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

by McEvoy, Colin

  “I won’t.”

  “Well, we don’t quit,” Mickey said. “We’ll keep, we fight ’til the last damn breath and we’ll…”

  “And then they’ll friggin’ bring me back to do it again,” his son interrupted.

  “Well, we’ll keep fightin’. We’ll keep fightin’ ’em,” Mickey asserted.

  “All right, Dad,” Ballard said quietly.

  “All right. I love you. Try to get a good night’s sleep.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Having spent more than fifteen years behind bars, Ballard didn’t find life at Northampton County Prison all that different from what he was accustomed to. But to the prison staff, Ballard was an abnormality. The 819-bed facility had certainly hosted its fair share of accused murderers before—even mass murderers—but Ballard’s history of five vicious attacks frightened county prison officials.

  Upon Ballard’s entry into the jail, Warden Todd Buskirk issued a memorandum outlining the jail’s special policy for dealing with the five-time murderer. Ballard was to be escorted by four guards—one a supervisor—every time he left his cell. A five-guard detail would be necessary when he took showers.

  His cell would be searched during each of the day’s three shifts. All guards would now carry Tasers for their own protection, something they had never done before.

  Ballard didn’t see what the big fuss was about. Other accused murderers were allowed to roam the halls without guard escorts. One fellow inmate who had shot two people had even climbed a razor-wire-topped fence in an attempt to break out of the prison while Ballard was there. So why should Ballard be viewed as the prison’s biggest threat?

  “They were just fucking terrified of me,” he later said. “Like I’m fucking public enemy number one.”

  Everything Ballard drew was confiscated, including a picture of a female prison employee, who was later questioned about why Ballard would be drawing pictures of her. In a separate incident, while trying to choose a book from the jail’s book cart, someone recommended to him The Devil in the White City, the true story of serial killer H. H. Holmes, who lured victims to their deaths around the time of the 1893 World’s Fair. The mere fact that Ballard possessed the book later drew red flags among the prison staff.

  Authorities seemed to take a particular interest in Ballard’s reading material. The state police seized two other books that he had left behind at the Allentown Community Corrections Center on June 26: Angel of Darkness, a true crime book about one of the world’s most prolific serial killers, Randy Kraft, who was suspected of murdering 67 people, and The 48 Laws of Power, a Machiavellian how-to book on obtaining power. The laws include “never put too much trust in friends” and “crush your enemy totally.” Both would later be among the items submitted as evidence for his trial.

  Ironically, Ballard was able to use the prison’s fear of him to obtain additional benefits from the staff. As incentive for staying in line, Ballard was allowed two visits a week instead of the usual one. He also eventually persuaded prison officials to forgo one of his three daily cell searches—the one during the 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift—so he could get a full night’s sleep.

  But despite the Tasers and additional restrictions, Northampton County Prison officials continued to feel uneasy housing Ballard. County officials requested that he instead be housed in one of the state prisons. In mid-July, he was transferred to State Correctional Institution–Frackville, a state prison about seventy miles northwest in Schuylkill County, and he was only transported back to Northampton County Prison when he had to make a court appearance.

  The first of those appearances was Ballard’s preliminary hearing, where the prosecution had to prove that enough evidence existed against him for the case to proceed to trial. While normally held in the small satellite offices of locally elected district judges, the hearings for more serious crimes were sometimes held at the Northampton County Courthouse in Easton, where sheriff’s deputies could provide better security. This was the case for Ballard’s preliminary hearing, which was held August 31 in the county courthouse before District Judge Diane Marakovits.

  The hearing marked the first time Ballard had been presented to the public since his arrest. The only image most people had ever seen of him was his widely publicized mug shot, taken while he was still in the hospital. Dressed in a hospital gown, Ballard appeared severely disoriented in the photograph, as if drugged. His eyes seemed to convey no sense of feeling or emotion whatsoever.

