The Hot One
Page 19
All of us have an origin story, some place where we started from or some inciting incident that makes us who we were. So much would always be unknowable, I understood, but I wondered if perhaps learning more about Gargiulo’s past could help fill in some holes. Since I hadn’t known Gargiulo in the “outside world,” as Jen, Chris, and Justin had, I couldn’t attest to his creepiness or experience any unprejudiced gut feeling about him, since I had only ever encountered him handcuffed and charged with murder. I wanted to come to some conclusion on my own, if that was possible, about if he had done it.
• • •
If I were a spiritual sort, I might have called what happened next divine timing, but suffice it to say I was excited and a little spooked that just a little while later I received an email from a producer named Doug Longhini at CBS’s 48 Hours who was working on a show about the Illinois case against Gargiulo. He had attended the preliminary hearing in LA after I’d left and had gotten my information from another CBS producer I had met there, and he was interested in talking to me about Ashley for background. (Before I left court, I’d exchanged emails with Christine from LA Weekly and the two other media people I had met in hopes of keeping in touch about the things I’d be missing later in the week.)
In his email, Doug explained that he had been following the Gargiulo case for the past two years, focusing on Gargiulo’s connection to the Tricia Pacaccio murder from 1993. He went on to say that even though Gargiulo’s DNA had been found on Tricia’s fingernails, the Cook County state’s attorney had refused to bring charges against him.
Doug had interviewed Tricia’s family the month before, and though they were still deeply traumatized, they had participated in the interview because they hoped the CBS show could convince Illinois authorities to take another look at the case, especially given all the new information that was coming out in the hearings in California.
I was intrigued, not just because I was eager to learn more about Gargiulo and what had happened to Tricia but also because I was curious about how a real investigative crime reporter/producer behaved and what it looked like not to have a personal stake in things. Doug had approached victims and their families with the conviction that the work he was doing could help bring them justice and, perhaps, peace. I envied that moral clarity and sense of purpose. I didn’t feel that my own personal auditing and researching and observing was contributing to anything as lofty as justice or peace for a grieving family, but still it felt important in its own way.
• • •
We met for a coffee at a place near my office. Doug was kind-looking, my father’s age, and I came away impressed with his sensitivity and experience. I spoke about Ashley and the questions I had about her last year of life, but mostly I found myself listening a lot more than talking. The mandate of his show was always justice for victims and their families, he said. Justice for Ashley, I thought. What would that look like?
In addition to loads of biographical details about Gargiulo that I hadn’t learned at the hearing, Doug shared a guiding principle about his reporting practice that I continue to think about to this day: “We’re not in the business of trying to convince someone why they should talk to us. They have to have their own reason.”
With that in mind, he told me, his production would not be approaching 2008 victim Michelle Murphy. The experience of having to talk about the before and after again would be too disturbing. It just wasn’t worth it. Doug told me he had had some email and telephone contact with Ashley’s father but that it had been inconsistent. Just when it seemed that they would be close to making a plan to meet, something would come up for Mr. Ellerin.
Part of me felt reassured hearing that Doug had also experienced difficulty reaching the Ellerins. I had often wondered if I should be trying harder to connect with them, beyond the multiple unanswered letters I had sent over the years. Should I send them something? Should I show up at their home in California? All of that felt terribly invasive. I realized that subconsciously I had all along been hoping that they would have their own reason for wanting to talk to me. By this point, I had come to accept that they did not.
• • •
I would remember Doug’s words again two years later when I met Chris outside court for the first time, watching his raw emotions give way to delicate insights. Someone might not tell you his motivation straight out for sharing their story, I saw—they might not understand it themselves—but if you listened closely and gave them time, things would begin to make sense for both of you.
