"It took me a long time to recognize him," Jessica said. "I had been held prisoner in that old mental hospital maybe three days before I remembered." She narrowed her eyes slightly as she looked into the camera. "I realized I had seen him at West End a few times—but then, as soon as that sunk in, I knew I had seen him before. I knew he had been down in Arizona." She looked sad. "I think that was the thing that scared me the most in the whole ordeal—the moment I realized this guy had been watching me for years and years." She grimaced slightly. "After that, frankly, I didn't care what I had to do to get out of there."
They showed how Plattener carefully videotaped each of Jessica's shows, and the elaborate archive of files and scrapbooks he would accumulate over the years. As the health of his beloved mother declined, his obsession with Jessica Wright increased.
James Plattener, as described by his colleagues where he worked in those years—the Arizona Board of Energy and Resource Management—was neat, polite and a genius, but he was also described as a geek and a freak and a loner. Nobody, however, would underplay the contribution he had made to overhauling the redistribution project of electrical power in the state.
"How can you deny the contribution of a single individual who saved Arizona residents over a billion dollars in power costs?" his former supervisor asked helplessly. "And I gotta tell ya, the idea that the guy who kidnapped Jessica Wright was the same guy that worked for us—" He shook his head in amazement. "No way we'd make the connection." He squinted. "The guy had a lace doily on his office chair. Does that give you the picture?"
After his mother Lillian died, Plattener packed up and moved back into the same house he had shared with his mother in Buffalo, and took a job with the Niagara Power Project, where his father had worked for so many years. Now his obsession with Jessica Wright, who had now become a national media star, accelerated into a full-fledged fantasy world, where Plattener "knew" he and the talk-show host would be together forever, and he began in earnest to plan how to make this happen.
"This is a notebook of his plans," FBI Agent Norman Kunsa related. "As you can see, it's hundreds and hundreds of pages. I can't read any of the contents until after the trial, but I will say he planned their every moment together for years."
Then Plattener landed a job with the New York State Energy Commission, a position that necessitated an apartment in Albany, but which also afforded him frequent trips to New York City, and a few to the West End Broadcasting Center itself.
"He vas a milquetoast, vat more can I say?" Dr. Kessler was shown saying. "Ve had to deal vith him on our power requirements at Vest End. And the idea that he vas the vun stalking Jessica ... " He threw his hands up.
In a parallel story, the special chronicled how an FBI agent stationed in New York City had left the agency under an undocumented cloud. "Oh, I can tell you what Dirk Lawson was up to," his former wife said. "He was drinking and sleeping around with other women and hitting Atlantic City three times a week to gamble, that's what he was up to. I have children to protect, so I threw him out." Evidently the former Mrs. Lawson had to get a restraining order during their divorce proceedings to stop the agent's midnight raids on the house. He ignored it and was arrested several times. When his superiors told him to clean up his act, he opted to resign with—what amounted to an honorable discharge.
The sad reality of celebrity, Alexandra then explained, was that it often created a target of obsession for mentally imbalanced people. "I myself perhaps know this better than most." They rolled footage of Alexandra being shot on the steps of the Capitol building eight years before by a crazed fan. Then they showed footage from the TV studio in Detroit where another crazed man had tried to shoot her seven years ago.
"After that," Cassy Cochran said when interviewed, "we had to get a top flight security person in here to design our system. Our first security expert was great. He was a retired NYPD captain, but then he developed heart disease and had to retire from here as well." She sighed heavily then, shaking her head. She bit her lower lip a moment and then looked up into the camera. "That's when I hired Dirk Lawson. The Federal Bureau of Investigation told me he had handled all the security for visiting dignitaries to New York. Who better than he? I thought." She closed her eyes, shaking her head again. "Good Lord."
What went wrong with Dirk Lawson was hard to pinpoint. "The best definition I've heard," Agent Kunsa explained when questioned, "is an overblown ego trying to compensate for low self-esteem. He has a grandiose vision of himself, a craving for power over those around him, particularly when it came to women. One thing we know about Lawson is that he and Jessica Wright did not like each other at all—and from the very start. And that Jessica, in fact, actually resembles Lawson's ex-wife, in force of personality, even a little bit physically. Their hair color, for example."
