Vulgar Favours

by Maureen Orth

  24

  Reese

  If the corpse of a dead man is found lying in the open on the land which the Lord, your God, is giving you to occupy, and it is not known who killed him, your elders and judges shall go out and measure the distances to the cities that are in the neighborhood of the corpse.

  —Deuteronomy 21:1–2

  the passage by an index card found in the Bible on William Reese’s desk

  ANDREW WAS IN full panic. He knew from all the news reports that he was being stalked electronically. The all-points bulletin on the Lexus was being broadcast on KYW, the area’s powerful, 50,000-watt, number-one radio station, four times an hour. A witness had already seen him ripping the antenna from the Lexus’s rear-window mount. He cut the wire to the phone receiver. He slashed the head liner at the rear window and removed the antenna wire. But because of the power box in the trunk that he could not find, the phone was still activated whenever he turned on the ignition. It would only be a matter of time before the police caught up with the Lexus, its trunk filled with the bloody residue of Lee Miglin’s murder.

  He crossed the Delaware Memorial Bridge. If he continued south on I-95, he would be heading toward Washington, D.C., in broad daylight on one of the most traveled routes of the eastern seaboard. Instead, he doubled back to an information center, where he nonchalantly inquired about points of interest in the immediate area.

  Fort Mott State Park, he was told, was off Route 49, the first exit after the bridge in New Jersey. Employees at the fort, erected in anticipation of the Spanish-American War, are convinced that Andrew had already been there the previous Monday, the day he was also buying Levi’s in New York. Carrie McIntosh, who worked in the welcome center, later said that a man she recognized as Andrew had told her that he was “touring from California.” He had declined to sign the guest register. Even though it was a cool day, he was wearing khaki shorts, and maintenance worker Larry Creamer claims to have spotted him lying down on a small hillside. When other tourists passed near, he would cover his face with a calendar of events he had been given by McIntosh. The other tourists, according to McIntosh, had noticed his Lexus with the Illinois plates in the sparsely filled parking lot. “See, they come from all over,” one woman remarked to her husband. “Even from the Land of Lincoln.”

  Adjacent to the state park is Finn’s Point National Cemetery, a Civil War burial ground where casualties of both the Confederate and Union sides, but mostly Confederates, were buried in trenches. Later, graves for German POWs of World War II were also dug there. The site could not be more remote. In order to reach the cemetery, you have to go down a long, narrow dirt road through deep woods. Tall trees eventually give way to reedy marshland as you near the Delaware River. The road ends at the cemetery parking lot. An iron gate separates the parking area from the cemetery entrance and a curving driveway going up to the caretaker’s stone house on the left and the barn and garage on the right. Most visitors are southern families looking for ancestors. Another road, which runs along the river behind the caretaker’s house, is a favorite teenage spot for drinking and making out, but that’s about as rowdy as it ever gets at Finn’s Point. According to Park Ranger David Kirschbaum, “It’s a very lonely place.”

  Bill Reese, who was forty-five, loved the peace and isolation. He had been the caretaker for twenty-two years and he took pride in his work; this land of the dead was totally alive and beautiful to him—he considered himself a caretaker of history, and he had been commended by the National Cemetery System for “superior service and dedication.” He knew all about the two thousand Confederate and Union soldiers buried beneath the lawns he kept so carefully, as well as the battles they had fought. For twenty years he had taken part in reenactments of the Civil War, even appearing in Turner Broadcasting’s TV movie Gettysburg. Bill Reese, in full black beard, cut a dashing figure. He had gone to Albany, New York, to research the uniform of the 14th Brooklyn company: bright red trousers with leather leggings, which he made himself, and a navy-blue jacket, modeled on the uniform of a French chasseur. He also made his backpack, haversack, and gunpowder cartridges. “Bill was a handy man, very meticulous,” says his best friend, Bob Shaw. “Everything he did, even if it took a little longer, he’d do it right.”

