Partners
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New England
OCTOBER 1975
Seabrook, New Hampshire, has the look of those towns that have grown up over the years along Route 1 the way algae sometimes grow along a ship’s line that has been underwater too long. It is just across the state line from Massachusetts, near New Hampshire’s short stretch of Atlantic shore, and Bostonians of a certain age tend to associate it with quickie-marriage factories—an industrial base that has long since been supplanted by a dog track. In Seabrook, Route 1 is dominated by the type of sign that seems to have been created by mounting the side of an old-fashioned theater marquee on a portable iron frame that can be wheeled to the roadside to attract the attention of a highway driver whose eye may not have wandered far enough to be caught by the signs on the gift shops and farm stands and factory outlets that lie just beyond the blacktop parking lots on either side of the road. All of the iron frames are painted yellow, and a lot of them include a huge yellow arrow curving back to point across the parking lot, and some of the arrows are outlined in multicolored blinking lightbulbs.
The Hawaiian Garden restaurant and lounge, which specializes in “Cantonese-Polynesian Food & Drinks,” is right on Route 1, with a parking lot on the side and some motel rooms in a connecting building along the back. Its restaurant serves the sort of Polynesian food that would be familiar to any Samoan or Fijian who happened to have eaten at a Trader Vic’s restaurant, as well as fourteen varieties of chow mein. Its lounge—a more ambitiously decorated room than the restaurant, with a large bandstand and ersatz tikis and a straw-mat ceiling over the bar—has a repertoire of drinks that makes it the only place on that stretch of Route 1 for someone who feels the need of a pick-me-up that comes in a ceramic coconut and is decorated with a tiny paper umbrella. The co-proprietor of the Hawaiian Garden—the man out in front, not the one in the kitchen—is a Cantonese immigrant named Wing Chin, who came with his family to Providence as a teenager in the fifties and, in the tradition of Chinese American entrepreneurship, spent some time working as a waiter in other people’s restaurants before opening his own. Last year, after operating the Hawaiian Garden for seven or eight years, Wing Chin became one of four partners in a corporation formed to establish another Cantonese-Polynesian restaurant just outside Atlanta, Georgia, in a town called Marietta—a town that does not have a dog track but does have a large aircraft factory. Each of the four partners agreed to put up twenty thousand dollars, the First National Bank of Boston agreed to lend the new corporation one hundred and sixty-six thousand dollars, the Small Business Administration committed itself to guaranteeing the loan, and a contract was signed for a building in Marietta. Wing Chin remembers saying to his partners, “I don’t think we can miss.”
The one silent partner in Chin Enterprises, Inc., was the type of investor often found in such ventures, a relative of Wing Chin’s who was always referred to by the active partners as Uncle Harry. The president of the new corporation was Wing Chin, the only partner who had extensive experience in the restaurant business. The vice president, a boyhood friend of Chin’s named John Oi, had been a busboy in a Chinese restaurant as a teenager—it was there that he met Chin, who was working as a waiter—but otherwise his restaurant background was one generation removed. His father, Henry Oi, was a restaurant proprietor who was also a prominent member of the Boston Chinatown business community—a man who, starting as an impoverished immigrant from Canton, had become proprietor first of a Cantonese-Polynesian restaurant in Boston and then of two more in Connecticut. John Oi, though, was not a restaurant proprietor but a professional soldier—an Army captain who had graduated from West Point and happened to be back in the Boston area during the formation of Chin Enterprises, Inc., only because the Army had sent him to Northeastern University to complete a master’s degree in electrical engineering. His wife, Cheryl, who came from a Chinese family in Hawaii, had a doctorate in ethnomusicology and ran an Asian program for one of the Boston television stations. Together, living in an apartment complex in the southwest suburbs, they seemed a long way from the Chinese immigrants working in the steamy kitchens of Chinatown. When a local reporter asked their neighbors for a description of John and Cheryl Oi some time later, what he wrote down was “Very friendly, always seemed busy, highly educated, classy.” They apparently looked on the Marietta restaurant as an investment that might eventually turn into a vocation—a place they might go to someday if John decided to leave the service after putting in twenty years. John Oi said nothing about the investment to his father. In a way, John had fulfilled the traditional role of the son of an ambitious immigrant in America. Henry Oi—who, despite imperfect English and no American education, had managed to get into flight school and become an officer in the Second World War—had been given the opportunity to swear in his son as a second lieutenant at John’s West Point commencement. But, according to Cheryl Oi, the Marietta restaurant was partly a way for her husband to prove himself to his father as a businessman as well as a soldier—as a successful partner in precisely the same kind of restaurant that Henry Oi operated. “I knew nothing about it,” Henry Oi said recently. “If I had, I would have knocked holes in it.”
