McCready and Dunn now had Kasso’s motive.
“About the second or third day I got out of jail,” Jimmy said, “I was with Ricky in the New Park in downtown Northport.”
Troiano had just been released from the Suffolk County Correctional Facility after burglarizing a home.
“Ricky beat Gary up because Gary had taken the dust,” Jimmy continued. “Ricky wanted Gary to pay him for the dust, and Gary kept putting him off. I think that was the third time Ricky beat up Gary.”
Finally, the moment the investigators had been waiting for arrived—Jimmy’s account of how Gary Lauwers was killed.
“On Saturday, June 16, about seven o’clock,” he said, “I met up with Gary, Ricky, and Albert Quinones.”
Still high on PCP from the night before, Troiano incorrectly recalled the date of the murder as being June 16. Unbeknownst to the police, it had actually occurred three nights later, on June 19. Completely unaware of this error, McCready and Dunn didn’t think to correct Jimmy as he went on.
“We hung out for a while and decided to go to Dunkin’ Donuts,” he said. “We got donuts and cigarettes and then walked up to Aztakea Woods. On the way, Albert said that Ricky was going to beat up Gary. After we got up there, Albert told me Ricky was going to kill Gary.”
This revelation surprised the interrogators. Based on the limited information they had gathered, McCready, Dunn, and the rest of the investigators had assumed the murder was a spontaneous rage killing. Now Jimmy was saying it had been planned all along.
“As we sat there watching a small fire,” he continued, “Ricky kept telling Gary to donate some of his clothes to the fire. At first, he told Gary to donate his socks. Then, he wanted Gary to donate his undershorts. Ricky kept telling him to donate things. Gary finally donated his jacket sleeves. Gary then told Ricky that he thought Ricky was trying to start a fight with him. Gary then told Ricky that he would fight only if it was one-on-one and no weapons. Ricky and Gary started to fight as Albert and I watched. Suddenly me and Albert heard Gary say, ‘I love you, Mom.’ I turned and saw Ricky stabbing Gary in the back. Gary tried to get away from Ricky and ran. Ricky ran after Gary and dragged him back by the legs. Ricky had dropped the knife after stabbing Gary. After he dragged Gary back, he found the knife and stabbed Gary in the back many times. Just before I heard Gary say, ‘I love you, Mom,’ I heard Ricky tell Gary to say, ‘I love you, Satan.’ I heard Gary say this once after Ricky had stabbed Gary in the back.”
Ricky Kasso had long been obsessed with the devil—and the police were well aware. Only three months before, Ricky had been arrested for trying to steal a skull from a nineteenth-century grave. When he was arrested, his pockets were searched, and a list of the dignitaries in Hell was found in his wallet, along with steps on how to conduct a ritual.
“He told me to help him drag Gary’s body away from the clearing and into the woods,” Jimmy continued. “I did this with Ricky and then I saw Ricky bending over Gary, saying something about Satan. As he was saying this, Gary’s head moved, and Ricky bugged out and started stabbing him in the face. He stabbed him plenty of times in the face. We all then covered Gary with leaves and branches. As we walked away, Ricky realized he lost his Satanic star necklace. We looked around for it and couldn’t find it. We then kicked dirt on the bloody spots on the ground to cover it up. As we walked away, Ricky was laughing about what happened. It was about three o’clock in the morning when we left. We went over to Albert’s house on Maple Avenue. Ricky took a bath and cleaned up. He put on the same pants, but I think he put on a different shirt. We went back downtown, and then during the day, I went to Kings Park.”
When asked about the murder weapon, Troiano told the three that when he returned to downtown Northport later the next night, Ricky told him he had thrown the knife into the harbor earlier that day. Troiano was, however, able to describe it.
“The knife has about a four-inch blade. It locks open and says ‘Flasher’ on it in gold letters,” he said. “The handle is black hard plastic.”
McCready and Dunn ended the interview by asking how Gary’s remains went from being hidden under a pile of leaves and sticks to its eventual burial in the shallow grave.
“Last Saturday, around eleven o’clock in the morning,” he replied, “Ricky and I went back up to Aztakea and buried the body. We took turns digging, and Ricky then pushed the body in the hole.”
