Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets Read online

  There is little else to explain Terry McLarney staring at the seminude body of an elderly woman, rigored in her bed with no apparent trauma, and deciding correctly-on the basis of an open window and a single stray pubic hair on the sheet-that he is working a rape-murder.

  Or Donald Worden, walking down an empty East Baltimore street minutes after a fatal shooting, putting his hand on the hood of one parked car out of twenty and feeling the heat of an engine-a sure sign that the car was recently occupied by persons who fled rather than be identified as witnesses. “There was some condensation on the back window,” he says later, shrugging. “And it was a little ways from the curb, like the driver parked it in a hurry.”

  Or Donald Steinhice, a veteran from Stanton’s shift, who is entirely convinced that the woman hanging from the ceiling of her bedroom has taken her own life, but somehow can’t leave the room until one last detail is settled in his mind. He sits there in the shadow of the dead woman for half an hour, staring at a pair of bedroom slippers on the floor below the body. The left slipper is below the right foot, the right below the left. Was she wearing the slippers on the wrong feet? Or did someone else, someone who staged the scene, place the slippers there?

  “It was the only thing about that scene that really bothered me, and it bothered me for a good long while,” he later recalls, “until I thought about how a person takes off their bedroom slippers.”

  Steinhice finally imagines the woman crossing her legs so as to wrap the toe of one slipper around the heel of the other, prying the slipper off from the back-a common maneuver that would leave the slippers on opposite sides.

  “After that,” he says, “I could leave.”

  FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 5

  In the clear sunlight of a winter morning, the academy trainees feel no sense of foreboding in the alley behind the rowhouses on Newington Avenue. As they crawl through its recesses and kick through its clutter, they find it to be an alley like any other.

  Dressed in the khaki uniforms of the Education and Training Division, the class of thirty-two trainees begins the second day of the Latonya Wallace investigation by moving slowly through the alley and the back yards of every house in the block bounded by Newington and Whitelock, Park and Callow. They search inches at a time, stepping only where they have already searched, picking up each piece of trash with great care, then setting it down with the same deliberation.

  “Go slowly. Check every inch of your yard,” Dave Brown tells the class. “If you find something-anything-don’t move it. Just go and grab a detective.”

  “And don’t be afraid to ask questions,” adds Rich Garvey. “There’s no such thing as a stupid question. Or at least for right now, we’re going to pretend that there isn’t.”

  Earlier, watching the trainees bound off a police department bus and count off for their instructor, Garvey expressed misgivings. Allowing a herd of new recruits to graze through a crime scene had all the makings of what detectives and military men like to call a clusterfuck. Visions of self-satisfied cadets trampling over blood trails and kicking tiny bits of evidence into sewer drains danced in Garvey’s head. On the other hand, he reasoned, a lot of ground can be covered with thirty-two interested persons, and at this point, the Latonya Wallace probe needs all the help it can get.

  Once loosed upon the alley, the trainees are, to no one’s surprise, genuinely interested. Most of them attack the chore with zeal, picking through piles of garbage and dead leaves with all the fervor and devotion of the newly converted. It’s quite a sight, prompting Garvey to wonder what primal force of nature could inspire thirty patrol veterans to get down on their hands and knees in a Reservoir Hill alley.

  The detectives divide the recruits into pairs and assign each to a rear yard behind the 700 block of Newington Avenue as well as the yards on Park and Callow avenues, which form the east and west boundaries of the block in which the child was found. There are no yards or open areas behind the block’s northern boundary, Whitelock Street; there, a red brick warehouse backs right up to the alley. The search takes more than an hour, with the trainees recovering three steak knives, one butter knife and one kitchen carving utensil-all marred by more rust than could accumulate on a murder weapon overnight. Also harvested are a variety of hypodermic syringes, an item commonly discarded by the local citizenry and of no particular interest to the detectives, as well as combs, hair braids, assorted pieces of clothing and a child’s dress shoe-none of it related to the crime. One enterprising recruit produces, from the rear yard of 704 Newington, a clear plastic bag half filled with a dull yellow liquid.

