by Ken Gross
Eddie Crimmins loved his daughter, but every time he looked at Missy he saw his wife. Missy was a golden child, one of those precious offspring who turns out to be everyone’s favorite. Her features, like Alice’s, were thin and finely drawn. And, like her mother, she was gifted with unbounded charm that would make perfect strangers want to hug her.
The father was drawn to his son—little Eddie with his thick, fumbling hands that matched his awkward, erratic personality. Little Eddie’s features might be coarse, but there was the unmistakable potential of strength about him. Like his father, Eddie had developed a kind of dogged loyalty; he would not let anyone near his sister. He hovered over her like an umbrella. Nina Schwartz, the neighbor across the mall, would remember that when her own son pulled some hair from one of Missy’s dolls, little Eddie came thundering to her rescue. Unafraid, he told the larger child: “Don’t you ever touch my Missy; don’t you ever touch my Missy.” Always it was “my Missy.”
The father had tried to introduce his son to a manly world, once taking him on a camping trip, leaving Missy behind because she was too young. But the separation was unbearable for little Eddie and they had cut short the trip to come home.
Alice understood her husband’s crude attempts to overcompensate for Missy’s dominance, but the problem was impossible. She favored Missy and would feel guilty about neglecting her son. She was determined that young Eddie would grow up different from his father—she told that to many people.
As the detectives were questioning the father about the death of his daughter, he was coming to a terrible realization. He told them how protective Eddie was about Missy. If anyone had tried to harm Missy, Eddie would not have quietly allowed it to happen. If someone had killed Missy, that someone would have found it necessary to kill little Eddie, too.
But there was no time for grief at the Fresh Meadows Precinct. Eddie’s story had to be tested again and again. There is simply no way to reconstruct stories except by picking them apart, bit by bit.
“Let’s hear again what you did yesterday, Eddie,” said Detective George Martin.
Eddie was off from work on Mondays and Tuesdays. He worked as a mechanic for TWA from 4:00 p.m. until midnight on other days. This Monday, after the two-week absence, he had taken his children to a park. They had got along well, he told detectives.
Tuesday, Eddie had played golf. He was not a particularly good golfer, but he found some solace in the long stretches of green and the occasional concentration. He had made a 7:00 a.m. appointment to play on a public course at Bethpage in Nassau County and had got up at 6:00 a.m. to keep it. Later in the day the links would be crowded and hot, and if he timed it right, he could catch the All-Star Game on the clubhouse television.
On July 13 he did not shoot even up to his usually mediocre game. Having seen the children again, he was brooding about the custody battle. Not even the long drives and hard slices could divert him.
After playing eighteen holes with a friend, Eddie drank three beers in the clubhouse and watched the baseball game on television. He was an ardent fan of the Mets and they were in the cellar of the ten-team National League, twenty games out of first place. But in his distraction he left before the game ended, probably around 2:00 p.m. (There was one curious coincidence: sitting at the bar after a strenuous eighteen holes of golf was John Kelly, a Brooklyn detective who specialized in murder cases. Neither man noticed the other, but they were destined to meet.)
When Eddie Crimmins left the golf course, he had a destination in mind. He had driven out to Nassau County that morning with another purpose in mind. He headed now for Huntington.
The house on Sandra Drive had a thick green lawn, a swimming pool shielded in the back, and was protected by two Doberman pinschers. The shrubs had been trimmed professionally. Like the man who lived there, the house was pampered and barbered to reflect a certain degree of achievement in life. But, like the man who lived there, it was overreaching. The house rested on the quicksand of impossible mortgages. The man who lived there was Joe Rorech, Alice’s sometime lover.
Eddie Crimmins drove by slowly. On a Tuesday afternoon in July the driveways along Sandra Drive all seemed to have built-in station wagons. The women of the houses drove the cars with vinyl wood paneling while their men were away in their summer suits and dark sedans. Eddie Crimmins was looking for a beat-up four-year-old Mercury convertible with a ripped top. He was not certain what he would do if he found it. Maybe just chalk it up as another point to bring out in court. Maybe just accept again that he had lost his wife.
