At four-thirty P.M. that Halloween Monday, Niki’s father arrived to take her trick-or-treating in the nearby Philadelphia neighborhood where he lived. Tina kissed Niki good-bye for the last time. Sometime before seven P.M., Phil returned home, bringing a friend with him. Earlier that day, Phil had shown off a .38-caliber revolver, loading it in the presence of some friends. That evening, as soon as Phil and a friend entered the apartment, Phil and Tina began fighting. After he hustled her into the bedroom, leaving his friend in the living room, the fight escalated.
After about fifteen minutes of shouting and loud bangs and crashes, Phil’s friend heard a gunshot. He ran into the bedroom and saw Tina on the bed, the side of her face blown off. Phil stood there, the pearl-handled .38 still in his hand.
Phil and the other man ran from the apartment but then separated. Phil returned to a rented room he kept in a suburb, Havertown, about twenty minutes away.
Although Tina’s neighbors liked her and thought her “very attractive” and “very nice,” none of them had ever called the police during her shouting matches with Phil. But the gunshot was something else and one of them called the police. The neighborhood was teeming with small costumed-figures trick-or-treating as police cars, sirens wailing, pulled up to Tina’s apartment building shortly after seven. Across town, little Niki was happily loading up her shopping bag with Tootsie Rolls and candy corn as she and her father made their way door-to-door.
Smashing in the door to the apartment, the police found Tina lying across the bed. Wearing jeans, a black blouse with red flowers embroidered on the cuffs and collar, and a red turtleneck framing what was left of her beautiful face, she had died of a gunshot wound angled up into her brain.
The morning editions of some Philadelphia papers dubbed Phil Sylvester, the prime suspect, “the Halloween Murderer.” The following afternoon, accompanied by his brother, he gave himself up to Lower Merion Township and Philadelphia police. No stranger to the Philadelphia justice system, Sylvester had a prior burglary conviction so was held without bail for a November hearing. The following April, he stood trial for murder.
Two key witnesses testified that Sylvester, on that fateful Halloween, had showed them a snub-nosed .38 with a two-inch barrel and pearl handle. Sylvester claimed he didn’t know the gun was loaded and that the shooting was unintentional; his defense attorney argued the gun had gone off accidentally. But the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania produced a similar weapon, and over defense counsel’s objection, the prosecution’s ballistics expert used it to demonstrate that considerable pressure must be exerted to pull the trigger on that particular type of gun.
During Sylvester’s trial, the Commonwealth argued that Tina had been strangled and slapped across the mouth just before she was shot. Barbara Christie, chief of the Homicide Unit in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, said Sylvester showed her how he did it: “He strangled her with one hand, and at the same time he was shooting her with the other hand… He had the barrel of the gun pressed up against her… I asked him to demonstrate. He was a big guy, a very big guy, with big hands. She was slender.”
The nature of the wound and the powder burns on Tina’s skin proved that, at the time the fatal shot was fired, Phil was holding the gun against her cheek.
After six days of testimony, jurors quickly reached a verdict of guilty; they did not believe the shooting was accidental. One month later, Phil was sentenced to life in prison. Barring a miracle, Phil Sylvester, twenty-three, ladies’ man, would spend the rest of his days in a steel and concrete building along with other men convicted of society’s most violent crimes.
But five years after the steel doors clanged shut behind him, Phil Sylvester would meet his salvation—a woman who would love him unconditionally, bring him warmth and affection, and once again convince him that he was handsome, sexy, irresistible—a man women loved to love. Maria Califano, buxom, black haired, brimming over with femininity and sensuality, would bring to Phil Sylvester the worshipful love he needed so desperately. And he, in turn, would give her the attention and affection she craved.
On the day Phil murdered Tina, Maria was working with preschool children in Youngstown, Ohio. Almost the same age as Phil but far less worldly, Maria would provide Phil with a link to the outside world, protect him from the dehumanization of prison, and promise him a sensual and sexual heaven in her arms—if he ever gained his freedom.
