Killer Triggers

by Joe Kenda

  I hung up the phone and looked at my wife.

  She gave me the one-finger salute, snatched away the beer I’d just opened, and took a big swig.

  “I guess this is mine now,” she said.

  That was my cue to get out before she started throwing things at me. Kathy had a better arm than Elway, but the Broncos made it to the Super Bowl without her help.

  My first Sunday off was over before the Broncos’ first play from scrimmage. I really had to go to the crime scene. Our police chief never showed up unless the stakes were high.

  I drove to the blue-collar neighborhood just east of downtown. It’s never a good sign when every television satellite truck within a hundred miles is parked on the street before you arrive. It looked like the Super Bowl parking lot.

  The chief was there, and all his chiefettes were running around like chickens with their heads cut off.

  I asked the patrolman outside, “What the hell is this all about?”

  “There’s an altar in the house, an animal sacrifice, and an adult female and four kids dead.”

  Okay, that sounds bad.

  I headed toward the front door to check it out for myself but ran into a small troop of top brass. They were all in a dither about the religious-sacrifice angle.

  “I’m gonna go tell the press about this,” said the chief.

  “Okay, but let me take a look first before we say something to the press that we can’t unsay later,” I suggested.

  Homicide investigations can go sideways fast if the press gets hold of a mere first impression of a crime scene, because often those first impressions are either flat-out wrong or not fully supported by the facts gathered later.

  I knew that once newspaper headlines and television news reports started screaming “Religious sacrifice!” we’d have every nut job in the western United States flooding us with phone calls.

  To prevent that from happening, I always tried to bring order to chaos. Step one: talk to the first officer at the scene.

  I found him and pulled him aside.

  “Okay, what have you got?”

  “The neighbors say the woman believed to be the mother of the kids just rented the house and moved in five days ago,” the patrolman said. “Her brother was trying to call her for a couple of days and couldn’t get an answer. So this morning, he came to the house and found it all locked up. Windows and doors, with the blinds pulled down. But her car was parked outside and that worried him.”

  When the brother walked to the rear of the house, he found a back window where the blinds were not pulled all the way down. He could see a pair of legs sprawled on the floor.

  “That’s when he called 911, and I was dispatched to check it out,” the officer said.

  This is called a “welfare check,” but it’s not a government handout. We dispatch an officer to check on the welfare of a resident due to concerns expressed by neighbors or family members or the mailman. We do a lot of welfare checks. Most of them turn out to be nothing.

  This one was really something.

  “Everything was locked up tight,” the patrolman told me. “But when I looked in the window, I saw someone down, too, so I used a knife to jimmy the window lock and climb inside.”

  He had to take a pause and gather himself before describing what he found. I’ll warn you, it was disturbing.

  There were five bodies: four children and an adult female. From the condition of their bodies, they had likely been dead three or four days.

  One of the older kids was in the bathroom with his pants down. The others were still in bed. The mother was wearing a T-shirt and underwear, no pants.

  “Then there was this sort of altar over the fake fireplace, with religious artifacts and pictures on it, and next to it was a dead cat,” the patrolman said.

  When he came out and reported what he’d seen to the patrol supervisor who had arrived, the supervisor hit the panic button and decided that what we had here was a ritualistic killing.

  He put the call out, making it sound as if the Manson gang had struck again, which brought all the brass and media streaming in.

  My impression was that the supervisor had been watching too many scary movies involving voodoo hoodoo.

  “Okay, I have a few questions for you before I go in and take a look,” I said to the patrol officer. “Did you check every door of the house?”

  “Yes, totally secured.”

  “Any damage or indication of damage?”

  “None.”

  “Is there a basement access?”

  “No.”

  “So, you checked everything.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You say there is a dead cat on a plank?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dead how? A knife in the chest? Gutted? How was it killed?”

  “It just looks like it’s asleep. No visible wounds.”

  “What about the people? Gunshot wounds, stab wounds, blood?”

  “None of that . . . Well, there was a little blood coming from some of the victims’ noses—like a bloody nose, not like a wound.”

  I went back to our band of brass wringing their hands over a ritual murder.

  “You’d better not have a press conference yet.”

  “Why not?” asked one of the minions.

  “Unless this is a homicidal Houdini, our killer could still be in the house, because it’s all locked and sealed tight,” I said. “The other alternative is that this was all done by an evil spirit that can pass through walls.”

  I was telling them that we needed to take a closer look before sounding the alarms and panicking the populace. My Spidey senses were telling me that this wasn’t the kinky killing it had been cracked up to be.

  “Oh, and the whole religious-ritual angle is looking like pure bullshit. But again, I’m going in to get a look at it all, so please, cool your jets.”

  The first officer on the scene had forced a window open, looked around the tiny place, and then quickly unlocked the front door and walked out. His training had taught him to get in and out quickly to lessen any chance of disturbing possible evidence.

