And who killed Hank Piasecny?
Once again, everyone had a theory.
Did he piss off a customer at the boat shop where he still worked? One of those people who bugged him and got a kisser full of cigar smoke as a fuck you?
Did he get into a drunken argument at a bar like he had done so often in his salad days, and maybe his adversary had followed him home for some payback?
Was the killer a mental case Hank had had a few run-ins with at the nuthouse and who was now on the loose?
Or was the killer, as Jimmy suggested, “Just some nigger who couldn’t take a joke when Hank called him a nigger”?
It was hard to say, almost a month after the murder, who had done it. With the crime scene cleaned up and potential clues washed away, the cops had a tough task ahead of them.
Everything had to be reexamined.
After learning of the new evidence, the first medical examiner and the funeral director both insisted they had seen the bullet hole but just hadn’t realized it was a bullet hole. The funeral director said it just looked like “a break in the skin, as far as we were concerned.”
The cops had missed a few glaring clues themselves. For one thing, it turned out there had been a trail of blood at least ten feet long at the crime scene, a trail leading from the kitchen to the hallway where the body was found. Given that one side of Hank’s head had been blown off, it was highly unlikely he could have moved ten inches, much less ten feet.
Then there was the matter of the gun’s positioning. It was found lying beside Hank’s right arm, but it was the left side of his head that had taken the shot.
When you considered the whole picture you had to agree with Jimmy.
“The frickin’ Keystone Kops woulda done a better job.”
Home Free
Even so, it took the cops only a month to find the killer.
It wasn’t that hard.
She was right in front of them.
On Halloween Day, 1977, they arrested Susan.
Susan—who had tipped them off in the first place.
Susan—who had fought to have Hank’s body exhumed.
Susan—who had been home free.
When the cops arrested her she didn’t argue, clam up, or proclaim her innocence.
She agreed to confess to the murder.
She just asked that her brother and her lawyer be there when she did.
Perhaps, after all the years of suffering, she finally felt some relief.
During the month of the investigation, her behavior had become increasingly desperate as she tried to evade detection for the crime she herself had “uncovered.”
She stole whatever she could get her hands on—golf clubs, ice skates, an alarm clock—presumably hoping to pawn them.
She returned to the scene of the crime and pocketed her father’s eyeglasses, telling a friend the missing glasses would bolster a case of negligence she planned to file against the police.
She wrote a threatening message on her car in lipstick and tried to convince the police it was a warning from the killer that she was next on his hit list.
Finally, as the police were beginning to put the pieces together and zero in on Susan, she came up with a truly bizarre scheme. She enlisted the help of a young woman she knew named Mary. A young woman she must’ve thought was pretty naive. She asked Mary to go to the police and confess to the murder.
She seemed to think if the cops got sidetracked with investigating Mary, it would give her time to slip away.
Maybe she was still planning to escape to California.
Maybe she was trying to frame Mary for the crime.
Susan’s true motives, I was beginning to realize, were not always easy to figure out.
But Mary was not as naive as Susan might have hoped. She did go to the police—behind Susan’s back. She told the police that Susan was trying to get her to make a false confession.
The police, now convinced that Susan was the killer, enlisted Mary in a scheme of their own. They goaded Mary to pump Susan for details about what had happened the night of the murder. They told Mary to tell Susan she needed those details to make her “confession” more believable.
This is what Susan told Mary to say:
She, Mary, had been breaking into Hank’s house when Hank suddenly appeared with his shotgun. She shot him in self-defense with a .22-caliber pistol. He was still alive, so she picked up the rifle and shot him in the head. She tried to drag his body into the bedroom, but he was too heavy. She left him where he was and wiped down her fingerprints.
The main question the cops were still hoping to answer was the whereabouts of the .22-caliber pistol. A cousin of Susan’s had reported such a weapon missing from his home and the cops were convinced it was the murder weapon. They told Mary to ask Susan about the pistol.
Susan instructed Mary to tell the cops that she had tossed the gun into the Merrimack River.
When I thought about it later, I couldn’t help but feel that the Merrimack was the perfect hiding place for Susan’s murder weapon. The river embodied everything the city was and had been for more than a hundred years. It sliced through Manchester like a wet, oily knife. It ran beside the crumbling, long-abandoned mills. It lapped the ground contaminated with anthrax from the goatskins that immigrant factory workers had turned into the linings of fine wool coats. Coats those workers could never afford to buy. It took whatever garbage the angry people of a dying New England city threw into it and never gave anything back.
It was the river that ran beside Hank’s Sports Center.
It was the river I feared swallowing me up in a Greek baptism.
It was the river I’d pictured leaping into in my darkest days of living in the shadow of it.
Divers searched that murky water, where Susan said the gun could be found, and turned up nothing. Maybe the gun had been carried away by the sludgy current. Maybe it had washed up onshore and been found by someone who liked to go rat shooting at the dump. Or maybe Susan never threw it in there in the first place and was just sending the Keystone Kops on a wild-goose chase to buy herself more time.
Even without the gun as evidence, the cops decided they had to move quickly and make an arrest.