MARIA’S STORY
Maria was born in Youngstown, the oldest of six in a close-knit, Catholic family. It fell to her to act as dutiful, surrogate mother to her five younger brothers when their mother was working and their father, although home, was unavailable because he was doing “men’s work,” like repairing old cars or cleaning up the yard.
Maria was considered a tomboy in the blue-collar neighborhood where she grew up; she had to be tough to protect her younger brothers. She gained value and self-esteem as their caretaker and protector. As a girl, the only worth she had was as nurturer, as bodyguard for the littler boys, as second mother.
Although Maria recalls a “happy childhood,” she was afraid of her parents. They hit her but were not abusive, she said. However, once, when she received a failing grade in a high school subject, she was “scared to death” to go home.
As she got older, she grew frustrated with her household responsibilities. “I resented the fact that I had to come home from school and take care of my brothers… Part of my sixteenth birthday present was that I didn’t have to wash dishes anymore … and they gave me a key to the house.” Finally, at sixteen, Maria felt accepted, the key a message from her parents that she belonged. She described her parents as “strict and overprotective,” warning her not to date or ride around in cars. She had no sexual relationships as a teenager.
But as she grew from a teenager into a young woman, Maria began to experiment sexually, and her experiences were mainly disasters. A supervisor sexually harassed her at one of her first jobs when she was nineteen. “He would corner you in the stockroom … and expel gas, or he would say little remarks or he would try to rub up against you… I was a virgin. I had no experience.” She recalled him as being six feet, five inches tall, frightening and “overwhelming.” She did the right thing and reported him, but she was the one who got fired.
She had another bizarre experience when she struck out on her own and moved in with a girlfriend. She supported herself by working as a salesgirl in a department store. But her friend unexpectedly got married, and Maria ended up living not, as she had expected, with a girlfriend but with a newlywed couple. The situation became stranger when the husband’s brother moved in also, and Maria was expected to share a bedroom with him. Uncomfortable with those arrangements, she moved back home.
At nineteen, Maria had sex for the first time, with an older man who was actually a friend of her parents. Afraid of their disapproval, fearful and guilty about sex, she chose a man with whom she felt comfortable. Bob, thirty-three, was going through a divorce and had a son who played ball with one of her brothers. She felt she knew him; sex with him would be safe emotionally because he was an old friend, and because he had had a vasectomy, it carried no risk of pregnancy.
Although she meant for her initiation into sex with Bob to be relaxed, it turned into every Catholic girl’s nightmare. Only the presence of a neighborhood priest could have made it worse. Maria left her car parked illegally near Bob’s house, and when Youngstown police broadcast they were going to tow a car with her license plate number, her parents heard it over their shortwave radio. They quickly figured out she was spending the night at Bob’s and showed up on the doorstep. “I was nineteen and he was thirty-three… The only reason I had sex was because I wanted to know what everybody else was talking about—and I hated it.
“I was afraid of my parents. I just knew that I wasn’t supposed to do it, and I was afraid that they’d find out and I was right. The very first time, they did find out.”
Her father promptly had a “heart attack” and had
to be taken to the hospital. Her mother called her “slut” and “whore.” Her father’s attack turned out to be irregular heartbeats, but he stopped talking to Maria for seven months. So her punishment for being sexual was meted out: She was annihilated. Her key to the house was symbolically taken back; she ceased to exist for her family.
Since sex for Maria was now colored by fear and guilt and—since she had been caught—by punishment, she had to do penance for what she had done, she had to suffer and sex came to represent not pleasure but suffering.
Her next experience—the final one before she met her future husband, Jesse Califano—was a date with a “gorgeous guy” who took her to a secluded spot and tried to rape her. He only gave up when a truck parked nearby and he was frightened off by the potential witness. But like so many sexual-assault victims, Maria felt responsible. “I never told anybody about it until I told Phil.”
