“She's never showed at her work. Never called her mom like she always does. She never took care of her cat. Hell, never left her cat like that before. This is real and it's heating up fast, Joe! A guy named Rubright was up visiting from Florida and says he slept in her driveway Saturday night. She never came home! He looks wrong, too. Plus, he has her belongings!”
He goes on about the quirks in her behavior as I pull on my jacket and straighten my tie for staff. “How old is this girl, Tom?”
“ Twenty-five.”
“And what's her name?”
“Amy St. Laurent.”
Later that morning, Chief Michael Chitwood and Amy St. Laurent's family members held a news conference in which she was officially declared missing. St. Laurent was described as stable and cheerful, a responsible young woman who was not the type to simply disappear. Family members pleaded with the public for any information they might have and for help in locating the missing woman.
Detectives spent the day gathering information1 on their most likely suspects, Eric Rubright and Russ Gorman, and beginning the long process of checking out their stories concerning their activities on Saturday night and early Sunday morning. Some detectives worked the phones while others spread out to interview witnesses, setting aside their existing caseloads wherever possible because the early days of an investigation are so crucial. But many other cases were fresh, urgent, and had to be attended to.
Eric Rubright was scheduled to depart that same day on a 4:00 p.m. flight. In response to the police request that he return for a second interview and take a polygraph, he agreed, after some deft cajoling, to delay his flight until Wednesday. Detectives were pleased by his apparent cooperation, but several things they had learned still concerned them. First was the information from Amy St. Laurent's neighbor, Ruth McElaney, provided by the South Berwick Police Department, about Rubright's angry behavior in their shared driveway on Friday night and St. Laurent's statement to McElaney that he was angry because he had hoped to have sex with her and that wasn't going to happen. Other friends of St. Laurent's confirmed that, in the days before Rubright's arrival, she had become increasingly nervous about his visit, worrying about being able to handle him.
Along with some minor drug offenses, detectives learned that Rubright, who was a big guy and a former semiprofessional rugby player, had been given a restraining order after being involved in a domestic incident with a former girlfriend who was also named Amy. They reasoned that a man who flew over a thousand miles to see a girl he hoped to have sex with might well react badly if his plans were thwarted. Especially if that man had a history of reacting violently—even more so if the man had a history of reacting violently toward women named Amy.
It looked like they could make a pretty good case for obsession. If Russ Gorman was telling the truth, and he had dropped off St. Laurent at the Pavilion, it would not be hard to imagine a scenario in which Eric Rubright, already angry at her for leaving with another guy, is cruising the Old Port, sees Amy St. Laurent, and decides he's going to get what he came for. Nor to imagine how badly things could go wrong if she resisted.
On Tuesday evening, with all this information in hand, Portland police borrowed Detective Gerard “Biff” Brady from the Cumberland County sheriff to polygraph Eric Rubright. Rubright didn't do well. Even before he was connected to the machine, while Brady was conducting the cognitive interview, trying to get Rubright comfortable and taking him through the story of the night Amy disappeared, Rubright's body language was strange. He crossed his legs, lowered his eyes, and tried to move away from the interviewer, all suggesting to Brady that Rubright was hiding something. As Brady began the polygraph and took him through the story, just mentioning Amy's name evoked a strong response. Queried about the response, Rubright told Brady about a situation with a woman named Amy in Florida, which resulted in a restraining order. He flagged as deceptive again when Brady queried why Rubright was able to enter Amy's apartment to take a shower but was uncomfortable sleeping there.
The polygraph session lasted for hours, with Brady coming out to consult with the observing detectives several times. Even after being confronted about being evasive and admitting it, Rubright continued to be untruthful, registering a strong response again when Brady asked if he had had anything to do with St. Laurent's disappearance. Sergeant Joyce and Lieutenant Loughlin, observing the interview, both felt that Rubright could be the guy. His behavior was strange and suspicious, he was obviously holding things back, and testing showed his behavior was “consistent with practicing deception.”
