McDonald photographed the scene. As he studied it, he assumed the person who had dumped the body had obviously chosen the area out of necessity and randomness rather than design. There was no reason to believe the woman’s killer knew the chief of police lived down the road and wanted to dump the body in, basically, his front yard. (“Son of a gun,” the chief said later, quite animated that a killer had left one of his victims in his front yard, “I drove by that body every day for months on my way into work.”)
After photographing the scene, McDonald walked up the road and sought out one of the chief’s neighbors, John Czerkiewciz. McDonald wanted to know if Czerkiewciz had seen anything suspicious. Although the nights were as dark as used motor oil out there in the woods, someone had obviously drove up Grassy Pond Road to dump a body, which meant someone could have perhaps seen him.
“I saw that bag for the first time about a month ago,” Czerkiewciz said. “I remember a friend telling me about a ‘foul odor’ near the bridge”—there was a small bridge over a small rain creek about twenty yards from where the bag was found—“and I heard about that odor maybe two months ago.”
“Thanks,” McDonald said. “If you think of anything else, call us.”
What the brief interview told McDonald was that identifying the body might prove difficult, especially if it had been out there decomposing for a few months.
IV
By late afternoon, Arthur Kershaw and Diane Dougherty, two members of the RISP–BCI Unit, arrived to assist what had become Detective Kevin McDonald’s investigation. McDonald was happy to have the help. It was going to be tough to identify the body. Besides the lower right leg, from about the top of the DB’s (dead body) shin down, the body was decomposed to the point of, essentially, a bag of bones. The victim, as McDonald described the body to the detectives, had been placed inside several white bags, which were placed inside several black garbage bags. The person who had placed her—they knew it was a female—inside the bags had gone to great lengths to seal the bags. They found no clothing besides a pair of “medium blue” panties she was wearing. (“There was a rope (clothesline),” McDonald explained later, “wrapped or tied around her pelvic bone, which told me that she had been tied up and bound at some point.”)
The coroner arrived, took some photos, searched the area around the body with McDonald and the others, and ordered the body to be taken to the medical examiner’s (ME) office for further assessment. When McDonald got back to the Hopkinton PD, he had officers check out the local campgrounds. “Preference paid to domestic disputes,” he suggested. See if any females had been reported missing within the past six months. Maybe a husband got drunk, pissed off, and did his wife in after an argument. While they did that, McDonald called the Connecticut State Police (CSP) troop closest to where the body had been found to see if the CSP had any unresolved missing persons cases that fit the criteria. A trooper told him they had been investigating a missing prostitute case from a truck stop near Hopkinton. “She worked that truck stop and vanished at some point last summer.” But there was never a missing person report filed.
Then McDonald called Detective Mike Carrier, from the Westerly Police Department (WPD). Westerly was beach territory. Weekend beachgoers from all over the Northeast flocked to the popular Misquamicut State Beach Park. There was always trouble on weekends during the summer. Kids getting drunk. Drugs. Bar fights.
Burlingame, a campground near the beach, was a common spot Westerly cops were called out to patrol and investigate. The Mashantucket Pequot Casino at Foxwoods in Ledyard, Connecticut, was a twenty-minute drive from the beach. Lots of drugs and trouble flowed from the casino to the beach, back and forth. Maybe a woman had been reported missing from the casino, campground, or somewhere in between.
“I’ll search our records, Kevin, and get back to you,” Detective Carrier said.
The next morning, McDonald drove out to the CSP barracks in Montville, Connecticut, to see if it had a match of any kind.
No luck.
From there, he stopped at the truck stop to see about the missing hooker. But it was a rumor, he was told. There was no prostitute working the truck stop.
Back at the Hopkinton PD, McDonald sat down with Chief Scuncio. The chief said he remembered something that, in hindsight, might be important to the investigation. “Last November I saw a vehicle—an Explorer or Bronco—in my driveway,” he told McDonald. The only way to get to the chief’s driveway was to turn left or right from Route 138 onto Grassy Pond and head west toward his house. “I went up to the driver and asked him what he was doing.” The vehicle had driven into a gravel bank. The driver seemed confused. When the chief approached and started asking questions, “the guy took off.”
So the chief made chase.