When Maria was twenty, her brother, who worked in a gas station, introduced her to Jesse, twenty-three, just discharged from the Army and working for a company that rustproofed cars. The first time they met, Jesse immediately invaded Maria’s privacy and established the parameters of their future relationship. “I had a T-shirt on. I don’t even know what it said on it and he went, ‘What does this say?’ and he drug his finger across my chest.”
She told him to keep his hands off her, but of course, he didn’t. Maria didn’t think Jesse was very nice, but she did find him “gorgeous.” Maria likes good-looking men: “Pretty boys are easy on my eyes.”
When Maria and Jesse slept together four months after they met, it was the first time she had ever enjoyed sex. “We had a few drinks and we smoked a joint and I was totally relaxed and I think that’s why it was different.”
With Jesse, she had fewer inhibitions and felt comfortable. But Maria never really overcame her repressive upbringing; she was married two months before she had enough nerve to see a gynecologist. “I was just afraid to go … and have an internal examination.
“I was naive as far as sex and birth control and everything… I had never had sex explained to me… I found out how babies were made in fourth grade in the girls’ bathroom… When I was growing up, I had a little Italian grandmother from the old country telling me, ‘You crossa you legs and you tell ’em no touchin’ my place.’” Maria picked up her mother’s attitude toward sex, which was “she really didn’t enjoy it a whole lot and … she thought it was because of her mother.”
She married Jesse even though she knew he wasn’t the knight in shining armor for whom she had been waiting. He was unpolished, rough, unschooled in the small niceties Maria’s romantic fantasies led her to feel she deserved. But the sexual attraction was there; and it was time she got married.
She had just turned twenty-two when they married in August 1979, but her romantic fantasies were already dead. When Jesse told her to quit her job to be a full-time homemaker, she put up little resistance.
Jesse drank a lot while they were dating, but it wasn’t until they lived together that Maria understood the extent of his drinking problem. He was an alcoholic and the marriage turned into a nightmare. When he was drunk, he abused Maria emotionally and physically. He would erupt into anger and destroy her most valued possessions. “He knew how important [something] was because my grandmother gave it to me, and he’d break it right in front of me to cause me to fight back with him… I’d clean up whatever he destroyed and the next day he wouldn’t believe me.” He had blackouts and never remembered the violence.
He also pulled her hair, pushed her around, and intimidated her. One day, in a move eerily similar to Phil’s murder of Tina, Jesse threatened Maria with a loaded gun. “He pointed it at my head and didn’t remember… He was in a blackout. I’m lucky my brother Jimmy was there because Jimmy talked it out of his hands.”
Finally, Maria left Jesse. Once again, her family came through—but for Jesse, not for her. “My family’s so crazy, my mother told him where I was at.” Maria and Jesse reconciled, and for the next few years the relationship depended on how much Jesse drank. If he wasn’t drunk, “he was the best person that you could ever want around you.” But drunk, he became an abusive monster.
Things got worse when he was laid off from his job as a lineman in the paint department at General Motors. Maria got a part-time job teaching preschool; before July 1979, Ohio preschool teachers were not required to be college graduates or state certified. Although she was bringing in some money, Jesse didn’t like it. He wanted to be the “man” of the family. Although he initially received 95 percent of his pay after his layoff, that was cut and Jesse was bored and rapidly becoming broke. He also had too much time for drinking. So he took a night job cleaning the offices of the local newspaper.
It was snowing on December 12, 1982, when Jesse went out to a meeting for his new night job. He told Maria to stay home, but uncharacteristically, she didn’t listen and went out with friends instead. She still feels guilty she wasn’t home when it happened. When she returned at about midnight, the phone was ringing. It was the Youngstown police telling her Jesse had been in an accident and was in a coma. No one knew if he’d slipped and fallen on ice or if he’d been mugged and hit over the head. Doctors told her Jesse would always be in “a vegetative state.” Although he eventually returned to consciousness, he was never again recognizable as Jesse Califano. At the age of twenty-five, after being married to this difficult, possessive, alcoholic man who abused her, Maria was left with a man she controlled, whose life was in her hands.
