by Linda Wolfe
Robyn had an alibi for the hours up to about midnight on the evening Delia disappeared. She’d been getting her nails done at the home of a friend, a professional manicurist. But the prosecution claimed that she had been with Robert later that night and proved that she’d even made a telephone call for him, dialing his boss at Zipperz and saying he’d been mugged, his face was all scratched, so he wouldn’t be coming to work. Other prosecution witnesses testified that Robert had pawned Delia’s wedding ring, which she had presumably been wearing until she was killed; that Robyn had become furious when she’d learned that Delia’s purple shoes had been taken from her; and that she’d gotten extremely shaky when a friend had pointed out that her bed was missing a familiar yellow blanket, presumably the one used to wrap Delia’s dead body. (Both the shoes and the blanket became the subjects of a legal tug-of-war. Were the shoes the ones that Delia disappeared in? Was Robyn’s blanket the one in which Delia’s body was found?)
For the first week and a half, the evidence against both defendants was basically circumstantial. Then, as if to justify Judge Rothwax’s early worries about the joint-trial law, a written confession by Robert was introduced.
It was a letter that Robert had sent to Giorgio but that Giorgio had misplaced. In fact, a friend had somehow gotten hold of it and only during jury selection thought to bring it forward.
In the letter, Robert said, “Delia had sent me and Robyn to get the gun in Pennsylvania so that she could rob some man she met at Studio Fifty-four of cocaine and cash. We would split the goods. Supposedly she would set it up when we were in Pennsylvania.… Robyn, Delia and I went to Rockland to go to the Cuckoo’s Nest.… [A friend] has supposedly stolen very expensive sound equipment from the Nest and hidden it in the woods. We arrived at the spot. Delia and I were walking toward the woods. Robyn shot her in the back of the head. I ran. [Then I came back and] I shot Delia twice to put her out of her misery.”
Consternation ensued once the letter appeared. Robert didn’t deny having written it, so for Dilts, his lawyer, the key would be suggesting that the letter had somehow been illegally or unethically elicited by Giorgio. For Rosen, the letter raised fears that the jury would be influenced by an assertion about his client that, while not admissible as evidence against her, might nevertheless affect their reasoning. He again demanded separate trials, but Rothwax refused.
There was no choice but to go forward, and at last Dominick Giorgio was called. He had been the recipient of the fateful letter, and if he was to be believed, he was the recipient of oral confessions to the murder by both parties on trial. Giorgio told the jury that he had heard about the murder four times. Once he had overheard Robyn say to someone on the phone, “Look, you shot her, and I shot her.” Another time, she had blurted out something about the murder to Robert while Giorgio was present, then had said to Giorgio, “Now you’re involved.” And twice Robert had verbally confessed the act. As in the letter, he’d admitted to Giorgio that he’d shot Delia. But, said Giorgio, Robert had claimed Robyn had already also shot Delia and he’d merely polished off his former beloved, as one would a wounded horse, in order to spare her further suffering.
Giorgio was the nucleus of the prosecution’s case against both defendants. But could Giorgio be believed? After Delia’s disappearance, he had become Robert’s lover. “He told me I was his best friend in the world,” the pale, earringed male nurse said mournfully from the witness stand. Yet it was he who had told the police, after he’d been arrested for stealing drugs from the hospital, about Robert’s confessing to having shot Delia. Robert had been promptly jailed, and Giorgio had received probation for his own crime. Afterward, however, they’d stayed in touch, exchanging love letters, and Giorgio had not only visited Robert in jail but once even smuggled drugs in to him. He’d been caught but had received a conditional discharge. What kind of person was he? A tormented soul or a conniving one?
Both defense attorneys insisted on the latter reading—although attributing different connivances to him. Giorgio had been no true friend to Robert, Dilts suggested, but had kept in contact with his client just in order to make him implicate himself—to get him, for example, to write those self-incriminating letters. Giorgio was Robert’s creature, Rosen tried to show, and thus he’d made up the story of Robyn’s involvement in the shooting, hoping that if Robert could claim Delia was already dead when he fired his shots, he might be guilty of something less than murder.
