by Ken Gross
When Jerry Piering arrived at 11:00 a.m., he found precinct cars parked at random angles all around the mall, as if to punctuate the seriousness of the situation. Small knots of confused residents—men without socks; women in curlers and pinched faces, arms folded protectively across their chests in poses familiar to fearful tragedy—crisscrossed the malls without apparent pattern. No one wanted to stand still. Uniformed policemen moved briskly in and out of buildings, making basement-to-roof searches. Jerry Piering, the first detective to arrive on the scene, was struck by a curious uncertainty about all the activity. The search was halting because Eddie and Alice Crimmins were still trying to convince the police that their children were indeed missing—that they hadn’t hidden them from each other. It was a story never accepted by everyone.
3
“Eddie! Missy! Can you hear us?”
The police sound trucks, starting from 72nd Drive, made wider and wider circles, like ripples in a pond.
“Eddie! Missy! If you can hear this, come out onto the street!”
The search was spreading. It had started in the 107th Precinct in Fresh Meadows and traveled like rumor toward Flushing. Now the commanders were arriving—men with stars on their shoulders, flanked by captains and lieutenants, chauffeured by plainclothes detectives. As their braided caps bobbed through the collecting crowds, a stiffening of attention made itself felt among the lower grades of police. The senior police officials were accompanied by men with briefcases—inside the briefcases were contingency plans for drawing reserve manpower from spare units around the city.
In the newsrooms around the city, the police reporters recognized that this was an event rich in danger and universal appeal. Without much discussion or reflection, the reporters headed for Queens.
A green flag had been planted outside the entrance of 150-22 72nd Drive, where Apartment 1-D had been isolated by uniformed policemen. Alice Crimmins’ apartment had become a police command post. Next door, Mrs. Robert Yoquinto was conscripted to brew vats of coffee to fuel the police. It was a welcome diversion for her. She didn’t want to be helpless and hand-wringing. Making coffee and sandwiches, she could feel that she was being useful. Mrs. Yoquinto hoped to bring coffee and sandwiches to Alice Crimmins, but her neighbor was blockaded behind a wall of frantic activity.
The press photographers were always ahead of the reporters. Their quick arrival was no trick. Tommy Gallagher was a staff photographer for the Daily News, which kept a dozen radio cars scattered around the city for just such emergencies. Often Gallagher would arrive before reinforcements and find himself pinned down under murderous crossfire. A veteran of fifteen years with the Daily News, Gallagher was pulled off of his regular assignment—which was the tedious stakeout at the World’s Fair, waiting for some pseudo-event such as a press agent causing a young starlet to fall into a fountain.
Gallagher lugged his heavy camera case out of his gray radio cruiser and began looking around to see how to best “cover” the disappearance of two small children. It was a delicate operation. The police had very tight limits in such situations. If the children were recovered quickly, the police would be grateful for a front-page picture of the rescuing officers and the two children wearing the cops’ hats. But if the situation was truly serious, then Gallagher would have to contend with a layer of hostility. The higher brass might spot a stray photographer and tell the nearest man in uniform to “get that guy out of here.” Journalists were always considered a nuisance by police during a crisis. It was almost as if the reporters’ and photographers’ presence was a kind of challenge.
Gallagher’s first thought was to shoot some establishing pictures—a distraught neighbor or an anxious father or, ideally, a tearful mother. Instinctively, he knew that the best picture, under the circumstances, would be that of the mother of the two missing children. People could identify with her and he was in the business of vibrating nerves. If the tearful mother was a cliché, the Daily News was not in the business of “new journalism.” Its readers operated lathes and rode the subway and looked for predictable reactions. They had a predictable vision of how a mother who lost her two children was supposed to react, and it would tear at something fundamental if they couldn’t find it. Newspaper photographers are supposed to sense and capture in a single frame the essence of any story—a politician loses an election and he looks sad; the temperature climbs past 100 and people walk around without coats and with their neckties undone; Miss America is crowned, overcome with joy. . . .