But Alice’s car wasn’t there—she was taking it to Kissena Park with the children for a picnic. Reluctantly, Eddie Crimmins pulled out of Sandra Drive and headed back to the expressway.
He arrived home at 5:00 p.m.—the time that Alice was calling her attorney. In his room overlooking the Grand Central Parkway he could hear cars inching along during the rush hour. He said that he stayed there until eleven, watching television. Then he drove along Union Turnpike to a small stand near St. John’s University, bought a plain pizza and a large-sized bottle of Pepsi-Cola, and hurried home before his dinner cooled. Eddie Crimmins is a big man—an inch over six feet tall and weighing more than two hundred pounds—and has a large capacity. He finished most of the pizza.
But he was still restless. He drove back to Union Turnpike, a rutted east-west road running from Kew Gardens to the lip of Nassau County. He picked out one of the desultory bars sprinkled like lampposts along the way and sat drinking gin-and-tonics. That was unusual, for Eddie was a beer drinker. He did something else unusual. He made conversation with a bartender named Lou, who would remember the hulking customer who drank gin-and-tonics. There were one or two other patrons in the bar, but there was nothing else to distinguish the people or the place from a hundred other saloons and a thousand other nights.
The other patrons started home by 2:00 a.m. Eddie Crimmins, perhaps thinking of his empty furnished room, ordered another drink. He had his last round at 2:45. Then he did a very strange thing: he made the familiar twists and turns and found himself in the parking lot behind his wife’s bedroom window. He said that he saw light in her window and in the living room. And he sat there for a moment.
In his solitude, Eddie Crimmins had come there often. Sometimes he would park a few blocks away, in a place where Alice would be unlikely to spot his car; then he would sneak into the basement under her bedroom. He would sometimes sit there for hours, listening. He had installed a crude bugging device and could hear whatever went on in the bedroom.
Why did you do that? asked George Martin.
It was the custody thing, said Eddie. But it went beyond the custody battle. Putting the bug on her phone, the microphone in her bedroom, setting up the basement listening post—they were acts that Eddie Crimmins couldn’t fully understand himself. It was like poking a sore tooth. He couldn’t leave it alone.
Once, hearing Alice and a man in the middle of sex, Eddie ran out of the basement and burst into the bedroom. The man, Carl Andrade, fled naked out of the window to his car. Eddie, in the full throttle of anger, could be a frightening sight. Alice had to go out and give the man his clothing, after dressing herself. She was furious with Eddie. How dare he! They had a separation agreement. They would soon be divorced. He had no more rights.
But to Eddie, Alice was always his wife. He was a literal-minded Catholic who refused to recognize divorce. Alice was his wife, and he would sit in the basement listening to his wife’s infidelities, tormenting himself.
Eddie told the detectives that he stayed outside the window on the morning of July 14 for a few moments, saw her car and the lights, and left. He said he went home and called up Alice and talked about the maid. Then, he said, he watched a movie on television, read, and fell asleep by 4:00 a.m.
A detective who checked out Eddie’s story was bothered by one point Eddie said he had watched a particular movie after coming home from his wife’s apartment. But the CBS programmin
g department said the movie had been on much earlier.
9
Dr. Richard Grimes waited for Missy Crimmins at Queens General Hospital. She was placed on a cold slab in the basement morgue—still wearing the faded white undershirt, yellow panties, and the pajama noose around her neck. Even in death she was a lovely child. Grimes dictated his notes to an assistant—a mixture of his initial findings at the lot and later details from the hospital.
