by Mark Bowden
The next day, Larry and Marcia took driving tests, and within weeks they were both carrying new Virginia driver’s licenses under their new names and address. It was a big breakthrough. Larry felt the last hurdle had been cleared.
But then there was the baby. Larry was worried because he knew Chuck Reed had a good idea of when the baby was due. He knew the new obstetrician/gynecologist would want Marcia’s history, and the hospital would want forms filled out, addresses, phone numbers, immediate family, etc. Larry did not want the doctor or hospital to even know their address or phone number.
But the preliminaries went smoothly. They found a doctor who did not ask too many questions. On the hospital forms they left many questions unanswered. Larry found that since he was willing to pay for services in advance, very few questions were asked.
He and Marcia attended birthing classes together, and on April 5, as they finished eating dinner at Pizza Hut, Marcia said, “I think we had better go straight to the hospital from here.” Larry dropped Chris off at the Millers’ and drove to the emergency room.
Less than an hour later she gave birth to a dark-haired baby girl. Larry was amazed. For Christopher, Marcia’s labor had gone on for more than ten hours, and in the end the doctor used forceps to help with the delivery. This birth was over so quickly there had hardly been time to generate the kind of excitement of the first. Larry drove home to pick up Chris, and tied pink balloons to one of the trees in the front yard. Marcia and Larry named their daughter Tara Erin O’Neil.
Larry didn’t care that much, but Marcia wanted the baby baptized. She had enrolled in the local Catholic church, and within weeks of bringing baby Tara home, Marcia and Larry were attending group discussions with other new parents preliminary to having their babies baptized.
But baptism presented another problem. They had no friends as close as Jess and Babette Miller, their next-door neighbors, so they were the obvious choice for Tara’s godparents. But wouldn’t they think it was odd to be asked to play such an important role after having known Brian and Marcia O’Neil for only several months?
Larry invited the Millers over. He told them that he and Marcia wanted them to be Tara’s godparents, “but I think I owe you an explanation,” he said. “You may have noticed that we are never visited by our families, or by old friends. There’s a reason for that.”
Larry swore the Millers to secrecy. Then he told Jess and Babette that he and Marcia were really not Brian and Susan O’Neil.
No. Those were false identities. Jess and Babette were spellbound. There had always been something vaguely mysterious about their young, moneyed neighbors.
“Marcia and I are living in the federal Witness Protection Program,” said Larry.
He explained that he had turned state’s evidence to convict some of his partners in the computer company in Philadelphia, so, for his own and his family’s protection, the government had given them new identities.
The Millers promised to keep their secret, and gladly agreed to stand as godparents for Tara. Marcia felt deep chagrin. It was the most calculated lie she had ever been party to in her life, and it made her skin crawl to see how easily it had come to Larry. He was delighted when the evening was through. They had pulled it off! Marcia felt sick to her stomach.
With all the confusion and household disruption of bringing home the new baby, Larry and Marcia wanted a special treat for Christopher on his third birthday. They invited the Millers’ little boy and threw a birthday party for Chris at Showbiz Pizza Place, a fun kiddie restaurant with a giant mechanized puppet show and lots of games and rides. They all sang when the Shobiz mascot, Billy-Bob the Bear, a cuddly costumed bear with oversized orange-and-yellow striped overalls, waddled out carrying a cake with white icing and three candles on top.
Marcia had been better than Larry about calling or writing home. She had written two letters to her mother, which were sent through the mail drop to the address of one of her mother’s friends. Larry had scanned the letters carefully to make sure they contained no clue to their whereabouts. After Tara was born, which occasioned the second letter, he had insisted they dress her in blue for the picture and tell Agnes that their new child was a boy. In that letter, Marcia had strongly urged her mother to keep silent about anything having to do with her or Larry. Marcia knew that the FBI was putting pressure on, and she knew her mother resented their leaving and wanted them back. She worried that, even though Agnes did not know where they were, she might cooperate with the FBI in trying to find them. So she wrote fervently to her mother, trying to emphasize the importance of her silence and patience.
