The Last Place You'd Look

by Carole Moore

  Based on Guzman’s information, deputies searched a storage unit and mobile home rented by the fugitives. By then, they’d left Onslow County far behind. Gary Fernandez, his girlfriend, Maria Monserrate, and Gary’s son, Orlando Fernandez, were in Miami.

  R

  The way most successful detectives investigate any case is a bit counterintuitive: they do not try to unearth enough evidence to prove someone is guilty of a crime but instead attempt to exculpate each suspect. When they cannot build a case for innocence, they usually have their answer.

  Phyllis’s disappearance left them with a hurdle that would prove difficult to overcome. Since they had no inkling of her whereabouts, investigators treated her not as a victim, but as a party to the crime. Helen later said she knew they were doing their jobs, but it was still painful.

  Why wasn’t Phyllis cleared once deputies knew about Gary Fernandez? Because until she was found and an arrest made, everyone associated with the case remained a suspect, even Phyllis.

  When a loved one vanishes, even if the evidence points to a dark ending, it’s often difficult for the family to accept what may seem inevitable to others. The Aragonas continued to hold onto their faith that Phyllis would be returned to them alive and whole, even when most expected the worst. Mothers often find hope in the bleakest of scenarios. Helen Aragona was no exception.

  R

  As the search for Phyllis continued, investigators tracked Gary Fernandez and his accomplices. With Phyllis still missing weeks after the robbery, Helen traveled to New York to visit one of her other daughters. Detectives followed her on the premise she could be meeting Phyllis. Helen feels conflicted at the premise she might have been in league with her daughter or that Phyllis was suspected of involvement in Scott’s slaying.

  But Helen and Phyllis were not alone in the spotlight. Detectives couldn’t rule out anyone who might benefit from Scott’s death, even his father, Robert.

  “They thought Robert might have killed Scott for the money,” Helen says, her voice derisive at the implication this father would sacrifice his child for cash. Although their relationship was strained at first because Phyllis remained missing after Scott’s body was found, Robert Gasperson has become a good friend over the years.

  As long as Phyllis remained missing, her absence became almost like a living thing—the elephant in Helen Aragona’s life. Though she arose each day with the hope that Phyllis would be found, even she admitted as the days passed, it seemed less and less likely. But never once did she buy into the theory Phyllis was involved in the robbery or Scott’s murder.

  “She loved him. She loved him more than anything,” Helen says. “She would never, ever do anything to hurt that man. He was the center of her world.”

  Meanwhile, Helen continued to endure rude comments and finger-pointing. People yelled at her on the street from passing cars. She hated going out. The abuse also affected Jennifer.

  A counselor at Jennifer’s school called the stricken student into her office and advised her to “get over it.” An honors student, Jennifer’s grades slipped, and she grew morose. She could think of nothing but her sister. Soon things grew so nasty that Helen sent Jennifer to Texas to live with another sibling. There, the fragile teen was spared the cruelty and idle speculation of classmates and strangers, but her life would remain altered and broken beyond repair. To this day, she still weeps for Phyllis and Scott, and her trust in others has all but evaporated.

  “I don’t feel safe anymore,” Jennifer says, trembling.

  R

  Months passed and the investigation continued. The Aragonas observed their first Thanksgiving without Phyllis. The Christmas holidays ahead promised little peace. The struggle to return to business as usual and put their lives back together remained difficult. Without knowing where Phyllis was and what happened to her, they felt as though they lived in some sort of hellish alternate universe.

  Winter stripped the trees of their leaves and turned the grass brown and lifeless. Helen Aragona went through the minutiae of living, but there was no longer any joy in her life. Still, she was convinced, as she had been since the beginning, that her daughter was innocent of the things people said about her. The ugly speculation and scrutiny continued to wound, but she tried not to think about it and focused instead on the continued search for Phyllis.

  By this time, the agencies involved in the case, including the FBI, read like a book of acronyms. Authorities were now convinced Gary and Orlando Fernandez and Maria Monserrate killed Scott Gasperson and robbed the pawnshop. They tracked the threesome from Miami to the Dominican Republic, where they had traveled by boat.

