Oxygen’s true crime series Living With a Serial Killer hinges upon a primal fear — the idea that someone we love, a lover, a parent, or even a sibling, could be a murderous monster.
One episode from the show’s second season covered Tim Boczkowski, a North Carolina man with a terrible secret. In 1994, Boczkowski’s second wife, Maryann Boczkowski, was found dead in the family’s hot tub, just like how Boczkowski’s first wife, Elaine Boczkowski, was found dead four years earlier, the AP reported.
Whom did Tim Boczkowski kill?
Described in the Living with a Serial episode synopsis as a “church-going family man,” Tim Boczkowski owned a dental supply business when he met Maryann Fullerton. Boczkowski and his three children had recently moved to Pittsburgh after his first wife, Elaine Boczkowski, died in 1990. In a whirlwind courtship, Tim and Maryann agreed to marry. However, tragedy struck just eighteen months later.
According to The Cinemaholic, in November 1994, Boczkowski phoned an ambulance and claimed to have found his wife unresponsive. When first responders, including the local police, arrived at the scene, they found Tim attempting to revive his wife. Maryanne was transported by ambulance to Allegheny General Hospital, as per Tim’s request, despite the fact there was another one closer. Maryanne was pronounced dead on arrival.
Suspicions arise
Local authorities grew suspicious of Boczkowski’s version of events when Maryanne’s blood alcohol level was found to be .22%, nearly twice the current legal limit of intoxication. Furthermore, her autopsy revealed that she was asphyxiated rather than drowned, as Boczkowski claimed. For further evidence, Tim had scratch marks on his arms and hands. Meanwhile, while his wife was being transported to the hospital, he remarked, “I hope they don’t try to put this on me.”
All combined, investigators found that Boczkowski not only murdered his second wife, but he murdered his first wife as well, in nearly the same way. Unlike Marryane, Tim’s first wife, Elaine, was found dead in a bathtub, not a hot tub, but otherwise, the details of each death are nearly identical.
Where is Tim Boczkowski now?
Tim Boczkowski is currently serving a life sentence in The State Correctional Institution — Greene in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, a Supermax prison holding more than 1700 prisoners. However, before that, he served 22 years in prison in his native state, North Carolina, before he was granted parole.
At first, Boczkowski faced the death penalty in Pennsylvania for the murder of his first wife, Elaine Boczkowski, until a court ruled that he had been illegally extradited to North Carolina to face charges for Elaine’s Boczkowski. Instead of the death penalty, he was given a second life sentence to serve in Pennsylvania.
After Boczkowski’s parole in North Carolina, he returned to Pennsylvania to serve the remainder of his sentence.