Knowing that he would be working under Captain Joe Borrelli, an old friend, was the first good news Coffey had that day. The two talked for about an hour before getting down to the gruesome work of finding out why someone would want to shoot to death a twenty-six-year-old Wall Street secretary named Christine Freund.
Christine was sitting with her boyfriend, John Diel, in his car near the Forest Hills train station. It was a popular make-out spot. At 12:30 A.M. on Sunday morning, a lone male fired three shots through the passenger-side window. Christine was hit twice in the face; Diel was not injured.
All that was known at the time was that the couple had spent the evening in Forest Hills. They went to a movie and then to a small restaurant on Queens Boulevard and were seen by passersby playfully sliding and falling on the ice-covered streets as they made their way back to the parked car.
Borrelli called in his squad commander, Lieutenant Bill Gorman, and his number one sergeant, Dick Conlon, to go over the case with Coffey. Joe was floating on air. He was in a room with three pros, the kind of cops he loved working with. He knew both Conlon and Gorman personally and by reputation. “This assignment will be a good one,” he thought, “as long as I can work with guys like these.”
It was decided that Joe would concentrate on the Freund case, supervising the detectives working the night tour, roughly 4 P.M. to midnight, while Gorman and Conlon would continue to run their shifts as usual, adding the Freund case to their already heavy caseloads. At this time New York City was at the height of its fiscal problems. For the past year the department had been operating with only about 1,000 detectives, about one-third the number there had been when Coffey first reported to DA Hogan’s squad ten years before. Squad commanders like Gorman were hard-pressed to spread their resources around. A hard-working cop like Coffey was a valuable commodity, and by working the night shift he would be able to do the important follow-ups and second looks, the leg work that was increasingly falling through the cracks of the thinned-down Detective Division.
After the short meeting, Coffey and Detective Marlin Hopkins took a ride to the murder scene, where the car still was. Behind police lines, local residents were being interviewed by reporters doing second-day stories. The murder of a white Wall Street secretary who was killed while making out in a car parked on one of the finest streets in New York City was big news.
As the preliminary detective report indicated, the passenger-side window was shattered, glass covered the front seat, and there were blood stains all over the passenger area. Coffey tried to imagine the moment of death. He thought the young woman probably never knew what happened. Her companion, who ran through the streets screaming for help, would live with the nightmare forever.
Throughout his career Joe had been taught that a good detective must always keep the eventual court case in mind. Catching the criminal was the cop’s job. Most police cases were considered closed once the perpetrator was identified. If the case was lost in court, or never even made it that far, as has happened to many of the terrorist cases, that was considered the fault of the prosecutor. But Coffey felt that if the detectives did their jobs properly, the prosecutors would have to be imbeciles not to be able to make the case. First on the list of doing things properly, was establishing and protecting the chain of evidence. Even if there was very little physical evidence it had to be safeguarded and examined from every possible angle.
So far, the only physical evidence that existed that might help catch the killer of Christine Freund was the two bullets removed from her head. Coffey traveled into Manhattan to the ballistics lab at the Police Academy, to see what the examination of those bullets could tell him about the killer.
The bullets were in the hands of a veteran ballistics expert named George Simmons. He was a man whom Joe had worked with on many occasions, and Simmons was glad to see him on the case. He needed a friendly face, because he had a frightening theory about the person who killed Christine Freund. Simmons knew from experience that most detectives did not usually accept the theories of “tech” men like Simmons whom they considered eccentric geniuses out of touch with the mean streets, who lacked an understanding of the criminal mind and the instinct of the street cop.
Coffey was hardly through the laboratory door when Simmons spotted him and cried out, “Joe, I think we’ve got a psycho here.”
“What do you mean, George?” Joe asked.
Simmons explained that the bullets taken from Christine Freund were a rare .44 caliber. He said it was a very unusual bullet to find but that in the past year or so they had been showing up in his lab with regularity, the first on July 29, 1976. It was taken from the body of an eighteen-year-old medical service technician named Donna Lauria. She had just returned from a New Rochelle discotheque and was sitting in a car with her girlfriend Jody Valente, age nineteen, in front of her apartment building in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx. At about 1:00 A.M. a lone male fired two shots through the passenger side of the car, hitting Donna in the back and Jody in the thigh. Donna died instantly.
Simmons continued that in October 1976, a similar, bullet was taken from the head of a twenty-year-old man named Carl DeNaro who was critically wounded while sitting in his car with his girlfriend, Rosemary Keenan, the daughter of a New York cop, in Bayside, Queens. Rosemary was not injured. Interestingly, DeNaro wore his hair long and may have looked like a woman from the rear.
On November 27, 1976, two more .44 caliber bullets were found. They were removed from Joanne Lomino, eighteen, and Donna DeMasi, seventeen. The two girls were sitting on a stoop in front of a house in Bellerose, Queens, at 12:30 A.M., when a man wearing army fatigues approached, mumbled some questions, and fired five shots into the car. Joanne was hit once in the back and was paralyzed from the waist down. Donna was struck in the neck but recovered.