Reaching speeds up to 100 mph, the chief lost the guy somewhere over the Connecticut border.
It seemed like nothing, but McDonald said he’d look into it.
McDonald went back to his office and spread out the photographs he had taken at the crime scene. Something was missing. He had recently received several photographs from the coroner, which gave him a fairly good view of the body. What struck him right away was a tattoo on what was one of the only patches of skin that time and the elements hadn’t decayed. The coroner described the area as the “lateral aspect” of the “left ankle.” McDonald’s Jane Doe had a rather unique piece of art there: quite faded, it was an image of flowers, a bird, and several “unreadable words,” the coroner noted. Looking closer, however, McDonald noticed something.
Tarzan—written on the woman’s ankle.
67
I
At forty, Detective Kevin McDonald was in better shape than half the cadets training at the local academy. Part of it was McDonald’s belief in being prepared for any situation. He kept his solid, six-foot two-inch, 210-pound frame in shape by running six miles every morning with Chief Scuncio and other colleagues. For McDonald, growing up in Narragansett, a fishing village, had been a satisfying experience. From an early age, McDonald said, he had always found police work interesting. Out of high school, he started working part-time for the police reserves. “I loved it.” By 1984, there was an opening in Hopkinton, and McDonald took the test, scored higher marks than he had ever expected, and immediately went into the academy. From there, he followed the normal route to a gold badge, working several years with the Hopkinton PD’s K-9 team.
After a few years as an accident reconstructionist, in 1998, when the Hopkinton PD appointed its current chief, John Scuncio, McDonald made detective. Most of his time had been spent working narcotics. Although Hopkinton, by all accounts, is rural, and its neighbor is Westerly, Beach Town, USA, crack cocaine has still found its way into the infrastructure of the population. “We did a yearlong case with Westerly once, ‘Operation Stateline.’ Big case. The FBI was involved. Over the course of a year, we bought about seventy thousand dollars’ worth of crack.”
McDonald didn’t see his Jane Doe as a casualty of the drug war going on in and around Hopkinton, however. The way she had been found just didn’t lend itself to being an overdose or drug-related. But before he could begin to think about solving the case, McDonald and his colleagues had to first identify the woman. It was hard to catch a killer without first knowing who his victim was and where she lived.
When McDonald joined the police department back in the 1980s, there were six cops—including him—on the force. A small-town operation by most standards, as he leapt full-throttle into the Jane Doe investigation, the department had grown by ten to make sixteen full-time cops. When the Hopkinton Police Department needed assistance, it turned to the state police. All McDonald had at the moment was a tattoo. So why not, he thought, send a copy of the tattoo around to the local police departments and see if it stirs any interest? (“We had nothing to lose,” McDonald told me later.)
First, McDonald had his friend and colleague from the RISP, Arthur Kershaw, draw a sketch of the tattoo so they could distribute it more eas
ily than a photograph. Then, “After we tried a few prisons,” McDonald said, “thinking maybe we could get a match with an inmate or someone who had just been released, I faxed a copy of the tattoo drawing to a majority of the police departments in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts.”
McDonald knew it was a long shot, but worth a try. In the interim, several leads were checked. One included following up a tree service worker who had fallen from a tree and died in 1998. By itself, the lead didn’t seem significant. But when coupled with the guy’s nickname, “Tarzan,” the tattoo on Jane Doe’s leg took on new meaning. Was the victim in the garbage bag Tarzan’s wife? Girlfriend? Daughter? The key was to locate the family and find out.
After some checking, the tree service worker’s wife turned out to be alive and remarried.
II
During the early afternoon hours of January 8, Grassy Pond Road resident Bob Hendricks (pseudonym) came forward and said he had been in the woods off Grassy Pond on November 24, 2001, when he saw something peculiar. It was around 11:00 A.M., Hendricks explained. “I observed a vehicle, a Volkswagen two-door, charcoal in color with a hatch-back…stopped.” Hendricks and McDonald were standing on Grassy Pond. Hendricks pointed to the area where Jane Doe had been found. “Right there,” he said, “the car was parked. I was behind a tree.”
Hendricks had no idea where the body in the bag had been found.
“What’d you see?”
“Two guys got out of the car. The guy in the front seat was big, had a beard, was wearing a black leather jacket and blue jeans.” McDonald was intrigued. “Biker types,” Hendricks added.
