The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  I attended the pretrial hearings in Manhattan Supreme Court and, later, the trial itself, and from the beginning I kept struggling to try to understand what had drawn Robert and Robyn to the mercurial John/Diane Delia. I also kept struggling to understand what—aside from their both finding, for a time, a lover and soulmate in Delia—they could possibly have in common. It was clear that there was something. After Delia disappeared, the two lived together, sharing Robyn’s apartment. And in court, at least during the pretrial sessions, they behaved like friends, smiling at and chatting with one another. Yet they seemed remarkably different.

  Robyn was clearly a royal being, her auburn hair lustrous, her fingernails impeccably manicured, her body tanned and athletic, her stylish tops and flowing skirts different every day. Unlike Robert, she was out on $25,000 bail, and whenever she came to court she was engulfed by family: her father, the surgeon; her mother, an administrator in the father’s East Side office; a clutch of concerned cousins and aunts; even, after a while, a new fiancé, a Manhattan dentist. She would laugh and giggle with these people or with her expensive lawyer, Michael Rosen of Saxe, Bacon & Bolan, the firm headed by Roy Cohn, as if being in court was just another stop in her easy round of pleasant, self-pampering rituals. She was either stalwartly secure in her innocence or completely without a sense of appropriate behavior. It was hard to imagine her in love with Delia.

  Robert was another type altogether—depressed, anxious, clearly less prosperous, for he was always in the same suit. And he had no hangers-on in the courtroom, not even any family. His mother told me that he’d asked his parents not to attend the trial, saying it would be too painful and shocking. Still, she’d wanted to come anyway and would have, she said, except that just before the trial began, she finally—after eight months of looking—found a job in Berwick. She added, “Besides, New York is a four-and-a-half-hour drive each way, and if I didn’t drive each day, where could I have afforded to stay over?”

  For a moment, I was touched. Then I remembered that Robert’s lawyer had said that after the marriage to Delia, the family had disowned him, decided they wanted nothing further to do with him.

  As I began to learn about Robert and Robyn, I saw that it was relatively easy to understand Delia’s appeal for the bartender.

  Robert was brought up in Rockland County, New York, but before he completed his senior year of high school, his family moved to Berwick. “We had to move because of economic reasons,” his mother explained. Robert finished high school in Berwick, but he was exceedingly unhappy in the tiny town. The Ferrara home, a split-level ranch house, was in a rural area on three acres of land that bordered a big field, where wealthier neighbors kept horses. Behind it stretched woods and hills and, beyond them, more woods and hills. Robert made up his mind to get out of Pennsylvania.

  He joined the navy but realized that it wasn’t for him and went AWOL. Disappearing from his base in San Diego, he returned to the New York suburbs and tried to elude discovery. He lived with friends, worked as a waiter, then started tending bar. He was fixing drinks at the Playroom in 1978 when he met John Delia and first became his lover.

  He rarely had any money. Robyn Arnold said she lived with Robert after Delia disappeared only because he couldn’t pay his rent in Yonkers; she took him in because she had taken pity on him. And according to his friend, the nurse Dominick Giorgio, his lack of money was a particular stress for he had a drug habit, relying heavily (when he could afford them) on cocaine and Quaaludes. “Delia knew this,” Giorgio told me, “and one time, after a trip to Canada, she gave Ferrara a thousand dollars’ worth of uncut cocaine. She had all these little bottles and gave him the bottles, too, so he could sell some of the cocaine for a hundred dollars a bottle. She said it was a present for him, so he could buy himself a motorcycle.”

  Delia looked after Robert, but she also fought with him. And he fought back. One night, when she wanted to go out and he wanted her to stay home, he smacked her around and threw the dishes at her. Another time, when she caught him in a car with someone else and demanded he get out, he came out swinging and knocked her to the ground, slamming her head against the sidewalk. One night at the Come Back, in Piermont, after Delia got so angry with Robert that she stabbed him in the elbow with a knife, he smashed her in the leg with a hammer. In this battle the police were called in, and Delia was jailed until her mother bailed her out, while Robert—his desertion from the navy surfacing—was sent back to California and briefly placed in the brig. When he got out, he returned to Delia and the fast New York life.