But, after all the theatrics and poses, the dramatic heart of the trial lay in the accumulation of detail about the life Delia and his friends had managed to pursue. Witness after witness reported that drugs and the kind of sexual decadence associated with cities, with Manhattan’s ragged edges or Berlin’s 1920s cabarets, had not only found their way to but taken root in the tranquil towns above New York. Despite their well-tended lawns and gardens, the suburbs were producing an underclass of drifting, disaffected, sensation-seeking young people. “This is the most intriguing expose of modern suburbia anyone ever dreamed of,” said Rosen, the defense lawyer. “There’s a legitimate subculture up there that’s beyond the wildest imagination.”
“You expect these things in the city,” said Detective Donald Longo. “Not up there. But it turns out we’re all squares in Manhattan.”
Longo had hung around the gay clubs of suburbia during the investigation of the murder and had found their existence astounding. During the trial, as owners, employees, and patrons of the clubs came forward and as testimony about mood-altering drugs, orgiastic nights, and jobless days mounted, old images of suburbia began to seem like nostalgic dreams.
After three weeks of testimony, the case drew to a close. Neither defendant took the stand. In their summations, both defense attorneys focused on Giorgio. He had stolen drugs, Dilts reminded the jury, and smuggled them into Riker’s Island. Given his proclivities, wasn’t it possible that everything he’d said was a lie? Wasn’t it even possible that the written confession itself, the one Robert had mailed Giorgio, had been elicited unscrupulously by a Giorgio who was cooperating with the police?
Attorney Rosen invented still another scenario involving Giorgio. “Imagine,” he intoned, “that it’s a beautiful fall day, and you and your family are taking a drive up the Palisades Parkway. Suddenly you or someone in your car has a heart attack. You wind up at Pascack Valley Hospital. You are taken to the emergency room. There, at the door, stands Dominick Giorgio.” A shiver seemed to pass through the jury, and Rosen concluded in high emotional style, “If you wouldn’t trust putting your life, or that of someone in your family, into the hands of Dominick Giorgio, don’t put Robyn Arnold’s life in his hands, either!”
Four days later, Robyn Arnold was acquitted of the murder of Diane Delia. The jury had apparently decided not to believe Giorgio. But Robert Ferrara was convicted. The jury had apparently decided to believe Giorgio.
Several of the jurors later commented on the seeming contradiction by explaining that, basically, they had been persuaded by Rosen’s argument that Giorgio had hoped to lessen Robert’s guilt by dragging Robyn into the case. But at the moment of the decision, none of that mattered. Robyn’s family began weeping with relief, and she herself, guilty not of murder but merely of having been a hanger-on, seemed suddenly to alter. For the first time in weeks, her control broke: her hair became disheveled, her blouse came untucked, and she acted extravagantly, nearly swooning in the arms of her lawyer. He supported her, and while he did so, Robert Ferrara was led silently away.
Minutes later, outside the courthouse, the jury thronged Robyn. Several women jurors hugged her. She hugged them back and, her face wreathed in smiles, invited all the jurors to her upcoming wedding to the dentist. There would be a special jurors’ table, she promised.
Her dentist fiancé went to get his car. Returning, he offered several of the jurors a lift uptown, and they piled in. The hubbub on the sidewalk swelled. Robyn was still surrounded. She was just starting to make excited farewells when a prison bus clanged
its way up a ramp from the bowels of the courthouse and headed away down the still-crowded street. The bus was nearly empty. Inside, the only face to be seen was that of Robert Ferrara, staring.
Several days after the trial, I arranged an interview with Robyn Arnold, hoping to learn something about what it was like to escape so narrowly from being convicted of murder. But she agreed to talk only about why she’d gotten caught up with Delia and his/her group. “I never loved him, you know,” she said emphatically. Her nails were freshly manicured, her hair impeccably coiffed; she was wearing an exquisite red and purple bat-wing silk blouse. “It was just infatuation. No, not even that.”