  “Sir,” he asks, holding the bag up to eye level, “is this important?”

  “That appears to be a bag of piss,” says Garvey. “You can put it down anytime you like.”

  The search does not produce a child’s small star-shaped gold earring. Nor does it yield a blood trail, the one clue that might point to the murder scene, or at least the direction from which the body was carried to the rear of 718 Newington. Small purple blobs of coagulated blood dot the pavement where the little girl was discovered the morning before, but neither the detectives nor the trainees can locate another droplet anywhere else in the alley. The severity of the child’s wounds and the fact that she was carried to the alley wrapped in nothing more constricting than her little raincoat almost assures that the killer left blood spatters, but the rain that blanketed the city from late Wednesday to Thursday morning has neatly destroyed any such evidence.

  As the cadets search, Rich Garvey walks once more through the yard behind 718 Newington. The yard itself, about 12 by 50 feet, is mostly paved, and it is one of the few rear parcels in the 700 block that is enclosed by a chain-link fence. Rather than dump the child’s body in the common alley or in one of the more accessible yards nearby, the murderer inexplicably took the trouble to open the rear gate and carry the body through the yard to the rear entrance of 718 Newington. The body had been found only a few feet from the kitchen door, at the foot of a metal fire stair that runs from the roof to the rear yard.

  It made no sense. The killer could have dumped the little girl anywhere in the alley, so why risk taking her body inside the fenced-in yard of an occupied house? Did he want it to be found immediately? Did he want to cast suspicion on the elderly couple that lived at 718? Or did he feel, in the end, some perverse sense of remorse, some human impulse that told him to leave the body inside a fenced yard, protected from the stray dogs and alley rats that roam through Reservoir Hill?

  Garvey looks toward the far end of the yard, where the back section of the fence meets the common alley, and notices something silver on the ground behind a dented trash can. He walks over and discovers a small, six-inch piece of hollow metal pipe, which he carefully lifts at one end and holds up to the light. Inside the tube is a thick mass of what appears to be coagulated blood as well as a dark strand of human hair. The pipe looks like a piece of some larger assembly, and Garvey allows himself a hard thought, wondering whether just such an item could have caused the vaginal tear. The detective carefully hands the pipe to a lab tech, who bags it.

  A television cameraman, one of several hovering around Newington Avenue this morning, watches the exchange and wanders across the alley.

  “What was that?”

  “What?”

  “That piece of metal you picked up.”

  “Listen,” says Garvey, placing a hand on the cameraman’s shoulder. “You gotta do us a favor and keep that out of your film. It might be a piece of evidence, but if you put it on the tube, it could really fuck us. Okay?”

  The cameraman nods.

  “Thanks. Really.”

  “No problem.”

  The presence of television cameramen on Newington Avenue that morning-one from each of the three network affiliates-is, in fact, the other reason for the trainee search of the alley. Garvey’s lieutenant, Gary D’Addario, gained a good understanding of the command staff’s priorities in the first hours of the investigation, when his captain v
entured out of the admin offices to suggest that detectives should maintain a high profile in Reservoir Hill. Maybe, he said, something could be done for the television cameras. D’Addario had been unable to contain his aggravation. The Latonya Wallace case was only hours old and already the brass was asking his people to jump through hoops for the media.

  He responded with an uncharacteristic lack of diplomacy: “I’d rather have them doing something that will solve the case.”

  “Of course,” said the captain, with a mixture of anger and embarrassment. “That’s not at all what I was saying.”