  During his preliminary hearing, Ballard appeared far less dazed as he was led into court, his hands and feet shackled, wearing a prison-issued orange jumpsuit, sporting short-buzzed hair and a small mustache. But much of his stoicism remained. Testimony about the grisly details of his crime caused multiple gasps and cries from friends and family on the prosecution side of the courtroom, but Ballard remained entirely emotionless throughout the ninety-minute hearing.

  Troopers Raymond Judge and Mark Rowlands testified about their discoveries of the crime scenes, and Judge spoke of Ballard’s confessions during his stay at the hospital. Emily Germani, Denise’s fourteen-year-old neighbor, testified about spotting a blood-soaked Ballard on the front porch of Denise’s home the day of the killings, trying to “shake [the blood] off himself,” according to the Morning Call.

  But perhaps the most noteworthy testimony came from Northampton County Coroner Zachary Lysek, who painstakingly detailed the number of times Ballard had stabbed each of the four victims. Lysek particularly highlighted the many defensive wounds found on Steven Zernhelt.

  “This individual, it appeared, fought very vigorously to defend himself and protect himself from being stabbed,” Lysek said, according to the Morning Call.

  The bloody details—as well as the shocking revelation that Ballard had written DENISE IS A WHORE in blood on the wall—would lead news reports the next day. As expected, Judge Marakovits determined that enough evidence indeed existed for the case to go to trial. Ballard’s two publicly appointed defense attorneys, Michael Corriere and James Connell, declined to speak to the press afterward, as did the family members of the victims who attended.

  By now the newspapers had reported that Ballard had lived with Denise for a period of time, and many suspected that the two had dated and that the murders may have resulted from their relationship. But Ballard’s motive for the quadruple homicide did not officially become publicly known until September 7, when John Morganelli submitted court paperwork laying out that the stabbings were a premeditated effort by Ballard to get revenge against Denise for her infidelity.

  That court paperwork was Morganelli’s filing to seek the death penalty against Ballard.

  “[Steven] Zernhelt was in the wrong place at the wrong time, interrupted Mr. Ballard’s revenge killing and was most likely killed because he was a witness to what Ballard had done,” Morganelli told the Express-Times.

  To win a death penalty verdict, prosecutors had to prove only one of the state’s eighteen aggravating circumstances that permit a death penalty finding. Examples of such circumstances include the killing of a police officer, and the torture of a victim. In Ballard’s case, two aggravating circumstances applied: There were multiple victims, and Ballard had already been convicted of a murder in the past.

  And while Morganelli had a long-standing practice of taking the death penalty off the table for murderers if they accepted life imprisonment without parole and agreed to waive their appellate rights, he made it clear to Ballard’s attorneys that no such offer would be made in this case.

  “You’re not getting an offer of life,” he told them. “Even if the guy would come in tomorrow and say I’ll plead guilty to murder one, four counts, give me life. I would say no to that.”

  * * *

  Michael Ballard’s case was not the first to draw questions about the effectiveness of Pennsylvania’s parole system.

  One of the state’s most notorious cases was that of Reginald McFadden, who was convicted in 1969 of the murder of his sixty-year-old
neighbor, Sonia Rosenbaum. McFadden, then sixteen, broke into her Philadelphia home along with three accomplices to rob the place. After Rosenbaum revealed the location of her valuables, they tied her up, pushed a desk onto her legs so she couldn’t move, and stuffed a washcloth into her mouth. The elderly woman suffocated as a result.

  McFadden was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. However, after serving twenty-two years of his sentence, the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole considered the possibility of early release for McFadden. During its monthly meeting on August 27, 1992, McFadden was one of twelve cases the board considered in a two-and-a-half-hour period, according to the New York Times.

  They spent only a few minutes reviewing the case and never met with McFadden personally, according to the newspaper. Instead, they took into consideration his good psychological evaluations, favorable behavioral reports from prison, and a letter from his sentencing judge claiming he believed McFadden had been rehabilitated.