And Alice Crimmins should be sobbing for her missing children. But she was not available for Tommy Gallagher. She was inside Apartment 1-D, telling a story she would repeat a thousand times.
Gallagher was not dismayed. A photographer learns early that if he is blocked from the ideal shot, he takes what he can. It’s called “getting it in the bag.”
Click! A picture of the hectic arrival and departure of grim detectives, shields hanging from their breast pockets, making cellar-to-roof searches.
Click! A picture of neighbors, caught in half-surprised concern; even in the worst circumstances, one can’t help smiling at the camera as if some voice in the ear has whispered “Cheese.”
Click! A picture of two uniformed patrolmen sitting in their cruiser, studying photographs of the missing children—the faces of the policemen are tense.
Click! A wide, long-distance shot of the area, revealing its nature—the low garden-apartment buildings with chipped, naked brick. Later, police photographers would take similar pictures to show the density of the hedges, the conditions of lighting, the positions of doors and parking area. Gallagher’s pictures would be printed in gray in the newspaper, but even the police color photographs could not add much hue to the dreary landscape.
Click! A picture of the empty window in the children’s room. This was perhaps the most evocative photograph Gallagher would take—the unspoken absence of the two children crying out at the viewer. (That photograph would provide an important record, since it would show the condition of the window—without the screen, open to a seventy-five-degree angle, and with a porter’s stroller underneath. Inexplicably, police photographers neglected to shoot the pictures Gallagher took.)
Jerry Piering wanted this case. He wanted it from the first with a kind of high-school yearning. When he had telephoned the precinct, he had spoken to Detective Sergeant Kurt Gruenthal, who was in temporary command of the 107th Squad Detectives while Lieutenant Ray Jones was on vacation. Gruenthal’s reaction to the bulletin was phlegmatic:
“It’s a grounder.”
“Listen,” said Piering with superior instinct, “I’ve got kids and what worries me is the age.”
“OK,” said Gruenthal with a shrug, “if you want it, take it.”
Piering’s instinct told him immediately that this was a detective case. When he first arrived on the scene, he was overshadowed by the uniformed forces, for whom it seemed an appropriate job. The case did not require elaborate detection—merely careful sweeps of the neighborhood. The uniformed men were blocking out the standard search techniques, avoiding duplication. They saturated the neighborhood with teams who went from door to door, house to house. They were bound to find Eddie and Missy with shoe leather, not brilliant detective work.
But Jerry Piering never believed it. Of course he wanted to make second-grade detective, and he knew that promotions within the detective command were propelled by important cases, good instincts, and lucky hunches. This time Piering’s instinct told him that the uniformed men were looking in the wrong place. Piering had staked out the one place where the uniformed men were not allowed—inside the head of Alice Crimmins. He would never look anywhere else.
Piering was new to the job, but he was intent on being thorough. He went through Apartment 1-D, treating it as evidence. In the crowded, frantic confusion of the morning Jerry Piering would note the conditions and contents of each room. And he began to form hard opinions. There were a dozen empty liquor bottles in
the garbage. Alice would explain that she had been in the middle of cleaning the apartment. She had been told by an attorney to expect an inspection visit from a court agency in connection with the custody suit. And so she had been painting the foyer and cleaning up. Getting rid of the liquor bottles was part of cleaning up. She had wanted nothing to suggest she was an unfit mother. Piering noted the bottles and the explanation, but he did not like this woman in the tight toreador slacks and thick makeup.
Patrolman Mike Clifford had already taken Piering aside and explained the complication—husband and wife were separated and in the middle of a custody fight. Clifford showed Piering the hook-and-eye latch on the door to the children’s room.
“What’s that doing there?” Piering asked Alice Crimmins.
“I had to put that up because Eddie would sneak out of bed and raid the refrigerator,” she explained. “He’d make himself sick.”
In his hand Piering held a black address book that Alice had dropped outside; it had been part of a key-holder attachment. The names of men outnumbered names of women by four to one. He didn’t like Alice’s explanation about the lock on the children’s door. He saw it as something sinister, rather than as a mother’s attempt to prevent a son from overeating.