Marcia wrote her mother for a third time in early June. She had snapshots of the baby to send. So with her rounded feminine script on stationery decorated in the upper left-hand corner with a rose, she composed a brief note to her mother.
Dear Mom,
Hi! I finally got my pictures back. Isn’t the baby cute? He’s doing OK now but at 2 wks he had a cold, then got a virus that lasted over a week. I had him in for all sorts of tests & then they finally decided it was a virus. The poor baby screamed for a week—everything’s fine now. Chris had a great birthday. We took him & his best friend to one of those pizza places like I used to go to at home with video games & rides & the bear brought out his birthday cake & sang him a song—he was thrilled! He loves this little boy from across the street who’s 4-and-a-half. They have so much fun together. They are out in the sandbox right now. I enrolled Chris in a nursery school for 2 mornings a wk starting in September. The place is so neat with lots of toys, puzzles, playdough, jungle gyms—I want to go too! . . . I am well. I still have 10 pounds to lose—but it’s coming off slowly & I’m still nursing the baby. Larry is doing great. We are very happy. We went to a barbeque at the neighbors on Memorial Day. They have four kids and the people next door came with their 3—so we all had fun. Chris is so happy here & he’s talking up a storm. . . . I’ll send you more pictures when I can. I hope you are happy & are taking care of yourself—we love you & are always thinking of you.
She signed off, “Love, Marcia.”
But before sending the letter, she and Larry learned more about what was happening back in Philadelphia.
At first, Ken Weidler was the only person besides Rusty Lavin whom Larry had trusted enough to telephone regularly since running away. But in spring Larry began to grow a little more bold. He placed a collect call to the New Jersey workplace of Marcia’s brother, Richard, who told Larry that Agnes and Ken Weidler seemed to be getting the most pressure from the FBI. Both were bitter about their predicament: Larry and Marcia hadn’t trusted them enough to confide where they were going, and the FBI refused to believe they didn’t know. Chuck Reed had been stopping by Agnes’s townhouse once or twice a week. He had gotten her to open up Larry’s house in Timber Lane so they could go through it without a search warrant. Marcia, who also spoke with her brother on the phone, was angry when she heard what her mother had done. She passed some harsh words to her mother through Richard, urging him to tell her how important it was to give the FBI no help at all.
In another call, this one to an old colleague at the Penn Dental School, Larry learned that his old partner had been in the school library checking over “demographics,” statistical studies indicating where there was a surplus or shortage of dentists. If Ken was looking at the charts, it most likely meant he was thinking about opening a new practice. Larry had left him with a thriving one, so why would he be shopping around?
After hearing what had been said about her mother, Marcia added a postscript as long as the original note. Her tone had shifted from the happy daughter reflecting on all’s well to a stern, urgent voice filled with the fear Larry’s occasional calls let into their idyllic family life:
Hi, again. Larry just spoke to our friend & I’m glad I didn’t mail this letter. I’m so sorry if I made you feel as though I didn’t trust you. The only information I get about you is secondhand & the way it sounded was the FBI was really pushing you &
that you were having a hard time dealing with it. So I felt I must keep saying to be careful what you say to the jerks & with what you have (letters, pictures) since you think they broke in once. I may have made my point too often & too strongly in my letters to you but please remember that our lives & the happiness of our kids is at stake & I cannot take chances. So please overlook any harsh words I may have used. Larry also felt that we can finally say that we have a daughter—I’m glad for you to know the truth so I can send you pictures of her as a girl—as usual, if you are ever asked the sex refuse to answer! I’m also sorry that Ken and Barb were offended by Larry not trusting Ken—again I wish everyone would realize that we have to protect ourselves first & worry about others’ feelings last. Our lawyer told us not to contact him so we didn’t. I’m glad you’re seeing them. I think of them often & hope that everything works out for them. Well, I hope I made you feel a little better—please still be careful. I know Ken was able to get a phone # to us so Larry could call him—please try to do the same through the same channel. I would really love to talk to you—it has been so long. Larry should call our friend two weeks from the last time—so see what you can do. Chris wants me to write a note to you—’Dear Grammy Mommy, Me got robots, toys, new house, me love you.’
