by Charles Fox
They said, “Paul, blindfold yourself.” I could have put it on so I could see them, but I didn’t. They said, “Blindfold yourself and sit on this thing.”
So I put it on and sat down on the chopping block. I was quite petrified and all I said was, Paul, think tomorrow—what it will be like tomorrow. I was sure that the day after—I was sure that I would feel great. Piccolo said, “Do you want anything?”
Some people came in the room and I knew what was going on. There must have been about seven people in the room. I heard the clink of the surgical things and the plastic. Piccolo was sadistic. I would have been too, the way the whole thing was. He started to hate everybody. Piccolo was the only one who talked. They had a candle. I could tell by the flicker of light. Piccolo told someone, “Prepare the cotton and that red stuff”—iodine. I said, “Can I have a handkerchief?” I rolled it up and put it in my mouth like a gag. I said, “Is it going to hurt?” and Piccolo said, “Of course it’s going to hurt.” Another man, I’d never heard his voice before, told Piccolo, “Don’t be like that to him.” I said, “Io capisco.” I told him I understand, and they all laughed. I said, “You can do it,” so they pulled back my shirt.
He moved my blindfold out of the way, just like this. I put my head up and I said, “Do it. Quickly.” He rested the razor on my ear. He played around and held it there. There was a sound like ripping paper. It was done in two strokes. The noise was the worst thing.
There’s a limit to pain. If you prepare yourself, you can withstand it. Because of this there was no pain. I said, “Are you finished?”
He said, “Yes, we have already finished.” There wasn’t much blood. Then I could hear them bringing in all this stuff, and they put alcohol on it, and, oh Jesus, that just flipped me out and everybody was saying, “Ah, you’re so brave, so brave.” Then they bandaged me up, big whole thing like in those Polaroid pictures you’ve seen—a whole construction. Then they said, “Lie on your side on the bed.” So I lay on the bed, and they gave me an anti-tetanus shot and a penicillin shot, and now I felt exactly like I knew I was going to feel. I lay down on the bed and in about half and hour I began to bleed. I bled so much and I felt worse than I ever felt. Then in two hours I got scared. It was coming out normally, but after about five hours of continuous bleeding, it came out in, like, jelly. I had to lie down, I couldn’t move. They started to get scared. They gave me about six shots an hour of penicillin. I only found out after that I’m completely allergic to it. I can die from penicillin. I got really flipped out from the smell.
I asked, “Can you take this off?” and they took the blindfold off and they were right there and I could have raised my eyes like that, but I didn’t want to look. The smell, I can still smell the smell. So much blood and gooeyness, it was in my hair, all over my body, down my back, the whole thing. It couldn’t cure itself, because if I just touched it like that, it started bleeding again. There was blood all over the room. They started giving me another kind of shot, a coagulant. I told them, “I have to shit.” Normally I was only allowed to shit at night, so they brought in this big pail and carried me to it, and I shit and I felt sick and I vomited. I fell down on the floor and they carried me back onto the bed and by that time I had been bleeding for seventeen hours straight. I had to go to the bathroom again. I got up and everything just went—I promise you, acid is nothing—blood on the walls. For a long time after I could see the blood on the walls. I freaked out. They told me I would be all right. But I had almost no feeling left. Everything was just vomiting, vomiting and screaming, screaming. I was absolutely mad from loss of blood. I was so weak, just so weak, incredibly weak and the vomiting was all over the place. I couldn’t eat. But it stopped after about a day and a half, the bleeding and the vomiting.
They never changed the bandage again. They probably would have, but if they took it off, the scab would have come off and it would have started again.
The kidnappers called Gail and told her what they had done. She didn’t believe them.
Gail:
They kept calling, panic-stricken. They told me they’ve cut off his ear, and he’s bleeding and he’s hemorrhaging. I thought they were putting me on. They always talked about mutilation. They had threatened so many times—not only Mr. Fifty, but another man. They had from the very beginning threatened every kind of possible mutilation. Now they say he was dying, but how did one know? I said, “Let me come and see him. Let me come and take care of him.” But they refused.