• • •
Doug painted Gargiulo to be a cocky bully. He told me how he had driven a dark green pickup truck and had done stints as an HVAC guy and a bouncer in LA but would tell anyone who’d listen that he’d been thisclose to becoming an Olympic boxer. For a time he had thought about trying to make it as an actor—his first year out in LA, a USC film student had cast him as a boxer in his graduate thesis, a short feature called “Boxing’s Been Good to Me.”
I found the movie on YouTube as soon as I got back to the office: Gargiulo appears in the film only briefly, meeting the protagonist in the ring for a practice bout and leveling him in less than thirty seconds with a nasty right hook. In the background at the end of the scene, you can see him raising his fists above his head in a victory dance. The main character is slumped over on the floor and later told by his disappointed coach, “You just ain’t got what it takes. You gotta be a killer inside.”
As the credits rolled, I felt dirty. The short was dated 2000, so depending on the time of year, it might have been filmed only a matter of months before Gargiulo allegedly killed Ashley. Tricia Pacaccio was already seven years dead. This was the first time I had seen him younger and in his prime, close to the way Ashley would have seen him, not the drawn character with the shaved head and orange jumpsuit I had seen in court. The difference was striking.
Twenty-four-year-old Gargiulo was tall and muscular, his upper body covered in menacing tattoos: a rabid-looking dog on his left forearm, a skull on his right shoulder, the Chinese character for “champion” across his back. I wanted to think that I could pick out the violence inside him already, just from that momentary glimpse on-screen, but in truth, all I saw was awkward acting.
• • •
Five months later, I stood in front of Gargiulo’s childhood home in Glenview, Illinois. I had driven there on a few hours’ break from a wedding weekend in Chicago. It was the quintessential upper-middle-class suburban town, straight out of a John Hughes movie. I hadn’t planned on going to the house when I’d booked the tickets earlier in the summer, but then I got to my hotel and I realized I’d never be closer to where Ashley’s alleged killer—an alleged serial killer—had grown up. By itself, it might not have been a place I would have sought out on my own, but since I was already most of the way there, it felt too big to ignore. Maybe if I saw it—maybe if I saw where Tricia had died, too—I’d feel a sense of connection. It was like those “Dearly Departed” tours of Hollywood, where they take you on a bus around to all the sites where celebrities met their end and tourists can take pictures. For a time, I’d heard, they had been going past Ashley’s house, Ashton Kutcher and all.
• • •
None of the Gargiulos lived there anymore—Michael’s siblings had scattered in different directions in the years after Tricia had died, and then his father moved across town. The house was just around the corner from a primary school, with a banner out front reading CHARACTER COUNTS IN GLENVIEW. It looked a bit desolate now; there was a motorcycle with a FOR SALE sign leaning against the big tree in the front yard.
“I knew this moment well,” Geoff Dyer wrote in Out of Sheer Rage after arriving at the nondescript house in Sicily where D. H. Lawrence briefly lived. “You look and look and try to summon up feelings which don’t exist. You try saying a mantra to yourself, ‘D. H. Lawrence lived here.’ You say, ‘I am standing in the place he stood, seeing the things he saw . . .’ but nothing changes, everything remains exactly the
same: a road, a house with sky above it and the sea glinting in the distance.”
This is where a murderer grew up, this is where a murderer grew up, I repeated to myself, just as Dyer had written about. I felt nothing except cold.
• • •
The neighborhood seemed friendlier than I had imagined, though, so different from rural New Jersey, where Ashley and I had grown up. Where we had lived, you couldn’t see your neighbor’s house from yours and there was no sidewalk to stroll on. Here everyone had a short driveway and maybe a quarter acre of land, and their houses were built close to the street. It seemed you could practically see what people’s plans were for the day if you just looked out your window. Were they dressed for a day in the city and running late for work? Or was it a thrown-on-rain-boots-to-drop-the-kids-at-camp-and-come-back kind of morning? You could probably see who had stocked up on groceries before the snow was due to come and who was finally putting on that addition out back. This wasn’t the big city—New York or LA; when a murder happened in a place like this, I could imagine that it’d be quite some time before things got back to business as usual, if they ever did.
