by Ken Gross
“You can’t see her now,” said Detective William Corbett.
“Where’s Eddie?” asked John Burke.
“He’s at the station house,” replied Corbett.
“Where’s that?”
The Fresh Meadows Precinct headquarters looked more like a heating plant to service the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company’s garden-apartment complex than a New York City police precinct. The flat brick building was covered with ivy and surrounded by shrubs, blending softly into the background.
Shortly after 7:00 p.m. John Burke and his mother stood before the high magistrate’s desk asking if they could see Eddie Crimmins. The man behind the desk was sympathetic, but said they would have to wait. It was awkward. Outside, reporters and photographers were clustering to pounce on anyone connected with the case. Like empty shell casings marking a battle, used coffee containers and cigarette stubs accumulated outside the station house. The detectives, meanwhile, never stopped. The uniformed men turned out for a change in shifts. And Alice and John Burke felt naked as they sensed the eyes of the policemen and saw the whispering just out of earshot.
The afternoon was a blur. There were stark moments, however, that would stand out. Alice Crimmins remembers clearly the demarcation between the time she was treated with some tenderness and the moment she became a murder suspect. She was in her bedroom with Detectives Jerry Piering and Bill Corbett. They had been circling, suggesting but never actually saying that she was a suspect. Piering had been clumsy. Corbett fancied himself subtle.
“Alice, would you like a priest?” asked Corbett.
She shook her head no.
“You know,” began Corbett, “sometimes a mother can hurt her own child accidentally.”
Corbett spoke softly. He told Alice that he understood things. He had taken a few psychology courses in college. He used the word “hurt” to take the sting out of what he was suggesting.
“Sometimes an accident can happen. It can happen to anyone.”
“I didn’t kill Missy.” Her voice was a razor blade.
“Look, Alice,” said Piering, “this thing, you know, you can’t shock us. We’ve seen it all. Why don’t you let us get you a priest?”
She didn’t want a priest.
Every so often the door to the bedroom would open. A high-ranking officer would whisper to Piering or Corbett and leave. And then Alice Crimmins was jolted into the full reality of her situation. At one point in the afternoon, when she looked through the open door, she saw a policewoman.
Eddie Crimmins, meanwhile, was undergoing a relentless interrogation.
“One of you two did it,” said George Martin in the room inside the detective squad complex of the Fresh Meadows Precinct. “If you didn’t do it she did. Or maybe you did it together?”
“I swear on my children . . . ,” he said, then choked on the words.
The telephone in Alice’s apartment never stopped. The calls were brief. The policewoman who answered explained that the telephone had to be kept free in case someone wanted to ransom the child who was still missing. Friends of Alice and Eddie called with offers of help.
Michael LaPenna called after Alice failed to keep her appointment to discuss the custody suit. John Burke phoned LaPenna back and told him he might be needed. LaPenna arrived at the apartment in the afternoon, and the police led him into Alice’s bedroom. Her eyes were red and sore.
“Could you leave us alone?”
Corbett and Piering stepped outside.
“What happened, Alice?”
She looked at him hard. He had been briefed by the detectives and now he, too, was suggesting she had had something to do with Missy’s death.
“Do you know what happened?” LaPenna asked.
“All I know is when I woke up the kids were gone,” she said.
“Did you have anything to do with this?”
“No!” she cried.
She went to the Fresh Meadows Precinct with LaPenna. It was still light out and Alice remembered watching from the station window as night fell. They led her into the detective lieutenant’s office and sat her behind the desk. They left her alone for a few moments—to think about all the dreadful possibilities, to feel the great weight of authority, to worry about her dead daughter and missing son. It was at the precinct house that Alice began to think that she needed additional legal advice. Michael LaPenna might be competent to handle a simple custody case, but Alice thought that he was over his head in this situation. She didn’t like the way he kept deferring to the detectives. Everyone seemed preoccupied, including LaPenna, and Alice began to feel frantic.
