Because You Loved Me

by M. William Phelps

  And for the next half hour Jeanne sat as Carla filed and polished and painted her nails. As part of the service Carla offered, she concluded the session with a hand massage. Yet no sooner had she finished, did Jeanne grab her by the hands.

  “Let me do that to you now,” suggested Jeanne. “You sit here and do this to everybody all day long and I bet you never get it done.”

  Carla was taken aback.

  “You’re right, Jeanne,” she said in a half-joking manner. “You know, you’re right.”

  “That’s just typical Jeanne,” Carla insisted later. “She gave me a little hand massage because she wanted to do something for me.”

  It was as if Jeanne couldn’t accept a moment of pleasure, a luxury for herself, without giving back.

  A few weeks into July 2003, Carla and Jeanne found themselves both cleaning their houses on the same day, a leisurely Saturday afternoon. Jeanne, out of nowhere, called Carla.

  “I’m making piña coladas, honey. You want one?”

  “Honey” was a common name Jeanne used to greet her closest friends and neighbors—just one more way for her to make people feel comfortable.

  “Sure, Jeanne.”

  “I’ll send it right over.”

  A few minutes later, Nicole knocked on Carla’s door. She had a smile on her face and a fresh piña colada in her hand.

  “It was just so funny, so random. Now that I look back on it all, Jeanne just loved putting a smile on everyone’s face. It’s a good memory. I’ll never forget it.”

  CHAPTER 13

  While Chris McGowan stood outside of Jeanne’s home, a detective wandered over and asked him a few pointed questions. When Chris had called 911, he had initiated an investigation. Information that could be important to finding Jeanne’s killer needed to be documented immediately. Chris might know something central to the case without realizing it. Also, as far as detectives knew, Chris McGowan was their prime suspect.

  Beyond the initial “who are you?” and “what’s your date of birth?” Chris wasn’t pressured to answer any tough questions relating to the murder scene. Detectives could tell he was not in his best frame of mind.

  “Everything was moving so fast,” recalled Chris. “I was stumbling through my words. I had no idea what was going on.”

  There was going to come a time, detectives promised, when Chris sat down and, in a sense, defended himself. He wasn’t going to walk away without explaining a few things, which, early on, didn’t seem to add up.

  Standing in front of the window in her living room, Carla Hall was mortified at the thought that her friend and neighbor, a woman who ostensibly had no enemies, lay dead on her kitchen floor, her killer at large. For a moment, Carla stared out the window and shook her head. Yellow crime-scene tape. Police officers. The scene looked like some sort of CSI TV drama. Spotlights illuminating the property, casting an eerie football stadium gaze on everyone.

  Incredible. What is happening?

  Neighbors gathered in the street and talked as police came and went. Dumaine Avenue was clogged with crime scene investigation box trucks and evidence vans. Uniformed officers banged on doors, asked questions, took statements. Jeanne’s ex-husband became the most popular topic of conversation among many standing out front. It was no secret Anthony Kasinskas had been in trouble with the law.

  He and Jeanne, more than one person later noted, were at odds constantly. Jeanne was terrified of him.

  There was no doubt Jeanne had developed high anxiety where Anthony was concerned. She called neighbors during the day when the kids were home and asked them to go look in on the children. Her biggest fear, several neighbors reported, was that Anthony showed up unannounced.

  “Do you see anything going on over there?” Jeanne asked. “Is everything OK?”

  “She would call me,” recalled one neighbor, “two or three times a day sometimes and ask me to check in on the kids. She would make a point to say she was scared Anthony was going to ‘do something.’ She called less frequently when Chris started staying overnight, but she was still frightened of Anthony.”

  “Terrified is more like it,” said another friend. “She always thought that he would kill her. She believed it.”

  When Anthony and Jeanne divorced, Jeanne made it clear that she wanted to drop his name and went to court to change her last name back to Dominico. She gave the kids the option to do the same, never pressuring them, and both chose to keep their dad’s name.

