The Adirondacks

Park Predators

This episode of Park Predators investigates the chilling true crime case of Robert Garrow Sr., a serial predator whose crimes spanned multiple states in 1973. After the disappearance of Boston University student Sue Petz

Key takeaways

• Robert Garrow Sr., a Syracuse man with a history of sex crimes, murdered Danny Porter on July 14, 1973, after kidnapping and sexually assaulting him

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia Diambra. And the case, or rather cases I'm going to tell you about today, occurred in the Adirondack Mountains, which are in the northeast part of New York State. According to New York's Department of Environmental Conservation, the Adirondacks are six million acres in size, bigger than Glacier, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, and Yosemite National Parks combined. So a lot of land, that is both private and public. And it's a lot of land that is both private and public. It's a space that offers ample opportunities for outdoor activities. A chunk of this land is what's called Adirondack Park, which state legislators have given the label Forever Wild. A fitting name for the habitats, wildlife, and plant life that exists there. That term Forever Wild could also be an appropriate name for the aspects of the human predator in today's episode. What he did and the impact his crimes had on multiple families and communities will never go away. Or ever be fully understood. This is Park Predators. On the afternoon of Monday, July 16th, 1973, a young man named Pat Cadell was at his office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, busying himself with work for the day. But he was also worried. Two days earlier, his colleague, 23-year-old Danny Porter, and Danny's girlfriend, 21-year-old Susan Petz, had gone on a camping trip to the Adirondack Mountains. a distance of more than 250 miles each way, and eight hours or so round trip. But they'd not come back. Pat and Danny were both recent Harvard College graduates, who, along with another one of their friends, had launched a political polling company in Cambridge. Last thing Pat could recall, Danny was expected to come into their office after his weekend trip, but it was Monday afternoon at that point, and his friend had been a no-call, no show, which Pat knew was out of character for him. Around 4 o'clock that afternoon, Pat couldn't shake his growing concern for the couple, so he decided to call the New York State Forest Rangers, who quickly directed him to get in touch with New York State Police. Unfortunately, though, the state trooper who took Pat's call didn't think the situation was urgent enough to merit launching an immediate investigation. They suggested he wait a little longer before calling back. And then that was that. Two days later, which would have been Wednesday, July 18th, A man driving in Weaver Town, New York, not far from a highway known as New York State Route 8, which winds through the Adirondacks, saw a light blue car parked on the side of the road that he knew had been there since a few days earlier. It was a 1972 BMW sedan, and if his memory served him correctly, it hadn't moved an inch since the first time he'd spotted it. So he phoned the state police to report it as abandoned, and a few hours later two troopers responded to assess the situation. They discovered the car was locked and the registration came back as a long-term lease for a business in Massachusetts called Cambridge Survey Research Inc, which just so happened to be the company that Pat Cadell and Danny Porter had co-founded. It doesn't appear that the two troopers who initially responded to this car did much more than see that it was there and look up who owned it. Journalist and author Jim Tracy wrote in his book, sworn to silence, that before leaving, the troopers wrote a note for two other troopers who were, were scheduled for the morning shift the next day to dig into the BMW more. And sure enough, a few hours later, when those troopers arrived, they re-examined the car and did a small search around it. But they didn't see anything outwardly suspicious or concerning. Like I said, the car itself was locked and there was no indication that a disturbance or violent altercation had occurred. In fact, one trooper later told Jim Tracy that law enforcement's assumption at the time was that the owner would be coming back for it. The state police did eventually tow the BMW to an local service station and go through it. They found equipment for camping, including sleeping bags, tents, and other gear. It doesn't appear that investigators' sense of urgency was very high at that point, but they did at least call Pat Cadell back and ask him some follow-up questions. You see, the same weekend he'd said Danny and Sue had gone to the Adirondacks, a large group of Boston University students had also set out in the same area for a long whitewater rafting trip. At the time, Sue was with them, so it seems police made the assumption the couple could have been on that expedition. But Pat, of course, told the police that Danny and Sue weren't with that group because they'd told people they knew that they'd be home after spending just the weekend in the mountains. It was after this conversation with police that Pat's gut feeling that something was really wrong became overwhelming. He got a hold of Sue's parents who lived