Lawson began to dream about a big score, a way of winning the recognition he deserved and money and power and glory. Very soon an idea began to form in his mind about kidnapping one of the DBS stars—Alexandra Waring or Jessica Wright—and then playing the hero by finding them. "Evidently he thought Alexandra was the toughest to get to," Kunsa said, "because Ms. Waring had such high security around her from the beginning. Jessica, on the other hand, had been relatively unscathed by her fame, and she simply didn't believe that people presented a possible danger the same way Alexandra knew that they did."
Lawson, fifty-one, started an affair with Jessica's new secretary, the lonely, somewhat troubled Bea Blakely. "I knew something was funny," one of the West End custodians said. "They were acting funny. At night, I'd see them around, together. I figured they were working on something for Miss Wright."
When James Plattener began writing to Jessica, writing her under the name of Leopold, Lawson realized that a perfect fall guy—or at least a very good screen—was in the making if he were to actually kidnap Jessica. "We know that Lawson then got in touch with a former CIA operative in Atlanta, Calvin Denton," Agent Kunsa said. "Denton was in a vulnerable position and Lawson knew just how to play it to draw him into his scheme."
At this point the documentary briefly detoured to profile Calvin Denton's family, focusing on the long struggle of their second child, little Alyson, and her cruel battle with violent epileptic seizures and the failure of the Dentons' insurance to cover experimental treatments and the Dentons' subsequent descent into hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. Lawson had found his man. The deal was, twenty thousand in cash up front to Denton to make the snatch, and a four-hundred-thousand-dollar "contribution" from Lawson to the Dentons' little girl when the reward money was paid. No violence or force would be used; it would be a well-thought-out, humane kidnapping of Jessica Wright.
"Denton felt he had little to lose," Kunsa's voice said, superimposed over movies of Denton with his young daughter. "He was confident he could pull it off. And most of all, he was confident he could keep Jessica Wright safe and calm throughout the whole ordeal. He had actually done some work in this area before, overseas."
And so Dirk Lawson decided to mimic Jessica's obsessed fan, and composed a note in Leopold's name that promised he and Jessica would be together soon. The note worked very well, making everyone nervous that Leopold was about to appear and do something. But then Leopold did do something. Leopold got through Lawson's own security system to stage an elaborate gift-giving scenario—the present hanging in midair in the control room to Studio B—that demonstrated a fantastic knowledge of both electrical engineering and the detailed internal layout of the West End complex.
"It must have freaked Lawson out," Kunsa said. "Here he had just written a note in Leopold's name saying he was coming and then the guy appears. And Lawson had not a clue as to how he had gotten in. The irony was, it was Lawson's own girlfriend, Bea Blakely, that had let Leopold in."
To complicate matters further, Lawson discovered that Bea Blakely was making money on the side by supplying secrets about Jessica Wright to the tabloids. Lawson told her to stop. She said maybe he better start payin
g her to stop, particularly since she knew a lot of other stuff that would get Lawson in big trouble. Whatever Lawson told her, evidently Bea Blakely thought everything was well between them, for she then dyed her hair like Jessica's in anticipation of satisfying a particular sexual fantasy of Lawson's concerning Jessica and one of the property rooms.
"In her journal," Detective Jefferson Hepplewhite said, "Ms. Blakely had detailed a lot of their sexual encounters. One of the fantasies they had often played out involved her pretending to be Ms. Wright, of him surprising her in her office or in her dressing room. Now, in this case, Bea Blakely had gone the whole nine yards and dyed her hair and set up the property room the way he had described it in his fantasy. Only they didn't have sex this time." He paused, swallowing. "Instead, he electrocuted her, burning her practically beyond recognition."
As a diagram of the crime scene filled the screen, the voice of Agent Kunsa explained, "Lawson killed her with over a thousand volts of electricity, diverted from a major power line into the telephone line Blakely was using. The sophisticated setup was consistent with the knowledge demonstrated by Leopold in his magnetic field gift-giving scenario, and so Lawson successfully threw all suspicion for the murder onto the invisible stalker, Leopold."
