John Lesko’s Childhood

The depravity of John Lesko’s childhood in Pittsburgh during the 1960s rivals Oliver Twist’s misfortunes and misadventures in 1850s London.  But not even the genius of Charles Dickens could craft a happy ending from this story.

The following account, put together from press accounts and court documents, tells the story of a child neglected and abused by his family.  Social welfare agencies thoroughly documented the family’s conditions for years, but all efforts to intervene seem woefully inadequate or misled in retrospect.

John Charles Lesko was born Nov. 11, 1958 in Homestead Hospital.  His mother, Mary Anne Fedorko, 16 and unmarried, thought John’s father was most likely Thomas Tucker Muse, but she gave him the last name of Lesko, for the man who had captured her affection at the time of John’s birth.  Ten months later, this man, too, would be gone, but Fedorko would give birth to another son, John’s half brother, Michael Lesko.  Four more children would follow.

Fedorko’s mother had discovered that her father was a bigamist and thrown him out of the house before she was born.  Consequently, she had never known her father – and neither did any of her own six children.  According to his aunt, John “hungered for a father” all through his childhood and adolescence.

When John was young, his mother and her children lived in his grandparents’ home on Ravine Street in Munhall.  Fedorka resented her stepfather, James Ridge, according to testimony, because he sexually abused her and may have even fathered one of her children.  He also flew into rages about the way she neglected her children.  Fedorko’s half sister, Bunny Ridge Aikman, believes that Fedorka and her mother conspired to have Ridge removed from the house “by inventing the fact that he was having flashbacks” to the World War II  . They “succeeded” – he was committed to the VA hospital in Leach Farm and later died there.

During the mid 1960s, Fedorko’s two oldest boys got into various misadventures on the street and in a creek that ran near the house.  One warm day when John was about six, neighborhood boys grabbed and tied him to a tree.  His younger brother Michael recalls: “I saw them put his hands behind his back and squirt something on him.  I ran for help and when I got back to where John was...smoke was pouring from his pants and shirt.  John was crying and yelling and I pushed him into the creek to put the fire out.” 

John spent 32 days in Homestead Hospital recovering from the burns.  He still bears a thick, four-inch scar on the left side of his torso, a visible reminder of his tortured childhood.

Michael describes a shoeshine business he and his brother ran on the streets of Homestead when they were in elementary school and remembers John being sexually molested by a customer who lured them to his home with a promise of more quarters.

Eventually, Fedorka struck out on her own, allegedly after a split with her mother over their mutual affection for the same man.  After her third child, Matilda, or Tillie, was born, Fedorka called herself Mrs. Miller after Tillie’s father, Kermit Miller, although they had never married.  She also used the name Miller for her last three children, Kimberly, Joseph, and Alicia, although they each had different fathers.

Over the next several years, Fedorka moved her family frequently, leaving behind unpaid bills and angry landlords.  The living conditions, by all accounts, were consistently atrocious.

“I was in and out of her various apartments and recall that they were filthy, cold and largely unfurnished,” Aikman recalled.  “The children either slept on the floor or on a mattress in the corner of a room on the floor.”  When the then-baby, Alicia, finally got her own crib, “the mattress in it was covered with human feces…The children were never properly clothed and wore rags most of the time, and dirty rags at that.  They lived on food stamps and usually went unfed.”

Child welfare workers’ records describe apartments that lacked running water, were littered with animal and human feces, and heated only by the burners of a gas stove in the winter.  They complained that their feet stuck to the floors when they went in to inspect the rooms.  The children, they confirmed, were scrawny and unfed, dressed in dirty and torn clothing with hair that was never combed or properly cut.

Fedorka , by her sister’s account, “would bring one or more of her men friends whom she met in the course of an evening back to her apartment.  She had taught the kids to go through their pockets after they had passed out.”

“My earliest memories are of living in apartments in Homestead with our mother and my older brothers,” Tillie said.  “Our mother sometimes left us alone.  There were rats.  We were scared, even John, who was the oldest.”

Sometimes the children would go to Moxley's, a store nearby where the people would take pity and give them hamburgers.  In another location, a kindly pizza shop owner downstairs sometimes sent up left over pies.  The kids had to wash their own clothes in an old washer in the basement, where their fingers would often get caught in the wringer, Tillie remembered. When they didn’t have water, they just went dirty.

