DELIVERED TO THEIR DEATHS

By CHARLOTTE FALTERMAYER/FRANKLIN

Steam was starting to rise from the two bodies when Lori Clayton arrived at the edge of the marsh just after 11:30 Saturday night. "Lori, Lori, I can't find a pulse," one of the cops at the accident site yelled out when he saw her. Clayton, an emergency-medical-team worker, quickly made her way through the darkness and into the mud. "These guys were still hot," she recalls. She did a pulse check. Nothing. And then she looked at her hands: they were covered in blood. A few yards away was shattered glass, but the car did not appear to have hit anything. Taking a flashlight, she focused a beam on the corpses and was almost overcome at the sight of the head wounds. She turned to the police and told them the two men had been shot. Clayton put her hands in her pockets. "I was a nervous wreck," she says. "I felt like I was being watched. The fog was rolling in. It was eerie. Like an Alfred Hitchcock movie." She turned to a co-worker and said, "We're in a crime scene now."

By Monday, the small town of Franklin, New Jersey (pop. 5,000), had become an Alfred Hitchcock crime scene, with two suspects arrested for murders so pointless that their inexplicability was virtually a cinematic device. The vacuum absorbed the attention not only of Sussex County's stunned residents but also of big-city papers and network television. thrill killer, screamed the tabloid New York Daily News over one suspect's photo. victims lured to a remote spot and slain, echoed a rare top-item crime story in the august New York Times.

"No," said a victim's relative in disbelief. "Not in a town where people tip cows for fun." Franklin was a place where the local cultural establishment was the Mineral Museum, where the arrows for fun (ski resorts, zoo, theme park) point out of town. Now Franklin is the town where Thomas Koskovich, 18, and Jayson Vreeland, 17, allegedly spent part of Saturday night calling area pizzerias for two plain cheese pies, finally enticing two deliverymen to an abandoned house on Scott Road.

From Hardyston, about four miles away, Georgio Gallara, 24, the owner of Tony's Pizza & Pasta, and an employee, Jeremy Giordano, 22, drove off in Giordano's Pontiac Grand Am with two pies. When they got to Scott Road, Gallara and Giordano were met with a volley of bullets fired from a .45-cal. automatic and a .22-cal. pistol. Their car rolled into a small marsh. The attackers then apparently took a pizza box and flung it like a Frisbee, scattering slices throughout the scene.

Franklin, which had not seen a murder in nine years, is overwhelmed with rumors: a boy who threatened to spill the beans was found dead in a Dumpster; another body was thrown from a water tower; not only was pizza flung in the air in celebration, slices were smeared on the faces of the dead. None of those rumors were true. So what is the truth? "I can't comment on the motive," says Sussex County prosecutor Dennis O'Leary. "But I can tell you what it's not. There was no intent to rob. It was not an initiation. It was not a cult. None of the classic elements like revenge or greed seemed to be present. I think that's what bothers people. They want a reason." Franklin's peace is no more.

Motorists raise a middle finger as they pass Koskovich's home on High Street (where Sam Donaldson's limo was parked last week and where a sign reads IF YOU ARE A NEWS REPORTER PLEASE GO AWAY, THANK YOU). There Bertha Lippincott cracked open the door, as the plastic sheeting over the front window rattled in the wind. Sobbing, she protested her grandson's innocence: "There were four other names given that were involved."

Talk of Koskovich's family brings out a variety of emotions from Clayton, the EMT. "That grandmother is going to have a stroke dealing with this," she says. "She's got so many kids she's raising in that house. There are four or five different families in there. Someone should track down the mother and make her take some responsibility." Mention of Tom's uncle Lenny Koskovich provokes a different response. "He's got a rap sheet that's as long as Scott Road. He is one bad man," says Clayton. The uncle is now serving his latest sentence, 10 years for burglary.

Clayton has posted a sign near her house: DEATH PENALTY. The suspects' friends tore it down, but she promptly replaced it. "I told them this is my freedom of speech. You're allowed to be angry, I'm allowed to be angry, we're all allowed to be angry." And while everyone gropes for explanations, Clayton recalls the sight of the corpses. "I know in my heart that they did it just for kicks. They wanted to see what it was like to kill someone and see what it felt like inside." And then that night at the marsh comes back to her, the feeling she had as she stood in the fog waiting for more help to arrive. "I felt they could have been there watching us and laughing." She shudders. "They could have wasted us all."