The Buried Bodies Case

The episode opens with four young people—three men and a woman, ages 18 to 23—camping in New York’s Adirondack Mountains on the night of July 28, 1973. The next morning, a middle-aged man wearing what looked like a conservation officer’s outfit, including a feathered fedora, sunglasses, a rifle, a buck knife, and binoculars, ordered them out of their tent. He said, “I’ve killed before and I’ll kill again,” threatened to take their gas, and marched them into the woods. He made the campers tie themselves to trees. Then he stabbed 18-year-old Philip Domblesky five times in the chest. The other three escaped; one, David Freeman, was recaptured and forced to lie in a ditch while the attacker watched him. When armed locals arrived, Freeman ran for help and the gunman disappeared. The ensuing search became the largest manhunt in New York State history, involving hundreds of officers, rifles, shotguns, bloodhounds, helicopters, and patrols through the mountains. Police identified the fugitive as 37-year-old Robert Garrow, an ex-convict who had served seven years for rape. He survived by raiding abandoned campsites left behind by frightened residents. On August 9, after being shot several times while fleeing, Garrow was captured and taken to a hospital.

The capture of Garrow leads to the “buried bodies case,” centered on the conflict between a defense lawyer’s professional duty and his personal sense of right and wrong. Legal-ethics professor Lisa Lerman frames the question as whether a good lawyer should do what the law requires even when doing so feels morally intolerable. Garrow’s attorney was Frank Armani, a Syracuse lawyer who described himself as someone who had always fought for the little guy. He had previously represented Garrow in less serious matters, including an automobile accident and an accusation involving young girls, but Garrow had also been charged with trying to kidnap two college students and had skipped court after being released on bail. Armani immediately sensed that Garrow was dangerous. When Garrow was arrested for the Domblesky murder, he would speak only with Armani. Although Armani had never handled a full murder trial and did not initially want the case, the judge told him that the court had an obligation to provide the lawyer Garrow requested. Armani agreed to serve as his public defender and recruited Francis Belge, a more experienced criminal-defense lawyer, as co-counsel.

Armani and Belge visited Garrow in his hospital room, where police watched from outside and allegedly even used a lip-reader to monitor him. The lawyers turned up the television and fans so Garrow could speak privately, because they needed his complete account to prepare a defense. They told him that the evidence was overwhelming and that an insanity defense might keep him in a mental hospital rather than a maximum-security prison. Eventually, Garrow told Belge that he had killed Domblesky and other people. He described a recurring pattern in which severe headaches led to psychosis, although he claimed not to remember many details. He also said that Susan Petz, a 21-year-old from Chicago whose boyfriend had been found murdered while they were camping, and Alicia Hawke, a 16-year-old Syracuse girl, had been killed. Garrow gave locations for their bodies. Belge and Armani drove toward an abandoned mine near Mineville, changing cars after becoming suspicious that police were following them. Armani was lowered into an air shaft and saw a blue sneaker and a leg. Belge later found Hawke’s body in a cemetery, where Garrow had said it would be. The discovery created the central dilemma: the lawyers knew where two missing girls were, but Garrow had told them in confidence.

The lawyers considered whether they could report the bodies. Lisa Lerman explains that under the confidentiality rules applicable to the case, information related to representing a client generally could not be disclosed unless disclosure was necessary to prevent reasonably certain death or serious bodily harm. Since Petz and Hawke were already dead, there was no future crime to prevent. The families were still suffering, investigators were searching, and public resources were being spent, but those facts did not create a legal exception. Lerman says this is precisely what makes defense work so difficult: the lawyer’s role is not to act according to what he personally believes is good or fair, but to serve as the client’s advocate within the justice system. Armani recognized the anguish of the families, especially because he had lost a younger brother, an Air Force pilot whose plane went down in 1962. He nevertheless concluded that his duty was to preserve Garrow’s confidence. Rather than disclose the locations anonymously, the lawyers tried to negotiate. They offered the information about the bodies to the prosecutor in exchange for a commitment to place Garrow in a mental institution instead of prison. The prosecutor and state investigator rejected the proposal, viewing it as an outrageous attempt to bargain with murder victims. The meeting lasted about five minutes, and the deal collapsed.

The failed plea bargain left Armani with no way to share what he knew without violating his understanding of his professional duty. The day before the meeting, Susan Petz’s father had visited Armani and asked, father to father, whether he knew anything about his daughter. Armani could not tell him. He tried only to offer hope by mentioning that he had a meeting scheduled with state investigators and the prosecutor. When the meeting produced nothing, he returned to his office and, overwhelmed by guilt and frustration, threw books and damaged the phone and other furniture. Armani described sleepless nights, nightmares, and waking at 2:30 in the morning to wait for the newspaper. He considered making an anonymous call but decided that if he disclosed the information, he would do it openly. He did not break confidentiality. In December 1973, five months after the disappearances, Petz’s body was found by children playing near the mine. Hawke’s body was discovered soon afterward near the cemetery. The families finally received the physical answers the lawyers had possessed for months, but only after enduring the uncertainty and continuing search. The episode presents Armani as caught between two moralities: compassion for the victims’ families and the defense lawyer’s obligation to protect even a hated client.

At Garrow’s 1974 trial for Domblesky’s murder, Armani and Belge pursued an insanity defense. They decided to put Garrow on the witness stand so he could tell his life story and demonstrate, in their view, that he had been mentally ill when he killed. Garrow described severe childhood abuse, little education, being sent to work on a farm at age seven, slaughtering bulls as a child, drinking blood, having sex with animals, and committing rapes as an adult. He also admitted killing Petz and Hawke. During Garrow’s testimony, Belge apparently asked, “Is that the one I found?” The remark revealed that the lawyers had located one of the bodies. They then held a press conference explaining that they had kept the information secret because of their duty to protect client confidences. The public reaction was furious. Newspaper headlines said the bodies had been used as “pawns” in a legal game. Armani received death threats, a dead fish was left in his car, and an unlit Molotov cocktail was found in his backyard. He began carrying a pistol and keeping shotguns in his home and car. Garrow was convicted of murdering Domblesky and received the maximum sentence: 25 years to life in a maximum-security prison. Afterward, Armani and Belge faced possible criminal charges and an ethics complaint that could have led to disbarment.

The criminal charges against Armani and Belge were eventually dropped, and the ethics complaint was dismissed. The state bar and court concluded that their conduct was legally and ethically proper. Belge began drinking heavily, abandoned his practice, and moved to Florida. Armani continued practicing but struggled financially, suffered a heart attack, and felt that the case had damaged his career. Years later, however, the buried-bodies case became a standard teaching example in legal-ethics and criminal-defense classes. Professors use it to show what confidentiality requires and what it means for a lawyer to represent someone everyone else considers monstrous. At a professional-responsibility conference in 2007, Armani was treated as a hero. He resisted that description, saying he was simply a lawyer who did his job. Lerman similarly argues that his conduct protected a core principle: a client must be able to tell a lawyer everything without fearing that the lawyer will become an informant. The episode ends by giving Susan Petz’s mother, Roberta Patch, a direct response. Patch says she was horrified that law schools taught Armani’s conduct as correct. She believes the victims should have been given at least equal, if not greater, consideration. She says Armani’s silence caused her and her husband months of additional horror and calls it a lie, whatever the lawyer’s ethical justification. Susan received her degree posthumously, but her parents could not bear to collect it. Patch says there is no justification for protecting the person who killed her daughter.