Examination disclosed . . . no gross evidence of trauma to the ano-genital area. However, the rectal sphincter gapes rather widely; no definite tear of the anal mucosa is apparent. There is no blood or other secretion on the panties. Several superficial abrasions noted over the right popliteal space and over the posterior aspect of the right calf. The fingers . . . show no evidence of injury. . . . The deposits of insect eggs are not only over the eyes but are also over the left side of the forehead and in the folds of the tie. . . . There were a couple of hairs found on the inner aspect of each thigh. On the medial aspect of both upper thighs were found several fibers and several hairs; fibers were reddish; hairs appear brown; one blond hair was found. . . .
So Missy Crimmins died without much of a struggle; otherwise the fingernails would have shown something. She had been strangled or smothered—helpless or impotent. There were no signs of bruises or resistance, only the normal bumps of childhood play. Had Missy been sexually molested? The evidence pointed against it, but not conclusively—things never are conclusive along that line. “Rectal sphincter gapes rather widely. . . . There were a couple of hairs found on the inner aspect of each thigh. . . .”
In death, especially violent death, the body convulses in protest. The muscles make one last great strain—like a final sigh. The brown hairs matched those of the family dog, Brandy. The fibers were identical to the thread of a dress Missy wore. There were no answers, no conclusions, no compelling leads in the preliminary autopsy.
Grimes’ immediate task was to put brackets around the time and circumstances of Missy’s death for the police. He telephoned Sergeant Gruenthal at the Fresh Meadows station and said that Missy appeared to have been strangled and had been dead from six to eighteen hours when she was found.
There were techniques for fixing the time of death with greater precision—examination of internal organs, chemical tests. The body would be shipped to New York City, where the Chief Medical Examiner, Dr. Milton Helpern, a man with a worldwide reputation in forensic pathology, would supervise the autopsy. And then there would emerge a dispute about crucial details. At first Dr. Helpern would take the position that there was no way of telling for certain whether Missy died before midnight. Later, after it became apparent that there was no other evidence against Alice Crimmins, after a long and arduous campaign by the District Attorney to attack Alice’s contention that she had seen the children alive at midnight, Helpern would change his story.
10
The discovery of Missy’s body did not interrupt the world’s business. It was not a historic milestone, like the concurrent death of Adlai Stevenson. And yet it was a cosmic event, evoking a terrible vulnerability—a reminder of some subsurface horror lurking beneath mannered surfaces.
Minnie Feldman ran up and down Jewel Avenue, frantically calling her three children. They had been spectators at Jewel Avenue and Main Street, watching the unfolding drama. Saul, the oldest, was nine; Jeremy was seven, and he held the hand of his sister, Amy, five.
Mrs. Feldman was half mad with worry. The sirens, the helicopters, the armies of police had driven her near to hysteria. When she finally found the children, she slapped Saul, the oldest, whom she held responsible. “Where were you?” she said angrily.
“We were just watching,” he replied petulantly.
Minnie Feldman was sorry. She realized that she had been wrong to slap her son. It was because of the awful fear, and the vision of his body lying in a field covered with flies.
After the news had raced around the city, people tried to reassure themselves about their own families. This impulse was evident during the great blackout, after assassinations; citizens reached for telephones and the lines became swamped. The lines to Queens on that Wednesday were overburdened.
“Did you hear about it?” asked Raymond Bonelli, an import clerk in Manhattan. He was talking to his wife, Kate, in Kew Gardens. It had taken him forty-five minutes to get through. Kate had already spoken to her mother and two girlfriends and she had three other friends to call and begin by saying, “Did you hear?”
“It’s terrible,” said Kate Bonelli. “I’m not letting the kids out of the house.”
From her window she watched police detachments sweeping through the bulrushes down by the subway-train yards near Flushing Meadow Park—a frightening place where she imagined that all sorts of vice took place after dark. Twice, uniformed policemen had knocked on her door and showed her pictures of the missing children. The first time the officers had had pictures of Eddie and Missy. The second time they handed her only a picture of Eddie.
