Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets

by David Simon

  “I’m on parole,” he reminds Edgerton.

  As dawn arrives in the homicide office, Edgerton is at an admin office typewriter, working up the two-page charging documents for his suspect. But when he takes the papers into the interrogation room to show Dale, the suspect reads them quickly and then tears them to pieces, further endearing himself to Edgerton, whose typing skills are less than stellar.

  “You don’t need this,” Dale says, “because I’m going to tell you the truth. I didn’t kill that girl. In fact, I don’t know who it was that killed her.”

  Edgerton listens to version number three.

  “I don’t know who really killed her. The reason I told you the other things was to protect my girlfriend and her family. I work every day while her relatives are always in and out of the apartment all hours. All of her sisters and brothers use the apartment while I’m sleeping in the bedroom.”

  Edgerton says nothing. At this point, why bother to say anything at all?

  “One of them must have kept the gun in the linen closet. One of them must have killed that girl.”

  “Did you know the gun was kept in your linen closet?” asks Edgerton, almost bored.

  “No I didn’t. I know you can get five years for having a gun. I don’t know who had that gun in the house. I really don’t.”

  Edgerton nods, then walks out of the interrogation room and back to the admin office typewriter.

  “Hey, Roger, look at what this asshole did,” he says, holding up the shreds of the charging papers. “This took me forty minutes.”

  “He did that?”

  “Yeah,” says Edgerton, laughing. “He said I didn’t need them ’cause he was going to tell me the truth.”

  Nolan shakes his head. “That’s what you get for letting him hold on to the paperwork.”

  “Maybe I can tape it together,” says Edgerton, more tired than hopeful.

  The last statement by Eugene Dale concludes as the dayshift detectives are taking roll call in the main office, and many of those men are out on the street before Edgerton can retype the arrest sheets.

  The Southern District wagon arrives an hour or so later, and Dale is cuffed for the ride back to the district bail hearing. Walking down the corridor, he asks again for Edgerton and the chance to make another statement. This time he is ignored.

  But there will be one last encounter. A week or so after the arrest, Edgerton checks his gun at the Eager Street entrance of the Baltimore City Jail and follows a guard to the second-floor hellhole that prison administrators call an infirmary. It is a long walk up a set of metal stairs and down a hall cluttered with human failure. The inmates fall silent, staring as Edgerton passes through to the medical unit’s administrative area.

  A heavyset nurse waves him down. “He’s on the way up from the tier.”

  Edgerton shows her the warrant, but she barely bothers to look at it. “Head hairs, chest hairs, pubic hairs and blood,” he says. “I guess you’ve done this before.”

  “Mmm-hmmm.”

  Eugene Dale rounds the corner slowly, then stops at the sight of Edgerton. As the nurse waves the inmate toward an examination room, Dale moves close enough for Edgerton to notice the bruises and contusions, obvious signs of a bad beating. Even inside the city jail, the man’s crimes merit special attention.

  Edgerton follows his suspect into the examination room and watches as the nurse prepares a needle.

  Dale looks at the syringe, then back at Edgerton. “What’s this for?”

  “A search-and-seizure warrant for your person,” says Edgerton. “We’re going to match your blood and hairs to semen and hairs we got from the girl.”

  “I already gave them blood.”

  “This is different. This is a court order for evidence.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “You don’t have a choice.”

  “I want to talk to a lawyer.”

  Edgerton shoves the paper into Dale’s hands, then points to the judge’s signature at the bottom of the page. “You don’t get to talk to a lawyer for this. It’s signed by a judge-see that? We have a right to your blood and your hair.”

  Eugene Dale shakes his head. “Why do you need my blood?”

  “For DNA testing. We’re going to match it to the girl,” says Edgerton.

  “I want to talk to a lawyer.”

  Edgerton moves closer to his suspect, his voice low. “Either you let her take some blood and some hairs the easy way or I’m going to take it myself, because that warrant says I can. And I can tell you that you’d definitely rather have her do it.”