Tricia was murdered outside her home, in the house that was just around the corner from where I stood, only about a thousand feet away from the Gargiulo house. From local news clippings I had found from the time, it sounded as though after the tragedy, people had gone into crisis mode. The church where the Pacaccios went, St. Catherine’s, had filled up, and counselors had worked overtime at the high school. Everyone seemed to agree: Glenview wasn’t the sort of place where things like this happened. They all wanted to know: Who would do something like that to someone like Tricia?
• • •
In contrast to the way Ashley was written about, eighteen-year-old Tricia Pacaccio seemed about as wholesome as they come, according to the news articles. No one would ever call her a party girl. Everyone in town loved the whole Pacaccio family; it sounded as if they were like a Hallmark movie. The mother, Diane, was always in the kitchen cooking something, and Tricia’s father, Rick, worked at Bell Telephone and was always kind when the neighborhood kids wanted to hang around while he was working on cars in the driveway. He’d show them the way the engine was put together and never lose his patience when one of them would inevitably do something careless. The younger boys, Doug and Tom, were bright and well behaved.
And then there was Tricia. She seemed to be one of those girls who did everything right, I read, but not in a way that made anyone jealous. No defense attorney could parade her sex life and drug use for a jury to see, as if it had some bearing on why she had been murdered. It just wasn’t possible.
At Glenbrook South High School, Tricia had wended her way among the different cliques without belonging to any particular one. She was liked by just about everyone: the debate kids, the band kids, the straight-A students like her, she treated them all the same. She was pretty but not intimidatingly so. She had olive skin and wavy brown hair that reached just below her shoulders.
In photos from the various articles, it looked as though she had kept her style simple. She wore cardigans and jeans. For her senior photo, she had just a bit of lip gloss on and a pale blue top that almost matched the starry backdrop she sat in front of. She wanted to meet “interesting people who had the same desire as [she did], to save the world,” an article said she wrote in her yearbook.
“Your strength, determination, and strong sense of right and wrong will see you through,” her parents wrote back to her in a congratulatory message.
• • •
Thinking of Tricia as the “good girl” led to a bit of cognitive dissonance in me. I’d had in mind that all of Gargiulo’s alleged murders had been triggered by a sense of sexual rage or jealousy. Tricia was so unassuming and demure—so young—how could she have been targeted? But then I realized how those labels—the hot one, the smart one, the good girl—were essentially meaningless. They were about how others viewed you and, maybe, how you viewed yourself, but they were not based upon any quantifiable truth. One man’s hot one was another man’s smart one, and if you were a murderous psychopath seeing the world through a distorted lens, you’d make anything fit one way or another.
• • •
I went to the Pacaccio house next, just at the bottom of a cul-de-sac. I pulled over across the street from the house and sat in my rental car, going over old Chicago Tribune clippings about the case that I had printed out from LexisNexis. I wanted to see if I could picture exactly how everything had happened back in 1993.
Some of the stories went into lots of detail about the night of Tricia’s murder. Apparently her crowd of friends was doing a graduation party scavenger hunt, driving around the neighborhood looking for clues, all of them ending up at a big party. The concept seemed so quaintly dated, even though Tricia had graduated from high school only three years before Ashley and I did. Tricia was leaving for Purdue in a week, and the plan was that they’d cruise around and then meet up for a late dinner and party at T.G.I. Friday’s, where Tricia’s boyfriend worked. It had taken some organization, but they’d managed to plan it to fall on the creepiest, coolest date of all: Friday the thirteenth.
At the end of it all, it was after 1 a.m., and by the time Tricia got home, it was almost two in the morning. Reports conflicted as to whether Tricia had driven herself home, or whether one of her friends drove her.
