by Ken Gross
Her poise never broke. Her voice was measured. “Mr. Piering, I told you what I had done that day.” She took another swallow of her whiskey and spilled out some anger: “And I tell you this, Mr. Piering, I don’t care what scientific proof you have. In fact, you can take what scientific proof you claim you have and shove it any place you want.”
Piering was not undone. He took out the brown paper bag and tried to outflank Alice Crimmins’ defenses. “Would you be good enough to identify these things for me?” he said.
He had Missy’s undershirt and panties and the pajama top that had been used to kill the little girl. It was a cheap trick, but Alice was out of reach. “Those are my daughter’s things,” she replied icily.
The meeting lasted for hours. It is perhaps a measure of Alice’s reputation at the time that Jerry Piering had not felt safe going alone. At another booth, discreetly hidden from the couple, was Detective Jerry Byrnes.
But none of the traps had been sprung.
25
John Kelly was waiting for Eddie Crimmins at the clubhouse of the Bethpage Golf Club. Eddie didn’t know Kelly, so the detective showed him the gold shield. Eddie had just played a hard eighteen holes of golf and Kelly waited for him to change. “Let’s take a ride,” said Kelly.
“How many times do I have to go over the same thing?” asked Eddie. “I’ve told the story to I don’t know how many cops.”
“There’s a way you can make it stop,” suggested Kelly.
“How?”
“Take a lie-detector test.”
They were riding along the Northern State Parkway. It was late September and the trees were turning pale before the fall flush. Eddie stared out of the window of the unmarked police cruiser.
“OK,” he said.
A private Manhattan firm, Backster Associates, administered the polygraph test. The machine is not infallible. It measures respiration, pulse rate, and blood pressure. Under stress—for example, when telling a lie—most people will exhibit marked changes in breathing and pulse rate and blood pressure.
Detective Corbett had tried to get Alice to take the test. “I can always tell when someone is lying,” he told her, taking her hand.
“Their hand sweats.” She pulled back her hand.
Eddie Crimmins was strapped into a chair facing a mirror. Behind the mirror, he was being watched. It did not help his nerves to know that he was not alone in the room with the technicians. He could see the flicker of cigarettes behind the mirror.
The test on Eddie ran for more than an hour.
“How old are you?”
The answers would measure Eddie’s reaction to objective facts and provide a norm.
“Are you married?”
When asked if he had killed his children, he answered no. When asked if Alice had killed the children, he answered no. The indications were that he was telling the truth.
“Why won’t Alice take the test?” asked Kelly as they rode back to the Fresh Meadows Precinct.
“She’s nervous,” said Eddie.
But the most important result of the test was that the weight of police pressure shifted to Alice. Eddie was willing to take it and she wasn’t. Therefore it could be assumed that she had a reason for refusing.
“See if you can convince her,” said Kelly. “If she doesn’t take it, it looks like she’s got something to hide and she’s afraid.”
Alice was adamant. She did not trust the machine, which made her nervous. For every argument that Eddie mustered for taking the test, she raised fears and fantasies.
“It’s not legal,” she said. “They don’t accept it in court. There must be something wrong with it.”
“But it will make them leave us alone,” said Eddie.
She held out for three days. Her eyes were puffy. Coffee cups trembled in her hand. She was never without a cigarette when she was awake—and she seldom slept. On the fourth day she capitulated. Eddie called Kelly at the 107th and said that Alice had agreed to take the test, but she wanted assurances that she would be alone in the room with the technicians and no one would be watching her.
“Fine,” said Kelly.
Eddie held her hand on the ride down to the polygraph firm. By the time she was strapped into the machine, her nerves were ready to pop. All she needed was an excuse. And she found one.
They had just finished the test questions and were starting on the substantive issues of the case when she tore the wires and tubes off of her arm. She had seen flickering cigarettes behind the mirror, and heard the muffled laughter of the men smoking them. Feeling betrayed and boiling with anger and frustration, she refused to continue the test.
It would be whispered in the press—through detectives close to the case—that Alice shut down the test because she was failing. It became habitual for the police to say nothing publicly about the case. That is, when television newsmen were there and the cameras were rolling, police officials were scrupulously silent about an ongoing investigation.
However, once the cameras and recorders were turned off, detectives would vent their frustrations about the case that wouldn’t crack. Off the record, detectives would say, she couldn’t pass that lie-detector test. The needle was going right up the wall. Confidentially, we know there are lies in her story. You can’t quote me, but she was a rotten mother and told more than one person that she’d rather see them dead than with Eddie. She never cried for her children.
From the beginning, some detectives used the press to poison the public against Alice Crimmins. Detectives and prosecutors spent long lunch hours attacking her behavior, her coldness, her immorality.
Although Alice kept accumulating negative points with the police they had no solid evidence with which to bring charges against her. In the case of little Eddie, it would seem impossible to construct a murder charge against anyone. The body had been so decomposed that the cause of death was never determined. Murder could be “inferred” because of the circumstances of Missy’s death, but it was an elusive legal point.
