Murder “Investigation” Raises Far More Questions Than it Answers

Murder victim Amanda Wienkowski

"It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key."

Winston Churchill’s famous 1939 quote, about the wartime plans of Stalin’s Soviet Union, could be applied equally well to the case of Amanda Weinckowski, the beautiful Niagara-Wheatfield Regents’ scholar who took a once way ride to Buffalo in December 2008 and whose brutal killing has since become one of the most famous unsolved mysteries of the Niagara Frontier, a place well known for its’ unsolved mysteries.

No fewer than three nationally renowned forensic pathologists have looked at the evidence in the case and come to the same conclusion – Than Amanda was murdered, strangled, before her body was deliberately frozen and then dumped into a garbage tote to be found some five weeks later.

The only argument you’ll get on that is from the Erie County Medical Examiners office, which has ruled variously that she died accidentally of a heroin overdose, of asphyxiation brought on by a combination of ingestion of “the date rape drug” GHB and rough sex, and, finally, a cause of death labeled simply “undetermined.”

The original autopsy report was signed by four medical examiners, several of whom were clearly not even in the building when the autopsy was performed.

And while DNA from Amanda’s body was linked to no fewer than four men and two women, DNA samples taken from the garbage tote have apparently never been submitted for analysis, and the tote itself was never dusted for fingerprints.

A video security camera overlooking the corner of Spring and Clinton streets in East Buffalo where the body was dumped should have caught the act, but no mention is made of it in the mountain of police reports made available to the Niagara Falls Reporter.

Was it simply overlooked? Was the camera malfunctioning? Did a detective review the tape and found nothing of interest? We can’t know. The verified existence of the camera is not even noted in any report.

And what of the botched autopsy itself? By all accounts, the slipshod, amateurish effort by the Erie County Medical Examiner’s office was so eager to jump to the conclusion that Amanda died of a drug overdose that the results of the toxicology report weren’t even back yet when the report was issued. When the report came back and it was discovered that Amanda didn’t have enough heroin in her young body to cause death, the ME’s office began casting about for a new cause of death.

And, when Amanda’s body was exhumed and a second autopsy performed by the well-known Los Angeles based forensic pathologist Dr. Silvia Comparini, who ruled that Amanda had been strangled, it was discovered that the medical examiners in Erie County hadn’t even bothered removing her jewelry before having at it with scalpels and forceps.

A gold bellybutton ring had been sewn back into the corpse.

For Leslie Brill Meserole, each of these revelations came stinging like a cold slap in the face. She’d lost her daughter. The killer was still at large. And the authorities refused to do anything.

Amanda Wienkowski was an intelligent and beautiful 20-year-old woman with a taste for heroin that led her to augment her salary as a barmaid at Cocktail Bob’s on Cuddaback Avenue through work as a prostitute and police narcotics informant.

She fell in with some rough company, including Adam Patterson, who she moved in with following arguments with her mother over the dangers of working undercover for the police.

Patterson, who has been variously described to the Niagara Falls Reporter as Amanda’s boyfriend and pimp, picked her up at Cocktail Bob’s late on the afternoon of December 5 and drove her to Buffalo’s East Side, where he had arranged for her to have sex with a man, Antoine Garner, in return for a quantity of drugs.

According to Patterson, he waited in the car parked on Spring Street for an hour when she called and texted that it was going to take longer than expected and that he should just go home, which he did.

According to Garner, Amanda arrived at his apartment, stayed a few minutes and left.

Her mother reported her missing a few days afterward, following a meeting with Patterson in which he gave her Amanda’s purse, which he said she left in his car.

 The purse contained a small amount of heroin and a hypodermic syringe in addition to other personal effects.

Buffalo police launched an investigation. Patterson and Garner were put under surveillance, named as “persons of interest” in Amanda’s disappearance, and the investigation was hot.

Amanda’s naked and frozen body was found stuffed into a garbage tote five weeks later, on Jan. 9, 2009. Her long blonde hair had been cut off and her tongue was bitten in half. The body was covered with contusions.

According to Dr. Comparini: There was a bruise under the angle of the jaw on the right side, which is the classical kind of mark that fingerprints leave. Internally, there Comparini found evidence of compression deep into the neck, hemorrhage of the inside of the carotid artery, which usually is evidence of some sort of force applied to the artery.

“That's why I call this manual strangulation," she said

But incredibly, the Erie County Medical Examiner’s office ruled the death as “accidental,” which effectively shut down the police investigation on January 10. In the six years since, evidence has been lost and memories have faded as officials fought to keep Leslie Brill Meserole from gaining access to documents and evidence concerning her daughter’s tragic fate.

The Herculean effort on the part of the medical examiner’s office, Buffalo police, the Erie County Sheriff’s Department and the district attorney’s office to prevent a grieving mother from knowing the facts about her daughter’s grisly death is as baffling as anything else concerning the case.

Are the officials merely attempting to cover up a horribly botched investigation that allowed a killer or killers to walk free? Or was Amanda’s work as a police informant, making drug buys at the direction of various police agencies on the Niagara Frontier, a factor in her death.

Meserole has vowed not to rest until she finds out. She has assembled a dream team of attorneys including Peter A. Reese, Michael Kuzma and Daire Brian Irwin, along with a crew of investigators with significant experience in homicide, to assist her.

“Murder will out,” wrote Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th Century. And it’s as true now as it ever was. The killer or killers, along with those who have acted since to prevent the truth from coming to light about Amanda’s death, have plenty to worry about.