by R. G. Belsky
“You’ve read what I’ve written in the Banner about Galvin?” I asked her.
“Yes. I found it fascinating reading. David Galvin certainly seems to me to be a classic case of the Godhood Syndrome.”
“What’s the Godhood Syndrome?” I asked.
“The people who create these fantasy games, the leaders, the ones who make the rules—even if they don’t always follow them themselves—are called gods,” she said. “Gods have the ultimate powers. They can create life, they can kill it, they can resurrect it. The power of godhood is even more powerful than just playing the game. If I’m a god then . . . well, no matter how powerful you become, I can destroy you. I can reward my friends, punish my enemies, set deadly traps, and create monsters to wreak havoc throughout my entire fantasy world. I am the ultimate power. But, as we all know, ultimate power ultimately corrupts. It sounds to me like that’s what might have occurred with David Galvin. He began to believe he really was a god.”
I shook my head. “I don’t understand,” I said. “This is just supposed to be a game, isn’t it?”
“Not to the people who play it.”
“So you’re telling me that David Galvin may have actually thought he was a God?”
“Yes, I think that’s a distinct possibility.”
We talked about my interview with Galvin at the prison. Everything he’d told me that day. And the things he hadn’t.
“He said he felt remorse for everything he’d done,” I told her. “He discussed God and how religion was helping him as he battled the cancer that was killing him. He said he wanted to make peace with God before the end, get his life in order, settle all this unfinished business—before his own judgement day. That’s why he told me everything he did. He wanted a clear conscience when he died.”
Dr. Whalen threw her head back and laughed loudly. “And you believed him?”
“He was dying,” I told her.
“I think he was still playing a game with you,” she said.
Chapter 46
Janet Parsons remembered David Galvin very well. Even after eleven years, the nightmare had never gone away, she said.
She was his last victim. The one he was with when police burst into an apartment not far from the NYU campus and ended his reign of terror. Now she was in a wheelchair. A permanent reminder of the monster who claimed to be a man of God during his last days on this earth.
I’d already been to see Becky Spangler. She was the one in a mental hospital. Whatever happened between her and David Galvin would probably always remain a mystery. She had survived the horror by retreating into her private little world. Now the doctors said that she might never come out of it again.
Janet Parsons would never walk again. One of her vertebrae had been broken—and the nerves in her spinal cord severed—at a point just above the small of her back. This type of injury usually happens during some kind of accident. But this was no accident. Galvin had done it to her deliberately when she tried to escape. He was a premed student at NYU, who’d read medical books about the spinal cord and nervous system. He knew exactly what to do to cause the damage that he wanted.
“I found out later that he’d been watching me for days,” she said now, as I talked to her in her apartment in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. She was married now and she was the director of a school for handicapped children and she’d even adopted a handicapped child of her own a few years ago. She’d put her life back together again after David Galvin. Janet Parsons was a survivor. I don’t know many people that could have done what she’d done. I know I couldn’t. I admired her.
“That was his modus operandi,” she said. “He watched women for hours, days, sometimes even weeks. He got off on it, I guess. I suppose it was some kind of power trip. Playing God and deciding how long he’d let us all live or something. That’s what the cops and the shrinks and all the other people I talked to afterward told me. I don’t think they understood though. The only person who knew why he did what he did was Galvin, and he’s dead now. For the rest of us, we’re trying to rationalize sane motives for the actions of an insane man. It can’t be done.
“Anyway, I was living then in this place on West Fourth Street. A little brownstone in Greenwich Village, where I was working as a model/actress/waitress. I thought I was going to be the next Lauren Hutton or something. It might have worked out that way too. But now I’ll never know.” She smiled sadly. “There’s not too much demand for a model or an actress in a wheelchair.
“One day I’m coming home from my job at the restaurant, and I see this guy in the hallway outside my apartment. He tells me he’s just moved in down the hall—and he’s already locked himself out. Can he use my phone to call the super? Well, he looked kind of familiar—I realized later that was because he’d been hanging around the coffee shop where I was a waitress, checking me out. He was handsome too. And very polite. I remember even hoping that he’d ask me out. So I let him in.
“Once he was inside, he changed completely. Some of it is still a blur, but I remember that he hit me and I lost consciousness. When I woke up, I was tied to the bed. Then he . . . well, he started playing this game with me.”
“What kind of game?” I asked.
“He wanted me to beg for my life. To tell him what I’d promise to do if he let me live. He said many other people had played this game before me. So I better be imaginative and creative and come up with things that he’d never heard before.”
“Did you do it?”
“Of course I did. I would have done anything at that point to survive. So I told him what he wanted to hear. I told him I’d be his love slave for life. I’d worship him. I’d treat him like a god. I’d run naked through Times Square for him if he wanted. For the rest of my life, I’d do everything he wanted me to do. I’d belong to him.”
“And he believed you?”
“No. He was too smart for that. But I was playing the game with him. I knew that as long as I kept him talking and playing his game, he would let me live. When the game was over, my life was too.”