Jimmy then described how Gary Lauwers’s skull ended up down by his feet.
“When Kasso and Troiano pushed him into the grave, he was so badly decomposed that the head just fell off—and they kicked it into the grave,” Robert Howard later told a television interviewer. “The head was not cut from the body. . . .”
* * *
Later that morning Albert Quinones, who had just been rearrested downtown, encountered Jimmy in the hallway of Suffolk County Police headquarters.
“Tell them everything, Albert!” he yelled to the muscular boy with the mop of black hair.
Assuming Jimmy had been cleared of the crime, Albert decided to talk. He was brought into another room and told the police about Gary’s murder. Albert’s statement mostly mirrored Jimmy’s. He described how Ricky had lured Gary to Aztakea and how the drug debt was paid off and seemingly forgotten. He talked about the donuts and how the four tried to get a fire started in the damp woods. He told the detectives how Ricky gave Gary a knife and told him to cut the sleeves from his denim jacket to use as kindling. Albert then surprised the interrogators by saying Ricky had killed Gary at the behest of Jimmy, insisting he saw Jimmy tell Ricky to slice the boy’s throat. Despite the unexpected revelation, no one was shocked that Jimmy had failed to mention this important detail—thereby incriminating himself—but the detectives weren’t about to interrupt Albert over this matter. They sat quietly, jotting down notes in their legal pads as Albert described how Ricky had forced Gary to get down on his hands and knees and say he loved Satan as he repeatedly plunged the knife into his friend’s body.
The lurid story concluded with Albert telling the investigators how he had helped Ricky and Jimmy cover Gary’s body with leaves, and how he’d even let Ricky come back to his house—where his mother and two sisters were sleeping—so he could wash Gary’s blood from his body and borrow a shirt. Despite what Jimmy had told investigators earlier, Albert made no mention of advance knowledge of Ricky’s intentions to kill Gary. At the same time, the detectives weren’t naive enough to believe Albert would deliberately incriminate himself during questioning. However, since they still had nothing solid to charge him with, they decided to let Albert go.
Shortly afterward, Detective Louis Rodriguez of the Suffolk County Police Department was asked to take Jimmy back to Northport so more crime scene photos could be taken. Rodriguez, along with a few other investigators, then headed toward the village. Once there, they briefly stopped at the police station and then drove to Skipper’s Pub, one of Northport’s Main Street restaurants, for lunch before the trip to Aztakea. The investigators hoped the friendlier environment would help Jimmy loosen up and divulge more information. He was shocked when the detectives ordered him a hamburger and a Coke.
“People think we use these horrible tactics to get people to make statements,” Chief Howard later told an interviewer. “We bought James Troiano a hamburger. A big hamburger and a Coke. He couldn’t believe we were being so nice to him.”
As Jimmy chowed down on the first decent meal he’d had in weeks, Ricky was brought to see Detective McCready back in Yaphank.
There, Ricky gave a statement that was nearly identical to Albert’s and Jimmy’s, save for one important detail—Ricky claimed that all three knew in advance that Gary was going to be killed, and that Jimmy actually helped him do it. Ricky told the detectives that Jimmy held Gary down while he was punching and biting him. Echoing Albert’s statement, Ricky confirmed that Jimmy had told him to slice the boy’s throat and had later handed the murder weapon back to him after he dropped it.
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sp; This changed everything. With these new details in mind, McCready now wanted a second statement from Jimmy.
After lunch, the detectives drove Jimmy to Franklin Street to take photos of the Aztakea crime scene. Here, events took a controversial turn. Around this time, Detective Rodriguez had been made aware of Kasso’s confession and how Troiano seemed to be much more involved in Gary’s murder than initially assumed. Sitting in the car, Rodriguez questioned Troiano further and eventually got a second and more damning statement out of him. Not only did Jimmy supposedly admit to handing the knife back to Ricky after he dropped it, but he also claimed to have broken Gary’s ribs during the attack, and even helped Kasso drag Gary back to the campfire after he had briefly run away.
With this new confession added to the record, Jimmy was arrested shortly after taking the requested photos in the woods. He was then driven back to Suffolk County Police headquarters, booked, and placed in a cell.
