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

by McEvoy, Colin

  At times, Morganelli felt like he had seen almost everything during his years as district attorney. Even so, he wasn’t fully prepared for what he was about to see inside 1917 Lincoln Avenue.

  After arriving at the Northampton house, Morganelli entered the front door, where his eyes were immediately drawn to the body of Steven Zernhelt curled up in front of the sofa. He could have been napping if not for the half-dried puddles of blood that stained the carpet around him.

  Morganelli was greeted by Raymond Judge, the state trooper handling the investigation. The two had met only briefly in the past, when Judge worked with the district attorney’s office on the cold-case grand jury investigation of Lucinda Andrews, a fifty-five-year-old woman accused of shooting a man to death in his Northampton apartment in 1985. They had very little contact during that investigation, but Morganelli knew Judge by reputation, and knew him to be a very careful and competent officer.

  Judge and Morganelli stepped into the kitchen to survey the rest of the crime scene. Even for a seasoned prosecutor like Morganelli, the bodies were a disturbing sight: Denise Merhi, her arms and legs splayed out, the kitchen soaked with blood in all directions. Alvin Marsh Jr. dead in his wheelchair, the elderly man’s neck shredded, his mouth agape, his face frozen in a permanent mask of horror and surprise.

  This, Morgnaelli thought, is probably the worst crime scene I’ve ever seen.

  It was clear to the district attorney that the Northampton Police Department was too small to handle a case of this magnitude. He directed the Pennsylvania State Police to take control of the investigation, just as they did for most major homicide cases in the county.

  Morganelli was also deeply concerned when Judge reported that Denise Merhi had two young children, ages thirteen and ten, who had not been found. He ordered that the rest of the house be searched more thoroughly. There was a chance that they had been home when the murders took place and had run off to another room or closet somewhere to hide.

  Or they could have become victims themselves. It was a horrible thought, but one both Morganelli and Judge knew could not be dismissed.

  After ordering that he be contacted as new information became available, Morganelli excused himself from the crime scene and left to rejoin his wife and their friends for dinner, although he was quite sure his appetite had just been ruined.

  * * *

  Michael Ballard was rushed to the Bethlehem campus of St. Luke’s Hospital, one of two trauma centers in the Lehigh Valley, and the closest to where he had crashed Denise Merhi’s car. The hospital emergency room staff had been alerted to a major trauma on the way. A handful of EMTs pushed Ballard into the hospital on a stretcher, his bloodied clothes partially removed and pushed over to the side.

  Dr. Timothy Costello, the chief resident of the hospital’s emergency medicine residency program, was on duty in the surgical intensive care unit when Ballard arrived at 5:47 p.m. He knew little about the car crash itself, and nothing at all about the horror that had occurred only a few minutes earlier on Lincoln Avenue.

  Ballard was covered in blood, with his right leg especially gruesome. Costello immediately took note of the deep, severe cut on his right thigh. Ballard had fallen in and out of consciousness during the flight, and even now he was suffering decreased levels of consciousness.

  Ballard’s blood pressure was determined to be 80/50, which was dangerously low compared with a normal 120/80. His heart rate was 126, which exceeded the normal range, and his oxygen saturation was 98 percent. Costello ordered that a breathing tube be inserted to protect Ballard’s airway. His extreme level of blood loss was life threatening both in itself and because it lessened his body’s ability to provide oxygen to his brain.

  Death was a real possibility for this man.

  * * *

  Northampton County Coroner Zachary Lysek arrived at 1917 Lincoln Avenue shortly before John Morganelli departed. He had first stopped over at the crash scene on Route 329 upon hearing it was designated a secondary crime scene. Lysek had been coroner since 1992. Before that he spent two years as deputy coroner and about seven years as a police officer in several nearby departments, including Lower Saucon Township, Fountain Hill, and Salisbury Township.

