by Larry Crane
“So, Connie, what did you think when she was killed?”
“Look, would you like another one? I would. Danny, two more here, please. For it to happen to someone you knew—of. The sandpit was—you know.”
“I don’t. Well, that’s not right. I do know,” Marcella said.
“Would you go there with some guy?” Connie asked.
“Did you ever think it could have been you?”
“We figured he was after her tits. Could it have been mine? Probably not.”
“Did you and the others feel any compassion for her at all?”
There you go again with the superior attitude, Marcella thought. It probably just came down to being human and being self-centered. Not terribly unusual for high school girls.
“Sure. It was horrible what happened,” Connie said.
“Did kids put things out on the steps, a memorial? Flowers? Anything, for her?”
“I didn’t kill her.”
“She’s walking along a lonely pitch-dark road thinking she can always run and hide if she needs to. A car approaches. A girl’s worst dream. But, she recognizes the driver. He offers a ride. She’s only half a mile from home. She only has a moment to think. It could have been any of you. Any of us at some point in our life.”
“Oh, I don’t know if I believe that,” Connie said.
“Have you followed the story in the papers? About the guy in the car? He’s getting out. He’s a celebrity.”
“I haven’t.”
“He’s written books in jail. Studied the law. Wrote his own appeals. He’ll get paid thousands for giving lectures on the injustice of him landing in jail,” Marcella said.
“Is this what your story’s about?”
“It’s not fair. He’s a murderer who’s going to be living the high life. And Vickie, she’s gone down as a flirt who got what she deserved.”
“Oh god. I’m just not into this the way you are. I’m very late. I have to go,” Connie said.
“People have their own truth and they’re sticking to it. I want you to tell me a truth, all the details about a smart, cute sophomore who wowed everyone at the cheerleader tryouts in ‘57 and was instantly everybody’s best friend. A budding star who suddenly disappeared from school. Vickie Zielinski.”
Where did this come from? Marcella thought. You’re asking her to make up stories?
“Reporters make their living checking facts, you know,” Connie said. “I don’t want to go there. I need some time to think about it. I’ll get back to you.”
“Imagine what it would mean to her.”
“She’s dead.”
“You owe her.”
“People will look at the group cheerleader picture in the yearbook. She’s not in it,” Connie said.
“Well, it was taken after she was killed, wasn’t it?”
“Was it?”
“You’re saying it was. Right?”
“Other girls on the squad might say it never happened.”
“Well, they have faulty memories, don’t they?” Marcella said.
Connie slid off the stool without answering and had her coat and hat on in a few seconds. She walked away toward the door. Marcella turned back to the bar and her old-fashioned. She finished it and asked for another. She saw movement in the mirror in back of the bartender and saw Connie snatch off her hat and sit down next to her again.
“Danny!” Connie called out. She ordered another Jack and Coke. Then she told Marcella: “I get what you’re doing. I’m scared, but I’ll do it. Tell me more.”
Hannah was waiting in the car as usual when Marcella finally came out.
“I’m a liar, Sweetie. Every bit as bad as he is. He lies, so I can lie too. It’s a lie that Vickie was a flirt. Maybe she flirted once. Everyone flirts once. But he was worse. So, I can be worse. I can make things up and pin them on him. He gets what he deserves. What’s fair is fair. That’s all.”
Chapter 25
Sol Beidermann, editor of The Bergen Record, was mirthless. He folded his arms across his chest and sat still pretending to listen to Marcella prattle. The expression on his face was pure skepticism. No matter what she said about the story—‘well, the premise is that this common housewife dares to go see Smith on death row’—everything really hinged on the words she put on paper. She handed a thin stack of papers across the desk, and held another stack to herself. She’d corrected all the basics—misspellings and bad grammar. He threw the cover letter aside immediately. Now, it was down to the writing. He spent all of three minutes scrutinizing it.
“Okay, so you’ve come up with some sample articles. They’re not bad. Pretty good, in fact,” he said.
“Yes.”
“On the subject of the contentious aspects of the Edgar Smith case.”
“Exactly.”
“Shit. You’d have to be in hibernation over the last twenty years not to know everything there is to know about it already,” he said.
“Wrong. Fourteen years actually. I reckon the average reader of the paper recognizes his name and vaguely knows he’s in jail. That’s all. The details have faded,” she said.
“Not for me,” he said. ‘Ex-Marine murders cheerleader.’ What more do I need to know?”
“Other than the three books he’s published, Buckley’s articles proclaiming him innocent, bungling by the prosecutor, and the likelihood that the Supreme Court is going to set him free? Nothing.”
“Write a letter to the editor and I’ll publish it,” he said.
She sat still staring back at him across his desk. He took another long drag on his cigarette. Hold your tongue, she thought. Just hold it. Let it sink in. He’s a little nervous. He’s been rude and dismissive of a good idea, competently presented, and he knows it. You’re a pro. Now act like one.
“Here’s my lead,” she said, reading from her own stack of papers: “The sensational Edgar Smith murder trial that rocked Bergen County in 1957 and sent Smith to death row at Trenton State Prison is back in the news as subsequent Supreme Court interpretations have shed new light on the case that may set Smith free.’ Follow that with five hundred tightly written words that have readers wanting more. It’s topical. It happened right here.”
