More detail on this person: His bullets cut
families' hope for answers When Michael Nicholaou
shot his wife, her daughter, then himself in
Tampa, say police, he left mysteries.
By ALEXANDRA ZAYAS
Published January 8, 2006
TAMPA - To the Cowboys of the Army's 335th
Assault Helicopter Company, Michael Nicholaou
was frozen in time as "Nick the Greek," a fearless
20-year-old gunship commander who flew through
57 bullets to save a comrade's life.
He earned medals that included two Purple Hearts,
two Silver Stars and two Bronze Stars. Then, in
October 1970, he and seven others were accused of
strafing civilians on a reconnaissance mission in
the Mekong Delta. The soldiers languished in a
stockade in South Vietnam for six months until the
Army dropped murder and attempted murder
charges.
Nicholaou left Vietnam, feeling bitter and
betrayed, but Vietnam never left Nicholaou. He
hired a lawyer to sue the Army. He spent his life
both fleeing the war and clinging to it, glory
days captured on news reels and shared by fellow
Cowboys at reunions. He became obsessed with
telling his story and found a teacher he hoped
would write it.
Decades blurred into a roaring whirlwind of
paranoia, failed jobs, criminal charges,
disconnected phone numbers and dysfunctional
relationships.
The noise ceased when the bullets did, a week ago
in Tampa.
Nicholaou had a Massachusetts detective on his
trail over the 1988 disappearance of former wife
Michelle. Georgia police had questions, too, after
his latest wife, Aileen, claimed he and his son
ran her over with a Jeep last month, breaking her
shoulder.
Wearing a black leather trench coat, hiding guns
inside a guitar case, Nicholaou, 56, appeared at
Aileen's childhood home on Walnut Street in West
Tampa, where she was recovering.
After an hourlong police standoff, Nicholaou, 56,
lay dead.
With him, police say, he took Aileen, 45, and her
20-year-old daughter, Terrin Bowman.
And he took the answers to so many questions.
Whispered gossip from family members surrounded
his childhood in New Jersey.
Nicholaou told people his mother molested him and
his father beat him. He was always finding
substitute father figures - a high school buddy's
dad, a superior soldier, his father-in-law.
He was a portrait of teen bravado. He rode a
motorcycle to Farmingdale High School in Long
Island, where friends cheered him at wrestling
matches.
Afterward, they would take their girlfriends to a
local hamburger joint.
It was Nicholaou who came up with the idea of
dropping a rooster into the women's bathroom and
skipping out on a check, said Mark D'Angelo, a
lifelong friend.
"Okay," he remembers Nicholaou saying, "when the
girls start screaming ..."
He craved adventure. In the Army he could fly Huey
helicopters with no college degree. He boasted
about stealing a helicopter while in boot camp and
leaving it on a roof.
After boot camp, the stories slowed. At a welcome
home party, Nicholaou said he wasn't allowed to
talk about Vietnam.
"To get Silver Stars, you had to be a really good
warrior, and we realized what he was and what he
did," D'Angelo said. "Not that we held him up as a
hero. It was a rude awakening to us that this guy
did some really good military stuff."
They lost touch. D'Angelo went into the insurance
business.
Nicholaou worked jobs in restaurants and on
construction sites. He always seemed to be
moving. Charlottesville, Va. Richmond, Va.
Holyoke, Mass. Fort Lauderdale. Great Bend,
Kansas. Tampa. Dade City. Houston. Lutz.
Hiawassee, Ga.
With Michelle Nicholaou, he fathered two children;
his next wife, Aileen, already had Terrin.
Over the years, people confused him with a
Virginia cousin by the same name, causing
problems for the cousin. There were unpaid fines.
A hit-and-run crash.
"Bring back my daughter," cussed and screamed
Michelle Nicholaou when she thought cousin
Nicholaou was her husband. That was 1986, the
year their first child was born.