  The exchange, which took place in the main homicide office, was overheard by several of D’Addario’s detectives, who related it to several others. Before the end of the day, many of the men on both shifts were willing to believe that D’Addario, already frustrated by his exclusion from the Monroe Street probe, had needlessly thrown down a gauntlet. Even if the call to Education & Training had been accompanied by calls to television assignment editors, the trainee search wasn’t exactly the worst idea the brass had ever seized upon. More to the point, the captain was a captain and D’Addario was a lieutenant, and if this case went down in flames, the supervisors with lower rank were more likely to end up as casualties. As the immediate supervisor of all the detectives involved, D’Addario might be crucified on Latonya Wallace alone.

  Isolated from the command staff, D’Addario now put his faith-and quite possibly, it seemed to some, his career-in the hands of Jay Landsman, a man who for all his profane and comic impulses was the senior and most experienced sergeant in the homicide unit.

  At thirty-seven, Landsman was the last of a line: His father had retired with a lieutenant’s rank as acting commander of the Northwestern District, the first Jewish officer to rise to a district command on a predominantly Irish force; his older brother, Jerry, had left the homicide unit only a year before, going out as a lieutenant after twenty-five years. Jay Landsman signed up for no less of a reason than his father, and the family tradition allowed him to come out of the academy with a veteran’s knowledge of the department’s inner workings. The family name was some help, but Landsman thrived in the department by proving himself to be a smart, aggressive cop. Soon there were three bronze stars, one commendation ribbon, three or four commendatory letters. Landsman was in Southwestern patrol for less than four years before coming downtown to CID; similarly, he was in homicide for only a few months before being bumped to sergeant in 1979, yet in that short time he put down every case to which he was assigned. Then they shipped him to the Central for an eleven-month tour as a sector supervisor before bringing him back to the sixth floor as a detective sergeant. When the Latonya Wallace investigation began, Landsman had been leading a homicide squad for almost seven years.

  In his senior sergeant, D’Addario had a supervisor who could be expected to act like a detective, following his own instincts and pressing an investigation over days or weeks. Landsman had managed to limit the effect of gravity on his stocky, 200-pound frame, and after sixteen years of police work, his tousled black hair and mustache were just beginning to show the occasional slivers of gray. Other sergeants in the homicide unit might resemble grocers who consumed too much of the profits, but at an inch over six feet, Landsman still looked like a street police, a hard case who on any given night might take a nightstick and wander down Poplar Grove for that rendezvous with destiny. In fact, he did his best work not as a supervisor, but as a sixth detective in his squad, affixing himself to red balls, police shootings and other sensitive cases, then sharing the crime scenes, the legwork, and the interrogations with the primary detective.

  Landsman’s instincts were especially acute: In his time as both a detective and a sergeant, he had broken a good share of cases simply by following his own gut. More often than not, Landsman’s contribution to a case would appear in retrospect to be little more than sheer impulse-a wild rant in an interrogation room, a bald accusation against a seemingly cooperative witness, a spur-of-the-moment consent search of a witness’s bedroom. As police work, it often appeared random and idiosyncratic, but then again, it often worked. And with two fresh murders every three days, the Baltimore Police Department’s homicide unit was not exactly the best place to hone an exacting, meticulous approach. Landsman’s damn-the-torpedoes method had its share of adherents among the detectives, but even the men who worked for Landsman would admit that it wasn’t always pretty. Most of those on D’Addario’s shift could remember nights when Landsman had shouted his throat raw, accusing three separate suspects in three separate rooms of murdering the same man, then offering two an apology an hour later while handcuffing the third.

  The Landsman blitzkrieg often succeeded simply because of its speed. Landsman worked fast and gave free rein to his impulses, and he held a firm belief in Rule Number Three in the homicide manual, which declares that the initial ten or twelve hours after a murder are the most critical to the success of an investigation. In that time, bloody clothes are being dumped or burned, stolen cars or tags ditched, weapons melted or thrown into the harbor. Accomplices are consolidating their stories, agreeing on places and times and shedding wayward and conflicting details. Coherent and reliable alibis are being established. And in the neighborhood where the murder took place, the locals are mixing rumor and fact into one thick, homogeneous gruel, until it becomes almost impossible for a detective to know whether a potential witness is expressing firsthand knowledge or barroom talk. The process begins when the body hits the pavement and continues unabated until even the best witnesses have forgotten critical details. When Landsman’s squad was handling calls, however, the process of deterioration would never be far along before someone, somewhere, was locked in a soundproof cubicle and forced to endure the heat from a detective sergeant in the throes of spontaneous combustion.