“I want to make a telephone call,” she told Deputy Inspector Thomas McGuire, detective commander of Queens.
She wanted to reach City Council President Paul Screvane. If the police had taken the trouble, they might have discovered at this stage of the case that Alice Crimmins knew Screvane. The threads were right in front of them. Michael LaPenna had been hired through Tony Grace, the Bronx contractor. Grace had important city contracts, and he counted Paul Screvane—once the city’s Sanitation Commissioner—as a friend. Screvane had been with Alice Crimmins socially. As had the Mayor, Robert Wagner. She didn’t expect that Wagner would remember her name; their encounters had been brief and almost anonymous. She dialed one of Screvane’s aides, who said he would pass along the message. But Paul Screvane was the leading Democratic candidate for Mayor of New York and if he were linked to this particular woman—no matter how harmlessly—it would be political disaster. The telephone call was never returned.
As it grew dark, the lights went on at the World’s Fair. Cars hurried down Main Street. People were coming home from work or heading for an evening of dancing and Belgian waffles at the Fair.
Two-man police teams, meanwhile, were going from door to door, hoping to catch a clue from someone who had been at work or out shopping earlier. Across the mall and one block east from Alice’s apartment, two uniformed men were canvassing 72-21 153rd Street. The business became ponderously routine. They would show the pictures of the children, wait while the tenants stared and clucked at how tragic the situation was. And then the residents would hand back the pictures and say that they knew nothing, had seen nothing.
In Apartment 3-A a nervous woman with fluttering hands and an inappropriate smile shook her head even before she looked at the pictures. She said she hadn’t seen or heard anything. In fact Sophie Earomirski was convinced she had seen and heard something very significant, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell the policemen. Sophie had a reputation among her neighbors for exaggeration. There was, for example, the time she had sworn that a yellow mouse ran up her arm at the World’s Fair. And the times she had had to be hospitalized for her “nervousness.” She didn’t want to appear a fool again. So Sophie Earomirski shook her head and said she had seen nothing and heard nothing.
12
“I see something very specific when you mention welfare. I see a picture. I see half-naked kids on a tenement stoop. The mother is drunk and there’s no father around. It’s a very frightening picture to me.”
—ONE OF THE DETECTIVES ON THE CRIMMINS CASE
The 102nd Precinct headquarters is in Richmond Hill in central Queens. It is an old building and the staircase leading up to the divisional detective command post creaks under the weight of almost a century of crime. The old-timers said you could read it all in the field reports of crime filed on the second floor of the 102nd—that the change from rural tranquility to urban terror was recorded there as on a Rosetta stone.
The old-timers suffered lingering regret at the differences. The burglaries were inexplicably crueler. Instead of clean professional break-ins, homes were sometimes damaged pointlessly. Instead of the occasional teenage drinking excess, kids were shooting dope. Family fights were more savage and often irreparable.
Instead of neighborhoods stitched together by one-family homes, cheap apartment houses were sprouting like blisters. People who
lived in the apartments were transients—strangers who were careless about the tissue of community.
The reports would come into the 102nd from the various precincts of Queens and the men sifting through them became like Regular Army soldiers trying to grapple with an elusive guerrilla enemy. They could confront the surface crime—the rapes or murders or burglaries—but, like Jerry Piering, most detectives had come to believe that the crime was only a surface symptom. Somehow, in the mid-1960s, Queens had lost its adhesion. The shared values and beliefs and standards had become unstuck. The old-timers would tell you what was wrong. They would spit out the “problems” like a bad taste: “Welfare.” “Abortion.” “Divorce.”