“For God's sake, of course it's him! It's great. Less than twenty-four and you guys got him. It looks good, Danny! He's establishing his story …”
Danny looks at me and says, “I'm not sure, Lieutenant. He does look good but I'm still not sure. I feel funny about a few things.”
“Dan, he slept in her driveway. Does that tell you anything? He was disgusted with himself. He went into a jealous rage because of these other guys and probably broke her neck. Then he dumped her somewhere. Look, he couldn't even sleep in her house! Why would you do that unless something else was going on? He stayed there the night before, so why wouldn't he stay again and wait for her return? It's because he killed her and can't stand it. Now, of course he's cooperating. Wanna bet he fails his poly?”
My good buddy Gerard “Biff” Brady is on loan to us to perform a polygraph. Brady is a talented interviewer and has solicited confessions from some of the worst child abuse cases I've ever run across.
“Biff'll get it out outta him.” I head back through the bay toward my office.
We all feel confident Rubright has something to do with this girl's disappearance. Tom Joyce and others are in the room watching the closed-circuit videotape of the polygraph.
“Check his history out,” I say. “You'll see. He's hot.”
It's Tuesday night around 2000 hours. Just twenty-four hours since Danny got the call. We're all still working, but I feel good. They got a guy who looks responsible or certainly knows something. I call the chief and let him know what we got.
Chief Chitwood was involved in over five hundred homicide cases during his career in Philadelphia, including the Ira Einhorn/Holly Maddux murder. He's a cop's cop. I have tremendous respect for the man.
“Yeah, Chief, he's in the poly now and it's not looking good for him. Christ, not only that, he went back to her place Sunday morning with her cell phone, coat, purse, backpack still in his car. He has some BS story about driving around, looking for her, etc. Then he slept in his car in her driveway. There's a whole bunch of crap. I'll keep you up on it. You never know, but yeah, he looks like the guy.”
Brady emerges from the room, drained, and tells the huddled detectives that Rubright has failed on a number of parts, plus he seems nutty.
“He has lied to me several times and admitted to that later on. He's real emotional, of course, considering the circumstances, but he's testing deceptive or inconclusive on various categories. You guys know all of the flags, and that he's got all her belongings to boot? Something certainly isn't right.”
Tom and I get into it a bit. “Christ, Tom, check it out and you'll find the homicidal triad2 in his background, personality disorder, history of violence. Should I go on?”
“Oh, you gonna start this up again?” Tommy says.
“Well, Tom, how many times have I been right on this?”
“Oh, okay, Lieutenant. You know. You know.”
We banter back and forth, our usual mechanism to work our minds. “Now, Tom, when I was in the FBI academy back in ’95 in that criminal psychology course …” I go on for fun. “Hey, don't make me go to the box, Tom … Don't.”
The box is an old cardboard box of my solved cases from the ’80s and early ’90s that I literally slam down on a detective's desk every now and then as a reminder that I, too, did this job.
“Well, he is cooperating,” Tom says.
“Wouldn't you, in a case like this?” But he's r
ight. We still have to be objective. Tom and I like Rubright as a suspect. Sergeant Bruce Coffin likes Rubright. Danny is shifting.
At this point, it's three to one, but Danny pushes on. “Remember, Rubright was mad the night before as well.”
“Look,” Tommy exclaims, “Rubright is gonna leave. He leaves, gets a lawyer, and then it's back and forth to Florida. We gotta hit it hard now and push this other guy aside. He can wait.” Tommy's just doing his job here—prioritizing and being practical.
Brady emerges from the polygraph again, shaking his head wearily, and consults with Coffin. “He's testing deceptive and inconclusive again. Admits he's still lying to me. Plus there's this thing with another girl named Amy. He told me he has harassment papers against him and this other girl fits your girl's description.”
I'm feeling excited because I think we've got our perp. It's a strange, conflicted story, and everything points to him. But Danny is still holding out. He's pushing this other guy, Russ Gorman. Gorman's on probation, which means a criminal history.