In the mountains Paul’s nightmare grew worse.
Paul:
The day after, my head felt like a box. The bandage, my body, the bed, everything, everything was completely red. And always the smell. The smell, rats; rats came in and ate the jelly blood off the floor. They were on my bandages.
By the third day I was sure I was going to die. However, on that day I started to eat, but I couldn’t open my mouth. They’d bandaged me so I couldn’t open it. I could only eat with a straw. I had very good food at that time, little warm soups that I drank through the straw, and fruit juices and milk. Finally they came and they said, “We spoke to them. We’ve come to an agreement.”
Then they moved me to another house. They carried me over some very weird no-man’s-land, covered in ash.
What happened next remains obscure. The kidnappers may have had reason to fear they had been in one place too long or were concerned that word might have leaked out in some other way, but in either case, they were now pinpointed by the man who had called himself Bruno. On October 29, Iacovoni received a letter. The handwriting was crude, the Italian very poor:
I, the undersigned, declare that I have nothing to do with the kidnapping of Paul Getty and I have never taken part because I don’t want any trouble with the forces of justice. However, I knew about the kidnapping and up till now I have been quiet. Instead now I want to talk because I’m fed up of the whole business and now I want to tell you where you can find Paul and that Paul is well. The place that he is to be found is in the province of Caserta. He is to be found precisely in the village that is called Sallopaco near the old windmill—that is in an abandoned house. Also the owner of the house is an accomplice. He is thirty-three years old. But now, however, you have to be careful because he is dangerous and they are all armed with pistols and sawn-off shotguns and they won’t stop at anything. I can say no more than this. Now I can’t remember anything else and I am ready to be on the part of the law and I hope that my name is never mentioned because otherwise certainly I am a dead man. With thanks.
Iacovoni handed this letter over to Chace. In his dry, xenophobic fashion, Chace’s notes recorded his speculation about what he imagined happened next.
Chace (notes):
Informed Carabinieri Captain Martino Elisco of the contents of this letter. He has located house, so he says, outside Sallapaco [sic]. Small town in mountains. Captain Elisco says he took his people there arriving approx. 4:30 A.M., but then sent for coffee, fearing confusion if they approached in dark. It was daylight before they had coffee, according to the captain. It was agreed approaching house in daylight was too dangerous, better to wait ’til after lunch when the occupiers would be sleeping off wine and food. Elisco and his men ate a large lunch, then didn’t feel ready for an attack. They finally advanced at dusk, and found the house empty. No wonder Italians made such terrible Nazis.
Upon Paul’s seventeenth birthday, November 4, no ear had arrived, and the kidnappers were beside themselves with rage. Chace was still talking about a simultaneous exchange and the police were still trying to trace Fifty’s phone calls, so Gail took matters into her own hands and forced the pace.
Gail:
Fifty kept calling. “Have you received the ear?” I kept saying to him, “Honestly we haven’t. Why would I lie to you? How could we hide it from you anyway?” They thought the family had bought Il Messaggero.
They kept saying, “You’re lying to us. You have it. You don’t want to admit it. You’re doing it for reasons that we
don’t understand.” Everyone figured that if they had done it, then it would arrive, but it hadn’t arrived, and they had cried wolf for so long. Deep, deep down I really knew it was going to come. Every day I’d waken with the fear that it was going to arrive today. I really didn’t know what to do. Chace was pushing me heavily, saying, “They keep saying they’ve cut the ear off, nothing has arrived, but something has happened, the situation has changed drastically.”
Chace said, “If this is true, and maybe it is, should we not be prepared?” I got together all the photos of Paul I could, and we looked at them. We checked the shape of the top, looked at how the lobe was attached, how long it was, how the two ears differed, how they were in connection to the head.
