3
The house is silent by the time I get inside. Kara left an hour ago to run errands, and the boys are away at school. Down the hall, my mother-in-law is napping in her bedroom. Her door is closed. I’ve forgotten to take my boots off, and as I walk into the family room, I leave a trail of cut grass on the hardwood floor behind me. Sitting down on the sofa, I pick up the remote control from the coffee table. My hands are shaking. Remembering what Carly Albright told me right before we ended our call—and ignoring the near constant vibration of my cell phone inside my pocket—I click on the television and turn to CNN.
The reporter is young and fit with chiseled cheekbones and a hint of dark roots showing in her blow-dried blond hair. The chyron at the bottom of the screen reads: LAURIE WYATT, CNN—HANOVER, PENNSYLVANIA. A banner headline in red lettering runs across the upper right corner of the screen: “THE BOOGEYMAN” IN CUSTODY. Beneath it is the image of a person I do not recognize.
“… to recap this afternoon’s breaking news, members of both the Pennsylvania and Maryland State Police executed a search warrant on a residential home in the 1600 block of Evergreen Way in Hanover, Pennsylvania, and took fifty-four-year-old Joshua Gallagher into custody, charging him with the 1988 murders of four Edgewood, Maryland, teenagers, including his younger sister, Natasha.
“According to a police spokesperson, Gallagher, a longtime employee of Reuter’s Machinery, had been under surveillance for an undisclosed amount of time, while police awaited the results of a DNA test…”
4
The 1990 publication of Chasing the Boogeyman: A True Story of Small-Town Evil remains, to this day, an oddity in my career. The only nonfiction book I’ve ever written, it sold a total of 2,650 copies before going out of print in 1995—far from a bestseller, but not abysmal numbers, either, for a small regional publisher that regularly released books about duck decoys and lighthouses.
Over the years, I’ve seen a handful of copies surface on eBay, usually with broken bindings and tattered dust jackets, selling for not much more than the original cover price. I did, however, once witness a mint signed edition go for a tad over $150 dollars from a well-known online bookseller.
The book still has a small but dedicated group of fans—my oldest son, Billy, adores the damn thing; the page margins in his personal copy are filled with scribbled notes—but I’m not one of them. The story brings back too many painful memories.
The late, great Locus and Rocky Mountain News book reviewer, Ed Bryant, once wrote: “As the sweltering days of summer passed, Chizmar not only found himself increasingly haunted by the story of his hometown Boogeyman, he found himself actually becoming an integral character in the story, a willing and unafraid participant. As such, when the inevitable time came to sit down and put pen to paper, Chizmar valiantly chose the more difficult, yet infinitely more intimate point of view from which to tell the tale: his own. And through those piercing, at times naive eyes, readers get an earnest and honest snapshot of time and place and conscience that is hard to turn away from.”
I suspect that Ed’s overly generous review was responsible for selling a large percentage of those 2,650 copies. I also suspect he was in a very kind and charitable mood the day he sat down at his keyboard to write that review. Looking back, I didn’t so much choose any authorial point of view when it came down to the writing of Chasing the Boogeyman; I simply told the story the only way I knew how.
Earlier this week, when my literary agent called with the surprising news that multiple publishers had inquired about an updated version of Chasing the Boogeyman, I was tempted to immediately sit at my desk and tackle a complete rewrite. Instead, I gave it some thought and decided that Ed Bryant was right about at least one thing: the story I chose to tell back in 1988 was a snapshot of time and place, as honest and well-crafted as that young writer was capable of performing. And even now, that’s good enough for me. As a result, while I’ve revised large sections of the original manuscript to make for an easier reading experience, I’ve left the heart and soul of the story alone. Warts and all, as they say.
One final note regarding the original 1990 edition, a curious aside that never fails to bring a smile to my face: the book’s initial publication made unlikely heroes of two of my favorite people—my mother and Carly Albright. To this day, I continue to be approached by readers at bookstore signings and appearances and asked if I might have any photographs of my adorable mother to share. As for Carly, she was so flooded with date requests for almost a year after the book’s publication that she eventually had to change her phone number. Of course, she bitched and moaned and blamed me for the inconvenience, but I’m pretty sure she enjoyed every damn minute of it.