Maria panicked; she had never had to make decisions before: “When I was younger, my father told me what to do. Then my mother told me what to do. Then when I was married, my husband told me what to do.” After Jesse’s head injury, she was on her own, burdened with total responsibility for another human being. For a while he was in and out of various hospitals. Then in March 1983, Maria checked Jesse into a Pittsburgh institution that specialized in head injuries.
“He was more or less a vegetable. I planned to leave him here and come on weekends.” Maria was still living in Youngstown, some ninety-five miles away, but eventually moved to Pittsburgh so she could visit Jesse daily. He remained in his own world, totally dependent on others. “He can’t talk because his brain won’t let him.” He was left without the use of the right side of his body and with the left side slightly spastic.
Maria grew increasingly uncomfortable with Jesse’s being in an institution. She began to see him as a victim, as helpless. “Someone who is ill and left in the hands of doctors and nurses and administrators is really like a kind of prisoner.” She decided to take him home and hire private nurses with the money she was collecting from the Ohio Bureau of Worker’s Compensation.
In part, Maria’s newfound empathy for someone she felt was imprisoned was the result of her recent involvement with an inmate. His name was Phil Sylvester, and five years earlier he had murdered his girlfriend.
MARIA AND PHIL
While Jesse was in the institution, Maria had become close with a nurse, Lucy, who wanted Maria to meet her husband, imprisoned for burglary. Although Maria liked Lucy, she was a little shocked: “I had never known anyone incarcerated before.” Up to that point, her world did not include criminals, but she agreed to go because she knew her friend was anxious to have someone on the outside meet the man she loved.
On their way to the prison, an additional burden was put on Maria when Lucy asked her to visit with another inmate, a friend of her husband’s who never received visitors of his own. “My friend asked me to call out another gentleman… I was scared. I never knew anybody in prison before. I guess maybe I grew up sheltered. I was afraid; I didn’t know what it would be like. I imagined the typical inmates you see on television and the movies. But that wasn’t what I found.”
On August 16, 1983, Maria Califano found herself nervously approaching the State Correctional Institute of Pittsburgh. “I was really apprehensive. My knees knocked, and when I went to sign in, my handwriting was
shaking. When they finally let us in, they have these doors that slam shut and that’s a terrible feeling.”
In the visitors’ room, a tall, good-looking man with dark hair waited. “He walked up to me and I was just like amazed. There was this normal-looking person standing in front of me. The man I met was nothing like what I imagined.” Maria returned weekly to visit, and although she soon found out Phil was serving a life sentence for murder, she fell in love with him.
Phil was no longer the same arrogant young man who had killed his girlfriend. He had been doing hard time in a state correctional facility for five years. He had seen and done and heard things he didn’t want to think about.
Meeting Maria was a boost for Phil; she was attractive, sexy, and willing to spend hours talking to him. For her, that first meeting was merely pleasant: Maria and Phil talked about their families for the entire three-hour visit. “It was kind of uneventful. No, I didn’t think anything of his looks then. Now, of course, he’s gorgeous. But at that point, he was a nice-looking person. I just saw a nice guy. We talked about my husband, his parents, his sisters and brothers.”
Though she had no intentions of returning to the prison—she had done her good deed and visited a lonely inmate—at some point she decided to see Phil again. “I had met a person who looked like he could be my next-door neighbor. He was intelligent; he came from a good family. I decided to … go back. You see, I didn’t plan on staying in Pittsburgh that long because I was still living in the pipe dream that my husband was going to get up and walk and talk and everything.”
Her decision to visit Phil again was motivated solely by the desire to “do something nice for someone else.” Maria admits, though, that if Phil were “ugly, I wouldn’t have gone back. He asked me to visit and I continued each week to meet a sensitive, kind person… I know it’s hard to believe.”
Women Who Love Men Who Kill Page 2