I really longed for an ear to arrive because I felt that if there wasn’t some kind of shock, what was going to happen? How many years was Paul going to sit there? If something didn’t happen to jolt “the family” into action, we were just going to go on and on and he was going to be there suffering.
The kidnappers were angry. There was no understanding or warmth. They thought we were lying, that we had received the ear, but we really hadn’t. The kidnapper V said to me, “I know you have it, I put it in the post box.”
When I heard that, I just went wild. “You horrible beasts, animals, you put an ear in a post box?”
Finally, in desperation I told Fifty we had the money. I told him we’d pay the three million dollars. They believed me, I even told them where it was and I told Fifty we had to work out the details of the drop. Anything to stall for time. Now we had to find the money and find it fast. Fifty said Paul had really wanted to be out by his birthday. I told him, “We all did.”
The police were still trying to trace Fifty. They set up another phone with a recorder or something and I had to get him to call me back on that other number. He was calling at random times, so I had to stay in the apartment all the time. I couldn’t leave. So I told them, “I have to take my other children to school at such-and-such a time and I have to fetch them at another time. So please don’t call me then or, if you have to, let me know, I’ll work out something else.” I had to keep Fifty on this other phone for ten minutes. So I’d say, “Excuse me, I haven’t understood. How are we going to do this?” Anything, repeating things over and over again, telling him how much each sack weighed, telling him not to be worried, everything was going to go all right, the money was going to be delivered, there were no police involved, that it would all be fine. Once the police did trace Fifty—he was calling from a phone box in Naples, but he got nervous and broke off.
I called my father. “What do you think? Please help. Please tell me if I’ve lost my mind.” He had a conference with the FBI director, who said, “Hold Chace off.”
Gail’s father, Judge Harris, turned to his attorney, Martin McInnis, and asked him to explore every possibility, because the money was there in abundance. McInnis in his dry legal language recounted:
I wrote to Fletcher Chace telling him that we intended to use the Sarah C. Getty Trust to get the ransom money for J. Paul Getty III. We pointed out to J. Paul Getty that if he was disposed to paying the ransom, he could take it out of the trust rather than paying it himself. It would be a tax deduction because the trust, like other trusts, contains a provision for invasion of corpus in the event of an emergency. So the payment of funds from that source would not represent income to anybody. The letter was sent to Chace, who replied that there was no wish to take this course of action. I sent a copy of this letter to J. Paul Getty, but I didn’t receive a reply.
Finally, the thing Gail both feared and hoped for occurred.
Gail:
On the night of the tenth, a week after Paul’s birthday, a man from Il Messaggero called me: A package had arrived, would I come down? I didn’t trust these people, the press, and anyway I don’t think I believed it or didn’t want to because I said, “If the police call me and say they have my son’s ear or whatever is in the package, then I will go. But because you tell me, I won’t accept that.” I hung up and called Masone, the squadra mobile detective, and asked him if it was true that something had arrived. We almost had a fight, we were so tense. He finally said, “Yes, a package has arrived. Are you capable of coming down and looking?” “Yes, I am.”
Iacovoni and Chace were in the police car that came to get me. They walked me out. There was an even bigger crowd of paparazzi than usual outside my door. They took us to the questura. It was dark. When we walked into the office, the police seemed more nervous than I was. They didn’t know how to approach it, how to show me, what to do, whether I was going to fall apart, faint. There were a lot of policemen all standing around this desk with a big bright light over it. They were shaking and nervous. They warned me the ear had been under tons of mail and was a little squashed. They told me that it had been held up by a long mail strike down in the south. We hadn’t been aware of it in Rome because mail was still arriving from other places.
They took out this little plastic bag with the ear in it. We looked at it. The formaldehyde had removed some of the color—it was really a weird-looking thing—there were still little marks, pigmentations. One can’t even say they were freckles.