  My job was to look for that evidence while not screwing it up.

  I went in through the front door and could pretty much see everything I needed to see. In the first room was the “altar,” which was no more than a two-by-six board about eight feet long, suspended over bricks to create a mantel over the fake fireplace. The “religious artifacts” were the sort you’d find in many Hispanic homes. The Madonna portrait. Some prayer candles and other typical Christian decor.

  The dead cat was just a dead cat. It hadn’t been mutilated. There was no blood present. It looked asleep, but it was dead. No doubt about that.

  It was a small house, so from the front room, I could see the bodies of the family members scattered about. There was just a bit of blood and mucus running from the noses of a couple of the victims.

  What really caught my eye were the telltale striation patterns on the skin of those victims closest to me.

  Uh-oh. I think I know what this is . . .

  I realized I needed to get the hell out of there, but before I could take a step, my head exploded with such pain that I nearly went down right where I stood.

  It took all the strength I had to fight it off and stumble out the front door and into the yard. My head was spinning.

  I went to my knees. Everyone rushed toward me.

  “Stay out of the house,” I said, fighting off nausea. “It’s full of carbon monoxide. That’s our killer. Call the city utilities crew and get them to shut off the gas!”

  silent and deadly

  In this investigation, I was the canary in the coal mine. When a Kenda goes down, you know there is something very bad in the air.

  Carbon monoxide is an odorless gas that will put you
down in a heartbeat. Fumes are produced by your stove, generator, grill, space heater, furnace, or the car warming up with the garage doors shut.

  Anything that burns fuel, basically, can create carbon monoxide. If those fumes somehow build up inside a confined area because of a broken or blocked pipe or lack of ventilation, it’s good night, Charlie.

  You won’t smell it, and you won’t see it coming. Victims of carbon monoxide poisoning often have a unique skin discoloration in a striated pattern of white and pink. Cops call it “carnation pink and apple-blossom white” as a way to remember it.

  Another thing about carbon monoxide poisoning is that the victims suffer severe abdominal pain and think they have to go to the bathroom. That is why one of the kids was found in the bathroom with his pajamas down.

  The mother was dressed for bed in a T-shirt and underwear. Like the kids, she probably woke up with her head pounding, made it a few steps into the living room, and was overcome. A planter was knocked over beside her. She probably grabbed it to keep from falling.

  The fact that she was overcome so quickly indicated a very high level of carbon monoxide in the house. That was confirmed when the city utility division sent out a guy with a handheld meter. He had to go inside to take a reading.

  “Be very careful,” I said. “Get in and get out. I was in there only a couple of minutes, and my head is still pounding.”

  He stepped up on the porch, and the meter’s alarm went off.

  “Holy shit!” he said, looking back at me. “You weren’t kidding.”

  He opened the door, extended his arm, and put the meter inside. When he pulled it back out after thirty seconds, the meter showed a concentration one thousand times the strength capable of killing a person.

  “I’ve never seen a reading that high,” he said.

  We had to purge the deadly gas before we could go back in. The city-owned utility company shut off the natural gas to the home’s furnace at the meter. The fire department came out with some giant fans and vented the place.

  The ritualistic-murders theory went out the window with the carbon monoxide, so the police brass and the media went home. I wasn’t so lucky.

  Actually, I didn’t want to go home, because something about this case was bothering me. And no, it wasn’t the poisonous CO gas still trapped in my thick head, as my wife suggested when notified that I wasn’t coming home for a while.

  “You can come back home,” said my wife. “This isn’t a murder investigation. It’s a gas leak, so it’s accidental.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. “With concentrations that high, it could be a homicide case. I’m going to keep working a while.”

  a deadly hack job

  On January 9, 1990, Sophia Gerardo, thirty-four, moved into a crummy wood-frame rental house with her sons Nash, ten; Mario, thirteen; and Daniel, eight; along with her nephew Mark McPeak, fifteen.

  Sophia was fighting for her family’s survival when she rented that house. Her husband and her oldest son were in prison, so she was working two jobs and putting in eighty hours a week. One of her jobs was stuffing advertising flyers into the local newspaper.

  Desperate for a place to live, she had found the cheapest rental she could afford. They moved in, and on their first night, the kids helped Sophia unpack for several hours before going to sleep in the two small bedrooms.

  That was the last anyone heard from them. Over the next few days, family members tried to call Sophia, to check on her and the kids, but couldn’t reach her. On the fifth day of no communication, her brother went to the house.

  It was a good thing he couldn’t get in, or he might have died, too.

  The crime lab went to work checking out the source of the heavy carbon monoxide levels in the house. They pulled the grill off the gas-fired wall heater, and it looked as though someone had beaten a part of it with a hammer. No one could identify the part at first, but it appeared that someone had tried to bang it into place.

