A few minutes later Sergeant Ed McMullen of the Northport Village Police Department pulled up behind the Pontiac.
Independence Day 1984 would be Ricky Kasso’s final night of freedom.
Chapter 35
“YOU’VE GOT NOTHING ON US! What are you hassling us for?!”
Ricky screamed and spat as he was pulled from the Pontiac by Suffolk County detectives. Surging from a sudden burst of adrenaline—not to mention the PCP he had smoked earlier—Ricky wasn’t going down without a fight. He quickly reached into his pocket. Luckily, one of the dozen investigators on the scene saw this.
“Hey, he’s reaching for something!” he shouted.
Ricky was subdued and placed into handcuffs before he could hurt anyone. When his pockets were searched, a switchblade was found.
In contrast to his friend, Jimmy decided to cooperate.
“I always do square business with the cops,” he told Suffolk County Detective Jim McCready as he was cuffed.
Ricky was placed in the back seat of a car with Northport Police Officer Gene Roemer and Detective Lieutenant Robert Dunn, commander of the Suffolk County Homicide Squad, and was taken to the Suffolk County Police Department headquarters in Yaphank. Jimmy was driven in a separate car. The investigators didn’t want to give the two a chance to collaborate on a cover story—assuming they hadn’t already.
When they arrived at eight thirty a.m., Ricky was charged with the second-degree murder of Gary Lauwers. He was then brought to another room for mug shots to be taken. Ricky lowered his head and leered at the camera, and its flash threw a quick burst of light at the gaunt face draped by wavy curls of greasy brown hair. He was then fingerprinted and locked in a holding cell until McCready and Dunn were finished speaking with Jimmy.
After Jimmy made his statement, Ricky was led into the interrogation room. Although he was still high on angel dust, he had calmed down significantly and decided to confess.
“Late at night, me and Albert Quinones, Jimmy Troiano, and Gary Lauwers all walked up to the Dunkin’ Donuts,” he said as McCready began writing the statement on a Suffolk County Police Department notepad. “We bought some donuts and went up to Aztakea Woods. When we got up there, we decided to start a fire, and Gary donated one of his socks to start the fire. I asked him to donate his jacket, and he said he’d cut off his sleeves. We did that and got a nice little fire going. We were all talking about killing Gary.”
This revelation was significant. Jimmy had already told Detective McCready that Albert had advance knowledge of Ricky’s plan to kill Gary. Ricky’s statement gave credence to this claim, but now also directly implicated Jimmy. McCready silently made special note of this in his head. The thirty-seven-year-old detective suspected Jimmy of participating in the murder more than he cared to admit, due to the savage nature of the attack. Earlier, word had been passed down from the Suffolk County Medical Examiner’s Office that Gary Lauwers had been stabbed twenty-two times at the very least, based on the holes in his jacket alone.
“Gary said that he got bad vibes—that we were going to beat him up,” Ricky continued. “Gary didn’t hear us talking about killing him. When Gary said that he got bad vibes, I grabbed him around the neck. Gary said he’d fight me one on one as long as Jimmy and Albert didn’t jump in. I said okay and then bit him on the neck. We were wrestling around on the ground, and I made Gary say, ‘I love you, Satan.’ I was holding him on the ground and Jimmy kicked him in the ribs. I bit him on the ear. I looked up at Jimmy and Jimmy told me to cut his throat.”
McCready’s eyes lit up. He now had even more information to link Jimmy to the murder.
“I then took out my knife, held it in two hands, and stabbed Gary in the right side of his back,” Ricky said. “The knife went all the way in. Somehow, he got away and ran through the woods. I caught him and brought him back to where the fire was. I had dropped my knife when I chased him, and Troiano found it. Troiano gave me the knife, and I stabbed Gary in the back and front a whole bunch of times.”
There was now little doubt in McCready’s mind that Jimmy Troiano would soon be charged as an accessory to Gary’s murder.
“Me and Troiano dragged Gary back into the woods,” Ricky said. “We started to cover him up with leaves and he sat up. I bugged out and started to stab him in the face.”