The group of investigators were proud of the work they had done. In less than a week, they had successfully followed up on Jean Wells’s tip, identified the location of Gary Lauwers’s remains, secured a witness statement from Albert Quinones, and safely apprehended the two suspects. Adding Ricky’s and Jimmy’s confessions to the ever-growing pile of evidence against the two gave the detectives an overwhelming sense of confidence. All in all, this seemed to be an open-and-shut case for the courts.
Ricky Kasso, however, had other plans.
Part Two
A BRIEF INNOCENCE
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.
Nobody that matters, that is.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay,
Wine from These Grapes
Chapter 4
THE BOY WHO WOULD BECOME the Acid King was born Richard Allan Kasso Jr. on March 29, 1967, in Long Island’s Huntington Hospital. The child, affectionately called “Ricky,” was the firstborn son of Richard Sr. and his wife, the former Lynn Pechman.
On the surface, the young husband and wife seemed to be a natural couple. Both taught at Northport High School and ostensibly complemented each other well. What Lynn lacked through her more reserved nature, Dick made up for through his aggressive passion for sports. Initially Dick indulged in this love through coaching, but his athletic obsessions eventually spilled over into the Huntington home he shared with Lynn. On the night her water broke, Dick forced his twenty-five-year-old wife to wait until he was done watching a sports game on television.
Only then would he drive her to Huntington Hospital so Ricky could be born.
As the years went by, the Kasso family grew larger. In 1969 Lynn gave birth to a daughter, Kelly Lynn, and within the next four years, two more sisters were born; Jody Lee in 1970, and finally Wendy Lauren in 1973. The family eventually moved from Huntington into a quaint, four-bedroom home on Seaview Avenue in Northport. To some, life might have appeared cramped inside the small Dutch Colonial house the Kassos called home, but matters were alleviated by Kelly and Jody sharing a bedroom. The two always seemed to come as a pair from then on, which created a vacuum between Ricky and Wendy. This, however, allowed for a strong bond to form between them.
In family photos, Ricky is almost always seen standing with Wendy, happily engaged in the sacred role of his sister’s protector. The two even began to resemble each other more than they did their other siblings. Kelly and Jody stood out from the pack with their golden blond hair and cherubic faces, while Ricky and Wendy shared identical shades of earthy brown hair, piercing blue eyes, and even the same thin, straight nose. Ricky doted on Wendy, playfully nicknaming her “Windy.” If Kelly and Jody were bothering his youngest sister, Ricky would let Wendy stand in the doorway of his second-floor bedroom so she could call them names. If they tried to come after her, Ricky would yell at his sisters, chasing them away.
When Wendy was a student at Northport’s Ocean Avenue Elementary School, she was given a chicken egg to carry across the school gymnasium on a small plastic spoon during an afternoon of activities and games. She soon began to stress over the responsibility of the task, but Ricky, who was watching nearby, saw the fear on Wendy’s face and quickly ran to her aid. Placing his hand on his little sister’s back, Ricky kept his sister steady as she made her way from one end of the gymnasium to the other, never once dropping her egg.
“Ricky loved Wendy,” recalls Sue Sterling, a family friend. “He would say, ‘My Wendy! My little Wendy-Lou!’ If she was upset, he would take his hand and rub her hair, saying, ‘It’ll be okay, Wendy-Lou! It’s all right! Don’t cry!’ He idolized her.”
Sue first met the Kassos in the early 1970s in her hometown of Argyle in upstate New York. A few years earlier, Dick’s parents had given him and Lynn a small red cabin on Argyle’s Hemlocks Lane, and the family began spending their summers there. The cabin itself was far from extravagant, containing only a couple of rooms barely larger than an average closet, plus a living room that doubled as a kitchen. However, the unobstructed view of the wilderness surrounding the midnight-blue waters of Cossayuna Lake was the best vacation this nuclear family from Long Island could hope for. Every June, on the last day of school, the Kassos would pack up their Dodge station wagon and make the four-hour drive upstate.
