The Midnight Hour

by R. G. Belsky

  “Aha!” I said in my best Hercule Poirot accent. “The game is afoot.”

  I opened the folder. There was a directory listing several different files. The first one was about Thomas Gallagher and his family. It was a summary of the murders that night that included pretty much the same details I already knew. Including the fact that Dani’s father, Jack Keegan, was the FBI man who’d worked with the Logan Point police on the investigation.

  The second file was the one that got my attention. The name was MARGARET KOTCHNER AND FAMILY. I recognized the name. It was the murder case that happened in Milwaukee a few years after the Gallaghers had been killed. The one that Larry Keller thought might have been done by the same person. Dani had made the same link that Keller had.

  Douglas Kotchner, his wife, Margaret, and their twelve-year-old son, Donald, were found shotgunned to death in the bedrooms of their home in Milwaukee in 1989. The killer apparently struck in the middle of the night. At the time no one understood the message that the killer spray-painted on the side of the house, which said, “My love comes tumbling down.” No one recognized it as another song lyric from “The Midnight Hour.” No one connected it to the murders several years earlier in Logan Point, Ohio. No reason they should have.

  There were three other files listed. I read them too.

  Barbara Lachman—Boston, Massachusetts—1991

  Gail Warner—Omaha, Nebraska—1993

  Susan Newhouse—Monterey, California—1997

  “What does it all mean?” Heller asked when I was finished.

  “Serial killer,” I said.

  “Jesus!”

  “Dani was on the trail of a serial killer when she was murdered.”

  • • •

  I explained it all at a News editorial meeting later that day. Staley was there. Heller too. And a lot of the other top editors.

  “Barbara Lachman was a thirty-six-year-old history professor at Boston College who was found dead with her husband and young daughter in an apartment complex not far from the campus. All three of them had been shot during the night with a small-caliber handgun,” I said.

  “Gail Warner was a local politician in Omaha—a city councilwoman who was running for the Nebraska state senate. She and her husband and their three children were killed by a bomb explosion that demolished their house as they slept.

  “The last killing was in Monterey, California. Kevin Newhouse—a police officer on the Monterey force—was found dead along with his wife, Susan, and their two teenage sons. Mrs. Newhouse and the two boys appeared to have been stabbed to death in their bedrooms. Kevin Newhouse was found dead in the living room, an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. It was ruled a murder-suicide. Friends said that Newhouse had been depressed for weeks, telling people his wife was having an extramarital affair and that the marriage was over.”

  “There’s lot of differences between the cases,” one of the editors pointed out. “They happened in different parts of the country. Some were shootings, some were stabbings, and one involved a bomb.”

  “Yeah,” someone else said. “So why did Dani think they were related? Did she have a specific reason to suspect a link between them?”

  “Four of them actually.”

  Dani had spelled that out clearly in the files. I recounted her words to them now.

  “One: In all of the cases, a family was massacred. The woman, along with her children and—with the exception of the Gallaghers—her husband too.

  “Two: The time. All of the murders happened overnight, with the estimated time of death sometime around midnight. And the writing on the wall at the Gallagher house—first of the killings—said: ‘Beware the Midnight Hour.’ Plus, it seems relevant now that Dani’s own murder occurred around midnight.

  “Three: The music references. At several—if not all—of the crime scenes there had been some reference to ‘The Midnight Hour,’ the song from the sixties by Wilson Pickett. The phrase ‘when my love comes tumbling down’—also one of the song lyrics—at the Kotchner killings. At another of the murders, the song was playing over and over again on a CD when police arrived. No one had put it together until now.

  “Four: The sex angle. Kathleen Gallagher was supposed to be playing around with other men. So was Susan Newhouse. There were rumors of infidelity involving the other women too. Dani’s theory was that the killer was the lover, and he wiped out the entire family when the affair was over.”

  I looked around at everyone in the room.

  “Finally, Dani wrote at the end of the file: ‘I have no hard evidence of any of this. Only supposition. But I am close to obtaining the information I need to validate my theory. I believe what we are dealing with here is a single perpetrator who has carried out a series of seemingly random murders over the past thirty years without being caught.’ ”

  Everyone sat there in stunned silence.

  “Dani said she was on the verge of obtaining the vital evidence she needed to break the story wide open,” I said. “So the big question now is: Did that get her killed?”

  • • •

  My article hit our website and the front page of the Daily News the next morning:

  COPS HUNT SERIAL KILLER IN KEEGAN MURDER

  Slaying Might be Linked to Five Other Murder Cases

  EXCLUSIVE

  BY GIL MALLOY

  Soon after, law enforcement authorities, working with several DNA samples and other evidence that police found at the five other long-ago murder cases, determined that there was indeed a connection between at least some of the cases.

  The DNA couldn’t tell who the killer was, but it did definitely prove who it wasn’t.

  Mitchell Aldrich.

  It turned out he had been arrested in a sex offense case on Long Island a few years back. The wife of one of his business partners had claimed Aldrich tried to grope her in a parking lot after a dinner party. The woman later retracted the complaint, but the town had a new law that required DNA samples as well as fingerprints of all suspects the cops arrested. So they already had Aldrich’s DNA to compare with what was found at the Gallagher murders and the other crime scenes. It didn’t match any of them.