  Eugene Dale sits silently, almost in tears as the nurse brings the needle up to his right arm. Edgerton watches from the opposite wall as blood is drawn and then hairs plucked from his suspect’s head and body. The detective is on the way out the door, samples in hand, when Eugene Dale speaks again.

  “Don’t you want to talk to me again?” he asks. “I want to tell the truth.”

  Edgerton ignores him.

  “You want to hear the truth?”

  “No,” says Edgerton. “Not from you.”

  WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 9

  Rich Garvey stands shivering in the predawn emptiness of Fremont Avenue, staring at a pile of blood-soaked clothing, two spent.38 casings and a blue plastic lunch pail containing two submarine sandwiches wrapped in tin foil. So much for physical evidence.

  Robert McAllister stands shivering next to Garvey, scanning the length of Fremont Avenue and its tributaries for any trace of human endeavor. It’s not bad enough that the streets are empty, there aren’t even any lights in the rowhouse windows. So much for witnesses.

  In the few seconds before anyone speaks, Garvey looks at McAllister and McAllister looks at Garvey, each of them wordlessly communicating the same thought:

  Hell of a case you got, Mac.

  Whoa, you caught a tough one here, Garv.

  And yet before anything unseemly can pass between two partners, the first officer-a kid by the name of Miranda, an earnest young soldier still basking in the wonder of it all-approaches them to offer up one little detail: “He was talking when we got here.”

  “He was talking?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Well, he told us who shot him…”

  If this universe is truly balanced, if there is a negative and positive to the order of things, then somewhere exists a yin to balance Rich Garvey’s yang. Somewhere there exists another career cop, an Irishman no doubt, with wire-rim glasses and a dark mustache and a back problem. He is standing over his eleventh straight drug murder in silent suffering, bargaining with an indifferent God for one shred of physical evidence, for one ignorant, evasive witness. The anti-Garvey is a good cop, a good detective, but lately he has entertained a few doubts about his abilities, as has his sergeant. He is drinking a little too much and he is yelling at his kids. He knows nothing of balance and order, of Tao logic, of his alter ego in the city of Baltimore who is wantonly solving homicides with the good fortune of two men.

  “Oh do tell,” says Garvey.

  “He said Warren Waddell shot him.”

  “Warren Waddell?”

  “Yeah, he said his buddy Warren shot him in the back for no reason. He kept saying, ‘I can’t believe he shot me. I can’t believe it.’”

  “You heard all this?”

  “I was standing right over him. Me and my side partner heard it all. He said this guy Warren works with him at a place called Precision Concrete.”

  Way to go, my man, way to go. Everything was going from gray to black in the rear of Medic 15, but you got it done, you said what had to be said. You left a little something behind for a homicide detective to remember you by, and for that Rich Garvey thanks you.

  A dying declaration, the lawyers call it-admissible evidence in a Maryland courtroom if the victim is informed by competent medical personnel that he is dying or otherwise indicates that he believes himself to be dying. And while it
’s not uncommon for homicide victims to make dying declarations, it is a rare and special moment when those utterances are at all helpful to a detective, not to mention relevant.

  Every homicide detective has a favorite story involving a murdered man’s last words. Many of these tales center on the code of the street and its observance even at life’s end. One involves the last moments of a West Baltimore doper, who was still talking when officers arrived.

  “Who shot you?”

  “I’ll tell you in a minute,” the victim declared, presumably unaware that he had about forty seconds left to live.

  Having suffered deep stab wounds to the chest and face, one dying man claimed to have cut himself shaving. Another victim, shot five times in the chest and back, assured officers with his last breath that he would take care of the problem himself.

  But perhaps the most classic dying declaration story belongs to Bob McAllister. Back in ’82, during his first weeks as a homicide detective, Mac had worked a long detail case with other detectives and had been a secondary on a few calls, but otherwise he was pretty green. In the hope that he’d learn from a veteran, they paired him with Jake “the Snake” Coleman, alias the Polyester Prince, a gravel-voiced, bantamweight detective of legendary proportions. And so, when the call came in for a shooting on Pennsylvania Avenue, Jake Coleman was out the door with McAllister in tow.

