The Devil in the Red Dress

by Abigail Rieley

  ‘I’m in New York just from Paris on my way to Chicago to visit Aya. If you want to meet somewhere email me back ASAP.’

  The plan was to tip off the Feds once the meeting was arranged. He wasn’t going to be the only one facing a prison sentence. Engle once again replied quickly. Maybe the last time she had sensed that it wasn’t Eid on the other end of the keyboard. Maybe she wanted to twist the knife a little in the other woman. Either way she wasn’t going to play ball. She wrote back a single line.

  ‘I dreamed about you last night. I can’t seem to get you off of my mind.’

  She didn’t fall for the meeting. Perhaps she knew that it was unlikely Eid would walk away as she had. Especially after she had convinced the gardaí what a monster he was. It would take a little longer for the FBI to finally track her down to her family home where she had gone back to living with her sister and daughter, her flight to Las Vegas forgotten in her hour of need. Eventually though, Eid had the satisfaction of knowing that he wouldn’t be the only one to face the music. Although once again, Engle would charm the authorities with her story of abuse and coercion. She agreed to cooperate fully with the FBI, all the better to make sure Eid bore the brunt of whatever punishment was heading their way. She agreed to tell them anything they wanted and plead guilty to her part in the California case. She was really just another victim in all of this after all. As 2007 began, Engle started helping the FBI. She proved to be a particularly informative witness. She told them details that began to close the net not just on her lover, but also on ‘Lying Eyes’ herself.

  CHAPTER 12:

  FIND THE LADY

  Yet for several months it seemed that Collins had got away with it. The Advent computer had disappeared without trace, and the gardaí had no proof whatsoever of her involvement with Eid though they were deeply suspicious of her. Howard was standing by her and life was continuing pretty much as normal. No one had believed the claim that she and Eid were having an affair. She claimed that she had been the intended victim of an elaborate fraud.

  Then her world collapsed. The FBI conducted a search of 6108 Camden Cove Street looking for documents that would provide them with a link to the website that advertised ‘Luciano’s’ dubious services. They left with a blue plastic folder in which someone had thoughtfully stored an enticing range of documentation.

  There were emails from Collins, internet booking forms for trips to Ireland and a letter from Eid’s boss at the Bellagio confirming he worked there for the purposes of a visa to Ireland. Whoever had been keeping up the correspondence had been very conscientious about keeping records. There was far more here than the FBI was actually looking for. They had gone in searching for documentary proof for the extortion attempt on Anne Lauryn Royston. What they came out with was a tantalising glimpse of a plot that stretched across the Atlantic.

  They notified the gardaí who notified Collins that they would be needing to talk to her on a somewhat more formal footing. Collins was in bed when they arrived on 26 February 2007. She didn’t hear them immediately as they let themselves into the open door of Ballybeg House shouting her name. She came out of the bedroom in her nightclothes as they were coming up the stairs. A female garda stayed with her while she got dressed despite her protestations that she was perfectly happy to go to the garda station herself.

  She didn’t seem to understand the change in her circumstances—it was eventually explained to her that as a suspect it wasn’t up to her to go to the gardaí. From now on the gardaí would always come to her and they would continue to do so until she answered their questions to their satisfaction. So began an interview process that must have been frustrating for all concerned. Collins stuck to the story she had told P.J. Howard in the wake of the robbery. It was a tale of a woman called Maria Marconi; a tall blonde with more than a passing resemblance to a young Lauren Bacall and an effortless sense of style. To a cynical observer it might seem that Maria Marconi was not just an alibi but an idealised alter ego created by an ultimately insecure woman.

  The gardaí asked her if she meant Engle by her description but Collins scornfully dismissed the idea, even though the description of the elusive Marconi differed from that of Eid’s former lover only on the matter of hair colour and style. Collins described in detail how her writing mentor Marconi had come to visit her in Clare in June 2005, after Collins had been writing exercises for her for months. She said that she had been in Spain when Marconi rang to tell her she was coming to visit Ireland but her visit home had corresponded with her arrival in the area. She said she met Marconi at the Downes & Howard offices and Marconi had asked to use the computer. While she was checking her email she had somehow managed to hack all the computers she had access to—setting Collins up like a rat in a trap.

  She wove an alibi that ticked every box in the case the gardaí would eventually put together. She described the car trip that had taken Marconi around Clare. She explained how she had taken the scenic route, pointing out all the places she had written about in her writing exercises, how they had visited Kilkee and had ice cream—only a small one for her because she was dieting. She told of a quick visit to Ballybeg House where Marconi had needed to use the bathroom and had been shown to the en suite off the master bedroom. The detail was drawn with an imaginative eye, almost a novelist’s attention to detail, keeping her story just close enough to the truth to keep in sync with what couldn’t be brushed away as coincidence and she stuck to it.