  Still, would Anthony go as far as to murder his ex-wife? It didn’t seem logical. In the eyes of detectives, Anthony was an obvious suspect—and prosecutors later said that indeed Anthony had a bull’s-eye on his back immediately.

  There was one instance where Anthony had fired a shotgun—a warning shot—in the air as someone walked toward his car while he was hunting. The guy turned out to be a cop. Anthony was arrested.

  But had Jeanne been murdered by a firearm? By this point, detectives weren’t willing to offer those sorts of details. Save for a few detectives and crime scene investigators inside the house, no one knew how Jeanne had been murdered. Not even Chris.

  As Carla stood by the window, Jeanne’s death was sobering and numbing. What was Nicole going to do when she found out?

  “Nicole’s going to die when she finds out her mother is dead,” Carla had told one of the officers nearby, before she had been allowed back into her home. Now she was worried how Nicole was going to react. Nicole was prone to depression. Although she and Jeanne hadn’t gotten along well lately, Carla believed Nicole loved her mother. She was likely out with Billy, Carla thought, driving around town, just being a kid, spending her final night with her boyfriend. This, while her life was being turned upside down back at home and she didn’t even know it.

  “I believed Nicole was a sweet girl,” Carla said later. “Jeannie worked hard to provide for those kids….”

  Carla couldn’t sit still. She ran outside for a moment and told police again: “You’ve got to find Jeanne’s daughter and son, Drew and Nicole.”

  Some of the neighbors congregated outside insisted that Drew was at a friend’s house and was due to come home anytime now. What was going to happen when he walked in on all of this?

  “You’ve got to find Nicole,” Carla said again. Then she asked one of the officers standing closer to her driveway, “Was this a random attack? Should we be worried? I’m home alone over here.”

  “We can’t really give you any information, ma’am. We don’t know who it is. But don’t be worried. OK?”

  After that, Carla returned home and called Donna. She was still distressed.

  “I can’t believe this, Carla. I cannot believe it.”

  “I know, Donna. I know.”

  “Come over here.”

  Carla walked across the street and sat with Donna for a while. While consoling each other, they discussed a group of kids Drew had been hanging around with that summer. Donna later said the kids were known around the neighborhood to be “bad kids always getting into trouble.” She wondered if perhaps one of the kids tried to burgle Jeanne’s house and fought with Jeanne.

  “I never once thought Drew was involved, but the kids he hung around with were always getting into trouble. That was one of the reasons why Drew and Jeanne were, at the time of her death, butting heads so much.”

  Yet that theory quickly dissolved after two police officers stopped by Donna’s house and asked if she and Carla had seen anything peculiar earlier that day.

  “No,” both women said.

  Donna had even walked through Jeanne’s yard somewhere between 6:00 and 6:30 P.M. to go get one of her kids at the day care facility adjacent to the back of Jeanne’s house.

  “It was easy to cut through Jeanne’s yard,” recalled Donna, “and Jeanne certainly didn’t mind. But I didn’t see anything at the time I walked through.”

  “Can you come into the station with one of our officers to answer a few questions? Just routine stuff.”

  “OK,”
Donna said.

  It was well after eight o’clock. Donna made sure her children were taken care of before she left.

  Outside Jeanne’s house, in the front yard and down the street, the crowd—uniform police officers and detectives, medics, neighbors—had swelled with curious onlookers. One officer took Donna by the arm and led her through a group of people standing around, wondering what was going on. As they walked, Drew emerged from the crowd; he had just returned home.

  “What’s going on, Donna?” Drew asked when he saw Donna walking with the officer. Like everyone else, the boy was confused. The flashing lights. Crime scene tape. Police asking questions, directing traffic.

  “What’s going on?”

  Donna and the officer stood by a police cruiser she was going to travel to the Nashua Police Department (NPD) in and didn’t react to Drew’s query.

  “Donna, where’s my mom? I want to see my mom,” Drew said.

  Donna dropped her head. She started to say something, but had trouble getting the words out. “Just as I began to talk, the officer ducked me into the cruiser and closed the door. I never had a chance,” she added through tears, “to say anything to poor Drew.”