Henry Oi, who had slept on the office floor rather than leave his West Hartford restaurant during its first weeks of operation, might have questioned the wisdom of opening a restaurant so far away. Restaurants may be even more in need of constant supervision than other retail cash businesses, and restaurant proprietors, like commanders of armies in the field, are ordinarily cautious about straying too far from their support operations. As a veteran of the tightly knit ventures of Boston’s Chinatown, Henry Oi would also have presumably been put off by the fact that the fourth partner in Chin Enterprises, Inc., was an Occidental—a former New Hampshire state policeman named Armand R. Therrien. A contemporary of Wing Chin’s and John Oi’s, Therrien was the son of a lumberjack from the center of New Hampshire—a descendant of the poor French Canadians who had come to New England from rural Quebec to work in the forests and the mills, and, for the most part, had remained poor. After a few years in the Air Force, Armand Therrien had worked as a Northeast Airlines ticket agent for five years and then joined the state police, where he showed an aptitude for investigating crimes such as embezzlement. He was eventually made a detective corporal and assigned to an office near Seabrook, a hundred miles from his home. In 1973, he resigned from the state police, moved permanently to Seabrook, and began trying to make a living as an insurance agent. “I wanted to better myself,” he said later. He had been divorced the previous year, and he had two households to support. Selling insurance did not turn out to be the route to quick riches, nor did selling real estate. In the synopsis of a résumé Therrien composed at the time, he wrote, “Schooling limited. Capabilities unlimited. Ambition strong. Training varied and diversified. I have enjoyed and done well at all my occupations but to date have not found one that would consume my entire efforts.” Therrien had known Wing Chin since the late sixties, when, as a state trooper, he was in the habit of dropping by the Hawaiian Garden—or “the Gardens,” as he came to call it. During 1973, he began to work for Chin—first part-time as a sort of security man for the lounge, and then full-time as just about everything except chef and bartender. Therrien lived at the Gardens; his girlfriend was one of the waitresses. He made some junkets to Las Vegas. But he was regular about his checks to his family and regular about Sunday visits to his children. Therrien was not only the secretary-treasurer of Chin Enterprises, Inc., but also the only partner who planned to work as a salaried employee at the Marietta restaurant—as the manager. John Oi and Wing Chin apparently saw Therrien in the role of a sort of white front man in Georgia. The three partners spent a lot of time together in the summer of 1974—planning the Marietta restaurant, hunting, target shooting in a quarry near the Gardens. In January of this year, John and Cheryl Oi took Therrien and his girlfriend to an Italian restaurant in Boston for a farewell dinner before Therrien
left to supervise renovation of the building in Georgia. As Cheryl Oi remembers that evening, the only business conversation was some jovial talk about who would buy the first Rolls-Royce after Chin Enterprises, Inc., hit the jackpot.
—
On February 11, in Westwood, a Boston suburb a few miles from where John and Cheryl Oi lived, Patrolmen William Sheehan and Robert P. O’Donnell were partners for the four-to-midnight shift, riding in police cruiser 92. Bill Sheehan, the senior member of the Westwood Police Department, was known as an amiable and conscientious man who had personally broken in many of the officers on the force. A widower, he often worked nights, and occasionally picked up some extra money doing lawn care during the day. Sheehan’s father had been a caretaker on an estate; one of his brothers was a fireman. His daughter was a graduate of Boston College, and his son was a senior at Dartmouth. Sheehan was working that evening—a bitterly cold and occasionally snowy evening—with the most junior member of the force, O’Donnell having been appointed only a month before. A clean-cut, rather laconic man in his late twenties, O’Donnell, like his father before him, had been an ironworker—putting together the girders of Boston high-rises for ten years before turning to an occupation he expected to be both more satisfying and more secure than work in the steadily narrowing construction field. As O’Donnell remembers the events of February 11, he and Bill Sheehan turned onto Canton Street, a wooded but heavily traveled road that feeds onto Route 128, at about seven-thirty and saw a Pontiac Grand Prix parked a few feet from the curb, with its emergency lights flashing. The driver, as seen in silhouette through the fogged window, seemed slumped in his seat. Parking the cruiser and walking back toward the Grand Prix, Sheehan and O’Donnell were met by a man dressed in fatigues, who had come out of the passenger side to say that his friend was ill but no help was needed. The two policemen, suspecting a drunk driver, continued to the Grand Prix and looked in. “Hey, what’s all the blood?” O’Donnell said. Someone said, “Hey,” there was a blinding flash as O’Donnell turned, and he felt himself falling. There were more shots, and then O’Donnell, feeling a foot next to him, grabbed at it and began struggling with the man in fatigues, only to have him break loose and run. O’Donnell drew his own gun and fired, bringing the man down in the middle of Canton Street. As it turned out, O’Donnell had two minor wounds and serious powder burns of the face. Bill Sheehan lay dying on the street, a bullet from a snub-nosed .38 in his head. The man slumped in the driver’s seat had a similar .38 slug in his head and died not long after reaching the hospital. He was identified as Captain John Oi. The man in fatigues was Armand Therrien. His wounds were not critical, and the following morning, in Massachusetts General Hospital, a Westwood police officer was able to inform him that he was being charged with the murder of John Oi. “He was my business partner,” Therrien said to the police officer.