“How many times did you stab him?” McCready asked.
“I didn’t count how many times,” Ricky answered impassively. “I’m not really sure. When I finished stabbing him in the face, we both finished covering him up with the leaves. I don’t know what I said, but a whole bunch of Satanic things just rolled out of my mouth.”
The next words to roll out of Ricky Kasso’s mouth would haunt the investigators for decades to come.
“We heard a crow caw, which is the sign of the devil,” Ricky said. “I knew Gary was dead then. Me, Albert, and Troiano then went back to the area by the fire. I knew I had lost my Satanic star and we looked for it, but couldn’t find it. As we looked for the star, we saw blood spots on the ground and kicked dirt over them. We all then left. We went to Albert’s house, where I took a bath. I changed my clothes and took the clothes I was wearing and threw them in someone’s garbage can near Albert’s house. The clothes were full of blood.”
“What about your shoes?” McCready asked, looking up from his notepad.
“I’m wearing the shoes I had on that night,” Ricky said. “I don’t think I had blood on them.”
“Where’s the knife, Ricky?” McCready asked. Jimmy had already told him that Ricky said he had thrown it into the water, but he wanted to see if Ricky would tell him the same story.
“I threw the knife into Northport Harbor near the New Park gazebo the next night,” Ricky replied. “It’s straight out from the wood forest playground. The handle is black and ‘Flasher’ is on the blade.”
Curiously forgetting his earlier assertion, Ricky then added, “I must have stabbed Gary forty times or more. I went back to the body three times before I buried it with Jimmy. I had a shovel up there, and the fourth time I went up there, Jimmy and I buried it. We showed the body to Mark Florimonte because he didn’t believe me. I also showed it to Richard Barton. Troiano told Mike Higgins about it.”
“But why did you do it, Ricky?” McCready asked.
Ricky thought for a second.
“Gary had been ripping people off for money and drugs in town,” he told McCready. “Nobody liked him, and he got what he deserved.”
The investigators were shocked by the sheer callousness of Ricky’s words. Sure, they had dealt with hardened criminals before—Detective Lieutenant Dunn had been one of the investigators to question Ronald DeFeo Jr. during the Amityville murder investigation nearly a decade before—but this was a scrawny seventeen-year-old. Ricky wasn’t even old enough to legally drink, yet he had spent the past three years making his name as a drug dealer. Now the Acid King had upgraded to murder and seemingly couldn’t care less. Ricky signed the statement McCready wrote out for him and was brought back to his cell.
McCready made sure word of Ricky’s allegations about Jimmy made it back to Detective Louis Rodriguez, who was en route to Aztakea with the suspect. Rodriguez, a fifteen-year veteran of the department, had been called in early by Suffolk County Detective Sergeant Richard Jensen. Rodriguez’s last shift had ended less than twelve hours earlier, but he agreed to come in and assist with the investigation. Jensen wanted Rodriguez to photograph the Aztakea Woods crime scene and told the dark-haired homicide detective to bring Troiano along while Kasso was being questioned by McCready—the logic being that by having him accompany Rodriguez, the exact location of the murder could be determined. This idea would later come back to haunt Jensen.
Rodriguez drove Jimmy to Northport while fellow detective Robert Amato followed closely behind. When they got to Aztakea, Rodriguez pressed Jimmy about what had really happened the night Gary was murdered.
Finally Jimmy sighed and said, “You might as well know I had
a part in it. Ricky did all the stabbing. I held him, but Ricky did all the stabbing.”
Rodriguez pulled out his notepad and began jotting down Jimmy’s words. Once he was done, the detectives exited their vehicles and had Jimmy show them the clearing where Ricky built the small fire and later killed Gary. A Suffolk County Police photographer snapped photos of Jimmy pointing toward the patch of dirt where Gary was first stabbed. Suddenly Jimmy noticed something out of the corner of his eye. He walked over to a nearby sprouting of green leaves and found a tuft of Gary’s hair lying on the ground. He bent down, picked up the clump of blond hair, and handed it over to Rodriguez. Stunned, the detectives immediately bagged it to be entered into evidence.
