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Pennsylvania State Trooper Fatally Slashes Throat of Girlfriend's Estranged Husband
Beloved Pennsylvania dentist John Yelenic’s worst fears came true when someone came into his Blairsville, Pennsylvania house, smashed his head through a plate glass window and slit his throat.
John Yelenic predicted he was going to be killed.
The beloved Pennsylvania dentist was so convinced he'd be murdered — and that the crime would go unsolved — that before he was found brutally killed in his home, he had asked his attorney to hold $10,000 to pay for a private investigator to look into his own murder.
“He was convinced that he was going to be killed and that his murder would be covered up and that the evidence would be buried along with him and that it would go unsolved,” attorney Effie Alexander said in "The Premonition" episode of Dateline: Secrets Uncovered.
Yelenic’s worst fears came true in the early morning hours of April 13, 2006, when someone came into his Blairsville, Pennsylvania house, attacked him, smashed his head through a plate glass window by the front door, and slit his throat.
Pathologist Cyril Wecht — who once consulted on the John F. Kennedy assassination and has performed more than 20,000 autopsies, including Yelenic’s — described the murder as “certainly one of the most violent deaths I’ve seen.”
Finding Yelenic’s killer, however, would be no simple task as law enforcement soon began to suspect the murderer could be one of their own.
Who was John Yelenic?
Those who knew Yelenic, a family dentist, described him as the life of the party, often making others smile and laugh.
His father died in a car accident when Yelenic was just a few months old, and he grew up with his doting mother. His cousin Mary Ann Clark remembers Yelenic always making the honor roll in high school, before he headed to college and then dental school.
After settling back in his hometown of Blairsville and partnering with his childhood dentist to open up a practice, other aspects of Yelenic’s life began to fall into place too.
In his late 20s, Yelenic — who loved old movies and never carried a cell phone — met Michele Kamler, a beautiful single mom of two who worked as a “Budweiser girl,” promoting the beer at bars and events.
“He would tell his friends and people that he finally got the homecoming queen,” close friend Dennis Vaughn told Dateline.
Within months, the two were engaged and later got married in a New Year’s Eve ceremony in Las Vegas. Yelenic relished his new role as a stepfather, even volunteering to help take his stepson’s hockey teams on road trips. But he also longed for a child of his own.
“That was always something very important to him and so they tried and finally they made the decision then that they would just adopt,” Vaughn said.
The couple adopted their son J.J. from Russia, bought a big house with a pool, bar and hot tub and began life as a family of five.
But the seemingly idyllic picture of their life together soon began to crumble. According to friends, the couple struggled to find much in common.
“John was affectionate toward Michele, but I never saw Michele be affectionate back to John,” fellow dentist, Dr. Maria Tacelosky, told Dateline. “She always seemed distant or almost put off by him.”
The marriage finally imploded four years into the union after both admitted to being unfaithful.
What happened to John Yelenic?
Yelenic moved out of the family home and was trying to rebuild his life when he was violently killed in the early morning hours of April 13, 2006 at age 39.
Neighbors reported hearing what they thought were pig squeals and screams around 1:30 a.m.
Later that day, Yelenic’s 9-year-old neighbor Zachary Uss discovered his body after going to the house looking for Yelenic's son J.J. to hang out with.
“I'm walking up to his porch and I noticed the broken glass on the steps," Zachary, now an adult, told Dateline. "He had red carpet so I didn’t notice the blood at first, but I noticed that his panel side window on the left was broken and there was blood kind of smeared a little bit going down the front. I put my hand through the window, I unlocked the door, went inside and I saw John laying right there.”
Terrified, Zachary ran home and alerted his family, who called 911.
Don Isherwood, an officer with the Blairsville Borough Police Department, arrived at the scene to find John lying in a pool of his own blood with his throat slashed. Bloody footprints, presumably left behind by the killer, led out a back door.
“It was pretty gruesome,” Isherwood told Dateline.
On a nearby coffee table, Yelenic’s divorce papers, slated to be signed the next day, lay covered in blood.
Investigators try to figure out who killed John Yelenic
Shortly after discovering the body, police began to look into who may have wanted the popular dentist dead.
One of Yelenic's neighbors reported hearing someone yell, “I’ll never loan you money again,” around the time of the murder, according to Corporal Janelle Lydic of the Blairsville Borough Police Department.
Lydic began by looking into the lengthy list of people Yelenic, who had always been generous with his money, lent money to. One of the people on that list was neighbor Melissa Uss.