  Reese had grown up in South Jersey, in Vineland, a town of sixty thousand. He was the oldest of four children. David Reese, his father, was an electrician, and he and his wife, Nancy, were religious people who belonged to an independent Christian church; their firstborn son was equally devout. “He was never in trouble his whole life,” says his father. “He was a clean-living kid who didn’t drink or smoke.” Bill, his parents, and his sister Fay rode dirt bikes and motorcycles together. Bill loved the outdoors and animals and worked during high school in the local SPCA. Schoolwork was never much of a challenge—he especially loved history—and after graduating from Vineland High, Bill became an electrician like his father. “Sometimes you just follow in your father’s footsteps instead of what you lean toward,” says his sister Fay.

  When Bill Reese was twenty-two, he and Bob Shaw and a few others began researching the 14th Brooklyn, New York, State Militia, which had fought at Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg. Bill’s great-grandfather had fought at Gettysburg, on the Union side. They became so involved that in 1978 they incorporated themselves as a historical society: the Society for the Historical Preservation of the 14th Brooklyn, New York, State Militia Infantry. Bill was a “founding father” and first sergeant. Today the 14th Brooklyn has 250 members and has been reactivated as a branch of the U.S. Army National Guard, which troops the colors in full regalia at Guard reunions.

  In the course of pursuing his historical passion, Bill Reese became friends with the supervisor of the cemetery and found that the supervisor needed an assistant. So Bill went to Finn’s Point. When his mentor retired, Bill stayed on alone. “Bill liked the idea of going to the same place every day,” says Shaw, “and then going home.” He had found his calling. “He loved his job, if you can love a job,” says Craig Platania, Bill’s brother-in-law. “He enjoyed being by himself out in the fresh air.” Bill would even get in his truck and chase litterbugs. Once he caught up with them, he’d wave the litter at them and yell, “How would you like it if someone threw garbage on your front lawn?”

  In 1978, Bill Reese married Rebecca Gunderman, the librarian in a local elementary school. Their son, Troy, is thirteen. Not long after they were married, they bought two acres of land and built a small house in Upper Deerfield, about thirty miles from the cemetery. Bill and Rebecca liked to make things together: puppets, birdhouses, and wooden ornaments to sell at craft fairs. Bill would hitch a trailer to his 1995 red Chevy pickup and the family would go camping.

  On Friday afternoon, around 2:30 P.M., just when Andrew was being driven mad by the Lexus phone signal, Rebecca Reese telephoned her husband to make sure that they were still going out that night. He said yes. Being a man of habit, he always drove to the main road to pick up the mail around 3:30. By 4:00 he was usually ready to go home. He would lower the flag, lock the caretaker’s house and the gate, and leave.

  Bill’s former boss had had two German shepherd watchdogs at Finn’s Point, but he took them with him when he retired. Even though people said the stone house was haunted, Bill never had any fear. He loved every inch of the property. If a visitor stopped by, Bill would not hesitate to ask him in to show him the map of the grounds on a wall inside the house. Generally, though, says Ranger Kirschbaum, the site was so removed that “nobody knew he worked down there.”

  The phone in the Lexus was last activated at 3:33 P.M. that Friday. Andrew may have seen Bill Reese picking up the mail in his truck and followed him back to the cemetery. Or he may have arrived there on his own, a complete fluke for such an out-of-the-way site. Certainly it would not have taken Andrew long to deduce that the two of them were alone. The red pickup he wanted was parked close to the house. Andrew parked the Lexus next to the barn. A Christian radio station
was playing in Bill’s office and his Bible was on his desk when Andrew entered through the side door.

  REBECCA REESE COULD not understand why her husband was not home by 5:30. He was always so punctual. She worried that the pickup had broken down, or that he had lost his balance and taken a fall. He had recently been diagnosed with the beginning stages of muscular dystrophy, so she was especially concerned. She took Troy with her and drove to the cemetery, on the lookout all the way. Meanwhile, someone in the park had seen Bill’s red pickup racing out at approximately 6:10 P.M. It looked odd—Bill Reese would never drive that way.