He misses you & I do too.
Love,
Marcia
The questions raised about his best friend and former dental partner’s conduct haunted Larry enough that he skipped his next two scheduled monthly calls to Ken. In a previous call, months before, Larry had been warned by Tom Bergstrom not to phone Ken Weidler and David Ackerman. He told Tom that he didn’t believe Ken would ever betray him. There was something between him and Kenny that ran too deep for the government to penetrate. In fact, after skipping the two prearranged calls, Larry had second thoughts. If he couldn’t trust Ken, whom could he trust? Besides, curiosity was eating at him. Larry believed only he would be able to tell what was really going on with Kenny. And the only way to do that was to talk with him.
So Larry sent word through Richard of a time and place to contact Ken. Marcia was dead set against it. It was foolish to call in the first place, she argued, and even more foolish to call after they had been given cause to suspect that Ken was cooperating. For all they knew, the indirect information they were getting about Kenny might have been his way of warning them to keep away.
But Larry had made up his mind. He drove out to a nearby shopping mall. Marcia stayed in the van with Christopher and the baby. Larry promised to keep the call down to two minutes, which he felt would ensure that it could not be traced, and told Marcia to watch the digital clock on the dashboard and signal him when time was about up. It was a sunny, hot Saturday, June 8, 1985. In a hallway just inside the doors to the mall, where he could still see Marcia in the parking lot, Larry fed quarters into the pay phone and punched in the Philadelphia area code and number. The line was busy. Larry tried again. Again it was busy. So Larry walked back out to the car, waited another five minutes, and then tried again. Again, the phone was busy. Larry debated with himself, then tried one last time.
“Yo!” said Ken.
“Kenny,” said Larry.
“Oh, oh, Larry,” said Ken, pronouncing his friend’s name as a baby would, “Way-wee,” the way he always did when they were joking around. “I couldn’t believe it. This fuckin’ guy would not get off the phone.”
“I was just about to give up, man. Maybe you had somebody to see or you weren’t there or something. You fucked up—”
“Kenny here! Kenny was gonna go to the shore but Kenny didn’t go to the shore ’cause—”
“Sorry,” said Larry. “I didn’t know whether you would be working today or not.”
“Come on!” groaned Ken. Larry had always teased his friend about his lackadaisical work habits. “This is Saturday. What’s wrong with you?”
“Well, first of all, I want to tell you I’m sorry. You know, I heard that you told Marcia’s mom you thought I didn’t trust you and all that stuff.”
“Yeah?”
“So . . .”
“Well, she said the same thing.”
“Well, I don’t trust her,” said Larry, laughing. “I do now, but, you know, she’s not as smart. You know, she took him to my house.”
“You want to hear what the story was behind that? At least what she told me?”
“Yeah.”
“She said that Reed came to her door and said that he wanted her to take him up to the house. And she said, ’Well, I can’t do that,’ and that she would have to call Bergstrom. So she called Bergstrom and Bergstrom apparently said they’d either do it today or they would come back with an order, a court order for her to do it tomorrow.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” said Larry.
“So she wanted me to press upon you that she didn’t just, you know, go open the house up to him. She called the lawyer first and that’s what he told her to do.”
“Yeah. I see. That’s too bad. You know, Richard should have told me that.”
“Yeah,” said Ken.
