The Coffey Files

by Coffey, Joseph; Schmetterer, Jerry;

  The next day Queens Detective Commander Richard Nicastro ordered more detectives to be assigned to the Borrelli task force. Coffey requested that two old colleagues, George Moscardini and John O’Connell, be brought in. The three would spend many, many hours together over the next eight months.

  They began by driving up to Barnard College, which is a part of Columbia University in upper Manhattan, for a look at Virginia’s records and to interview students and faculty who had known her. On the way up the three talked about the slim chance that they would develop a useful lead. If this was a routine homicide, they reasoned, the trip to Barnard would almost certainly prove fruitful—a spurned lover, a jealous classmate, some ancient family feud maybe going back to Bulgaria. These were three detectives who could believe anything; they had seen it all. But in reality they understood they were practically wasting their time at the school. They would find no clues, no motive, no sign of passion that would lead them to this killer.

  As Coffey walked the Columbia campus, which was stirring with the news of Virginia’s murder, he thought again of his own daughter, Kathleen. His career to this point had not brought him into much contact with average people. He had spent most of his thirteen years on the force pursuing professional criminals—criminals who for the most part did not come into direct contact with John Q. Public. But this case was different. He could not shake the thought that his own daughter could have easily been the victim that Virginia Voskerichian became. As he spoke to the bright, pretty young students who went to class with Virginia he thanked God a thousand times that his daughter was alive, that the evil force that had invaded the Voskerichian family had so far avoided the Coffeys.

  Joe, Moscardini, and O’Connell were sitting in a faculty lounge reviewing their notes when Coffey’s beeper went off. All three shared the same thought. “Another murder.” Coffey called his office back in Queens and was told that George Simmons wanted to talk to him. “Call Simmons at the lab” was the message.

  Simmons was unusually excited when Coffey got through to him. It was good news. “Joe, the Voskerichian bullet matches, the Donna Lauria. I’m sure of it. The same gun was used to kill both girls. I wanted to tell you first; now I’ll spread the word through channels.”

  The three cops raced off the Columbia campus with siren screaming. They made the trip across Manhattan back to Queens in fifteen minutes.

  By the time they arrived at Borrelli’s office, he had gotten the news from Simmons. Borrelli began gathering his brain trust. Coffey remembers a high state of anxiety in the office. He felt some satisfaction in knowing, now, that he was right, but that feeling was overwhelmed by a sense that things were about to get out of control.

  A new chief of detectives, John Keenan, was now in office. He, Nicastro, and Borrelli gathered to work out a strategy. Police Commissioner Michael Codd was brought up to speed, and Borrelli’s small task force was immediately expanded, doubled in size from sixteen to thirty men. Lieutenant John Power from the Bronx and his men who were investigating the Lauria case were brought in. Power was one of the department’s best officers, and Coffey was glad to see he would play an important role from here on in. Mayor Abe Beame was briefed, and because everyone agreed all this police activity was impossible to hide from the press, the department’s deputy commissioner for public information, Francis McLaughlin, was given access to the entire operation.

  One hundred cops were assigned for the weekends, Friday night to Sunday night, the times the killer seemed likely to hit. Coffey was ordered to command the weekend detail.

  Two days after Virginia Voskerichian was gunned down on Dartmouth Street in Forest Hills, Commissioner Michael Codd—a tall career cop with the bearing of a paratroop general and a true love for the uniformed cop, whom he favored over detectives—held a press conference in the second-floor auditorium at One Police Plaza.

  As is usually the case before a major press conference, the city’s reporters had a strong inkling about the subject. Most of the press who covered the police regularly had already alerted their city editors that Codd was about to put forth a blockbuster—“something about a serial killer.”

  The reporters had underestimated what would occur. It was bigger than they could have imagined. The auditorium was packed wall to wall with print, radio, and television reporters and all their equipment. Coffey stood with his back to the exit door as Deputy Commissioner McLaughlin called the group to order.