  Rebecca was alarmed to find the iron gate to the cemetery wide open. She and Troy went through the house calling for Bill and got no answer. “Bill, Bill, are you in here?” In his office, she picked up the phone and called her parents, who lived about an hour and forty-five minutes away. “Something’s not right,” Rebecca said. “Bill’s not here, his truck is gone, and there is a dark green Lexus parked next to the garage.” Her father told her, “Hang up the phone and get out of there now. Call the police from the road and wait for them there.”

  What Rebecca’s father didn’t tell her was that he had heard a news report saying that an armed and dangerous murderer driving a green Lexus was at large in the vicinity.

  The nearest township was tiny Pennsville, about five miles away. Rebecca called the police and waited for them on the main road. When the Pennsville police arrived, they had her and Troy wait on the road outside the cemetery parking lot. They went inside the house but found nothing. Bill Reese was nowhere to be seen outside either. Then they noticed that the basement door was locked from both the inside and the outside. They broke the inside lock, went down the stairs from the kitchen, and found Bill Reese at the bottom, slumped against the wall. At first glance, the police thought it could be either murder or suicide, but since there was no weapon in sight, they quickly concluded it was murder. “This was just a cold-blooded, heartless killing,” says New Jersey State Police Detective Sergeant First Class Tom Cannavo, who was in charge of the crime-scene investigation. “He had him kneel down and shot him in the back of the head.”

  Within minutes of running a license check on the Lexus, the Pennsville police had their answer: Andrew Phillip Cunanan had killed for the fourth time in twelve days. They called for backup. “To think the guy way back in there could be a victim is really hard to believe,” says Chief Salem County Investigator Ted Vengenock. “It’s very unusual.” Lieutenant Patrick McCaffery of the Pennsville police adds. “No one even heard the shot. That tells you how remote it was.” When the police phoned the county prosecutor to notify him of a major crime, McCaffery says, he was told that the prosecutors had been notified that Cunanan was in the area. Vengenock says they only heard it on the news. Tragically, nobody had notified the Pennsville police. Why? “That’s a good question,” McCaffery says. Later, law enforcement blamed the media for Bill Reese’s death, but from the first leak onward there was enough blame to go around.

  “CAN I COME stay at your house tonight?” Rebecca Reese’s voice was very calm as she spoke to Linda Shaw, Bob’s wife, about 11 P.M.

  “Sure you can, Rebecca.” Linda thought maybe Bill and Rebecca had had an argument.

  “Can I stay for three or four months?”

  “OK. What’s the matter, Rebecca?”

  “Bill’s dead.”

  “Was he in an accident?”

  “He’s been shot. He was shot because a guy wanted his truck.”

  Rebecca Reese had been taken to the New Jersey state police barracks in Belmar. She was frightened, and the police did not want her to stay in her house alone. When Linda Shaw arrived, the Reeses’ minister was already there. He told Linda to keep an eye on Rebecca—she might be suicidal. Linda took Rebecca and Troy home with her; Rebecca’s parents, who lived in Whiting, New Jersey, also came to spend the night. People took turns staying up, to make sure nothing happened.

  At 3 A.M. the Lexus was hauled away on a flatbed truck to be processed. Inside Bill Reese’s office, investigators found his Bible open to the passage in Deuteronomy talking about unknown murderers. “It was very strange and very eerie,” says investigator Tom Cannavo. “It was similar to what had just happened.”

  At 4:30 A.M. the Shaws’ phone rang. Rebecca answered. It was the state police calling to say that the victim definitely was Bill and that the investigators had completed their work at the crime scene. They wanted to know if Bill had any credit cards. Only then did Rebecca break down and cry. “Until then she wanted to believe that it was someone else—it couldn’t be Bill,” says Linda Shaw.

  Meanwhile, panic was sweeping the surrounding area, mostly brought on, chief investigator Ted Vengenock says, by the sight of fifteen or twenty satellite TV vans racing through the sparsely populated townships to the crime scene. “A number of residents were very concerned that evening,” he says. Police heard a rumor that a woman was so scared when she heard a noise in her bedroom that she dove through the screen on her bedroom window and ran up the street in her nightgown and slippers. A cop reportedly smashed up his car chasing the wrong red pickup.