“He should have told me that. He made it sound like . . . but, aw, I don’t want to waste too much time on the past. I’d like to hear what’s going on with you. But I’ll just tell you, the only reason I didn’t call you is I called Bergstrom one time, before this happened, you know”—Larry was referring to his flight—“and he had just talked to your guy. And he said, ’Just don’t talk to Weidler or Ackerman.’ He said, ’They’re under extreme pressure right now. . . . I’m telling you. Don’t talk to them.’ So I hear that, and then I call Joe. . . . He’s telling me that you’re, you’re in there looking at demographics. I’m there . . . well, why would he do that? And I said, ’I guess he’s looking for a new practice.’ And then he says, ’Well, I don’t really know.’ But then I’m thinking about it, well, jeez, it sounds like, you know, you’re under all this pressure, that you’re going to be moving practice, and, ah, so I just didn’t want to add any more temptation. That was my bottom line.”
“Yeah?” said Ken.
“I took this one little course and I found out they can tap a phone in two minutes. They can find out. You know how I found out? These numbers where people call for suicides. You know? If they hang up, they just drop the phone, that’s how long it takes them to find the place.”
“Oh, Jesus!”
“But, anyway, tell me what’s going on,” said Larry.
They discussed the dental practice. Ken had been having a hard time making a go of it without Larry. He had never been the one to keep books or deal with the women who worked as receptionists and hygienists. Larry had always taken care of that. And the “girls,” as they called them, had always liked Larry more than Ken. So it had been difficult, and Ken had been looking for a buyer to take over Larry’s patients and his own.
Then the conversation wandered. Larry told Ken about the new baby, about how she had been sick with a virus and how the doctors scared him and Marcia by ordering up a whole battery of tests that had all proved negative. He had recently taken Chris to his first visit with a dentist.
“It killed me,” said Larry. “He’s telling me he’s got some type of overbite. I’m there, ’Oh?’ I felt like saying, ’Is it a Class Two?’ You know?”
They talked about sports. Ken teased Larry about his facility for picking losers. Larry had picked the Miami Dolphins to beat the San Francisco 49ers in the Super Bowl, and the 49ers had won. And Larry had picked the Celtics to beat the Lakers in the NBA championship, and Boston had lost a game the night before.
Out in the car Marcia was signaling Larry that time was up, but he felt comfortable talking to Ken now, and had decided to take the risk. He waved back to Marcia, indicating that he was going to stay on the line. She scowled and just shook her head sadly.
Larry asked Ken how his legal situation was developing. Ken said he was definitely going to be charged for tax fraud, but he still might escape drug
charges. He told Larry that Mark Stewart had just been sentenced to four years.
“Oh,” said Larry.
Ken laughed. “I thought—”
Then Larry erupted in laughter.
“I thought you’d be interested in that,” said Ken.
Larry suggested that Ken give them everything he knew about Mark Stewart, but then realized most of what Ken knew was hearsay.
“Well, I can remember meeting him before the fire,” said Ken.
Larry reminded him of the meeting where Mark had said, “Just give me two more weeks.”
“Yeah . . . but that can’t be corroborated, right?” said Ken. “I mean, what if the boy [meaning David Ackerman] decided to say that, the same thing, too? . . . It looks like the boy’s got a problem. The boy doesn’t think he has a problem.”
“The bad thing about that is you, if you really push that [the meeting with Stewart], they can probably charge you with that, too.”
“Yeah.”
“At least, that’s my thought. . . . Even though it was vague . . . it looks like everyone conspired to do it then, and actually we had very little—”
“Input,” said Ken.
“Control,” said Larry. “It was just, we were listening to what he was going to do. We didn’t have much choice anyway.”
“Well, wasn’t one motive . . . to get you . . . the insurance settlement?”
“Right. Right. . . . You know, I just can’t believe the stupidity of it all. You know? Every month you get older you just think how you handled different things in your life and you just can’t believe them, you know?” Larry laughed wistfully.
“Yeah,” said Ken.
“So I gotta just think back like to fraternity days, how I would have handled things now, you know? It’s just, it’s just so different . . . but, so anyway.”
“So I don’t know what my exposure is,” said Ken.
“But they haven’t done any more, huh?”