In the case of Missy, a charge of murder could be sustained, but against whom? No one had seen the child strangled. No one had witnessed the disposal of the body.
There were inconsistencies in Alice’s story. She said she had tanked up her car at about 8:45 p.m. while two garage men said it was 5:30, but no sinister implication could be drawn from that gap.
She said she had fed the children at 7:30 p.m. and last seen them alive at midnight. The medical estimates, in the fall of 1965, did not place this outside the realm of possibility.
She was cold and hostile to the police.
“She was her own worst enemy,” Detective John Kelly would say later. “Her attitude didn’t help her.”
“See, they wanted me to break down. They wanted me to grieve—not for the sake of my children, but for them—the police. I wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction. They were my kids. Nobody was out looking to see who killed my kids. They were just interested in making me break.”
What the prosecutors needed to mount a case against Alice Crimmins was a witness. What was required was someone who could provide a flesh-and-blood link between Alice and the deed. The best evidence would have been a witness who saw Alice strangle her daughter, but no one came forward.
Police officials knew they did not have enough evidence to support a case. So by October they began disbanding the heavy concentration of detectives.
The week before he returned to Brooklyn, John Kelly spoke to Eddie Crimmins again. Talk to Alice, he told the husband. “See if she won’t take the test again.”
Eddie said he would try, but his own polygraph test hadn’t thrown suspicion off him completely.
“Truth serum,” said Kelly. “Maybe some people can fool the machine, but if you take sodium pentothal, nobody’ll bother you again.”
Kelly argued persuasively. Grudgingly, Eddie agreed to take the sodium pentothal. Kelly returned to Brooklyn confident that Eddie would t
ake the drug. Later he would learn that Eddie refused when Piering again got “nasty.”
26
In the garden-apartment courts of Queens, each mall became a separate village. The three-story buildings were constructed around a center mall, and the mall determined which village one belonged to. There were visits back and forth between villages, but loyalties and gossip remained within one’s court. This wife was having an affair with that husband. This wife spent the afternoon putting away a quart of gin behind drawn blinds. The neighbors would shield the children tolerantly, regarding the disabled alcoholic as a battle casualty of the struggle to survive the courts. The neighbors would mask the steamy affairs, and if there was envy, it was not something for which they would betray a straying member. They might snipe among themselves, but they would protect one another within the lifeboat of their own little court.
Each court also had its own clown. On 72nd Drive, Phil Claymore was the court jester. He would come home at night from his bruising day at the automobile agency where he sold used cars and pedal around the mall on his kid’s three-wheeler. The women always laughed in mock outrage at the incongruous sight of a grown man riding around the footpaths on a three-wheeler with his legs stuck out like airplane flaps. Of course, Phil Claymore was known to have a terrible temper. Through the walls of the garden apartments, neighbors could hear him shouting at his long-suffering wife, Bea, and three children. Occasionally there would be a slap. While their altercations never reached the point of becoming beatings, sometimes Bea would come running out of the house, her face red on one side. She would sit on one of the benches biting back tears. Phil would come out apologetically, and buy ice cream for all the children in the neighborhood. Bea would soften and go back inside. She would never complain openly. Such things were forgivable on the mall. Understandable. A man had to cope all day in a world of marginal survival. He’d come home with a barely adequate paycheck. And if the dinner wasn’t always ready and the house wasn’t always clean, it was possible to read failure into that.
The women were sinking into a world of marginal survival as well. They were coming to understand that life would forever be a balance between buying new drapes or re-covering the couch. They sent their children off to take dancing or piano lessons, like tossing out notes in a bottle. And they turned blind eyes to the sour details—the tracks of ice-cream wrappers planted off the footpaths; the wobbly legs of a year-old kitchen set; the sad taste of too many cigarettes and too much coffee out of Melmac cups; the bitterness of idleness, directionlessness, and comparing.
“Not for me,” said Connie D’Amato. “After a while you hear the same dreary stories. The same women talking about the same soap operas—their lives.”
Connie D’Amato was an exception. She was young; she had no children. Her husband was a writer and she was studying to become a musician. She was a friend of Alice Crimmins, with whom she had much in common. They both regarded the courts as a dead end and were determined to get out.
“She was not only a great mother,” said Connie, “she was a great person. She was alive, you know? One of the few live people in that court.”
In time Connie would tell the same thing to the police. She would offer to testify in court that Alice Crimmins was a good mother and a good person. But the police found out that Connie was having an affair with a man in her school. In fact, on the day the children were found missing, Connie was driving to Maine with the man while her husband was away on a writing assignment. The police persuaded Connie to withdraw her testimony. Otherwise, they suggested, they would have to tell her husband about the other man.