“What’d they do when they got out of the car?”
“Both walked into the woods and stopped approximately ten to fifteen feet in…” The area Hendricks pointed to was in close proximity, McDonald wrote in his report, to where the body was discovered.
They stood in the woods, Hendricks claimed, for about ten minutes, before returning to the car and tearing off for Kenney Hill Road (not Route 138, the main road). At that moment, Hendricks walked out of the woods—and that’s when he saw them pass by, heading in the opposite direction on Grassy Pond (they must have turned around up ahead on Kenney Hill), barreling at 50 mph toward Route 138. Grassy Pond was a road people were afraid to travel more than 20 mph down. Not because of cops, but the road had ruts and bumps.
At this point, with the car turned around, Hendricks saw the driver as they sped past: a white female, brown hair. The license plate was from Connecticut.
III
McDonald and a colleague took a ride to the Troop E Barracks of the CSP on January 9, 2002, with a copy of the tattoo drawing. From there, they were escorted to York Correctional Institution for Women in Niantic, the only women’s prison in the state of Connecticut. The idea was to show the tattoo to the guards and have them pass it around to see if anyone recognized it. A quick search of the computer system indicated that an inmate with a similar tattoo had not been released—or if she had been, the tattoo had not been part of her rap sheet. When they returned to Troop E sometime later, one of the sergeants on duty gave McDonald the name of a possible suspect the CSP had termed “extremely dangerous.” The guy had been incarcerated for several violent sexual assaults, but he had been paroled late the previous year. “His last known address is in Exeter,” the trooper explained. Quite alarmingly, Exeter, Rhode Island, was a twenty-minute drive from where Jane Doe had been found in Hopkinton.
By January 10, four days after the grisly discovery of Jane Doe’s decomposed remains, it appeared that every promising lead ran cold. No one at York recognized the tattoo. The Exeter suspect had been out of state since his release. It seemed Jane Doe would end up another body without a name buried in an unmarked grave.
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Medical Examiner Jennifer Swartz released her findings by the end of the second week of January. Jane Doe’s body was so badly decomposed it was hard to pin down an exact cause of death, but there was no doubt in Swartz’s professional opinion that Jane Doe had been murdered.
Jane Doe became number 040883. She had been found in a fetal position, Swartz wrote, on her right side with loops of rope tied about the wrists, ankles, and waist. Jane Doe’s killer had hog-tied her, in other words.
Houdini-like.
There was an additional loop of rope tied around both of Jane Doe’s forearms and the right knee, a loop of rope tied at the anterior aspect of the left shoulder passing around both knees around the neck, and back to underneath the left arm, and there [was] a loop of rope passing from the ankles up around the neck and through the loops of rope on the wrists and knees and then tied at the neck.
Whoever had tied the knots knew what he was doing.
Another important piece of evidence Swartz uncovered was that the deceased had been placed inside eleven garbage bags, layered, one inside the other, that [had] been neatly stapled and taped together. [The] ends of the rope looped about the waist protrude[d] exteriorly through the garbage bags.
The vicim’s killer had gone to great lengths in placing her inside the bags and securing them, as if it wasn’t the first time he had done such a thing. In addition, there was ninety-four pounds of flesh and bones left to Jane Doe. There were small portions of decomposed tissue on her back, buttocks, lower extremities, feet, right arm, and hands. Fly larvae measuring 3/16–9/16 of an inch, Swartz wrote, in length and unhatched pupae [were] present on the body. The decedent’s underwear wasn’t blue, as early reports indicated; her panties were black, size M/6. More graphically speaking, there was also a small portion of Jane’s face, the right side, and scalp, still intact; with part of her earlobe—with two piercings—hanging beside several long brown hairs. One finger had red polish on it, as well as several toenails. Jane Doe’s skull showed no signs of trauma, a gunshot wound, strike by a club, hammer, or blunt object. There were several healing fractures on the side of Jane’s nose, which meant she had perhaps broken her nose at some point in her life. A good sign for detectives was that nearly all of Jane’s teeth were intact and acutely prepared for comparison once dental records were—with any luck—located. Furthermore, there were no gross or radiologic evidence of sharp or blunt force trauma to any of the bones. It was fairly clear, although not entirely impossible, that Jane hadn’t been stabbed to death, although her killer could have carefully placed his strikes to pierce only internal organs, missing bones entirely. An experienced murderer would be able to pull this off.