Mary told them Susan was beginning to threaten her.
Susan was charged with first-degree murder and held without bail in the Hillsborough County jail. It was the same jail her father had been held in after murdering her mother.
The next day, Susan made her first court appearance. She didn’t enjoy the same protection from being photographed that Hank had received when he was arrested. A front-page photo in the Union Leader showed her looking frail, hunched over, and wearing a neck brace from a fender bender she had supposedly gotten into the previous week. She didn’t look like the person who could’ve taken down Hank Piasecny. Then again, maybe that neck brace was part of a new scheme.
Susan’s attorney entered no plea on her behalf and she was held without bail.
I called Jimmy to find out the latest.
He said he hoped they’d throw the book at Susan. In his book she had committed the biggest sin of all.
“That kid never respected her old man. Even as a pip-squeak. She stole goddamn candy from Hank’s first store. She’s nothing but a conniving little con artist.”
Takes one to know one, I thought.
“I felt like knocking off my old man plenty of times, but did I? No. ’Cause he’s the king of the goddamn jungle. The king’s the king. The king’s always right—even when he’s wrong.”
You’re wrong, I thought.
“Hank shoulda just wiped her out along with that whore of a mother!” he yelled, really building up a head of steam. “I mean it, they better keep that bitch locked up for the rest of her goddamn life, ’cause if they let her out, I’ll go looking for her myself. I’ll blow her goddamn brains out. Kaboom!”
When he said that, something in me just snapped. Kaboom! I was sick of listening to all the things Jimmy said that
turned my stomach. Sick of either pretending to agree with him or being a silent accomplice. Sick of clamming up out of fear that he would come after me like Fuad Ramses or the Boston Strangler. Sick of being afraid he’d blow my goddamn brains out.
“Goddamn Hank got what he deserved!” I yelled back, and hung up on him.
Sure, I was defending a murderer. But some part of me still admired Susan. Maybe now more than ever.
Sorry but Not Sorry
I wish I could say that was the last I ever spoke to Jimmy, but it wasn’t. After all, I was a good Greek girl, raised to respect her parents.
Before long, Shirley called to broker a truce.
“I just want us all to get along. Is that asking too much?”
I held my ground, for a few minutes at least.
“I’m not speaking to him ever again. I’ll talk to you, but not him.”
“You’re putting me in the middle. You’re making me choose sides.”
“Nobody’s putting you in the middle.”
“I can’t go against him. I can’t call you behind his back. He’ll see it on the bill. I have to live with him, you don’t. If you don’t talk to him, I can’t talk to you.”
“You’re making me choose sides! I can’t listen to him say awful things anymore.”
“Oh, he doesn’t mean half of what he says. His bark is worse than his bite. And look what you said about Hank. That wasn’t very nice either. No matter what you think, he was Daddy’s friend and he’s gone and you didn’t show any sympathy. Now who’s the mean one?”
Jimmy was still the mean one, but I called and apologized.
I didn’t want to be cut off from my mother.
Jimmy continued to rant about Susan as if nothing had happened between us. He mailed me newspaper articles, dissected her case, and handicapped her chances of being strung up. New Hampshire hadn’t hanged anyone in almost forty years, so the odds, he said, were “a million-to-goddamn-nothing.”
Over the next few months I learned that the state had engaged Dr. Hans Standow to evaluate Susan’s sanity. As fate would have it, he was one of the shrinks who had examined Hank.
But Susan had other ideas. She wanted Dr. Harry Kozol to examine her instead. Dr. Kozol was the Harvard hotshot who, in addition to examining Hank and the Boston Strangler, had gained fame the previous year for evaluating kidnap victim–turned–bank robber Patty Hearst. Susan felt Kozol had been sympathetic to her in the past. He’d even offered to put in a good word for her with Harvard when she was applying to medical schools.
Susan had her lawyer file a motion to have Kozol appointed as an independent expert. She refused to just sit back and let the shrinks evaluate her; she was going to evaluate them too.
But, unfortunately, the state turned Susan down. Kozol was expensive and, since the state was footing the bill, they preferred to go with a cheaper guy. Unlike Hank, Susan didn’t have the money to pay for him herself.
Also unlike Hank, Susan didn’t have a hotshot lawyer who could maneuver to keep her in the state hospital rather than in the much less comfortable county jail. After a few weeks at the nuthouse, Susan was shipped back to the slammer.
Dr. Standow came to the jail and examined Susan over the course of three afternoons. The doctor said Susan was able to provide him with an “extensive history of her life” and her “extremely traumatic upbringing.”
She told him about Hank’s heavy drinking.
She told him about Hank threatening the family with a shotgun.
She told him about Hank sexually abusing her from the age of four to eight.
Whether this last revelation was true, no one but Susan could know for sure.
About eight months after Hank’s murder, Dr. Standow testified at Susan’s court hearing before a judge.
The shrink contended Susan had had a “lifelong love-hate relationship” with her father—something I could certainly relate to. He said this tortured relationship had finally been “resolved by his death.” However, he felt Susan’s guilt over what she had done was far from resolved. He said that Susan’s exhuming of Hank’s body had been a manifestation of this guilt.
