Obsession (West Bridgewater, Pennsylvania, 1918)

Mary and Maeterlinch Pavlinich of West Bridgewater, Pennsylvania, took in boarders to earn extra income. So, they opened their home to George Karas, a swarthy, mustachioed charmer from old-world Austria. The thirty-nine-year-old had the square shoulders of a boxer and could easily slip into and out of German, Italian, and English. He also had a personality prone to obsession.

Almost immediately, Karas developed a fixation on the oldest Pavlinich daughter, eighteen-year-old Katherine. Madly in love with the teenager, Karas flipped when Katie married someone else. He attended the wedding, and after the nuptials, shot the bridegroom—Frank Brozich of Beaver Falls—in the arm. Terrified of Karas, his mercurial temperament, and his automatic pistol, neither Brozich nor Pavlinich wanted to press charges.

Karas immediately developed an obsession with the youngest Pavlinich daughter, thirteen-year-old Barbara. He became overprotective and demanded that she never go out without him. This was too much for Maeterlinch. He gave Karas the boot.

But he couldn’t get rid of the thorn in his side so easily. Karas rented a room with a family across the street and resumed his surveillance of Barbara.

When Barbara went out one Friday night with an elderly neighbor woman and some neighborhood kids, Karas snapped. He went looking, and once he found Barbara, shot her five times in the stomach with a .38 automatic. Barbara collapsed to the ground, and Karas bolted into the woods.

For weeks, Barbara lingered between life and death. Doctors considered her case hopeless.

Meanwhile, a posse organized by Detective Daniel Baker combed the brush looking for Karas. Even Barbara’s father and brother took part in the hunt, but they couldn’t find him.

Karas had doubled back and headed to the last place anyone would look for him: the Pavlinich residence. Wracked by guilt, he penned a note for Mary Pavlinich and left it on the front porch. He blamed Barbara’s friends for leading her astray, and he added a morbid type of blood oath. “If Barbara gets well I should ask you and her to forgive me; but if she dies, I shall ask God to forgive me and come to your own house to die. You shall see me die.” With this note, Karas essentially pledged to commit suicide in front of Mary Pavlinich if Barbara didn’t make it.

After leaving the note, he remained in the West Bridgewater area, hiding in the underbrush and emerging only at night. He managed to obtain a razor and shaved his moustache.

Barbara, as it turned out, made a miraculous recovery despite the five bullets that shredded her intestines.

Karas never had to make good on that promise he made to Mary Pavlinich.

He had evaded capture for two weeks when he made a fatal error. He emerged in the daytime and was headed down Market Street toward the Pavlinich residence when he was recognized. Detective Baker nabbed him before he made it to his destination.

Convicted of felonious assault and battery, George Karas spent the next few years behind bars. He was denied parole in 1921. He served out the remainder of his sentence and simply faded from view.

In an interesting epilogue, in 1938, police found a “bed of marijuana” in the yard of seventy-one-year-old Mary Pavlinch’s boarding house. The Pavlinch matriarch was arrested and fined the princely sum of $250.