  A couple of weeks before Christmas, they had them: Gary, his son, and Maria, the girlfriend. Arrested in the Dominican Republic, the three were brought back to stand trial for Scott’s murder. Phyllis was still missing.

  The story behind the crime was so bizarre and so heinous that the case would be reenacted on John Walsh’s television program, America’s Most Wanted. When Gary, Maria, and Orlando were apprehended in the Dominican Republic, one law enforcement agency involved contacted the television program to announce the arrests, even though Helen Aragona had not yet been notified. Helen found out when the news media called for comment.

  R

  Helen’s quest to clear her daughter’s name would continue until April 1991, as the sun warmed the cold hard earth.

  On Sunday, April 7, almost nine months from the day that Phyllis Aragona was abducted, her skeletal remains were discovered in a wooded area in nearby Pender County. Like Scott, Phyllis had been shot once in the head. Over time, her bones were scattered, and authorities were forced to use dental records to identify her. Bits of hair and duct tape also were found at the scene.

  The news brought mixed emotions to the Aragonas. When she heard, Helen experienced intense pain, but also a grim sort of relief—not because Phyllis was dead, but because Helen could stop hoping.

  “That year in limbo, that was the worst time of all,” Helen says.

  Now her phone could ring unanswered and Helen could do something no mother ever wants to do: lay her child to rest.

  R

  It took almost three years to find all the people responsible for the deaths of Phyllis and Scott and bring them back to Onslow County to stand trial for the murders. Helen went head-to-head with the investigators during the entire process. She demanded to know their progress, to stay in the loop.

  In addition to the Fernandezes and Maria Monserrate, Eli Ocasio, Maria’s teenaged son, also was charged with murder. After a long, intense search that saw the case stretching into the spring of 1993, authorities located and arrested Eli in New York City.

  After the trials, after the sentencing, after the young lovers’ names were chiseled on their headstones, the full story emerged about how Scott and Phyllis were kidnapped to facilitate the pawnshop robbery. And Gary, who masterminded the crime, turned out to be more than a Cuban refugee; he was also a government informant enrolled in the federal witness protection program.

  During the trials, testimony revealed the crime was one of swiftness, brutality, and an underworld far removed from the lives of ordinary, decent people like Scott and Phyllis. Gary was involved in drug dealing and theft, and his past had caught up to him. He needed money fast. Gary cased Woodson Music and Pawn and made plans to take the couple hostage, then force them to open the safe so it could be looted.

  Scott and Phyllis were captured at their home and then held at the trailer. Two of their abductors left the trailer early on the morning of July 12 and drove to the pawnshop Scott managed. After opening the door and going inside, they departed and waited to see if their actions would trip a silent alarm and trigger a police response. No alarm sounded; no officer came by.

  They drove back to the trailer and retrieved Scott. They brought Scott to the pawnshop in his own car—the car witnesses would pass as it sped toward Smith Road, where Scott’s execution-style murder took place. Maria also drove back to the pawn
shop, but in Phyllis’s Blazer. Phyllis was held in Maria’s mobile home, where she was beaten and raped.

  At one point during their capture, Scott broke free and tried to run but was chased down and forced back inside the residence. The morning of the robbery—July 12—was the last time Scott and Phyllis saw one another.

  A few hours after murdering Scott, the killers took a terrified Phyllis and drove her to a location even more remote than the one where they left Scott. As they walked her deep into the woods, she clung with fraying hope to her captors’ promise that they would leave her there so she could be rescued. She knew that they took Scott away but not that he was murdered. That hope died with Phyllis when she was shot in the back of the head and abandoned to the elements. The bullet, from a .380 caliber handgun, exited near her eye.

  Gary was the first one tried and convicted of robbing, kidnapping, and murdering Scott Gasperson and Phyllis Aragona. Arthur Bollinger, an inmate imprisoned with Gary Fernandez, testified at Gary’s trial that Gary told him he shot and killed Phyllis, and his son, Orlando, killed Scott. Gary also admitted to Bollinger that he beat and raped Phyllis.