  But this methodology was often in conflict with an opposite truth in homicide work: Speed is a risk as well as an ally. If Landsman’s tactical onslaught carried a weakness, it was its decidedly linear progression, its preference for immediate depth over widening scope. The decision to pursue a single-minded plan of attack was always a gamble and a detective charging down one corridor in a labyrinth had no assurance that he wasn’t rushing toward a dead end. Nor could he be sure that other, unopened doors would still be there when he tried to retrace his steps.

  Up on Reservoir Hill, the labyrinth seems to grow in size and complexity with each passing hour. Even as the trainee class is returning to its bus, other detectives and detail officers are extending the previous day’s canvass to the rowhouses on Park and Callow avenues, east and west of the alley where the body was discovered. Others check the carryouts and corner stores on Whitelock and nearby North Avenue, asking about which businesses sold hot dogs with sauerkraut and whether those items had been sold to anyone on Tuesday or Wednesday. Still others are at the homes of Latonya Wallace’s playmates, asking about her daily routine, her habits, her interest in boys, their interest in her-necessary questions that nonetheless seem stilted when asked about so young a child.

  The lead investigators, Tom Pellegrini and Harry Edgerton, spend some of the day on the computer, feeding new names into the data base, pumping out another spate of criminal histories. Edgerton has still not solved the Brenda Thompson murder, but the case file, containing page after page of handwritten notes from his last interview with a potential suspect, has disappeared from his desk, replaced by white manila folders that divide the criminal histories of Reservoir Hill residents by street and block number. Likewise, the two-week-old Rudy Newsome case no longer plagues Tom Pellegrini; as the primary on a child murder, he isn’t expected to work on anything else. Forced priorities are a truth about homicide work that every detective learns to accept. In life, Rudy Newsome was a faceless drone in Baltimore ’s million-dollar-a-day drug trade, a street-corner entrepreneur who proved himself entirely expendable. In death, he is again supplanted, this time by a greater tragedy, one that cries louder for vengeance.

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sp; Later that second day, Pellegrini slips out of the office to spend a few hours on Whitelock Street, talking to merchants and residents, asking background questions about the Fish Man, who remains at the top of his list of suspects. Pellegrini asks everyone he encounters about the store owner’s apartment, his whereabouts earlier in the week, his seeming interest in young girls, his relationship to the victim. The plan is to bring the Fish Man downtown tomorrow, after Pellegrini and the other detectives have a chance to do some checking into his background. And with any luck at all, someone on Whitelock Street knows a little something about the old man, something that can be used as leverage in the interrogation room.

  Pellegrini works the street and comes up with a little more innuendo, a little more rumor. There is a lot of talk about the Fish Man and young girls, but nothing that can be called a smoking gun, and for now, Pellegrini can only consider him the first of many suspects.

  After his interviewing on the street, Pellegrini returns to the office to check in with Edgerton, who is still collating the criminal histories of residents near Newington by street and block number. Pellegrini picks up one file for the Callow Avenue addresses and shuffles through a dozen computer printouts. The sheets with sex offense arrests are marked by a red grease pencil.

  “That’s a lot of perverts for one city block,” says Pellegrini wearily.

  “Yeah,” agrees Edgerton, “there must be some kinda special zoning up there.”

  The weakest prospects are parceled out to the detail officers, with the detectives themselves running down alibis for the more promising suspects. Edgerton takes a young addict over on Lindin; Pellegrini, in turn, checks the background on a Callow Avenue man. It is a little like trying to draw to an inside straight, but without a murder scene-a primary site where the little girl was actually killed-there is no way to limit the prospects.