  The dead man at Pennsie and Gold was named Frank Gupton. McAllister can remember the name without hesitation; he also remembers that the case is still as open as the day is long.

  “He was alive when we got here,” said the first officer at the scene.

  “Oh yeah?” said Coleman, encouraged.

  “Yeah. We asked him who shot him.”

  “And?”

  “He said, ‘Fuck you.’”

  Coleman slapped McAllister on the back. “Well, brother,” he growled, imparting an early lesson to the younger detective, “looks like you got your first murder.”

  Now, standing out on Fremont Avenue, Garvey and McAllister both know enough about their victim, one Carlton Robinson, to say that whatever else he was, he wasn’t cut from the same cloth as Frank Gupton. He wanted to be avenged.

  An hour after clearing the scene, both detectives are in a west side rowhouse, talking with Carlton’s girlfriend, who had packed the victim’s lunch pail and kissed him good-bye as he left to catch an early morning ride to work.

  The interview is hard. The girlfriend is pregnant with Carlton’s child, and he was supporting her and talking about marriage. She knows that he usually caught his ride to work at Pennsylvania and North and she knows the name Warren Waddell as a co-worker who sometimes caught the same ride. But Garvey and McAllister have only a few minutes to talk with her before the sound of a ringing telephone fills the small apartment. The hospital, thinks Garvey, already aware of what the news will be.

  “No,” she wails, dropping the receiver on the floor and falling into a girlfriend’s arms. “No, goddammit. No…”

  Garvey stands up first.

  “Why is this happening to me?”

  Then McAllister.

  “Why…”

  Both detectives leave their cards in the kitchen and find their own way to the door. Everything so far-from the lunch pail to Carlton’s willingness to name his killer to his girlfriend’s tears-tells them they have a real victim here.

  A few hours later, at a doughnut shop off Philadelphia Road in eastern Baltimore County, the site manager of Precision Concrete confirms as much: “Carlton was just a great guy, a really great guy. He was one of my best guys.”

  “And Waddell?” asks Garvey.

  The manager rolls his eyes. “I mean, I’m amazed he actually killed him. I’m amazed he did it, but I’m not surprised he did it, you know?”

  Warren was crazy, the manager says. He came to work every other day with a semiautomatic pistol tucked into his jeans, showing off his flash money and telling everyone about how good his drug connections were.

  “Did he have drug connections?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  It was hard getting Waddell to do work out at a site, the manager says. He’d rather spend time telling everyone else on the crew how dangerous he was and how he had killed people before.

  Well, thought Garvey, listening to the manager ramble on, that much was true anyway. Back at the office an hour ago, the detectives had run Waddell’s name and come up with an impressive sheet that culminated in a second-degree murder conviction twelve years ago. In fact, Waddell had just made parole.

  “He’s a mental case,” says the manager, a sawed-off billy with dirty blond hair. “You know, I’d be scared to deal with him sometimes… I can’t believe he killed Carlton.”

  For the regulars in the morning rush at the Dunkin’ Donuts counter, the conversation is a startling diversion. The manager chose the spot because it was near the day’s construction site; now, the businessmen at the counter are ordering refills and staring over their newspapers at the spectacle of two plainclothes detectives working a murder.

  “What was Carlton like?”

  “Carlton was a real good worker,” says the manager. “I’m not sure, but I think it was Carlton who got Waddell his job with us. I know they came to work together all the time.”

  “Tell me what happened yesterday at work,” says Garvey.

  “Yesterday,” says the manager, shaking his head. “Yesterday was just a joke. They were joking around, you know, teasing Warren.”

  “What about?”

  “Different stuff, you know. The way he acted and how he didn’t do any work.”

  “Was Carlton teasing him?”

  “They all were. They called him a dickhead and he didn’t like that.”

  “Why’d they call him a dickhead?”

  “Because, you know,” says the manager, shrugging off the question, “he’s a dickhead.”

