by Dave Balcom
“What about our police?” Cindy asked.
“Max Hennessey told me to get out and shut up, in so many words.”
“How do we get the FBI’s ear?” Randy asked.
“Call ’em,” Cindy said. “They’re in the phone book.”
“Really?” I was skeptical, and went to the other end of the room where a phone sat on an end table. The phone book was beneath it. I opened it to the front government pages and looked under “Federal.”
“I’ll be damned,” I said. “I’ll call them right after we conclude here.” I then went back to the front of the table. “Here’s what I think we need to do.
“I’ll handle the Feds as a source to them. Cindy, you’ll follow up with them, and you’ll get to cover the story wherever it leads.
“Marge, I want you to interview the people who covered these other three cases.” I saw a wicked smile start on her face, “Calm down, we don’t have a travel budget to send you to California or Ohio. You have a great presence on the phone, and I’m expecting you to capture these three tragedies – the impact on the police, the cities, their families and their friends – in something under three thousand words, each.” She frowned at the mention of a word limit.
“That’s like a thirty-plus-inch story on each one,” Randy said in a stage whisper. She smiled again at that.
I continued, “Fritz, you’ll need to collaborate with their photo staffs to get the shots you need to illustrate all these words.” I handed a sheet of paper to each of them, “Here is all the contact information I have. Do any of you have questions?”
They looked at me and then at each other. Cindy finally asked, “So, when you get the Feds involved, will you be able to guarantee access for me?”
“I have no idea. I never considered that Hennessey wouldn’t be interested in this information, but he’s still burned up over the story of finding Suzanne. I just hope the Feds will listen long enough to make an intelligent decision.”
45
Listen they did.
My call was answered by a woman who identified herself only as “FBI, Buffalo Office; may I ask for whom you were calling?”
“I am calling to speak to any agent about what appears to be a serial killer of young women,” I recited from my notes.
There was no pause, no exclamation of shock or surprise, just a simple, “Please hold.”
There was no holding music, either. About thirty seconds later, a woman spoke into the phone, “This is Agent Marcia Reynolds; how may I help you?”
“Agent Reynolds,” I said as I added her name to my notes, “My name is Jim Stanton. I’m the managing editor of the newspaper in Lake City, and I have a long story to tell someone, but the real short version is that we had a young woman abducted and murdered here a year ago last August, and through chance and happenstance, I now know of three other very similar cases – two in California and one in Ohio...”
I waited about a five count, and then she said, “You’re talking about Suzanne Czarnopias, right?”
“That’s correct.”
“Can you give me the names and hometowns of the others?”
I recited them for her.
“Where are you right now?”
“In my office.”
“What’s that number?” I gave it. “And your home phone?” I gave that as well.
“Mr. Stanton, thank you for your call. I’ll get back to you later today, but I have one question more.” She suddenly seemed hesitant. “Have you told your local police authorities?”
“I tried to, but the chief of detectives wouldn’t listen to me at all. Like I said, it’s a real long story, and I just wanted to find out if you were interested, and, if so, I’d either lay out everything I have for you here, or bring it to Buffalo.”
The silence hung for more than a few seconds, and she replied. “I’ll call you back later today, sir.” And she hung up.
I sat back and wondered if she was in a hurry to make a meeting or if that was just her operating speed, but she seemed abrupt to me.
At three o’clock that afternoon, my desk phone buzzed, and the receptionist was whispering again, “Mr. Stanton, there are two FBI agents to see you.”
“Thanks, I’ll be right up.”
I walked to the lobby and found a young woman and a middle-aged man in navy blue slacks, white shirts, striped ties and navy blazers. Both had FBI shields hanging on fobs from their blazers’ handkerchief pockets.
“Agent Reynolds?” I asked as I approached with a smile and my hand out.
“And this is Agent Segura, Mr. Stanton,” she replied without a smile. She also extended her hand, and in it was a sheaf of papers. “I have here a federal subpoena for all your files and records pertaining to or related to the Suzanne Czarnopias murder.”
I stopped cold, and took the papers from her hand. “You’ll excuse me while I consult with our attorneys.”
“There is no reason for any delay.”
“We’re fast writers here, Agent, but pretty slow readers. Have a seat here, and I’ll be right back.”
“Mr. Stanton, this is not a courtesy call. You have been served, and any failure on your part to comply with this subpoena will result in your immediate arrest and incarceration.” Her voice was conversational, but it brooked no debate.
“Cool your jets, Agent. I called you, remember? I’d remind you that the First Amendment and the New York State Shield Law both argue against this subpoena. I’m not arguing, mind you. We pay lawyers to do that; so have a seat, and we’ll get to this immediately.”
“We’re the FBI. There is no Federal Shield Law.”
I gave a real sigh, “But you’re in New York, Agent Reynolds. There is no state of FBI. I don’t know why you’re coming on like Elliot Ness, but before you or any other representative of government confiscates my newspaper’s intellectual property, I’m going to consult with a lawyer. Have a seat, please.” I looked at the front office gals who were watching with bulging eyes. “I’m sure one of these nice ladies would be glad to get you a coffee, soda or, as if you needed it, some ice water. Right, ladies?”
