The Last Place You'd Look

by Carole Moore

  The U.S. Department of State helps—but often finds local laws and the Privacy Act tie their hands. Some families claim they don’t do enough, but officials counter that they do what they can, although admitting it’s often not as much as the families would like. And what the families would like most of all is quite simple: to find their missing loved ones alive and safe, then bring them back home.

  • 9 •

  A Story of Rumors, Gossip, and Innuendo: A Family’s Tragedy Feeds the Gossip Mill

  Ill deeds are doubled with an evil word.—William Shakespeare

  On a stifling summer’s day in 1990, Helen Aragona’s life crashed with the savage velocity of an out-of-control airliner. There were no sirens or blinking lights, no forewarnings at all, not even a fleeting moment’s intuition her universe was about to buckle and break around her.

  Up until then, Helen had defined her life as ordinary, perhaps pedestrian. She cooked, cleaned house, worked, spent time with her kids and friends, and made the occasional trip back to her hometown. Helen’s roots were in New York, where many of her Italian Catholic relatives still lived.

  Widowed by the death of her Italian husband, Gildo, in 1984, Helen has dwelt for decades in the same unpretentious, square brick home in the quiet Bryn Marr subdivision of Jacksonville, North Carolina. Until Gildo died, he and Helen ran a tiny restaurant where New York-style pizza with basil-infused tomato sauce sold at a gratifying pace to Jacksonville’s mostly marine clientele.

  Jacksonville leans against not one, but three Marine Corps installations: Camp Lejeune, which bills itself as the world’s largest amphibious marine base; Camp Johnson, a training facility for bright, shiny recruits fresh from boot camp; and Marine Corps Air Station New River, home base to thousands of helicopter and Osprey pilots and their support personnel.

  In 1990, Helen’s eldest of six children, thirty-year-old Phyllis, lived fifteen minutes from her mother on a narrow paved road in the southwest community, which skirts the nearby air station. Phyllis shared a small, wood-frame house with Scott Gasperson, her fiancé, who was a few days shy of his twenty-sixth birthday.

  Physically, Scott and Phyllis embodied the Chinese concept of yin and yang: Phyllis stood under five feet; Scott, well over six. Phyllis was delicate and fair; Scott was dark and bearish, with liquid eyes and an easy, generous smile. Although different in appearance, the two had been together for several years and shared a common work ethic and unbreakable family values. They also planned to spend the rest of their lives together. Their future wedding occupied a good portion of Phyllis’s spare time. She liked to leaf through bridal magazines and look at invitations in preparation for those nuptials. Phyllis had no way of knowing there would never be a wedding.

  Scott and Phyllis’s home sat well off Ben Williams Road, on a spacious rural lot with plenty of room for animals. Phyllis decorated the little house in the casual country style so trendy in southern homes in the mid-1980s: lots of blues and pinks, ribbons and lace, ruffles and bows. It was girly—like Phyllis.

  Cats, dogs, and chickens roamed their land, and the pasture hosted Phyllis’s horses. She couldn’t pass up a stray. Once, after a mother hen died, Phyllis housed a batch of baby chicks in the bathroom, treating the tiny peeping birds as her own babies. Scott tolerated the menagerie well; he was a gentle soul. The couple’s shared reverence for life was one of the things that brought them together. Phyllis could never love a man who wasn’t kind. And Scott’s kindness extended not only to the woman he loved, but also to her family.

  Scott enjoyed sliding by Helen’s house for a meal. Jennifer, Helen’s youngest child and an almost eerie echo of her older sister, often cooked his favorites for him. As a teen, Jennifer enjoyed Scott’s affectionate banter and gentle teasing. Of all the Aragona children, then-fifteen-year-old Jennifer was the sibling closest to Phyllis and Scott. In fact, Phyllis, who was twice Jennifer’s age in 1990, acted as a sort of surrogate mother to the family’s baby, doting on the little sister who worshipped her. Jennifer embraced her sister’s boyfriend not only because he was funny and paid attention to her, but because she knew he loved Phyllis as much as she herself did.

