Biegenwald was born in 1940 in Staten Island and had been institutionalised as a child. In 1958, aged eighteen, he shot Stephen Sladowski, a shopkeeper in Bayonne, New Jersey, during a robbery. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
He was released on parole in 1975, having served seventeen years, and settled at Asbury Park on the New Jersey shore. Between 1981 and 1982 he killed at least five people, most of them teenagers: Maria Ciallella, seventeen; Deborah Osborne, seventeen; Betsy Bacon, seventeen; Anna Olesiewicz, eighteen; and William Ward. Some were shot, some stabbed, and several bodies were buried at a house he had access to. The New Jersey press called him the Thrill Killer.
He was arrested on January 22, 1983 after an accomplice talked. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1983. The death sentence was overturned on appeal and he was resentenced to life without parole. He died in prison on March 10, 2008.
The parole is the substance of the case in New Jersey. He served seventeen years of a life sentence for a murder committed at eighteen, was released without conditions that made any difference, and killed five young people within six years. The state's parole practice in the 1970s was examined at length afterwards. The higher figure reflects further deaths attributed and never charged.