Their Son Disappeared. They Trusted His Best Friend to Bring Him Home.

Serial killer Hugo Selenski had already buried their son in his backyard, and he wasn’t finished with the family.

Friday, May 3, 2002, was a beautiful spring afternoon, and by a quarter to five, the lot outside the Little People daycare in Kingston, Pennsylvania, had emptied of parents and children. Almost. Two boys were still waiting. Tyler was five. Connor was three. Their father had dropped them off that morning, and the afternoon pickup was his.

Michael Kerkowski was never late for his sons. Never.

The teacher checked the clock and started calling. She tried Michael’s house and got no answer. She tried the boys’ mother, then their grandparents, then their aunt. By five o’clock, her unease had turned into something closer to fear. That same afternoon, Michael’s girlfriend, Tammy Fassett, also failed to come for her son. Tammy’s sister picked the boy up and could not reach her.

Michael Kerkowski was thirty-seven years old when he was murdered.

Michael was a pharmacist in nearby Tunkhannock, and in eleven days, on May 14, he was due to be sentenced for selling OxyContin out of his own store, one of the larger pill operations the state had seen. A man in that position who suddenly fails to collect his children invites an obvious explanation. He ran.

His family never believed it. When his parents let themselves into his house in Hunlock Creek that weekend, the cars were parked at odd angles. A screen door was propped open with a chair, the kitchen surveillance monitor was switched off, and its tapes were gone; two bedspreads were missing, and a decorative rolling pin that hung on the kitchen wall was in the basement with its handle broken off. Upstairs, they found Michael’s wallet and credit cards. Nothing a man takes when he disappears on purpose was gone.

The family called the person Michael trusted most. He had introduced this man to them as his best friend, someone he trusted more than his own lawyers.

His name was Hugo Selenski. He told them he had no idea where Michael had gone. But he did. He had murdered Michael and Tammy that afternoon.

Thirty-seven-year-old Tammy Lynn Fassett was visiting her boyfriend when she was murdered.

His Father Vanished With a Million in Jewels

Hugo Selenski was born Hugo Friend in Sioux City, Iowa, on August 1, 1973. His father, Robert, was a charming, conniving gem salesman. When Hugo was ten, Robert vanished with more than a million dollars in jewels that he was supposed to be showing for his employer. He spent nine months on the run before he was caught trying to cross into Mexico at El Paso. He pleaded guilty, served two years, moved to Las Vegas, and pretty much abandoned his kids.

Hugo Selenski was forty-one when he was convicted of the Kerkowski/Fassett murders.

By then, Hugo’s mother had remarried, to a bank examiner named Ronald Selenski, and moved the family to the Back Mountain area outside Wilkes-Barre. Ronald adopted the kids. Hugo Friend became Hugo Selenski.

He was a good athlete and a worse student. By high school, he was drinking and collecting charges: burglary, receiving stolen property, motorcycle theft, and drunk driving. His own mother told juvenile authorities he had a violent temper. He graduated 150th in a class of 151. The Marines took him and then threw him out when they learned he had hidden a debt he owed to the juvenile court.

In June 1994, Hugo robbed a bank. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to seven years in federal prison. He landed at the penitentiary in Lewisburg, where he met Paul Weakley.

Weakley had grown up in Michigan and left the law-abiding path early, after his father died of multiple sclerosis. He was smart, he built pipe bombs, and he stole military vehicles. He was locked up on the bomb charges.

Inside, he and Hugo ran a small drug business, marijuana paid for in postage stamps. By the time they got out, Hugo owed Weakley around fifteen thousand dollars. Hugo was released in January 2001. Weakley got out the following year and came straight to Pennsylvania, partly to collect.

That left Hugo back in the Back Mountain, living in his adoptive father’s basement, behind on child support, jumpy in crowds, and broke. Then a woman named Carey Bartoo, the mother of one of his daughters, asked him for a ride. She needed to borrow money from a pharmacist she was connected to through family, and she had no car. Hugo drove her out to the house in Hunlock Creek and met the man who answered the door.

Jarrett Ferentino prosecuted the case and later wrote a book about it. In his account, Hugo shook Michael Kerkowski’s hand, smiled, and saw exactly what he was: an opportunity.