Jimmy then led the detectives over to the spot where he and Ricky hid Gary’s body. Until the day before, it had been a small, remote pocket of Aztakea that was easy to miss. Now it was a wide-open area. Crime scene technicians from Suffolk County had cleared away much of the brush and poison ivy plants that had once shrouded the body, leaving behind the blue tarp that had covered the grave the night before. There, Rodriguez and Amato had Jimmy pose in front of the shallow grave, pointing at it with a stick. Directly in front of him was the black imprint left on the ground by Gary’s decomposing body. The photographer took special care to ensure it was in the shot.
When they got back to police headquarters, Rodriguez took his notes and typed up a statement for Jimmy to sign. Jimmy quietly read the pages until he came to the part where he handed the knife back to Ricky during the murder. He looked up at Rodriguez and said, “I don’t want to be seen holding the knife in this.”
Rodriguez now had a tough call to make: stay firm and risk Troiano ending his cooperation or let this one detail slide. In the end, Rodriguez took a risk and chose the latter. Jimmy reviewed the modified statement, which read:
On Thursday, July 5, 1984, during the morning hours, I was taken by detectives of the Homicide Squad to Yaphank, where I was told that a guy I know as Gary Lauwers’ body was found murdered in Northport. The detectives asked me a lot of questions, and I told them some answers, but not everything. Not that I wanted to lie to them, but since they hadn’t asked certain questions, I didn’t offer a lot of things. I made it look like I hadn’t done too much during the killing of Gary; that Rick Kasso had done most of it. When I finished telling those detectives the first story, I left there with Rodriguez and Amato and headed for Northport Village. It was during this time that I realized I should tell it all, that is, how the murder of Gary Lauwers went down. I knew that if I did this, I would end up feeling better.
I took Rodriguez and Amato into the woods to show them where the fight had started that night in June, the 16th, Saturday about 2:00 a.m.
Before we went there, me, Rick, Albert Quinones and Gary, had been at a Dunkin’ Donuts, and Albert had told me that Rick wanted to beat up Gary, who had taken some angel dust from Rick. When we arrived at the woods known as “Aztakea Woods,” Albert told me Rick was going to kill Gary. I decided I didn’t care because Gary should not have taken the dust that belonged to Rick. In the woods, Rick started a fire and Gary gave him his socks and then the sleeves on Gary’s jacket. I cut the sleeves off the jacket with either Rick’s knife or my knife. Gary was on the ground, saying that he felt he was going to be beat up or something. I saw Gary and Rick start to fight. All of a sudden, I heard Gary say, “I love you, mom.” When I looked, Gary was on his knees and Rick was stabbing him in the back. I was pretty high, but I’m sure it was around this time that I went to Gary’s side, and as hard as I could, I kicked him in the rib area. I know I broke some ribs because I felt that side cave in. Gary managed to run from us, and we chased him into the woods. Rick and I dragged him back, and I believe during this time, we took turns cutting hair off Gary’s head. I guess I cut about three pieces off. Rick was holding Gary as I did this, and Rick told Gary to repeat “I love you, Satan,” which Gary did, even though he was really hurting. I knew that Gary had to be killed or he would rat us all out if he lived. While I held him, Rick also cut some hair off and stabbed him some more. I didn’t see Albert Quinones do any of this. I guess he was just watching. I saw Ricky put Gary in a headlock, and Gary was saying something like, “Please don’t kill me.” Ricky stabbed him some more. Like I said, I was glad because Gary could not leave those woods alive. Ricky was saying some shit about Satan over Gary’s body. He’s into things about Satan and the Devil. I saw Gary lift his head slightly, and Ricky went buggy and started stabbing Gary in the face. I don’t have any idea of how many times, but it was a lot. We—Ricky and me—dragged Gary into the woods and covered him with leaves and branches. Rick realized he had lost his Satanic star, which was on a chain. We couldn’t find it in the dark. About this time, the three of us left the woods and Gary, and went to Albert’s home, where I showered. I left them and went to Kings Park. That night, I saw Ricky Kasso, and he told me he threw the knife he killed Gary with into the harbor off the “New Park” dock in Northport. Today, Thursday July 5, 1984, I was photographed pointing at several spots where this killing took place. I also pointed out and had my picture taken at the spot where Rick and I buried Gary Lauwers with a shovel this past Saturday, June 30, at about 11 a.m. We found chunks of Gary’s hair, and I had my picture taken pointing at them.