  Robert and Delia had a lot in common besides explosive tempers. Like Delia, Robert had hopes of becoming a model, a male model. He jogged and lifted weights and eventually put together a portfolio of flattering photographs. Like Delia, he was fond of clothes, although where Delia favored skirts and shirts trimmed with maribou feathers, he liked designer jeans and Lacoste polo shirts. And, like Delia, he had been unsettled about his sexuality. After their first affair, he lived for a time with a young woman from Berwick—although he continued to see Delia.

  Finally, Robert and Delia were alike in one other, important way. Each one was prone to hysterical suicide attempts. One day, a few months after Diane disappeared, Robert nearly succeeded in doing away with himself. Downing a fat handful of Quaaludes, he took a cab to the Red Carpet Inn in Paramus, New Jersey, and there tried to die by smashing a glass ashtray and cutting his wrists with the shards.

  Robyn Arnold’s fascination with Delia was more difficult to untangle, for on the surface, at least, they seemed nothing alike. Robyn had been born in Manhattan but raised from the time she was four in a big, comfortable house in the Westchester suburb of Mount Vernon. Several young women who knew her during her grammar school years there told me she had not been popular. They said she used to walk off with their toys. The mother of one of these girls recalled a day when her daughter and some other children decided they no longer wanted to play with Robyn. They relented only after Mrs. Arnold approached this woman and asked her to intercede on behalf of the outcast.

  But on the whole Robyn seemed to have had a pleasant, indulgent girlhood. Besides her ballet lessons, she studied music, attended cousins-club meetings and country clubs with her parents, went to mother-and-daughter luncheons at a synagogue in Mount Vernon, learned to ski and play tennis, and became an inveterate shopper. Her last two high school years were spent at a private school in Tarry town. Still, she must have been a troubled adolescent. At some point in her high school days, she was involved in a petty theft that brought her to the attention of the police, but since she was a juvenile, her records were sealed.

  When it came time to choose a profession, Robyn decided on nursing. Her whole family was involved in medicine. Not only was her father a doctor, but her grandfather had been one too. Her favorite cousin was a nurse, and her only sibling, a brother, was planning to go to medical school. Robyn enrolled at Lehman College, in the Bronx, determined to become a nurse.

  This much about her is clear. Other areas of her life are more murky. For example, the women who went to school with her in Mount Vernon told me she had changed her name to Robyn from the less glamorous Roberta. Indeed, one of her relatives, whom I interviewed during the trial, kept referring to her as Roberta. But Robyn insisted that she hadn’t changed her name and that she was never known as Roberta. Moreover, she originally told me that before going to Lehman College, she got a B.S. degree from Syracuse University. Syracuse reported that no student named Robyn or Roberta Arnold had ever earned a degree there. (When asked about this discrepancy, Robyn insisted that she had attended Syracuse, but just for two years. Syracuse then informed me that a Roberta Arnold had attended for a single semester before dropping out.) Robyn also said she was a licensed nurse, but the New York State Division of Professional Licensing said, in a phone interview, that their records did not disclose a registered or practical nurse named either Robyn or Roberta Arnold.

  After Lehman College, Robyn landed a nursin
g job at Montefiore Hospital, in the Bronx. She is vague about what happened next. For some reason, she and Montefiore parted company, and she took a job with a plastic surgeon. It was in his office, according to her, that she met Delia. But there are two scenarios for that meeting. Delia’s friends told police, after Delia was murdered, that Robyn used to frequent the Playroom and that she and Delia met there. No matter. By the end of 1979, they were dating.

  Then came the courtship. There are also two versions of that. The Delias, mother Joan, stepmother Patricia, and father Bruno, all claimed that Robyn and John were engaged and that they even went for a premarital blood test. Robyn told me that wasn’t true and said that although she and John were lovers, they hadn’t made wedding plans. “I’d never have married Delia,” she said. “He was too confused a person.” She also said that John had told his parents a lot of stories about her that weren’t true, among them that he’d made her pregnant and that she’d gotten an abortion, during which it was discovered that she had been carrying twins. None of this was correct, Robyn insisted. John had made up the story to make himself appear, once he was dating a woman, highly macho.

