Who Killed Chrissy?: The True Crime Memoir of a Pittsburgh girl's Unsolved Murder in Las Vegas

by Simcic, Beverly

  One more important thought here: Chris was not domestically inclined, I knew that, and I didn’t think she was actually washing sheets or bedding. I thought it was strange the bed was stripped of all bedding—I didn’t get it.

  As I descended the steps from her balcony, there was Fred. My heart fluttered and skipped when I saw him standing there. He was silent, waiting for me to say something.

  “So Fred, I’m looking for Chris, have you seen her?” I tried to be casual and friendly, but he was odd and suspicious acting. I felt it. Those words came choking out of me, I was lucky not to have choked on them. It was difficult even looking at him. I stood there frozen like ice afraid to move in either direction, feeling like he would grab me and throw me to the ground.

  “No, I haven’t seen her around,” He said slowly. “Well Fred, she must be around here somewhere because her bike is here. I’m going to walk around and look in the laundry rooms.”

  He nodded his head back and forth to tell me no, then he walked away coldly.

  He knew I was looking to warn her. He was guarding her place is what I thought. He was going to try and steer me away from her so I couldn’t warn her.

  I walked all over and she was not in any of the laundry rooms. It was dusk and time for me to lock myself in. I did not venture out after dark, and I now knew that I would have to pay for another week because my rent was up. I couldn’t leave without talking with her first.

  The next day I was back over at her apartment and the drapes were now closed. So she’s home now I thought, and I banged and banged on the door, but no answer. Then I wondered how she could be in there without the air conditioner on. It still wasn’t running, it was off, and I panicked and ran to the rental office. I told the manager that I had been over to her apartment several times and now I was very worried about her.

  Again, I locked myself in my apartment and didn’t sleep well. Early the next morning, two police detectives were hammering my door.

  TEN: DENIAL

  “There is an odd synchronicity in the way parallel lives veer to touch one another, change direction, and then come close again and again until they connect and hold for whatever it was that fate intended to happen.”

  –Ann Rule

  Detectives Don Gibbs and Harry Green stepped through my doorway the afternoon of Friday, June 25, 1982.

  This was probably about Fred. He had done something and they had heard something from someone about my story and wanted more information—even though I hadn’t told one solitary person about him attempting to rob me, this was my first and only thought.

  When one of them said, “Why don’t you take a seat?” I suddenly felt faint. Why do I have to take a seat if this is about Fred robbing someone or about some other accident that happened in the complex, or who knows what, but why do I have to—why do I have to take a seat kept repeating in my ears. I didn’t want to take a seat, and I didn’t want to hear what they had to say and my hands started shaking and my knees felt like they weren’t there anymore, and I didn’t want to face this encounter right now.

  I reluctantly sat on the sofa.

  One of them stepped closer to me and said, “Did you come here from Pittsburgh with Christine Casilio?”

  So this was about Chris, and then I was relieved because I knew it was that she had crashed her bike out on the road or beat someone up or what else—maybe she got caught shoplifting, but why would she be doing that? I had fifteen thoughts all at once, and I knew that something had happened to her, but that it couldn’t be serious.

  “Yes, Chris is my friend. We lived together here in this apartment until about a week or so ago, and then she moved out and got her own place. I’ve been worried about her because I haven’t seen her around; I’ve been over there to her new place, but couldn’t find her—what’s wrong?”

  I knew they weren’t there to tell me she was fine; I knew there was something really wrong. I knew she had been hurt.

  One of them said, “We found Christine deceased in her apartment this afternoon.”

  My head was already in my hands, and I think my tanned face turned white and blank, and now they both walked over to me and gently encouraged me to sit back in my chair and try to relax. I could feel my breathing picking up, and I tried to pretend this wasn’t happening to me. Chris couldn’t be dead, she’s not dead, it was definitely a big mistake and I wasn’t going to cry because it was not true—it was not true. “It can’t be Chris,” my voice squeaked. “Where is she? Where did you find her? I was just over there and she was there in her apartment.” I knew it wasn’t her they were talking about because I knew she was just in and out of her apartment doing laundry or shopping. I knew this.

  “It is her.” The detective said gently, pulling out a note pad out of his pocket. “The maintenance man was standing on the porch and he smelled a strong odor by her door.”

  “Why didn’t I smell anything? I was just standing over there on her patio yesterday and didn’t smell anything, so how could he smell something? I don’t understand how he could smell something when I smelled nothing.”

  He wrote in his notebook and then added, “I don’t have the answer to that, and I’m sorry Miss.”

  I told them how I had been back and forth over there looking for her, and how the drapes were open, then they were closed, and that’s how I knew she was around the complex somewhere because I saw her bike in the apartment and her ring of keys was on the coffee table in the living room.

  “Miss, the body is badly decomposed, and we believe she’s been dead in that apartment for at least a week, possibly eight days, and the air conditioning had been shut down.”