Bernie Jacobs climbed the old staircase inside the 102nd shortly before 5:00 p.m. on July 14. Technically, he was about to take charge of the Alice Crimmins case. In the procedural charts of the New York City Police Department, the lines of authority are as precisely drawn as a pyramid. A detective is responsible to his squad commander, who is responsible to the division commander, who is responsible to the borough commander, who is responsible to the Chief of Detectives, who is responsible to the Police Commissioner, who is responsible to the Mayor. It is all very neat on paper. Reality is a little sloppier. Politics and ambition blur the lines of the chain of command. The skin of a line police officer is as fragile as an eggshell. The Mayor can rage against high police commanders, who serve at his pleasure. But a detective is cushioned by fraternal and professional organizations. If a Mayor reached down to a common detective, the shriek of politics would explode. In reality, the pyramid is tender.
Jacobs understood situational protocol. A New York City policeman for twenty-two years, he had not become a detective lieutenant by mashing toes. The Police Department was an agency dominated by Irish Catholics. By tradition and inertia, Irish Catholics floated into the choice assignments—such as the detective division. This case, in which Irish Catholic morality was to play a crucial role, Bernie Jacobs tactfully left in the hands of Jerry Piering. After he had checked in at his home precinct and driven over to Kew Gardens Hills, Jacobs was assured by Piering that he had things “under control.” Jacobs was not a blundering presence, but something was bothering him. He didn’t like this thing being conducted in Alice Crimmins’ apartment.
Jacobs talked to some of the other commanders. They, too, wanted to take Alice to what they euphemistically called “our environment,” meaning the precinct house. They felt more comfortable surrounded by communications and stark green walls. Jacobs did not feel compelled to press the issue. For one thing, his boss was on the scene. By the sheer whim of the rotational chart, Jacobs had become detective commander of Queens at 5:00 p.m. But Deputy Inspector Thomas McGuire, the detective commander of Queens, had not gone home at 5:00 p.m. McGuire, a short, balding man with thick glasses, was prowling the Crimmins apartment, his inspector’s shield flopping out of his breast pocket. He, too, wanted Alice to be taken to “our environment,” but Piering was reluctant to break the mood. Every so often Piering would brief McGuire and Jacobs.
If Jacobs was popular among his brother officers, McGuire was somewhat aloof. An attorney, he did not talk in police jargon. The cops under him said he spoke with a Boston accent, but it was simply his education washing his speech.
By mid-afternoon Jacobs and McGuire had managed to convince everyone that Alice would be easier to handle at the 107th. Just before they left, there was a telephone call which the police answered. One of them handed the phone to Alice. It was Joe Rorech. “I can’t talk to you now,” she said. “The children are missing and the police are here. I have to keep the telephone open.”
As she sat in the lieutenant’s office of the 107th Precinct, Alice Crimmins had time to reflect on the frantic hours. She had been questioned again and again. Each time the tone of the questions had got tougher.
“Piering was very rough with me from the beginning,” she would recall later. “He was very rough. They brought me back into the children’s room and kept asking me what was missing. The only thing I could find was the blanket off my son’s bed. It was blue plaid. All the slippers and the shoes that the children owned were in the apartment.”
From time to time they had left Alice and Eddie alone in the children’s bedroom. The associations and emptiness were extraordinarily painful.
“Then Piering came back into the house after having gone out to my car; he came back with a blue blanket and threw the blanket into my face and said, ‘What were you doing with this in your car?’”
It was the blanket she had used for the picnic in Kissena Park. She had spread it on the grass when she and the children ate meatball heroes and drank soft drinks.
The “nastiness” did not soften at the precinct. There McGuire seemed obsessed with her sex life, she recalled. While the detectives were questioning her, Alice was thinking of the dead body of her daughter.
“I don’t remember if they uncovered the body or if it just wasn’t covered when I approached. I was approximately ten feet away from her when I recognized her as being my daughter. I don’t remember if I saw her face. I don’t remember if I passed out or not. I think I recognized the body as being that of my daughter. I don’t remember if she was dressed or undressed. . . . I don’t remember anybody saying anything to me.”
McGuire and another man were in the lieutenant’s office with Alice. Jerry Piering stepped out. McGuire had asked him to leave them alone.