near Chicago, but they didn't even know their daughter had to go to the mountains with her boyfriend that weekend. Still, by Thursday, the Petz had caught a flight to New York and filed a missing person's report for Sue. Same for Danny's parents. They'd traveled from Ohio to make sure New York authorities launched a formal investigation into their son's whereabouts. The law enforcement officer these families met with first was a detective named Henry McCabe. He was the senior investigator for the state police's Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Around that same time, and some of Danny's other friends in Boston made their way to New York to help in any way they could. On Friday morning, the state police took them to the road in Weaver Town that Danny's car had been found abandoned on. The group quickly noticed that where the sedan had been parked was right past a sharp curve in the road, which obscured it from view of traffic on state route aid. In other words, where Danny's car had been found was conveniently out of sight of others. And the longer his friends looked around, the more they realized this wasn't the kind of place, he or Sue would have likely pulled off to camp. The terrain wasn't suitable for setting up a tent or going hiking, and in general, it just seemed so random. To learn more, the guys fanned out and began searching for clues themselves. Sometime around 11.40 a.m. or so, one of the older men in the group clocked something white in the distance within the trees that caught his eye. It was about 25 feet from the road, and as he got closer, he realized what it was. a white Adidas brand sneaker. As his eyes tracked upward from the shoe, he saw Danny, lifeless and resting against a tree. His shirt was soaked in blood, and he was facing away from the roadway that his car had been found on. It was apparent right away that he was long gone. Still, his friend, seemingly in disbelief about what he was seeing, decided to pick up Danny's body and carry it back to the roadway to alert the other men in the group. Pat and the other guys recognized, though, that life-saving measures were not possible for Danny. And shortly after that, one of them drove to the nearest pay phone and reported what they'd found to the state police. Puzzlingly, Danny's other half, Sue, was nowhere inside. Of course, because Pat and the other men had found Danny's body so quickly after authorities had already looked in the area, and their company just so happened to have a substantial life insurance policy for him, investigators were initially suspicious of them. Detective McCabe pursued this line of inquiry, even going so far as to dispatch troopers to visit Massachusetts and investigate the men's backgrounds and the polling company. But that lead led nowhere. And it became clear that none of Danny's friends or colleagues were involved in his murder, or Sue's disappearance. According to Jim Tracy's reporting and his book, sworn to silence as well as news coverage from the time, Danny's official cause of death was determined to be fatal hemorrhaging in shock from four stab wounds to his chest. Based on the state of his body and clothing when they were found, he'd been killed sometime on Saturday, July 14th, six days before his friends found his body, and just two days before Pat Cadell noticed he'd missed work. There was evidence that he'd been heavily reined on after being murdered, which I have to imagine was challenging to investigators as far as evidence preservation went. But not all hope was lost, because on Friday, July 20th, Detective McCabe visited the crime scene and reviewed the contents of Danny's car. He found several items he suspected were important to the case. For example, on the side of the road about 10 feet away from where Danny's BMW had been left, McCabe discovered a white nylon rope that appeared to be in good condition. It was laying in a path between where the road turned into woods and where Danny's body had been found. McCabe also discovered a brown shoelace at the scene, which happened to match a shoelace he later found inside Danny's vehicle. What the detective didn't see were signs of an altercation or anything that pointed toward a violent act having happened inside the car. The only fingerprints the state police could identify in the sedan belonged to Danny and Sue, and as far as I saw in the source material, in terms of other forensic evidence, there wasn't much. There was also another glaring reality about what wasn't at the scene, any sign of Sue pets. McCabe got her photo from her family and immediately issued her description to newspapers to get word out. Sue was said to be just more than 100 pounds, stood five foot two inches tall, and had blue eyes and short, dark blonde hair. She'd last been seen wearing jeans, a light top, and sneakers. But the next few days passed and no trace of her surfaced. During that time, her parents returned to the Chicago area to be with their other daughter and wait for updates from police. By that point, Detective McCabe had learned quite a bit more about the couple's timeline, leading up to and on July 14th. According to Jim Tracy's book and coverage by the Post-Star, using a notebook of Danny's that investigators had either found on his person or in his vehicle, they were able to establish that he and Sue had left the Boston area around noontime on the 14th.