by Ken Gross
At that moment Lombardino felt a thrill of exhilaration. He believed that he had enough. Everyone, presumably, had forgotten an earlier statement of Dr. Helpern saying that the time couldn’t be pinpointed before 4:00 a.m. He had said this on the telephone and it had been recorded on Detective Phil Brady’s tape.
Ideally, detection is a pure science which marches forward irresistibly toward a solution. Fixed ideas and prejudice, like enemy fortifications, are trampled by logic. In a typical case, the police are confronted with a crime. In the police academies, future detectives are taught that they must keep open minds as they match the strands and threads which will lead them to the correct solution. (For “solution,” read “suspect.”) In textbook conditions, this is accomplished without passion. Dispassion is crucial in criminal investigations because emotion can cloud judgments, throw up phantom clues, create solutions out of paranoia. In a complicated and sensational criminal case, investigators face a hundred blind clues that can lead to a hundred possible solutions. It is a lot like being in a room full of mirrors, where only one of the images is real. In the Alice Crimmins case, the police began with a solution and worked backward. It would become a classic example of investigative inversion. There had been token efforts at other solutions, but the police became obsessed with reconstructing Alice’s guilt. The clues and the evidence were read with the single purpose of establishing her guilt. By the time James Mosley came onto the scene, he was caught up in the great retreat.
As Tom Mackell went through the disarray of Nat Hentel’s departure, he came upon a stack of mail. He turned it over to Mosley, knowing that his baffled assistant was having problems in bolstering the case against Alice Crimmins. “Maybe you can find something in there,” said Mackell.
Mosley put the stack aside. He had set up an interview with Alice Crimmins’ mother. Alice Burke was driven to Queens by detectives and seemed almost shrunken with fear as she walked through Mosley’s basement command post. It was an environment that inspired dread. Security was as tight as at an army headquarters. Everyone had to be accompanied by a detective. Even unfamiliar detectives had to show credentials at two checkpoints.
Mrs. Burke, a small, timid woman, arrived in a black dress. She was still in mourning for her dead husband and grandchildren, and she bore herself with a kind of perpetual grief. Her hands, scorched raw by a lifetime in soapy pails, fluttered up and down, nervously covering and uncovering each other, as if she were ashamed of the dishpan scars. She was, in fact, so intimidated by the official confrontation that she wet herself at the first question and sat through the ordeal trying to reassemble her dignity. It started at 2:00 p.m. on May 15,1967, and lasted a scant ten minutes. The notes on her visit to Mosley’s office suggest little profit:
Mrs. Burke was questioned about Alice Crimmins’ friends—about whom Mrs. Burke knew very little—not having met any of them except a woman she knew as Marge—Alice brought Marge to Mr. Burke’s wake where Mrs. Burke met her for the first time.
Questioned about having found money on Alice—negative—a recollection that Edward [sic] Crimmins found money on her [Alice].
Questioned about the cruise that Alice took—no knowledge of whom she went with—never found out.
Questioned about how Alice and Edward were getting along since reconciliation—
Answer: no personal knowledge—neither one said much except that they were getting along well—Edward refused to comment to Mrs. Burke regarding this.
Mrs. Burke had no personal knowledge of Alice’s activities, either prior to separation or after reconciliation.
Mrs. Burke questioned about Tony G.—never met him—never heard of him.
Mrs. Burke questioned as to whether she was financing the legal fees—Answer, no.
Mrs. Burke questioned whether she had any knowledge of Alice’s extra-marital activities recently.
Answer: No, except that Alice told her recently that she had gone out with her last employer. It was suggested by the District Attorney that there was more to this relationship than one date.
Mrs. Burke questioned about her opinion of what happened on the evening in question.
Answer: Alice told her she had looked in on the children and they were all right-could not remember the time.
Alice Burke had obviously assumed a stance of noncooperation with the authorities. Her answers bore only a literal semblance of the truth. She could not help knowing the extent of her daughter’s affairs, and yet she refused to acknowledge it officially. She had chosen to remain blind to the gossip and rumors swirling around her.
She had pledged to pay for Alice Crimmins’ defense. Her husband had left a $15,000 life-insurance policy and she had been making monthly withdrawals from the Bronx Savings Bank, living off the capital. Eventually, in 1968, she would withdraw the entire balance—$10,394.52—to give to Harold Harrison, her daughter’s attorney. It would close out the account. But as she sat in Mosley’s office fighting for control, she told him that she was not paying.
41
“Sentence first—verdict afterwards.”
—ALICE IN WONDERLAND
Dear Mr. District Attorney:
I know who killed the Crimins kids, but I’m not gonna tell. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.
Signed:
Guess Who?
There were bushels of letters; there were tissue-thin wisps of notes full of fretful sounds, from people who never slept and embroidered stray noise into the flesh of demons. Such people lived on every block, peeking out fearfully from behind lace drapes, pouring out their nightmares now that someone, at last, would listen. The detectives were deployed in teams of two, listening to all the dreadful details.