  So that left me back at square one in looking for the killer.

  I knew one thing for sure now though.

  The chain of events that ended with Dani’s death in New York City somehow began on April 26, 1985, in Ohio when Kathleen Gallagher and her two children were brutally butchered, leaving only baby Lauren—now Christine Keegan—as the lone survivor.

  Whoever killed Dani was somehow linked to that terrible crime.

  And there was only one way to get the answers to what really happened.

  I needed to go back to Logan Point . . .

  CHAPTER 17

  Rudy Sewell was as frustrated as I was over the news that Mitchell Aldrich wasn’t the killer of the Gallagher family.

  “Do you have any other leads?” I asked him as we sat on the porch of his house in Logan Point.

  “No, but it doesn’t have much to do with me anymore. The FBI has set up a special multistate task force to coordinate a nationwide investigation. It makes sense, I guess. A series of murders in five different states over such a long period of time. The FBI’s got the resources to find out something if anyone can. I’m supposed to help them in any way I can, of course. Make our files available and stuff like that.”

  Sewell had invited me home with him for dinner. It was a nice gesture, and—since I was already approaching a first-name basis with the waitress at the diner next to my motel—I took him up on it. Sewell’s wife was in the kitchen cooking the meal. His two kids were playing in the backyard. We sat on the porch, drinking beers and talking about the case. It was a clear night and the only noise was the sound of the wind rustling through the trees in front of his house. You could see mountaintops off in the distance.
It all felt very peaceful. Bucolic. And a welcome change from the craziness of the street I lived on back in New York City.

  Maybe I should try living like this. Move to a small town. Be sort of like Andy of Mayberry. Well, actually Sewell would be Andy. He’s the sheriff. But I could run the local newspaper or something. Being a small-town editor sure has its appeal. Okay, maybe I wouldn’t be breaking Kennedy assassination stories, but I could get some traffic lights fixed.

  I drank some more beer.

  The more I thought about the idea—and, perhaps correspondingly, the more beer I drank—the better it sounded.

  Yep, I’d just walk away from the New York pressure cooker. Everyone would wonder what happened to me. Staley. Heller. Everyone at the News. And, of course, Susan. Bet she’d really miss me too once I was gone. Maybe I’d even send her postcards every day from Logan Point to show her how happy I was in my new life. That’d show her.

  “When does the federal task force get here?” I asked Sewell now.

  “Later this week. Right now they’re talking to the cops in Monterey, and then they plan to make their way across the country. Like they say, they’ve got the resources to handle a big case like this.”

  “Feds didn’t do too well on the Gallagher case last time,” I pointed out.

  “Nope. They didn’t.”

  “Sure would be nice to get this thing all wrapped up before they got here, huh?”

  “Now how in the world are we ever going to do that?”

  “Finding what everyone missed the first time around,” I said.

  • • •

  We spent the rest of the day going through the old files, planning to reinterview anyone we could who was still around. We didn’t find anything new until we got to Tim Vardell.

  Vardell had been a kitchen worker at the Union Tavern back in 1985. No one questioned him at the time, but years later, during the new investigation after Thomas Gallagher had been executed, Vardell said he remembered seeing Gallagher there that night. Sewell was able to track down a phone number for Vardell in Louisville, Kentucky. We called him from a speakerphone in Sewell’s office.

  “I remember going into the men’s room sometime before ten o’clock,” Vardell said. “I saw Tom Gallagher come out and then walk over to the bar. I recognized Gallagher because I sat in a few times on his English literature classes and had seen him around campus too.”

  “Why didn’t you tell that to police at the time?” Sewell asked.

  “No one ever asked me. And besides, Ike told me not to get involved. He didn’t want the bar or anyone who worked there caught in the scandal. I needed the job for money to stay in school. So I never talked about it until a long time later.”

  The bottom line, of course, was that Vardell thought it didn’t really matter anyway whether or not Gallagher was at the bar that night. He saw him before ten o’clock. That still gave him plenty of time to go home and massacre his family. So even if Vardell had told his story in 1985, it wouldn’t have been enough of an alibi to save Gallagher.

  But it did play a part in the case against him. Gallagher said he’d been at the bar. No one at the bar remembered him. He said he’d gone to the library to return some books. No one at the library could find any record of it at the time. None of this was hard evidence, but it was all part of a pattern of inconsistencies in Gallagher’s story that ultimately cost him his life. It was as if the stars were lined up against him that night. Everything he did turned out wrong.

  Vardell said that for a long time his conscience bothered him about not coming forward. So when he got the chance to finally talk to police about it several years ago, he was relieved to set the record straight.

  “You said that you knew Tom Gallagher—did you know Mrs. Gallagher?” I asked Vardell.

  “I’d seen her around too.”

  “Around campus?”

  “In the bar.”

  “With her husband?”