I picked it up—phew—but it’s my son’s. I turned it over and I looked at it and I looked at the shape and the structure. Even though it had been lightly flattened, this part of it was very much Paul’s and the lobe—there was little question.
I wasn’t absolutely, hundred-percent sure it was his right off. How can you be when you’re looking at something that’s been in the mail for a month? It was amazing. It was really very well preserved. But the hair was the thing that really blew my mind. There was no question about whose hair it was. Chace was more positive than I. The police asked us how either of us could be so sure. Chace’s answer was very simple, clinical: “I know an ear when I see one.”
I was able to touch it because if you’ve ever had anyone in your family die—I had my aunt die in my arms—somehow because there’s something awful happening, it doesn’t mean you can’t touch something that belonged to a person you love.
But so as not to seem like the emotional mother, I told them I wasn’t one hundred percent sure. I said, “As far as I’m concerned, yes, it’s my son’s ear, but would you like it in percentages? I am seventy-five, eighty percent sure.”
They said, “We have to find out if the ear came off someone dead or alive.”
Chace’s notes of the same occasion are characteristically full of bravado:
The ear arrived. It took twenty-eight days in the mail for the ear to travel from Naples to Rome. The Italian mail’s not very good. The ear was mailed on the twenty-second October to Il Messaggero. Got the call in the hotel at seven P.M. Ear and hair has arrived. The police picked me up and then we picked up Gail. Nobody’s going to be calm if the police tell you an ear has arrived in the mail. The newspaper instantly gave it to the cops to take pictures. Swarms outside the police station. It’s a big attraction. Everyone gets in on it to get their picture taken. They argued about it. It was all a big drama. The Italians love drama. They get excited easily. There’s nothing dignified about excitement. If they get a murder everyone sticks their finger to the wind. Iacovoni turned pale and blasted off in the corner and I wondered if he was going to keep his cookies. The thing was lying flat on the table and someone said, “Maybe it’s not a human ear,” and I decided to pull it out. I picked it up and plunked it out and I said, “It looks like one to me.” It was rather traumatic to see a red ear and a bunch of hair and for someone to ask Gail, “Is this your boy’s? Can you identify it?” I could identify it of course. Gail was calm and very much under control. She handled herself very well.
I went back to the station after they’d all gone and spent some time communing with the ear, matching up the freckles. It is the boy’s ear.
Like her son, Gail assumed that now that the deed was done and the ear at last had arrived, that would be the end of it. The logjam w
ould release and the money would flow. She was wrong.
Gail:
Every day I called and asked if they had the test results. “Was the ear from a dead body?” It all came back to the same old filthy thing, money. Would they pay if he was dead?
We were afraid because Fifty had said that Little Paul was bleeding and there was hemorrhaging. Had he really survived this thing? Maybe he wasn’t all right. Maybe he was dead. I didn’t think so, but I also wanted to find out if they had him doped up on medicine, or if he was lucid.
To determine Paul’s state, I asked Fifty to ask him a lot of really difficult questions. I asked for the floor plan of a house we’d had in Rome. He described a portrait on the wall; he was able to remember the name of the painter. I knew that not only was he alive, but he was lucid. There was no question.
When the report came from the scientific department of the police, it went into unnerving detail. They had it figured out how many cuts there were and where the cuts were made.
Then I heard from someone that when Big Paul heard I had identified Little Paul’s ear his answer was, “She wouldn’t know the difference between an ear and a piece of prosciutto.”
I was really, really angry. Nothing was going to stop me, my back was against the wall. Chace was terribly good. He really knew how to make me fight. When he saw me sink he’d say something he knew was going to pull me up again, challenge me.
I wanted them to see every horrible detail in England. Maybe they don’t print these kinds of things there, but in Italy the front page of every paper had a blow up of the plastic bag with the ear in it, and it’s pretty disgusting. It makes your stomach turn. I had blow-ups made. Very large poster-size photographs from different angles. I sent them to Old Paul and Big Paul. I wanted them to really hurt.