“They all want to give you tea,” a veteran detective would recall after spending a hundred afternoons listening to a hundred accusations. A milkman with a sour disposition would surely warrant investigation, one smiling grandmother told the detective. A man wearing a black hat and carrying a wolf’s-head cane was planning to kill a lady on 72nd Drive, the woman said with the certainty of a bishop. But she had taken precautions—installed extra locks and varied her schedule. She had read somewhere that was a good means of defense against assassination.
“Very good,” said the detective, pretending to sip from the delicate china cup. “You can’t be too careful. But, if I’m not being too presumptuous, what has this to do with the Crimmins case?”
“Don’t you see?” she said. “It’s so plain. He couldn’t get to me, so he took the children!” She swallowed the remains of her tea with a glint of triumph. “Would you like a biscuit?” she asked.
“Do you know the man’s name?” asked the detective.
“You just find a man with a black hat and a wolf’s-head cane and you’ll have your killer,” she said with an impatience that implied she couldn’t do all the police work herself.
“Thank you very much, ma’am,” said the detective, trying not to look at his partner. They heard the clicks of four locks after them as they left.
“When you become a policeman,” the detective would recall, “you get a special glimpse inside people. People who look perfectly normal walking down the street or in the supermarket, they have these really far-out, secret lives. They sit in their apartments and dream up the most incredible stories about each other.”
In the course of their careers, policemen become accustomed to the bizarre fantasies of the people they guard. “You try not to become too turned off to it,” said the detective, “because every once in a while you come up with something genuine.”
In the Crimmins case it was necessary to answer every cry of wolf. The paucity of evidence was such that the investigators had to trust that one of the alarms would turn out to be authentic. So far, the police had only a few of the ingredients necessary for a successful prosecution. They had opportunity—Alice had been alone in the apartment with the children.
This was, in fact, their strongest fact against her. They appeared to have proof that Missy’s death was a murder. But the Medical Examiner had fluctuated, hemming and hawing so many times that they were never certain his testimony would stand up. Nick Ferraro, later to become the Queens District Attorney, was a young assistant when the case first broke. He left the job in December 1965, and up until that time Dr. Helpern was still hedging, refusing to be pinned down about a time of death. “Helpern flip-flopped all over the lot,” said Ferraro, who became a State Senator before coming back to the District Attorney’s post.
That was before young Tony Lombardino started working on Dr. Helpern.
So, by now the police had the fact of murder, although there was doubt even about the strangulation, and opportunity. They could conjure up a motive with the custody suit. What they needed, what the case cried out for, was someone credible who could connect Alice Crimmins to the act.
In March 1967, James Mosley came across the anonymous letter from the woman in the window who had seen a woman carrying “what appeared to be a bundle of blankets . . . under her left arm. . . .”
Mosley knew that if he could find that woman and she made a credible witness, they would have a case against Alice Crimmins. It might not be a case strong enough to convict her, but the police and prosecutors were convinced that if they could crack through Alice’s elaborate defenses, she would tell them the entire story. Each step became another bit of pressure to make her break, leading to a further step.
Tony Lombardino was also certain he could use Joe Rorech in a pinch. Rorech could be made to say incriminating things about Alice. Rorech could be made to do almost anything, Lombardino was certain.
The immediate problem was to find the letter writer. It took several weeks—a long time, considering the clues in the letter. Handwriting experts concluded that the writer was a woman; they could tell that by style and the flourishes of the handwriting.
From the evidence of the letter, the woman had a window that faced 72nd Road. She was in one of the upper stories, since the letter said that the people had looked “up” when she closed her window. The woman had a view of 72nd Road, but she could see that “The car turned from the corner of 153 St. onto 72 Road and out to Kissena boulevard.” Only eight buildings fitted all the criteria. The police went to the garden apartments’ management and got samples of tenants’ handwriting to compare with the letter. Out of forty-eight possibilities, they had the letter writer—Mrs. Sophie Earomirski of 72-21 153rd Street.
Just before noon, on June 13, 1967, Detectives William Corbett and Harry Shields knocked on the door of Apartment 3-A. The door opened, held back by a chain.
“Police,” said Corbett.
Corbett and Shields sat with Sophie Earomirski for hours. They wanted to make certain they were dealing with a serious person. “I knew you would find me,” she told Corbett.
It was amazing. Sophie Earomirski had been interviewed by the police almost a dozen times about this case. “I spoke to her myself three times,” said Detective Phil Brady. She had never uttered one word about staring out the window on the night of July 13/14.
“Why?” asked Corbett.
“I didn’t want to get involved,” she replied.
“Why now?”
“My conscience was bothering me.”
It was staggering, and the detectives went over her story again and again, trying to poke holes in it but not really wanting to lose the one link that directly connected Alice Crimmins to the case.
James Mosley was going through a routine piece of paperwork when Corbett telephoned. Anthony Lombardino was standing over his desk. “What?” he heard Mosley cry in a voice he had never heard before. “You gotta be kidding!”
Corbett was telling Mosley that they had found the letter writer. “How is she?” asked Mosley.
“A little shaky,” replied Corbett.
“Well, don’t press it now. Get back here,” said Mosley.