From the first confrontation there was an instant chemical reaction between Jerry Piering and Alice Crimmins, and it was not affection. Piering had the reputation among his brother officers of being something of a martinet. He was only just over the height requirement to become a policeman, and some detectives who worked with him said his size caused a kind of gruff assertiveness, an inability to admit mistakes. There was, they said, a harshness that would have been tempered by someone more confident of himself.
Other detectives found it difficult to warm up to Piering. He would not drink on duty, although he would not turn in his brother officers who did. Perhaps because of his height complex, his first reaction was always to overpower a suspect. So the tactic he employed with Alice Crimmins was to be tough. And Alice Crimmins flinched.
“From the first minute, I never had the feeling that they”—the police, or, more precisely, Detective Jerry Piering—“were interested in finding my children,” she would recall later. “I got angry.”
Detective George Martin flashed his gold shield and rode the bus across Jewel Avenue to Kew Gardens, still annoyed by his partner’s overeagerness. He had been left without the radio car, which, as senior partner, he was entitled to. His brooding was interrupted by the sudden whoosh of a helicopter. Through the bus window he could see that it was a police helicopter and was executing an intricate grid search—hovering, plunging down, then sucking itself up again for height, like a gull working to spot a fish. And George Martin, with a sinking feeling, could hear the police sound trucks crying for the two missing children.
One helicopter was running at rooftop level when Martin left the bus at 150th and Union Turnpike near Main Street. He had been going to meet Piering primarily to retrieve the car and gloat in his senior wisdom. But now he felt like a truant. Hundreds of cops were running communications trucks through the streets; they were looking on rooftops and watertowers for the children.
“Holy Christ!” thought Martin with a jolt. “This is for real.”
Alice and Eddie Crimmins were sitting frozen on the couch in the living room of the apartment when Martin arrived. Jerry Piering was on an easy chair.
“You know, if you know something, if either of you are hiding something, you should tell me now. Don’t let this thing go too far!”
Eddie would look at Alice . . . Alice would look at Eddie . . . Piering would study them both, but nothing broke. “Is there someone who has a grudge against you?”
“We divide them up,” whispered Piering to Martin after filling him in. “You take Eddie. I’ll take the bitch.”
There was a brief interruption as Eddie was rushed to the 110th Precinct; a young girl had been found and there was a flurry of hope that it was Missy. The girl was ten years old, however, and bore no resemblance to Missy. Still, Eddie walked over to her and touched her before he said it wasn’t his daughter.
Jerry Piering took Alice into her bedroom. George Martin was slipping into a depression. Alice’s room was air-conditioned. Martin and Eddie Crimmins stood in the superheated children’s room.
The case had eluded Martin, but he was an old professional. In the summer of 1965 he was forty-seven years old and had more than two years to go before retirement. Like many of the other detectives who would be involved in the case, Martin was a product of the parochial schools of New York City. His father had been a pharmacist, broken during the Great Depression. Martin vividly remembers standing in the street with his father when the family store went bankrupt. His father pointed to the man directing traffic and said: “He’s got more job security than I’ll ever have . . . with all my education.” That was when George Martin decided to become a cop.
He and Eddie Crimmins stood awkwardly in the center of the children’s bedroom. Neither man seemed to want to touch anything. It was as if the room itself were stricken.
“What do you think, Eddie?”
Eddie shrugged. Then he looked at the open window without the screen. “That must be how they got in,” he said.
Over the years Martin had developed a flexible rapport for dealing with people. He had spent World War II as a cook in the Coast Guard, and in questioning people he would divert their guard with his rambling anecdotes—earthy and rich in inelegant detail (“It was so hot on that ship that the sweat ran down between the cheeks of your ass and you could mop the floor with it”). If Martin had a strength, it was an ability to connect with a guy like Eddie Crimmins, an airplane mechanic who worked with his hands and spent time in neighborhood bars, showing the first signs of a beer paunch. They spoke to each other in short jabs.
“Whaddya think, Eddie?”
“I dunno.”
