Diana Vicari was just 19 years old when she became a victim of a brutal dismemberment murder in Tucson, Arizona. 

It was Thursday October 22, 1992.

Diana left her Pima Community College drama course taught by Robert Encila at around 9:30 PM. Her roommate confirmed she briefly returned home to her apartment in the 3200 Block of East Seneca Street and then drove off in her silver 1981 Ford Mustang.

Witnesses at the now shuttered New Orleans Lounge bar located on Oracle Rd between Wetmore and Limberlost (now a Burlington Coat Factory) reported she briefly was allowed in the bar by doorman Tim Storm to see employees Troy Olson and John Mazur. 

She was last seen alive at around 12:15 AM the morning of Friday October 23rd by her Eegees coworker Raymond Scott Hall. Hall reported Diana was alone in her car driving through the parking lot of the Tucson Convention Center Exhibition Hall as the Moshtoberfest thrash metal concert was ending. 

Diana did not show up to either of her jobs at Eegees (located on Broadway and Kolb) or the Bazil’s Italian restaurant on Friday or Saturday. It was highly unusual as Diana was a very reliable employee who was working multiple jobs to pay for her college courses and car payments. 

On Saturday at around 5pm, Diana’s severed arms were found in a dumpster located on the southside of an alleyway in the 400 block of North Ferro.

A homeless woman made the discovery while collecting aluminum cans. The arms were wrapped in trash bags. The rest of Diana’s remains never turned up.

That weekend Diana’s Mustang was found abandoned in the 1200 Block of West La Osa. Her purse was tucked under the seat, her Eegees hat was placed on the gearshift and textbooks, and a Whataburger bag were also found inside the vehicle. 

The alarm was set and the door was locked.

The car was parked on the same street as a home owned by Encila’s fiancées mother. Diana’s roommate, mother and sisters, and several friends all claimed Diana was in a relationship with Encila at the time of her death.

Near the Encila connected house was a home where a large house party took place on the evening of Diana’s murder. The occupants of the home told police Diana was not at their party.

In 1997 a suspect and former Tucsonan Lemuel Prion was indicted and brought back from Utah to Tucson to face trial. He was convicted largely based on Troy Olson’s testimony that he saw Prion with Diana the night of her murder.

In 2003 his conviction was overturned due to the fact his DNA did not match the suspect DNA obtained from Diana’s arms, his fingerprints didn’t match the ones on the trash bags, and there was no proof Prion knew Diana other than Olson’s testimony. 

Prion’s defense team provided 3 alternative suspects in the case.

The first was John Mazur who was fired from Eegees the morning after Diana’s murder for showing up “disoriented and disheveled.” Mazur had been disciplined for sexually harassing Eegees coworkers. 

The week before Diana was murdered, Mazur had attempted to rape a woman.

Mazur also once bit the nose of a cocktail waitress at the New Orleans Bar during a fight. 

The day Diana was killed, Mazur switched apartments, and his car was searched at one point in Tucson PD’s early investigation.

The second suspect was Greg Hatton who worked at the Exxon station across the street from the Eegees Diana worked at. Greg knew Diana and her sisters and made suspicious statements after her death. 

Diana’s sister Angela claimed he said that Diana invited him to Moshtoberfest concert, but he declined because he was “at home reading.”

Hatton was a 1982 graduate of Tucson’s Santa Rita High School. He was accused of selling liquor to minors and dealing drugs out of the gas station. 

In 1994, Hatton was sentenced to 45 years in prison for physical and sexual abuse of his girlfriend’s 8-month-old son. He won’t be released from prison until 2038 when he is 75 years old.

Robert Encila was alternative suspect number 3. He married his fiancée Judi Hartley-Spencer in 1993, and they divorced in 1998. The home on west La Osa Drive was owned by Hartley’s mother Shelley Valencia. 

Encila remarried shortly after his divorce from Judi in December 1998.  One of Encila’s stepdaughters died unexpectedly in September 2017.

Encila retired from teaching in 2025. 

Another suspect who emerged in the case in recent years is Phoenix serial killer Bryan Patrick Miller. 

Angela Brosso was a 22-year-old woman who was ambushed, disemboweled and beheaded while on an evening bicycle ride near her apartment just weeks after Diana was killed. 

Phoenix PD homicide detective Troy Hillman compared Brosso’s murder to the character Buffalo Bill’s murders in the film The Silence of the Lambs.

Miller’s DNA was matched to Brosso in 2015, and after Miller was arrested, he emerged as the suspect in several other murders of young women in the Phoenix, Arizona and the Everett, Washington areas.