  The jury convicted Gary but hung during the sentencing phase, which meant he did not receive the death penalty. Instead, Gary Fernandez was given a mandatory life sentence for each of the first-degree murder convictions, plus 130 consecutive years for the other charges.

  The four defendants are each serving life sentences. It is doubtful any of them will ever be paroled.

  TODAY

  In the corner of one room of Helen Aragona’s pastel-hued home sits a huge blue stuffed rabbit. It is the size of Helen’s four-year-old granddaughter. The rabbit has seen better days. Its stuffing is lumpy, its fur bedraggled and the ears look as if they’ve been used to drag the bunny around.

  Helen’s kitchen, all sky blue and white, has a little country feel to it. It’s a look that went out of fashion more than a decade ago, but Helen doesn’t care. Most of what hangs on the walls of her antiseptically clean home has been taken from the little house on Ben Williams Road that Phyllis shared with Scott.

  Jennifer, grown and married now with children of her own, resembles her oldest sister so much that Helen’s voice breaks when she remarks on their similarity. Both mother and daughter remember with absolute clarity the moment they heard about Scott’s death. His killing disassembled what remained of their faith that Phyllis would come back home to them alive.

  Helen fiddles with some papers on the table while, from the corner of her eye, she watches her young granddaughter play. In the playroom stands a giant wooden horse Scott had made for Phyllis.

  All these years have passed, and Helen finds herself in disbelief at the things people still say to her about Phyllis and the Aragona family’s loss.

  “People would say to me, ‘Well, she was thirty years old,’ and ‘You have other children,’ as if that means I shouldn’t mind losing my daughter,” Helen says. “I have never gotten over it, and I never will.”

  Helen’s home is full of Phyllis’s things, but visitors would not get the impression that she has built a shrine to Phyllis.

  “I have her shoes,” Helen says in a soft voice. She strokes Jennifer’s hand as her youngest daughter sits white-knuckled at the table.

  “I still run into people to this day who ask about the case and want all of the juicy details,” Jennifer says, disbelieving. “I don’t always want to relive that.”

  Helen’s windows are open, and the smell of cut grass wafts in from the yard. She is drinking water, and ice tinkles in the glass as her granddaughter babbles to her toys in the other room.

  Phyllis, Helen says, wanted to be a veterinarian. It seemed like a natural extension of her affinity for animals. But Phyllis forgot all about veterinarian school when she met Scott. “He was all she wanted,” Helen says.

  Her family says Phyllis was so short she had to sit on something to drive. But in direct opposition to her feminine personality, Phyllis preferred muscle cars, like Ford Mustangs.

  She listened to Neil Diamond and Barbra Streisand and Bon Jovi. Always cheerful, she was feisty, hardworking, and the kind of kid who makes a mom proud. After all this time, Helen still can’t believe she lost this happy-go-lucky child to the random greed and cruelty of someone like Gary Fernandez and his co-conspirators.

  “See these letters? They’ve [the killers] written me,” Helen says, holding the papers in her hand. She shakes her head at the ordinariness of Phyllis and Scott’s killers. “I’ve met Gary and Maria and Orlando, and I did not see the evil in them.”

  They have asked for her forgiveness, but it’s a request Helen will never grant.

  “I don’t understand why they killed them,” she says. “And I will never understand it, never in a million years.”

  She finds the community’s response to her daughter’s initial disappearance just as perplexing. After all, those driving the rumor mill were friends, neighbors, and classmates. Of all people, Helen says, they should have shot down the whispers and kept the good Aragona name out of the muck. They should have acted as her defender. Instead, many seemed not only willing, but eager to dirty her name.

  “It was like losing my child all over again. First to the people who killed her and then to the people who decided it was their business to crucify her,” Helen says.

  • 10 •

  Foul Play Suspected:

  What Happens When All Hope Is Gone

  Fear is a journey, a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arriving.—Alan Paton, Cry the Beloved Country

  Keith Call, a handsome twenty-year-old from a tight-knit family, stopped by his brother’s place on April 9, 1988, to borrow a shirt for his first date with a classmate. It was the last time his brother or anyone from his family would see him alive.

