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

by McEvoy, Colin

But that all changed on August 18, 2003, when the fifty-nine-year-old Webb met a woman at a Quakertown bar. After she was injured in a bar fight with another woman, Webb offered to accompany her to the hospital. Along the way, he directed her to a deserted stretch of road, forced her to pull over, dragged her into a field, and attacked her. Wrapping a leather belt around her neck, he threatened to kill the woman as he raped her.

  “I’m going to drown you in the swamp if you scream,” Webb told the woman, according to police reports.

  The woman was saved after a passing newspaper carrier saw them and informed two state troopers, who found Webb on top of the woman and arrested him. In 2004, Webb was sentenced to life without parole for kidnapping charges. To ensure that he never left prison again, Bucks County Judge David Heckler also gave him an additional forty to eighty years for attempted murder, rape, and aggravated assault.

  But for his rape victim, the damage had already been done. Although she survived the attack, she was emotionally traumatized. Not long after the attack, she attempted suicide by leaping into the Schuylkill River from the Green Lane Bridge in Philadelphia. She also purchased a handgun for protection, which one night she pointed at three men after they tried to drive her home from a bar, concerned that she’d drunk too much. Terrified, she had believed those men wanted to rape her, too.

  “If he doesn’t get the death penalty, I want him to have to go to church in prison, so he can tell God he’s sorry for what he did,” the woman said at Webb’s sentencing hearing, according to press accounts.

  She then turned directly to Webb and shouted: “But you’re still going to burn in hell! Because that’s what you deserve!”

  While most of these incidents had long since fallen from the public’s memory by the time of Michael Ballard’s alleged murders, a more recent case had drawn such an intense public uproar and so many calls for reform that it led to a temporary halt for parole releases in the state altogether.

  Daniel Giddings was charged with his first violent crime at age ten, when he was convicted of beating and robbing a mentally disabled man in his home neighborhood in North Philadelphia. Over the next seven years, Giddings fathered three kids, was shot twice, and had been arrested several times for assault, some of which involved a handgun. He freely spoke to authorities about selling drugs on the corner, raising pit bulls, and gambling throughout his youth.

  In August 1998, during a botched carjacking, the seventeen-year-old Giddings shot a man in both kneecaps and robbed him of a hundred dollars. After he was convicted of robbery and aggravated assault in a Philadelphia court, Assistant District Attorney Joseph Coolican sought the maximum sentence of twenty-two-and-a-half to forty-five years, which would have kept Giddings in prison until at least 2020.

  “From what I have seen in the four years of prosecuting violent crime, I have never seen an individual who presents a higher risk of reoffending,” Coolican told the court, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

  Instead, Judge Lynn B. Hamlin sentenced Giddings to the mandatory minimum of six to twelve years.

  During his time in prison, Giddings was written up for thirteen misconduct violations between 2001 and 2006, according to the Inquirer. Those allegations included fighting, stealing from cellmates, and, on one occasion, passing a sharpened metal object to another inmate. He spent 498 days in solitary confinement within the prison as a result of these infractions, and served four years longer than his minimum sentence due to the pattern of misbehavior.

  Although Giddings was twice denied parole before getting released, he appeared to show more promising signs of possible rehabilitation by the latter part of his prison term. He underwent extensive counseling; took courses in anger management, violence prevention, and victim awareness; and had no reported misconducts after 2006. Giddings was paroled on August 18, 2008, having served ten years of his twelve-year sentence, and was sent to live in a halfway house in Philadelphia starting August 25.

  Just under a month later, on September 23, Giddings was a passenger in a car that was pulled over by Philadelphia Highway Patrol Sergeant Patrick McDonald. It was 1:20 p.m. in North Philadelphia. As McDonald spoke with the other occupants of the vehicle, Giddings slipped out of the car and fled, prompting McDonald to run after him. After a three-block chase, McDonald caught up with Giddings and the two got into a physical struggle.

  In the midst of the fight, Giddings pulled out an illegally owned .45-caliber Taurus semiautomatic pistol and fired.

  The round entered McDonald’s shoulder and struck his heart. As he fell, the officer drew his service revolver and fired one shot, but his injury was too severe and he missed. Giddings stood over the fallen McDonald, prone and helpless on the ground, and shot him several more times, killing him execution-style.

  Giddings himself was killed shortly thereafter. After stealing a bicycle and attempting to ride away, he encountered two other police officers and exchanged gunfire with them. One of the officers, Richard Bowes, was non-fatally shot in the hip, but Bowes returned fired and gunned Giddings down. The shooting was later determined by prosecutors to be justified.

  The death of Sergeant Patrick McDonald at the hands of a recent parolee provoked wide feelings of anger not only in Philadelphia, but also across the state of Pennsylvania and beyond. And with Giddings dead and many in the public looking for someone to blame, much of the criticism was levied against the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole.

  Members of the media and the public began to ask how it was Giddings had been paroled at all, given his long history of violent crime. Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham placed the blame squarely on Judge Lynn Hamlin for imposing a minimum sentence against the suggestion of prosecutors. Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter and Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey publicly expressed outrage that Giddings had been freed and demanded an inquiry into the parole board.