  The board voted four to one to commute McFadden’s sentence, but under the condition that he spend two years of supervised release in a halfway house to ensure a safe, gradual transition back into society.

  But everything went wrong.

  The commutation papers went before Governor Robert P. Casey Sr. to be signed, where they lingered on his desk for a year and a half before he finally signed them. State officials later said that the documents from the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole were so poorly written that parole officials mistakenly believed McFadden was to be freed immediately, with no halfway house or any other supervision whatsoever.

  McFadden walked free on July 7, 1994, and moved to New York. Over the next three months, he was accused of killing two people, raping a third, and possibly killing other unknown victims.

  On October 6, McFadden was arrested for the September 21 kidnapping and rape of a fifty-five-year-old woman in South Nyack, Rockland County. After abducting the woman while she was taking out her garbage, McFadden raped her three times, beat and tortured her for five hours, and stole all her cash and jewelry. The woman survived. Shortly after McFadden was arrested, authorities realized he was responsible for even more heinous crimes.

  He eventually admitted to raping, strangling, and stabbing to death a seventy-eight-year-old woman named Margaret Kierer while she was walking home from a railroad station in Floral Park, Long Island. McFadden later told a Nassau County judge that he’d stumbled upon Kierer after he had gotten lost after leaving the same train station.

  “I got kind of frustrated and my history of when I get frustrated is I develop, I guess, rage, anger,” he told the judge, according to the New York Times. “Something came out of the shadows [and] I just went off. Just when I realized it was this little old woman, it was too late. To be quite frank with you, she wasn’t responding, it was just like I was throwing a rag doll around and I wasn’t getting any response from her.”

  McFadden was convicted of the Kierer murder, the South Nyack rape, and the murder of Robert Silk, a forty-two-year-old computer programmer from Long Island. Police claimed Silk was murdered after he pulled over to help McFadden when his car broke down. Silk’s decomposing body was found in Rockland County six months after he went missing in September. Authorities alleged that McFadden may have been responsible for at least two other murders, though he was never charged with them.

  McFadden’s release, and the apparent errors the Pennsylvania parole system made in the process, drew harsh criticism for the state. When asked whether McFadden would serve his full sentence in New York before possibly being extradited back to Pennsylvania for violating his parole there, Rockland County District Attorney Michael Bongiorno told the Associated Press, “We don’t want him going back to Pennsylvania. They didn’t do the job the first time. We’ll see it’s done correctly this time.” The scandal torpedoed the 1994 gubernatorial campaign for Democratic Lieutenant Governor Mark Singel, who served on the parole board and cast one of the votes for McFadden’s release.

  Another famous case that crossed state lines was that of Robert “Mudman” Simon, a member of Warlocks motorcycle club. Originally from Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, Simon had been in and out of prison since age eight. He was already serving time for an armed robbery in 1982 when he was charged and convicted for the 1974 murder of his former girlfriend, Beth Smith Dusenberg.

  Simon had wanted the nineteen-year-old Dusenberg to have sex with other members of the motorcycle gang. When she refused, Simon pulled a gun and shot her in the head, then dumped the body into a sixty-foot strip mine. It would be eight years before her remains were discovered, allowing police to trace the murder back to Simon.

  When confronted with evidence of the crime, Simon spoke of having sex with the corpse and told police he wanted to decorate his cell with evidence photos of her mummified remains, according to the Associated Press.

  Simon was sentenced to ten to twenty years in prison for second-degree murder. His time in prison did not stop his violent tendencies: He fatally stabbed another inmate during a fight, but was acquitted after it was determined to be self-defense.

  Although Simon became eligible for parole after ten years, he was rejected for release three times before he was finally paroled in 1995 and released to Williamstown in Gloucester County, New Jersey. The parole board was impressed by Simon’s promises to leave the Warlocks behind and stop using illegal drugs, and they determined that, despite the stabbing incident, he had been a model prisoner.