5
Speaking of Carly Albright, even with her big promotion and pay raise—not to mention her pager—she didn’t last very long at the Aegis. By her twenty-seventh birthday, she was one of the Baltimore Sun’s most widely read columnists. From there, she moved on to the Philadelphia Inquirer and, after a brief but unhappy stint at Vanity Fair, she settled in at the Washington Post, where she still works as a senior writer. Carly’s personal life was equally prosperous. While in her early thirties, she joined a book club and, at the inaugural gathering, met a very nice man named Walter Scroggins. The two were instantly smitten with each other. Walter, bald and bespectacled, was a former professional football player who now ran a successful physical therapy practice in Rockville, Maryland. A gentle giant, he was kind and funny and never read the newspaper, a habit he’d developed during his playing days. Following a whirlwind, six-month romance, Carly and Walter got married and went on to raise three lovely daughters, each one more stubborn and sassy than the last.
After telling me to go inside and turn on CNN, Carly promises to call back as soon as she has more details, and hangs up on me. It takes her three long hours to eventually make good on that promise, but I never doubt her for a second. After all these years, she’s yet to let me down. For the next forty-five minutes, she reads from her extensive notes. This is what she tells me:
Lieutenant Clara McClernan is the detective in charge of cold case files at the Maryland State Police Department. She’s closed a number of high-profile murder cases during her years on the street and is known as a thorough and relentless investigator. At some point, she becomes interested in the Boogeyman. She knows of Detective Lyle Harper from reviewing many of his past case reports and listening to the usual talk around the barracks. She respects his body of work and very much enjoys his company the handful of times they meet before his death in March 2019. Up until his retirement fifteen years earlier—and even after that, if he was being honest—Detective Harper had never stopped thinking about the murders of the four Edgewood girls and the serial killer who evaded justice almost supernaturally for all these years. The last items to be removed from his bulletin board on the day he left his office for the final time were photographs of Natasha Gallagher, Kacey Robinson, Madeline Wilcox, and Cassidy Burch. When asked by Lieutenant McClernan, he was only too happy to hand over his stack of personal notepads involving the open case.
And buried deep inside one of those small spiral pads, McClernan uncovers the first loose thread—and yanks on it.
Following the death of Natasha Gallagher on June 2, 1988, none of the immediate family members were swabbed for DNA. The initial reason for this oversight was the overwhelming nature of the crime. Edgewood was a small town not really prone to such violence—a home abduction that turned into a murder involving mutilation and a posed body was unheard of, and police were scrambling to cover the appropriate bases. The second reason the family was never swabbed at the time of the murder is because of how utterly distraught they were, especially the girl’s father. Detective Harper even scribbled a note in that regard: “Need follow-up DNA on dad/mom/brother, but family needs time.”
For whatever reasons—perhaps because detectives failed to turn up even a hint of evidence at the Gallagher crime scenes or simply a matter of police o
versight—the subject wasn’t broached again until the day after the June 20, 1988, murder of Kacey Robinson. At that time, after directing the swabbing of the Robinson family, Detective Harper ordered members of the Harford County Sheriff’s Department to follow through with taking samples from the three members of the Gallagher family. On Friday, June 24, a sheriff’s deputy swabbed Mr. and Mrs. Gallagher at their home on Hawthorne Drive. The same deputy noted, in his report, that he was unsuccessful in his attempt to attain a sample from Joshua Gallagher because the young man was working off-site, making lumber deliveries all day. Phone messages were left at both his residence and place of employment, directing Mr. Gallagher to return the call in order to set up a brief appointment to be swabbed.
And that is the last mention of it that Lieutenant McClernan is able to find anywhere. As a result, it goes on “her list.”
That list grows daily, comprised of black holes and dusty forgotten corners of the investigation that she knows for certain have already been checked and rechecked any number of times, but that’s what the cold case grind comes down to. Doing the work again with brand-new eyes and ears. Searching for not only what might’ve been missed the first time around, but also what might’ve been viewed in a different light. Change the light in the room, she’s fond of saying, and you never know what you might see.
