Michael Andrew Nicholaou lived in Charlottesville only a short time. He drove a cab, worked as an undercover drug informant for the Charlottesville police and opened a porn shop called The Pleasure Chest.
He wanted to become a police officer, but couldn’t pass the background check, former Charlottesville Police Chief John “Deke” Bowen recalls. Despite Nicholaou’s brushes with cops over the porn store, Bowen says, he was “always friendly…a very likeable type of guy.”
As it turned out, Nicholaou wasn’t a nice guy. When he moved to Virginia in 1988, he left behind the mother of two of his children in Holyoke, Massachusetts, who was never found again, according to a June 2006 Associated Press article. He told some people his wife had run off with drug dealers, he told others she was dead.
 The Blue Ridge Parkway is known for its beauty, but a grisly rape there in 1984 caused a local stir—particularly when the wrong man was originally convicted. Now investigators think they may have fingered the actual perpetrator: Michael Andrew Nicholaou, who once operated a porn shop in town. |
Nicholaou has also been linked by a Florida private investigator to a string of murders across New Hampshire and Vermont. In the mid- to late-1980s, the man dubbed the Connecticut River Valley Serial Murderer slashed and stabbed six women to death and injured one.
In January 2006, in West Tampa, Florida, Nicholaou killed his wife, Aileen Nicholaou, fatally wounded her 22-year-old daughter, Taryn Bowman, and then killed himself.
Now Nelson County police are investigating whether the deceased Nicholaou could have been the Blue Ridge Parkway rapist, a criminal who, in 1984, brutally raped and sodomized a 19-year-old woman after abducting her from her car where she and her boyfriend slept on an overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway.
In 1984, police thought they had caught the rapist. Roanoke resident Edward Honaker was picked out of a lineup, matched the victim’s description and drove a similar vehicle to the attacker. Honaker served 10 years in prison on seven counts of rape and sodomy before DNA evidence cleared him. Then-Governor George Allen pardoned Honaker in 1994, according to The Innocence Project.
Nelson County police picked up the trail on Nicholaou when the private investigator contacted them, saying a man she’d been tracking (Nicholaou) bore a striking resemblance to Honaker.
Nelson police are now building a circumstantial case against Nicholaou. Some of the details match up: The rape victim said her attacker talked about Vietnam, and Nicholaou served as an Army helicopter pilot from 1968 to 1971 and is reported to have suffered post-traumatic stress symptoms from the war. He also impersonated a police officer when he abducted her.
Despite the links, Nelson County Chief Investigator Mac Bridgewater says the case will take time to piece together. DNA test results from the rape may be analyzed once police have enough evidence. But Bridgewater says, “We don’t want people to get their hopes up too much.”
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