• • •
Her father, Rick, usually got up early to take the dog out, and he was the one who found her body. He saw her tennis shoes first, pointing down toward the driveway with her legs lying limp over the second step of the side entrance. He fell to his knees on front of the stoop. Their neighbor Evelyn Kane was making breakfast in her kitchen across the street, and she heard the noise and quickly headed for the window. She saw Tricia’s car in the driveway, and she saw Rick beside it, and then there was more yelling. Her brother Gerald was in town from Iowa, and the two of them ran out to see what was going on.
Tricia’s legs and upper body were covered with dried blood, but there were pools of it around her body as well. Stab wounds covered her chest; one looked to be straight through the heart. Her arm had been snapped back behind her and was pinned under her back in an unnatural way. Rick was kneeling beside her, wailing still, keening almost. “Is she breathing? Is she breathing?” he shouted. Gerald, who knew CPR, checked for a pulse, but he knew it was too late. In a matter of hours, the neighbors came out, the police tape went up, and television crews began camping out on the lawn, the one I was staring at right now. It still looked partially green, even though it was near Halloween.
• • •
Years later, when I reached Tricia’s friend Karen by phone, she still wondered at age forty-one: What if? In her memory, she had been the one to drive Tricia home, and through the years she still replayed the night in her head. What if she had gotten out of the car in the dark and walked Tricia to the door? What if she had waited to see that Tricia got into the house? “If I had done that, maybe she would have been safe,” she said. We were quiet. I resisted filling the space with my own perspective. Don’t do that to yourself, I wanted to tell her. I used to think like that, too. It eats away at you. But nothing was ever about just one moment, one false step, one trip to LA, one flat tire.
Instead I said nothing. I didn’t want to cancel out Karen’s feelings with my own.
“I envy you,” Karen continued. “Going in there and trying to figure out what happened. When it happened to me, I felt like I was completely powerless and my job was to mourn.”
I had never considered things that way: that asking questions and seeking answers the way I had done, as confused and overwhelmed as I felt most of the time, was something that another person might feel unequipped to do; that it took a sort of confidence, a sense of entitlement even, that I didn’t often associate with myself but that apparently someone else could see.
• • •
An older woman looked out her window from across the str
eet as I got out of my rental car. Could it be Evelyn Kane? I wondered if she knew why I was there. Perhaps she had a better idea about me than even I did about myself. She was probably used to people like me: the gawkers, the memorial makers, the people on the periphery trying to be a part of something. I looked down and tried not to be too conspicuous.
I stood on the edge of the property, nearly in the middle of the street, trying to picture how Tricia’s body might have looked. There were the cement steps up and then a door that had since been painted shut, Doug had told me, but you couldn’t tell that from where I was. The lamppost out front was covered by a large plastic jack-o’-lantern. Whose benefit was it for, I wondered? I imagined the Pacaccios had had it for years, pulling it out each fall to keep up appearances. Perhaps they did it for the neighborhood kids, because it wasn’t their fault that a girl had been murdered on their street.
It was the saddest pumpkin I had ever seen.
• • •
Doug had told me that after Tricia had died, the Pacaccios couldn’t bear to live in the house anymore, but they didn’t want to sell it, either. The family had posted a reward of $10,000 for any information leading to an arrest, but nothing had come of it. They had moved in with Diane’s mother, but Rick still stopped by the house from time to time to water the plants and mow the lawn. They kept Tricia’s room upstairs exactly as she had left it. They didn’t change a thing, even the “Sweet 16” poster that leaned against the wall, glitter glue letters sparkling.
Michael had been friends with one of Tricia’s brothers, and after her death he had started behaving strangely. He’d sent flowers to the Pacaccios—other things, too, as the months went on.
Meanwhile, the criminal investigation continued. Police questioned everyone: neighbors, classmates, people who had been at the party that had apparently been going on across the street. Tricia’s boyfriend was interviewed early on, but he was quickly ruled out. His coworkers at the restaurant said he was sensitive and well liked, and many attested to how hard he had cried over Tricia’s open casket at the funeral.