The Romeo Killer | Part 2

The morning of November 15, 2004, the University of Rochester campus was quiet in the half-light of late autumn. The air carried a damp chill, the kind that made students quicken their pace between buildings, coffee cups steaming in their hands. It was early, too early for most undergraduates to be out. But a few members of Sigma Phi Epsilon, Chris Porco’s fraternity, were already awake when they noticed him jogging across campus.

At first, it was an ordinary sight: a student in a hooded sweatshirt, earbuds in, pacing himself through the cold morning air. His bright yellow Jeep Wrangler, the car that seemed to symbolize his carefree confidence, had been gone during the night. But here he was again, running as if the campus were his track. To his fraternity brothers, it looked like a burst of discipline, maybe even a new habit, an attempt to clear his head before the day began.

Only later would prosecutors reinterpret the scene with darker meaning. They argued it was not exercise at all but staging—an alibi in motion, a way of planting himself visibly and undeniably in Rochester while, miles away, the walls of his family’s home in Delmar still dripped with blood.

At the time, though, no one thought twice. Chris wasn’t breathless or shaken, not disheveled as if he had been up all night. If anything, he appeared calm, even composed. That easy, nonchalant charm—the same quality that let him slide through classes and parties with a grin and a shrug—was still on display. For his fraternity brothers, it was just another glimpse of Chris being Chris. For those who would later piece together the story, it became something else entirely: an eerie snapshot of normalcy against the backdrop of horror.

News of the attack broke only hours later. The memory of Chris jogging that morning hardened quickly into something unsettling, a detail that would never leave those who saw it. The ordinariness of it was the most haunting part: how casually he moved, earbuds in, as though nothing had shifted in his world, while in reality everything had.

Because while Chris was running across campus, horrors were unfolding in the quiet cul-de-sac of his childhood home. At about 4 a.m., well before dawn, Peter and Joan Porco were attacked in their bed with an axe, taken from its storage space in their garage.

Peter, gravely wounded, somehow managed to rise. What followed seemed less like conscious thought than muscle memory, his body clinging to fragments of his routine even as life slipped away. He unlocked the back door. He stepped into the bathroom. He shuffled down the stairs into the kitchen. He even attempted to start the coffeemaker. These were not the deliberate actions of a man greeting his morning—they were fragments of a life unraveling, the body’s final movements tracing the lines of habit. At last, near the front entrance, Peter collapsed. That is where he died.

Upstairs, Joan remained in bed, her body destroyed by the same assault. Her jaw was shattered, her skull fractured, her face and body brutally disfigured. Yet she was alive, clinging to consciousness in a house that had become unrecognizable. Against every odd, she survived those first hours, her breathing ragged but insistent.

When Peter failed to arrive at work that morning at the New York State Appellate Division, colleagues immediately knew something was wrong. He was punctual to a fault, the sort of man who left nothing to chance, and his absence was out of character. A court officer was sent to check the house.

What he discovered was a tableau of nightmare. Peter’s body lay sprawled in the entryway, a crimson pool widening around him. The silence was heavy, suffocating, broken only by the faint sounds of Joan gasping upstairs. Emergency responders rushed in, racing against time. They found her barely clinging to life, her face so shattered it was nearly unrecognizable, yet still she fought for breath.

In those fragile moments, police pressed for answers. Was Chris involved? Did she know who had done this? Unable to speak, Joan managed the faintest nod. It was a small gesture, ambiguous in its clarity, but it became a pivotal moment—one that prosecutors later built their case around and one that defense attorneys would fight bitterly to explain away.

That morning, two separate worlds unfolded at once. In Delmar, a family home was transformed into a crime scene, its walls marked forever by violence. In Rochester, on a quiet college campus, Chris Porco jogged across the damp pavement as if nothing had happened. For those who later tried to make sense of it, the juxtaposition was almost unbearable: the image of a young man running free, earbuds in, while the life he came from lay in ruins.

Keep your eyes open for Part 3, to be published separately.