  “So, when I looked through the window and through the open drapes, she was dead in there already? I was looking at her dead but she wasn’t there?” I was confusing myself at this point, and probably confusing the hell out of them.

  “She was dead in the bathroom.” He kept writing down what I was saying, I felt like I was rambling now….

  “Miss, why don’t you relax and let us tell you what happened, and then you can tell us everything you know?” Green said calmly. They were both calm and cool, like this was their job every single day. I reached over and turned the air conditioner up to blasting as high as it would go—I was sweaty and tired all of a sudden, but I knew this was a big mistake. It wasn’t Chris in that apartment—absolutely not her.

  Green told the story. “The maintenance man opened the apartment because of the odor and upon opening the door he knew there was a dead body in there; the smell was overwhelming. She was nude from the waist down with her bra on and her jacket was yanked up over her head. The tub was filled with water. The bottom part of her body was not in the tub. Her head was submerged in the bathtub water. The comforter from the bed was also submerged in the tub water. The body was in advanced stages of decomposition with maggots.”

  I couldn’t speak. There was no possible way to envision Chris like that, no way.

  “Why don’t you come with us and walk over there, the coroner is on his way now, and you can see for yourself when they bring her out.”

  I gasped, “See what? I don’t want to see anything like that.”

  Green put his arm around me and offered me solace, “You won’t see anything; sorry, I just meant that you would be able to see that it is her apartment.”

  I decided to go with them, as I still knew this was not Chris in that apartment. They had the wrong apartment and I knew it, but the mention of the comforter being in the tub made me think about the bed being stripped of all bedding when I had peered through the window a few days earlier.

  The continuous thought of the drapes opening and closing was planted in my mind, and this thought would never leave me. The killer was coming and going in there while she was rotting. Was it the maintenance man? Was it Fred? Those were the only thoughts I had at this moment, and I quickly blocked them out because I still knew that Chris was not dead.

  As the three of us walked towards the other si
de of the complex, the smell was starting to surround us. The closer we got to her apartment, the worse it got, until I could hardly stand it. It was a smell I had never experienced and will never, ever forget—it burns itself in your memory. A person may never smell a dead body in their life, but if they do, they will never forget it. I had heard this and knew right then it was true because it was so horrific, so awful that I covered my face with both hands the closer we came to the apartment.

  The black bag was being carried out the doorway and down the steps. There were a dozen or so people milling around the area and I just stood there numb from the hideousness of it. The scene that Detective Green had described to me was playing in my head now, over and over again. I saw her lying on the bathroom floor slumped over the tub. I must have swayed because Gibbs grabbed me by the armpit to steady me. Then they both walked me over to sit down on the laundry room bench. Gibbs pulled coins out of his pocket and bought me a Coke, and I just sat there sipping on it, gratefully.

  They walked me back to my apartment so we could sit in the air conditioning and finish the questioning. I still could not cry because I knew this wasn’t really happening to me. What the hell was I doing here? What the hell was happening to me right now? I wanted to be Dorothy and click my heels together and be back in Pittsburgh with my family—right now.

  I gave them everything I knew. Fred had tried to rob me, and I was trying to find Chris to warn her about it. I also mentioned that photographs that she had in her possession and told them that it was a bulging envelope full of them and they should be in her apartment, and if they weren’t there that it meant Fred had done it, because I didn’t believe Chris would ever give up something that someone had given her, and if they weren’t there it meant that Fred had taken them after he did away with her. They told me that her apartment was clean and tidy and they hadn’t found any photographs.

  I told them she had a lot of jewelry and that she wore it on her person all the time. They told me there was no jewelry found in the apartment at all—none. So then I knew Fred had robbed and killed her, I knew it.

  I also mentioned that I overheard a conversation between Chris and her boyfriend, Marty, back in Pittsburgh, and that he was supposed to come out to Vegas, but that she had moved out before I knew anything more about that. They said they would follow up on all the information I’d given them.

  When they left, I felt like I was alone and going to die. I called home and I called my son’s father, Rick, who was in Seattle performing. I don’t know why I called him; I just wanted someone to talk to, someone I knew. My mother was distraught and told me to hurry up and get out of there as fast as I could. Rick said the same thing. I got off the phone and called for flight reservations. Either there were no available flights for the weekend or I didn’t have the available funds to purchase the ticket price, I don’t remember to this day. I made the reservation to fly out Monday morning, June 28.

  I locked the door to my apartment, but I knew someone was coming for me. I knew I was next because Fred knew that I knew he did it. I removed the drawers from the small dresser and pushed it out of the bedroom and over in front of the door. I tried to push the sofa but it wouldn’t budge, so I stacked the drawers up on top of the dresser against the locked door.

  I called Kathy Roberts and told her what happened and asked her to come and get me as soon as possible. She said their car was in the shop and they wouldn’t be able to come and get me until Sunday afternoon, the best they could do, and their house was too far away to travel by taxi, so I settled for her offer. She said, “You can come over Sunday afternoon and then spend the night and we’ll drive you to the airport Monday morning.”

