Reunitepeople.com

Oct 5, 5:25 PM EDT

Woman who survived stabbing looks for public's help

MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) -- It's been close to 20 years since Jane Boroski, then six months pregnant, had been stabbed 27 times in a store parking lot in Swanzey.

She survived - and so did her baby girl. But no one was ever charged with the attack and Boroski lived in fear for years. Now she believes she knows who stabbed her and she's seeking the public's help on other unsolved cases in the area.

In August 1988, Boroski had stopped to get a soda after leaving a fair in Swanzey, where she had won lots of stuffed animals to fill up her baby's nursery.

Boroski fought off her attacker and was able to give police a sketch of him, which ended up in a 1991 book about unsolved Connecticut River Valley serial murders.

After seeing the sketch, reading Boroski's story and going over the attacker's profile, a team of investigators realized a case they had been working on for five years might hold the key to the identity of Boroski's attacker - and perhaps others, including some of the Connecticut River Valley slayings.

In the late '80s, the remains of at least six other young women had been dumped beside back roads along Interstate 91 in a stretch that straddled Vermont and New Hampshire. A killer had slit throats and stabbed victims repeatedly in the lower abdomen.

The dead included Mary Elizabeth Critchley, a hitchhiker; Bernice Courtemanche, a 17-year-old nurse's aide; Ellen Fried, a nurse; Eva Morse, a single mother; Lynda Moore, a housewife; and Barbara Agnew, another nurse.

Boroski and the investigative team believe that it was Michael Nicholaou who attacked her. Nicholaou, a Vietnam veteran who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, killed himself and two family members in Tampa, Fla., last New Year's Eve.

The investigator, Lynn-Marie Carty, a retired Vermont criminal profiler, John Philpin, and a New Hampshire cold case detective have been piecing together Nicholaou's life. They are awaiting DNA test results that may complete a puzzle and solve six murders that have baffled investigators in the two states for two decades.

Boroski and the investigators are seeking help from the public on the whereabouts of Nicholaou in New England in the late 1970s and 1980s. They are holding a news conference at 7 p.m. Friday at the Holiday Inn near the Manchester-Boston Regional Airport.