  Codd soon took over and for more than an hour explained to the media that a link had been established between the murders of Donna Lauria on July 7, 1976, and Virginia Voskerichian just two nights before. The link, he explained, was the .44 caliber bullet and the certainty, on the part of the department experts, that it was fired from a Charter Arms Bulldog. Codd explained there was also general agreement on the part of detectives assigned to both cases that the same gun was used in three other attacks in the Bronx and Queens.

  The reporters went nuts. This was an enormous story. Some recognized it to be the biggest story ever in New York—bigger than the gang wars of the thirties, bigger than the Mad Bomber of the early fifties, bigger than the blackout of the sixties. And they all wanted to know one thing. Almost as one voice they asked, “What is the police department doing to protect the young women of the city?”

  Coffey smiled at that question. He knew Codd had little to offer. But valiantly the commissioner, who was never comfortable in these situations, described the “John Doe” warrant that had been issued based on descriptions of the killer given by witnesses to all five attacks as “a white male, twenty-five to thirty years old, six feet tall, medium build, and dark hair.”

  Codd explained how the killer seemed to use a military-style crouch when he fired and that he walked away from the scene, apparently to an unknown type of car parked nearby. He repeated that additional cops had been assigned to the case and ended the press conference with an appeal to the public for help.

  The reporters were left to use their own sources to learn that all the victims, even Carl DeNaro, had long dark hair. They contacted victims’ families and pumped Coffey and other detectives for any tidbit they could get. That evening’s newscasts and the next day’s papers described a city in fear and a police force searching in desperation for the kind of real clues or informants it would need to bring the killer to justice.

  Things would only get worse.

  By the weekend of April 17, 1977, Coffey’s men had established a routine of stakeouts in unmarked cars that covered virtually every lovers’ lane or darkened area near a disco or bar. In the Bronx, Sergeant Fred DeLuca whose regular assignment was with the Sex Crimes Unit, patrolled the service road of the Hutchinson River Parkway. It was a road that the killer could use as an escape from Queens into the North Bronx or Westchester. His patrol took him within blocks of where Donna Lauria was killed. In fact, DeLuca met the two detectives assigned to the Lauria case while on patrol that night and spent some time talking to them. But by 3:00 A.M. an uneventful tour of duty had passed and he checked out. Coffey, also having an uneventful evening, cruised Queens and spent a few hours clearing paperwork and answering telephones in the office. At about the same time DeLuca called it quits, Coffey left the office and went to a Chinese restaurant and bar with another cop for a winding-down drink before heading home. The two cops bemoaned the fact that almost 200 stakeouts that night had produced nothing.

  At about 4:30 A.M. Joe arrived in Levittown. He was just in the door when the phone rang. It was a detective from Borrelli’s office. “Joe, we’ve got a shooting in the Bronx that fits our boy.” Fifteen minutes of 100-mile-per-hour driving brought Coffey to the murder site as the body of Valentina Suriani was being placed into the city van that would take her to the morgue. Her companion, Alexander Esau, was already in surgery at nearby Jacobi Hospital. He would not survive.

  Valentina, age eighteen, and Alexander, twenty, were a beautiful young couple, deeply in love. They were not the kind of couple Hollywood makes movies abou
t. They were from middle-class homes. Alexander was a tow-truck operator; Valentina dreamed of being an actress. They had spent the evening in Manhattan, seeing a movie in Times Square, then having dinner before heading home to the Bronx. These two kids reminded cops of their own youths.

  They parked about 3:00 A.M., for a few private minutes, on the Hutchinson Parkway service road, just across from Valentina’s apartment house. It was three blocks from the home of Donna Lauria and almost the exact spot where Sergeant Fred DeLuca had parked fifteen minutes earlier.

  The engine had just been turned off when four shots slammed through the windows of the 1968 Mercury Montego. The youngsters were each hit two times. Valentina died almost instantly; Alexander fought for his life for two hours at Jacobi before succumbing.

  Coffey knew the m.o. fit the other .44 caliber cases, and he would not need the bullet to see that this time. But now there was a twist. One of the first cops at the scene had found an envelope in the street about fifteen feet from the car. It was addressed to Captain Joe Borrelli.