  No one knew whether Andrew was still in the area or not, although police sought to calm fears by stating they did not think he would linger. “We were pretty sure that after that night he was gone,” says McCaffery. “If that truck wasn’t found within a certain number of hours, he was out of here.” Privately law-enforcement officials felt that a bright red pickup truck with a license tag that was being broadcast throughout several states within minutes of the finding of Reese’s body ought to be snagged in a flash. “It’s a very visible pickup truck that should have been easily seen,” says Vengenock. But apparently Andrew took off straight down I-95 with impunity.

  The satellite trucks came equipped with searchlights that shone so brightly over the little stone house and cemetery that at times the scene resembled a night game of the World Series. Local reporters were doing stand-ups. Fox TV was shooting last-minute footage for America’s Most Wanted, which would air the following night. The usually empty parking lot was full. The next morning, when Bob Shaw went to get Rebecca’s car, the area looked like a space station with all the satellite dishes pointing straight up and “people walking up and down the road with clipboards.” Shaw said he and Rebecca’s father “tried to look like police, because if they had any idea who we were, we would have been besieged.”

  Pennsville police set up a command center for the various law-enforcement agencies involved behind the station house and tried to figure out where Andrew might be going next. “I thought he would have headed for New York,” McCaffery says. But no one really had a clue. “Once he left the cemetery,” says FBI Deputy Assistant Director Roger Wheeler, “he could be anywhere in the country or literally anywhere in the world, because he did have a passport. We really didn’t have specific, exact sightings to put him anywhere at a certain time.”

  The FBI began an exhaustive search for Reese’s pickup at every major airport between South Jersey and Boston, plus “hotel parking lots, shopping center parking lots, airport parking lots, bus terminals—anyplace where someone might park a car and leave it for a period of time,” Wheeler says. “Literally, a logical fugitive lead in this type of case would be, Go check the parking lots.” That weekend was also the climax of Gay Pride Week in Philadelphia. The FBI was on the scene and contacted various gay organizations in the area to be on the lookout for Andrew and to distribute fliers with his photo—all to no avail.

  The autopsy took place on Saturday. The medical examiner concluded that William Reese had died from a single “gunshot wound of head with perforations of skull, brain, and face, aspiration of blood and massive bleeding.” Reese’s brother-in-law, Craig Platania, had been called in the night before to identify the body officially. On Saturday, the state police arranged things so that while they were briefing reporters at the crime scene Rebecca was being questioned by the police in another location. That way she was spared exp
osure to the media. The FBI quickly concluded that William Reese was not connected to Andrew Cunanan in any way but rather was the victim of a crime of opportunity.

  In the ensuing days, the TV reporters wouldn’t leave Rebecca Reese alone. She had to call police to get their vans off her neighbor’s property. For several weeks they would intermittently pull up to her house at night without warning and shine their lights in her windows, “giving the effect of being in a Nazi concentration camp,” said one observer. When that happened, Rebecca would have to get Troy and find cover in her own house, when all she wanted was the privacy to grieve alone.

  APPARENTLY ANDREW HAD worn gloves to murder Lee Miglin, whose wallet and credit cards he left in the Lexus glove compartment along with a blank bank check on the account of Lee and Marilyn Miglin. A “creative thinking” cassette belonging to Lee Miglin was still on the tape deck. Inside a clear plastic garbage bag found in the trunk was the black suede Ferragamo shoe that matched the one on Lee Miglin’s corpse, as well as the bloody screwdriver Andrew had punctured him with and an assortment of gloves: white cotton gloves with black rubber dots on them that matched the gag in Lee Miglin’s mouth, with a piece of masking tape stuck to one; heavily bloodstained brown suede gloves; and blue cloth gloves with leather-tipped fingers, also stained with blood. There were also bloody paper towels, a Banana Republic shopping bag, and a Pratesi shopping bag with Marilyn Miglin’s name on it.