Fatal Jealousy: The True Story of a Doomed Romance, a Singular Obsession, and a Quadruple Murder

by McEvoy, Colin

  The deceased elderly man was Alvin Marsh Jr., Denise’s eighty-seven-year-old grandfather, who had been living with Denise along with her father, the sixty-two-year-old Dennis Marsh. Dennis’s current whereabouts were unknown.

  The dead man in the living room just inside the front door was Steven Zernhelt, Denise’s fifty-three-year-old neighbor from 1915 Lincoln Avenue, the other half of the twin home. He was the husband of Janet Zernhelt, the woman who had hysterically confronted Joseph York when he arrived on the scene.

  After York reported what he had found at 1917 Lincoln Avenue and more police officers and emergency officials arrived to help secure the scene, the next step was to talk to the witnesses. One of the first people the police spoke with was Debbie Hawkey, the wife of Denise’s cousin and one of her very closest friends.

  She was also the first person to find Denise’s body and, after listening to her story, it became clear to the police that she could have very easily been one of the murder victims herself.

  Debbie and her two sons, ages three and five, had just spent the last three days with Denise and her daughter Annikah at the beach in Seaside Heights, New Jersey. They had gone there to celebrate Annikah’s birthday; she had turned ten on Wednesday, June 23. The five of them arrived back home on Friday and planned to later make arrangements for Debbie to pick up her keys from Denise, who was borrowing Debbie’s van while her own car was in the shop.

  Debbie and Denise had exchanged text messages earlier in the day, she told the police. Debbie said she’d received a text that her van was back, and she’d arranged for Denise to leave the keys in the mailbox so Debbie could pick the van up later. Somewhere around four forty-five that afternoon, Debbie’s husband dropped her off in front of Denise’s house. She opened the mailbox, only to find that the keys were not inside.

  Debbie went up to Denise’s front door, and when nobody answered her knock she turned the doorknob and stepped inside. The door was unlocked, but it wasn’t unusual for Denise to leave her door unlocked during the day, and Debbie often came in and out freely.

  “Hello?” Debbie had called as she entered. “Hello? Is anybody here?”

  Debbie walked through the living room into the dining room and saw her keys sitting on the table. As she picked them up, she believed she heard noises in the kitchen, as if someone was cooking something. Placing her purse on the dining room table, Debbie stepped into the kitchen where, to her horror, she found Denise sprawled out on the floor in a pool of blood, dead.

  Debbie didn’t see anybody else at the time, but believed she heard some rustling coming from somewhere deeper inside the house. Terrified, she ran back through the dining and living rooms out the front door, hoping to find her husband waiting for her out front.

  He has to call 911, she was thinking. We need to call 911.

  But her husband had moved his car farther down the block and he couldn’t see Debbie. Still shaken from what she had just seen, she thought to call 911 herself, but realized she had left her cell phone in her purse, which was still in the house. She raced back up the porch and entered the house again, rushed to the dining room, and swept up her purse.

  As she did so, she heard noises from the kitchen again. Glancing into the room, she saw a large shadow on the wall. It appeared to be a man.

  Absolutely terrified, Debbie ran out of the house again, desperate to find somebody to call 911. In a panic, she ran to the porch on the other half of the twin home and started pounding on the neighbors’ door.

  Steve Zernhelt answered, and after Debbie told him somebody was hurt, he ran to Denise’s house to help. That Good Samaritan act had cost him his life.

  After speaking with Debbie, the police spoke to Emily Germani, a fourteen-year-old girl who lived just north of Denise’s home. She provided the police with what would prove to be an invaluable piece of information: She had seen the man who likely murdered the three victims.

  Emily had heard Debbie Hawkey and Janet Zernhelt screaming; it had sounded like Janet was shouting that her husband was killed. When Emily came out to investigate, she saw a shirtless man come out through Denise’s front door onto the porch. He was covered in blood, and was trying to get blood off one of his hands by flicking it toward the ground.

