At around 4 a.m. on July 30, 2007, 15-year-old Shea McDonough woke up in her Chelmsford, Massachusetts, bedroom to something cold against her neck. "I woke up in the middle of the night to a cold object on my neck," she would later recall. "I just saw dark eyes and a mask." A man dressed head to toe in black, his face covered, held a 15-inch hunting knife to her throat. "If you make any f---ing noise, I'm going to kill you," he told her.

She made noise anyway. What happened in the next several minutes, in a dark bedroom in a quiet Massachusetts suburb, ended a killing spree that had already taken two lives and left a third victim fighting to survive, and cleared the name of a grieving husband who police had spent weeks treating as a murder suspect.

Evidence Log · Police reports, trial record & investigative reporting
A — 3 attacks across Pennsylvania and New Jersey, July 13–29, 2007; 2 dead, 1 survivor
B — Stopped mid-attack on a 4th victim by her parents, Chelmsford, MA, July 30, 2007
C — DNA from his own knives cleared a wrongly suspected husband and confirmed 2 murders
D — Convicted/pleaded guilty in 3 states: life (PA), 50 years (NJ), 25–30 years (MA)

A trucker on backroads

Adam Leroy Lane was born August 7, 1964, in Jonesville, North Carolina. He dropped out of high school, worked stretches in a chicken-processing plant, and eventually settled into long-haul trucking, driving routes that carried him up and down the Northeastern seaboard. He lived in a trailer with his wife and three daughters. Nothing in his public record marked him as anything other than an ordinary long-haul driver.

In the truck he was driving in July 2007, investigators would later find two large hunting knives, a length of choke wire, a leather mask, and a DVD copy of the 2002 film Hunting Humans, about a serial killer who stalks his victims before killing them with a knife. Over seventeen days that summer, Lane turned his own routes into a hunting ground, attacking four women in three states.

Darlene Ewalt

At around 2 a.m. on July 13, 2007, 42-year-old Darlene Ewalt was on her back patio in West Hanover Township, a suburb of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, talking on the phone. Lane came out of the dark, slit her throat, and stabbed her to death while her family slept inside the house. It was the first killing of the spree, and for weeks, investigators did not know his name.

The husband they arrested first

When police responded to Darlene Ewalt's murder, they turned first to the person closest to her: her husband, Todd. "People who are killed at home are most likely to be killed by someone close to them," Dauphin County District Attorney Ed Marsico Jr. later explained of the department's early thinking. "Most likely, her husband." Todd Ewalt and his son were both brought in and questioned. Todd would later describe the moment detectives told him his wife was dead: "After about three hours, one of the detectives came in, sat me down. That's when they told me that Darlene was dead." For weeks, he lived under the suspicion of his own community while his wife's actual killer remained free and unidentified, hundreds of miles away, still driving his truck.

Patricia Brooks

Four days after Ewalt's murder, on July 17, 2007, Lane broke into a home in rural Conewago Township, York County, Pennsylvania, and stabbed a woman named Patricia Brooks as she slept on her couch. She survived the attack, becoming the one victim of the spree to live through it before the McDonough family stopped him for good.

Monica Massaro

On July 29, 2007, Lane crossed into New Jersey and broke into the Bloomsbury duplex of 38-year-old Monica Massaro. He cut her throat and stabbed her in the head, neck, and chest. Detective Sergeant Geoff Noble, who later interrogated Lane, described the violence: "It was just the type of crime that someone with an incredible amount of violence and rage would have done." Under questioning, Lane offered a chillingly clinical account of her death: "She bled to death. I couldn't do nothing about it. It didn't take very long. Less than 60 seconds." Asked whether the attacks were sexually motivated, Lane denied it flatly: "I love my wife, I love my wife very much. I ain't out for sexual toys."

Massaro would have turned 45 that August 11.

An unlocked door for the wrong reason

The next night, July 29 into the early hours of July 30, Lane's truck route brought him to Chelmsford, Massachusetts. Shea McDonough had left her family's back door unlocked, expecting her brother Ryan to come home later that night, not knowing he had made other plans. Lane found the door before Ryan ever needed it.

Once inside, dressed entirely in black with a mask and gloves, Lane made his way to Shea's room and put a 15-inch hunting knife to her throat. Detective George Tyros, who investigated the case, later said Lane had already tried at least three other houses in the neighborhood that night before finding the McDonoughs' unlocked door. "He was out in our town hunting humans that night," Tyros said.