—
“The word ‘probably’ is not enough,” Therrien’s defense attorney, a well-known criminal lawyer from Boston named Gerald Alch, said as he explained the concept of “reasonable doubt” during Therrien’s trial for the murders of John Oi and William Sheehan. No one had actually seen Oi and Sheehan shot, but the circumstantial evidence seemed overwhelming. The bullets that killed both victims had been fired by the .38 Therrien was carrying. A box of shells and two pairs of handcuffs had been found in Therrien’s pocket. A room key, also found in his pocket, had led to the discovery that he had checked in to a nearby motel that afternoon under an assumed name, after a virtually nonstop drive from Georgia. The telephone in his apartment in Marietta had been left off the hook, and when he telephoned his girlfriend in New Hampshire during the drive north, he had given her the impression that he was still in Georgia, with no plans to leave. The police reasoned that Therrien, having parked his own car in a restaurant lot near John Oi’s apartment, was forcing Oi to drive him toward a deserted spot when Oi, perhaps with thoughts of escape, suddenly stopped the car on Canton Street—only to be shot in the back of the head. But why? In the day or two after Oi’s death, the police received a couple of anonymous tips that the crime had to do with gambling and the mob; the district attorney was quoted in the local press as saying that the investigation was partly concerned with the possibility that Therrien was connected with “the Chinese Mafia.” Then police discovered that Chin Enterprises, Inc., had, as a requirement of its loan, taken out a two-hundred-thousand-dollar life-insurance policy on each of its officers—policies that were to be assigned to the bank as soon as the final loan papers were signed. Oi’s death at a time when the policies were payable directly to Chin Enterprises, Inc., meant that the restaurant would be capitalized with an additional two hundred thousand dollars. The corporation would have no need to take a bank loan and operate under its restrictions—which included a limit of fifteen thousand dollars a year on salaries that could be drawn by corporate officers. Neither Oi nor Chin was concerned with salary because Chin had the Hawaiian Garden and Oi had the Army, the prosecutor, an assistant district attorney named John P. Connor, Jr., told the jury. “But Therrien cared. Because Therrien wanted to better himself.”
Therrien’s trial was in the courthouse in Dedham, the seat of Norfolk County. Bill Sheehan’s son and daughter were there, and so was Henry Oi. Cheryl Oi and Wing Chin were among those called to testify by the prosecution. Armand Therrien’s sisters and his girlfriend and former wife were all among the spectators—all loyal, all willing to demonstrate by their presence that those closest to Therrien believed he could never have committed the crimes he was charged with. Except for one moment, when he broke into tears while reading a letter he had sent Henry Oi from jail, Therrien was calm and self-assured on the stand—still enough of a policeman to refer to O’Donnell as “the subject.” He offered four or five legitimate reasons to explain his sudden trip north. He said that his girlfriend had been allowed to believe he was still in Georgia because he wanted to surprise her. The gun was with him because he was returning it to its owner in New Hampshire, and the handcuffs and shells happened to be in the pocket of his heavy coat because he had been cleaning out his desk at the Gardens the last time he was in a cold enough place to wear it. He had registered under an assumed name at the motel because he happened to have a female hitchhiker with him at the time. Therrien said he couldn’t remember everything that had happened on Canton Street that night because Oi had hit him during an argument that began with Oi’s insisting that Wing Chin was heavily in debt from gambling and was planning to cheat his partners in Chin Enterprises, Inc. As Therrien told it, Oi had apparently been shot accidentally during an argument with O’Donnell, who then turned on Sheehan. It was a story that offered some explanation for every piece of incriminating evidence, and Therrien had the restraint not to push it past that.