  In those nearly thirty years of experience, Lysek had seen more than his fair share of grisly crime scenes. As coroner, he saw an average of between eight and fifteen homicides each year in Northampton County, and had long developed a required level of professional detachment when it came to the violence. Even so, like Morganelli, Lysek felt this particular crime scene was in its own category of atrocity.

  This is horrific, Lysek thought as he surveyed the house.

  Lysek’s job was to document the scene, identify any evidence, assist in the collection of that evidence, and document any injuries on the bodies. Lysek was particularly concerned for the safety of Denise Merhi’s children. He was directed by Morganelli to search the house and ensure they were not inside somewhere. Judging by the brutally violent way these three victims had died, the coroner felt certain that whoever committed the murders would not have hesitated in killing the children as well.

  Somebody had a lot of anger, Lysek thought. Obviously this was a crime that took an extended period of time to do, based on the extent of the injuries to the victims.

  Lysek began the search along with Trooper Raymond Judge, members of the state police’s records and identification unit, and one other member of Lysek’s own office. Gradually, they made their way to the home’s basement, which was accessible via a doorway in the kitchen, just across from where Denise Merhi’s bloodied corpse lay spread across the floor.

  Unlike the floors upstairs, Lysek noticed that none of the basement steps had any bloodstains. The brown stairs, each of which was covered by a black-and-yellow-striped pad, led down to an open door with a multicolored bag dangling from the doorknob, the words HAPPY BIRTHDAY written in bright block letters.

  The downstairs opened up into a partially finished basement apartment with multiple smaller rooms, each with a drop ceiling and recessed lighting. Lysek stepped past a tall white rotating fan and a wall-mounted rack with four coats hanging on the hooks. He walked into a small living area with a beige couch, a blue-and-white plaid armchair, a wide-screen television, and a small brown floor table with magazines and empty soda bottles scattered atop.

  A pair of legs was visible on the brown-carpeted floor, just in front of the couch.

  Lysek rushed over and quickly realized that the legs belonged to an adult, not a child. A white quilt with a pattern of fuchsia stars had been draped over the person. His legs stuck out of one end of the quilt, the feet fitted with a pair of red, white, and blue sneakers and white socks.

  On the other side of the quilt, the man’s right arm reached outward from beneath the quilt, as if he were a student raising his hand in a classroom. His left hand also poked out from under the quilt, sitting completely still next to the side of the body, resting in a large red bloodstain that was slowly drying on the carpet.

  They had discovered a fourth murder victim.

  The authorities would later identify him as Dennis Marsh, Denise’s sixty-two-year-old father, a parts clerk and truck manufacturer who lived in that basement apartment of Denise’s home. Like the other bodies, Dennis appeared to have been stabbed multiple times. The pattern from the extensive bloodstains was consistent with arterial spurting, and all the signs indicated to Lysek that there had been a struggle before he died.

  Dennis’s white T-shirt was completely soaked in blood. Around the gray-haired man’s neck, Lysek found a silver necklace with a MedicAlert tag indicating he had a past medical history of diabetes. A gold wristwatch was intact on Dennis’s left wrist. Through the blood, Lysek noticed several tattoos on the man, including one of Mickey Mouse on his left arm, one of singer Jim Morrison on his left calf, one of a semi-clothed woman and a jail cell window on his right calf, and one of a multicolored butterfly on his right upper back.

  Looking up from the
body, Lysek saw a message written in blood on the white wall: DENISE IS A WHORE.

  The coroner stood up and walked closer to the eerie message, which he noticed seemed to have been traced on the wall using a sharp object—possibly the knife used to kill these victims. The letters were only a few inches tall, written in all capital letters next to a framed painting of a beachside ocean scene.

  Lysek made another surprising discovery: a light blue T-shirt with a Superman logo resting on the arm of the plaid armchair. The shirt did not appear to be strewn randomly on the furniture, but was instead folded neatly and seemed to have been deliberately placed there. Lysek noticed bloodstains underneath the familiar red S and shield logo.