  Robyn, of course, did not marry John. But they remained friends, and eventually she managed his career, booking his dates, buying his costumes, even opening a joint checking account with him. And she became the friend of his friends. Why? What was a girl of her background doing in a world like that? Her favorite cousin, Connie, told me, “Robyn was going through a period of reduced ego. Delia and his friends made her feel good.” A close friend from nursing school, Barbara Barlow, had a somewhat different explanation. “Robyn was always looking for the ultimate thrill,” she said. “She did everything to try to get it.”

  After Delia disappeared, Robyn stayed close to her onetime lover’s friends, inviting them to a Christmas party, lending them Delia’s clothes, and living with Robert. She even traveled with Robert to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and spent time there with him and a female impersonator who had become so attached to Delia that he called Delia “my sister.” The affectionate impersonator claimed that Robyn was “forever taking” Black Beauties—amphetamines—and that she also took LSD one night, only to appear crying and distraught the next morning and to demand of him, “Bobby Ferrara said I told you last night that we—or I—killed Diane. Did I?” The impersonator assured her that she hadn’t. (Robyn denied the incident to me; she also denied ever taking drugs.)

  Meanwhile, the police were questioning Delia’s friends, and their investigation began to focus more and more on Robyn and Robert. One member of the circle handed over a pair of enormous purple suede shoes that appeared to be the ones in which Delia had last teetered about. The shoes had come from Robyn’s closet. Other friends began telling the police that Robert had been furious with Delia for moving out and that Robyn had been furious with Delia for moving in and then promptly flirting with Laura. The clincher came for the police, however, after Dominick Giorgio was picked up for stealing synthetic cocaine from Pascack Valley Hospital, in Westwood, New Jersey, where he worked in the emergency room. He eventually told detectives that he’d heard both Robyn and Robert admit to Delia’s murder. They were arrested within a week.

  When the pretrial hearings were finally over and the trial itself got under way, Robyn at last appeared to realize the gravity of her situation. She began ignoring Robert’s bids for conversation, and after a while the two of them sat at the defense table like mismatched strangers in a crowded restaurant who have been dropped at the same table by a sardonic headwaiter.

  The trial lasted four weeks and turned out to be a remarkable drama, featuring extraordinary witnesses, an eleventh-hour confession, and a cliffhanging, four-day jury deliberation. It was also, at times, sheer theater of the absurd. The major players were no longer Robyn and Robert but Judge Harold Rothwax, of Manhattan Supreme Court; Assistant District Attorney Steve Saracco; Robyn’s defense attorney, Rosen; and Robert’s defense attorney, Robert Dilts, of Ridgewood, New Jersey.

  Each person had reasons of his own to consider the case exceptionally challenging. For Rothwax, the challenge was that the two defendants were being tried together. This is done in New York when evidence links two defendants. In this case, one of the chief pieces of evidence would be the testimony of nurse Giorgio, who claimed to have heard each defendant separately confess that they’d murdered Delia and that they’d done it together. Because of this link, Rothwax felt legally bound to refuse defense requests for separate trials.

  But the joint-trial law has a serious drawback. It requires a jury to understand that not all evidence presented during a trial is admissible against both defendants. Some evidence can be held against only one. For example, if one defendant in a joint trial confesses to the crime, that confession can be held against only him, no matter what it says about the role of his codefendant. Thus, the joint-trial law goes, in effect, against a natural inclination. It demands that at one moment a jury give certain evidence serious weight and that at another the jury screen that evidence from its consciousness.

  Given what he knew of human mind and memory, Rothwax had long had doubts about the wisdom of the joint-trial law. Now he was being asked to try a case under it. In the end, he came to view the trial’s outcome as a validation of the law and a vivid demonstration of a jury’s ability to deliberate according to instructions. But early on he worried about whether the jury would be able to absorb the complex directions he was continually issuing.

