John Yelenic predicted he would be killed.
The popular Pennsylvania dentist was so convinced his murder would remain unsolved that before he was found brutally murdered in his home, he asked his lawyer to withhold $10,000 to pay a private investigator to investigate his own murder.
“He was convinced that he would be killed and that his murder would be covered up and that the evidence would be buried with him and that the case would remain unsolved,” said aTorney Effie Alexander said in the episode “The Premonition” of Dateline: Secrets revealed.
Yelenic’s worst fears came true in the early hours of April 13, 2006, when someone broke into his home in Blairsville, Pennsylvania, attacked him, smashed his head through a pane of glass next to the front door, and slit his throat.
Famed pathologist Cyril Wecht – who once advised on the assassination of John F. Kennedy and has performed more than 20,000 autopsies, including Yelenic’s – described the murder as “certainly one of the most brutal deaths I have ever seen.”
However, finding the murderer would not be an easy task, as police officers soon suspected that the murderer might be one of them.
Who was John Yelenic?
Those who knew Yelenic, a family dentist, described him as the life of every party, often making others smile and laugh.
After his father died in a tragic car accident when he was only a few months old, Yelenic grew up with a loving mother. His cousin Mary Ann Clark remembers her smart cousin always being among the top students in high school before going on to college and then dental school.
After settling back in his hometown of Blairsville and starting his own practice with his childhood dentist, other aspects of Yelenic’s life began to take shape.
In his late 20s, Yelenic, who loved old movies and never owned a cell phone, met Michele Kamler, a beautiful single mother of two who worked as a “Budweiser girl,” promoting the beer in bars and at events.
“He told his friends and people that he had finally gotten homecoming queen,” recalled his close friend Dennis Vaughn.
Within months, the two were engaged and later married in a New Year’s Eve ceremony in Las Vegas. Yelenic enjoyed his new role as a stepfather and even volunteered to accompany his stepson’s hockey teams on trips. But he also longed for a child of his own.
“That was always very important to him and so they tried it and finally made the decision to just adopt,” Vaughn said.
The couple adopted their son JJ from Russia, bought a large 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 found it difficult to find much in common.
“John was loving to Michele, but I never saw Michele show affection toward John,” recalls dentist Dr. Maria Tacelosky. “She always seemed distant or almost repelled by him.”
The marriage finally broke down after four years after both admitted their infidelity.
What happened to John Yelenic?
Yelenic moved out of his family home and tried to rebuild his life when he was found in the early hours of April 13, 2006 at the age of 39.
Neighbors reported hearing what they thought was the squealing and screaming of a pig around 1:30 a.m. that night.
Later that day, Yelenic’s nine-year-old neighbor Zachary Uss discovered the body after going to the house to look for JJ to play with.
“I noticed the broken glass on the steps. He had a red carpet, so I didn’t notice the blood at first. But then I noticed his left side window was broken and there was a little blood smeared on the front,” Zachary recalled years later. “I stuck my hand through the window, unlocked the door, went in and saw John lying right there.”
Completely terrified, Zachary ran home and alerted his family, who called 911.
When Blairsville Police Officer Don Isherwood arrived at the scene, he found John lying in a pool of blood with his throat slit. Bloody footprints, presumably left by the killer, led out a back door.
“It was pretty gruesome,” Isherwood recalled.
On a nearby coffee table lay Yelenic’s divorce papers, which were due to be signed the next day, covered in blood.
Investigators try to find out who killed John Yelenic
Shortly after the body was discovered, the police began investigating who might have wanted the popular dentist’s death.
While we were checking out the neighborhood, Corporal Janelle Lydic the Blairsville Police One of the neighbors reported hearing someone scream: “I will never lend you money again,” around the time of the murder.
Lydic first looked at the long list of people to whom Yelenic, who had always been generous with his money, had lent money. One of the people on that list was neighbor Melissa Uss.
