According to Dominic Arena of Lassellsville, if Robert Garrow had been wearing his glasses that day in 1978, Arena would be dead.
Sept. 11 will mark the 30th anniversary of the death of the serial killer responsible for between eight and 22 murders and the largest manhunt in the state's history.
Arena is retired from the New York State Department of Corrections, but still carries the memories and the pain of a bullet from the gun of convicted serial killer Garrow. He was part of a Corrections Emergency Response Team who searched for escaped convict Garrow from the Fishkill Correctional Facility from Sept. 9 to 11. Arena was Garrow's last victim, but he lived to tell the story. Others were not so fortunate.
It was the third day of the search for Garrow, who had been housed in the elderly and handicapped hospital wing of the Fishkill prison. With a gun smuggled into the prison by his son, Robert Jr., in a box of fried chicken the evening of Sept. 8, 1978, Garrow managed to climb out of his wheelchair where he feigned paralysis and climb the fence and then elude a 200-man search for three days, according to the official report of the Acting Commissioner of the New York State Department of Correctional Services Richard D. Hongisto in October of 1978.
"Our CERT had been out for three 16-hour days of searching in a row when we were called back in," Arena said Thursday. "I heard the guy on one side of me yell 'Freeze!' and saw the flash of Garrow's glasses up on his forehead and then the business end of his [.32 caliber] pistol firing at me."
Arena said he thought when his CERT team-member yelled "Freeze!" it was because Garrow was giving up and Arena was about to put the handcuffs on him. Arena said he was only about 15 feet from Garrow when Garrow opened fire.
"Those in my group returned fire," Arena said. "[An officer] pushed me down, out of the line of fire, since I had been shot in the hip."
Arena said the bullet from Garrow's gun went through one leg into his other and was deflected by his pelvis, doing enough damage to put him in the hospital for a six-month recuperation before he could come back to work. Garrow was hit by four of 19 bullets fired at him and he fired five times, hitting only Arena.
Arena said he later learned a transistor radio Garrow had purchased in the commissary had been found turned on with batteries still good about 3:15 p.m. which is why searchers knew Garrow was still nearby.
"We had probably come within a few feet of him on our sweeps of the area," Arena said.
It wasn't the first time Garrow had eluded searchers with his wilderness know-how as a fugitive.
Robert Francis Garrow was born on March 4, 1936, the son of French-Canadian parents near the village of Dannemora in upstate New York, according to Mark Gado's extensive narrative on the Web site www.trutv.com. Robert Garrow had five brothers and sisters; one brother died at a very early age. Another brother, the oldest, was given away at birth and his whereabouts have never been discovered.
"The senior Robert Garrow was a mineworker and a heavy drinker who took out his frustrations and anger on his son. But his mother, the 5-foot-1, 270-pound Margaret Garrow, was well known in Mineville and her hostile, callous disposition weighed heavily on Robert's stunted development, Gado wrote.
"My mother was an extremely cruel person," one of her daughters said later.
She was a violent, unforgiving woman who beat her children and displayed little compassion or understanding for any of them.
"I more or less block everything out of the past," said her daughter Agnes years later, "I more or less closed it out of my mind, anything as a child."
Margaret beat Robert often and sometimes used whatever was handy at the time, including a crowbar, a belt or even a brick. On more than one occasion, she had assaulted the boy to a point where he was rendered unconscious.
"My mother hit my brother Robert extremely hard with a piece of stove wood I thought he was dead and I threw some water on him," said his sister Florence in 1974. "My mother used to whip him all the time."
At age 7, he worked on a neighbor's farm for which his mother collected his pay.
"My father gave him away to a farmer down in Moriah and he worked there on the farm until he was approximately 15 years old," his sister Florence said later in court testimony.
"When I was probably about 10, 11, 12 years old, I had no friends and I never used to play I didn't know no children or anything," Garrow said during court testimony.
At the age of 15, he was sent to a state reform school for punching his father in the face after a heated argument. When he was released from the school a year later, he joined the Air Force.
In the military, Garrow stole money from an Air Force sergeant. He received a court martial and was sentenced to six months in a military prison in Florida. Garrow escaped from custody but was apprehended several days later. He had spent nearly two years in the service, almost all of it in jail.
Hongisto reported Garrow claimed he had two personalities while in prison: Mr. "G" and Mr. "F," with "G" being basically good and "F" being evil.