Beidermann answered right back, as if he wanted her to be brazen and was waiting for her to demonstrate. “Believe it or not, madam, I like the sound of it,” he said. “We could use a little brass around here. But I want to see more. I can’t tolerate a one-trick pony.”
She brandished her other thicker sheaf of papers. “I have half a dozen ready except for a final polish,” she said. “I’m calling them Smith Case File Briefs.”
“I could ask to see them, but I won’t. We’ll stay fluid on length. We’ll run one of these, Sunday in Op-Ed. We’ll see if it creates any buzz.”
“Good,” she said. “How much are you going to pay me?”
“Pay? You’re cheeky. Two cents a word.”
“Sold,” she said.
Chapter 26
Edgar Smith Case File
by Marcella Armand – Staff Reporter
The Confession
The sensational Edgar Smith murder trial that rocked Bergen County in 1957 and sent Smith to death row at Trenton State Prison is back in the news as subsequent Supreme Court interpretations shed new light on the case that may set Smith free.
Without Smith’s statement that was admitted as evidence in the trial, it is doubtful that the verdict returned by the jury after deliberating for less than three hours would have been the same—guilty of murder in the first degree.
Smith was asleep at his mother-in-law’s house in Ridgewood when detectives knocked on the door at 10:30 p.m. on March 5, the day after the murder. The police wanted to question Smith after a friend of his, Joe Gilroy, came to them with incriminating information about Smith’s behavior around the time he was returning the car Joe had lent him on the night of the crime. They took Smith to the Mahwah Police HQ where they began questioning him about his whereabouts the nigh
t of the murder.
Some thirteen hours later, at 12:50 p.m. on March 6, Smith agreed to make a voluntary statement. This was by questions and answers, and Smith gave it under oath. It was taken down by a stenographer, partly in the Prosecutor’s office and later in the crime area. The statement was concluded at 3:45 p.m. and Smith was taken to Mahwah for arraignment.
In the course of the trial two months later when the prosecutor asked that the statement be admitted in evidence the defense objected saying, “It is not a confession and as such, unsigned as it is, it is not evidential at all. It is not competent to go before the jury.”1 The prosecutor offered that the statement was in fact a confession and was properly admissible into evidence. He offered the following wording from the statement as an example of one instance among several of an admission of guilt:
I went back in. That’s when it dawned on me that I had been with her the night before and something snapped in the back of my head that I did it and I knew it in the back of my head.2
The Court admitted the statement in evidence, and the prosecution read it to the jury. The statement was used extensively in the lengthy examination of Edgar Smith on the witness stand. It is fair to say he never managed to escape the web of admissions it threw over him.
Over the course of more than fourteen years of incarceration on death row, Smith has appealed to all of the courts of New Jersey for a reversal of his conviction. Many of these have touched on aspects of the statement, its nature as an admission not a confession, whether or not it was given voluntarily, and Smith’s ignorance of his right to give no statement at all. In the coming months, it’s certain that the statement will be at the center of appeals to even higher courts to issue a writ of habeas corpus.
* * *
1 Calissi, Counterpoint, 404.
2 Ibid., 437.
Chapter 27
Gilbert Rathskeller cut the engine on his Studebaker in the parking lot of the FBI Field Office in Lisle. He sat motionless and stared straight ahead. Talking to the feds is a high stakes poker game with a card shark, he thought. To be the perfect Boy Scout they want you to be, you would have trotted straight to them when you got your hands on the second letter that this Pinky woman sent to Celia. It must be a woman. You have advantages over the feds, speed being one. You don’t have to coordinate with or report to anyone else before you take action. How many leads had they already gotten? Hundreds? How many agents did they have working the case? How long would it take them to learn what you learn in a week?
Agent Elton Dvorak was not in the office, but Salter was. He had called ahead, so she knew he was coming. Nevertheless, they had Rathskeller sitting for fifteen minutes before she approached him and took him into Dvorak’s office.
“I’m glad you could find a couple of minutes to spare,” Rathskeller said.
“You said you had something on the Armand missing child case. What is it?” she asked. “We had no idea that you were doing anything with this case. I have to inform you that interference with FBI investigations is a felony, even though you know that.”
“Do you want to hear what I have or not?”
“Mandatory caution #2: Child abductions are extremely sensitive. The perps are playing with fire and they know it. If they get the slightest inkling that they’re under observation, they can and have done extremely sudden and violent acts on victims.”
Rathskeller said: “You know who I am. I know who you are. I have every right to follow wherever leads take me as long as it doesn’t interfere with what you’re doing. All right, all that is out of the way. Let’s discuss why I’m here.”
“I’m recording this,” she said.
“I have here letters the Armand’s daughter Celia received three weeks ago. Maybe you should read them.” He took a manila envelope from his briefcase and poured the first letter and envelope out onto the desk.