Michael was everything Hugo was not. He was a licensed pharmacist, heavyset, bright, socially awkward, a man who had worked hard for what he had. He was also in free fall. He had been running one of the largest illegal painkiller operations in the state out of his own pharmacy, a scheme that moved hundreds of thousands of dollars in OxyContin. He had been convicted and was waiting to be sentenced. His marriage was over. He was terrified of prison.

Hugo told him he could help. He said he understood the system, that he knew things lawyers didn’t, that he could get the charges beaten or reduced. Michael paid him tens of thousands of dollars for legal help that amounted to nothing. At the trial, Hugo was supposed to tamper with the jury. Instead, he sat in the gallery and stared at the judge, who would remember those cold eyes for years. Michael was convicted anyway.

They stayed close. Michael introduced him to his parents as the person he trusted more than his own attorneys. His best friend. By early 2002, Hugo knew about the pharmacy money, the house, and the family. He had spent months making himself essential to a desperate man.

Why a Bounced Check Got Two People Killed

In the spring of 2002, Hugo wanted a house. It sat on six wooded acres on Mount Olivet Road, private and quiet, and it belonged to an aging local man who was moving to Florida. The price was $160,000. Tina Strom, Hugo’s girlfriend, was the buyer on paper, and on April 30, she wrote a ten-thousand-dollar check for the down payment.

There was $700 in the account.

The check was going to clear in a matter of days, and Hugo had already burned through the money Michael had paid him. He told Tina not to worry; Michael would help them out. What he meant was that he was going to rob Michael, and if it came to it, kill him. Weakley signed on once Hugo pointed out that a pharmacist who had skipped his own sentencing was exactly the kind of man the police would assume had run.

The night before, the two of them sat in the basement on Miller Street, testing flex ties to see how much they could take. The next morning, May 3, Weakley filled his pockets with flex ties, wire cutters, and gloves, and Hugo hid a gun under his shirt.

They drove out to Hunlock Creek expecting to find Michael alone. He was on his lawn tractor when they pulled in. Tammy Fassett was a few feet away with a weed whacker. Weakley would later call her a curveball. He and Hugo took one look and decided, before they were even out of the car, that she would have to go too. Hugo noticed her safety glasses and joked about whether she was wearing a bulletproof vest.

Michael invited them inside. They drank beers and made small talk. Around two-thirty, the phone rang, and Tammy answered it. It was Michael’s mother, calling about a new television and a grandson’s birthday party, and Tammy told her they had company and would call back. Sometime after that, Hugo took out the gun and told Michael and Tammy to get on the floor. Michael thought it was a joke.

They bound the couple’s wrists and ankles with flex ties. Weakley carried Tammy upstairs and told her to stay quiet. She asked him why they were doing this. He told her it wasn’t about her. Then he went back down to the basement, where they had set Michael on a small footstool, and on the way, he pulled the wooden rolling pin off the kitchen wall.

What they wanted was the money. They wrapped duct tape around Michael’s eyes and his chest and his legs, and around his already-bound hands, ten passes of it. They beat him with the rolling pin. They put a flex tie around his neck and drew it tight, then loosened it, then drew it tighter, working him for the location of his cash. He gave up twenty thousand dollars hidden in the ceiling. Then he gave up more. He told them about the money at his father’s house. He begged them to let him and Tammy go and promised to get it for them. They kept tightening the tie, cutting one off and putting on another, until the last one was so tight that the medical examiner later said a finger could not have fit beneath it. That one killed him.

Then they killed Tammy the same way, with a flex tie, upstairs.

They had come for tens of thousands of dollars, and they left with tens of thousands of dollars. The pathologist, Michael Baden, would call the flex tie a near-perfect instrument for strangulation, because it closes on the whole circumference of the neck at once.

They wrapped the bodies in the missing bedspreads, carried them out to Weakley’s car, and moved the vehicles around the property. They switched off the surveillance system and took its tapes. By the time they finished, the house was arranged to tell the story Hugo wanted it to tell: that Michael Kerkowski, facing prison, had taken his girlfriend and his money and run.

The Money-Grubbing Man

When most people picture someone who kills for money, they picture a woman. The black widow who buries one husband after another, the wife who knows to the dollar what a life insurance policy pays out. True crime has trained us to look for her. She is patient, she is intimate with her victims, and she poisons.