Fedorko’s punishments were strict and erratic.  According to Tillie, Fedorka sometimes forced them to kneel on the radiators where they had to remain, sometimes for hours, until she gave them permission to move.  Their knees burned and hurt, but they could not get up, even to go to the bathroom.  If they wet their pants, their mother beat them with a cat o’ nine tails, an extension cord, or the tracks from their toy racing cars.  The other children had to watch the beating.  Tillie remembers one time when Fedorka shouted at John: “I wish you were never born,” and John responded with, “Why did you have me?”

"My first and lasting impression from my childhood is that we were not wanted,” recalled Joey, the fifth of Fedorko’s six children  “Our mother left us everywhere.  Her numerous addresses never actually felt like home and were filled with arguing, hatred and violence.  There was no love.”

 Joey stated that he was spared some of the neglect and abuse that John and his other siblings endured because he was taken out of the home and placed elsewhere at a younger age than the others.

When John was 11, the family was evicted from their last apartment together on Eighth Avenue in Homestead, and the three oldest children were placed in Holy Family Institute.

“The years at Holy Family were hard,” Tiller recalled.  “We were lonely but felt safe there.” 

Their mother or grandmother would visit on weekends, and every other weekend they could go home to another filthy apartment filled with animal waste, where their mother lived with her boyfriend Ray Pryzbilinkski.  When Ray tried to molest Tillie in the basement where she was doing her laundry, her mother and Ray blamed it on John. 

Afterward, Tillie was separated from John and Michael and none of the children was allowed to visit again at their mother’s home. On weekends, they instead went to stay with their grandmother, Anna Ridge, whom the Institute saw as more wholesome.  Ridge was living with Ed Humanik, the man who moved in after her husband was committed, but the children were instructed never to mention him.  Sometimes the children went along to Humanik’s bar, where they were allowed to sit on the stools and sip on hard liquor.  Tillie and her cousin Stacy, too young to reach the bar stools, sat on floor behind the bar and helped themselves to drinks.

Eventually, Anna Ridge gained full custody of the children, “but she did not treat them any better than she had treated us when we were growing up,” Aikman testified. “The boys began drinking and using drugs and fled her house to play in the projects.”

John, who had always been moody, became even more temperamental as a teenager.  “I recognized that John was going off the deep end and was headed for serious trouble,” Aikman said.  “His drinking and drug use increased.”

Drugs and alcohol were easy to come by, Tillie said.  Their aunts— Joanne, who lived with them, and Bunny Aikman, who visited frequently—were both alcoholics.  Aikman, Tillie said, was also addicted to cocaine and heroin.  John found Joanne’s stash of rum in the stereo cabinet and drank it, filling the drained bottles with water.

Like Oliver Twist’s character Fagan, John’s demanded that he earn hi keep by crime  “When we visited our grandmother, Anna Ridge, on holidays,” Joey recalled, “she taught us to steal."

 “Both Gran and Bunny taught us to steal from stores,“ Tillie said, “and told us to not come back home at all at night if we were empty handed.  If we did...she [their grandmother] would lock us out of the house, even during the winter months.  We would have to stay with friends or sleep outside.  Sometimes the police would find us outside, and then my grandmother would let us back in.  There was no love, only fear in my grandmother’s house.”

After a mediocre record in several schools, John joined the Marines.  He went AWOL (absent without leave) several times before the Marines gave him a less than honorable discharge.

“After he got out of the Marines, something seemed different about him,” Tillie said.  “He was changed.  He was more distant and harder to talk with.  He took chances  – fighting, driving, and drinking –acting like he was afraid of nothing.”

John had a girlfriend whose mother later testified about how he helped her with the cleaning and care of her younger children.  But he had no place to stay at times.  In fact, they found him sleeping under the tarp of the family’s boat in the driveway.

Not long before John became friends with Michael Travaglia and began their drunk and drug-crazed rampage, his grandmother told him that authorities had learned that his brother Joey’s home placement in Ohio had not been a happy one.  A male guardian had repeatedly abused him.

"I learned that my grandmother had told John about my molestation while I was at Miami Valley in Hamilton, Ohio,” Joey testified.  “John had been very upset about it because he had also been sexually abused.  This brought back bad memories for him."

Only days later, John Lesko followed Michael Travaglia’s lead on a series of killings that allegedly began with “retaliation” for a homosexual advance.

The depravity of John Lesko’s childhood in Pittsburgh during the 1960s rivals Oliver Twist’s misfortunes and misadventures in 1850s London.  But not even the genius of Charles Dickens could craft a happy ending from this story.
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Throughout his years at Kiski Area High School, Travaglia – described as a tall, thin youth – was an active member of the swim team, marching band and symphonic band.  “He enjoyed school and his classes, especially music,” his wife Fran said, noting that school was a break away from his home life.
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