“McGuire asked me about my personal life . . . the men I had known. I answered truthfully all the questions because I was trying to help the police find the murderer of my child.”
Both Eddie Crimmins and Detective George Martin were hungry. During a lull in the questioning the two men went to a diner on Union Turnpike for bacon and eggs. The long questioning paused while they ate and drank cup after cup of steaming coffee.
Outside, a few reporters and photographers waited in ambush. Martin spotted them as they were coming out of the diner.
“Do you have anything to say, Mr. Crimmins?”
“Nothing,” muttered Eddie, his head ducked as he hurried toward the unmarked sedan. “Nothing.”
George Martin grabbed Crimmins under the arm. “Look,” he tried to explain to the father. “Your child is missing. Why don’t you ask these guys to help? Make an appeal to the public?”
Crimmins did not quite understand. Martin explained that a concerned father should make some sort of public appeal for his child’s return. Awkwardly, Eddie Crimmins came back to the group of reporters and said he wanted to appeal to the public—if anyone knew where his child was, or if someone had taken the child, please return him home.
Martin stood off to the side watching, and decided that he was dealing with someone who was “very dumb.” “I mean,” Martin would say later, “I had to practically drag him up to make a normal appeal. He just didn’t understand. Not too swift.”
On the basis of such judgments, it was decided that Eddie Crimmins did not have the requisite imagination, intelligence, or cunning to plan and execute murder. Furthermore, the police would conclude, a man of his limited wit would not have been able to sustain a cover story in the face of interrogation. They simply never took Eddie Crimmins very seriously.
13
The technicians had finished with Apartment 1-D. The surfaces had all been dusted for fingerprints. The items had been inventoried.
“One child’s baby carriage—blue.”
Alice Burke sat crumpled in a chair in the living room. John Burke tried to comfort his mother and to find someone in charge. He was concerned about his sister.
“My sister has a heart murmur,” he told one detective after another. “She should have a doctor look at her.” But no one seemed to pay attention.
One detective dismissed the request with a flash of anger. “She doesn’t need a doctor,” said the detective. “She needs a priest. She’s our major suspect.”
Alice Crimmins was dazed and utterly
drained when she returned to the apartment on LaPenna’s arm. It was 11:00 p.m. Mother and daughter fell into each other’s arms, weeping. John Burke folded his arms around his mother and sister and cried.
The policewoman was camped in the apartment for the night. Alice Burke took off her coat and began to make tea. While she waited for the water to boil, she started scrubbing the sink. Her daughter went to work on the cabinets. They took out a pail and a mop and washed the floor.
John Burke did not find it strange that his mother and sister were scrubbing the apartment. He had seen that reaction to stress before. When his mother was having problems with his father, she would be seized with a burst of housecleaning. As he watched the two women ferociously attacking every stain, he thought it probably helped to wash away the bitter reality.
Neither woman slept that night. At daybreak, their hands raw and red, they were still sloshing around in the cleaning bucket. By daybreak one or the other had turned countless times to stare at the silent telephone—trying to make it ring. All night long, policemen had been in and out of the apartment.
The second day broke hot again.
Alice and Eddie Crimmins were compelled to consider arrangements for their daughter’s funeral. “I really don’t want to think about it,” Alice told her mother.
“You have to,” said Alice Burke.
George Martin and Jerry Piering went home for a change of clothing and a shower, but the adrenalin of the case kept them going around the clock. By daybreak they were back at the 107th plotting moves designed to crack Alice Crimmins. When they came to take her away, they were brusque. In ordinary circumstances, what they were about to put her through might be cruelly unnecessary. But Jerry Piering considered it vital.
The Manhattan Medical Examiner’s office is located at 30th Street and First Avenue—part of a hospital complex. Alice was hurried through the corridors and down a flight of stairs. Some men in white wheeled a stretcher to the door. They lifted the blanket and Alice Crimmins swooned. Again, when she saw the lifeless body of her daughter, she fell into the arms of Jerry Piering.