What was it, then? “It was the lifestyle,” she said. “The excitement, the glamour. I found it interesting for a while. Then it grew boring.” She was planning now to marry the dentist, have children, maybe even go to law school and become a defense attorney like Michael Rosen, she told me. “And I’m going to live in the suburbs. Have the life I was raised to have.”
Won’t that get boring, I asked, “I mean, considering the exciting life you once led?”
Robyn Arnold inspected her nails. “I’ve had enough excitement,” she said.
THE LADY VANISHES
Nantucket Island, Massachusetts
1980
LATE ON A WEDNESDAY afternoon in January 1980, an executive with Avon Products in Rye, New York, was just pushing through the company’s revolving door at the end of her day’s work when out of nowhere, it seemed, a flustered, worried-sounding woman she’d never seen before popped up alongside her.
“I’m lost,” the stranger said. “Altogether lost. I’m a nervous wreck. Can you help me?”
The Avon lady was frightened and hesitated for a split second. It was dark. There was no one around. The woman who had approached her looked haggard, tense. But at once, as if sensing her fear, the stranger explained herself. “I’m a doctor,” she said, “from New York. I was on my way to Nantucket, but I started feeling terribly tired a little while ago. I thought I was about to fall asleep at the wheel, so I pulled off the highway. Figured I’d find a hotel and get some sleep.” She smiled. “If there’s anyone who ought to know better than to drive when exhausted, it’s a doctor.”
The Avon lady relaxed. The stranger had an amusing, reassuring way of expressing herself and a refined New England accent. When she went on to say “Someone told me there were some places to stay further up this road, but I’ve been back and forth, back and forth, and haven’t seen any,” the Avon executive suggested she go to a nearby Marriott hotel, and offered to get into her own car and lead the way.
The lost woman was Margaret Kilcoyne, a New York doctor and medical researcher who, in her own words that night, was “sitting on the Nobel Prize.” Two nights later she would become altogether lost—and vanish into thin air from her weekend home on Nantucket Island.
I first learned about the disappearance of Dr. Kilcoyne from the newspapers, and it seemed, from those reports, that she must have committed suicide by drowning herself. Her wallet, passport, bankbook, and summer sandals were found neatly stacked in a pile—the kind of orderly assemblage of personal effects that many suicides make—about a mile inland from the ocean and a half mile from the pond near her home. True, her body hadn’t been found. But then, Virginia Woolf’s body wasn’t discovered until weeks after her suicide. And the bodies of some drowning victims are never found.
I assumed that Dr. Kilcoyne had been depressed and, as a result, had killed herself. Doctors have one of the highest suicide rates in the country. Women doctors, subject to special pressures, may be at even higher risk for self-destruction than their male colleagues. And certainly, from outward appearances, Margaret Kilcoyne, who worked at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, had had the kind of lonely life that can trigger suicidal depression. Forty-nine years old, she had never married, had no boyfriend, and her principal attachment was to the children of her brother Leo, an executive with IBM, who unfortunately lived far away in Canada. So in February 1980, as I headed for Columbia-Presbyterian to interview some of Kilcoyne’s colleagues, I was certain I would find in their reminiscences the anecdotes of love-lessness and despair that have traditionally marked the lives of so many other women physicians who have brought about their own deaths. Then, suddenly, I was in the midst of a mystery.
It happened while I was speaking with Dr. Rosamond Kane, a colleague who had known Margaret Kilcoyne for ten years and was, as far as I could establish, the last person at Columbia to see her.
“What was Margaret Kilcoyne like?” I asked the white-coated, gray-haired Dr. Kane.
“She was hilarious,” Kane said. “She could make the most mundane subject fascinating. Hyperbole was her mode of expression. If she started telling you how she made junket, you’d expect that Vesuvius itself would rise up on the plate.” Then Dr. Kane leaned forward, troubled, and continued, “That’s why I can’t figure this whole thing out. Because it can’t have been suicide. Tell me someone has committed suicide and I’ll say, ‘Well, yes, maybe he or she was depressed. Or worried about something the rest of us didn’t know about.’ But not Margaret.”
How could she be so sure? I wanted to know.