In the aftermath of Blakely's death, it came to light that she had actually known Leopold and, in fact, had accepted ten thousand dollars from him to help him beat Lawson's security system. "It was an extraordinary piece of luck for Lawson when that ten thousand dollars turned up in her bank account," Alexandra related. "Because the authorities then assumed that Leopold had simply killed her when he had no further use of her."
The thing was, Alexandra reported, not even Bea Blakely had known that Leopold, on one of those visits to West End, had bugged Jessica's office. When the authorities failed to track down Leopold and began looking at Jessica's book publication party as means of attracting him, Lawson feigned objections to the plan.
"This is the part that burns me up most," Agent Kunsa said. "I had worked with Lawson before, when he was with the Bureau, and it honestly never occurred to me that he could go bad. He was a good agent. But, man oh man, what a scumbag he turned out to be."
The authorities of course had no idea that the former FBI agent they were relying on to coordinate security for the event was, in fact, coordinating with a former CIA operative to set up a successful kidnapping. The last-minute choice of Rockefeller Center as the site of the party was not last minute at all, but was the very site Lawson had selected months in advance.
In another ironic twist, the party did attract the stalker, Leopold, and he had known exactly where it was going to take place because he had been listening in when it had been explained to Jessica in her office. "Contrary to everyone's belief," Alexandra said, "Leopold had not gone there to stalk or kidnap Jessica, but to protect her from the danger he knew was present at West End. Someone had murdered Bea Blakely, and Leopold didn't know who."
So on the Monday before the party, Plattener hacked into the Niagara Power Project system to sign out a truck in master electrician Mark Brewer's name and went up to Niagara Falls to pick it up. He drove down to New York City and waited to hear where the actual site of the party would be on Tuesday. As an assistant commissioner, Plattener had high-security clearance and access to the electrical plans of every major building and building complex on file with the state. When he heard where the party was to be, he simply called up the Rockefeller Center plans on his computer to familiarize himself with the layout and decide on the best vantage points to watch.
Leopold was there early that afternoon, surveying the area. "What caught his eye," Agent Kunsa said, "was a Con Edison work project roped off in front of the NBC building on Sixth A venue. There was only one worker there, and he knew that they were always assigned in pairs. So he called and checked and found out there was no work detail assigned to the site, and so he knew the guy had to either be a part of the security effort for the party or the guy was a potential threat.
Leopold was outside the party, on the upper level over the rink, listening in on the security walkie-talkies. (The security cameras had caught him several times, and it was eerie, watching him, knowing what was to come from this very nondescript, mild-mannered man.) When Leopold heard· over the walkie-talkie frequencies that Jessica had been nabbed and pulled through the maintenance door, he had a very good idea where the kidnapper was taking her, and he was waiting in his own van when Denton and his hostage came out of the NBC building and took off in the Con Edison truck.
He followed them to the downtown lot and watched as Denton walked Jessica into the tool shack. Leopold went to the front gate to close it, affixing the open padlock hanging there and locking it. Then he hid.
He watched Denton help Jessica into the back of the truck and then drive to the front gate. Looking baffled, Denton jumped out to examine the lock, at which time Leopold hailed him, asking if he could help. Denton asked him if he had the key to the gate. Leopold said yes~ walked over, and instead of taking the key out, struck Denton in the face with a wrench. When the former CIA operative fell to the ground, Leopold proceeded to beat him almost to death. Then he took Denton's keys and unlocked the back of the Con Ed truck and found Jessica sound asleep on the stretcher. He brought his van up next to the Con Ed truck and rolled the stretcher with Jessica on it into his van. Then he dragged Denton's body into the back of his van, leaving Denton on the floor. Finally, Plattener used the lock cutters from the Con Ed truck to cut the lock off the gate and head out of town.