  When he heard about the envelope, Coffey was immediately concerned that it would be mishandled. He passed orders to safeguard it: Watch for fingerprints and don’t open it. That should be done by police lab technicians. By that time however, the envelope had gone through several sets of hands and cops’ fingerprints were all over it.

  Coffey knew the murder scene was in DeLuca’s sector. He called the sergeant at home to ask if he had noticed anything. “Freddie broke down on the phone when I told him what had happened. He believed he was parked in that exact spot. But he didn’t see anything,” Coffey says.

  This incident shattered Coffey. His plan to stake out likely areas and patrol the escape routes seemed to be on the mark, and this latest attack proved it. But he felt he was up against a killer who lived in the shadows, perhaps drawing strength from the energy of the cops who were hunting him.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he had sat down for a real meal. He hadn’t seen one Levittown Little League game yet that year, and he had lost 20 pounds, falling to below 200 for the first time in his adult life. The spirits of Donna Lauria and Virginia Voskerichian haunted him, demanding action. Now he had to go to the morgue to examine the body of a beautiful eighteen-year-old girl whom he was supposed to have been protecting.

  He lost his cool at the morgue. This is how Coffey remembers it: “I never liked going to the morgue in the first place. I never could get used to dead bodies, although I had seen plenty of them. Now, here was one of the most beautiful young girls I had ever seen, lying on the morgue table, just a thin sheet covering her.

  “I found it hard to look at her. She was just two years older than Kathleen. She seemed so innocent. I wondered, ‘How could this happen to such a child?’ She was covered from head to toe with dried blood, hers and Alexander’s. She had a gold bracelet on her wrist.”

  A morgue attendant approached the body with a knife. When he lifted the girl’s arm, Coffey grabbed him. “What are you doing there. What are you doing?” he demanded.

  The attendant said he was going to cut the jewelry off, as he always did. Coffey grabbed him by the neck, lifted him off his feet, and threw him against the morgue’s white-tiled wall. The attendant screamed and groaned as he slumped to the floor. The room fell silent. Three other detectives standing around the table watched the scene, not reacting. Coffey gently removed the bracelet from Valentina’s wrist and placed it in an evidence envelope. He turned and walked out, a new burst of adrenaline pumping through his exhausted body. A renewed determination pushed him behind the wheel of his car. He went to visit Fred DeLuca hoping he had seen something and hadn’t realized it.

  The next day the letter to Borrelli was opened at the department’s Fingerprint Section. The first paragraph read:

  Dear Captain Joseph Borrelli,

  I am deeply hurt by your calling me a wemon [sic] hater [referring to Borrelli’s remarks at the March 11 press conference]. I am not. But I am a monster.

  I am the “Son of Sam.” I am a little brat.

  The letter went on with about 200 rambling, nonsensical phrases and ended with a warning:

  I say good-bye and good night.

  Police: Let me haunt you with these words:

  I’ll be back!

  I’ll be back!

  To be interrpreted [sic]

  As—bang, bang, bang, bank [sic], bang—ugh!

  Yours in Murder,

  Mr. Monster

  Coffey was furious that the letter was mishandled, though as it turned out no useful fingerprints were lifted from it and it would not be valuable evidence in the event of a trial. However, it served another purpose in this case. In early June, the Daily News got hold of a copy of the letter. “Son of Sam” was born in the public’s mind, and the case would be known by that title forever.

  On April 19, as pressure from the media for police action mounted and precinct telephone lines around the city were choked with calls from frightened citizens, it was announced that the Queens task force would be expanded. Because of its high priority and the crossing of precinct and borough lines—and not incidentally because the case was now costing the city almost $100,000 a day—it would be headed by an inspector. Codd chose a mild-mannered detective with a reputation for supervising group efforts named Inspector Timothy J. Dowd.

  The veteran group of cops who had been working the serial cases from the beginning resented the intrusion of Dowd, but they knew a headquarters heavyweight was needed. Borrelli may have felt pushed to the rear but admitted to colleagues that naming Dowd was a necessary move.

