choke hold.
Another woman, this one 19, told Vascetti that Tackett had pulled a gun on her the night of Aug. 25. The woman said they were in his truck and he demanded oral sex. She said she refused and was able to get away. He has not been charged in that case.
State troopers used warrants to search Tackett's house and truck and to obtain samples of his hair, blood and saliva. Since then, they have said they do not consider Tackett a suspect in the deaths of McLaren or Mullins. He is free on bail.
Perhaps the only certainty about the homicide case is that McLaren and Mullins died at different times.
Lawrence County Coroner Russ Noga estimated that Mullins' body had been in the woods three to four weeks before it was found. In contrast, McLaren's body was there two to four days.
Mullins' husband, Jeffrey, reported her missing Aug. 5, a few days after he said he last saw her. Sansone said Jeffrey Mullins had told her to leave their home because of her habitual drug use. Even when they lived together, she often disappeared for a few days at a time, Sansone said.
Jeffrey Mullins reported her missing this time because she did not cash a government benefits check as soon as it arrived, Sansone said.
No missing-person report was filed on McLaren. Police are checking tips that she was seen getting into a pickup truck Aug. 26, five days before her body was found.
Even with two unsolved deaths hanging over the town, police have no expectation that prostitution will lessen. Sansone said women who court strangers to pay for their addictions want nothing to do with his officers or their warnings.
First published on September 11, 2005 at 12:00 am