Kevin and Jeannie

Shea's scream brought her parents, Kevin and Jeannie McDonough, running. What followed was a fight for their daughter's life against a man who outweighed Kevin by nearly a hundred pounds. Kevin, drawing on wrestling experience from high school, grabbed the intruder. "I knew a choke hold was the only thing that I had a chance on restraining him," he later said. Jeannie, meanwhile, grabbed the blade of the knife itself with her bare hands to force it away from her daughter, cutting her hands badly in the process. Kevin wrestled Lane to the floor and held him in the chokehold while Shea ran to call 911; in the chaos of the call, she initially told the dispatcher a man had come in with a gun, before realizing it had been a knife. Police arrived within minutes and arrested Lane on the floor of the McDonough home, still in Kevin's hold.

"Adam Lane, no doubt about it, is perhaps the most dangerous man that I've seen personally. And the reason is because there is no explanation. There is no 'why' with Adam Lane."

— Detective Sergeant Geoff Noble

The DNA that cleared an innocent man

Once Lane was in custody, investigators recovered his knives and gloves, which carried DNA from more than one victim. Detective Noble described the moment the evidence came back: "The results showed that not only was Monica Massaro's DNA on his knives, but also Darlene Ewalt's. Her DNA was also on Adam Lane's knives." The same evidence that convicted Lane of two murders exonerated Todd Ewalt of the one he had spent weeks quietly suspected of. District Attorney Marsico personally met with Ewalt to apologize. "After we discovered that Darlene's blood was on the knife taken from Adam Lane, I did meet with Todd Ewalt and explained to him that we had found the perpetrator, and apologized that he had been a suspect." Ewalt and Darlene's daughter, Nicole Pogasic, learned of her father's exoneration from the newspaper before anyone called her directly. "I found out that my mom's DNA was on a knife from the newspaper," she said. "I'm like, 'So you're clear?' And then it just kind of becomes a blur after that."

Three states, three sentences

Lane faced prosecution in three separate jurisdictions, and pleaded guilty or accepted deals in all three rather than risk trial. In Pennsylvania, prosecutors had pursued the death penalty for Darlene Ewalt's murder; Lane pleaded guilty to avoid it and was sentenced to life in prison, along with 10 to 20 years for the attempted murder of Patricia Brooks. Todd Ewalt supported the plea. "It was not hard to accept a plea deal for life in prison for Adam Lane," he said, "'cause whether he's on death row or not, it's not gonna change my circumstances at all."

In New Jersey, Lane received 50 years for Monica Massaro's murder. In Massachusetts, prosecutors negotiated a plea of 25 to 30 years for the attack on Shea McDonough, dropping a sexual assault charge specifically so Shea would not have to testify about it in open court. Assistant District Attorney Kerry Ahern later said the sexual assault count had been the one point Lane refused to budge on: "He was adamant that he wasn't going to sexually assault Shea McDonough." The McDonough family accepted the deal to spare their daughter the trial.

Lane has also been linked to two additional non-fatal attacks on women in Pennsylvania and New York, though he has never been charged in either. He is currently held at the State Correctional Institution at Fayette in Pennsylvania.

What came after

Shea McDonough struggled in the aftermath in ways that outlasted the case itself. "She had gone off to school," Kevin said, "and she had some anxiety. She thought she was ready to go on to college. She had to come home." Shea later credited therapy with helping her process what had happened to her: "Therapy made a huge difference. I was able to just get a lot of emotions and feelings out that I didn't even know I had built up."

Jeannie McDonough went looking for an explanation that never quite arrived. "I wanted to know why Lane would go off and start killing people," she said. "I started digging, looking for answers." She eventually co-wrote a book about the ordeal, Caught in the Act: A Courageous Family's Fight to Save Their Daughter from a Serial Killer, published in 2011 with Paul Lonardo. The families of Lane's victims stayed connected to each other afterward. Nicole Pogasic, Darlene Ewalt's daughter, described her bond with Jeannie McDonough: "I can call Jeannie anytime. She's programmed in my speed dial. Usually at the end of every phone call it ends with 'I love you.'" Of the McDonoughs' role in stopping Lane, Pogasic put it simply: "They stopped an innocent man from going to jail. They put a guilty man away. And they saved countless women."

A door left open for someone else

Nothing about that night was supposed to involve Shea McDonough's parents at all. The door was unlocked for her brother, not for a stranger driving trucks through three states with knives and a choke wire in his cab. What turned an ordinary act of teenage forgetfulness into the end of a killing spree was two parents' decision, in the space of a few terrified seconds, to fight rather than freeze. Detectives who worked the case have said they still cannot explain why Lane did any of it. The McDonoughs never got a why. They got their daughter back instead.

Sources

Criminal proceedings referenced above are matters of public record in Dauphin and York Counties, Pennsylvania; Hunterdon County, New Jersey; and Middlesex County, Massachusetts. Adam Leroy Lane pleaded guilty to murder and attempted murder charges in Pennsylvania, was convicted of murder in New Jersey, and pleaded guilty to the attack on Shea McDonough in Massachusetts, receiving consecutive sentences in each state.