  Lysek wondered if the killer had deliberately placed the T-shirt there after committing the murder.

  After conducting a thorough search of the rest of the residence, Lysek and Judge concluded there was nobody else inside the house, living or dead. Lysek called John Morganelli to inform him about the fourth victim, news that both shocked and angered the district attorney. He could hardly believe that the authorities hadn’t found the body for more than half an hour after receiving the first 911 call about the murders.

  Lysek, however, was less concerned. He knew the police wanted to make sure all the evidence was preserved, and the best way to do that was to quickly secure the crime scene and make sure the house was cleared so nobody would trample over the evidence. Since the quilt concealed the fourth body, he believed it was entirely conceivable that it would have been initially overlooked, and ultimately none of the evidence was compromised.

  Regardless, it was now clear that the police were dealing with a quadruple homicide, the first that Morganelli or Lysek could recall in their long careers in Northampton County.

  * * *

  The police later learned that Denise’s son Trystan and her daughter Annikah were alive and well. In the days before the murders, Denise had taken the kids down to the New Jersey shore to celebrate Annikah’s birthday. CNN reported that John Morganelli said Denise’s mother, Geraldine Dorwart, was still at the shore with the children when Denise was killed.

  The authorities were extremely relieved. They knew that, if Geraldine and the kids had been home, they could just as easily have suffered her fate.

  Geraldine had long been divorced from Dennis Marsh at the time of the killings, having only been married to him a total of seven years. The fifty-five-year-old lived with her sister Karen in Whitehall Township—less than three miles away from her daughter and grandchildren—which was where Geraldine was now taking her grandchildren.

  But while Geraldine had escaped physical injury, the emotional pain was immeasurable. Denise was her only child, and they had a very close relationship.

  “To know that Denise suffered terrible pain and the utmost fear before her life was taken from her is beyond any heartache imaginable,” Geraldine would later say in court.

  In recent years, Denise had taken on a sort of caretaker role in the relationship with her mother. Denise helped Geraldine complete all of her important paperwork, and Geraldine sometimes referred to her daughter as her personal secretary and medical adviser. Geraldine had been undertaking training and schooling to start a new career path as a certified nursing assistant, and Denise was so helpful that Geraldine would refer to her as “my coach.”

  I’ll no longer have her to be there for me, Geraldine thought. She is no longer a phone call away.

  Denise would have turned forty the following May, and already Geraldine had been planning a major surprise celebration for her daughter. Denise had gone above and beyond for Geraldine’s fortieth and fiftieth birthdays, and she wanted to return the treasured gesture to her only child.

  Denise, in fact, was born on Mother’s Day in 1971, and Geraldine considered her daughter a true gift from God that day. Mother’s Day was always an extra-special occasion for the two women, and Geraldine couldn’t believe that the one they celebrated last month would be their last ever.

  Geraldine also considered her daughter the family’s memory maker. Denise loved planning family vacations, and would organize every little detail: where the family would go, where they would stay, where they would eat, and even what they would wear, so they would all match and look like a family.

  And Denise would always document those trips and other special occasions through photographs. She had put the family photos into scrapbooks for her two children. Unfortunately, Geraldine thought, those scrapbooks would end with photographs of Trystan at age thirteen and Annikah’s recent tenth birthday.

  She won’t be able to take dozens of photos the way she always did when Trystan and Annikah go to proms, graduations, and weddings, and put these treasures into the already-started scrapbooks, Geraldine thought.

  Even though they had been divorced for decades, Dennis Marsh was still a part of his ex-wife’s life. With Denise and their grandchildren in common, Dennis and Geraldine attended many of the same family dinners and holiday celebrations. Geraldine even took care of Dennis’s mother before she died.