  We brought in a city utilities guy with more expertise. He took one look and said, “Oh, fuck! That’s a vent. It’s supposed to prevent carbon monoxide from being forced into the home, by venting it out through the roof, but some moron beat it into place to make it fit. The problem is, the part wasn’t fitting—because they put the vent in backwards.”

  The knucklehead installation resulted in the “vent” actually turning into a carbon monoxide generator that flooded the house with deadly fumes.

  Now the question became, was this just a dumbass mistake? Or was it done with intent to kill? But who would want to kill Sophia and these kids?

  We first looked at her husband, who had a lengthy rap sheet, but he’d been locked up for two months. We interviewed other family and friends and learned that Sophia reportedly had not one boyfriend but two.

  We checked them out. The dueling boyfriends knew about each other. They tried to implicate each other, but both had alibis, and we let go of that thread.

  We found something more promising when our detectives went to City Hall and searched records on the house and its owners. We found that the current owner was Darrell Atkinson, a retired fire captain who was widely known as a slumlord.

  He had a bad reputation among the patrol officers who worked in the area. They described him as a bitter old guy who preyed on low-income people, charging them high rents for shitty, poorly maintained houses.

  “He complains to us all the time about his renters, but he does nothing to maintain his properties,” we were told. “He won’t spend a nickel and then raises hell when his tenants complain or bail.”

  We talked to some of the city firemen who had worked with Atkinson. He wasn’t exactly the most popular guy in the firehouse. They said he had grown up dirt poor during the Depression and joined the fire department so he would always have a steady job.

  “Mostly, all he would talk about was how much he’d suffered as a child and how he bought up a lot of dumps as rentals because he never wanted to be poor again,” one of his former coworkers said.

  He had succeeded in becoming one of the city’s biggest slumlords and building up a big pile of money, but none of that seemed to relieve his misery. He certainly didn’t seem to take any joy in buying himself nice things. Instead, he preyed on the same sort of people who struggled to get by, just as his family had.

  While checking those city records, our detectives turned up a very interesting document. It was a city inspection report noting that previous tenants of the same house suffered carbon monoxide poisoning while living there in 1989, just a year before the deaths of Sophia and the four children.

  What a coincidence! Or not?

  The report said that William Haag and his wife, Becky, were the renters back then. When I read it, I had to laugh at their story, just a little. They put a fresh new spin on the “Not now, honey, I have a headache” excuse.

  In the report, Haag said he’d told his wife he had a headache that night before heading to bed. Becky actually suggested that he could either take an aspirin for the headache or have sex with her.

  Not surprisingly, Bill passed on the aspirin and took the sex.

  The report didn’t say, but we’ll just assume that afterward they cuddled and fell asleep.

  But then it gets even weirder.

  Bill and Becky woke up in separate beds—in a hospital.

  It wasn’t the sex that almost killed them, in case you were wondering.

  They got lucky (after getting lucky) when a friend happened by. Normally, that might have been lousy timing, but in this case, it was very fortunate.

  The friend knocked and no one answered, but the door was unlocked, so he stepped inside and called out for them.

  No answer.

  Sensing that something was wrong, he looked into the bedroom and found them unconscious on the floor. He called 911, and the EMTs and ER docs saved their lives
by pumping them full of oxygen.

  When you breathe in carbon monoxide, it rapidly replaces the oxygen in your bloodstream. At high concentrations like those found in that shitty little house of death, the gas can kill you in just a couple of minutes.

  The CDC says that in the United States, at least 430 people die every year from accidental CO poisoning. Another fifty thousand find themselves in the ER due to carbon monoxide intake like the Haags’. Typical symptoms include headaches, dizziness, weakness, nausea, vomiting, chest pain, and confusion.

  I highly recommend getting CO detectors for your home. Give them to your friends for Christmas. They save lives. It’s a pretty cheap investment, all things considered.

  After they learned of the Haags’ near-death experience, the city utilities inspectors went out and found that the house had three decrepit wall heaters that were older than dirt. All were tagged as unsafe.

  The red tags signaled that no one could occupy the house until the heaters were repaired or replaced by a licensed contractor, then inspected by the city and approved.

  We dug into the city files and found that Atkinson simply had shut down two of the faulty wall heaters. There was a note in the file that the city had received notice from the landlord that the third wall heater had been repaired. He included the name of a heating contractor and his phone number.

  We brought Atkinson in for questioning on that, and he said it had been repaired. Then he tried to throw in a red herring or two, claiming that Haag might have messed up the vent system by trying to fix it himself after he and his wife nearly died.

  It was a typical bullshit attempt to cover his own ass—the old ploy of, “Well, if you don’t believe that, how about this?”

  We went back to Haag. He said they moved out shortly after being gassed, and he never touched the vent in the crappy wall heater. He did open it up and remove a wad of soot that had built up, because it was stinking up the house.

  Our guys also interviewed the contractor about the alleged repair paid for by Atkinson. We showed him the ticket from our public utilities records, featuring his signature, license number, and phone number.