She is real. I went through the Radford and Florida Gulf Coast University serial killer databases, which hold records on more than 5,700 killers, and pulled the 5, 207 cases in which a motive has been coded. Among women, money is the single most common reason they kill, by a wide margin. The stereotype holds. A woman who kills again and again is usually doing it for money.

What the stereotype misses is the big picture. Serial killers are overwhelmingly men, and among men, money is the second most common motive, behind only the cluster of thrill, lust, and power. It drives just over a quarter of them. That is a smaller share than for women, but it is taken from a far larger group, so in raw numbers, the people who kill for money are men by four to one.

And the men look nothing like the sneaky poisoner. When I split the money killers by sex, the women came out close to what we imagine: black widows, then women who killed family members, ran baby farms, worked as lethal caretakers, or collected on insurance. Quiet, domestic, close to the victim. The men did not. More than eight in ten of them were robbery killers of one kind or another, and the most common type after that was the home invader, the man who comes through the door and takes what he wants by force.

So the poisoner everyone pictures is not the rule. Hugo Selenski was the rule. He did not earn a victim’s trust to slip something into a drink over months. He talked his way into a friendship, learned where the money was, and then beat and strangled a man in his own basement to take it. He killed a pharmacist for the proceeds of a pill operation, and a year later, he tied up a jeweler during a robbery with the same kind of flex ties he had used on Michael. Under the friendship and the front-page legend, he was the oldest and most ordinary kind of serial killer there is, a robber who kills the people he robs.

The only unusual thing about Hugo was the lie itself, and how long he was willing to keep it up.

He Took Money Meant for a Dead Son

Before he died, with the flex tie around his neck, Michael gave Hugo one more thing. He told him there was a hundred thousand dollars at his father’s house. Only two people in the world knew about that money: Michael and his father. Now Hugo did too, and that money is what Hugo went after next.

Over the months after the murder, he came to Gerry and Michael Sr. with a story. Michael was alive. He had fled before his sentencing and was in hiding. He needed money to stay safe, and Hugo, his loyal friend, was the one who could get it to him. In July, he took $30,000. In August, he came back and took another 30,000. Each time, Michael Sr. asked to speak to his son. Each time, Hugo said he was working on a secure way to make that happen.

Michael’s parents were desperate. They were not fools. They wanted proof their boy was alive, so, during the second meeting, they wrote out a list of questions only Michael could have answered, small private things like the name of a stuffed animal one of his sons slept with. They asked Hugo to come back with Michael’s answers.

The answers never came. At one point, while Hugo sat there talking, Gerry wrote three words on a napkin and slid it to him. “Is he alive?” He looked at it, smirked, and said nothing.

By September, the Kerkowskis had still not heard a word from their son. When Hugo came calling for more money, Michael Sr. told him he would not give him another dollar until he spoke with Michael. He sent Gerry out to the grocery store. Then he and Hugo went down to the basement, and Hugo took out a gun and fired it over the father’s head into the wall. “Your fucking life or the money,” he said. Michael Sr. went to an unused air duct where the rest of the cash was hidden, took it out, and gave it to him. On the way back up the stairs, Hugo kept the gun on the older man so he would not say anything to Gerry. Hugohad also bagged the beer bottles he drank from, so as not to leave anything of himself behind. After Hugo left, Michael’s dad rubbed shoe polish into the bullet hole in the wall so his wife would not see it.

There was one more meeting. Hugo called Michael’s father to a McDonald’s and brought along a man who looked like a biker, parking him in view to suggest that people were watching. When Michael Sr. got into the truck, Hugo said Michael needed more money. By then, Michael Sr. had stopped believing. He said he thought his son was dead and would not pay another cent.

Hugo looked at him and said, “You have another son. Your house could be on fire right now.” Michael Sr. told him he was done, got out of the truck, and drove to the state police. They went to the house and found the bullet still in the back wall of the basement, under the shoe polish.

By the end, the family had paid Hugo close to $100,000.

The friendship that got him to Michael also got him to the parents. They trusted him because their son had. So after he murdered Michael, he sat with them week after week and took their savings, selling them the one thing they wanted more than the money: the chance that their son was still alive.

He Burned the Next Two in His Backyard

A year after Michael and Tammy, in May 2003, Hugo did it again.