  Perhaps most valuably, her ex-husband was a caring grandfather to their grandchildren. Their shared housing allowed him to experience the simple things with them, including taking Annikah to school every day and regular trips with both grandchildren to the borough library and pool. Dennis and Trystan shared a love of cars, and together were restoring a 1967 Chevy. Trystan was memorialized through a tattoo on his grandfather’s right thigh.

  Alvin Marsh, her ex-father-in-law, also remained part of Geraldine’s life. In fact, she never thought of him as her father-in-law—he was more of a father to her than her own father. She, like many other people, called him Poppy. Geraldine had known Poppy since she was fourteen, and shared more with him than she did with her own father or any other male figure in her life. He helped her through problems, as he did for many people in his life.

  Since he’d become confined to a wheelchair in recent years, Geraldine had been able to spend even more time with him. Alvin had served in the US Navy during World War II, and could tell stories for hours about his time as a gunman on the USS North Carolina. Alvin often spoke about the future and how much he wanted to be a part of it. It had always been his dream, Geraldine said, to live long enough to see Trystan drive.

  It breaks my heart knowing he survived the war only to die this way, Geraldine thought.

  * * *

  By now, John Morganelli had rejoined his wife and friends in Bethlehem for dinner, but his mind was never far from the crime scene he had left behind in Northampton earlier that night. The district attorney tried hard to engage in pleasant dinner conversation, but his thoughts kept drifting back to those horrible, bloody images he had seen at the house. And it certainly didn’t help that he was receiving constant calls from Trooper Judge and others at the scene with updates about the investigation.

  Just as Morganelli started to relax a bit and enjoy his dinner, his cell phone rang with another call from one of the investigators. After again apologizing for the interruptions, he stepped away from the dinner table and answered, trying not to sound too irritable. He was still deeply disturbed from the last call, when he learned about the fourth body, and hoped there wouldn’t be any more surprises tonight.

  But that hope was dashed once he was told the latest news: The police had been conducting a criminal background check on Michael Ballard, the man who had apparently stolen Denise’s car and told emergency officials that he “just killed everyone.” That background check was finished, and it turned out he had killed before.

  He had previously been convicted for killing a man in 1991. When he was only eighteen years old, Ballard had stabbed the man to death in an apartment in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

  The largest city in the Lehigh Valley region, and the third largest in the state—behind Philadelphia and Pittsburgh—Allentown was only about twenty minutes south of Northampton, although they were practically two different worlds. Allentown was a much more urban environment an
d, Morganelli knew, much more prone to violent murders than the normally quiet borough of Northampton.

  Details about that previous murder were still scarce at this point in the investigation, but it appeared that Ballard had killed the man, then stolen the victim’s car and attempted to flee to Ballard’s home state of Arkansas. If that was true, Morganelli thought, there were already obvious parallels between that killing and the murder of Denise Merhi, whose car it appeared Ballard had also stolen.

  Morganelli learned that Ballard had pleaded guilty and been sentenced to fifteen to thirty years in prison for the 1991 murder, but was released in 2006 after serving the minimum. Although it would take some time to track down all the details, it seemed he had been arrested again in April 2008 for a parole violation, then released on parole again on April 19, 2010.

  Barely two months ago, Morganelli thought, growing furious. How could this man have been out on the streets? Morganelli had long been a proponent of reforming the parole system in Pennsylvania, particularly when it came to violent crimes. He felt liberal policies from “bleeding-heart do-gooders” had allowed far too many murderers and rapists back on the streets. Now they were dealing with a suspect who had not only killed before and been given a second chance, but had apparently been arrested again after his parole and was set free a second time, giving him the opportunity to commit four murders.

  Following his recent parole, Ballard had been released to Allentown Community Corrections Center, a halfway house for state prison inmates, the investigator explained to Morganelli. Inmates there are allowed to be released for limited periods of time for purposes related to work, education, or treatment. Ballard had been released earlier in the day, but a warrant had since been issued for his arrest. Ballard had been due back at two o’clock, less than three hours before Denise Merhi and the others were killed. He never showed up.