“When did he do that to you?” I asked Janet Parsons, looking over at her wheelchair.
“He left the apartment,” she said, a pained expression on her face as she recalled the moment. I hated to do this to her, but I had no choice. “Somehow I managed to get free. I don’t know how I did it, but I did. I could barely move—my legs were cramped from my confinement and I’d had no sleep and, as you can imagine, I was in a pretty hysterical frame of mind. But I managed to get out the door and into the hall of my building. That’s when he caught me. I screamed for help and I tried to fight back, but I was too weak. He dragged me back inside the apartment. Then he said he’d make sure I never ran away from him again. That’s when he did this,” she said, looking down at her wheelchair. “He began doing something to put this pressure on my back. It hurt terribly, and he gagged me so I wouldn’t scream anymore. I didn’t know exactly what he had done until later. But I was in so much pain that I wanted to die. Only he wasn’t ready for that yet. He wanted me to suffer some more. And we were on his timetable now, not mine.”
“But you did survive,” I said. “What happened?”
“My run for freedom—my last run of my life on these legs—worked after all. Someone had heard my screams and called the police. It took them a while to get there. At first, they figured it was just another domestic argument or something. But eventually they arrived to check it out. After they found me, they arrested Galvin. They knew then they were dealing with a madman. But they didn’t realize until later that this was the madman named Felix the Cat who had killed all those people in the past year.
“They’d never have caught him without me,” she said. “I was the person who saved a lot of other women from a terrible fate. I guess I should feel good about that. Only it’s hard to feel very good when you’re spending your life looking at the rest of the world from a wheelchair.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. When I’d talked to David Galv
in in the prison hospital, none of the things he’d done back then seemed real to me. But Janet Parsons was real. This was Felix the Cat’s legacy to the world he’d left behind. I thought about what he told me about wanting to get into heaven. They say God is all-forgiving. Well, David Galvin was going to be a real test for him.
“What do you remember most about him?” I asked Janet Parsons at one point.
“The look in his eyes.”
“What was it you saw there?”
“Evil,” she said. “Pure evil.”
The same thing Dennis Righetti had told me.
They’d both seen the real David Galvin. The one I’d met was sick and weak and old before his time. Janet Parsons had come face-to-face with the true monster. I was glad I hadn’t. I don’t think I’ve ever had the kind of courage that she did.
“I don’t know if this matters,” I told her, “but he changed in prison. He found God. He confessed his sins. I know he did a lot of terrible things, but he sought some kind of salvation at the end. He wanted God’s forgiveness. That’s what he told me.”
“That’s bullshit!” she said.
I didn’t want to get into an argument with her.
“He was dying,” I said. “He was a changed man. That happens to people. Even to somebody like David Galvin.”
“He never would have changed,” she said.
“You don’t know . . .”
“I know. Believe me, I know. I spent forty-eight hours with the man. I’ll never forget a single second of any of it. I know him better than anyone else does. Except maybe Becky Spangler. And, from what you say, she’ll never be able to tell anybody what she knows. David Galvin loved pain, he loved suffering, he loved snuffing out people’s lives. All this talk about him and God is just more of his lies. The man was the antichrist. He was Satan. I hope David Galvin burns in hell.”
“Well, anyway, he’s dead now,” I said quietly.
“Are you sure about that?”
I was stunned by the question. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve been reading about everything that’s happened,” she said. “His list. All the other murders. It’s like . . . well, it’s like he’s still playing a game with us all.”
Just like Christine Whalen had said.
“Do you know for sure that he’s dead?” Janet Parsons asked. “I mean what if it was all a ruse or something? What if somebody else is buried in his grave? And David Galvin is still out there. Killing people. Changing lives. Playing his sick games. He called his group the Great Pretenders. Nothing was real. It was all pretend. Maybe his death is pretend too. Maybe . . .”
Janet Parsons began to cry.
She was a strong woman. But she wasn’t that strong. My meeting with her had brought back too many bad memories.
Of course, she was just being paranoid. I knew that. David Galvin was dead. Definitely dead. He had to be. There was no doubt about that.
But I checked anyway.
I guess her paranoia had gotten to me too.
The people at the prison thought I was crazy when I asked the question. So did the coroner. The cops. Everyone else too.
And, of course, it was all for nothing. It really was David Galvin who had died in the prison hospital. He was buried in an unmarked grave in New Jersey, not far from his parents’ house. There was no question about it. The monster was gone.
Death remains the great equalizer.
No one can come back from it.
Not even David Galvin.
Chapter 47
The newspaper library at the Banner was a lot different now than when I worked there eight years ago.
It used to be filled with tattered, yellowed newspaper clippings and photos—stuffed into bulging envelopes in old filing cabinets. Then they switched to microfilm, which you threaded through a projector to find the article you were looking for. Now everything was on computer. You just punched a few keys and . . . presto, there it was on your screen.
The newspaper business sure was changing awfully quickly.