The victims were Frank James, twenty-nine, and Adeiye Keiler, twenty-two. They were drug dealers. Hugo knew them by their street names, Rudy and Redman, and prosecutors said he lured them to the Mount Olivet Road house, intending to rob them of drugs and money. He and a man named Patrick Russin shot both of them, then threw the bodies into a fire pit behind the house and burned them.

The two crimes barely look like the work of the same man. The Kerkowski murders were patient. Hugo spent half a year building the friendship, planned the robbery, staged the scene to read as a flight, and buried the bodies on his own land where no one was looking. It nearly worked. The dealer killings were the opposite. He shot two men and burned them in a pit in his own backyard, then kept the charred bones there, on the property where he lived.

The headlines that called Hugo a criminal mastermind never accounted for the burn pit. The careful planner and the careless one were the same man. His patience with Michael had not been some special talent, only the time a long con takes. When there was no con to run, when it was just two dealers and a robbery and a gun, what remained was a man who killed on impulse.

He also never killed alone. It was Weakley for Michael and Tammy, Russin for James and Keiler. Hugo was the one common to both, and each time he needed a second man. That is a common shape in these cases, and it has a built-in weakness. A solo killer has only himself to give him up. Hugo had partners, and a partner can talk.

Years later, at a court hearing, a prosecutor read the names Frank James and Adeiye Keiler out loud, and Hugo said he did not know them. He only knew the nicknames. He said it was out of respect for the families. He had killed two young men, burned their bodies, and kept their bones in his yard, and he had never learned who they were.

The Partner Who Pointed at the Ground

By the spring of 2003, the investigation into the two dead dealers was closing in, and Paul Weakley, the man Hugo had met in Lewisburg and brought to Pennsylvania, started talking to investigators. He lied to them repeatedly, shading the story to shrink his own part in it. But on June 4, 2003, he gave them the one thing that mattered. He told them where Michael Kerkowski and Tammy Fassett were buried.

The next day, investigators went to the property on Mount Olivet Road with a warrant. Behind the house, in a shallow grave, they found Michael and Tammy. That alone would have ended it. But they kept digging, and in the fire pit they found thousands of fragments of burned bone, and among them three left jawbones. Two belonged to Frank James and Adeiye Keiler. The third belonged to someone who has never been identified.

More than twenty years later, that is still true. There is a person whose remains were burned in Hugo Selenski’s fire pit, and no one knows their name. Five sets of remains came off that property. Four have names. The fifth is still waiting for one.

He never killed alone, and that is what finally beat him. A partner is a witness, and a witness who is frightened for himself will point you to the ground.

He Beat a Murder Charge With Five Bodies in His Yard

The bodies came out of the ground in June 2003. That fall, Hugo was charged with murdering the two dealers. A few days after the charges came down, on October 10, he and a cellmate named Scott Bolton tore the jail’s bedsheets into a sixty-foot rope, climbed down from the top floor of the Luzerne County prison, and went over the razor wire on a mattress. Bolton fell and was caught on a roof. Hugo got away.

For three days, the search for him dominated the national morning shows and the front pages. Then it was over, and he turned himself in, surrendering at his own house after his lawyer arranged it.

At his 2006 trial for the two dealers, with at least five sets of human remains dug out of his yard, the jury acquitted him of one murder and hung on the other, and the judge ruled he could not be tried for it again. The only thing they convicted him of was abusing the corpses. For burning two men in a pit, Hugo Selenski was sentenced to two to four years. The press called him charismatic.

He did not walk all the way. The moment the 2006 verdict came in, prosecutors charged him with the murders of Michael Kerkowski and Tammy Fassett. And there was the jeweler. Back in 2003, before the bodies were found, Hugo and Weakley had broken into the Pocono home of a jeweler named Samuel Goosay, bound and blindfolded him with duct tape, and robbed his house and his store. Goosay worked the tape loose, saw Hugo’s face, and lived to point at him in court. In 2009, a jury convicted Hugo of that robbery, and a judge sentenced him to as much as sixty-five years. With Michael, he had used a year of friendship to get through the door. With Goosay, he used a ski mask.