The receptionist stood up and directed herself at the agent. “Of course. May I get you anything?”
I took an immediate left to Doug’s office. “Is he here?”
Harriet looked up, “On the phone; might be Daddy.”
I nodded, tapped twice on the door and went inside.
Doug looked up in surprise, and I held up the subpoena and tapped it with my free hand.
“Excuse me,” he said into the phone. “I’ve got to deal with something here; let me put you on hold.” He listened, and said, “That’ll work. Good-bye.”
As he hung up, he stretched his hand out for the papers. I handed them to him, and he sat back in his chair to read them.
After a minute, he shrugged, “I maybe should have seen this coming when we agreed to call them, the pricks. They’re no better than the IRS.” He reached for his phone and hit a speed dial feature programmed into his console.
“This is Doug Read. I need to speak with Ben. It’s a matter of some urgency.” He listened, and then said, “I have a federal subpoena in my hands and an FBI agent in my lobby...” He listened again and a smile spread across his face.
“Perfect. I’ll await Ben’s call.”
He turned to me. “Please bring the agent in here, will you?”
“There are two of them.”
“Bring ’em both, then.”
I couldn’t read him perfectly, but I felt like he was taking this as some kind of big joke.
When I escorted agents Reynolds and Segura into Doug’s office, he was on the phone, listening and making notes. He put up his hand and beckoned us in with his fingers. I put the agents in the two chairs facing his desk, and pulled up another chair from the small table in the front corner of the office.
Doug put his phone on hold. “Agents, I’ve scanned this subpoena and called our attorney, Ben Patterson of Patterson and Douglas of
Syracuse... you may be familiar with them. He is waiting on hold and would like you to visit with him via our speaker phone...” He held his finger poised over the button that would put Patterson on the speaker.
Agent Reynolds spoke, “I don’t see the need for your lawyer. Just give us your files and we’ll be out of your hair.”
“Nice try,” Doug said quietly as he punched his phone.
Patterson sounded like a hood from Brooklyn on the phone. I’d met him several times at conferences where he was often a guest speaker on newspaper legal issues. Later in life, when I saw Danny DeVito on the screen, I thought it was Ben Patterson reincarnated.
“Marcia, what kind of bullshit is this?” Patterson rasped over the speaker as his way of salutation. “My friends at the Sentinel give you a tip on a huge story they could have just as well let you read about on Sunday, and the next thing you do is show up like some kind of storm trooper ready to walk all over their First Amendment rights...
“And, who’s that you got with you, Segura?”
“’Lo, Ben,” Segura said casually.
“Jack, whatthafuck?”
“Ben, we tracked down the call as normal. Contacted the Lake City cops; they told us we were dealing with some fire-breathing, headline-hunting egomaniac of an editor running some bullshit scam to make them and eventually us look bad...”
“So you got to your tame judge and brought an AK-47 to a pissin’ contest?”
Reynolds spoke up, “Pretty much.”
“Nice touch, Marcia. I actually had more respect for you two than to expect this kind of stunt. It will take me fifteen or maybe twenty minutes to quash that bullshit subpoena, and then I’m going to file a complaint with the Bureau demanding that my fees be reimbursed to the Sentinel. In the meantime, why don’t you two use that time to hear Mr. Stanton’s story and see his material – much of which he would be interested in sharing with you if it would help – and hold on to your hat here – if it would help you put this crazy sonovabitch responsible for these murders away.
“Does that sound like a plan you might live with, Agents?”
They neither looked at each other nor spoke.
“Perfect. Doug, stick by your phone and fax. Talk to you later.” And he hung up.
“Folks,” I said from behind them, “If you’ll come with me, I’d like to show you why I called you.”
As we walked down the corridor to the conference room, Reynolds spoke up, quietly. “I’d take that coffee now.”
Segura grumbled, “Maybe some ice water to douse the flames?”
46
The meeting went much better from then on. There was a sticky moment when Doug walked in with a fax copy of a judge’s order to quash the Federal subpoena, but Reynolds took the order and filed it in her brief case and just turned her attention back to the sequence of events.
“I’m not one of the agency’s psycho owls,” Segura said, “but a three-year cycle may well be a record.”
Reynolds nodded, “And, more to wonder about, it hasn’t moved up over time... this is one very peculiar perp.”
I had gone over all these thoughts by myself, so I sat quietly as they mused. Segura was leafing through the clip file from Ohio. He had already been through the California files. “You know if this is all the work of one perp, it isn’t one of those vagabond killers we fear so much,” he said without raising his eyes off the file.
“Why is that?” Reynolds asked.
“It would take time to identify the victim.”
That obvious fact had eluded me, and I thought it had eluded Reynolds as well. “What if the similarity of the victims was incidental?”
“Or,” I said, “what if we only know about these four victims. What if there are others?”
“I’ll have the agency work on that. It wouldn’t be too hard to identify missing women aged seventeen to nineteen who disappeared on the last Saturday of August... we could go back to, say, nineteen sixty...” She was making a note and lost the thread.