Yelenic had lent the family money to open a bakery in Blairsville and there were some rumors that Yelenic and Melissa may have been having an affair. But Lydic never found any evidence to support the gossip and Melissa herself staunchly denied the rumors.
John Yelenic's bitter divorce
Yelenic’s friends and family were also quick to point to a suspect much closer to home. At the time of his death, Yelenic had been going through a bitter divorce battle with Michele, who had already moved on and was living with her boyfriend, Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Kevin Foley.
During the heated custody battle for their son J.J., Michele accused Yelenic of sexually abusing the boy — a claim Yelenic adamantly denied. A judge found there had been no evidence of abuse and a criminal investigation into the allegations never resulted in any charges.
Yelenic's friends described him as being a devoted, loving and patient father.
Lydic described Michele as being “money hungry.” At the time of Yelenic's death, Michele was still listed as the beneficiary in his will and on a $1 million life insurance policy.
Once the divorce went through, Michele also stood to lose a monthly spousal support payment she had been receiving up to that point.
The divorce had gotten so contentious that after Yelenic's car was mysteriously vandalized, he had called his divorce attorney Effie Alexander and made that ominous prediction about being murdered.
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Lydic, who was running her first murder investigation, called the situation “difficult” because it involved Foley, a state police trooper whom she'd worked with on multiple cases.
“He’s been my backup,” she said of why she was hesitant to believe Foley could have been involved. “I let him behind me with a gun and I was ok with that. I was safe.”
Lydic was ordered not to interview Foley by District Attorney Bob Bell — who would later tell Dateline that he'd asked her not to talk to Foley because he felt she was too inexperienced and was hoping to gather more evidence to build a stronger case first.
Based on a gut impulse, Lydic decided not to send Yelenic’s fingernail clippings to the state crime lab and instead stored them in the refrigerator at the Blairsville Borough Police Department station.
The case seemed to stall until Yelenic's cousin Clark reached out to the Pennsylvania Attorney General about a year after Yelenic’s death and asked the office to take over the case.
Deputy Attorney General Anthony Krastek was assigned to the investigation and was floored that Michele and Foley had not been interviewed during the initial investigation.
“She spewed hate about how she felt about John Yelenic,” he told Dateline. “That was the life Kevin Foley was living... Michele was just constantly saying what a horrible man he was.”
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Foley’s colleagues also reported that he often came into work saying, “I wish John Yelenic was dead” or “I wish he died a horrible death.”
“This was daily. This was after hello,” Krastek said.
Surveillance video was discovered that showed a truck similar to Foley’s driving in the direction of Yelenic’s home about half an hour before neighbors reported hearing those screams the morning he was killed. Although an FBI analyst wasn’t able to definitively determine the truck was Foley’s, the analyst couldn't rule it out either.
When Yelenic’s fingernail clippings that Lydic had stored at the Blairsville Police station were sent to an FBI lab, the FBI reported that there was only a 1-in-13,000 chance that the DNA left behind on the nails did not belong to Foley.
Kevin Foley arrested for John Yelenic's murder
Foley was arrested and charged with Yellenic’s murder in September of 2007.
By the time the case went to trial, prosecutors were also able to link the bloody footprints left behind at the crime scene to a specific kind of limited edition Asics shoes, not available for sale in western Pennsylvania. They discovered, however, an invoice showing Foley had purchased that same type of shoe through an online program the company offered to law enforcement officers.
A new state-of-the-art cyber genetics technique that relied on a “super computer" was used to analyze the DNA left behind under Yelenic’s fingernails, which concluded that it was 189 billion times more probable that Foley had left behind the DNA rather than someone else.
Prosecutors believe Foley may have gone to Yelenic’s home to talk to him and then attacked him when an argument between the men broke out.
“This was clearly a killing of passion,” Krastek said.
Who killed John Yelenic?
Foley’s attorneys challenged the science behind the DNA evidence and even called Foley to testify in his own defense, but in the end, a jury convicted him of first-degree murder.
He was sentenced to life behind bars.
Authorities investigated Michele, but were never able to find any evidence to link her to the crime. She moved to Georgia with her children shortly after the trial ended.
As for Yelenic’s friends and family, they were glad they were able to achieve at least some measure of justice.
“I don’t think you ever get over a murder,” Tacelosky said. “You learn to live with the new reality, but it’s always with you.”