  Great, but I had to spend this night and the next night at Woodbridge, and I was so terrified now that I could only sit in the chair in the middle of the living room and stare at the dresser against the door. I sat up all night and could not close my eyes for one minute.

  I did not eat anything and by dawn I was hungry and tired. I had to prepare myself for lock up in my apartment, and I knew I had to walk to the convenience store for supplies.

  I had to drag all the piled up furniture away from the door, walk to the end of the apartment complex and down the highway to the convenience store to purchase supplies to get me through.

  It was hard to move at this point, my body was arthritic when I moved, and I had a hard time pushing the furniture around. Stepping outside into the abominable heat put me in slow motion like a cartoon, and I had to push myself to move—gotta move….gotta move….gotta walk to the store. Walking through the complex was undeniably the walk of the last death for me. I knew that Fred was lurking amongst the bushes or in the laundry rooms and he would jump me in broad daylight, no one would hear anything and I would be attacked and killed, dragged into the desert and left to rot, just like Chris. I felt his presence the second I stepped outside my doorway. I didn’t see him but I knew he was there waiting for me somewhere between the long winding trail through the complex to the end where I could emerge onto the highway sidewalk.

  As I reached the end of the complex and stepped onto the highway sidewalk I feared if I ran into him now that he’d throw me off the narrow sidewalk into speeding traffic. I tried walking faster but my shoes were made of sticky rubber, like I was dreaming. I could see the convenience store a couple hundred feet in the distance, but before I reached the parking lot I came upon two dumpsters sitting on the side of the sidewalk and something stopped me in front of them. I wanted to lift the lids and see if Chris’s stuffed bag of photographs were in there, and then I pulled myself back thinking I was momentarily insane. I envisioned Fred dumping the envelope in there after he killed her and felt that if I could climb into the dumpster that I’d find them. I had to keep my focus on making it to the convenience store and decided against climbing into the trash.

  I sped through the store like lightning and picked up supplies; quickly rushed the cashier through the checkout, grabbed the grocery bag and took off, almost running back along the skinny sidewalk to the complex and back to my apartment.

  I stayed locked down with piled up furniture in my apartment until Sunday afternoon when Kathy came to pick me up.

  More terror and monsters were coming for me.

  Newspaper article in the Las Vegas Sun, Saturday, June 26, 1982 (transcribed copy follows)

  Las Vegas Sun – Saturday June 26, 1982

  Woman, 25, found slain in bathtub

  By Harold Hyman, SUN Staff Writer

  Metro Police Friday were investigating the mystery slaying of an attractive woman from Pittsburgh found murdered in her apartment in the Woodbridge Inn, 700 E. Flamingo Road.

  Identity of the 25-year-old unmarried woman will not be disclosed until relatives are found and notified of her death, police said.

  The woman, who moved to Las Vegas approximately one month ago, was discovered dead at 3 p.m. by a maintenance worker and an apartment security guard.

  They used a passkey to open her door after the maintenance worker smelled a strong odor from inside the second floor flat and got no response when he knocked.

  Police said the woman may have been dead as long as a week. She was last seen alive by neighbors in the large apartment complex one mile from the strip approximately one week ago, they said.

  The slaying was unusual in that the woman was found lying against the bathtub in her bathroom with her head submerged in the tub filled with water. Her body, nude from the waist down, was out of the water, police said.

  Cause of death was not immediately apparent but a large amount of blood in the bathtub water indicated she may have suffered a massive head wound of some type, police said.

  She wore only a blouse and bra, they said.

  Her body was taken to the Clark County morgue where an autopsy is scheduled Saturday to determine exact cause of death.

  The woman’s apartment was termed “immaculate” and not in disarray.

  Police said it appeared the woman had not been
robbed and that they had established no motive nor suspects in the slaying.

  The woman was said to have lived alone and kept to herself during the one month since she moved into the Woodbridge, a large complex of more than 300 apartments whose residents are primarily resort industry workers.

  Her reasons for coming to Las Vegas had not been established by police Friday but investigation of the slaying is scheduled to be intense during the weekend.

  Police also said they had been unable to learn whether she had a job in Las Vegas.

  THE AUTHOR’S ANALYSIS OF THIS ARTICLE:

  Obviously they had her age wrong; she was 23 when she died.

  I don’t know where they got the idea that she had moved to Las Vegas. I don’t know who would have told them that.

  The article claims that the investigation would be intense over the weekend. I can only say that after the initial contact with the two detectives, no one attempted to contact me any further.

  The strangest part of this article was the wording. The choice of words such as mystery slaying, murdered and unusual, tell me that the police knew this was a murder, but for some reason they never pursued the case. The reporter who wrote this article could not have, and would not have used such wording unless the detectives gave it to him that way. When a reporter arrives at a crime scene he knows nothing until the police provide him with their views and opinions on what they found.

  There was no mention in this article about the jacket that was supposedly yanked up over her head, which is what the detectives told me.