  The parole decision came despite objections by members of Dusenberg’s family, as well Carbon County Judge John Lavelle, who first sentenced Simon.

  “I consider him one of the most dangerous individuals who ever appeared before me,” Lavelle wrote in a letter to the parole board. “This man has no respect for human life and I believe that it would be only a matter of time before he would kill again.”

  As it turned out, the judge was correct.

  On May 6, 1995, just eleven weeks after Simon was released, he was the passenger in a car that was pulled over in Gloucester County’s Franklin Township. It was 10:25 p.m., about half an hour from the end of the police sergeant Ippolito “Lee” Gonzalez’s shift. Gonzalez approached the car and asked for the license and paperwork from the driver, also a member of the Warlocks.

  As Gonzalez reviewed the papers, Simon fired a shot into the forty-year-old sergeant’s neck. After the officer went down, Simon fired a second shot into his head. Gonzalez died a few hours later. Simon and the driver were apprehended later that night after a brief car chase.

  The incident led to the expected cries of outrage against the parole system and, as with McFadden, finger-pointing across state lines. The killing resulted in hearings by the Senate Judiciary Committee as well as an investigation into the parole system by Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge. But Pennsylvania officials also blamed New Jersey for not properly monitoring Simon and ensuring that he followed a parole condition that he no longer associate with the Warlocks.

  For her part, New Jersey Governor Christie Whitman claimed Pennsylvania did not properly alert them about the conditions of Simon’s release. She questioned why Simon was released in the first place, let alone released to Williamstown, which, as it turns out, was a hotbed of Warlock activity.

  Simon pleaded guilty to murder in 1997 and was sentenced to death. Although he was scheduled to die by lethal injection, the matter was rendered moot in 1999, when Simon was brutally beaten to death by another inmate at the state prison in Trenton, New Jersey.

  Another case slightly closer to home for the people of Northampton County was that of Raymond Edward Webb, who went on to commit attempted murder in neighboring Bucks County after getting released on parole.

  Webb had previously been convicted of a home invasion murder in August 1971. He and two other people had traveled from Pennsylvania all the way to Jefferson County, Missouri, to rob a couple whom Webb’s two accomplices claimed owed them money. Police discovered their bodies three
days later: Thirty-year-old William “Tex” Redden was found dead in a garage covered with a green tarp, and his twenty-two-year-old wife Joyce was found in a bedroom with a butcher knife in her back and two bullet wounds to her head.

  Webb fled back to Pennsylvania after the murder, where a Bucks County couple picked him up hitchhiking along Route 309 near Montgomeryville on August 17. Once inside the car, Webb drew a .45-caliber revolver—one of three guns he was carrying at the time—and forced the couple to drive him to a rural area of Bucks County.

  Along the way, he bound the man’s hands with rope, forced him out of the car, then continued on with the nineteen-year-old woman, whom he eventually raped at gunpoint.

  Webb was eventually arrested and convicted for both crimes. He was sentenced to two concurrent life sentences in Missouri for the murders and a separate five-to-fifteen-year sentence in Pennsylvania for the rape. At the time, first-degree murderers were eligible for parole in Missouri. That changed in 1986 when the state parole law was revised, but Webb was grandfathered in under the old law and still legally eligible for parole.

  Citing his good behavior in prison, the Missouri parole board shortened Webb’s sentence to seventeen years in 1988, which made him immediately eligible for parole. He was extradited back to Pennsylvania to serve his time for the rape conviction, but was released after six years, less than half the maximum sentence. Officials told the Philadelphia Inquirer that Missouri’s decision to release him early likely played a role in Pennsylvania’s decision to do the same.

  Webb went free in 1994 and, for a time, seemed like he might have indeed been rehabilitated. Over the next nine years of parole he had only one minor infraction, when his urine tested positive for alcohol, which he was forbidden from drinking. Otherwise, parole officials told the Inquirer, Webb met regularly with his parole officer, registered as a sex offender as required by law, attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and stayed out of trouble.