Long Island Man Arrested in Shirley in Connection With Murder Spree

Aug 28, 09:44 AM

Current Headlines: By Christine Armario and Michael Fr, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.

Aug. 28--A Long Island man was caught Monday in a nationwide dragnet after he killed six people in a spree spanning two hill country towns in Texas and a Pennsylvania suburb, federal authorities said Monday.

U.S. marshals tracked down Paul G. Devoe III, 43, to a friend's Shirley home. He was arrested after a brief standoff on a Texas murder warrant and held for questioning in five other homicides -- including the deaths of four people found in a Travis County, Texas home, authorities said.

Devoe also was held on a federal charge of unlawful flight to avoid prosecution, said Supervisory Deputy Marshal Hector Gomez.

Devoe had a handgun with him when authorities found him at a house on River Road around midday Monday, but he was persuaded to surrender, according to the U.S. Marshals Service.

Investigators believe Devoe shot and killed a bartender Friday in Marble Falls, Texas, before fleeing to a nearby town and killing four others two days later. En route to Long Island, he shot a woman in the head in Pennsylvania and stole her car.

Devoe was identified by Gomez as a suspect in the quadruple killing, although the Travis County district attorney and sheriff's office did not immediately say whether they were planning to file charges against Devoe in those homicides.

While closing in on Devoe, federal agents targeted places where they thought he would turn up. They sought his ex-girlfriend and told her she needed to leave her Suffolk home for her safety, said the woman, who didn't want her name revealed.

She said Devoe was a Patchogue native who drank too much alcohol and had a temper. She cut ties with him in 2001.

"I never dreamed this would happen," she said. She added she never fathomed he was capable of killing five people, "but you can never put anything past anybody."

Devoe was sentenced to 20 months behind bars following a drunken-driving arrest in 1997 and served five years' probation, spokesman Robert Clifford said.

Devoe was found at a home neighbors say belongs to Gerard Baldoni. Monday, marshals knocked on the doors of Baldoni's neighbors telling them to leave their homes or get in their basements.

Neighbors on the usually quiet street described seeing a swarm of cars and agents in tactical gear, search dogs and helicopters overhead.

Agents stopped Stephanie Hancock at a roadblock when she tried to return home to her sons. "They said, 'Get your sons and get out of here,'" she said.

Motives for the killings remained unclear Monday.

Surveillance was arranged in places Devoe was known to frequent, and authorities saw him inside the Shirley home, said Lenny DePaul, commander with the U.S. marshals' New York-New Jersey Regional Fugitive Task Force.

Neighbors said Devoe once worked with Baldoni as a house painter and described Baldoni as an older, reclusive man with health problems. Baldoni did not respond to a message left at his house Monday.

The search for Devoe began in Texas after bartender Michael Allred, 41, died from a bullet wound to the chest at O'Neil's Bar in Marble Falls.

After shooting Allred, police said Devoe fled 30 miles south in a pickup to Jonestown, Texas, about 15 miles south of Austin. The pickup was recovered Sunday by police outside a two-story home in the 2,100-person town. Inside, officers discovered four bodies, said Travis County sheriff's department spokesman Roger Wade.

Wade declined to release the identity of the four, but a San Antonio man, Jonathon Griffith, 29, said his mother, Paula Griffith, 46, and sister, Haylie Marie Faulkner, 15, who lived at the house, were among the dead, the Austin American-Statesman reported.

Officials said the four were found with gunshot wounds.

A white 2001 Saturn station wagon was missing from the home where the bodies were found. That car turned up outside a home in Greencastle, Pa., about 160 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, where state police found the woman dead inside her home, DePaul said.

The woman's car was later recovered outside the Shirley home, marshals said.

Devoe is scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday in Central Islip on an additional charge of being a fugitive from justice, authorities said.

By Christine Armario and Michael Frazier. Staff writer Alfonso A. Castillo and The Associated Press contributed to this story.

-----

To see more of Newsday, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.newsday.com

Copyright (c) 2007, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.