  Almost immediately after she spotted him, the man looked directly at Emily and made a surprised expression. Then, she told the police, he immediately doubled back into the house. A little later, Emily saw Denise’s car, a gold Pontiac Grand Prix GT, speeding away. The police issued a radio report for other surrounding departments to keep an eye out for that vehicle.

  Emily recognized the man as Denise’s boyfriend, or at least a man she had dated in the past. His name, she told the police, was Michael Ballard.

  CHAPTER 3

  Raymond Judge was about halfway through his noon to 8 p.m. shift, catching up on some paperwork in his office, when the call came in about the multiple murders in Northampton borough.

  Judge had been with the Pennsylvania State Police for more than fifteen years, during which time he had been involved with at least fifty homicide investigations. He was forty-one years old and, with a strong, square-shaped jaw, he had a youthful look about him, particularly in his big, round brown eyes. He also had a sterling reputation and was well known for his strong work ethic and dedication to the job, as well as his impressive investigative abilities.

  Just over three weeks earlier, Judge had played a pivotal role in solving a murder case within hours of it occurring: He’d handled the police interrogation of Darius K. Maurer, a twenty-year-old man from Emmaus, a borough about fifteen miles southwest of Bethlehem. Judge was a member of the criminal investigation unit at the state police’s Troop M, which had barracks in the nearby regions of Dublin, Belfast, Fogelsville, and Trevose in addition to Bethlehem. Many of the towns in those areas had no police departments, or had small departments that weren’t equipped to handle homicides and other major cases, so the state police were often called in to take over those investigations.

  Maurer was the boyfriend of twenty-year-old Donya Sinan Abdulrazzak, also from Emmaus, who had been reported missing the evening of June 4, 2010. According to her parents, she’d left the house that morning for what she claimed would be a ten-minute walk and never came back. When the state police looked into Maurer, they learned that he had called out sick from work that day. His mother told the police he had left the house around 10 a.m., just half an hour after Donya was last seen, and that he’d returned two hours later to change his clothes. He was dirty and sweaty.

  That night, Maurer was found after crashing his sport-utility vehicle at Route 309 and Interstate 78 in South Whitehall Township. He had a stab wound on his chest. After he was taken to Lehigh Valley Hospital–Cedar Crest to be treated, Judge interviewed Maurer and he quickly admitted to having killed Donya.

  They were in love, he claimed, but her family wouldn’t approve of their relationship—he was black, and she was from Iraq—so they decided the only way they could be together was in death, according to Maurer. After having sex in a wooded area of Emmaus—Maurer claimed it was consensual, but authorities disputed that—he punched her, strangled her to death, and left her body alongside a walking trail. Maurer later tried to commit suicide, first by stabbing himself, then by crashing his car.

  It was a slam-dunk case for Judge; Maurer would eventually plead guilty to second-degree murder and no contest to rape, and was sentenced to life in prison. Now Judge had a new case on his hands.

  According to the police call, they were looking at a stabbing in Northampton borough, possibly involving multiple fatalities. The Northampton Police Department was already at the scene, but they were a small force and it looked as though the state police would be taking over the investigation. Judge was the on-duty criminal investigator that day. His paperwork was going to have to wait.

  As Judge started to leave the barracks and head for his car, he was informed that there had also been a motor vehicle accident near the intersection
of Route 329 and Savage Road in East Allen Township that could possibly be related to the killings. That was only about a mile and a half away from where the murders took place—a five-minute drive at best.

  Judge decided to check out the crash scene first. When he arrived, he found several uniformed police officers still milling around, as well as the off-duty Corporal Mark Rowlands. A damaged gold sedan was still entangled in a patch of trees off the side of the road, but the man who had been driving it—a man named Michael, according to Rowlands—had already been airlifted to St. Luke’s Hospital. Apparently, it wasn’t looking very good for him.