Simmons had filed the proper reports and passed on his hunches, but there was no inclination on the part of the police department to link the cases. This was because all the bullets recovered so far were badly mutilated, having passed through glass, metal, and bone before arriving at Simmons’s microscope. Psychos were bad news; a serial killer on the loose would panic the city! What detective commander would be courageous enough to announce such a possibility based on the theory of a tech man and a bunch of mutilated bullets?
Coffey was stunned by the information. First of all he knew something about .44 caliber bullets and the Charter Arms Bulldog handgun they were designed for. During his work against FALN and Croatian terrorists, Joe had met several agents of the Federal Aviation Administration. They were known as sky marshals because they were charged with guarding airplanes against skyjackings. Their standard weapon was the Charter Arms Bulldog. It weighed only eighteen ounces and was designed to fire the .44 caliber bullet at a slow velocity so that it would not exit the body of a skyjacker. A standard bullet coming out of a powerful gun at short range would almost certainly pass through a body and then might endanger the aircraft and its passengers by puncturing the skin of the fuselage and causing the plane to depressurize.
“George,” he asked the white-haired ballistics expert, “do you believe these bullets were fired from the same gun?”
The response sent a chill down Coffey’s spine.
“Joe, tell Borrelli it’s the same gun.”
“Sure, tell Borrelli it’s the same gun,” Coffey thought as he drove through frigid streets on the way back to his office. “Tell him there’s a serial psycho on the loose in New York. That ought to make me some points with the boss.”
As crime ridden as New York was during the seventies, a serial killer was one kind of criminal that seemed to have passed the city by. The closest Coffey could remember to anything like that particular horror was the “Mad Bomber” case of the early fifties, when a former Con Edison employee was seeking vengeance on his boss and setting bombs on the utility’s property.
He had come into contact with professional hit men, drug dealers by the score, and the lowest of the street c
riminals. But a serial killer investigation, he figured, was a different kind of ballgame and he was not sure he wanted to throw the first pitch. He decided to let things sit for a day or two until he had a better handle on what the status of the other investigations was. “I really hoped someone would make an arrest and put this dark notion to bed,” he remembers.
Coffey spent the next day making phone calls to the detectives working on the three previous cases that Simmons had theorized were linked to the Christine Freund investigation. At the same time other detectives from Borrelli’s unit were questioning Christine’s friends and family and her boyfriend, John Diel.
Coffey’s phone calls did not produce much help. In all the cases there were sketches drawn from details provided by survivors and witnesses. But if there was one investigative tool that Coffey went out of his way to avoid, it was the sketch. His experience had taught him that a sketch often led a detective in the wrong direction. “When people witness a shooting they remember nothing but the flash and noise of the gun,” he often told his younger partners. “Forget about their providing reliable descriptions.”
In the Donna Lauria case, Bronx detectives had felt that there might be an organized crime tie-in. Lauria’s father and a former boyfriend were said to have some mob connections, but after six months that lead had gone nowhere and no other lead had developed.
The other two cases prior to the Freund killing had produced even less of a solid lead than the mob possibility in the Lauria case. All the detectives Coffey spoke to agreed that the .44 caliber bullet was unusual. But without a well-preserved bullet that they could actually match to a gun, none of the detectives even wanted to speculate about the possibility of a serial psycho. Coffey, however, was beginning to feel there was no other choice, no other possible road to follow. When Borrelli’s guys returned that evening with nothing solid to go on, he made up his mind to tell the captain the following day that he was buying into Simmons’s theory.
Back in Levittown that evening Joe told Pat about the cases and what he was going to lay on Borrelli the next morning. She thought he was nuts. “When are you going to let someone else run the police department for a change?” she asked. But she knew that Joe would never let anything rest until it was settled. He had already forgotten how his ambition and impatience with the bureaucracy had lost him friends and cost him choice assignments. She was not anxious to see him involved in another assignment that would keep him away from home for days at a time. On this freezing night in January, though, neither Joe nor Pat Coffey could imagine how her fears would be realized.
True to his word, Coffey marched into Borrelli’s office early in the morning on February 3, 1977, and told him he believed, based on the information from the ballistics unit and after telephone conversations with detectives in the Bronx and Queens, that two people had been killed and four wounded in four separate shootings since July 29, 1976, by the same gunman. He told Borrelli that he was convinced the killer was using a .44 caliber Charter Arms Bulldog and that unless some organized effort, at least borough wide, was made to catch him, he would definitely kill again.
This information did not exactly thrill Captain of Detectives Joseph Borrelli. He knew of Simmons’s theory and he knew the facts of the case. He did not buy it. But he was too much of a pro and too good a manager to write off the idea without some advice. As Coffey lit his umpteenth cigarette of the day, Borrelli called Lieutenant Gorman and Sergeant Conlon into his office. Coffey went over the scenario again.
The three veteran detectives heard him out and from the looks on their faces he knew what they were thinking: “This guy is on the job three days and he’s telling us we’ve got a serial killer on the loose and we had better do something about it.” Coffey could also tell they agreed with him.
For a while, after he finished talking, it was colder in Borrelli’s office than on the street. Then the captain broke the ice. He told the group that it might be a good idea for them to work the case as if a serial psycho was a strong possibility. He would circulate the idea to the proper authorities at Borough Command and downtown at Police Headquarters.