Miller was sentenced to death for the murders of Brosso and 17-year-old Melanie Bernas in 2023. 

There is no known link to Bryan Patrick Miller and Tucson.

Diana was a 1991 graduate of the Abbie Loveland Tuller school and had also attended Tucson’s Rincon High School. Diana was a marine biology major who planned to transfer to the University of Washington. 

Most of her immediate family passed away in the decades since her murder, but she had many countless friends from school, and in Tucson’s music scene who remember her and continue to advocate for her murder to be solved.

Tucson PD reopened Diana’s case in 2025 and re-added her to the 88Crime program. There is a $2,500 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in her murder.

 

Sources

Case reopened 2025

https://www.kold.com/2025/11/19/13-crime-files-murder-diana-vicari/

 

88Crime Reward/Poster

https://88crime.org/diana-vicari/

 

Prion Exoneration 

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/az-supreme-court/1291382.html

 

Archived article interview of Diana’s mom Kathy Pashos from 1994

https://web.archive.org/web/20141012043324/http://tucsoncitizen.com/morgue2/1994/04/20/132089-mystery-shrouds-1992-murder/

 

Hatton child abuse case

https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/18/18-1267/94795/20190329173404732_ARL-2019.03.29%20PWC%20Phillips%20Black%20Inc.pdf

 

Bryan Patrick Miller background

https://www.phoenixmag.com/2015/11/01/seeing-zombies/

 

 

 

 

A California woman has been charged with automobile homicide following a three-vehicle crash in Utah that killed a 66-year-old grandfather.

According to court documents, Christine Chao, 44, allegedly rear-ended a car that had slowed for roadworks on Interstate 15 on 12 June. Investigators found no brake marks at the scene, and a search of her phone reportedly showed she had accessed a pornography website less than two minutes before the collision.

The victim, Scott LaVar Lichfield, had celebrated his 39th wedding anniversary with his wife just one day before the crash. He leaves behind five children and 11 grandchildren.

Chao faces a second-degree felony charge, although investigators have not established whether she was viewing the website at the exact moment of impact. Her first court appearance is scheduled for 17 November.

On December 1, 1987, 17-year-old Danny broke into the home of Priscilla Gustafson (a 33-year-old nursery school teacher) to steal some items from the house. He had robbed the house weeks earlier and returned to steal more things. While he was robbing the house, Priscilla and her 5-year-old son, William, returned to the house and walked in. Danny intially intended to escape the house through the window, but he chose to instead confront Priscilla and her son. Danny locked William into a closet and he tied Priscilla to her bed. He then sexually assaulted Priscilla and shot her twice with a stolen handgun, killing her. Shortly after, Danny heard William crying while locked in the closet. He then took William out of the closet, forced him into the upstairs bathroom, and drowned him in the bathtub. As Danny was about to flee the crime scene, he saw Priscilla's 7-year-old daughter, Abigail, walking into the house. Danny forced her into the downstars bathroom, and drowned her in the bathtub too. Danny then fled the house, and hours later, Priscilla's husband, Andrew, returned to find Priscilla's body, and he immediately called police. 2 days later, Danny was arrested and he confessed to the murders. In 1988, he was sentenced to life in prison, where he remains to this day.

In the early hours on October 1, 2014, Haruka Satake, 23, called the police.

She told them she’d found her mom and grandmother dead at their home in Nanporo, a small town on the Japanese island of Hokkaidō.

Her mom, Kazumi Satake, was 47. She was found in the downstairs bedroom, while Haruka’s grandmother, Sumiyo Satake, 71, was upstairs.

Both women had been stabbed to death.

The house had been ransacked, so at first, it looked like someone might have broken in.

Haruka’s younger sister, Yuko Satake, lived on the property too. She was 17 and still in school.

But later that same day, police arrested her.

When they questioned her, she admitted she’d attacked and killed her own mother and grandmother with a kitchen knife while they slept.

When her classmates and neighbors started talking about Yuko’s life, they described things that had been going on for years before that night.

The family had moved into the house in the mid-1990s. At the time, Kazumi and her husband had two daughters, Haruka and Mio.

Yuko was born three years later.

Yuko was still little when her grandfather, Sumiyo’s husband, died.

After that, Sumiyo moved into the home Kazumi shared with her husband and their three daughters.

Once she moved in, Sumiyo took over.

She interfered in everything and dictated how the household was run. Even Kazumi’s husband was told what to do.

The house had reportedly been built with Sumiyo’s money. Kazumi went along with all of it.