“You think she hid ’em on you?”
“Maybe, but I don’t think so.”
Both men looked around the room. The beds had been slept in. The window was open. The screen was off, lying outside on the ground. But there were no signs of a struggle. As they looked, each man was aware, although neither of them spoke of it, that the thing they were really looking for was blood.
Jerry Piering stood while Alice Crimmins sat on her bed. Piering wanted to emphasize the formality of the relationship and so he braced in a kind of attention. The distance between them was more than space. It never crossed his mind to put her at ease, to comfort her.
Alice was conscious of the buzz of the air-conditioner. Her legs were like rubber. The man standing over her couldn’t keep the cutting edge out of his voice. It was strange. Usually she would dismiss such a man with the flick of an eyebrow, but now she was obliged to submit to him.
“Yesterday,” he was saying. He wanted to know what she had done yesterday. It was hard for her to answer. She had to pull herself away from the dreadful possibilities of today.
“We went to the park yesterday,” she said. “We had a picnic.”
Detective Jerry Piering wrote on Form UF-16, his field memo book. He was all business, functioning, creating a record.
“We went on a picnic to Kissena Park yesterday afternoon,” said Alice Crimmins.
“What time?” asked Piering.
“Oh, I guess it was about two-thirty.”
July 13 had been a perfect day for a picnic, even if Alice Crimmins’ days did start a little late. She was a night person who spent long tracts of time in the bars and restaurants of Long Island. If she awoke before noon, there usually had to be a reason. The children learned patience, or were taken care of by one of Alice’s helpers.
On that Tuesday she had piled the children into the front seat of her four-year-old Mercury convertible and driven six blocks to the park. They had taken along meatball sandwiches and soda, and the children were too impatient to wait to eat. Little Eddie had gone down the
slide again and again. Alice had pushed Missy on the swings until she got tired. Then she had sat with other mothers, listening halfheartedly to this one’s grief with a mother-in-law; to someone else’s dinner coup. It was comfortable and lazy, sitting in the shade, watching the children run out of energy.
Jerry Piering jotted it down, omitting the parts that had no business in a police narrative. He was only interested in the parts he could check.
Alice remembered leaving the park at about 4:30. She could pinpoint the time because she had to stop at a comer telephone booth to call her attorney. She knew he might not be there after 5, so she made certain to leave by 4:30. The telephone call was to Michael LaPenna, the attorney representing her in the custody suit. LaPenna was busy. He told Alice to call back later, he would be working late.
“Whatdja do then?”
“We came home. Oh, I picked up some things for dinner first.”
Alice said she’d stopped in a neighborhood delicatessen and bought a package of frozen food, a can of string beans, and a bottle of soda. Her purchases in the delicatessen were always modest and spur-of-the-moment. She enjoyed cooking, but often she was carried away by the whim of a summer afternoon and would be forced to conjure meals on the run. She said she had bought frozen veal. At the time it would seem a trifle, perhaps not worth noting. Later a dispute would rage over whether it was in fact frozen veal or frozen manicotti.
When Alice and the children reached home, a few neighbors saw them walking from the car to the apartment. Later, people would remember Alice walking with the brown grocery bag while the children skipped carefree ahead.
Alice left the children outside to play while she went in to call LaPenna. Piering wanted every detail, precise times. Why was all this necessary? Alice wanted to know. What has this to do with the disappearance? Why wasn’t he outside looking?
“It’s just routine,” said Piering.
Alice punched out cigarettes one after the other. OK. OK. She understood. Her nerves were on the ragged edge of hysteria, but she understood. She went on with the narrative. She talked to LaPenna about the custody case, which was scheduled to come up for a hearing in a week. Alice had learned that a former maid was going to testify against her and she was worried. The maid, Evelyn Linder Atkins, claimed that Alice owed her six hundred dollars, but Alice said that was nonsense. The maid had hinted that if she got her money she wouldn’t be available to testify, said Alice. Alice Crimmins was not the sort of person who would tolerate a shakedown. It was just another messy detail, said Alice, shaking her head.