  “No, with other men. She was a regular at the Union. Came in a lot, especially during the day. She seemed nice, but she was lonely. She wanted companionship. She even flirted with me once. I told her I wasn’t interested. I didn’t need that kind of trouble. She found plenty of other takers though.”

  “We understand she was seen there on at least one occasion acting intimate with Mitchell Aldrich.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Ike Montrose.”

  Vardell laughed loudly over the phone. “That’s funny,” he said. “That’s really funny.”

  “Why?” Sewell asked.

  “Well, I told you I saw the Gallagher woman with a lot of other men.”

  “Yes.”

  “Ike Montrose was one of the other men.”

  • • •

  It’s funny how you can look at someone one way and never think about the possibility that the person might have once been something totally different from what you see. When I talked to Ike Montrose, I saw an overweight sixtysomething who ran a bar and once spotted Mitchell Aldrich and Kathleen Gallagher making out in a back booth of his place. That’s all. I never thought of Ike Montrose as a player himself. But why not? In 1985, Montrose would have been barely thirty. Maybe he was a really good-looking hunk back then. Maybe he was the Ryan Gosling of his day.

  “I don’t want any trouble here,” Montrose said nervously when we confronted him about Kathleen Gallagher. “I screwed the broad. I admit that. But that’s all. Nothing else happened. I don’t know anything about her murder. She told me her husband didn’t understand her. She told me she needed someone to make her feel like a woman again. She was really hot. I mean I know she’d had a few kids, but she was in damn fine shape. So the two of us . . . well, we had a thing for a while.”

  “Why didn’t you tell this to the police at the time?” Sewell asked.

  “I couldn’t get involved. I was married. Besides, it didn’t have anything to do with her murder. Everybody knew the husband did it. Or at least that’s what they thought at the time. I talked with the cops and I even talked with this FBI guy they brought in from New York. Those guys were just going through the motions. They had Tom Gallagher fingered for the murderer right from the very start. So why get myself in a mess by telling about my relationship with his dead wife?”

  “Okay, Ike, now it’s three decades later and it’s time for you to tell the story,” Sewell said.

  And so Ike Montrose did.

  “On the night of the murder, Gallagher did come here to the bar,” Montrose said. “Just like he said. He didn’t have any alcohol. He ordered a soft drink. I was really nervous about him being here—what with me doing his wife and all. Sure enough, he called me over to talk to him. He confronted me, said he knew I was sleeping with his wife. He begged me to stop. He said he loved her.”

  “Gallagher’s alibi was that he was here,” Sewell said. “That would have been very relevant to know.”

  “There was plenty of time for him to get home to kill his family,” Montrose said. “He seemed very upset. I figured he’d just gone off the deep end and killed his family in some sort of jealous rage.”

  I remembered what he’d told me about the bartender who used to get off on slipping LSD into people’s drinks.

  “Do you know if Jerry Lassiter put something into the soft drink that Gallagher was drinking that night?” I asked.

  “Yeah, he did.”

  “You know that for a fact?”

  “Jerry told me afterwards. He was laughing about it.”

  “About the murders?”

  “No, right after he did it. But then, when he heard what happened, he got really scared. He figured that the drugs had made Gallagher crazy enough to do it. That’s why neither of us ever said anything. We didn’t want to get involved in a murder investigation. I’m sorry now the way everything worked out, but we didn’t know he was innocent. W
e were just trying to protect ourselves.”

  There was a long silence while Sewell and I took this all in. “Did you kill Kathleen Gallagher and her family?” Sewell finally asked.

  “God, no!”

  “You were having an affair with the dead woman.”

  “Hey, I wasn’t the only one.”

  “If you’re talking about Mitchell Aldrich, he’s been cleared.”

  “Not Aldrich. The other one. She told me about him the last time I was with her. She said she was sleeping with some student too. But she told him it was over. She told me the same thing too. She said she was going to give her husband one more shot. She said she wanted to make her marriage work. She said she owed that to her kids.”

  “Who was the student?” Sewell asked.

  “The one Gallagher was supposed to see that night. The kid he was tutoring.”

  “Nicholas Faron?” I asked.

  “Yeah, that’s the one. Kathleen told me she’d broken it off with Faron right before she did the same thing with me.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Nicholas Faron had been a footnote to this case, nothing more.

  The student who Tom Gallagher was supposed to tutor on the night that his wife and his two young daughters were murdered.

  Back in 1985 the cops listened to his story about Gallagher never showing up for the tutoring session, thanked him, and sent him on his way.

  Then they forgot all about him.

  Now he was suddenly a lot more interesting.

  Faron was a local kid. His father was one of the richest men in Ohio, the heir to a multimillion-dollar fortune that his own father had made in the financial world at the beginning of the century. The Faron family owned extensive holdings in banks, corporations, and industries across the country. Nicholas Faron’s mother was a onetime chorus girl that her husband met on a trip to New York City. She’d tried out for a part in a play he was bankrolling, gotten the role, and also snared herself a rich husband. They moved back to Ohio, where she gave birth to their only child, Nicholas, in 1963. They lived in a majestic, old-style mansion on a rolling estate just outside Logan Point.