  Among the strongest voices against the parole board was that of Larry McDonald, Sergeant McDonald’s father. He spoke publicly in favor of a bill proposed by Pennsylvania state representative Brendan Boyle calling to lengthen sentences and eliminate parole for second- and third-time violent offenders.

  “I will not insult the heroic actions of my son Patrick and Ricky Bowes by accepting validations of procedures that dearly need to be completely revised,” McDonald said of the parole system during testimony before the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, according to court documents. “Experts may disagree, but I believe that some people can not be rehabilitated, and therefore, should never be released.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Several hearings for Michael Ballard were held over the next couple of months. On September 18, Ballard appeared in the courtroom of Northampton County Judge Edward Smith, where the attorneys discussed tentative trial dates and their time line for filing motions in the case. A county judge since 2001, the forty-nine-year-old Smith had a kind face and a bright smile and always spoke very politely in a gentle tone of voice. But his appearance and manners were sometimes deceiving to the accused criminals who came before him. A former US Navy man and military judge, Smith had earned a reputation as a tough but fair jurist during his nine years on the bench, despite his friendly demeanor.

  Wearing an orange prison jumpsuit and shackles on his wrists, Ballard was taken before Judge Smith again on October 15, this time for a discovery hearing and a discussion about future scheduling for the case. District Attorney John Morganelli was still waiting on some information, including autopsy reports and state police lab results, but he had a trove of other evidence, which he had already shared with Ballard’s defense attorneys.

  Among the evidence discussed before Judge Smith were cell phone records, a transcript of Ballard’s prison phone call with his father, and surveillance videos of the various places Ballard had been before the murder, including the Allentown pawnshop where he bought the knife. Morganelli also briefly discussed the allegations that Ballard had sexually assaulted a girl during his previous parole. That informat
ion had never been publicly released and, despite the fact that charges had never been filed, it led many of the newspaper stories and television news broadcasts the next day.

  Nobody from the victims’ families was in attendance, so the benches were relatively empty behind Ballard. He sat calm and unmoving throughout the hearing, showing no sign of emotion. However, once the proceedings were finished and the guards began to escort him out of the courtroom, he glanced at a woman sitting in the second row behind him and winked. She smiled and blushed, delighted at the bit of attention he had afforded her.

  Her name was Danielle Kaufman, and she had been exchanging letters with Ballard for the past several weeks.

  The twenty-seven-year-old was a lifelong resident of the Northampton area. A 2000 graduate of Northampton Area High School, she was now living in a mobile home in Allen Township, about two miles north of the borough itself. Now married, with a three-year-old daughter named Katrina, Danielle had been writing to prisoners since she was fifteen years old.

  It all started when she did an Internet search about finding pen pals and read about people who regularly wrote to inmates in prison. Her parents hated the idea. In fact, when she was a sophomore in high school, her father once brought her to Lehigh County Prison, hoping the gritty reality of prison life would scare her straight. Instead, the plan backfired, leaving her even more fascinated with the people she was writing to.

  By her estimate, Danielle had written to hundreds of inmates over the years. Not everybody wrote back, and with many the correspondence was brief. Some were too busy working on their defense cases to write, and others only wanted money, after which Danielle would quickly end all contact.

  She decided who to write to based solely on mug shot photos she found online. The men had to have a “friendly face,” according to Danielle, and she was usually drawn to those with blue eyes. She didn’t pay attention to the crimes they committed, and in some cases didn’t even bother to look up their criminal history before writing.

  “If it doesn’t affect me, I don’t care,” she said.

  It was a kind of emotional detachment Danielle experienced in other aspects of her life. For example, she was working at the gift shop of the Lehigh Valley International Airport near Allentown during the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2011. Everybody around her was crying, running to get out of the airport, scrambling to call family and friends. But Danielle didn’t understand what the commotion was about.

  “I mean, I was excited because I got to go home early, but I didn’t care,” she said. “Everybody was crying and stuff, but if it doesn’t affect me personally, I don’t care.”

  Danielle had written to several murderers over the years. There was Leif Bothne, who was convicted of killing a teenager in Austin, Texas. And Richard Borjerski, the Florida man who decapitated his landlord and hid the body in the trunk of a car. There was Stanley Elms, who raped and murdered a Kansas woman. And Glen Burton Ake, who shot a Baptist minister and his wife to death in their Oklahoma home. Danielle stopped writing to Ake after a short while because, she said, “he creeped me out.”

  She had even sent Christmas cards to famous serial killers Dennis Rader—also known as the BTK Killer, which stood for “Bind, Torture, Kill”—and David Berkowitz, better known as the Son of Sam. Neither responded to her.

  “It takes a degree of insanity to do what I do, I guess, but I’ll be the first to admit I’m nuts,” Danielle said with a laugh in a later interview. “I love these fellas, and I really believe that no matter how damaged a human being might be, if they have someone standing behind them, they can change for the better. I’ll never stop reaching out to the fellas, and I really don’t give a shit if society ever understands why or not.”

  Despite having written to several killers, Danielle claimed she was not drawn specifically to murderers.

