by Irene Pence
Hurrying over the hexagon-tiled entry, the investigator found the elevator and was soon on her way to the fourth floor.
She stepped off into a swarm of activity. Uniformed police officers stood at each end of the hall, shotguns at the ready. They had the dual task of protecting people if John Battaglia decided to return, and of quizzing residents as they re-entered their lofts. Many residents stopped and asked questions. They listened to the officers, shook their heads in disbelief, then walked on more thoughtfully, more somberly, back to their lofts.
Ray’s job was to be the eyes and ears for the medical examiners. She would write a detailed report of the scene for the doctors who would perform the autopsies the next morning. As she approached the entrance to Battaglia’s loft, she joined a group of blue-uniformed officers standing in the hallway discussing the scene.
“How’s it going?” she asked the first officer she encountered.
He shook his head. “It’s a real cluster-fuck. They’re still trying to figure out whether or not to get a search warrant.”
She glanced inside and saw the body of one of the little girls lying in blood. She decided to wait for the arrival of PES before entering the loft.
Taking out a tablet and pen, she asked the policeman who had information for the medical examiner.
He nodded toward Zane Murray, the officer who had called her earlier. Murray was young and hyper and wanted to be out chasing Battaglia. But as one of the first officers on the crime scene, he was posted there until he received further orders. He filled Gigi in on what they knew about the murders. Murray was particularly worried about the way the 911 call had been handled. Since it had first been aired as a domestic disturbance call, officers had continued to take care of other calls until they learned that children had been shot.
As Gigi began writing her report, she could sense that everyone was concerned about Battaglia’s whereabouts. All through the hall, officers had turned on their two-way radios, which periodically squawked with voices reporting the search efforts.
The absence of a warrant did not shackle the medical examiner. The bodies were under Ray’s jurisdictional authority, and she could remove them without a police warrant as soon as she arrived on the scene. However, she opted not to do that because she worked hand in hand with CAPERS and PES, who had yet to take their pictures and gather all the details. Their jobs were based on teamwork and they had a deep mutual respect.
Once the people from the Physical Evidence Section arrived, they and Gigi slipped cotton booties over their shoes, pulled on latex gloves, and went inside.
First, the investigators did a walk-through of the scene. They would normally search to see if there had been a struggle and if blood was located anywhere else in the loft. Then, PES painstakingly went through and identified each piece of evidence with a yellow numbered placard before taking photographs.
THIRTY-TWO
Officer Dane Thornton remembered Mary Jean telling him that Battaglia had moved from Loft 316 only a couple of days before. If Battaglia had kept a key, that would be an ideal place to hide from the investigators and still stay close to the scene.
Thornton asked another officer, Sgt. Phil Carrillo, to accompany him. Both officers hurried down one flight to the third floor.
They knocked on the door of Loft 316, stepped back, and waited. There was no response. Thornton had a track record of ten motorcycle crashes while in pursuit of escaping motorists and bank robbers, which made him a legend but had also taken a toll on his body. Carrillo immediately volunteered to break down the door.
Carrillo raised his foot and swiftly cracked the jamb on his first attempt. Yelling “Police!” they dashed inside, guns at the ready and eyes darting into the yawning space. The layout was essentially the same as Battaglia’s new apartment, only smaller.
The loft appeared empty, but the officers followed the same procedure they had upstairs to search the large walk-in closet and other smaller areas that could conceal a person. Without bodies, packing boxes, or furniture to hinder their search, they were able to secure the loft quickly and check it off their list of concerns.
Just to be on the safe side, they left an officer at the door in case Battaglia decided to return.
Mary Jean Pearle had been at the lofts for more than an hour. Now sitting on the lobby’s floor, looking drained, she held tightly to her cell phone, which connected her to a support team of family and friends. Then she thought of Laurie Battaglia and immediately became frightened for the girl’s safety. She quickly punched in Michelle Ghetti’s phone number.
When Mary Jean heard Laurie’s voice answer, she had trouble speaking. She swallowed hard, then said, “Honey, can I talk to your mother?”
“Hi, Mary Jean,” Laurie replied. “How are the girls?” Laurie’s question stabbed her heart and she fought for composure. “Laurie, I need to speak to your mom.”
In the background, Mary Jean heard Laurie calling Michelle. Soon Michelle picked up the receiver and said with a wry laugh, “Well, what’s going on now?”
“Is Laurie off the phone?” Mary Jean asked.
They waited a few moments until they heard Laurie hang up her extension.
Then Mary Jean blurted, “John just shot the girls.”
“That’s not funny,” Michelle said. “Don’t make a joke out of something like that.”
“It’s no joke, Michelle! Just tonight! A little while ago John shot the girls in his loft while I was on the phone with Faith.”
Michelle stifled a scream and ran outside so Laurie couldn’t hear. “Oh, my God!” she cried. “This can’t be happening!” She broke into loud, uncontrollable sobs. She fell into a wooden chair on her patio, unconsciously beating on its arm. “I can’t believe it. That’s so horrible!”