John Kelly was summoned from the golf course; Piering was pulled away from the dinner table. Mosley, meanwhile, went to Tom Mackell’s office, to which Corbett and Shields had spirited Sophie Earomirski. On his rich desk Mackell had spread a rogue’s gallery of photographs. Could you recognize the woman you saw from your window that night? asked Tom Mackell.
Sophie Earomirski, sometime saleslady, sometime neighborhood character, was beginning to appreciate her own importance. Detectives and prosecutors hovered around her in anticipation; she could sense their hunger. Suddenly her hand stopped that of Thomas Mackell, the District Attorney of Queens. She pointed a finger accusingly. “That’s the woman I saw that night,” she said in a dramatic voice.
“Are you certain?” said Mackell in half-disbelief that such an important witness could suddenly appear in his office so casually.
“That’s the woman!” It was a photograph of Alice Crimmins.
“It had to be the most satisfying moment of my career,” Mackell would later recall.
But someone else was even more gratified. James Mosley, who had virtually botched every opportunity since coming to Queens, who had gone from Manhattan hotshot to Queens laughingstock, had been vindicated by Sophie Earomirski.
James Carroll Mosley, father of four, graduate of parochial school and Fordham Law, counter-intelligence agent in the Army, had found Detectives Piering, Kelly, and Byrnes waiting on his doorstep when he moved into his new office. He’d barely had time to put his key in the lock before they were filling him in on the background of the Crimmins case. But time after time Mosley blundered in their eyes. The pressures made him appear foolish, and he would sometimes drink away his lunch hour in Luigi’s.
Mosley’s greatest fiasco took place the day he tried to break Joe Rorech. Here was a chance to redeem himself, restore stature to his role. On March 21, 1967, Mosley had Detective Phil Brady arrange an interview with Rorech in one of his own watering holes—the Red Coach Grill in Nassau County. It was a late lunch date and began pleasantly enough. Mosley washed down his steak with beer; Rorech with his customary Scotch mists. Lunch drifted into dinner and they moved to the bar. Brady lost count of the drinks, but by evening the moods had reversed themselves several times. Mosley tried being friendly. Rorech was impenetrable, giving his normal evasive answers. Mosley became angry. Finally, he lost his patience.
“OK, put the cuffs on him, he’s under arrest,” said Mosley, turning to Brady.
The detective leaned over and whispered to the Assistant District Attorney: “But we’re in Nassau County.”
“I don’t give a damn. Put the cuffs on him, he’s going in as a material witness.”
Brady kept his head. He walked over to the telephone, called the Third Precinct, and asked for assistance. Mosley was, after all, a District Attorney and did have some authority even in Nassau County. A pair of county detectives arrived and arrested Rorech on Mosley’s word. He was handcuffed and taken to the Third Precinct. Meanwhile, the bartender, who had been alerted beforehand by Rorech, called Harold Harrison.
Harrison received the call at home at 11:00 p.m. By 11:30 he was talking to a sergeant, then a detective in the Third Precinct. Finally he spoke to Mosley, who was forced to back down. Rorech was not technically arrested, he told Harrison apologetically. They had just wanted to bring him in for questioning, since he was to testify before another grand jury in May.
At 11:40 p.m., after everyone had regained composure, Rorech called Harrison from another bar and said he had been released. When Rorech went before the grand jury on May 12, he had in his possession a paper signed by Mosley conferring on him “immunity for crimes other than homicide in the event that any statements given by Joseph Rorech revealed his guilt of any other crimes.”
Mosley never quite recovered from the humiliation of being bested by Harrison and Rorech. As he passed out of earshot, he always thought he could hear people laughing behind his back.
Understandably, Mosley played his moment of triumph to it
s limits. None of the detectives and attorneys who gathered around his desk on June 13 knew why they had been summoned. Mosley built up the suspense as each new arrival appeared, explaining gravely that he wanted to make this announcement just once. John Kelly, fresh from the golf course, felt foolish in his Hawaiian shirt; Piering was unshaved. By 7:00 p.m. they all had assembled. Mosley waited until everyone was seated, then said quietly: “We got the letter writer.”
There was no way to react to such news but with silence. It had been so long. The room was filled with files and index cards, some stretching back two years, growing yellow and dog-eared. Some cards had had to be stapled together—lives had been disrupted and changed. There had been marriages, divorces, and remarriages. In two years, girls become women, boys become men, memories fade or harden. There were files and charts and maps of the area, with the witnesses tracked and filed as to their whereabouts during the crucial hours of the night of July 13/14, 1965. Legal questions and arguments could be diagrammed and plotted like ancient syllogisms. The case could be measured by the 2500 DD’s—reflecting the 2500 formal interviews. It could be tabulated by the cases of liquor consumed by the men trying to fit into Alice Crimmins’ world.
But there was no way to calculate the emotion that had gone into it all—the passions, the venom, the sense of impotence. Hours staring at pictures of dead children; time spent at home brooding about whether some crucial clue had been ignored or missed; random moments looking at a wife in a quite different fashion; trying to pay as much attention to the live children as to the dead pair.
More than two years and too many hours and men to count had come down to one hesitant woman.
42
“I wish Queens never asked questions!” Alice thought to herself.