Salter worked with the eraser end of two lead pencils to avoid adding her fingerprints to others that might be on the letter. She took two minutes to read it and to scrutinize the envelope. She fetched a couple of clear plastic bags and guided the letter and envelope into them. “Why didn’t you bring this to us as soon as you got it?”
He chose not to answer that. “I have a second letter apparently sent by the same woman.” He poured the letter, the photograph, and the envelope onto the desk. “I’m giving these to you now. I presume you will analyze them and try to lift prints. Do you have any interest in the investigative work I’ve done with them?”
“Am I right in assuming that you have done everything you could not to add your prints to any that we might find?” Salter asked. “You don’t have to answer that. What else do you know?”
“I called every Nugent in Montana, twenty-four of them, and got nothing out of it,” Rathskeller said. “When Celia Armand called to tell me about the second letter, I told her not to handle them. She understood why. I drove up to Northfield and got them from her. I told her to call me the minute she received any other letters or calls or anything. That was two weeks ago. I called every Nugent in Iowa, thirteen of them. No luck. I called outfits that provide photo developing services to determine if the numbers on the back of the photo have any identifiers embedded in them. Walgreens was no help. Hy-Vee Pharmacy identified the numbers as theirs and revealed that the photo was developed in Galesburg, Illinois. I called the Hy-Vee store there. The manager verified that the order for the development of the photo originated with him, but he had no recollection of the transaction.”
“It could be something or not,” Salter said. She tapped a pencil on the desktop.
He waited for her to say more. She looked into his eyes, but said nothing. Par for the course. There was no way the feds were going to give any inkling as to what they were doing or were about to do.
“I’ll offer this,” Rathskeller said. “This is a decent lead, something coming in over the transom. If it were up to me, I’d go after it full bore. The Hy-Vee manager was an oddball. I didn’t want to spook him, so I backed off right away. But there might be something worthwhile lying just under the surface with him. Just a hunch.”
Salter punched the button to shut off the recorder. “Thank you for this information, Mr. Rathskeller. If there’s anything else we need from you in connection with it, we’ll be in touch.” She rose and extended her hand.
She took his hand and held it, looking directly into his eyes.
“Don’t do anything more with this. Don’t tell your client what you’ve done,” she said.
Chapter 28
Marcella dreamt about Gavin’s picture of the world of a boxing training camp and about her as Muhammad Ali. She sees blood leaking from her nose. Crouched in a boxer’s stance in the center of the ring in a smoky arena filled with jeering fans, she’s stripped to the buff and ready for a fight, her hands up in front of her face. They’re enclosed in hard, compact gloves, nothing like the pillows they use in Sharkey’s Gym. She wears a blue jobber of a mouthpiece like those that girls use when playing field hockey. She opens her gob with the piece in. No teeth show, as if she had them knocked out. She pictures herself in a cage, locked in extreme combat with Smith.
“I’m back,” she said, approaching Edgar Smith. This time he was standing at the far end of the visiting area, watching her weave between the wooden benches.
“I didn’t have to come out here. I thought about it. I don’t need you. Get out of here,” he said.
“It’s not a question of need. It’s evaluating a business deal.”
“You’re a year late and a nickel short,” he said. “The judicial glacier is melting. I have another motion under consideration by the State Court of Appeals. With a little luck, I’ll be out of here in a couple of months.”
“Good. Think there might be a little wishful thinking going on there? Or is it a sure thing this time? Right. I didn’t think so.”
“Nothing’s for sure,” he said.
“What’s your plan for getting the ruling you want from the court?”
“I plan to pull some flat heads out of tight assholes. I’ve been a good boy in here. They like their parolees to be good boys.”
“Good boys don’t get charged with murder.”
“Second degree. That’s not real murder,” he said.
“You were convicted of first degree. That’s as real as it gets. The court has everything to lose and nothing to gain by ruling to release you. If they rule against you, nobody will squawk. Except you.”
“Wrong,” he said. “William F. Buckley will squawk. That’s a big squawk.”
Why is he being such a horse’s ass? He can’t have many people coming to visit. At the very least this could be a diversion. But no, he’s being difficult. It’s how he sees himself. He has to have the upper hand all the time. Use it.
“Ah yes, Buckley. You have Buckley on your side. How did you get Buckley?”
“What do you want?” he asked.
“Information. I know your case. I know the basis for all of your appeals. You’ve gotten this far largely because of Buckley. This is a chance for you to leverage that relationship. Maybe your last chance.”
“I’m still alive because of my appeals, sweetheart. My handwritten appeals.”
“A little help from the editor of National Review didn’t hurt,” she said.
“Bill is a good friend.”
“I’ll say. You call him Bill. You’re allowed family visitation. Think the warden’s feeling any pressure? How many people in jail have a celebrity egghead writing 5,000 word articles in Esquire about their case, telling everyone how brilliant they are? Even so, you need more than William F. Buckley, for all his influence.”
“Like what?”
“Like a focused argument for your claim of innocence. You’ve been going off in too many directions,” she said.
Marcella wondered what Smith was thinking. He’s just staring back at me, with that look that says: ‘What this? You come in here bright-eyed and all that, with these brilliant ideas.’