  Judge spoke to Rowlands and others at the scene and got a rundown of what had happened, including the fact that the car belonged to one of the murder victims, and that Ballard had made several remarks about having just “killed everyone.” Judge instructed the ranking officer on the scene—Corporal Steven Zellner—that the accident was to be treated as a secondary crime scene. All evidence would have to be preserved, and the scene would have to be cordoned off. He ordered the vehicle to be removed, photographed, and relocated to the Bethlehem barracks for processing.

  With little else to do at the crash scene—and a suspect seeking medical care with no chance of later escaping police custody—Judge headed over to 1917 Lincoln Avenue to see where the killings had taken place.

  * * *

  Janet Zernhelt still appeared to be in a mild state of shock. Although hysterical when Officer Joseph York had first arrived earlier, she was a bit calmer now; several of her neighbors had come and taken her back into her house, trying their best to comfort her. Once she had regained her composure—or at least some semblance of it—she was ready to recall for police the memories that would haunt her for the rest of her life.

  The memories of her husband’s murder.

  Janet told the police she and Steve had been married for thirty-four years. In fact, they had been just one month shy of their thirty-fifth anniversary. They met in high school, when they both worked at a fast-food chicken restaurant on 7th Street in Northampton, and they quickly became high school sweethearts.

  Janet was a native of the Lehigh Valley, having lived in the nearby borough of North Catasauqua, which was just a few miles south of where she lived now. Steve’s father had been in the US Navy, so the family had moved around a lot during his childhood, but he ultimately settled in Allentown, the largest city in the region. He had most recently been working as a technical service adviser for US Supply, a construction and repair supply company in West Conshohocken, a northern suburb of Philadelphia.

  Janet and Steve had lived at 1915 Lincoln Avenue for just under thirty years, having moved there one year before their oldest child was born. All three of their kids had been raised there. It was a nice neighborhood, Janet said. The kind of place where she could let her children play with the other kids across the street without worrying about their safety. The kind of place where you never even thought about locking your door.

  On this particular Saturday, Janet and Steve had been alone at home, watching a movie. They had originally been planning to take their boat up to Beltzville Lake, which was just under twenty miles north of Northampton in nearby Carbon County. Boating had always been one of Steve’s passions, Janet said. But instead, they decided to stay in and relax together.

  They were doing just that when they heard a scream from next door, according to Janet. It was a loud scream, and an unusual one. Janet had trouble describing it except to say that it didn’t sound like a normal noise someone would make.

  “That didn’t sound right,” Steve had said to her after hearing it. “Maybe someone got hurt.”

  Janet knew her neighbors Denise and Dennis, of course. She didn’t speak with them very often, but Janet had known the family even before she moved into the house because she had gone to high school with Denise’s aunt, who had also grown up in North Catasauqua. In the past, Janet had heard Denise scream after her grandfather Alvin had fallen in the yard, and they thought perhaps something like that had happened again.

  Steve went to the next-door porch and knocked on the front door to see if everything was all right. When nobody answered, he walked to the other side of the house to see if Denise or Dennis was in the porch out back, but nobody was there, even though both Denise’s and Dennis’s cars were parked nearby.

  Steve finally returned to his wife and they resumed their movie. But a short while later they heard screaming again, and soon a woman was pounding on their front door. When they opened it, they found Debbie Hawkey—although they didn’t know her by name—standing in the doorway shaking, terrified, clutching a cell phone in her hand.

  “Call 911!” she screamed. “Call 911!”

  “Who are you?” Steve asked.

  “I’m the cousin,” she said hysterically. “Don’t make me go in there! There’s blood all over!”

  Without hesitation, Steve rushed past Debbie and jumped over the small brick wall that separated the two porches, then rushed through Denise’s front door. He went so quickly that he didn’t bother putting on his shoes.

  “Steve, you don’t have your shoes on!” Janet called to him.

  It was the last thing she would ever say to her husband.

  Janet grabbed a phone from a receiver near the door and called 911. Debbie, still in a panic, ran past her into Janet’s kitchen, but Janet was too distracted and frightened to notice. She told the 911 dispatcher there was some sort of disturbance and repeatedly asked them to send someone to their address.