Good-natured and always smiling, Ricky had no difficulty making friends in Argyle. Once the family settled in, Ricky, Kelly, and Jody would join Sue and her brother Bruce for a multitude of summer activities. There were games of tag, speedboat rides, and swimming races held to see which kid could make it to the lake’s floating barrel dock the quickest.
Unfortunately, as the youngest sibling, Wendy rarely got to join in on the fun. Most of her time was spent with her mother, but occasionally, Ricky would bring Wendy out to the barrel dock with him. Placing his hands underneath her armpits, he would then let her jump in and out of the water a few times before bringing her back inside.
Once the sun set on a typical day in Argyle, the Kasso children, along with most of their friends, would dry off and gather around a large campfire Dick built near the edge of the water. There, everyone toasted marshmallows as Dick told ghost stories. Afterward, he would take his small motorboat out onto the lake for a round of night fishing. Hearing him approach, all of Dick’s children, along with Sue, Bruce, and others, would race down to the dock to see what he had caught—usually northern pike or largemouth bass.
Ricky often passed the time in Argyle by working at the Mallory family’s dairy farm. Ricky was friends with the Mallorys’ sons, Tony and Danny, and was more than happy to lend a hand. One of Ricky’s favorite duties on the farm was “Woodchuck Watch.” Several troublesome woodchucks had been laying waste to the farm’s corn crops, so the Mallorys allowed Dick to load up his station wagon with all the kids and shoot the rodents with his shotgun. When one of the children spotted a woodchuck, Dick would fire. Some were launched into the air and others would land sideways, leaving Ricky and the others rolling in fits of laughter.
After summer ended and the Kassos returned to Northport, the halcyon image of a Norman Rockwell existence continued. Ricky often rose at six in the morning so he could join the other boys on Seaview Avenue for a quick game of football before school. Nothing could have made Dick happier. His own father, Alfred Kasso, had once played as an outfielder for a minor-league baseball team and Dick, wanting to keep the family tradition alive, held high athletic aspirations for Ricky. Seeing his child grow into a young man who loved competitive sports was nothing short of a dream come true for Dick Kasso.
Ricky often enjoyed playing with his neighbor from two doors down, Grant Koerner. Grant was three years younger than Ricky—a gargantuan age difference for children under ten—but the two never seemed to mind. Their days were often spent playing with green plastic army figurines in Grant’s backyard sandbox or launching model rockets in the Ocean Avenue Elementary School parking lot with their friend Dave Johnson.
When Ricky wasn’t sending cardboard rockets on imaginary trips to the moon, he spent his days inside Oce
an Avenue as a less-than-average but likeable student. Dick Kasso didn’t mind Ricky’s C-average grades as long as his son maintained an active interest in sports.
“Nothing else could compete with my father’s love of sports,” Wendy says. “Not even his kids. Sports were his entire life. He was highly competitive and winning mattered to him. He wanted all his kids to be the same way. He had four kids who each had a natural ability to play sports well, but not all of them necessarily wanted to. Everyone had to be on a team. If what you were doing wasn’t related to sports, it wasn’t important.”
Wendy eventually realized this the hard way. When she was a young girl, she joined her school’s choral group. After spending weeks practicing, she raced home to tell her parents about her upcoming concert. Lynn was excited for her youngest child, but when she told Dick to save the date, her husband replied coldly, “It’s not a sport. It doesn’t matter. I’m not going.”
Unbeknownst to Dick, Wendy was in the next room and heard everything. She was heartbroken. From that day on, Wendy Kasso knew if she ever wanted to gain her father’s affection and approval, she would have to focus on sports like Jody, Kelly, and Ricky did.
For Ricky, at least, this was initially manageable. There were plenty of opportunities to play sports in the village. He tried his hand at basketball for the Northport Nets and Little League baseball with the Northport Mets. For the most part, Ricky was an average baseball player. Unfortunately, as he grew older, average became less acceptable in his father’s eyes. If Ricky’s playing wasn’t up to par, Dick had no problem calling his son out for it. On several occasions, Ricky found himself publicly humiliated by his own dad, who would leave the bleachers and loudly chastise him on the field while the game was still being played.
Ricky’s coach, Harry Schock, always stepped in when this occurred.
The Acid King Page 3