Gado reported that Garrow married Edith in 1957 in Lowville and moved to Albany. There he was arrested for burglary and raping a teenage girl in 1961. He fled arrest and was captured, tried and sent to Clinton prison, also known as Dannemora where he spent eight years until his release in 1968.
After a quiet period where he worked in a bakery until 1972, Garrow was arrested in Syracuse for unlawful imprisonment and drug violations and again in 1973 when he assaulted two pre-teen girls.
Released on bail, Garrow fled into the Adirondacks where he trapped four youths from Schenectady camped near Wells, resulting in the torture and stabbing death of 18-year-old Philip Domblewski July 29.
When two of the group escaped and went for help, the search was on.
Curtis Pickering of Fonda said he remembered going to Long Lake with friends fishing and having to go through several roadblocks on the way because of the massive search by state police and New York State Department of Conservation officers.
"We just wanted to go fishing," Pickering said Tuesday.
Fulton County Historian Peter Betz said he remembered the southernmost roadblock was just above the Northville bridge on Route 30.
Using back roads and knowledge of the area, as well as listening to radio reports as to where roadblocks were located, Garrow managed to evade searchers until his orange VW hatchback was seen July 31. He drove into the woods, crashed the VW and then fled on foot.
Another Adirondack camper, Daniel Porter, 23, of Concord, Mass., had been found July 20 murdered in a similar way to Domblewki and his girlfriend, Susan Petz of Skokie, Ill., still was missing.
Garrow later confessed to those murders as well.
Another suspected homicide, Alicia Hauck, 16, who disappeared on her way home from high school in Syracuse July 11, also was finally admitted to by Garrow when his public defender lawyers Frank Armani and Francis Belge tried to use the information of the bodies' locations for a plea bargain.
Garrow visited his sister Agnes in Mineville on Aug. 7 and when a DEC officer saw her son carrying food into the woods Aug. 9, Garrow emerged and was shot in his legs, back and hand.
A murder trial began in Lake Pleasant June 10, 1974, with District Attorney William Intemann prosecuting in the murder of Domblewski. Intemann is still an attorney in Hamilton County and his memories of the time are not good ones.
"I'm glad it's over," Intemann said Thursday. "I would not want to go through it again."
The eye-witness accounts of the other three campers with Domblewski at the time of his death and Garrow's hunting knife with his fingerprints left at the scene insured a conviction which came after an extensive and meandering narrative by Garrow on the witness stand in which his lawyers tried to show he was insane.
The guilty verdict came in June 27 after two-hours deliberation. He was sentenced to 25 years to life on July 1. His admission of three other murders had concurrent sentences added later and a map found in Garrow's car with 22 red circles where missing persons or murders had occurred lead many to believe Garrow was guilty of much more.
Garrow was sent to Dannemora prison near the Canadian border and later to Fishkill where a hospital wing was to treat the supposedly paralyzed Garrow in 1978. His escape the evening of Sept. 8 utilized a dummy made from rags and wire, only to be shot to death Sept. 11.
In his five-part series on the Garrow case, Judge Kenneth Lange wrote in The Westchester Guardian last year that most of those associated with Garrow's prosecution and incarceration were the worse for the experience.
Intemann was voted out of office in spite of a successful prosecution. Garrow's lawyers were investigated by a grand jury for not revealing the whereabouts of murder victims Hauck and Petz and Adirondack residents started locking their doors. (Armani told his story to Tom Alibrandi who wrote the book "Privileged Information" about how Armani and Belge agonized over not being able to disclose what was told them in attorney-client privilege.)
Asked if the community at large learned anything from the experience, Intemann said no.
"The community didn't learn anything," he said. "He was just a murderer run amok."
Arena, now head of security for a high-profile celebrity still feels the pain of the bullet from Garrow's gun.
"He wanted one more victim," Arena said. "I didn't know how badly I was hit at the time. After x-rays it took surgeons at Vassar Brothers Hospital in Poughkeepsie four hours to get the bullet out of my hip."
Arena said his biggest regret that day was not being able to respond to a call from Alicia Hauck's mother, Marilyn, who left the message, "Thank you for Syracuse."
"It was a scary part of my life, but I was just doing my job," Arena said.
In response to the episode, Intemann said, the entire community "was greatly disturbed."
"Summer people were prevented from coming here, tourism being Hamilton County's main industry," he said. "Garrow's final rehabilitation was when he was killed."
For more information go to http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/predators/robert_garrow/1.html.
Richard Nilsen is a general assignment reporter and can be reached at ga@leaderherald.com.