I had to hurry if I wanted to keep up.
I went through all the clips on the Felix the Cat case again. I was looking for some kind of clue or lead that might help me unravel everything that had happened. I read about his nine victims. The reign of terror he spread throughout the city eleven years ago. About the special elite police squad set up to catch him. The details of his arrest. And the whole account of his trial and sentencing, when he was sent away to jail for life with no possibility of parole.
None of it told me anything new.
I was still left with the same version of the Felix the Cat story we’d always believed.
David Galvin was a monster who killed a lot of people, but he did it all by himself.
There was nothing to support his story of a group of college friends who’d helped him carry out his bloody rampage.
Except for one thing.
People were still dying.
I looked up John Montero’s file next.
Somehow he seemed to be at the center of this case.
There were hundreds of articles listed under his name. I paged through them all. I read about Wall Street takeovers, market power plays, financial world double-crosses, and cut-throat political dealings. I wrote down all the names, all the incidents. I wasn’t sure why. I still didn’t know what I was looking for.
Then I thought again about the two stories Greg Ackerman had told me. I found them both in the clips.
The first one was about a federal prosecutor from the U.S. Attorney General’s office and a witness named Louis Archer. There was a list of articles about it. I pulled up one of them. It was pretty much the way Ackerman had described it.
DA DROPS FRAUD CASE AGAINST WALL ST. BIGGIE
The key prosecution witness in the John Montero fraud and racketeering trial stunned a Manhattan courtroom yesterday when he suddenly recanted all his testimony.
Louis Archer had been expected to take the jury through a detailed account of the U.S. Attorney’s case against Montero, the Wall Street czar who is accused of laundering millions of dollars in illegal funds, evading taxes, and engaging in a variety of other unfair business practices.
But Archer told Judge Thomas Hannigan that he had perjured himself in his earlier testimony during depositions in the landmark case. He said that he had made up many of his allegations against Montero at the insistence of federal prosecutors, who threatened him with jail unless he told them what they wanted to hear.
Judge Hannigan, after conferring with attorneys for both sides, said he had no choice but to drop all charges against Montero.
Montero’s attorney, Jack Milton, at a tumultuous press conference held on the steps of the courthouse afterward, blasted the government’s tactics.
“John Montero personifies the American dream,” Milton said. “He is a hard-working, enterprising, law-abiding individual who has become very successful in his chosen field. If our government can harass someone like John Montero, then none of us is safe.” Federal prosecutors called the judge’s decision a “travesty of justice.” But they made no comment when asked if they planned to bring new charges against Montero. . . .
A few weeks later, I found another clip about the prosecutor in the case. The one who quit.
PROSECUTOR RESIGNS; SEEN AS FALL GUY FOR MONTERO MESS
The lead prosecutor in the abortive case against Wall Street czar John Montero resigned yesterday, saying he planned to take advantage of several job opportunities in private practice.
But Jonathan Ackerman, 51, gave no indication of any specific jobs offers he had received.
And sources in the prosecutor’s office said that he had been forced out of his job as a result of the public embarrassment over the government’s failed case against Montero.
“We screwed this up bigtime,” one prosecution source said. “Someone had to take the blame for it. He was the fall guy.”
I almost missed it at first. I was reading the article for the wh
ole story, trying to find something about it that linked it to Franze or one of the other deaths on Galvin’s list. But then it hit me. The lead prosecutor was named Jonathan Ackerman. Ackerman, of course. The story had been told to me by Greg Ackerman. It could have just been a bizarre coincidence, I suppose, but I didn’t think so.
Sure enough, the file under Jonathan Ackerman’s name told me what I needed to know. It said he had a wife and three children. Two sons and a daughter. One of the sons was named Gregory. The age worked out right for Greg Ackerman.
I read through the rest of his father’s file. He’d gotten a job with a small law firm in Brooklyn, but that only lasted for a year or so. Then he went into private practice for himself. It seemed like he had not been very successful. He died of a heart attack four years after the Montero case. The way I figured it, Greg Ackerman must have been just about ready to go off to college then.
What did all this mean?
Well, it told me why Greg Ackerman had such hatred for John Montero, his daughter, and everything else related to the Montero family.
I called up the other story Ackerman had told me about. The one about the man who had disappeared after he refused to sell his company to John Montero.
NO CLUES IN DISAPPEARANCE OF QUEENS MAN
Police said they were baffled by the mysterious disappearance of Edward Findlay, a businessman who was last seen when he left his house in Kew Gardens to drive to work in Manhattan.
He never arrived.
The last people to see him were his wife and daughter, who said he kissed them goodbye—the way he always did—before setting out on the 30-minute drive into lower Manhattan.
Findlay’s wife did say that her husband had seemed tense and worried for several days before he disappeared.
She said she believed his concern had something to do with business dealings he’d been involved with recently.
She said he’d been under tremendous pressure from Wall Street business tycoon John Montero to sell his share of the company—and told her he was afraid of Montero.