Face of Evil: Alex Mengel
It was a discovery so grotesque that it would later help inspire one of Hollywood's darkest crime thrillers.
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Pamela Capone’s mother was abducted, mutilated and murdered in 1985 by a suspected serial killer.
It was a discovery so grotesque that it would later help inspire one of Hollywood's darkest crime thrillers.
Capone is now breaking her silence four decades later in her first television interview.
She sat down with our senior reporter Tara Rosenblum in her Yonkers home - a short drive from where her mother, Beverly Capone, was kidnapped as she was leaving her job at IBM.
On Feb. 25, 1985, the day before Beverly Capone went missing, Officer Gary Stymiloski stopped a car for speeding on the Saw Mill River Parkway. He was later found gunned down and his patrol car was stolen.
The suspect was 30-year-old Alex Mengel.
The next evening, Beverly Capone left her job at IBM but never made it home.
“I knew that night she was missing something was wrong,” said Pamela Capone.
Days later, Beverly’s IBM work badge was discovered in a Catskills cabin tied to Mengel.
“She put it in one of the drawers just to show she was there,” says Pamela. “She was very smart.
The following week, police tracked Mengel to Toronto behind the wheel of Beverly’s new white Toyota.
Her license and a woman’s scalp were found inside the car.
“They said they found a wig in the front seat, but it wasn't a wig. It was my mother's scalp. And this sick man scalped her,” says Pamela. “Hopefully, after she was dead.”
Beverly’s body was eventually found in Greene County buried under rocks near the cabin.
“He was an animal. Nobody does that to a person,” she said. It’s so horrifying. It’s like a movie.”
And that's exactly what some believe - that this real-life horror helped shape one of Hollywood’s most chilling crime movies.
“'Silence of the Lambs,’ that was kind of [a] connection to my mother,” she says.
Inside Mengel’s car, police found photos of unknown women and a Pennsylvania map marked with X’s.
But before anyone could get answers - before Mengel could ever stand trial, he was fatally shot and killed during an escape attempt.
“You just never get over it,” she says. “You don’t get over it ever.”