“Look,” Danny says, “this Gorman was the last one seen with the girl. We can't eliminate him yet.”
“Dan, he dropped her off, okay? Then nutbag here picks her up and he's in a jealous rage ’cuz she left him. Plus they had that fight the day before she went missing.”
Tom jumps in. “He's leaving tomorrow and we've got nothing on this guy. We have a lot of work to do to check this out.”
No one goes home. We're working against the clock on Rubright with a million other things to check. This is what investigation is all about. It's hard, frustrating, and tedious, but we're starting to think maybe we've got a dead girl, and that's what matters.
Danny Young, who was the primary, continued to disagree. He wanted to focus the attention on Gorman. Young, who felt he had a pretty good rapport with Rubright, took over interviewing him, an interview observed by Sergeant Bruce Coffin. (Frequently, significant interviews will be conducted by one detective with a second one observing.)
Sergeant Coffin is a tall man, wide shouldered and lanky with a graying Abe Lincoln beard. He always wears a suit. Coffin has a ready smile and is quick with a joke to ease tension or lighten people's spirits. His impatience, his eagerness to resolve matters quickly, contrasts oddly with the fact that he is a wonderful and patient explainer of police procedure. When he's not fighting crime, Sergeant Coffin is a gifted artist whose paintings are shown in galleries.
Although both the inconclusive polygraph and Rubright's peculiar manner continued to concern the detectives, Rubright was cooperative and forthcoming. He described being unable to find Amy, leaving the Pavilion nightclub, and using his compass to travel south until he reached the turnpike. Young found Rubright's story and demeanor convincing, and was impressed by his continued willingness to speak with them and his openness about his story.3
Young's feeling was that Rubright, a former college rugby player who was currently unemployed owing to the effects of a severe concussion sustained in a car accident, was just a down-to-earth, dumb jock who had developed a big thing for Amy St. Laurent, a feeling that she didn't reciprocate. However, at the end of the interview, concerns were raised again when Young and Coffin asked Rubright for hair samples and DNA and he refused. Why balk at this after having been so cooperative, unless the cooperation was just a ploy?
At the same time that they were collecting information about Eric Rubright, the detectives were also focusing on Russ Gorman, the man who, according to the timeline they were developing, appeared to be the last one known to have seen Amy St. Laurent alive. Gorman was twenty-one years old, a five-foot-ninish, 160-pound pretty boy with artificially streaked blond hair fashionably spiked with gel. He had multiple tattoos and a pierced ear. He was a regular in the Old Port bar scene, well known to bartenders and bouncers.
They learned that Gorman had been raised in Troy, Alabama, and Delray Beach, Florida, and had lived in the Portland area for about eighteen months. He had moved up from Florida after his mother, Tammy Westbrook, and her boyfriend, Rick Deveau, had moved to Scarborough.
A state criminal records search revealed that he was on probation in Maine for theft, a piece of information he had neglected to share in his interview with the police. (Individuals on probation are obligated to disclose this information when being questioned by police. They are also supposed to inform their probation officer of any contacts with the police.) The omitted information was significant because probation suggested a serious level of criminal activity. Detectives contacted the Troy and Delray Beach police departments to determine whether Gorman had a record in those states.
On the same Tuesday he interviewed Eric Rubright, Danny Young interviewed Russ Gorman a second time. Gorman said he had worked as a car detailer and was an on-call bouncer at the Iguana bar. He had been crashing at the Brighton Avenue apartment for about two weeks, sleeping on one of the living room couches. The other residents of the apartment were Kush Sharma, Jason Cook, Dave Grazier, and Grazier's fiancée, Dawn Schimrich. Prior to staying at 230 Brighton Avenue, Gorman had stayed at 136 Oxford Street with Matt Despins, another bouncer at the Iguana, and Brent Plummer.
Gorman repeated his version of events: He and St. Laurent and Sharma had left the Pavilion and gone to the apartment on Brighton Avenue. When no party materialized, St. Laurent wanted to go back to the Pavilion to look for Eric Rubright. Gorman left the apartment at about 1:45 a.m. to drive her back to the Pavilion in his red Pontiac Grand Am. On their way out, they met Jason Cook returning from work.