Segura put his file down on the table. “It would be so much easier if we had a national data base for missing persons. I can’t understand why we don’t have such a tool.”
“Maybe this will be the case that tips that into reality,” Reynolds said as she looked at me. “Now, that would make a story.”
“Speaking of a story, can we go to press with the fact that the FBI has entered the case?”
Reynolds took a deep breath, and I could see that she was struggling to frame a response that would work for me but I wouldn’t like. “Not right now. I don’t think I can make that judgment without talking to the Special Agent in Charge back at the office.”
“Is that a person I should know?”
She shook her head, “His name’s Chris Brownlee, and I doubt you’ll ever meet him. And he hates publicity of any kind concerning the cases we work.”
“I’ll take that as confirmation that you’re now working this case.”
She smiled as sweetly as she could muster, but her voice was firm, “I can neither confirm nor deny...” After a pause, she spoke again, with a more human tone, “I’m going to recommend we investigate this case and find out if your theory has merit. Before I’d feel right about confirming that to you, we’ll need to get approval for a nation-wide investigation, and we’ll have to establish liaison with local authorities in all four jurisdictions... That could take a day or two. I’ll call you on Friday with a confirmation or denial, and you can run with that.”
I pondered for a minute, “And, of course, I’ll be part of the media pack that gets that word all at the same time?”
“I’ll have to get back to you on that. But in any event, you have to feel good about what you’ve done by bringing the agency into this... if catching a killer is your primary goal, this is the important first step.”
I stood up and went to the door, “Then I’ll await your call on Friday.”
She shook my hand as she left, and Segura gave me a nod. I hooked Randy and Cindy with my finger and we walked to Doug’s office where Harriet ushered us in with some haste.
“Well?” The publisher asked from behind his desk. “Do we have a story?”
47
After our meeting with Doug, we went to my office, and revisited our plan. “If we get a call on Friday afternoon that the Feds are in, we need to have a story on Page One on Saturday,” I said, detailing the obvious.
“We should write it straight with what we know now,” Randy said. “You write a straight news story detailing how the FBI is investigating whether Suzanne is just the latest victim; Cindy writes a side-bar on the other three victims from the clip files you got. We can piece the Feds’ news release into the body of your story after we get the go-ahead.”
I saw the logic in what he was saying, and Cindy was nodding her agreement.
“And if we don’t get a call on Friday?”
“We have a pre-Thanksgiving fund-raising preview slated for the front right now. We’ll move it to Local lead if we get the nod; leave it out front if we don’t.”
I nodded. “Sounds like a plan. Check with Fritz and see if he’s made contact with the other papers to get those mug shots of the victims. The Associated Press will put them on the wire for us; have him arrange it so it gets billed to the Sentinel and not our colleagues.”
“We’ll have to tell everybody why we’re asking,” Randy said.
“I’ve already contacted the other papers; they know what we’re working on,” Cindy said. “I’ll go back through and tell them where we are, and that we’ll share our story with them for their Saturday editions as well as putting it on the AP.”
I couldn’t think of a better approach. “We’ll still be behind radio and TV if I guess how the FBI will play it, but it’s the best we can do.”
With that we got busy.
As the others went to the newsroom I cleaned the board, gathered my files and notes, and went to my office to start on the story.
The writing didn’t
take as long as one might guess, but trimming it back down to a readable, page-one length was another matter. By seven that night, I had pared it to some twenty-seven column inches, and that was well in excess of what a front page story usually ran in our newspaper.
I hated jumps – those stories that start on one page and continue to another. Too often that practice, born in a desire to put as many “points of entry” as possible on the cover, actually served to dilute news judgment and provide a cop-out for lazy writers and copy editors.
Randy must have seen me struggling through the window. He stuck his head inside the office, “Jim, get over it; it’s going to jump inside to Cindy’s story. You’d boil down Nixon’s resignation to an eighteen-line brief. Trust me on this story, readers will follow the jump.”
I couldn’t help but rise to that bait, “You know it’s true, fewer than fifteen percent of readers follow jumps.”
“That may be true when we look at all the horrible jumps so common in our business, but believe me, nobody in our readership is going to miss the jump on this story.”
I couldn’t argue with that logic. I turned to my screen and typed “-30-”, the traditional signal from the old wire days denoting the end of the piece.
“Good,” Randy said with a laugh. “I’ll go over it in the morning. We’ll have until Thursday to polish and still again on Friday before we get the word from the Great Eagle.” He turned toward the employee exit, done for the day after his fourteen hours.
I knew he was right. I printed the story to my personal printer, saved it again, and closed my machine. I took the time to straighten my desk, and then I left the building and started the walk home.
It was a beautiful fall evening, and the street lights came on as I slowly walked, thinking about the day and wondering where this was going.
48
I was about halfway home when an unmarked sedan pulled to a stop next to where I was walking on the sidewalk. The passenger window scrolled down and a voice came from inside the vehicle. “Nice night for a walk, isn’t it, Mr. Stanton?”