Suddenly the stranger let go of the chair and began to bash Jennifer with an electric cattle prod. In a fury, her mother leapt on the man's back as Jennifer broke free and ran screaming into the hotel for help. As the attacker pounded Sonya Rhodes, the hotel's night manager ran outside. "I've called the cops!" he yelled. "Stop!" Quickly the man leveled a 9 mm assault rifle at him and backed off. Then the assailant jumped into a white Lincoln Town Car and sped away. Minutes later, as an ambulance raced the two women to the Albany Medical Center—where Sonya would receive some 70 stitches and Jennifer about 30—Jennifer had a fleeting intuition: Perhaps the attacker had been Gary Wilensky.
The Hunter College High School senior was right on target. A little more than two hours after the attack, Colonie police cornered the white Lincoln in a parking lot. As patrolman Dave Leonardo approached, Wilensky, Jennifer Rhodes's onetime tennis coach, raised the 9 mm rifle to his mouth and pulled the trigger. Over the next several days, police pieced together a horrific tale of madness and obsession that sent a frisson of fear through wealthy Manhattan families who had, for years, been entrusting their children to a man now revealed as a potentially murderous psychotic.
As the investigation proceeded, it became clear that Wilensky, 56, had been stalking Jennifer for months. His plan, police concluded, reminiscent of the demented killer's in The Silence of the Lambs, was to hold her prisoner in the Adirondack mountains in a rented house, which he had outfitted like a macabre medieval torture chamber, replete with chains, handcuffs and an astonishing collection of sexual devices. Wilensky also loaded the cabin with high-tech monitoring devices, including motion detectors and closed-circuit cameras. "Had he been able to gel her up to the cabin," says Det. Lt. Steven Heider, who headed the investigation, "then you had to fear for the young lady's life. If we [the police] approached, he might haw killed her and killed himself."
When Wilensky starting coaching Jennifer more than a year and a half ago, both she and her parents were pleased with him. "He was very dedicated to his students," says a U.S. Tennis Association official. "He cared a lot about them." The first sign that he cared more than he ought to came last fall. Wilensky had been giving Jennifer private lessons lour times a week for about a year, when he began making increasing demands on her time. He phoned her constantly and wrote her long letters. Though he was thriving as a tennis instructor—in addition to giving private lessons, he coached the team at Brearley, an elite private school for girls in New York City—and lived in a luxury Manhattan apartment, he was depressed and lonely, he said. He had grown up on Long Island and married his high school sweetheart when he was 27, but they had divorced after only six months. According to those who knew him, that had been the end of his social life.
At the suggestion of her mother, a well-known psychotherapist. Jennifer, who will attend Harvard in the fall, tried to set limits and avoided discussing personal matters. "[But] the more she tried to pull away, the more he was calling and sending cards," says Lieutenant Heider. Finally in January, Jennifer told her father, Robert, an architect, and her mother that she was becoming frightened. In January, Sonya, the author of the 1989 book Cold Feet: Why Men Don't Commit, sent Wilensky a letter discharging him as Jennifer's coach and telling him he needed professional help. After his firing, Wilensky phoned the family several times. Sonya recommended he consult a therapist colleague of hers, and for two months he did.
After his death, it was discovered that he had been asked to seek treatment before. In 1988 he had been arrested for stalking two boys, Joseph Arena and John La Marca, both now 16, and an unidentified girl. Wearing a leather sex mask, a wig and black spandex pants, Wilensky had photo-graphed the two boys at a bus stop on their way to school. "He was there waiting for us every day for about a month," says Joseph. "At first we thought he was just a crazy tourist. The case was dropped, according to a spokesman for the Manhattan district attorney's office, when Wilensky, a first-time offender, agreed to gel psychiatric help.
For Wilensky, the final descent into madness began on March 18. On that day he broke off with his therapist and purchased a Cobray 9 mm semiautomatic assault rifle. What followed was a wild three-week shopping frenzy, during which Wilensky spent some 840,000 on such items as handcuffs, wigs, cameras, stun guns, whips, chains, a pair of night-vision glasses, and sexual paraphernalia. The first week in April he paid a year's rent in advance—$14,000—on his isolated chamber of honors.
While Jennifer played her match, Wilensky checked out the area and later watched with binoculars as mother and daughter had dinner. Following the attack, Jennifer and her mother were joined in Albany by her father and her older brother, Justin. The family returned to their Manhattan apartment Sunday night. The next day, Robert Rhodes was cleaning out the family car when he made a chilling discovery: a homing device. Police believe Wilensky planted it to track Jennifer.
Over the next few days, many who had known Gary Wilensky recalled tales of what they had assumed was his benign eccentricity. All expressed shock at the feverish but methodical intensity with which he had pursued Jennifer Rhodes and. ultimately, his own destruction. If there was a lesson to be learned, noted one, it was simply this: "You should really check out people you let near your kids—even people who appear to be nice."
CRAIG HOROWITZ
MARIA EFTIMIADES in Colonie, ALLISON LYNN and BRYAN ALEXANDER in New York City
- Contributors:
- Maria Eftimiades,
- Allison Lynn,
- Bryan Alexander.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
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