The bathroom door was bone dry. Not a drop of water anywhere, not on the floor, not in the tub. Officers stood in Elaine Baskauskas’s bathroom and knew something was terribly wrong. Just hours earlier, in the early hours of a November morning in Greensboro, North Carolina, police had been called to this quiet, affluent neighborhood.
Elaine, a mother of three, was rushed to Wesley Long Hospital. By the time Officer Good arrived, the emergency team was doing everything they could to revive her. But she was gone. Her husband, Tim, explained what happened.
The couple had been at a small gathering at their church, St. Paul the Apostle Catholic Church, with about a dozen friends. Elaine stayed behind to help clean up. When she got home, according to Tim, she went into the bathroom to take a bath.
She’d had too much to drink, he said. When she didn’t come out, he grew concerned. He claimed he had to take the door off its hinges with a screwdriver to get in, and he found her under the water, seemingly unconscious. He tried mouth-to-mouth, but it was too late.
At the hospital, Officer Good met Tim for the first time. The man was supposed to be a grieving husband, but there was something off. “What struck me was how cold and emotionless he was,” Good recalled. He tried to give Tim the benefit of the doubt.
People grieve in different ways. But when he spoke to his colleague at the scene, the facts didn’t line up. Officer Good communicated back and forth with the team investigating the apartment. Tim claimed Elaine had been drunk and drowned in the tub.
But the scene told a different story. There was no water anywhere. A body pulled from a full bathtub would have left puddles everywhere. It’s physically difficult to remove a limp body from water without splashing.
Yet the floor was dry. There was only a small amount of vomit in the tub. Tim said he had to force his way into the locked bathroom with a screwdriver. There were no marks on the door, nothing out of the ordinary.
The police needed to talk to Tim properly. He wasn’t eager to go to the station, reluctant even. Officer Good had to be empathetic, careful not to seem callous. Eventually, Tim agreed.
Over the next forty-five minutes of interview, Tim’s story began to unravel. He said Elaine was heavily intoxicated. Her friends from the party told police she wasn’t impaired at all when she left. Tim claimed she hit her head in the tub.
But the autopsy revealed multiple blunt force injuries, not just one head wound. He said rib fractures came from his CPR attempts, but those fractures were not the specific breaks caused by chest compressions. They were in the wrong places. There were also marks on her abdomen that matched the track marks on the shower door.
Every version Tim gave contradicted the evidence. He would start to explain, then catch himself, slipping into scripted-sounding utterances, trying to sidetrack the conversation. He never confessed. He never gave a straight answer.
It seemed he hadn’t fully thought through the scenario he was telling. Police strongly suspected foul play, but they needed more than a muddled account from a grieving husband. They started looking into the family. Tim and Elaine seemed like the picture-perfect family.
They ran a miniature golf and ice cream place north of Greensboro, were active in their Catholic church, and had three young children: Randy, Sandy, and Todd. Elaine was well-liked, a devoted mother and volunteer. But digging deeper, the detectives found the marriage was falling apart. Tim and Elaine were living distant lives under the same roof.
They were keeping it from the kids, but the marriage was over. Tim’s business was closing. Finances were a mess. They were in a terrible place.
And then there was the insurance. They found a $25,000 policy on Elaine’s life. Just hours after her death, Tim pulled aside the family’s estate attorney, Kevin Rockford. “How do I collect the life insurance money?
” he asked. Rockford was stunned. The man’s wife had died hours before. The autopsy results came back.
Toxicology showed no alcohol and no drugs in Elaine’s system. Tim’s story about her being falling-down drunk was a lie. The pathologist ruled the cause of death as asphyxiation but couldn’t determine if it was drowning or something else. The manner of death was marked “undetermined.
”
Without a definitive cause, police couldn’t charge Tim. The frustration was immense. “We knew he had some part in Elaine’s death,” Officer Good said. “We knew it.
But we couldn’t prove it. We didn’t have enough probable cause. ” They had to let him go. Tim moved with his three children back to Pennsylvania, his home state.
He had family there, a support system, a chance to start over. Less than a year later, he started attending singles events at a Catholic church. That’s where he met Mary Ann. They married, and Mary Ann became close to Randy, Todd, and Sandy.