  During that time period, Helen slept over at Phyllis and Scott’s little home once in a while. Her car was out of commission, so it was easier to let Scott or Phyllis drop her off and pick her up than to ride with one of her coworkers. Helen worked the graveyard shift at Charles McDaniel Nursing Home, a new complex at the time, located on the edge of town. Helen’s 11:00-to-7:00 shift as a nursing assistant meant she slept during the hot, humid Carolina days, which was fine with her. She liked the night shift.

  On July 11, 1990, Helen spoke with Phyllis on the phone as she always did, but decided not to stay the night with her. Instead, for no particular reason, Helen chose her own bed. It was a small, insignificant decision, but it saved her life.

  R

  At 8:50 p.m. on Wednesday, July 11—–the same day Helen chose to sleep at her own home—Scott spoke with his father, Robert Gasperson, for what would be the last time. Later, Robert remembered how unremarkable the conversation was. He would muse that he would not have recalled a word of their exchange if things were different. Now, two decades later, Robert can still repeat every single syllable they exchanged. And although he had a good relationship with his son, he still agonizes over the things he wishes he’d said.

  But on that July day in 1990, ten minutes after Scott and his father hung up from their phone conversation, Phyllis finished closing the business where she worked. She managed one of the seven pawnshops owned at the time by Scott’s father. Scott ran Woodson Music and Pawn, also one of his father’s stores. Even then, Robert was a veteran of the pawn industry, a lucrative enterprise in this military town, where young marines often hock their valuables to get them through until the next payday.

  Sometime between the moment after Phyllis would have turned the key in the massive bolt that locked the heavy glass doors at the pawnshop before driving home and the seconds that held back the succeeding day, Helen tried to call Phyllis again. The phone in the small house on Ben Williams Road rang, but no one answered. With no success, Helen gave up and returned to her duties in the dim nighttime halls at the nursing home, not sensing this day marked the beginning of a change in her life as abrupt and final as a played-out game of Russian roulette.

  R

  By dawn the next morning, Thursday, July 12, it was clear the day would turn blisteringly hot. The pitiless coastal sun and shirt-drenching humidity drove local residents off the streets and back into offices, banks, or stores, where overworked air conditioners were kneecapped by the typical midsummer weather. Sitting behind the wheel of an open-window car was like piloting a coffin. Outdoor work crews labored in glistening sweat with kegs of water nearby, but most stayed off the streets and avoided the crushing heat.

  On the outskirts of Jacksonville, Cyrus Brinson pulled out of his driveway onto Ben Williams Road and passed the house where Scott and Phyllis lived. In this part of the county, everyone knew everyone, as well as everyone’s business, but it wasn’t simple nosiness that caused people to note the comings and goings of their neighbors. Instead, in this sparsely populated area where sons built next door to their fathers and family land rarely sold to other than blood kin, there was a strong sense of obligation to each other. Brinson drove by Scott and Phyllis’s home that morning and noted neither of their cars—a blue Chevy Blazer and a red Chevy Beretta—were there. The time was 5:30 a.m.

  R

  Paul Wiedner arrived at Woodson Music and Pawn to clean the business as he did most other mornings, but on this day no one was there to let him in. Wiedner wrote a quick note and stuck it in the metal gate that stretched across the front. After lingering a bit outside, Wiedner decided Scott was running late and left.

  Meanwhile, a little red Beretta streaked down narrow, twisty, sometimes congested Rocky Run Road—away from the pawnshop. The car passed a woman named Vicky Barber, who registered the driver’s reckle
ssness as a small irritation, the kind that’s common in a military community resplendent with platoons of nineteen- and twenty-year-old males.

  Kimberly Paulson also observed the red Beretta as it roared past her and noted its multiple occupants. Paulson didn’t see it, but after the red Beretta went by, the car veered off Rocky Run, making its way down another, more isolated, dirt road.

  Paulson worked with Scott and was supposed to help him open the business that morning, but was behind schedule. When she arrived at the store, it was still locked, but the metal gate to the front door was open. Peering through the thick glass, Paulson saw a jewelry box on the floor. Concerned, she drove to the home of the store’s assistant manager, Donald Whalen.