Many of the women in the courts spent their Friday afternoons at L’Vie, the beauty parlor on Main Street. Fridays and Saturdays were always busiest at L’Vie, and for Mr. Jerry, who ran it, it was sad. The women spent hours wistfully reading fashion and fan magazines. Their heads were primed and washed and rinsed and colored and teased, and, somehow, it was like an assembly line. Mr. Jerry could comb out one head, then move on to the next, never noticing the face underneath, never changing the slightly arched contempt of his eyebrow or chatter. Sometimes a woman would tell Mr. Jerry to take special care, that she was going to an affair. In that part of Queens, “going to an affair” meant a wedding or a bar mitzvah. Mr. Jerry might make some daring remark about preparing her for adultery, but the woman would giggle girlishly at the charming roué, Mr. Jerry, who felt sorry for them all. Most times, Jerry knew, they went through the beauty treatment just to revive their morale. They might be going out to a weekend movie or dinner at a Chinese restaurant. But often the bleached, teased heads would be wrapped carefully in kerchiefs—in styles that hadn’t varied in decades—to sit in front of a television set. In any case, the beauty parlor became an unbreakable ritual—even an act of hope.
There was one category of woman who stood apart in the beauty parlors: the women who were upwardly mobile. Their men were “making it.” The signs were unmistakable. The wife would complain less about the cost of ordinary food, but point out the expensive extras she was serving her family. She would sigh about the price of the beach club they had joined; about the trouble of taking the vacations they were between. She would flash the oversize diamond rings and, Jerry, please make the hair whiter than white. Her hair would be stripped and made the whitest shade of platinum, with silver tips. Often the price of arrival was parched, starved, and thinning hair. Her children would be riding new bikes, and the woman no longer bore the pained, martyred look of a wife who had to grind out the cost of baby-sitters or compute the cost of parking for a night in New York. It was understood that it was only a matter of time until they moved on. They would be buying a home in Woodmere or Syosset. Soon they would be gone and already a separation—like the imposed distance preceding death—was growing between them and the others in the courts.
Sophie Earomirski had accepted the limits of her existence, but not without some bristling. Her life had always been a struggle. As a young girl, she had had no special dreams, but there was vague ambition. Her father, George Satirion, was a cook at a series of restaurants, but he regarded himself as a chef. In the restaurants where George worked, speed was valued over subtlety. George Satirion was somewhat out of place. He read, understood, and quoted from the ancient Greek philosophers. And he accepted the life of respectable unimportance in Apartment 1-A of the twenty-four-family house on 34th Street in Long Island City. His wife was a sickly woman and the chores fell on Sophie and a younger sister.
On August 31, 1947, at the age of twenty-two, Sophie Satirion escaped the drudgery of caring for her mother and father and working in the garment district by accepting the overtures of Stephen Earomirski and becoming his wife. Sophie married into permanent disappointment. Her husband, a man much smaller than the generously proportioned Sophie, was an unpromising lithographer. He would be able to provide little more than the bare necessities, but at least he would be providing them for her own family. If Sophie did not complain openly about her fate, she did create a rich fantasy life for herself. Even her pregnancies—which were difficult—were embellished with dramatic textures in the retelling. Her friends and, later, a psychiatrist would say she was prone to exaggerate.
A circle of friends would learn to extract the truth by listening to Sophie and subtracting. The children came along and kept Sophie busy. In 1948 she gave birth to her first child, Susan. In 1952, after three days in the hospital, she gave birth to Stephanie. In 1955 she gave birth to Nancy.
As the children grew older, Sophie resumed her career. She worked at a series of part-time sales jobs, although she was determined that the business world would not dismiss her as a Queens housewife. In December 1961 she went to work for Saks Fifth Avenue—part of the reinforced Christmas sales force. Although she earned the equivalent of sixty dollars a week, the job was an education for Sophie. She was exposed to a class of people as remote from her world as the Habs-burgs. The smart, rich jet-setters who browsed Saks insisted upon instant
recognition of their class and station. They carried jeweled poodles and charged five hundred dollars worth of trifles with the insouciance with which Sophie would have ordered lunch.
“The salespeople at Saks develop the same snobbish arrogance as the customers,” said one daughter of a store executive. “An identification takes place. It is perhaps unreasonable, but it is inevitable nevertheless. The salespeople began to think of themselves as possessing the taste and values of the chic customers.”
Sophie stayed on after Christmas, but on February 1, after being turned down for a raise, she quit. She returned to Saks the next Christmas. This time she remained until June, leaving without explanation. She came back for the Christmas season and left permanently on December 31, 1963.
The pattern of Sophie’s career was erratic. She would work for a while, claim that she was not appreciated, complain about her nerves, then suddenly quit. But she couldn’t bear staying home either. On February 24, 1964, she went to work in the Better Boutique Accessories Department of Alexander’s department store in Queens. It was closer to home, but there was less exotic appeal to the job, despite the name. She resigned over the telephone on July 27 without explanation.
Sophie became one of those women convinced that they are plagued by an unkind fate. She might have achieved some sort of success if it had not been for a series of bad breaks or unlucky coincidences. After all, she was not so very different from the grande dames of old wealth who shopped at Saks Fifth Avenue. She couldn’t see the differences. If she hadn’t let herself go and become overweight, she would have been pretty. People were always telling her that. If she could resist the temptation to heighten the drama of her life, people might take her more seriously. But Sophie Earomirski was helpless against her appetites.