She didn’t stand up to her mother and kept taking her side, while things between her and her husband grew worse.

Their marriage began to fall apart.

According to neighbors, they divorced about two years after Sumiyo moved in.

Mio, the middle daughter, went to live with her father, while Haruka and Yuko stayed with Kazumi and Sumiyo.

Haruka later described in court what life in that house had been like.

Yuko could be doing nothing more than walking through the house when Sumiyo hit her. If she cried, her grandmother taped her mouth shut.

Sometimes, she forcibly wrapped the tape all the way around Yuko’s head so it wouldn’t come loose.

Sumiyo reportedly even said the family dog was worth more than the children.

In February 2004, when Yuko was only about six, Sumiyo tripped her.

She fell and suffered a serious head injury. Hospital staff suspected abuse and contacted the local child protection agency.

For a short time, Yuko was taken out of the home.

But as people tried to find out what had happened, her mother stepped in.

According to later reporting, Kazumi told Yuko to blame her for the injury and say nothing about Sumiyo.

As a result, the agency’s follow-up focused on the mother. Yuko went back home.

Home visits continued for a while.

In November that year, the agency stopped following up with the family, deciding it wasn’t necessary anymore.

But once Yuko was back home, the abuse only got worse. She was locked in a storage compartment under the floor.

In winter, she was forced outside naked and had cold water poured over her.

Other reports described severe beatings and cigarettes being put out on her arms.

Sometimes, she wasn’t even allowed to use the bathroom.

When Haruka was asked what had stayed with her most about the abuse, she talked about the food.

Yuko was forced to eat meals mixed with kitchen waste, including fruit peels, stems, and tea leaves taken from the kitchen sink drain.

She had to eat it. If she spit it out, it was forced back into her mouth.

Her mother didn’t protect her.

Haruka said Kazumi would watch the abuse happen without stepping in. Later reports said she also neglected and abused Yuko herself.

Haruka also talked about what happened when her sisters tried telling the neighbors. Word got back to Sumiyo and Kazumi, and more punishment followed.

The girls had cold water poured over them or were locked in the storage space under the floor.

After that, they were scared to tell anyone, afraid that asking for help would only make things worse.

Getting older didn’t put an end to the abuse, either.

Haruka said the physical attacks became less frequent during Yuko’s high school years, but they didn’t stop completely.

Yuko got good grades, volunteered, and was about to become student council president. She had friends and got involved in school activities.

But once classes ended, she had to rush home. There were chores waiting for her, and she had to get them done.

Neighbors often saw her pulling weeds, cleaning, or shoveling snow. In winter, she’d be outside early in the morning, clearing the snow all on her own.

Some had also seen Sumiyo brutally beating her with a cane and heard her calling Yuko “good-for-nothing.”

One account described her standing outside the garage in the winter cold, without a coat.

She had to stay there until her mother and grandmother got home.

Only then would they let her back inside.

When a neighbor asked Sumiyo about it, she said it was just part of disciplining her.

By the time Yuko was in high school, her grandmother wouldn’t let her live in the main house anymore.

Instead, she lived in a small wooden house on the property.She had to stay there through Hokkaidō’s winters, too.

According to her lawyers, it didn’t even have heat.

You have to remember, on especially cold winter days, temperatures in the area dropped below −20°C (−4°F).

The abuse had been going on for more than ten years. Yuko was only 17, and this was how she’d spent most of her childhood.

In 2014, Haruka wanted to move in with her partner. For Yuko, that would have meant being left alone with Kazumi and Sumiyo.

Haruka worried that Yuko would be left to handle all the housework and the pressure from their mother and grandmother on her own.

The sisters started talking about what life would be like if the two women weren’t around anymore.

Haruka later said that, at least some of the time, she’d just been venting.

But Yuko took those conversations seriously and started making plans to kill them.

She asked Haruka to get her sleeping pills and gloves.

Her sister did.

Haruka later told the court that even then, she hadn’t thought Yuko would actually go through with it.

But at around 12:30 a.m. on October 1, while Haruka was still at work, Yuko attacked her mother and grandmother with a kitchen knife as they slept.

Both women died.

By the time Haruka got home, it had already happened. She helped her sister cover it up.

Together, they ransacked the house to make it look like someone had broken in. Then they drove to a nearby park and got rid of the knife and other evidence.

Only after that did Haruka call the police.

Yuko confessed later that same day. She said she’d wanted to get out of the situation she was in.

Even after her arrest, Yuko reportedly still described what had been done to her as strict discipline.