  Alarmed by Paulson’s story, Whalen headed for the store, and discovered it had been ransacked. The safe was open, and an inventory would reveal thousands in cash and jewelry taken from the business. The most ominous discovery, though, was not the open safe nor the items scattered about the store, but a pillowcase. The percale material was covered with bloodstains.

  When members of the Onslow County Sheriff’s Department arrived, they wrapped the outside of the store in crime-scene tape. After ascertaining that Phyllis also failed to show up for work, deputies issued an all points bulletin (APB) for both Scott’s and Phyllis’s vehicles.

  Investigators didn’t yet know what they had, but whatever it was, they knew it couldn’t be good.

  R

  Deputies drove to the home Scott and Phyllis shared and found the back door ajar. Once inside, it was obvious they were encountering another crime scene. Among the evidence collected that day was a plastic wrapper discarded from a roll of duct tape and a piece of tape stuck to one of the beds.

  Helen Aragona was told her daughter and Scott were missing. The bearer of the news was a deputy who watched for Helen’s reaction. Fear slithered into her stomach and knotted there. She wanted to stay positive for teenaged Jennifer’s sake, so Helen tamped down the panic as best she could. Her oldest daughter was missing, not dead—that’s what she kept telling herself. For the moment, at least, there was hope and that had to be enough.

  When questioned by deputies, Jennifer recalled that Phyllis and Scott came separately to eat lunch with her the previous day, Wednesday, July 11. In good spirits, they both spoke about the future and their upcoming wedding plans. There was no hint of anything amiss, nothing that would have indicated anything was wrong.

  At 3:00 p.m. on Thursday, July 12, after Helen and Jennifer were interviewed, Phyllis’s Blazer was found abandoned behind the Econo Lodge, a hotel a couple of miles away from the pawnshop. Helen performed mental surgery, trying to suture this development into a positive outcome, but she couldn’t quite do it. Nausea swept in and threatened to overwhelm her. She wanted to stay strong for Phyllis, but all she could think about was that her child—her baby, her firstborn—was missing, and each new development was taking her closer and closer to a dark place where she did not want to go.

  Where was Phyllis? Where was Scott? And what in the name of God was going on?

  R

  Whenever the telephone in the Aragona house rang, Jennifer pounced on it. Like all teens who came of age before cell phones evolved into common currency, Jennifer’s life was predicated on the sound of the household phone. When Phyllis disappeared, Helen started to guard it. If and when Phyllis called, she wanted to be the one to answer. She also didn’t want Jennifer to take a call if the news was bad.

  Helen daydreamed that she would pick up the receiver and Phyllis would be on the other end, alive and healthy and with a good explanation for whatever happened in that store. She was afraid to leave the house because she didn’t want to miss that call. Until Helen could speak to Phyllis, her life was as off balance as a car with two wheels speeding along a mountain road.

  Helen’s mind kept circling the investigators’ implications. She worried about where the evidence might lead them, and worse—where it might take Phyllis. She believed that if she thought the worst, it might come true.

  Helen knew it was irrational to believe dark thoughts could inspire a similar outcome, but she couldn’t help herself. In the back of her mind, the niggling idea that her missing daughter could be dead sat like a cancerous tumor, draining her reserves. If she allowed herself to confront the idea that Phyllis was gone forever, then it was like giving up on her. Still, the mother in her couldn’t help but acknowledge how afraid Phyllis must be. She prayed Phyllis and Scott were still together. He would comfort her. He would stand by her. He would protect her.

  In those first few desperate hours after the news of Phyllis’s disappearance broke, there was nothing Helen could do but wait and pray. If the phone rang, it was most often a detective calling to check a detail or ask another question. Some of what law enforcement officials wanted to know drove Helen crazy. She didn’t understand why they asked these things about Phyllis, her relationship with Scott, her bills, her habits. Helen answered them as best she could, reasoning the deputies were, after all, on her side, and they shared the common goal of wanting to find Phyllis alive and well and as fast as possible. They had not said so, but she knew time worked against them. The longer it took to find Phyllis and Scott, the worse their chances of being whole and unhurt.

  As Helen prayed someone would find her missing child, what deputies discovered, instead, was Scott. And the news sent Helen into a downward spiral unlike anything she had ever experienced.