  Marconi, she said, had returned to the States but had soon been in contact again. She rang while Collins was in Spain, very upset. She said that her apartment had been broken into and among the things stolen was the laptop she used to keep in touch with all of the would-be writers she was mentoring, Collins included. Collins said Marconi warned her that all the emails they had sent each other were stored on the laptop but she had not thought any more about it. It was not until she had started receiving bizarre junk mail that she began to get worried, she earnestly told the gardaí. She said that she had deleted the first couple of emails without reading them but then one arrived with her name at the top. It told her she could be set for life if she wanted to be but wasn’t very specific about what that entailed. Collins told them the phone calls started soon after, growing increasingly threatening as she listened in disbelief to the threats. She said she couldn’t remember if the calls had all come from the same man or whether he had any kind of accent. She thought it was an American accent and had she mentioned that it could have been Marconi’s boyfriend.

  The phone calls had frightened her anyway, whoever they were from. They said they had all Marconi’s emails, including a particularly nasty one Collins had written about her partner. In this email she had made allegations about P.J. Howard’s sexual preferences. Now the mystery man or men were threatening to email the incriminating emails to Howard. She was terrified. She knew how much it would hurt him if he found out the kind of things she had been telling other people about him so she agreed to pay €15,000 to the blackmailers. She didn’t know why the blackmailers were using Essam Eid’s address. Those were just her instructions.

  Collins refused to acknowledge she was being treated like a common criminal, she insisted on treating the interviews like a rather awkward social occasion. She resolutely called the guards by their first names, making firm eye contact and smiling at the absurdity of the situation. She held a white handkerchief clutched in her hands which she kept patting smooth on her knee before folding it over and over on itself as she thought furiously for a way out. As the interviews slowly progressed the tissue was folded and unfolded countless times but Collins never stopped talking. The guards struggled to keep up, but had great difficulty keeping notes of the rapid-fire stream of stories that Collins was providing them with. She complained they hadn’t managed to capture her ‘tone of voice’ in their notes and had missed out swathes of what she was telling them, how could their paraphrasing put across the whole truth? She wanted it word for word otherwise it wasn’t truly what
she said. She would frown as the garda notes were read out to her at the end of each interview, then every time a new interview started she would lean forward earnestly and voice her concerns. It just really didn’t sound like her.

  Over hours of interviews that February, she fleshed out her story. Marconi became a living, breathing person whose aim in life was to ruin everything Collins had built up over the years. Collins said she was the victim in all of this, herself and her family; all of her family. She had been like a mother to the Howard boys, she would never do anything to harm them. Over almost three days she denied and denied, and wept and laughed and tried to make the detectives understand that it was all some kind of horrible mistake. For their part, the gardaí only had Eid’s word that there had been a link between him and Collins. They hadn’t had time yet to forensically examine the Iridium laptop they had taken from Ballybeg House when they went back to search it after Collins’s arrest and the computer from Downes & Howard was still missing.

  At that stage the gardaí hadn’t yet found the emails on both computers or discovered the fact that Collins’s computer profile for the Iridium laptop had been wiped two weeks later than she had claimed, when the heat had started getting a little bit too hot and gardaí attention had started to be turned in her direction. For the moment they simply didn’t have anything else to go with.

  In the US, Teresa Engle who was ‘helping’ the FBI with their investigation about the Royston case, was being far more forthcoming about that case and about events in Ennis as well. The gardaí had travelled to and from Nevada and the case against Eid was shaping up nicely. But there hadn’t been much movement since the February interviews with Collins. Then they received information that could provide the proof they were looking for.

  Reminiscing about their stay in the Two Mile Inn Engle told Special Agent Ingrid Sotelo how they had dumped the heavy desktop computer in a wooded area around the back of the hotel. It could still be there. The FBI promptly told the gardaí where the hardware was to be found and the gardaí dispatched a team to recover it from the bushes, hoping against hope that an Irish winter hadn’t reduced the hard drive to useless junk and they could find that vital proof.

  The winter of 2005 had been a mild one. If the desktop had remained in its hiding place it would certainly have been damaged by the rain and what frost there was, and the incriminating emails from ‘Lyingeyes’ could have been lost forever. Luckily for the gardaí, the hard drive had been found long before the worst of the winter took hold.

  Christie Tobin had been the caretaker at the Two Mile Inn for years. It was his job to oversee the general maintenance of the hotel and see that any technical hitches the guests encountered were sorted out. When he wasn’t needed he spent most of his time in his workroom deep in the bowels of the building. He was a solid Clare man who didn’t waste his words and didn’t see the point of bringing things up that weren’t asked about.

  One of his duties was to check around the outside of the hotel to see if the guests had left anything behind. It was amazing what was left behind or abandoned in the bushes round the back. Tobin set off on his tour of the bushes expecting to find cumbersome rubbish that would be gathered up and put in a skip to be disposed of. It was autumn and the weather hadn’t grown cold just yet. The Advent computer was wrapped up in a black canvas bag. The bag had successfully protected it from the worst of the weather and the hard drive looked just as it had in the offices of Downes & Howard.

  When he found the computer, he took it, bag and all, into his workshop and stowed it away. He made enquiries to make sure none of the hotel computers had found their way into the bushes for whatever reason but none were missing. It wasn’t until all his research had drawn a complete and utter blank that he began to look on the Advent as his own. Eventually he decided to check it was working and plugged it in. The hard drive whirred into action but without a monitor it was no use so he unplugged it and zipped it back up into its bag. He left it stored in his workshop for safekeeping, should the owner come forward. It was still sitting in the corner of the workroom when Detective Jarlaith Fahy came looking for it on 24 April 2007. Tobin recounted how he had found it and put it away for safekeeping and then handed it over without complaint. He was more than happy to help. The crucial hard drive was rushed off for further examination.