Then the documentary took a moment to introduce Salt Springs, an idyllic park located just over the New York state border in Pennsylvania. For centuries Indians had associated magical powers to the waters that bubbled up from the earth here, which Plattener's mother, Lillian, so many years ago, had also come to believe in. "And so this night, under the cloak of darkness," Alexandra said, as the screen showed the strange beauty of the spot, "Leopold had veered off Route 17 to Salt Springs, where he endeavored to cleanse Jessica with the magical waters, and to make her his."
"I saw the van pull in," the witness who had called the hotline said. "I had gotten up to go to the bathroom and I saw the lights. I didn't think much about it—there's always kids parking there. But then I couldn't sleep. There was just something that bothered me. It was a school night, you know? And it was very late. And so I got up again and looked out and I saw this woman stumbling around with this guy and I thought maybe she was drunk or drugged or something. And I thought, gosh, I better get down there. This doesn't look good, what is he doing to her? So I went downstairs and hurried outside, but when I called out, the guy slammed the door and took off. I saw most of the license plate and came back in and wrote it down on the pad in the kitchen." He shrugged. "Then I saw the press conference about Jessica Wright being kidnapped, my wife and I looked at each other, and then I ran to the phone to call in."
"And now you're a multi-millionaire," Alexandra said.
He beamed. "Well, yeah."
"Which just goes to show, it pays to get involved."
He grinned. "Well, yeah."
In the van, Alexandra continued, Leopold injected Jessica with a sedative to knock her out for the rest of the night. He drove her to Buffalo, to the now abandoned mental hospital where his mother once worked. He moved Jessica up to the suite of rooms he had prepared for her, and locked Denton's body in a room next door, leaving him to die.
The documentary now focused on how the FBI, NYPD and DBS News worked together to profile Leopold, track the van to Niagara Power and put all the information together to zero in on James Plattener. Meanwhile, at the network, when the authorities were preparing to race upstate to find Plattener, Dirk Lawson was genuinely frantic. "Only now did Lawson realize," Alexandra paused for effect, "that Calvin Denton, the kidnapper he had hired, did not have possession of Jessica, but that the real Leopold did. As to what had happened to Denton, he had no idea, but he knew that he needed to find out before anyone els
e did—for Denton was the one person who could tie Lawson to the kidnapping."
After a commercial break the documentary resumed with a clip from one of Jessica's shows where she bemoaned her essentially useless nature and "inability to hold a real job." Then Alexandra and Jessica took viewers through the rooms where Jessica had been kept captive. Jessica detailed how she had heard the moans of the dying man next door and had tunneled through the wall to find Denton. In a re-creation, they showed how she had dragged him through the wall, how she had made up a bed for him on the floor, hiding him in her room, and had not only attempted to nurse him to the best of her ability, but had demonstrated extraordinary kindness. "You would have done the same thing," Jessica responded when Alexandra questioned her compassion. "When you hear that certain pitch-animal or human—you know you have to try and help. You just can't let someone die."
Alexandra then detailed Jessica's relationship with Leopold in her captivity, her attempt to simultaneously win his trust and make him relax, and her ongoing attempt to keep him away from the man Jessica called Hurt Guy, who was lying under her bed moaning in the next room. When Leopold's attentions turned overtly sexual toward her, however, she frankly admitted "I bolted for daylight and nearly got volted to never-never land. But I'll tell you, anything was better than being touched by that guy."
The drama of the rescue assault on the old Buffalo Psychiatric Center was illustrated through film footage from that night. It highlighted how, after Jessica's rescue, Detective Hepplewhite and Alexandra Waring had stood by to witness Dirk Lawson's attempted murder of Calvin Denton.
Then Alexandra showed how Will and the local rookie had made the mad dash for the end of the runoff pipe and how they had waited hours and hours for Leopold to finally crawl out at dawn. "We knew that if the perp were to use that old runoff pipe as a means of escape," the rookie cop said, "that we had to act fast. The hospital grounds are so massive, I knew the others would be tied up for hours. And so I thought I just better go with Mr. Rafferty. I was pretty confident I could handle the situation, and fortunately, that's how it turned out."
Talk (The Alexandra Chronicles Book 4) Page 29