People commented on how strikingly similar Mary Ann looked to Elaine. She was also involved in the church, a good mother, well-liked. It was uncanny. The children loved her and saw a chance to have another mother.
For the detectives back in Greensboro, the case never went cold. Tim never came off their radar. They could only watch and hope he behaved. Almost four years to the day after Elaine’s death, detectives received an astonishing phone call from Pennsylvania.
Tim’s second wife, Mary Ann, was dead. She was found in the backyard hot tub. That evening, Tim claimed Mary Ann had been drinking heavily, maybe fifteen or seventeen beers, while they were in the hot tub. He said he left her alone while he went inside to shower.
When he came back, she was in the water, unconscious. He pulled her out and called 911. But the scene told another story. Mary Ann had several bruises along her neck and chest.
Tim had physical scratches and defense marks on his body that he couldn’t explain away. The responders noted something else odd: he had a portable CPR mask. Paramedics thought it was strange that a husband would have a breathing device ready to resuscitate his wife. Then, one of the detectives overheard Tim’s father, Buck, ask him directly: “Do they know about the first wife in Greensboro?
”
The detective immediately jumped in. “Has he been married before? ”
Tim had told no one in Pennsylvania about his first wife. And Timothy was heard saying, “I hope they don’t try to pin this on me.
”
Pittsburgh police contacted Greensboro. They asked Detective Ken Brady if he had a file on Timothy Baskauskas. “Got it right here on the corner of my desk,” Brady said. “It’s been here for four years.
”
Mary Ann’s autopsy revealed more. There were injuries to her back and legs, possibly defensive. Small punctate hemorrhages on her skin pointed to strangulation. The medical examiner ruled it a violent, homicidal death.
Tim was charged with Mary Ann’s murder. Now, the attention turned back to Elaine. With the physical findings from both cases, Dr. Butts re-examined Elaine’s autopsy.
He concluded it was a violent, intentional death. The cause was positional asphyxiation, compression of the diaphragm. The track marks on her abdomen lined up with the bathtub. Someone had pressed down on her long enough for her to die.
In both cases, there was little to no water in the lungs. It had nothing to do with drowning. Once Elaine’s death was ruled a murder, the case in North Carolina was reopened. Tim was arrested and charged with two murders.
His three children were left stunned. Randy, ten years old at the time, remembers the moment clearly. “I just lost my mom. I lost my stepmom.
And now I’m losing my father,” he said. “It messes with someone’s psyche. ”
The officers in North Carolina felt a bitter sense of relief. They could finally make the case for Elaine, but they couldn’t stop the second murder.
“If Mary Ann hadn’t died, I don’t think we would have ever been able to bring Tim back to North Carolina,” one detective said. Two murder trials in two different states followed. Pennsylvania and North Carolina had to decide who would try him first. Tim was extradited to North Carolina.
At trial, the prosecution presented the evidence, arguing that two accidental deaths in the same bizarre fashion were a one-in-a-million chance. The prosecutor pointed at Tim, looking him in the face. Tim was stoic, emotionless. The jury found him guilty.
He was given the maximum sentence for murder in North Carolina and served about twenty-two years. Then he was taken back to Pennsylvania, where he was convicted of Mary Ann’s murder. He was initially sentenced to death, but after appeals, it was reduced to life in prison. Years later, Randy made the decision to confront his father.
He wanted the truth. He gave his father an ultimatum: tell me what really happened, or you will never see or hear from me again. But Tim hid behind his legal appeals. A week later, Randy discovered his father had written a letter to his brother.
In that letter, Tim took responsibility for taking the life of his birth mother, Elaine. But he maintained his innocence regarding Mary Ann’s death, which was mind-blowing to Randy given the physical evidence. Randy’s relationship with his father is nonexistent now. He wrote a final letter, a goodbye letter, in 2018.
“Forgiveness is a gift you give yourself,” Randy said. “The reality is, he took someone’s life, my mom, Elaine. And then my stepmom, Mary Ann. He deserves to be where he’s at.
Plain and simple. “
