The official records available through FOIL requests mention no one who either saw or spoke to my brother Mark or the young pharmacist Dale Tarapacki for two to three hours before the death of each in a suspicious truck fire. In Mark’s case, strangely, only his wife Susan claims to have seen him at all on September 23, 2003. According to Susan’s witness statement in the New York State Police report, Mark left their house about 8:45 p.m., and she did not see him again until she noticed his truck on fire in the field across from their house about 11 p.m. In Dale Tarapacki’s case, the Cattaraugus County Sheriff’s records mention that the last persons known to have seen him were two neighbors who noticed him outside his residence at 11:45 a.m. on April 11, 2005. The next official reference to Tarapacki comes in the report of the fire investigation team, in which the “alarm time” for his burning truck is recorded as 2:45 p.m.
As numerous posts on this blog have discussed (see esp. July 23, 2016; February 28, April 30, and June 30, 2018; and July 31, 2019), there were similarly suspicious elements in both deaths in rural Great Valley, N.Y., that should have alerted the investigating authorities to the possibility, if not actual probability, of foul play. Though far from an exhaustive list, the following points highlight important similarities:
(1) Both truck fires occurred off road, with no real explanation provided for their strange location. Mark’s truck was fifty feet into the field across from his house, where he was certainly not in the habit of parking it. Furthermore, a pool of his blood found that night on the scene just where he usually parked the truck suggested that he had first parked it there. There was no apparent reason for Mark to remove it from his property. Tarapacki’s truck oddly was found off an unpaved and isolated section of a rural road. Yet, according to a close friend of his, the truck had recently been skid-plated and outfitted with off-road tires that would have kept it from getting stuck in such a position.
(2) The cause of each truck fire suggests possible sabotage. An accelerant was noted in the driver’s seat area of Mark’s truck, where the Cattaraugus County fire investigation team said the fire originated, presumably, as the report implies, from a five-gallon can of gasoline found on the floor of the passenger’s side of the cab. Mark, however, never put gas cans into the cab, but rather only outside in the back of his truck. According to the report of the Cattaraugus County fire investigation team, the drive shaft of Tarapacki’s truck was torn in half, which punctured the fuel line, resulting in fuel leaking onto the catalytic converters, which then ignited and caused further damage to the rubber fuel lines to the fuel pump. The involved explanation of the fire investigation team seems highly improbable to several experienced mechanics whom I consulted.
(3) Both victims had suffered a potentially incapacitating injury inflicted prior to their respective truck fires. Two firefighters on the scene observed a wound on Mark’s forehead. His attending physician at the burn unit noticed swelling on Mark’s forehead and told me that there was further soft-tissue damage to the left side my brother’s face. In Tarapacki’s case, a bullet wound on the back side of his right thigh was revealed only by x-rays during his autopsy, and the bullet itself was discovered on the autopsy table.
An anonymous letter sent to me in August 2014 provides a possible explanation for the failure of the N.Y. State Police to probe into Mark’s whereabouts the hours before his truck fire (see post of August 11, 2014). The writer of the letter claims that a Salamanca police officer named Mark Marowski was having an affair with my brother’s wife. The N.Y. State Police investigators knew that Marowski had argued with my brother at a local club the very day before the fire and had called in to the Salamanca police to have Mark arrested on his way home (on Marowski, see most recently post of June 21, 2016). According to several individuals, Marowski and my brother had argued on numerous occasions at that club. Yet Marowski’s name is never even mentioned in the police report on Mark’s death.
Furthermore, the anonymous letter also states that Mark was at the house of a neighbor right before the fire and that he could not have had a very high alcohol level, i.e., of the type that could potentially have led him to cause the truck fire and his own death. It is difficult to believe that this information did not come to the attention of the authorities during their investigation.
A friend of Tarapacki’s expressed concern that the investigation into his death was very brief. Apparently, the Cattaraugus County Sheriff’s investigators assumed that Tarapacki had gone fishing the day of his truck fire, presumably because a neighbor reported seeing him leave his residence with a fishing pole about 10 a.m. Two other neighbors who were interviewed reported seeing him about 11:45 that day. It seems unlikely that Tarapacki went fishing in the relatively brief period between 10 and 11:45 a.m. It is also very difficult to understand why Tarapacki’s truck, equipped as it was for off-road driving, was discovered apparently stuck off the road on that upper section of Hardscrabble Road and why it was there at all since there were reportedly no fishing holes in that area.
In addition, a friend of Tarapacki’s mentioned that the pharmacist had left two fishing poles in his truck the previous evening. Since Tarapacki was known to be a fishing enthusiast, someone might well have called him that day to bring extra poles with him in the afternoon. Significantly, the report of the fire investigation team mentions nothing about any burned remains of fishing poles in Tarapacki’s truck, though one would expect the metal reels to have survived in some form (the remains of two rifles, however, are mentioned). The lack of any fishing poles in Tarapacki’s truck, then, suggests that they had been removed prior to the fire. Had Tarapacki, then, taken his fishing poles to someone else?
By checking Tarapacki’s phone records (as the N.Y. S. P. investigators also should have done in Mark’s case), the Sheriff’s investigators might well have learned specific useful information about his last hours, in particular, the reason why he might have driven his truck to that isolated location and what could have caused both the damage to it and the subsequent fire. Was the possible invitation to go up Hardscrabble Road with his fishing poles innocent or malicious? Unfortunately, it does not appear that the police even considered foul play in Tarapacki’s death.