  Later that night, Keith and his friend and fellow student, Cassandra Hailey, eighteen, a vivacious young woman with a crown of curly dark hair and sparkling eyes, would vanish like an unfinished thought, leaving not a single clue as to their whereabouts.

  The two disappeared along Colonial Parkway in Virginia, where Keith was driving his red 1982 Toyota Celica. They had planned to take in a movie; they ended the evening with a spur-of-the-moment appearance at a local party.

  The parkway itself is not a sinister place. In truth, it is a beautiful, scenic route for travelers, with twenty-three miles of roads connecting the historic Virginia cities of Jamestown, Williamsburg, and Yorktown. The drive is filled with trees, colorful bushes, and flowers, as well as wildlife. With abundant waterways along the route, ducks and geese crisscross the skies; raccoons, opossum, and deer fill the wooded areas. A drive along the parkway would have taken Keith and Cassandra past many secluded spots prized by lovers as quiet places to park.

  But no one knows whether the couple chose to park and talk that night or if someone else forced their car to stop on the parkway. In either case, Keith and Cassandra never made it home. Instead, they vanished sometime in the early hours of April 10, leaving behind the little Toyota with most of their belongings in it, under circumstances that compel investigators to theorize they were the latest victims of what has been dubbed the Colonial Parkway Killer—or killers, since aspects of the crimes indicate the presence of more than one perpetrator.

  The case of the Colonial Parkway Killings began on October 12, 1986, with the discovery of the bodies of Cathleen Thomas, a titian-haired Naval Academy graduate who worked in nearby Norfolk, and twenty-one-year-old Rebecca Ann Dowski, believed to be Thomas’s lover. The two women were found strangled, their throats cut, in Cathleen’s car, which was parked on an overlook. The killer had tried without success to torch the vehicle, and there were signs the victims fought for their lives.

  As investigators continued to search for Thomas and Dowski’s killer, a second set of bodies was discovered. A little more than eleven months after the first killings, twenty-year-old David Lee Knobling and his fourteen-year-old companion, Robin Edwards, were found shot to deat
h and dumped at a game refuge, three days after Knobling’s truck had been found abandoned on the parkway.

  It was a little more than six months after the discovery of Knobling and Edwards in 1988 that Keith Call, of Gloucester, and Cassandra Hailey, a York County resident, disappeared. Multiple searches conducted over the years have failed to turn up indications of the couple’s whereabouts. But their disappearance did not signify an end to the string of violence and mystery in the vicinity of the Colonial Parkway: on September 5, 1989, twenty-one-year-old Daniel Lauer and his brother’s eighteen-year-old girlfriend, Annamaria Phelps, were found dead and decomposed after they disappeared from a rest stop along Route 64, near the parkway.

  Six families lost children and siblings, but they could lay their loved ones to rest. They say that it is small comfort, but it’s something. However, for the Call and Hailey families, there have been no funerals, no grave markers, and no chance to bring their children home. And, as terrible as it is to have proof of loss, the limbo of not knowing a family member’s whereabouts can be worse in a way. Keith’s sister, Joyce Call-Canada, says that their parents both died without ever knowing what happened to their bright, popular, attractive son. Their loss haunted the Call family, leaving a hole in their lives that could never be filled.

  “It was devastating. Agony. I had to watch my parents [go] to pieces. It was very hard. We never found any bodies, and [after] many, many years . . . we still are searching,” Joyce says.

  Letting go of the hope that a loved one is still alive is one of the hardest steps for the family of a missing person to take. Joyce says her own family didn’t want to give up on Keith. “For the first few years we had the hope that someone had them, and that was very hard, too,” she says.

  “Keith was very good-hearted, easy-going, loved his family. He had just started college for computer science, worked part-time at a boatyard, and commuted to nearby Christopher Newport College,” says Joyce. Keith and Cassandra were both freshmen at the college, just starting to move into adulthood and find out what they wanted to do with their lives. Joyce says Keith had broken up with his steady girlfriend and asked Cassandra out. The two were on their first date and following the movie had stopped by a small cookout at an apartment complex.