The number one item on Lieutenant McClernan’s list is re-examining a theory that none of the media were privy to back in 1988—the suspicion that the Boogeyman might’ve been a member of law enforcement. This notion would go a long way toward explaining the lack of a struggle in Natasha Gallagher’s bedroom, as well as no cries for help in the other three cases. A Maryland state trooper, Michael Moore (no relation to the award-winning documentary director), had been singled out as a potential suspect. At the time of the murders, he was twice divorced and living off the beaten track in the backwoods of Harford County. Over a period of seven years, several of Moore’s ex-girlfriends had called police to report physical and sexual abuse, but then subsequently refused to press charges. Moore was also a decent physical match for the police sketch of the Boogeyman, and there was some underlying confusion about the validity of his DNA profile. Knowing better than to get excited this early in the game, the lieutenant makes a series of phone calls and does some digging. What she comes up with is disappointing, yet not surprising. In April 2001, Moore was arrested for false imprisonment and rape, and is currently serving prison time in Cumberland, Maryland. His DNA profile was updated at the time of his trial and does not match the blood trace left behind at the Cassidy Burch crime scene.
After scratching Moore’s name off her list, the lieutenant moves on to item number two: a sheriff’s deputy named Harold Foster, who was forced to turn in his badge in 1998 because of drug and theft charges in Baltimore City. Foster’s ex-wife, a longtime resident of Fallston, had told her divorce attorney at the time that she wouldn’t have been surprised if Foster was responsible for the murders of the three girls in Edgewood (this was prior to the death of Cassidy Burch). According to the ex, Foster had violent sexual fantasies involving choking and biting and didn’t have an alibi for any of the three nights in question. Her lawyer relayed the information to a cop friend, and it was deemed good enough to be sent up the chain and entered into a file and investigated. However, a month later, when the DNA sample was discovered at the cemetery, there was no subsequent mention of a follow-up analysis involving Foster’s DNA. It had, most likely, just slipped through the cracks. Unfortunately, a series of quick phone calls clears up the issue for Lieutenant McClernan, providing evidence that testing had, in fact, been administered with no match found, effectively eliminating Foster.
Items numbered three through seven on the list are relatively minor in comparison and take only forty-eight hours for the lieutenant to go through. Still, she isn’t discouraged. The list is long and still growing. She has time.
So now she comes to item number eight: Joshua Gallagher and the question of his missing DNA sample. She starts by taking a closer look at his alibi. On the night of his sister’s murder, Joshua is with Frank Hapney, a co-worker and former classmate. They spend the evening drinking at Loughlin’s Pub until approximately 10:00 p.m. and then return to Hapney’s Edgewood Road apartment. Once there, they watch television and continue drinking until almost midnight. Joshua leaves at that time and goes home, arriving at his town house around 12:15 a.m.
Considering Natasha Gallagher’s estimated time of death, the timeline provided by Joshua Gallagher’s alibi is tight—not to mention difficult to verify—but the lieutenant isn’t overly concerned. Joshua Gallagher has no priors, no complaints, and is by all accounts a loving son and brother. He’s never once appeared on any list of suspects.
As if to prove her point, she opens another folder and stares at Gallagher’s twenty-two-year-old face. Compares it to a photocopy of the Boogeyman police sketch. They look nothing alike. Plus, there’s this: on the night of her close call, Annie Riggs claimed the killer was a large man—at least six feet tall, muscular and strong. Joshua Gallagher stands five foot, nine inches tall and weighs one-hundred-and-sixty pounds.
Having already run a background check on Gallagher weeks earlier when she first added his name to the list, Lieutenant McClernan knows he’s now married with two teenage sons, and lives and works in Hanover, Pennsylvania. He coaches his boys’ travel baseball teams during the summer, throws darts in a league on Saturday nights, and is an avid hunter. He seems to have made a decent life for himself. Next, she runs a check on Frank Hapney, just in case she decides she wants to talk with him. No police record. Still lives in Edgewood in a rented house on Willoughby Beach Road. Works full-time at Lowe’s Hardware in Bel Air.