The shrink pronounced Susan, just like her father, mentally ill. In fact, he thought it was likely she had inherited her condition from Hank.
He thought Susan was more of a danger to herself than others. He recommended housing her in an open ward at the state hospital, where she could receive occupational therapy and other treatment.
Like Hank, Susan was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Like Hank, she was committed to New Hampshire Hospital for life, or until she was deemed no longer insane.
The hearing took thirty-five minutes.
Jimmy mailed me a clipping about it.
The article said that at the end of the hearing Susan stood before the judge, smiling, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Were they tears of relief? Sadness? Victory?
I wasn’t sure, but I wanted to find out.
Reunion on Pleasant Street
Four months later, I returned to New England to see Susan.
Jimmy and Shirley picked me up at the airport in Boston. I hadn’t been home in a while and we all seemed nervous.
“I recognized you right away, Dracula,” Jimmy said when I walked up, like he’d been afraid he wouldn’t.
“What a fancy haircut!” squealed Shirley, who had given herself a perm for the occasion.
“I bet you paid some fairy a double sawbuck for that hack job,” Jimmy needled me.
I had paid a lot more than twenty bucks, but I lied.
“It wasn’t that expensive.”
“You shoulda paid me the dough. I woulda cut it for you.”
Remembering his drunken haircuts, I forced a smile.
“And you wouldn’t have ended up looking like a sheepdog either.”
“Jim,” said Shirley.
“What? I can’t even ride my own daughter anymore?”
Then he looked in the rearview mirror at me.
“You look pretty goddamn good, kiddo.”
I beamed. I couldn’t help it. His opinion still mattered.
We drove into the projects. The buildings had finally been repainted. I can’t say it cheered the place up much.
Downstairs in the apartment, there were a few more stuffed ducks on the wall and a new TV.
Upstairs, Shirley had hung fresh curtains and bought new bedspreads for the bunk beds. Jimmy had piled a bunch of eight-track tape players in the corner.
The bullet holes were still in the ceiling.
The next morning, I anxiously got dressed to go see Susan. I put on jeans and a turtleneck. I blow-dried my sheepdog hair. I tried to look nice but not too nice. I wanted to seem like I was doing well but not too well.
Jimmy, of course, had no intention of going along and I was glad about that.
“The only way I’d visit that murdering bitch is with a loaded .22,” he said.
Shirley insisted she had too much housework, maybe she’d go next time, but I knew she really just didn’t want to go against Jimmy.
I didn’t want to visit Susan alone. I was afraid that seeing my childhood idol locked up in the nuthouse might put me away. So I called up Virginia. Before I could even ask, she offered to go with me. She jumped in her jalopy and drove up from Massachusetts. She was living right over the New Hampshire border, but at least she’d made it out of the state. She’d also finally left the massage parlor and the married man. Dustin was getting older and she was trying to clean up her act. She was working at an appliance store and she’d become a vegetarian, which drove Jimmy crazy. She’d met a nice guy, a musician, and thought he might be Husband Number Two.
On the short drive up to Concord, I got more and more nervous. I hadn’t let Susan know I was coming. I’d told myself it would be nice to surprise her, but I think I was just afraid she’d tell me not to come.
I had called the hospital the day before to make an appointment. But, unlike with Hank, none was
necessary.
She doesn’t get many visitors, the woman on the phone had said.
I’d hung up and felt depressed.
I still felt pretty depressed.
Virginia tried to distract me on the way with funny stories about working at the appliance store. She was the person you called if your new fridge was a lemon. She had to calm down angry people all day long. She said she felt right at home.
Before long, Virginia’s jalopy made the familiar turn onto Pleasant Street.
The hospital looked like it hadn’t changed much since we had visited Hank, although having now been to college, I no longer thought it resembled one.
Virginia and I waited in a drab, crowded recreation room, while an attendant went to fetch Susan. I was clutching a gift-wrapped box of my favorite local fudge. My hands were so sweaty they were ruining the wrapping.
Susan walked into the room, looking for a familiar face. I jumped up, hoping that she’d recognize me. I had no trouble spotting her. She looked amazingly well: trim, pretty, and neatly dressed.
She lit up with surprise when she saw us.
I hurried toward her and awkwardly gave her a hug. Virginia did too.
“Wow. I didn’t expect to see you guys here,” she said, smiling and shaking her head.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call,” I said. “I wanted to surprise you.”
“I’m surprised all right,” she said. “This is the best surprise I’ve had in ages.”
I handed her the damp box of candy.
“Oooh, that’s my favorite!” she said.
At least I knew we still had one thing in common.
“Are you home from college?” she asked. It seemed like she’d been keeping tabs on me too.
“I graduated last year,” I told her.
“I always knew you’d make it. I knew you’d get there one way or the other. Jimmy must be proud of you.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said.
“Yeah, I guess you can never really tell with him.”
We all kind of laughed.
“Let’s go over there where it’s less crazy,” she said, pointing to an empty table. “Although less crazy here is still pretty crazy,” she joked.
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