At the Pavilion, Gorman said, he slowed down in the street to let her off, not even putting his car in park, and there was a group of people hanging around out in front when he dropped her off. He told Young he had reservations about leaving her there alone at that hour, but he insisted this was what she wanted. He then returned directly to 230 Brighton Avenue.
Gorman said that the trip took only about six minutes each way but balked when asked to name the streets he'd taken, refusing to be locked into any specific route. Gorman told Young that St. Laurent did not appear to be drunk.
Gorman said that when he got back to the apartment, Jason Cook was on the computer, sending an e-mail message to his aunt in Florida. Gorman also reported that he made a phone call, although he couldn't recall whom he had phoned. He gave three possible names: his ex-girlfriend Jamie Baillargeon, Matt Despins, and a friend named Kermit Beaulieu. He said he was on the sofa, watching TV, when Dawn and Dave returned.
As they had with Rubright, the detectives told Gorman that they would like him to take a polygraph test, which would help with their investigation and would help to eliminate him as a suspect.4 Gorman refused to take the test, saying he would want to consult a lawyer first. Police then asked Gorman if he would let them search his car. He indicated that it was an inconvenient time and added, “I'm definitely seeing a lawyer.”
Gorman's responses, when he was not in custody or being interrogated but only being interviewed along with many other people, told the police a lot. First, they flagged a familiarity with the criminal justice system. Gorman was not intimidated by police or by being in a police station— behavior that is sometimes unnerving to police officers. Indeed, he started his second interview with a line of chatter about a “guy in a yellow suit acting weird in the Old Port” that the police definitely ought to take a look at. Gorman was also very comfortable asserting his rights. Once they got his records from Florida and Alabama, the detectives would understand why.
Detective Donald Krier, observing Gorman's behavior, remarked, “In my twenty years as a cop, I'd never seen a guy so cocky and arrogant in a police station. He made eye contact and was actually sizing us up.”
Second, if the police were not already focusing on him, Gorman's statement that he wanted to consult an attorney would have immediately drawn closer scrutiny. If he was telling the truth and had nothing to hide, why not cooperate? Known in police parlance as “lawyering up,” expressing the desire to consult an attorne
y in a situation where there is both custody and interrogation, and thus a person's Miranda rights apply, automatically brings questioning to an end. But this was not a custodial situation. Gorman knew this was only an interview and he was free to walk out at any time.5 He was only one of many individuals asked to stop by the department and speak with detectives. With the city stunned by the news of St. Laurent's disappearance, many people wanted to help— but Gorman, apparently, didn't.
Portland detectives also looked at a third potential suspect, Amy St. Laurent's ex-boyfriend, Richard Sparrow. They knew that Sparrow had been at Amy St. Laurent's house on Friday evening, along with Eric Rubright. They had been told that Sparrow was there because St. Laurent was nervous about being alone with Rubright and that Sparrow drank too much and spent the night on her couch.
They had also been told by friends of the couple that Richard Sparrow was unhappy about the breakup and jealous of other men in Amy's life. Witnesses had told them of heated arguments between Sparrow and St. Laurent. Checking out these stories, interviewing Richard Sparrow, and finding witnesses who could establish his whereabouts on Saturday night were added to the detectives’ to-do list.
Twenty-four hours into the investigation, Danny Young had already spoken with more than a dozen witnesses and conducted several lengthy interviews. He had been to the Pavilion nightclub to speak with the owner and the manager, obtained lists of employees, and begun those interviews. His phone rang constantly. His desk was buried under a litter of pink message slips as the public, the media, and other police departments reacted to an event that highlighted life's transience and exposed everyone's vulnerabilities—the sudden, unexplained disappearance of a responsible young woman.
In the midst of all this, he had another, and equally pressing, task. He had to develop a detailed profile of the missing woman—Amy St. Laurent.
Finding Amy Page 4