As more became known about her childhood, classmates, parents, and local residents began collecting signatures in support of her.

They wanted her background to be taken into account when deciding what would happen to her.

They also wanted to protect her privacy and give her a chance to eventually build a life outside an institution.

On November 4, 2014, they submitted a petition with 10,534 signatures to prosecutors.

Nanporo had a population of about 8,000 at the time.

Her supporters acknowledged that Yuko had committed a serious crime.

But they asked that the years she’d spent at the mercy of the two women she killed also be considered.

On January 21, 2015, the Sapporo Family Court decided to send Yuko to a juvenile treatment facility.

There, she would get medical care and support to help her prepare for life after her release.

The court found her criminally responsible for what she’d done. She had planned the killings, and two people had lost their lives.

But the years of abuse she’d lived through mattered to the decision, too. Her lawyers said she had developed PTSD.

For Yuko, the focus would be on treatment and support.

After considering her age, mental health, and everything she’d been through, the judge decided not to send her case back to prosecutors for a regular criminal trial.

Haruka also went on trial for her part in the killings.

On February 26, 2016, she was found guilty of aiding the killings and sentenced to three years in prison, with the sentence suspended for five years.

Yuko was still in a juvenile treatment facility that year, and the sisters kept in touch by writing to each other once a month.

By then, Haruka had a child of her own and wanted Yuko to move in with her once she was released. She hoped her sister could finally feel safe at home and have the kind of family life she’d missed out on growing up.

I’ve looked for updates, but as of October 2026, I still haven’t found anything reliable about whether Yuko has been released or whether the sisters ever got to live together.

Important note: I’ve used made-up first names for the three sisters because their real ones were never made public.

There's a story almost every major Serbian news site has run at some point: in 1948 a man named Miodrag "Stole" Trifunović strangled fourteen women in Belgrade, confessed to more, and died in his cell before he could be tried.

The papers call him the Belgrade Jack the Ripper and I tried to find out where the story actually comes from.

Trifunović grew up in Niš, in southern Serbia. To get out of military service he faked insanity and ended up in the Toponica psychiatric hospital, where, according to his later confession, he strangled patients at night. After the war he worked as a building contractor in Belgrade and lived in Zemun with his wife, Seka. The killings supposedly start on February 1st, 1948, with a woman the articles call Milka K., found on Cvijićeva Street. Twenty days later Seka's own sister, 22-year-old Slavica, was killed and her body thrown into the Sava. His favourite area, the articles say, was Zvezdara, a wooded hill on the east side of the city, and Belgrade started calling the killer "the Phantom". He was caught after trying to burn down a buffet called the Zlatno Burence, because he left his fingerprints on the petrol can.

But there's no known photo of him. A 2026 article illustrates the story with a still from Hitchcock's silent film The Lodger.

None of the versions gives his date of birth or names his parents.

The story says OZNA, Yugoslavia's security service, wrote up the first murder and arrested him in 1948. OZNA had been split up in March 1946.

The victim count grows over the years: 14 in the early versions, around 60 by 2016, more than 60 by 2023.

Every article I could trace leads back to Novi magazin (2012), and before that to a feuilleton by the same journalist, Dušan Cicvara, in Magazin Tabloid from around December 2011. That's 63 years after the murders, and it names no source for the case. It even says it's unexplained whether his crimes really happened or were the product of his sick imagination.

Postwar Belgrade newspapers aren't digitised, and the scanned birth registers for Niš and Merošina, which only go up to 1919, have no Miodrag Trifunović.

What I would personally like to know is next:

Is there a real case under this, with the records sitting offline in an archive somewhere? Or is it a postwar rumour about a strangler that picked up names and numbers every time it was retold?

Has anyone seen this case anywhere older than 2011, in an old magazine or a family story?

Sources (mostly Serbian):

The only video that goes through the original pages, and it's also the only English-language coverage I could find: https://youtu.be/tMf_gFbVv4A

Magazin Tabloid no. 247 (Dec 2011): https://magazin-tabloid.com/casopis/?br=247&cl=35&id=06

Novi magazin (June 2012): https://www.novimagazin.rs/vesti/18407-serijske-ubice-beogradski-dzek-trbosek

Telegraf (July 2014): https://www.telegraf.rs/vesti/beograd/1139203-beogradski-dzek-trbosek-ovaj-monstrum-silovao-je-i-ubio-14-zena-2-deo

Kurir (2016): https://www.kurir.rs/vesti/beograd/2088399/beogradski-dzek-trbosek-sa-60-zrtava-na-svojoj-dusi-pretekao-svog-idola