by R. G. Belsky
At first, it starts as a “we” thing. “We have to find out what’s wrong,” “We have to do more research,” and, of course, “We have a problem.” With Houston, it took a while before the “we” became “you.” I could tell it wasn’t going to take nearly as long for the finger-pointing to start this time.
“I’m sure you understand that this puts the paper in a very vulnerable position,” Staley said when she finally met that morning with Carrie and me. “We’ve been out in front on this story. We’ve been the impetus behind the investigation into the Kennedy connection to the murders. And now it appears there may not be a connection. That raises some serious concerns for us and the newspaper. How do we deal with this? How do we take a hard look at our reporting and our overall performance on this story? And where do we go from here with this story?”
“The facts in the story, no matter what has transpired in the last few days, are all accurate,” I said, trying not to sound defensive about it but hearing that tone in my voice as I spoke the words.
“I’m not questioning the facts or the reporting you’ve done,” Staley said.
“Thank you.”
“I’m just trying to determine the best way to handle this story going forward knowing what we now know about the facts and the lack of any apparent connection between these murders.”
“Fair enough.”
“So what do we do for a follow at this point?”
“Well, we know for a fact that three people—Shawn Kennedy, Harold Daniels, and Marjorie Balzano—were murdered. A Kennedy half-dollar was found with all three crime victims.”
“But if the bartender killed the Kennedy woman and the drug dealer killed the old woman on the Upper West Side, then it would appear the murders are not connected. So how do you explain the presence of the Kennedy half-dollars at each of the three crime scenes?”
“I can’t,” I said.
“What else?” Staley asked.
“We know that I received a letter from someone—presumably the killer, because the letter talks about the Kennedy half-dollars. And whoever wrote the letter claimed responsibility for the murders and threatened more violence.”
“Except it can’t be the killer if we now know that at least two of the murders, probably all three, were never connected at all.”
“There has to be something else going on here that we are missing. I still want to find out what that is.”
“And then there’s Eric Mathis,” Staley said.
I shrugged.
“Look, the facts about Mathis are what they are. We know that he was upset with his father’s going public with the Lee Harvey Oswald family connection. We know he became obsessed with Oswald and the Kennedy assassination, to the point of moving to Dallas taking a job at the Sixth Floor Museum. And we know that he disappeared right before the murders started and he discovered the book his father was writing that would make public their family connection to Oswald. We took those basic facts and put together a scenario of what appeared to be happening. A scenario that pointed toward Mathis as the lead suspect in the killings. It was, and it is, a legitimate scenario. Even though it may not be the accurate scenario given the new information we now have. I know that makes us look bad, Marilyn, but I still stand by all the reporting that Carrie and I have done on this story.”
Staley looked over at Carrie, who hadn’t said a word yet, then back at me.
“There’s another factor we have to deal with here, Gil,” Staley said. “That factor is you. You and your background. We can’t ignore that. I’m sure you understand that it’s going to be an issue here.”
There it was, the elephant in the room. Out there in the open now. Gil Malloy, the guy who screwed up the Houston story. Now he was working on a new story that got all screwed up. Anybody see a pattern here?
Carrie spoke for the first time. “I think what we need to do is write an open, candid story for tomorrow raising all these new questions. Just spell out what we know and what we don’t know. Be honest with our readers. Transparency is what we should be striving for here to make it clear we have nothing to hide.”
“Transparency?” I said. “What the hell does that mean?”
“We make clear to our readers that we have nothing to hide and we’re sharing with them everything we know at the moment about the story. Including what went wrong. We give it to them warts and all.”
She said it in a patronizing kind of way, like it was barely worth her time to explain it to me. The way she used to talk to me before we started working together. And before we started sleeping together. I was pretty sure that we would not be sleeping together again.
Staley nodded in agreement to the “transparency” and “warts and all” comments suggested by Carrie, as if she’d never heard them before. But I figured they’d gone over all this together that morning before coming into the office and sitting down with me.
Staley then said Carrie should write the story as quickly as possible. She added that Carrie should do this story herself under her byline, not the joint byline we’d been using on all the previous Kennedy stuff. She didn’t say why, but she didn’t have to. She asked Carrie a series of questions about what she was going to write and how she was going to do it. They discussed all of this at some length between themselves as if I wasn’t even in the room.
Staley didn’t ask me any questions at all for the rest of the meeting.
Which was okay with me.
Because I was all out of answers.
The police didn’t have many answers either. Commissioner Ray Piersall held a press conference to deal with the stunning new developments. The press conference would be described in the papers the next day as “painful,” “extraordinarily embarrassing,” and—on the editorial page of the New York Times—“potentially career ending for the commissioner.”
“So are you saying there’s no serial killer, that these were all individual killings with no connections to each other whatsoever?” a reporter yelled out.