  For the Assistant D.A., Saracco, trying his thirty-eighth felony case, the murder victim herself was the challenge. During jury selection, numerous prospective jurors had snickered at the tidbits of Delia’s lifestyle that were described. Saracco had begun to fear that most jurors would be incapable of feeling sufficient empathy for Delia to treat the murder with the gravity it deserved. As a result, he decided not to challenge jurors who were young or employed in the arts. “Our side usually goes for the kind of guy who hangs out in Rosie O’Grady’s bar or has a big, traditional family with a lot of kids,” he later explained to me. “But how could we sell them Delia?”

  The jury that was finally selected consisted mostly of youthful, white, highly educated men and women, including three actors. But would such a jury—the kind generally considered favorable to the defense—be capable of finding the defendants guilty? Saracco kept worrying.

  Robyn Arnold’s counsel, Rosen, was worried because he was not planning to mount a case—in the sense of putting forward an array of witnesses or calling his client to the stand. He was hoping to win almost strictly on the basis of arduous cross-examination. But he knew how risky this approach would be: many legal observers think juries never fully accept the notion of a defendant’s presumed innocence when the defendant doesn’t take the stand.

  The person most challenged, however, was Robert’s counsel, Robert Dilts. Mild-mannered and straitlaced, Dilts, whose services were being paid for by a friend of Ferrara’s from the gay community in New Jersey, often spoke of his bewilderment with the lifestyle the case was exposing. “Here I am, a normal guy,” he mused to me outside the courtroom. “I mean, I’ve never had a desire to marry someone who had a fake vagina. Or even to hang out with someone who did. Or take drugs. Or go to clubs like these. I’m a normal guy. And I’m trying to understand all this!”

  In the face of these concerns, the trial at last got under way. The prosecution contended that on the night of October 7, 1981, Robyn Arnold and Robert Ferrara drove Delia to a wooded spot in Rockland County and shot her, each firing twice. About two weeks later, according to the prosecution, Robert returned to the scene of the crime. Delia’s body had not been discovered. Robert bundled Delia into a yellow blanket and dropped her into the Hudson, where she floated downstream. No murder weapon had been found, so with the exception of Giorgio, the prosecution witnesses would testify simply about Robyn and Robert’s possible motives for killing Delia and about circumstantial evidence linking them to the crime.

  On they came: Deli
a’s family, her mother, stepmother, and father; Delia’s pals, the habitués and managers of the bars and discos; and Delia’s protégés, the female impersonators (one sporting a mustache, another with the improbable stage name of Dottie Fuck-Fuck). The witnesses all seemed to think that both Robyn and Robert had had a motive for murder. Each of the pair, for reasons of his or her own, had become fed up with Delia.

  In Robert’s case, the problem had been Delia’s sex change. On the verge of tears, her eyelashes fluttering, Delia’s mother said that shortly before she disappeared, her daughter had telephoned and, in the long tradition of mother-bride talks, complained, “My husband isn’t as active in the bedroom as he used to be.” Robert, Delia’s mother implied, had been disgusted by Delia’s new sex and had seen no way out of the predicament of his marriage short of killing his anomalous wife.

  Jealousy was suggested as Robyn’s motive. Several witnesses testified that she had been obsessively in love with Delia. She had kept a kind of shrine to him, they said, with twenty or thirty photographs of him in and out of costume and all his wigs and shoes and glittery get-ups. She’d accepted his sex change, even paying for the operation, and accepted his marriage to Robert, even paying for the ring. But she’d apparently wanted to be, if not the only love of his life, at least the only woman in that life. The hair stylist Laura, with whom Delia had flirted, testified that Robyn had said wistfully to her, “If Delia can have a lesbian relationship, why can’t it be with me?” Delia’s stepmother, Patricia, said Robyn had told her she paid for Delia’s penile inversion, and that she’d done so because “if I can’t have Delia as a lover, I’d rather have him as a close girlfriend.” And Delia’s mother, Joan, insisted that on the night before Delia disappeared, when all the clique with the exception of Robyn had slept together at Tony Poveromo’s house, Robyn had in fact gone over in the wee hours to join the group, seen Delia and Laura locked in a nude embrace, and become so enraged that she fled.