“He’s still on the loose,” Mary Jean warned. “The police haven’t found him so that’s why I’m calling. I’m worried that he might be heading to Baton Rouge to do something to y’all.”
“Oh, dear Lord,” Michelle murmured. She stifled a sob and thought how considerate Mary Jean was. Here, in the middle of her tragedy, she was thinking about them.
“Oh, Mary Jean. I am so, so sorry,” Michelle managed. “That’s just dreadful!” She wiped away the tears streaming down her face, then said, “I’ve got to decide what to do here. I’ll call you back in a little bit.”
Michelle immediately phoned her sister, Lisa Holmes who jumped in her car and hurried to Michelle’s.
While she waited for her sister to arrive, Michelle sat in her den and took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. She recalled her concern about what John might do to Laurie—and now he had inflicted that wrath on those two sweet little kids. She had no idea how to tell her daughter, but she knew she had to get herself under control first.
Michelle somberly went into Laurie’s room and revealed the devastating news. Laurie screamed and screamed, then broke into heart-wrenching sobs. She fell into her mother’s arms. Michelle held her shaking daughter, but it was impossible to comfort her. Laurie had lost part of herself. She had lost her sisters.
Michelle was so relieved to hear her sister’s car pull into her driveway. Lisa Holmes rushed inside and threw her arms around her sister and niece. They all held each other and cried.
Michelle had returned home only twenty minutes before Mary Jean phoned. She had driven Laurie home from her church youth group and had picked up fried chicken on the way. They had just finished eating when Mary Jean’s call came in.
Sometime after her sister arrived, Michelle noticed that she had received three messages from John Battaglia. Now, after Mary Jean’s call, she was more than anxious to hear them.
She played back the first message and listened to John’s plea for her to ask Mary Jean to drop the charges so he wouldn’t have to go back to jail. “Back to jail?” Before tonight, Michelle hadn’t spoken with Mary Jean since Easter, so she didn’t understand what John was talking about. But knowing what she knew now, his words, “Maybe that’s
what Mary Jean needs. To lose the girls,” haunted her. She checked her recorder; he had left that message at noon.
A call came in later at 7:20 P.M., and another at 7:50. She saw that Battaglia had placed his last call to Laurie from his office, so she fast-forwarded to that one. Knowing what her ex-husband had done right before he left his message, she felt sick at the sound of his voice. But she couldn’t help being shocked at how calm he sounded.
“Hey, Orie,” Battaglia said. “This is Ba-ba . . .” Michelle listened to him describe how he was sending basically all of his money to Laurie. “This is your college money. Put it in an account and invest it. Save it for college, okay? Love you sweetheart . . .”
Michelle stared at her recorder. She had the chilling thought that he was about to commit suicide.
The most logical places police thought to look for Battaglia were his two separate business locations. First, they checked out his office on nearby Fairmount Street. Six months after his divorce, he had been evicted from the office above Dorrace Pearle’s antique store. Always staying close to maintain vigilance on his ex-wife, he had moved his private CPA practice to a small, two-story building only a few blocks away.
The property manager unlocked the door to Battaglia’s second-story office for the police. Shouting “Police!” they entered the small room. Numerous crayon drawings decorated the walls, but there was no indication that John Battaglia had been there. Police stationed an officer at his business just in case.
John Battaglia also worked for the Arcturus Corporation, which was located on Ross Avenue in a distinctive downtown high-rise. Because of an open space near the top floors, it was sometimes called the “key building.”
In addition to two patrol officers, a tactical officer accompanied Dane Thornton to the Arcturus Corporation. The building’s security officer met them in the lobby, where the police explained their mission. The uniformed security man reached for his roster and saw that John Battaglia had signed in an hour earlier at 7:40 P.M. The police wondered out loud if Battaglia could still be up in his fifty-third-floor office.
The security officer accompanied them to the elevator that whisked them up to the Arcturus Corporation’s floor. He unlocked the door to the reception area. The police drew their guns and went inside. Starting at one end of the floor, they began securing each room in every office, looking behind doors, opening closets, and checking the large, built-in cabinets. They reached the office that belonged to John Battaglia. In the corner on top of a file cabinet sat a photo in which he knelt, smiling, with both arms around his daughters. The terrible irony of the picture struck everyone. Thornton picked up the photo to use for identification of the suspect.
The computer’s screensaver cast a glow over the room, but one touch of the mouse revealed that he had been on the Internet. The screen message read, “John has not sent or received data for twenty minutes.” The police had no idea how long he had stayed in his office. Before entering, they had spent almost seven minutes securing the area; it was possible that he could have passed them on another elevator as they were climbing toward his office.
The four policemen and the security officer dashed out of the office and ran to the elevator. Battaglia had eluded them, but they were getting closer.
THIRTY-THREE
When Officer Zane Murray was released from guard duty at the crime scene, he and fellow officer Ray Rojas were assigned to search the rest of the Adam Hats Lofts building. Adrenaline pumping, they first headed for the roof. Opening a trapdoor in the fourth-floor ceiling, they pulled down the overhead stairs that would take them to the attic and, eventually, the roof. They found the door opening to the outside, and cautiously peered around the roof before taking their first steps onto the tar and gravel surface. They saw many possible hiding places. Two large advertising billboards sat at perpendicular angles, lit by spotlights anchored to the roof. A large metal water tank stood on stilts, probably a relic from the days when the building had been a Ford assembly plant.