Yelenic had loaned the family money to open a bakery in Blairsville, and there were rumors that Yelenic and Melissa might have had an affair. But Lydic never found evidence to support the gossip, and Melissa herself strongly denied the rumors.
Yelenic’s friends and family were also quick to point to a suspect much closer to home. At the time of his death, Yelenic was in a bitter divorce battle with Kamler, who had already moved on and was living with her boyfriend, Pennsylvania State Police Officer Kevin Foley.
During the heated custody battle over their son JJ, Kamler accused Yelenic of sexually abusing her son – a claim Yelenic vehemently denied. A judge concluded there was no evidence of abuse, and a criminal investigation into the allegations never resulted in charges.
Yelenic’s friends described him as a devoted, loving and patient father.
Lydic also described Kamler as “money-hungry.” At the time of his death, she was still listed as a beneficiary in his will and on a $1 million life insurance policy.
The divorce also threatened Kamler with the loss of a monthly spousal support payment that she had received up to that point.
The divorce had become so contentious that after his car was mysteriously damaged, Yelenic called his divorce lawyer, Effie Alexander, and made this grim prediction about his own death.
Lydic, who was investigating a murder case for the first time, described the situation as “difficult” because it involved a state police officer with whom she had already worked on several cases.
“He was my backup,” she said of why she couldn’t believe Foley could have been involved. “I left him with a gun and that was OK with me. I was safe.”
District Attorney Bob Bell ordered that she not question Foley. Bell later told Dateline: that he asked her not to talk to him because he thought she was too inexperienced and he initially hoped to gather more evidence to make his arguments stronger.
Nevertheless, Lydic made a gut decision not to send Yelenic’s fingernail clippings to the state crime lab, but instead to keep them in the refrigerator at the Blairsville police station.
The case seemed to stall until, about a year after Yelenic’s death, Clark approached the Pennsylvania Attorney General and asked him to take over her cousin’s case.
Deputy Attorney General Anthony Krastek, who was in charge of the investigation, was baffled that Kamler and Foley had not been interviewed during the initial investigation.
“She spewed hatred about how she felt about John Yelenic,” he said. “That was the life Kevin Foley lived, and Michele was constantly saying what a horrible man he was.”
Foley’s colleagues also reported that he often came to work saying, “I wish John Yelenic were dead” or “I wish he would die a horrible death.”
“It was like that every day. That was after hello,” said Krastek.
Surveillance video was discovered that showed a truck similar to Foley’s driving toward Yelenic’s about a half hour before neighbors heard the screams. Although an FBI analyst could not definitively determine that the truck was Foley’s, they could not rule it out either.
When the fingernail clippings were sent to an FBI laboratory, the FBI reported that the probability that the DNA left behind belonged to Foley was 1 in 13,000.
Foley was arrested in September 2007 and charged with Yellenic’s murder.
When the case went to trial, prosecutors were also able to link the bloody footprints at the crime scene to a specific type of limited-edition Asics shoe that was not available in Western Pennsylvania. However, they discovered an invoice showing that Foley had purchased the same type of shoe through a special online program the company offers for police officers.
Using a cutting-edge “supercomputer”-based cybergenetics technique, the analysis also found that the DNA left under Yelenic’s fingernails was now linked to Foley at a ratio of 189 billion to 1. That means it is 189 billion times more likely that he left the DNA behind, and that it was not a mere coincidence.
Prosecutors believe Foley may have gone to Yelenic’s home to talk to him and then attacked him when an argument broke out between the men.
“This was clearly a murder of passion,” Krastek said.
Who killed John Yelenic?
Foley’s lawyers questioned the scientific basis for the DNA evidence and even called Foley as a witness in his own defense, but the jury ultimately convicted him of first-degree murder.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Authorities investigated Kamler but were never able to find evidence linking her to the crime. Shortly after the trial ended, she moved to Georgia with her children.
Yelenic’s friends and family were happy that they managed 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.”