  The group was named Task Force Omega with headquarters set up at the 109th Precinct in Flushing. Detectives from all over the city were now being assigned to the case during days, nights, and Coffey’s weekend shift. Coffey adjusted his escape route surveillance with the additional tactic of shutting down all bridges and tunnels leading out of Queens as soon as word of another hit was broadcast on the police radios. Such a tactic required manpower. In the absence of physical evidence, manpower would play a large role in hunt for the .44 caliber killer, as the press was now calling the serial psycho.

  Coffey continued planning based on his strong feeling that the killer lived either in the Bronx or Westchester. A decade later he cannot call that feeling any more than a hunch. But he was always a hunch player and had learned to trust his instinct.

  For the handful of detectives like Joe, Gorman, Power, and Conlon, the efforts on the case were what police work was about. It was challenging, dangerous work, toward a worthwhile end. They found professional satisfaction in being assigned to such a case no matter how much pain it would cause them. A handful of cops from all over the city volunteered to join the Omega group for the same reasons. But for the most part, Coffey was disappointed in the attitudes of most of the cops ordered to report to Task Force Omega. He found them to be resentful and cynical about the assignment beyond reason.

  “Most of the guys, and I had a relative and some close friends among the group, thought it was a bullshit assignment. They resented being taken from their own cases, cases they controlled, to be used as foot soldiers in a manhunt,” Coffey says. “They just did not see it as work that would advance their careers or salaries. I never could understand that attitude and I guess they could never understand mine.”

  The task force was undoubtably a political maneuver to make the public believe the department had a handle on the case. Coffey did not really think it would help. He continued to believe the killer would be caught through old-fashioned police work or a lucky break. Almost one year after his first attack, the .44 caliber killer was still totally anonymous to his pursuers. He might as well have been a ghost. Recognizing all that, Joe resigned himself to being somewhat under the control of the bureaucracy he hated so much. “Whether I liked it or not, I got the help,” Coffey says.

  There was a feverish mood in the city about the case. Press conferences were held every day. Mayor Beame could not attend
any type of function without being asked about the manhunt. Dark-haired young women were dying their hair blonde; long-haired girls were rushing for haircuts. Parents were stepping up their warnings about lovers’ lanes. Reporters interviewed disco owners who feared the news of the killer would ruin their businesses, and psychics popped up who claimed they knew where and when the killer would strike next.

  Coffey had no use for most of the help the public was offering, especially the psychics. One famous crystal ball reader who had worked with New Jersey police on several occasions showed up at the 109th Precinct one morning to offer her help. Coffey rudely dismissed her. The next day she ripped into “that Detective Sergeant Joe Coffey, who really doesn’t want to solve this case,” on a radio talk show. Joe was thankful most of his superiors agreed with his view of supernatural detective work.

  While the task force detectives blanketed areas around lovers’ lanes and other places young people might park in their cars and stopped any suspicious-looking man walking alone, they continued their patrols of escape routes. Work was also continued on the individual cases as if they were not connected. If any case could be solved alone and established as not having a link to the others, it could bury the, thought of the .44 caliber killer.

  The detectives traced all 28,000 Charter Arms Bulldogs manufactured by the Bridgeport, Connecticut, company, a complicated task that failed to lead to Son of Sam because the gun, it turned out, was purchased by a friend of the killer in Houston, Texas. Coffey assigned himself to do background checks on auxiliary cops in the precincts where the attacks occurred because of the military- or police-type shooting stance of the killer—another hunch.

  Coffey’s other specific assignment was to follow up on the “kites”—reports alleging a cop was guilty of a crime, usually just thrown up for grabs anonymously by another cop. During the course of the Son of Sam investigation Coffey received more than 300 “kites.” Some were like the call from a patrol sergeant who suspected his police-officer driver. The driver had offered to fix the sergeant up with a willing woman in a pickup spot on Queens Boulevard known as the “Wrinkle Room” because of the advanced age of its female patrons.