  Janet could hear noises next door. She couldn’t make out any words, but she heard some sort of commotion, a fight of some sort. At one point she looked out her front door at Denise’s porch and saw a figure emerge, but with the screen door blocking her view she couldn’t make out who it was.

  Janet waited a few more minutes—it felt like a few hours—but the police had still not arrived. She knew something was wrong, and she couldn’t stand to leave Steve alone there any longer. She quickly went to her pantry to see if she could find something—a hammer, maybe—anything she could use to protect herself or her husband if she had to. When she couldn’t find anything right away, she abandoned the idea and rushed out of her house and over to Denise’s door.

  “I went in there. I saw my husband in a pool of blood,” she later said. “I just … I was standing there over the body.”

  Janet knew immediately that Steve was dead. She didn’t see how he could possibly be alive. There was just so much blood. At first, she couldn’t react. She was in a state of shock; her body had gone completely numb. She couldn’t do anything but stand there and stare at the body of her husband.

  “I saw him,” she later said. “I didn’t know how he could have been alive. He bled all over. I saw his face and pools of blood.”

  CHAPTER 4

  John Morganelli’s plans for the evening were about to change.

  Having returned from a golf outing earlier that day, the Northampton County district attorney had just gotten dressed to go out to dinner with his wife, Diana, and a couple of friends when he received a call from a 911 dispatcher. There was a police officer on the phone, the dispatcher explained, who wanted to speak to him about an incident in Northampton borough.

  “What’s up?” Morganelli asked once the officer was patched through.

  “Well, we’ve got this murder up here,” the officer replied. “It’s in a house, and it’s looking pretty bad. We wanted to let you know. The coroner’s coming.”

  Morganelli told his wife to go on ahead to the restaurant, adding that he would join her as soon as he could. It was his custom to head out to crime scenes himself whenever a murder occurred. His office had handled around two hundred homicides in the eighteen years he had been in the office, and he made it a practice to personally step foot in as many of those crime scenes as he possibly could.

  Morganelli, fifty-four, was first elected district attorney in 1991, when he was thirty-five years old, and he had been reelected fou
r times since. He was a short man with a slight build, a mop of curly brown hair, and a big smile, but the appearance hid a tough prosecutor who believed in taking a hard line against criminals, especially those who had committed violent crimes.

  Morganelli had run for Pennsylvania attorney general in 2000, 2004, and 2008. Although unsuccessful in those bids, he nevertheless had garnered statewide attention more than once over the years. In 1995, then-Governor Tom Ridge appointed him to the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency. He was president of the Pennsylvania District Attorneys’ Association from 1999 to 2000. In 2003, he was appointed by the state supreme court to a committee focused on capital litigation.

  But if you asked him to name his proudest accomplishments during his time as district attorney, the list would probably include some of the murder cases he had personally prosecuted. He had obtained twenty first-degree murder convictions at trial, including some of the most notorious cases in Northampton County history.

  Among them was Aragon Pautienus, who strangled his wife inside their suburban Forks Township home in 2008 and stuffed her body inside a plastic storage container, where it stayed for four days until his arrest. It took a jury only half an hour to render a guilty verdict.

  Morganelli had also successfully prosecuted the case of Kathy MacClellan, seventy-three, who in 2005 beat her eighty-four-year-old neighbor to death with a hammer in Moore Township after MacClellan claimed the woman had stolen from her. That case was particularly unsettling due to both the age of the killer and her cold demeanor: When the police came to investigate, MacClellan was sitting in her neighbor’s porch and said to them, “It’s too late. She’s dead already.”

  One of Morganelli’s most impressive prosecutions was that of James McBride, who in 1985 killed his wife in his Northampton home and was said to have dismembered her body and disposed of it along the Appalachian Trail. McBride was arrested in 2000 after a grand jury was convened to investigate cold cases, but many believed he would never be convicted because his wife’s body was never discovered. Nevertheless, Morganelli handled the prosecution himself and successfully secured a first-degree murder conviction.