“Because not only wasn’t Margaret the suicidal type, but when I saw her, she was particularly bubbly and excited because she was going on holiday,” Dr. Kane said thoughtfully. “But there’s another reason, too. You see, Margaret was taking penicillin for a superficial skin infection. Well, just before we said goodbye, she looked in her bag and noticed that she had only a few pills left. So she asked me to write her out a new prescription.” Dr. Kane leaned forward eagerly. “Do you see? Someone planning to kill herself wouldn’t have been so focused on completing her full course of pills, would she?”
The question hung between us. Certainly, it would seem that if one were contemplating suicide, one wouldn’t be worrying about sticking assiduously to the cure for a minor infection.
“Look, I’ll tell you something else,” Dr. Kane suddenly offered. “One of the things we talked about that afternoon was my giving her the wheel off my old Volvo, which is the same make as hers. I’d gotten a new car. Margaret wanted the wheel from my old one, and she told me she’d pick it up in four or five days.” Dr. Kane shook her head. “I just know she wasn’t planning to kill herself.”
That afternoon I interviewed several other colleagues of Dr. Kilcoyne’s. Each one described her much as Dr. Kane had. “She was friendly, outgoing, energetic, and had a marvelous sense of humor,” said one research associate, a Dr. Estes. “She was intact, witty, balanced,” said another, Dr. Braun. “She was ebullient. That’s the best word for her,” said Dr. Samuel Ritter, who did clinical work with her. “She was always smiling, and she talked freely, easily, in a stream-of-consciousness kind of fashion, going from one idea to another in a witty, amusing kind of way.”
Each of these people had spent time with Dr. Kilcoyne in recent weeks, and because they insisted she hadn’t been depressed, I felt the mystery thickening. Still, she could have been secretly in despair, secretly planning to do away with herself, I tried arguing with myself as I entered my home early that evening. The phone was ringing; Dr. Kane was on the other end. “There’s one more thing I forgot to tell you,” she announced. “Margaret took her ID pin with her to Nantucket. Usually we leave the pins in our lockers. But the nurses were striking at the time, and to enter the building you needed an ID. She took the pin with her—you see?”
I saw. Margaret Kilcoyne, when she left Columbia-Presbyterian on Wednesday, January 23, had every intention of returning to work after the weekend.
I wasn’t the only person to discover that Dr. Kilcoyne had clearly been planning to return to her job after her trip to Nantucket, and soon, both on Nantucket and in New York, numerous theories to explain her disappearance began cropping up whenever people discussed it. Primary among them was that the researcher had been the victim of foul play because she’d stumbled on some kind of important s
cientific discovery. The basis of this supposition lay in the fact that shortly before she disappeared, Margaret Kilcoyne had made a tape recording in which she’d announced that she’d come upon a discovery of Nobel Prize proportion. Her discovery had “the potential for great good to mankind,” she’d said, and she herself was shortly going to be “in a position of nationwide power.” People who had heard or read about the tape began advancing the notion that she might have been murdered by a jealous colleague or that she had been spirited away by Soviet spies.
Something about these theories got my back up. Those who voiced them struck me as credulous and psychologically unsophisticated. Why assume that just because a person claims to have made a monumental scientific discovery, she in fact has? I made up my mind to try, by finding out as much as I could about Dr. Kilcoyne’s research and her final days, to discover why she had disappeared.
What I learned was that although her disappearance was mightily mysterious, it wasn’t a mystery of cloaks and daggers or murder and mayhem. It was a medical mystery. Margaret Kilcoyne, as all the clues I unearthed began to indicate, had been suffering from a psychiatric disease known to cause sudden disappearances and even sudden accidental deaths. The mystery of her disappearance lay in the disease itself, for while it can easily be detected in the shy, the reserved, the meek, and the depressed, in a person who is naturally cheerful and ebullient, it can so resemble his normal state that even friends and coworkers may not see any problems until it is too late.
The disease is mania, the outstanding features of which are euphoria and hyperactivity. Other signs of the ailment are delusions, particularly those of grandeur, as well as poor judgment and the making of unrealistic decisions.