  Within seconds, Donna was on her way to the Nashua Police Department. She was panic-stricken by that point. What was going to happen after she left? she wondered. What was Drew going to do when he found out about Jeanne? And Nicole. Poor Nicole, Donna thought. The girl was going to “freak out” when she realized her mother had been murdered.

  CHAPTER 14

  Although Nicole’s pregnancy test had turned out negative, right before she found out her “second mom” had been murdered, Donna Shepard was on her way over to the house to tell Jeanne what was going on with Nicole lately. Because Jeanne had always been such a good friend, concerned neighbor, mentor to her children and outstanding mother to her own, Donna felt obligated to inform her that Nicole was sexually active.

  “Nicole and I had an understanding that she could talk to me,” recalled Donna. “I had always talked to her about things going on in her life. She knew that if I thought she was in trouble, I would have to tell her mother.”

  While Nicole was at Donna’s the previous day, she explained how she thought she was pregnant with Billy’s child. Donna said it occurred to her immediately that she was going to have to tell Jeanne. She believed Nicole was in over her head. Jeanne would know what to do.

  Donna’s story contradicts a rumor that later surfaced about Nicole trying to get pregnant so she could trap Billy into staying with her. Some had said Nicole was worried about losing Billy, not only because of the distance between them, but to another girl. Billy had other girls in his life. Nicole knew. Just a few months before his visit to Nashua, Billy had told a girl in Connecticut—someone he had met when they were hospitalized together—that he and Nicole were “engaged.” The girl was disappointed, and later said she wished she had “told Billy how she felt about him….”

  Any indication that Nicole might have wished she was pregnant was washed away on the day she came out of Donna’s bathroom with the results of her test in her hand.

  “I am so relieved,” Nicole told Donna when she emerged with the negative results. “I don’t know how I would have ever explained that to my mother.”

  There would have been, Nicole explained to Donna, a major “blowout” between them, had she been pregnant. It would have ruined everything. As it were, Jeanne was unhappy with Nicole and Billy’s relationship, especially how fast it was moving. Beyond that, Jeanne was convinced Billy was a bad influence on Nicole. Chris McGowan later said it hurt Jeanne to get up in the middle of the night that week and hear Nicole crying. Jeanne would use the bathroom, which was directly underneath Nicole’s room. The walls and floor were so thin, Jeanne had heard Nicole weeping and knew it was because of something Billy had said. Billy needed to go back home that Thursday, Jeanne was sure of it after that night. There was no question he was leaving. Jeanne felt Nicole would someday see for herself that Billy was no good for her.

  “Jeanne was hoping Nicole would get a job, meet other boys and forget about Billy,” said Chris. “Which she would have.”

  As Nicole babysat Donna’s kids over the course of that spring and summer, she and Donna talked about a lot of things. In the weeks and months leading up to Jeanne’s death, Nicole told Donna how mad her mother was about the phone bills. Billy and Nicole talked for hours on those nights they weren’t together. Some of Jeanne’s phone bills were in excess of $500 to $1,000. Jeanne expected Nicole to work and pay them off herself. There was one time that spring when Nicole showed up to babysit and explained to Donna that Jeanne had grounded her for running up the phone bill so high. “I need to babysit as much as I can,” said Nicole, “so I can pay off the bill. My mom won’t let me talk to Billy until I do.”

  Donna had met Billy for the first time the night before Jeanne was murdered. Of course, Nicole had mentioned Billy on numerous occasions. “He’s wonderful. I love him. You’re really gonna like him, Donna.” More than that, Nicole had told Donna’s children, who adored her, about Billy. The visit Billy and Nicole made to Donna’s that day was Nicole’s way of introducing Billy to the kids. Nicole was “all excited,” recalled Donna. “She was so close to my kids. She wanted so bad to show off Billy to them.”