I wish to add that I am 18 years of age with a date of birth of December 10, 1965, in Schenectady, N.Y. I now live with my adopted parents, Mary and Vincent Troiano. I am currently unemployed and gone through the ninth grade in Northport Junior High. I have read this statement of four pages and I swear it is true.
After reading it, Jimmy scribbled his name on the bottom of the last page and handed the confession back to Rodriguez, who asked, “How do you feel about this boy being killed?”
Jimmy shrugged.
“I don’t care.”
Despite the omission of Jimmy handing the knife back to Ricky and again failing to recall the actual date of the murder, the detectives now had a much more incriminating statement from him, along with a series of photos showing him pointing to the key locations of the crime. At one forty-five p.m., Jimmy Troiano was placed under arrest and formally charged with second-degree murder.
Around this same time, over on Tanager Lane, the phone inside the Hayward home rang. It was for Johnny. Dorothy had just found out about Gary’s body being discovered in the woods. When she told Johnny, he exploded in a fit of rage. He knew it had to have been Ricky. Tears streamed from his eyes as he screamed, “I’ll kill Ricky!” Johnny punched a hole in the wall and grabbed a large pocketknife. Darting out the door, he left the phone dangling from its cord. His mother ran out after him, but it was no use. Johnny was faster than her and guided by raw, primal emotion. His best friend in the whole world—the closest thing he ever had to a brother—was now gone forever, and he was sure it was Ricky who had taken him away.
Word had also gotten to the kids living at Merrie Schaller’s house. Two of Gary’s friends who were living there, Glen Wolf and his friend Mike McGrory, grabbed a couple baseball bats and headed downtown. Someone told the two that Jimmy Troiano had been involved, so they decided to find him and bring him in to the cops. A Northport patrol officer noticed Glen and Mike entering the New Park armed with the bats and pulled over to stop them.
“What are you guys doing?” the officer demanded.
“We’re trying to find the guy who helped kill our friend,” Glen replied.
“We got him already,” the officer told them. “Go home.”
Up the block, Johnny Hayward was frantically searching for the beat-up Pontiac. After an hour of looking, he finally ran into a friend who told him that Ricky and Jimmy had already been arrested.
“The cops got them in a car at the end of some street,” the friend told him.
Johnny sighed and said, “I’m glad they got arrested before I fuckin’ found them, because I would have killed Ricky.”
Still in shock and completely defeated, Johnny decided to walk back home. The
courts would have to handle Ricky and Jimmy now.
Chapter 36
BY THE NEXT MORNING, FRIDAY, July 6, word of the murder and subsequent arrests had reached the Northport Observer, Newsday, the New York Post, and the New York Daily News, all thanks to a press release issued by the Suffolk County Police Department. Shortly after Jimmy was booked the day before, Northport Police Chief Robert Howard told Suffolk County’s Chief of Detectives, John Gallagher, that an official statement should be typed up. Gallagher invited the Northport Village Police Department to write a press release, but Howard quickly declined.
“No,” he told Gallagher. “You guys do it. You have the experience.”
Howard was referring to Suffolk County’s own in-house professionals—people like William McKeown, the department’s assistant to the commissioner for media relations—a relative luxury Northport’s small office did not have, or even need up until this point. It wasn’t as if the Truman Capotes of the world were banging down the door every time a garbage can was lit on fire or a case of beer was stolen in the village. However, McKeown, for all his talents, would not write the official press release.
The Acid King Page 17