  Garvey laughs.

  At one point, the manager tells them, Waddell flashed his semiauto and declared cryptically that tomorrow was election day and people always get killed on election day. Garvey has heard the summer heat wave theory and the full moon theory of inner-city mortality, but never the election day postulate. This is a new one.

  “Tell me about this gun.”

  The manager describes the weapon as a 9mm semiauto with a clip of eighteen rounds. The casings at the scene were.38, but both Garvey and McAllister know that most people can’t tell a.38 from a 9mm on first sight. Warren was proud of the gun, the manager says, recalling that Waddell had explained that he always mixed hollow-point and roundnose ammunition together in the clip, alternating between the two. “That’s the way to kill a man,” Waddell told anyone willing to listen.

  That, too, matches up when both detectives return to the city to watch an assistant medical examiner pull bullets out of Carlton Robinson’s body. It is a slow morning on Penn Street-a double suicide or murder-suicide from Montgomery County, another suicide from Anne Arundel, two probable overdoses, an unexplained collapse, and a ten-year-old girl run down by a truck. The detectives don’t have to wait more than an hour to confirm that half the recovered slugs are hollow-point, the rest, standard roundnosed ammo.

  The ballistic evidence is tinged with irony. Not only is November 9 election day in Maryland, it also happens to be the same day the state’s vaunted Saturday Night Special law takes effect. Passed by the state legislature in the spring despite a $6.7 million lobbying effort backed by the National Rifle Association, the law set up a review board to identify and prohibit the sale of cheap handguns in Maryland. Touted as a victory over gun control opponents and a counterweight to handgun violence, the law is in truth a largely meaningless exercise. Not since the 1970s have cheap handguns been responsible for more than a handful of the city’s homicides; nowadays even teenagers are walking around with semiautomatics tucked into their sweatpants. Smith & Wesson, Glock, Baretta, Sig Sauer-even the dickheads of the world, Warren Waddell included, are carrying quality weapons. An
d though Maryland’s landmark gun control law is the pride of its political leaders, it has arrived about fifteen years too late.

  On the day after Carlton Robinson’s murder, Warren Waddell calls the manager to say he won’t be coming to work. He also asks if his employer can pick up tomorrow’s paycheck and meet him across town. Anticipating such a request, the detectives told supervisors at the construction company to explain to Waddell that he has to come to the office in Essex and sign for the check in person. The manager gives him that story and then asks if he really killed Carlton.

  “I can’t talk right now,” Waddell says.

  Then, to the amazement of all concerned, Waddell shows up the next morning to claim his paycheck, eyes the secretaries suspiciously, then leaves abruptly. He and the friend who drove him are arrested at a county police roadblock a mile or two away. Searched by the county officers, Waddell is found to be carrying a large amount of cash, an American Express card and a U.S. passport. Upon his arrest, he makes no statement, then further endears himself to Garvey and McAllister by faking a stomach ailment on the trip downtown, wasting two hours of the detectives’ time at Sinai Hospital.

  Everything about the case puts Waddell’s signature on the murder-the victim’s dying words, the fight and threats at work the previous day, the mixture of hollow-point and standard ammo, the suspect’s behavior after the murder. Yet when Garvey brings the case into the state’s attorney’s office, he’s told that it’s an easy indictment but a loser in court.

  The centerpiece of the case-Carlton Robinson’s dying words-may prove inadmissible simply because the officers at the scene did not inform the victim that he was dying. Nor did Robinson specifically tell the officers that he believed his life was ending. Instead, the officers did the natural thing. They called for the ambo and leaned close to the victim, telling Robinson to hang on, assuring him that if he remained conscious he would make it.

  Without an acknowledgment of imminent death by either the victim or his attendants, Robinson’s accusation could well be knocked down by a defense attorney who knows his Maryland code.

  And without the dying declaration, they have weak circumstance and little more. Having been through the murder mill once before, Waddell shows no interest in the interrogation process, nor does a subsequent search warrant produce the murder weapon.