Then she looks up the parents, Russell and Catherine Gallagher. She’s dismayed to find that Mr. Gallagher committed suicide in early 1989, but once again she’s not terribly surprised. Divorce and suicide are all too common among parental survivors of adolescent murder victims. Once feelings of guilt and blame enter the picture, it’s difficult to find the way back. And sometimes the other person’s simple presence is too painful a reminder of what has been lost. According to the computer file, Mrs. Gallagher is seventy-three years old and still living on Hawthorne Drive in Edgewood. She has never remarried.
Shuffling through Detective Harper’s notepads and a stack of old reports, the lieutenant comes across a scattering of handwritten notes regarding Joshua Gallagher. In the first one, Detective Harper mentions that Gallagher only attended three semesters of college in Pennsylvania before returning home to Edgewood. A reason for his early departure is not listed. Something else to check out, the lieutenant thinks, and adds it to the list within the list. The second note concerns Gallagher’s place of employment at the time of his sister’s murder—Andersen’s Hardware on Route 40 between Edgewood and Joppatowne. It’s no longer open for business, but she knows the store well because her father was once an active woodworker and often purchased lumber and tools from there. Remembering Joshua Gallagher’s claim that he was busy delivering lumber on the day his parents were swabbed, the lieutenant jots down a note of her own to check out what kind of vehicles the employees used for such deliveries. It’s been over thirty years, but someone has to remember.
The lieutenant places her pen down on the yellow legal pad she’s nearly filled and sits back in her chair, face etched in concentration. There was a bad accident ninety minutes earlier on Route 24—a convertible Mustang crossed the center line and collided with a dump truck carrying a full load of gravel—and the barracks is bustling with activity. The lieutenant notices none of it. A moment later, she leans forward, picks up the pen again, and scribbles a single hurried sentence at the bottom of the page: Natasha Gallagher—first victim and only girl not to be sexually assaulted. She makes a point to underline only. It’s an observation that Detective Harper had highlighted numerous times in his notes, but she suddenly feels the itch to dig deeper.
Finally ready to get
started in earnest, Lieutenant McClernan picks up the telephone on her desk and dials Joshua Gallagher’s house. An answering machine picks up after the third ring and she hangs up. Next, she tries his cell phone—one ring and straight to voice mail. This time, she leaves her name and number and asks Gallagher to get back to her.
To her surprise, he calls back five minutes later. She explains to Gallagher that she’s taking another look at his sister’s case, as well as the other three murders from 1988. She never once mentions the missing DNA sample. Soft-spoken and rather awkward, Gallagher sounds stunned that the case is still open. He sounds even more stunned a few minutes later when the lieutenant asks if she can meet with him at his earliest convenience, making it clear that she’s willing to make the drive north to Hanover. Without missing a beat, Gallagher tells the detective that he’s more than happy to come down to Maryland and meet with her, but it’ll have to be the following week; it’s smallmouth season and he has a four-day fishing trip planned on the Susquehanna. After making plans to meet at the barracks the following Wednesday at 11:00 a.m., Detective McClernan thanks him for his time and they hang up.
Her next call is to Catherine Gallagher, Joshua’s mother. She answers on the first ring, and by 2:00 p.m. that same afternoon, the lieutenant is sitting in the elderly woman’s living room, a cup of hot tea in front of her, surrounded by dozens of Hummel figurines and three long-haired cats. Lieutenant McClernan opens the conversation by asking about Natasha, and then as is often the case, she just sits there and listens. Mrs. Gallagher is only too pleased to talk about her daughter’s smile and messy bedroom and how she was training to one day try out for the U.S. gymnastics team and the Olympics. She tells the lieutenant all about Natasha’s plans to take acting classes in college and move to New York City after graduation. Then she takes out a thick photo album from a drawer underneath the coffee table—her once-happy life frozen in time under laminated pages—and invites Lieutenant McClernan to join her on the sofa to look through it.
Chasing the Boogeyman Page 25