Nick Farina felt as if he had just been reactivated into the Army. In a sense, he had. Farina had just become a detective, but on July 14 the city was short of manpower and so he was called back into uniform. He was permanently assigned as a plainclothes detective in the 107th Squad, the Fresh Meadows Precinct. Early on July 14 he squirmed back into uniform and drove to an unfamiliar precinct in Richmond Hill. It was the first time he had worn the uniform since being appointed a plainclothesman two years earlier, and he itched in discomfort.
As he drove from his Nassau County home, Farina flicked on the car radio. The music was interrupted every half-hour by an annoying roundup of news. Farina, still piqued about being put back into uniform, was only half listening as the radio announcer came on. The words flickered at his attention like a feather.
“A four-year-old Queens girl was found dead today . . .”
The words tickled his professional interest. Homicide? What precinct?
“. . . massive police hunt continues in the Kew Gardens section of the borough for her five-year-old brother, Eddie Crimmins . . .”
The bulletin launched Farina’s eyebrows.
“. . . the body of little Alice Crimmins, known as Missy, was found in a vacant lot . . .”
Farina continued to drive to the assigned precinct in Richmond Hill in a daze. He had more than a professional interest in the case. He was one of Alice Crimmins’ boyfriends. As he drove, he kept thinking of the delightful children—Missy clutching a doll and sitting on his lap and teasing her brother, Eddie, while Nick Farina waited on the couch for their mother.
When he reached the Richmond Hill station, Farina called his home precinct in Fresh Meadows, certain he would become an important part of the case. He was excited when he got the clerical man on the phone, but the man said everyone was busy—Jones was on vacation, Gruenthal was handling things, and everything seemed to be under control.
“Look, Nick, Piering caught the case,” said the clerical man. “You know, he stands to make second on this.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m not trying to be a hero, I just thought that I could help, you know, since I know the broad and all. She might talk to me. I could help. I know the broad, you know? I really know her.”
“I’ll tell him, Nick. But, you know, Jerry stands to make second on this and how’s it going to look?”
Farina couldn’t believe it. He was angry. He gave the clerical man the telephone number of the booth he was calling from. He said he’d wait around for a call. Otherwise they would be able to reach him through the Richmond Hill Precinct.
But no one called Farina back. In his ill-fitting uniform he patrolled the unfamiliar streets of Richmond Hill while Jerry Piering—and a score of other detectives—tried to pry information out of Alice Crimmins, by now a reluctant witness.
11
The lines in her face had been driven deep into an expression of permanent anguish. Alice Burke had spent a lifetime in a hope
less Jansenist reach toward grace. The tracks of her disappointments etched a frown.
Unflinching, she stood outside Apartment 1-D. Her fingers dug into the arm of her son, John. He told the uniformed policeman at the door that he was Alice Crimmins’ brother and the woman shivering in the summer heat beside him was her mother.
“Wait a minute,” said the policeman, closing the door behind him.
Alice Burke had come to comfort her daughter in their mutual agony. It was no small gesture.
They had never got along, mother and daughter. There were too many unkept promises between them.
The mother, born in County Limerick in 1909, was taught unquestioning obedience as a child. She was drilled to believe that a woman suffered almost anything from the men in her life—her father and later her husband—and kept her feelings locked inside. As a child in Ireland she had obeyed her father. As a wife in America she had obeyed her husband. It was the natural order of things in her world. When she had a daughter, there were unspoken expectations. Alice Burke named her Alice. But she was bewildered by the untamed child who obeyed nothing but her emotions.
The daughter suffered her own disappointments. She could never explain them to her mother. Somehow young Alice kept sliding away from her mother’s values and her mother’s church. She could never talk about her exploding dreams to a mother whose soul was weighed down by the constant dread of damnation. Alice would call her mother “cold” and bitterly fold her impacted ambitions inward. She would suffer in silence. She would marry Eddie Crimmins to shake off her mother’s name—and all the strangling family demands.
The family abyss was immediately forgotten in the face of the disappearance of the children. Now mother and daughter had something to share, something they could both understand. Alice Burke understood the loss of a child.