In order to give cover, the officers searched with their guns drawn and their backs to each other. The area was large and the probability high that someone could be watching, and change hiding places as the officers moved from point to point. Using their flashlights, they thoroughly checked around the water tank. They scrutinized the billboards but, with so much light from the spotlights, those would be unlikely hiding places. After several more minutes of fruitless searching, they concluded that the roof was secure.
The loft residents had begun to file out of their apartments. Some had heard the commotion in the streets, and those facing Canton saw the spinning lights on the emergency vehicles. Because of the building’s thick concrete walls, others had heard nothing and only learned about the shootings when they turned on the ten o’clock news. Every television channel’s lead story was the murder in the Adam Hats Lofts.
One first-floor resident, Sandy Wilhert, a young, pretty blonde, had been watching the news at ten and “freaked out” when she heard what had happened in her own building. In 1997, she had been the first resident to sign up for a loft and had always felt safe. She ran outside and grabbed the first officer she saw to find out what was going on.
As the officer gave her a synopsis of the murders, she felt a chill run through her body. She remembered those cute little girls skating in the lobby over the past several months. They had seemed like sullen, unhappy children; they looked like they didn’t want to be there. She had felt sorry for them.
“I’ve seen a lot,” the weary officer said, as he tried in vain to stop the tears forming in his eyes. “But, God, this is so horrible!”
They watched a man try to enter the lofts with two dogs he had taken out before all the commotion started. Now the dogs barked and howled, refusing to enter the building.
“We’re looking for Battaglia’s car,” the officer told Sandy. “I think he drives a small black sports car.”
She didn’t know anyone named Battaglia, but when the officer described him, he sounded like the man who had a reserved space next to hers in the basement parking garage. But that man drove a truck.
More residents began milling around. They grumbled that a background check was supposed to be run on anyone who wanted to rent a loft. What kind of guy was this? The management had allowed a murderer to move in?
Sandy kept thinking about the good-looking man who had the parking space next to hers. He was perfectly nice, but not chatty or overly friendly. She didn’t see him in the mornings, but rather after work hours when he was dressed in clean-pressed jeans and a T-shirt. He kept his shiny black truck so clean she could see her face in it.
She told the policeman that the man they were looking for sounded like the one who parked next to her, but that he didn’t drive a sports car. She gave a description of his truck, and agreed to accompany the police to the garage.
Down in the dimly lit basement, they found only a grease spot where Battaglia usually parked. Officers fanned out and began peering into large dumpsters and rummaging through the garage. It became apparent to Sandy that the officers had no idea where Battaglia was.
The police left one officer in the parking garage while the others went back upstairs to speak to Mary Jean.
With so many officers on the scene, communication became confused, and information was needlessly duplicated. The officer Sandy had talked with didn’t know that Mary Jean had already told the police that Battaglia drove a silver and black F-150 Ford 4x4 truck. An all-points bulletin was radioed throughout the city, advising every officer to be on the lookout.
The thought of her friends and family in potential jeopardy had alarmed Mary Jean all evening. She kept thinking of friends whom John Battaglia would also know. As they entered her mind, she would give police their names and addresses.
Dallas police scoured the city. They went to Melissa Lowder’s house to make sure that her children were safe, and left an officer there with the baby-sitter. They drove to the house of another of Mary Jean’s frien
ds, Karen Rogers, who was just returning home. Police escorted her baby-sitter to her car.
Other officers rushed to Mary Jean’s house on Lorraine in case Battaglia had gone there and was hiding, waiting to torment her further. As they entered to search her home, they met her live-in babysitter, Anna Castillo, in the front entry. They had the sorrowful task of breaking the news that the two children she loved and cared for daily had been murdered. Anna had a daughter who was one year younger than Liberty; they had been best friends. Anna had felt like a second mother to Faith and Liberty, and hearing of their deaths sent her into screaming, sobbing hysterics.
One of John Battaglia’s friends, Candy Bristol, had been irritated with him the last time they went out, but he was hoping she’d have cooled down by now. Three weeks ago, they had been at a bar where several men were overly friendly to her. She had cuddled up to her admirers with smiles and conversation, and afterwards John had let her know just how he felt about being ignored. Hopefully she had forgiven him and would be willing to be with him tonight. He turned his truck toward Candy’s house. She lived over by lower Greenville, an area well supplied with bars and places to have a good time.
Battaglia knocked on Candy’s door but there was no answer. He then drove his truck down her alley to check for any lights in the back of the house. Could she have seen him at her door and be ignoring him? So intent was he on trying to see inside her house, he drove straight into Candy’s trash cans, crushing all of them.
He cursed under his breath, quickly got out of the alley, and pulled onto the street. There were plenty of girls. Another friend, Missy Campbell, lived in an apartment in the lower Oak Lawn area.