  No sooner had they stepped into Donna’s house, then Nicole raved to Billy about the kids: “This is [so and so], isn’t he so cute, Billy? This is [so and so], isn’t she just a doll?” Then Nicole turned her attention toward Billy, kneeling down to get in the kids’ faces, “Isn’t he cute, kids, just like I said?” She smiled and stared at Billy. She was so happy just to share with the kids the relationship she had with the boy she loved.

  Donna saw Billy as a “clean-cut kid, very quiet. He was friendly. He obviously wasn’t as playful with the kids as Nicole, but he was polite and nice.”

  To Jeanne Dominico, children were the essence of life. They energized her spirit. Donna’s oldest child, who was six years old on the day Jeanne’s body was discovered, had problems communicating with people throughout his life, especially Donna. He wasn’t talking too much and had trouble explaining to her with hand gestures what he wanted. One day, Jeanne noticed something in the child that doctors, Donna said, had routinely told her not to worry about.

  “He was just nuts about Jeannie,” remembered Donna. “My son wasn’t talking as he grew older and I was getting concerned. Jeanne had been in the school system at one time as a paraprofessional.”

  So Jeanne knew immediately, after spending some time with the child, that there was a problem. Doctors were telling Donna that “some kids just talk really late.” But Jeanne convinced Donna the child needed special testing to find out what was wrong.

  “That’s when they found out he had autism. It was only because of Jeanne. Without her, I have no idea what would have happened to my son.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Chris McGowan was overwhelmed by what he found inside Jeanne’s modest blue-shingled Cape on the night of August 6, 2003. As the night wore on and the enormity of the crime settled on him, Chris had a hard time accepting the fact that he was never going to see Jeanne again.

  She was gone. It all seemed real now.

  At the same rate, however, by nine o’clock, Chris was growing frustrated that he still had no idea how Jeanne had died.

  “I knew she was gone,” he said later, “but they still hadn’t told me how.”

  Reliving the scene in his head over and over, all Chris could think of as he stood outside Jeanne’s house was that she had fallen and hit the back of her head on the corner of the stove. It was the only logical explanation.

  Why didn’t I show up sooner? I could have saved her life.

  “While standing there, as the police continued showing up and the night progressed, I kept going over it. All I could see was the blood underneath Jeannie…and I thought for sure she had fallen and split her head open.”

  For the entire time
he was at the scene after the murder, a police officer shadowed Chris, watching his every move.

  “What happened? How did she die?” Chris asked more than once.

  “Sir, we can’t say right now. Just relax. Please try to stay calm.”

  “What happened?”

  At one point, Chris ran into a cop he knew, a sergeant with the NPD he later described as a “close personal friend.” The guy was walking around the scene in front of Jeanne’s.

  In the eyes of the police, Chris was undoubtedly on the top of their list of suspects. After all, he had found Jeanne. He didn’t have a solid alibi to back up where he had been, and didn’t have anyone who could say where he was at the time of Jeanne’s death.

  Still, he didn’t want to believe it. “Even to this day,” Chris said later, “I never for a second was made to feel like I was a suspect in this. They never made me feel that way.”

  Chris approached his friend. “Can you believe this?” he said, shaking his head in doubt.

  “Chris,” said the sergeant, “I don’t know what to tell you. I have no idea what’s going on here. I’m so sorry.”

  Stumbling with his words, Chris shrugged. Then babbled: “Jeannie…it’s Jeannie. I cannot believe this.”

  “I know, Chris,” said the sergeant. “We’re going to get you out of here as soon as we can.”

  The scene continued to populate. Word spread throughout town. A large crowd continued to grow on the opposite side of the crime scene tape. While Chris spoke to his friend, a detective walked over.

  “We need to get you down to the station so you can answer some questions. You gonna be OK with that?”

  “That’s fine. Absolutely. Anything I can do to help.”

  “Come with me.”

  The detective walked Chris toward an unmarked cruiser. Along the way, he asked questions about Jeanne. Who she was? How did Chris know her? As they walked, making their way through the crowd, Chris heard the detective say to a colleague, “She’s here.”