“You drove thirteen hundred miles to Boston in approximately twenty-four hours to meet your fiancée, and yet you picked up a hitchhiker with the intention of having a liaison with her at a motel?” Connor asked him.
“That is correct, sir,” Therrien said.
In his closing statement, Alch made Therrien’s story sound at least conceivable. But the story required the jury to assume, among other things, that both Oi and O’Donnell, the West Point captain and the decent-looking policeman, had erupted into irrational violence. The jury had to believe O’Donnell or Therrien, Connor said. “One of them is a hero, one of them is a liar. One of them is a hero, and one of them is a crazed killer.” The jury believed O’Donnell. After nine and a half hours of deliberation, Therrien was found guilty of first-degree murder in both the death of William Sheehan and the death of John Oi.
—
The prosecutors and detectives who had worked on the investigation had the strong belief that they had solved the crime but not the mystery. The prosecution, of course, is not required to prove motive—the insurance policy was offered merely as a possibility—and Connor seemed under no illusion that he had. “We can never get inside that man’s mind and discover what the real reason was,�
� he told the jury. Would a man really commit premeditated murder for the rather indirect benefit of acquiring two hundred thousand dollars for a corporation he owned one-quarter of? Would a man murder to remove a ceiling of fifteen thousand dollars on his salary? How much more than fifteen thousand dollars could someone expect to be paid for managing a Cantonese-Polynesian restaurant in Marietta, Georgia? Was there something in the early rumors about gambling and the mob? Was someone else involved? Was Therrien rather than Wing Chin the partner John Oi suspected? What motive would be strong enough to explain murder?
Whether the insurance was the reason for John Oi’s death or not, it did make Chin Enterprises, Inc., a rather well-off little corporation. Months before Therrien was brought to trial, the insurance company paid the beneficiary of John Oi’s insurance, with no argument. A windfall of two hundred thousand dollars to an eighty-thousand-dollar corporation was, in a sense, the closest Armand Therrien had come to bettering himself in a big way. The corporation has problems, of course. It is the defendant in a civil suit filed by Cheryl Oi. Its vice president is dead. Its secretary-treasurer has just begun serving two consecutive life terms at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Walpole.
Melisha Morganna Gibson
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Cleveland, Tennessee
JANUARY 1977
Ronnie Maddux met Wanda Gibson eight years ago, when she was a widow in her late twenties with three children and a lot of men visitors. They met in Cleveland, Tennessee, on the southeast side of town—a neighborhood that attracts some poor-white country people, who wander into Cleveland from the hill counties to work in a furniture factory, and some locals like Ronnie Maddux, who never seem to work very long anywhere. “During the first two years, we went together on a regular basis,” Maddux said later, in a statement to the Bradley County Sheriff’s Department. “I quit going over to see her because of the drunks that hung around over there and because Joe Pete Cochran came over to where Wanda was living on Woolen Street looking for me with a sawed-off shotgun because of a gambling debt. Joe Pete Cochran cheated me out of the title to my car in a dice game, and I had to give him my title, my tags, and my keys. I had another set of keys, so I got Ronnie Goins to get the car and bring it to the corner where I was so I could go home. That was another reason I stayed away from Wanda. We didn’t see each other for about eight months. We got back together just before she had Thomas Glenn Maddux, my son. He was born on the tenth day of March, 1970. We were together that time for about a year. Then I got married to Josephine Holder. I lived with her for about three months, then left when I found out she was pregnant when I married her. We got a divorce later. During this time, Wanda got pregnant with Melisha Morganna Gibson by Ronnie Fairbanks. Wanda and I were together again when Melisha was born. I knew when she was born that she belonged to Ronnie Fairbanks.” A social worker who had reason to visit the home after the baby was born, in the spring of 1972, has described it as “one drunken party after another.” A church worker also visited regularly, bringing clothing for the children and testimonies to the advantages of a Christian life. “Jesus loves everybody,” the church worker said recently, “but those people didn’t respond real well.” The family called the new baby Ganna. When she was eleven months old, Ronnie Maddux and Wanda Gibson were indicted for beating her up. During the court proceedings, Ronnie and Wanda—inspired, some people in Cleveland suspect, less by ardor than by the rule protecting a wife from having to testify against her husband—became man and wife. And that is how Ronnie Maddux became Melisha Morganna Gibson’s stepfather.
Killings Page 8