Incision of the ankles and wrists underlying the ropes [did not] reveal hemorrhage, meaning that the victim was bound and hog-tied after death.
Swartz listed the cause of death as homicidal violence. Manner of death: homicide. By all accounts, with the experience of the detectives involved included, it appeared the decedent had been strangled. It was one of the only possibilities beyond poisoning or some other odd way of death—including a perfectly placed stab wound. One of the anomalies Swartz discovered was trauma to the front of the corpse’s teeth. It was unclear, however, whether the injuries occurred before or after death. Toxicology indicated nothing beyond nicotine in her system. Moreover, no seminal fluid was found, nor was trauma to any of her ribs, which were checked more thoroughly via X-rays.
One of the most important factors of the examination was that for the first time detectives learned through measurements and scoring of non-metric traits that Jane Doe was a female of European ancestry, aged 30 to 39 at death, with a stature of five feet three inches. She was Latin or Italian. Swartz was certain of it.
69
I
When Kevin McDonald returned to his desk on January 12, he had a message from the Hartford PD. It appeared Hartford detectives felt confident they could put a name to the Jane Doe that McDonald had been trying to identify for the past week. All those faxes McDonald had sent out to police departments throughout the Northeast paid off. The tattoo on the victim’s leg was a mirror image of a tattoo on a missing persons flyer Hartford detecti
ves had posted the previous year.
McDonald was thrilled.
Hanging up with Hartford, McDonald called Arthur Kershaw. “We got us a match.”
Kershaw said he’d grab colleague Kevin Hopkins and swing by to pick up McDonald. “Let’s head out to Hartford tonight.”
II
As McDonald and his colleagues were working to identify Jane Doe, the “Asylum Hill Killer” was arrested. Twenty-eight-year-old Matthew Johnson, a homeless transient and convicted rapist, had been on on HPD’s radar for a few years. Johnson was a brute of a man, over six feet tall, three hundred pounds. Some claimed Johnson was severely retarded and couldn’t help himself, yet one detective investigating the case later told me that Johnson “was retarded when he wanted to be retarded.”
There was no doubt that Matthew Johnson committed the crimes he had been later convicted of (three women) and could be responsible for as many as a dozen more murders. Still, the one missing persons case Hartford PD detectives believed without a doubt that Johnson had nothing to do with was Carmen Rodriguez. “Johnson’s MO,” Luisa St. Pierre said, “in no way fit with Carmen’s disappearance. If Johnson had murdered Carmen, we would have found her sooner.”
III
On the day Peter Mareck found the body, the Rodriguez family, as much as they could, celebrated what was usually, for them, a wild time in the city of Hartford: Three Kings Day. The day, generally celebrated twelve days after Christmas, is known as a time of the Epiphany, when the visit by the Three Wise Men to Jesus is officially noted. With no word regarding Carmen’s whereabouts, however, the day had been terribly subdued, especially for Luz, Kathy Perez, and Sonia, who firmly believed by that point that Carmen had met some sort of fatal harm. Knowing that the “Asylum Hill Killer” had been arrested and scratched from the list of suspects in Carmen’s disappearance gave the family some comfort, but the inevitable, Luz knew, would be coming any day. When Carmen’s birthday passed the previous October, Luz said later, “That’s when I knew she was never coming home.” Carmen was one of those women who made a big deal out of her birthday. Days before, she would call family and friends and say, “My birthday’s coming—what are you getting me?” And she’d laugh her charming giggle. “My grandmother [Carmen’s mother] was always cooking,” Kathy Perez added, “and everyone is always around and it’s a celebration.” On the day of her birthday, Carmen would go from one family member to the next, “Are you going to give me my present? Where is it? Let me see it?” It was a part of her character everyone lovingly recalled with a noted shade of sadness, knowing they would never hear those words again. Carmen was the pulse of the family, true, but also “a headache,” Luz said, “don’t get me wrong. She caused our mother a lot of sleepless nights. But that headache, as the weeks turned into months, was something we all wanted back.”
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