Fifteen-year-old Eric Doratio had been having problems both at home and at school. He was frequently truant, and was thought to be involved with drugs. The last time his mother saw him was on Thanksgiving, November 24th, but later on that same day, Eric was reportedly seen running away from a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania teen shelter.
Three days after that, Eric was spotted leaving a house near McKeesport, and later that day was dropped off by a friend at the intersection of Routes 22 and 48 in Whitehall.
On the morning of November 29th, 1977, a group of hunters traversing a road in Fallowfield Township came across an eerie sight: a merrily burning industrial barrel. The men carefully approached the barrel and peered inside, immediately recognizing that a human body had been placed within and set aflame.
The burned remains were quickly identified as those of Eric Doratio. Whoever had killed the teenager had soaked his body in paint thinner, two cans of which were discovered beneath his corpse. The assailant had also made a trail of paint thinner that stretched more than thirty feet from the barrel, which he had presumably used as a fuse.
Police were hopeful that the murderer would soon be unmasked, particularly because the barrel was of a rare and distinctive style: made of hard cardboard and supported by steel rings. A nearby company seemed to be the only place in the area where use of this type of barrel was common, so authorities focused a large portion of their attention there.
While they were exploring this lead, however, another arrived in the form of a series of anonymous letters which made reference to Eric Doratio’s murder. Investigators suspected that these letters had been written either by the killer or someone who was very familiar with the area where the body had been found. Unfortunately, police were never able to trace the individual who had written the letters, and after a few weeks, they stopped coming.
After their two most promising lines of inquiry petered out, detectives were left with not much else to go on. They hypothesized that Eric’s slaying might have been drug-related, but have no solid evidence to support this conjecture. The death of the Pennsylvania teenager remains a bizarre and grisly enigma.
Crime Immemorial 