“How could you spend weeks, devote all the resources of your department, searching for a ‘serial killer’ who didn’t exist, and looking for a suspect who was already dead before any of these murders took place?” someone else asked.
“What about the letter that claimed to take responsibility for the killings? The Kennedy letter. Who wrote that?” another person shouted out to him.
Piersall attempted painfully to run through the details of the case, to explain the changes in the direction of the investigation, to defend the department and himself for their actions.
He even made a personal appeal to the room to remember that they had now solved two of the three cases, and how maybe that wouldn’t have happened if they hadn’t pursued the relationship with the Kennedy angle so intensely until they finally got to the truth about the real culprits.
But no one was buying it.
He couldn’t answer the question of why the Kennedy half-dollars were found at all three crime scenes any more than I could. It didn’t make any kind of sense. The coins seemed to indicate a serial killer who wanted to make some sort of political point about Kennedy. But now that the cases no longer seemed to be related, how did the coins fit in? Unless it really was just a coincidence that all the victims had a Kennedy half-dollar on them at the time of their death. There were still a million or so of the coins in circulation, so it was possible—if not probable—that these three people had one of them with them at the time of their deaths.
Piersall also couldn’t answer the question of how so much of the police department’s resources had been used to chase after a suspect who couldn’t have had any connection with the murders. His only answer was that they had pursued the investigation in the direction it had seemed to be heading, until the facts of the case changed. Eric Mathis appeared to be a likely suspect at the time, even though now it was clear that he wasn’t.
> He also pointed out that the media had played up the Mathis angle too—often from investigative reporting beyond what the police were doing—so the media bore some of the responsibility for the mistakes that were made. He didn’t specifically mention me or the Daily News. I think he wanted to. But to suggest that the police manhunt for the Mathis kid had been set in motion because of a reporter’s lead—even if that was the truth—would be even more embarrassing than taking the responsibility himself for everything that had gone wrong.
There was one area where he could do some finger-pointing, though.
“We do have some concerns now about the so-called Kennedy Killer letter that was received by a member of the press,” Piersall said when someone brought up the topic.
Everyone in the room looked at me. I didn’t see Carrie anywhere. She had told me she’d meet me here, but she never showed up. She was smart. Maybe she smelled blood in the water too.
“So you’re questioning the authenticity of the letter?” someone asked.
“We are taking a new look at everything about this case at the moment, including the letter.”
I stood up. I had to. I had to do something.
“That letter was real,” I shouted out to Piersall, but even more to the other reporters in the room.
“Just like Houston was real?” someone yelled out.
“Do you really think I wrote that letter to myself just to get on the story?” I screamed, knowing even as I did it that I was fighting a losing battle.
I walked up to the front of the room and confronted Piersall face-to-face.
“Are you accusing me of manufacturing that letter?”
“I’m saying that given the inconsistencies that have emerged in this case, and given your history in terms of accuracy and integrity as a reporter, it is something that we have to consider.”
I should have been mad at Piersall, I guess. And I suppose I was. But mostly I just felt sorry for him. He was like a drowning man desperately trying to grab for a lifeline to save himself.
I was the easiest way for him to do that.
And you want to know the worst part?
If I’d been him—if I’d been any of the other reporters in the room, instead of myself—I would have been thinking the same thing.
That I just made up the damn letter.
Chapter 38
THE REPERCUSSIONS CAME quickly after that.
The attorney for Kevin Gallagher filed a motion for dismissal of the charges of killing Shawn Kennedy. The attorney pointed out all the flaws in the police investigation that had preceded his client’s questioning and subsequent arrest. He cited the confusion and inconsistencies in the case admitted by the police commissioner himself at the press conference. He brought up the Kennedy half-dollar connection to the murders, saying this was evidence these were not just individual crimes of passion or money as the authorities claimed.
On the advice of their attorneys, both Gallagher and Tyrone Greene, arrested in connection with the Marjorie Balzano killing, now said they wanted to recant their confessions, claiming they’d been coerced into making them by illegal police tactics and without the benefit of legal counsel. No one really questioned for a second that they had done the murders they were accused of. But there was some doubt about their convictions because of all the unanswered questions about the case.
Meanwhile, the media was calling for Commissioner Piersall’s scalp.
Someone had to pay for all this, and he was the most likely target.
The mayor put out a statement of support for the commissioner that was at best tepid and—according to some analysts—a clear signal that his time as commissioner was limited. There was already intense speculation going on about a successor. A half dozen or so names were thrown out in the papers, some of them probably leaked deliberately from the mayor’s office to help him gauge the reaction to each candidate to replace Piersall. I noticed that one of the names was Brad Lawton, the deputy commissioner I’d met earlier. Good for him. I liked Lawton. He seemed like a decent, honorable cop. Maybe something good could come out of this for someone, anyway.
As for me, well . . . there was good news and bad news.