Michelle Marie Ashley had met Nicholaou in New
York. They married in the mid 1980s, and she went
from being a bubbly young woman to a paranoid
wife, her family said.
"He ran her life," said her aunt, Linda Glamuzina.
"It was like taking over another person."
When Nicholaou and Michelle visited the
Glamuzinas in Louisiana, he wore skimpy shorts
Glamuzina found indecent. He brought a stash from
his Charlottesville, Va., porn shop. Disgusted,
Glamuzina threw it in the Mississippi River.
"There was something scary about him," Glamuzina
said.
Michelle thought so, too, her family said.
In December 1988, relatives entered the Nicholaou
apartment in Holyoke and discovered it deserted.
Michelle's baby diaries were there. There was food
left behind. But no people.
Family hadn't seen Michelle, or her toddler Joy
and baby Nicholas, in a month.
Just days after the family vanished, Michael
Nicholaou met up with a female acquaintance in
Charlottesville. The kids were dirty and hungry,
and he stole the woman's brand new car, the
woman later told Michelle's aunt.
There were calls to police, but nothing panned
out. Michelle's family hired a private
investigator. Her mother, Rose Young, told the
investigator something Michelle had once said.
"If I'm ever missing, he killed me, and you need
to track him down and find the kids."
Michael D'Angelo and his son Mark bumped into
Nicholaou when he was working at Pete's
Restaurant in Boca Raton in 1992.
He told them Michelle was dead, Michael D'Angelo
said. He had told other people that she ran off
with a Cuban drug dealer.
Nicholaou later visited D'Angelo and his wife at
their home. Joy, then a mature 6-year-old, told
them she brewed her dad coffee every morning.
Nicholas, 4, asked D'Angelo if he could be his
grandfather. Their sneakers were worn, and they
looked hungry. They had been living in Nicholaou's
car, Nicholaou later admitted in a letter to
D'Angelo.
Nicholaou wanted D'Angelo to help write a book
about Vietnam.
In 1996, Nicholaou wrote from an in-patient unit
of the post traumatic stress disorder clinic at a
Miami veteran's hospital. He had been under
treatment for a year.
He complained that the military had left him with
"isolation and avoidance behaviors" that kept him
from flying, yet he drew just $338 a month in
disability benefits.
"Not too many commercial qualified pilots are
afraid of heights and give up careers in aviation
to become bums," he wrote.
He said he left Fort Lauderdale because the state
wanted his kids.
He called them his "sole reason for living."
Once, in 1997, he and his kids stayed with a
friend in Dade City. Nicholas, then 9, got into a
fight with the boy next door. Nicholaou later
pleaded no contest to torching the neighbor's car
and got three years probation.
It was October 2001 when the private investigator,
Lynn-Marie Carty of St. Petersburg, tracked down
Nicholaou, living with Aileen in Tampa, and
called.
"How did you find me?" she remembers him
asking.
He said he had the kids, and they were fine. Carty
asked about Michelle.
"She's a slut," he said. "She was doing drugs at
the time. She ran off, and she just abandoned the
kids."
The next day, his phone number was
disconnected.
Holyoke police detective Kevin Boyle, in an
interview last year with a Boston television
station, said, "The factors surrounding this case
are suspicious, and Michael's actions are
suspect."
Boyle did not return a telephone call from the
Times.
Relatives describe Aileen Nicholaou as a bola de
humo, a Cuban fireball who charmed every man she
met. Her only flaw, her sister Adnery Almirola
recalled, was that she had poor judgment.
Aileen and Michael connected eight years ago
through a newspaper personals ad. Two weeks
later, Nicholaou and his kids moved into Aileen's
Tampa home. When relatives visited, Joy sat on
Aileen's lap and called her "mom."
"They were love-starved, it seemed," Almirola
said.
Nicholaou seemed charismatic. He called Aileen's
father, Arnaldo Toranzo, papi as he helped him
cook Christmas Eve dinners.