  Meanwhile, Collins was not taking the accusations against her lying down. She was the kind of woman who was used to being able to talk her way out of anything and she believed she could do so again. Once again she turned to the internet to find a way out. She researched where things were likely to go from here and learnt that she had the right to make a personal appeal to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP). Well, if anyone could persuade the DPP not to consider pressing charges she believed she could. This was nothing more than wishful thinking, and also displayed a slight arrogance on her part; that she believed she could achieve things that no one else could.

  So in March, against the advice of her solicitor who knew that the letters could and would be read out in court if she were charged, she wrote the first of three letters to the DPP.

  In a bright conversational tone she described her predicament and explained what a huge misunderstanding the whole thing was. She went into all the details of the Marconi visit and the subsequent blackmail attempt. After three or so pages she got into her stride and once again entered the stream of consciousness that had characterised her garda interviews. In her mind the Director, sitting in his Dublin office, aloof and all powerful, was her pen pal, her confident and her potential saviour. She poured her heart out in the way she said she had done with Maria Marconi and had certainly done with the shadowy ‘Tony Luciano’. Over almost a dozen pages she told the DPP all about her life in Ennis, her family, her relationship and all the convoluted details of her alibi. She begged him to let her go, casting herself as the tragic heroine in the story of her own telling. When the alibi had been spun in masterly detail it occurred to her the Director might think she was the kind of person who was capable of being involved in such a sordid little plot.

  She wasn’t like that, she insisted, she was a good woman, a religious, spiritual woman who went to the retreat on Lough Derg every year without fail. She had a strong moral compass although she believed in the death penalty and euthanasia and abortion. Though, she added hastily, the Director shouldn’t think she was someone who was cavalier about taking a human life. She would never do anything to hurt her nearest and dearest. She just wasn’t that kind of person.

  She never received a response from the DPP. Luckily she hadn’t been cast completely adrift since her arrest. P.J. Howard was standing by her. Since her arrest he had been her rock. Now he had another idea to help. He believed the story of Marconi as recounted by Collins; he simply could not accept that Collins would ever betray him. Marconi was a welcome scapegoat behind whom Collins could hide. If the ridiculous matter ever came to court she could be their star witness, that’s if she could be found.

  Collins didn’t have any contact details for her though. She blamed a virus or a hacker and Howard, a typical man of his generation, didn’t know enough about computers to argue with her. It might make things more difficult but what use was money if it didn’t solve these problems when life threw them up? Collins thought Marconi might have had a connection to Eid; that would mean she came from Las Vegas. Howard bought Collins an open return ticket and sent her to Nevada. Collins flew over and spent around ten days investigating the mythical figure. She was determined to find the woman whom the FBI had failed to find. By the time Collins got home to Howard she had hired Venus Lovetere, who she asked to find Marconi who would prove her innocence.

  Meanwhile the gardaí had been busy analysing the various computers seized on both sides on the Atlantic. The extraordinary correspondence between Lyingeyes and ‘Tony Luciano’ was revealed piece by piece. The emails were peppered through the hard drives of the computers. The correspondence was scattered but easy to put back together. The
Advent hard drive that Christie Tobin had found yielded up searches for hitmen and assassins, contract killers and inheritance rights. Collins had known this was possible and had begged for it to be removed and dumped somewhere irretrievable but the bumbling scam artists she had hired hadn’t bothered. They had only got as far as the back of the Two Mile Inn and thanks to Tobin’s work room the Advent hard drive was in perfect condition to give up its secrets. Collins had been right to be worried about the searches that had taken place but in the end it was not the searches ‘Lyingeyes’ had conducted for a hitman that made the biggest impact on the garda team, it was searches of a more mundane kind that sparked their interest.

  Secure in the anonymity of a web based pseudonym Collins had emailed ‘Luciano’ far more freely than she should have. While the Las Vegas conmen were happy to constantly use the name Tony, Collins had used the name of Bernie Lyons to open the ‘Lyingeyes’ email address, and repeatedly signed her own name. She also used an internet search engine that provided an email address which stayed logged in when the user went back to the home page.

  This showed that ‘Lyingeyes’ was researching Reductil slimming pills and astrological predictions for Collins’s date of birth. No one would believe her story of a second person trying to trap her; an Irish accomplice … maybe Maria Marconi didn’t really live in Las Vegas after all. The material the forensics experts dredged out of the computer drives could have been explained that way but that would have required a desperation to believe that very few people had. As the picture became gradually clearer there was only one logical explanation—that Collins had absent-mindedly skipped between her Lyingeyes alter ego and her habitual preoccupations, flitting between the dark plotting, the film noir search for a contract killer and her next flights to join Howard in Spain. The gardaí were faced with someone who was either a cold-blooded fiend who had an unnatural detachment from life and love or a fantasist embarking on a dangerous daydream.