  “I can’t help that the faces I seem to like to talk to are murderers or something,” she said. “It’s not like I dig the murderers. I would’ve talked to Michael even if he was in for tax fraud or whatever.”

  Danielle claimed it was also a common misconception that she was in love with the people she wrote to. Although married for five years to the father of her child, Danielle claimed the marriage was more of a friendship than a romantic relationship. Nevertheless, she insisted her letters to inmates were strictly platonic. While she admitted to harboring some feelings toward Stanley Elms, Danielle said that she never developed any major romantic feelings for any of the men she wrote to.

  Except for Michael Ballard.

  Ballard was different from the beginning. Danielle wrote to inmates all around the country—she usually went with the states that had the best prison websites and easiest access to mug shot photos—but Ballard was the first man she had written to from her local area. In fact, she wanted to write to him immediately after seeing news footage on television right after the Northampton murders. The broadcasts showed videos and photos of Ballard both from the present day and from his first murder charges in 1991, and Danielle was immediately captivated by his bright blue eyes and the intense look of hatred in his face.

  “Whoa,” she said while watching the news.

  “Is that a friend of yours?” her father asked in response.

  “No,” she said. “But he might be soon.”

  Danielle didn’t write to Ballard until late July, about a month after his arrest, because it took time before his information was registered in the prison system. To her excitement, he wrote back right away. Ballard claimed he had received lots of letters in prison, but most of them were from religious people who wanted to “save” him. He did not bother writing back to most of them, but told Danielle he had picked her letters out from all the others to respond to. It made her feel extremely special.

  Soon they were exchanging letters on a regular basis, and she was accepting collect calls from him from prison. By September, she was visiting him at the Northampton County Prison whenever he was brought up from SCI–Frackville for a hearing. They spoke in a room much like the type you would expect from a police television drama: all-concrete walls and floors, and rows of booths where visitors could speak to inmates through Plexiglas walls via tiny holes at mouth level. She came to see him about a dozen times, as often as she was allowed.

  Some questioned how Danielle’s husband must have felt about the close relationship she appeared to be developing with this accused killer, but according to Danielle his biggest concern was the amount of gas money she was spending during her visits. After all, gas prices had reached around $3.59 a gallon.

  Danielle found Ballard to be funny, charming, and very intelligent. Contrary to the public opinion that was rapidly forming about him, she never believed him to be crazy or evil. He was, however, very intense, which was something Danielle found appealing. His moods shifted drastically and very quickly. One moment he’d be calm and mellow, the next angry and animated. The same would occur in his letters, and Danielle quickly found his handwriting would actually differ depending on his mood.

  If it turned out he had multiple personalities, Danielle thought, I wouldn’t be surprised.

  Ballard also struck Danielle as a very creative person. He loved to read and would talk to her about books he particularly enjoyed. Some of Ballard’s letters to Danielle were written in a secret code that she had to decipher, a game that she reveled in. They came to call their shared language “Rascality,” named after a word used in The Devil in the White City, which Ballard read in prison.

  Ballard also drew pictures for Danielle, and she found him to be a fairly decent artist. Some of the pictures were light and serene, sketches of wildlife or nature settings. Others were much darker. One time he sent her a drawing of a horrifying man with no mouth and his eyes cut out. Danielle thought it was just a sketch, and didn’t believe the man was supposed to secretly represent Ballard or anybody in particular.

  “I thought that one was pretty cool,” she said.

  The Northampton County Priso
n guards started to refer to Danielle as Ballard’s girlfriend. It was a classification she felt perfectly comfortable with. In fact, Ballard even referred to Danielle as his wife in some of his letters, just as he used to with Denise Merhi.

  Ballard and Danielle talked freely about harboring feelings of love for each other, and at times some of their letters turned sexual as well. She affectionately referred to Ballard as “Blue,” and he wanted Danielle to get MICHAEL tattooed on her forearm.

  Danielle even let her three-year-old daughter speak to Ballard during some of their phone calls. Katrina spoke of Michael often, and would tell him she missed him when they spoke on the phone. Ballard referred to her as “little Kat.”

  But one thing that became very clear to Danielle during their correspondence was that Ballard had indeed committed the murders.

  Ballard spoke candidly and in vivid detail about his crimes from early on in their relationship. At one point, he told Danielle that he had killed Denise to save her from herself. According to Danielle, Ballard told her that Denise was becoming so promiscuous, he had to kill her to ensure she would get into heaven before she got worse.

  In one letter, he told a story about killing four spiders that had wandered into his cell within the prison. He explained that one of the spiders wouldn’t die right away, so he had to kill it twice. It was obvious to Danielle that he was really speaking about his four murder victims.

  Once, he went so far as to draw a picture of the crime scene. It was a sketch of Ballard standing in Denise’s kitchen, standing over her dead body, a bloody knife clutched in his hand. He had even pricked his finger and let his blood drops fall over the drawing of Denise to illustrate all the blood after he stabbed her. The drawing was so vivid in its details that he had sketched a candle that sat in the kitchen windowsill the day of the murder, complete with the label of exactly what scent it was.

  It wasn’t a fit of rage, Danielle realized of his murders. He remembers. He knew what he was doing.