About four years ago, they married in a Las Vegas
wedding chapel. In the wedding photo, their faces
are superimposed over other people's bodies.
Then, in September 2004, a family friend
discovered an online news story about Michelle
Nicholaou's disappearance. Aileen had no idea.
Nicholaou convinced her Michelle had run off, but
her family suspected he had killed her.
Four weeks ago, after a heated argument with
Aileen in their Hiawassee, Ga., home, Nicholaou
and his son got in their Jeep to leave. According
to a Towns County Sheriff's Office report, Aileen
approached the Jeep. She needed Nicholaou's
military sticker to get on base to buy groceries.
She told deputies Nicholaou threatened her with a
pistol and told Nicholas to step on the gas. The
Jeep hit Aileen and the two men took off.
Through a family spokesman, Nicholas denied
doing anything wrong. Towns County has a warrant
for his arrest, confirmed Tampa Police spokesman
Joe Durkin. Nicholas' attorney, Allison Perry, did
not return a Times call.
Tampa relatives learned Aileen was recovering in a
hospital, and brought her to her father's Walnut
Street home. Her daughter Terrin brought
magazines to her bedside.
Terrin Bowman, 20, had a firm handshake and a
flirtatious wink. She had a job waiting tables but
was so bright she had taken college courses as a
16-year-old.
"She wanted to fly to the moon," said her cousin
Shawn Lhota, 21.
Terrin had friends across the world she met while
backpacking through Europe. Her friend Lorena
Bledsoe recalls Terrin's favorite quote: "The
purpose of living is to prepare for dying."
About 3 a.m. Dec. 31, a friend saw Terrin heading
home to her aunt's house in Town 'N Country.
Relatives, after talking with police, think that
Nicholaou held Terrin hostage in her bedroom for
at least five hours as her aunt and uncle slept.
Cigarette ashes peppered Terrin's typically tidy
room, along with marijuana residue, pills and
fiberglass tape, relatives said.
They think Nicholaou used Terrin to get access to
the West Tampa home where Aileen was
staying.
Just after noon, when Aileen's sister, Audrey
Leon, opened the door on Walnut Street, Terrin
rushed in and hugged her tightly.
"I could tell she was scared," Leon said.
Leon remembers what happened next:
Nicholaou stepped into view.
"You didn't think you were ever going to see me
again," Nicholaou announced, entering the house.
He approached Aileen in the dining room.
"What are you doing with a gun?" Aileen asked
him.
Leon told him to get out.
"No, no, no," Nicholaou responded. "I'm going to
shoot myself over your mother's grave."
The sisters had struggled with their mother's
recent death.
As Leon scrambled to get her two children out of
the home, call her father and call police,
Nicholaou, Aileen and Terrin walked toward a
bedroom.
"Alina (Aileen) tells me really calmly, she goes
"Look, we're going to go to papi's room to talk,
okay?' I'm like "Terrin, Terrin, come here.' She
wouldn't budge. She went in there. She wouldn't
come out. Either he had her afraid or she didn't
want to leave her mom," Leon said.
Leon greeted police in the driveway. When an
officer announced herself and walked toward the
bedroom, Nicholaou pointed a rifle at her. Aileen
threw herself at the door, closing it.
Outside the door, police and family heard the
gunshots.
In the room, they found Aileen and Terrin, both
shot in the head. Terrin, fatally wounded, was
lying on her mother's body. Terrin died the next
day. Her mother was already gone.
Police said Nicholaou shot them before turning a
gun on himself.
In Massachusetts, Michelle's sister Tammy Patla
hopes for a reunion with Nicholas and Joy. She
also hopes for more. That the answer to
Michelle's disappearance didn't die with Michael
Nicholaou.
Times news researcher Carolyn Edds contributed to
this report. Staff writer Alexandra Zayas can be
reached at azayas@sptimes.com or 813 226-3354.
[Last modified January 8, 2006, 00:43:05]
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