The day after Piersall’s news conference, police showed up at the door of my apartment. They had a search warrant. The warrant said that a Manhattan Supreme Court judge had given them the authority to “search my premises and my possessions for evidence of a crime” that might have been committed by me. The alleged crime was supplying false evidence to law enforcement authorities. And that evidence, of course, was the Kennedy letter I’d told everyone I received in the mail.
It got worse when they discovered all the Kennedy assassination material I had in my place. A complete copy of the Warren Commission Report. Books on the assassination by everyone from Mark Lane to Jim Garrison to Norman Mailer. TV documentaries and videos about various conspiracy theories. And, of course, all the Kennedy/Lee Harvey Oswald stuff I’d taken from Eric Mathis’s home in Dallas.
They hauled a lot of these things out with them under the terms of the search warrant.
They also took me down to police headquarters, where they tried to make the case that I had this obsession with the Kennedy assassination and knowledge of all the conspiracy theories, which resulted in my creating the phony letter in an effort to resuscitate my own journalistic career.
They questioned me at some length about this. The Daily News offered to provide me with legal counsel before I answered the questions (undoubtedly more for their protection than mine), but I refused. I said I had nothing to hide. I just wanted to tell the truth.
I explained to the police over and over again that most of the Kennedy conspiracy material had come from my father. He’d been fascinated by the topic, and I’d kept it all in memory of him.
I maintained that the Kennedy letter had arrived unannounced at my desk just the way I had told everyone from the very beginning.
“I didn’t write the letter,” I told the detectives, repeating the mantra of denials that I’d been doing ever since they picked me up.
“So then who did?”
“I have no idea.”
“Okay, here’s a question for you, then: Why would someone else send that letter to you?”
“I’m a reporter.”
“They could have sent it to any reporter. But they didn’t, Malloy. The letter was addressed to you. And that really doesn’t add up, does it? Think about it. It was the Bratten woman’s byline on the original Kennedy story, not yours. So why not write the letter to her? Hell, your byline was hardly anywhere in the paper from what I understand. So, out of all the reporters at the paper or in the rest of the media, why would someone pick you as the person to get this letter? Unless, of course, you wrote it yourself.”
The question bothered me. Because it actually made a lot of sense, when I stepped back and looked at it objectively. I’d been so happy to get on the story that I’d never questioned why the Kennedy letter came to me and not to Carrie or someone else. Maybe if I’d asked myself that question back at the start I wouldn’t have jumped to so many wrong conclusions so quickly. The damn cop was right. It didn’t make sense that I was the only reporter in New York City who got the letter.
The next day I was front-page news. REPORTER QUIZZED BY COPS ON “KENNEDY LETTER,” one headline proclaimed. POLICE EYE DISGRACED NEWSMAN IN KENNEDY MESS, another announced. The rival New York Post made a point of making clear to everyone my past transgressions too by saying simply HOUSTON, WE HAVE ANOTHER PROBLEM!
The good news was that, in the end, the police let me go and conceded they couldn’t prove any involvement on my part in writing the letter or any apparent discrepancies in my account of how the anonymous letter wound up on my desk.
The question of who sent that letter remained unsolved in the case file.
Just like the question of how th
e Kennedy half-dollars wound up at each of the crime scenes.
The bad news came shortly afterward from Marilyn Staley.
“Gil, we’re going to let you go,” she said.
“You’re firing me?”
“There are serious questions about your integrity. Which means there are serious questions about the integrity of this newspaper. No newspaper can survive like that. So we’ve made the difficult decision that we have no choice but to part ways with you.”
I sat there stunned. Trying to take it all in. I’d known this was a possibility, of course. Just like I’d known it was a possibility back when Houston was happening. But because I’d somehow survived that crisis, I guess I assumed I would survive this one too. That I’d somehow get another chance to redeem myself. But now it was over. There were going to be no more chances for me.
I wanted to be mad at someone over how this had all wound up, but I didn’t know whom to be mad at. Except maybe myself. The thing is, she was right. I was damaged goods. I was a reporter whose integrity was in serious doubt. Which means I couldn’t be a reporter at all.
On the way out of Staley’s office, I turned around and asked her one last question.
“Marilyn, do you believe me? Or do you think I made up that letter? I’m not talking about your official position at the paper. I just want to know what you think. It’s important to me. Do you think I wrote the letter myself?”
“I don’t know, Gil,” she said sadly. “I really just don’t know.”
Chapter 39
WHAT WILL YOU do now?” Dr. Landis asked me.
“Look for a job, I guess.”
“Maybe this will turn out to be for the best in the long run,” she said. “We’ve talked in the past about your dependence on being a star reporter to validate the other things in your life. Now, for a while, at least, you’re going to have to face some of these issues without the defense of your ‘I’m a star reporter’ persona. This could make you stronger. So that one day, when you do get another job at a newspaper or other media outlet, you’ll have grown as a person from what you were before—”