Coffey knew where his boss was coming from. The real detective in Borrelli knew that Coffey and Simmons were right and that someone had better start pursuing that lead soon. But Borrelli did not become an influential detective captain without knowing how to play office politics. Coffey thought, “Borrelli is covering his ass by passing the word upstairs but not chancing the embarrassment of the department by appearing to panic over something that might turn out to be a total fantasy.” Coffey would never play the game that way. He was more willing, as he thought Borrelli should be, to suffer embarrassment in the name of saving the life of a potential victim.
Joe Coffey would never overcome his inability to play office politics. Though he would never regret maintaining that posture, his career would end in bitterness and frustration. Joe Borrelli would eventually become chief of detectives.
So a more or less informal task force was formed. About fifteen detectives and squad commanders in the Bronx and Queens were advised of the serial psycho theory and would share information that might prove a link between the killings—or as each of these hard-boiled cops hoped, disprove a link.
“There are times,” Coffey says, “when a detective would rather be proven wrong. This was one of those times.” But Joe Coffey, a devout Catholic, knew deep inside his police officer soul that he was about to go one on one with the devil.
A tremendous sense of urgency began to invade the lives of the detectives who carried an almost secret knowledge. These men believed a serial psycho was lurking in the shadows and young women appeared to be his target. Coffey’s sixteen-year-old daughter Kathleen was not much younger than the killer’s victims; this is a thought Joe still carries with him.
For the next six weeks the investigation went nowhere. Borrelli’s men, including Coffey, interviewed the Freund family over and over. They dug into John Diel’s background, learning that he had had a relationship with another woman while romancing Christine. However, logically they did not identify him as Christine’s killer and did not link him to the other cases that weighed so heavily on their minds.
The task force was stymied at 7:45 P.M. on March 8, 1977, when a twenty-year-old Barnard College student named Virginia Voskerichian was walking home from the Forest Hills subway station not far from where Christine Freund was parked with her boyfriend when she was killed.
As Virginia turned from the subway stairs and headed down Dartmouth Street in the direction of her family’s small Tudor-style home a few blocks away, a lone male walked up to her with a gun in his hand. Instinctively, Virginia put her school textbook up in front of her face at almost the same instant the man fired one shot. The .44 caliber bullet ripped through the textbook and into Virginia’s skull. The medical examiner would later report that the young woman was dead before she hit the ground.
Coffey was at home when Virginia was killed. Borrelli’s office called and told him about the shooting. The detective on the phone said that it did not look like the serial m.o. but it might be a good idea for Joe to come to the scene. Joe was racing towards Queens in his 1975 Chevy before the receiver was settled in its cradle. Within forty-five minutes, he was in Forest Hills. Virginia Voskerichian had been dead about ninety minutes. Her brother, brought from their nearby house to identify the body, was at the scene.
Coffey was briefed by the detectives already there, and what he heard convinced him the psycho had struck again. He could not see how anyone could think otherwise. He also felt the good guys had gotten their first break in the case. He ordered the bullet to be rushed to the ballistics lab as soon as it was removed. “This time, I thought we would have a good bullet. I did not believe the book would have mutilated it to the point that we could not match it with one of the other .44’s,” Coffey remembers. Joe went to the morgue himself to make sure the bullet was handled properly—as evidence against a mad killer that was haunting his city.
In the meantime other detectives canvassed the neighborhood. There were many witnesses to this murder, and they all agreed on one interesting point: the killer did not run away from the scene as one might have imagined he would. Instead he walked calmly away toward the nearby Forest Hills Tennis Stadium, at the time home to the U.S. Open.
This information was consistent with descriptions of the killer leaving the scenes of the other murders in Coffey’s notebook. Descriptions of the shooter as a white man wearing a ski cap, assuming a police- or military-type stance before he fired, also matched the earlier cases. It was circumstantial evidence to be sure, but enough to begin to convince even the most skeptical cops working the case that the serial theory was probably on the mark. “There will be no explaining this one away,” Coffey thought.
This was the first of the serial murders committed on Joe’s watch and he was glad for the opportunity to become totally immersed in the case from the beginning. He had been working up to this point with a savvy streetwise detective named Marlin Hopkins, and within two hours of the murder they went to the Voskerichian home. Going through the routine steps of a murder investigation, they spoke with the young student’s family.
They learned a lot about Virginia. They learned she was born in Bulgaria in 1956. She was an A student, majoring in Russian languages. Her parents, Garo and Yolanda, immigrated to Queens when Virginia was ten years old. She had two older brothers and an older sister. She was a beautiful, popular, studious young woman, who promised to fulfill all the potential immigrant families yearn for. To the rest of her family she was an American, and they couldn’t be prouder. This was all interesting information—heartbreaking considering the situation—but it offered Coffey and Davis not a hint of motive, not a whisper of a suspect.
“A goddamn, fucking psycho ruined a life like this,” Coffey thought as he listened to the Voskerichian family struggle to explain why no one in the world would want to hurt Virginia.
The Coffey Files Page 16