Take That Smile Off Your Face

After the 2006 acquittal, the murders of Michael and Tammy became a standing debt in the Luzerne County district attorney’s office. Everyone there knew Hugo Selenski had killed them. His partner had been in the room. The bodies had come out of his own yard. And he had beaten the charge once already. Proving it to a jury, after a failed first prosecution and years of appeals and delay, was something else.

It took until early 2015. Nearly a dozen years after the bodies were found, with Jarrett Ferentino among the prosecutors, the case finally went in front of a jury.

The trial ran close to three weeks. Paul Weakley took the stand and showed the jury how he and Hugo had bound Michael and Tammy with flex ties and taken turns working Michael over for the money. Of the friendship, he told them, “Mr. Selenski hated Mr. Kerkowski. It wasn’t a friendship at all. It was a financial relationship.”

The defense pointed back at Weakley and called him the real killer, the cooperating witness saving his own skin. Gerry Kerkowski testified too. She told the jury that her son had trusted the man who killed him, that Michael had believed Hugo was helping him with his legal troubles. When the prosecutor asked her to point him out in the courtroom, Hugo leaned forward and smiled at her. “Take that smile off of your face,” she said.

The jury convicted Hugo of two counts of first-degree murder. Then, in the penalty phase, his relatives asked the jury to spare his life. They said he was a good father and a good brother, even from prison. The jury that had just heard how he strangled two people with flex ties for a bag of cash chose mercy. Hugo Selenski was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, and then to another fifty-six to a hundred and twenty years on top of it.

It had been thirteen years since the afternoon the boys waited at the daycare. By then, almost everyone Hugo had ever drawn into his orbit had turned on him. Weakley and Russin had testified against him. The jeweler had survived to identify him in court. Michael Sr., the father he shot at, had gone to the police.

Weakley pleaded guilty to a federal racketeering charge that folded in the murders of Michael and Tammy and the robbery of the jeweler. He is serving life in a federal penitentiary in Arizona and has said he expects to die in prison. Russin pleaded guilty in state court to two counts of third-degree murder for shooting Frank James and Adeiye Keiler and burning them in the pit. He served for about a decade and was released. Last fall, as he left a courthouse on unrelated charges, he was asked who the fifth body was. He said he did not know, then told the reporter, “Ask your wife, she might have slept with Hugo.”

He Was Never the Mastermind

The story people wanted to tell about Hugo Selenski was the movie-star version: the charming criminal mastermind who broke out of jail on bedsheets and beat a murder charge with the bodies still in his yard. He did his part to feed it. He showed no emotion in court, and to this day, he refuses to say the names of two of the men he killed, claiming it is out of respect.

He was not the killer the genre trains us to look for. He was the common one, the man who kills the people he robs. He robbed a pharmacist and a jeweler the same way, by getting inside and taking what he wanted by force. The only thing that set the pharmacist apart was that Hugo first spent a year pretending to be his friend.

He could murder his best friend and then sit, week after week, with that friend’s grieving parents, taking their money by promising to bring their son home.

He shot two of his victims and burned them in a pit in his own backyard, and he never once worked alone, which meant there was always someone who could trade him to the police to get a better deal of their own.

Michael Kerkowski’s sons were five and three the afternoon nobody came to the daycare. Tammy Fassett left a son behind, too. Their families spent years not knowing, and then years more watching the man who did it come close to walking away. Gerry Kerkowski sat in a courtroom in 2015 and said out loud that her boy had trusted his killer.

The younger of those boys, Connor, grew up and spoke in a television documentary about the man who murdered his father.

Hugo Selenski will die in a state prison cell. The fifth set of remains from his backyard still has no name. No one has come to take that person home.

As always, thank you for reading this week’s issue of The Mind Detective. If you enjoyed it, please pass it along to one true-crime-following friend. See you next week.

References

Aamodt, M. G. (n.d.). Radford/FGCU serial killer database [Data set]. Radford University; Florida Gulf Coast University. (The motive figures in this piece are my own analysis of this database, covering 5,715 killers, 5,212 of them with a coded motive.)

Ferentino, J. (2026). Mothers, murders, and motivation: A journey through the mind and heart of a prosecutor. Post Hill Press.

News coverage of the investigation, the 2003 escape, and the trials appeared in the Times Leader, the Associated Press, NBC News, CBS News, and WNEP-TV.