  R

  Sergeant David West of the Onslow County Sheriff’s Department was one of the dozens of law enforcement officers fanned out in the county searching for the couple that Thursday in July. The investigation into Scott and Phyllis’s disappearance was hours old and already the day had grown long and intense. West, like the rest of the officers in his department, scoured parking lots, streets, and wooded areas for signs of the missing couple’s vehicles.

  Old leaves crackled under West’s shoes as he made his way through the woods. Tree branches and bushes snatched at West’s light, mud-brown uniform, now wet with perspiration. Mosquitoes buzzed, delighted at the intrusion. West swatted them away as he pushed farther into the musty-smelling underbrush. Off the road, he could hear the sounds of cars approaching and passing the spot where he’d parked his patrol car on the road’s shoulder.

  It was a little before 6:00 p.m. as West crept through the wood. There were still a good two or more hours of sunlight left before the shadows would lengthen, and he wanted to finish searching that particular area before moving on to the next spot. There was a lot of land to cover before night fell, and the department was stretched thin.

  The deputy was more than two hundred feet into the forest when he spied a jolt of red visible through the trees. As he moved closer, West found a small clearing. In the center of that clearing stood Scott’s candy-apple red Beretta. And on the ground between the car’s open door and the vehicle itself, curled up as if sleeping in a bed of leaves, was Scott, his head wrapped in a makeshift hood. He had been shot once at point-blank range on the left side of his head. Later, investigators would determine his hair contained traces of duct tape adhesive.

  R

  In addition to their grief and horror, Helen and her family were panicked at the news of Scott’s murder. They knew his killing meant Phyllis’s chances of being found alive had ebbed away.

  As each day passed and the investigation into the robbery of Woodson Music and Pawn and the kidnapping and murder of Scott Gasperson progressed, Helen also began to sense a shift in the way the community regarded her and her family. Although her lifelong friends and those who knew Phyllis well continued to stand by and comfort her, terrible rumors began to creep into the subtext of the Aragonas’ lives. Phyllis, people whispered, had been in on the robbery and helped kill Scott. Even now, these voices said, she was on the run.

  “My friends would call me up to say teachers had told the class my sister did it,” Jennifer says. Helen received telephone calls that were even nastier than Jen
nifer’s.

  “I’d get calls at work, a voice saying, ‘Help me, Mom, help me,’” Helen says.

  Jennifer was also on the receiving end of cruel, personal intrusions. “People would call and tell me that I was a tramp,” she says. For a fifteen-year-old girl mourning her big sister, the telephone calls were both crushing and astonishing. She didn’t understand how a world that was orderly and normal could turn sour and unsure so fast.

  Speculation about the circumstances of Phyllis’s disappearance continued to spawn gossip and rumor: Phyllis was after Scott’s money. He had a big life insurance policy and she was the beneficiary. She was on the run, hiding out, pretending to be a victim, but she’d come back soon to claim the cash.

  The officers investigating the case also conjectured on the petite redhead’s possible involvement. The discovery of Scott’s body with no sign of Phyllis placed everyone close to the missing woman, including Helen and Jennifer, under suspicion.

  R

  Onslow Sheriff’s Deputy Mack Whitney, now retired, has decades of experience as a cop. In addition to his law enforcement duties, Whitney serves as an ordained minister, a combination some might find odd, but not uncommon in southern law enforcement. Whitney’s mellow personality and soft, persuasive voice make him easy to talk to, even when the subject is murder.

  Five days after Scott and Phyllis were discovered missing, Tuesday, July 17, a man named Miguel Angel Guzman contacted Whitney. Guzman told the officer that about three months before Scott and Phyllis disappeared, he was approached by two acquaintances, a Cuban refugee named Gary Fernandez and his son, Orlando. Gary and Orlando asked Guzman to participate in a robbery. Their target: Woodson Music and Pawn. Guzman declined. He also failed to mention it to anyone.

  Guzman said Gary and Orlando Fernandez once again contacted him on July 1, still talking about the pawnshop robbery. After Woodson’s was robbed, on Thursday, July 12 and again on July 13, they told Guzman in two separate conversations they were going away.