The Hot One

by Carolyn Murnick

  Michael cooperated with the detectives when they came his way. He had nothing much to say, but in one interview he mentioned a friend of his whom he thought they should check out. Tricia’s keys were also found lying next to her, and police picked up some DNA off them, but there wasn’t a match on who it belonged to.

  What Michael told Justin later that I heard about in the preliminary hearing—that the FBI wanted Michael’s DNA because his best friend’s girlfriend had been killed—actually wasn’t so far off. Illinois authorities did end up pursuing him in LA in 2002 to get a sample. A match was made to some DNA found on Tricia’s fingernails, but it wasn’t clear whether that DNA was from on top of or underneath her fingernails, a key distinction in proving whether she had clawed Gargiulo in self-defense, or had just picked up his DNA from casual contact.

  • • •

  By the fall of 1998, the Pacaccios had moved back into the house, even though no arrest had been made in their daughter’s murder. Gargiulo was still around Glenview at that point, but I was never clear on what he had been doing in the ensuing years. Doug did tell me about a bizarre incident Rick Pacaccio had shared with him that must have happened that year, right about the time Michael was preparing to move to LA.

  One afternoon there was a knock on the side door of the Pacaccio house, the same place where it had happened. Diane answered the door, and there was Michael. He wanted to talk to Rick, he said.

  Rick wasn’t home.

  Michael said he’d wait.

  And there he sat at the kitchen table for more than an hour while Diane tried to keep herself busy.

  Rick came home in time for dinner. When he saw Michael, he didn’t know what to make of it, but for a second he felt hopeful. Maybe they would finally get some answers. Just as Michael began to speak, the Pacaccios’ side door burst open and in marched Michael’s father and sister. They didn’t even knock. They grabbed him by the neck, forcefully, and before anyone knew what was happening, they were gone.

  What had Michael been about to tell the Pacaccios? They immediately picked up the phone to call the detectives.

  That was the last time the Pacaccios would ever see Michael Gargiulo. Later that year he would land in LA, a fresh start.

  I took a few pictures surreptitiously on my phone. I wasn’t sure why, just that I wanted to add them to the file on Ashley in my desk back in Brooklyn. They belonged there, that much I knew. The house knew the truth, whatever it was.

  • • •

  I had now been to four different states and countless sites, trying to make sense of the loss of Ashley, and I felt as though the truth was becoming a more and more abstract concept.

  Seeing Tricia’s house, though, and Michael’s, and learning about her story, made one thing clear in a new way: it can be impossible for some people—I was one of them—to ever truly move on when the truth will be always out of reach. This place knew the truth, the universe knew the truth, but perhaps the absolute truth shouldn’t be a thing for us humans to obsess over. There would always be a new place for me to visit and a new report to read, but perhaps the truth was like an asymptote in geometry: I could get only so close, and then that final distance would stretch on as a constant out into infinity. Eventually I would have shift my focus from fact finding to letting go.

  • • •

  Half a year later, I sat with my parents in the TV room of my childhood home and watched Doug’s episode of 48 Hours. The title was “The Boy Next Door,” and though it had its cheesy tabloid-television elements—synthy horror-movie sound effects, police sirens as interstitials—I viewed it without criticism, thinking of the compassion and sensitivity that I knew had gone into it. The Pacaccios were heartbreaking, and the childhood and teen pictures they had compiled of Tricia looked like ones any girl growing up in the eighties might have had—they looked like the ones I had. I understood that most people watched this type of show because they wanted to feel something. They wanted to connect to the victims and feel outraged that a killer was still at large. Sometimes the shows actually advanced an investigation, and sometimes they just made you feel a little more grateful for an hour or two. Sometimes that could be enough.

  My mother gasped when Ashley’s picture flashed on screen. I sat back, feeling a bit jaded. I knew how the sausage was made. Ashton Kutcher was mentioned, but I was pleased to see no mention of Ashley’s drug use or stripping. Detective Small showed up, telling the interviewer that “the injuries [Ashley] suffered were horrific. Probably the worst I’ve seen.” Justin, Jen, and Chris were all interviewed in a studio together. There was some jailhouse tape of Gargiulo as well, as the voice-over explained that he had met with the 48 Hours correspondent numerous times while considering doing an on-camera interview. Ultimately he had declined, but not before telling her “My truth is being 100 percent innocent, being wrongfully charged.”

  • • •

  Two months later, in July 2011, a man who had seen the episode and worked with Gargiulo as a bouncer in LA came forward to say he remembered he had heard Gargiulo bragging about having killed a girl in Chicago long before. That new witness was finally enough for a Cook County grand jury to formally indict Gargiulo for Tricia Pacaccio’s 1993 murder. He would stand trial in Illinois following the completion of his California trial.

  • • •

  The show had done its job, on me as well. I was fairly certain now that Michael Gargiulo had killed Ashley, despite not knowing the guy and despite the lack of DNA evidence. But as soon as that realization settled upon me, I felt it give way to an even murkier and uglier question, one that I knew was probably impossible to fully answer: Why?

  15

  DIMINISHING RETURNS

  I WROTE TO him once, a short query I typed out and printed on white paper from the office. I was squeamish about revealing my own handwriting for some reason—it felt scary enough that the thing I was touching would later be touched by him. Better to keep things as businesslike as possible.

  I pictured the letter ending up in some prison mail room, being sorted and scanned by a warden before it was delivered by him. I wondered if my letter could end up with his defense team.

  I rented a P.O. box at the copy place down the street so I didn’t have to use my home address on the envelope. “I’ve followed your case,” I wrote. “I grew up with Ashley and I’m trying to learn more about her life in L.A. I know you knew her.” What a euphemism if there ever was one. “Anything you could share I’d appreciate.” I understood that I was being far more polite than he deserved and that I gave the appearance of empathy. Internally I felt nothing of the sort. The gesture felt like a formality, a shot in the dark, some kind of due diligence just to be able to say I had tried. Gargiulo was a demented narcissist. I had heard him proclaim his innocence in the face of incontrovertible evidence. There was no reason to be had with him. I knew that whatever response I did receive, if there was one, would likely not even be intelligible, let alone sufficient.

  • • •

  In the movie version of this story, Gargiulo would have written back right away, and I’d be shocked by his sensitivity and humor. We’d develop a correspondence, and I’d find my emotions getting tangled in the unlikeliest of ways. I’d develop sympathy for him or a twisted affection almost against my will. I’d have to rethink everything I’d thought to be true. I’d have to rethink the person I’d thought I was. “What is happening to me?” I’d cry to my girlfriends, teary over whiskey in a dark bar. “I’m so ashamed.”

  Instead, I walked to the P.O. box every two weeks for nearly half a year and the box remained empty. Each time, after my heartbeat quickened and calmed again, I’d feel relieved.

  After my six-month lease expired, I didn’t renew it.

  • • •

  Meanwhile at Department 108, everything had started going haywire behind the scenes. Almost two years after the preliminary hearing, no trial date had yet been set. It seemed outrageous, and it was hard to find a clear explanation as to why.
In May 2012, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Sam Ohta approved Gargiulo’s request to act as his own attorney. I read the news online at my desk at the office one spring afternoon and immediately excused myself for a coffee break. What was happening here? Was it good or bad? How could this be going on—wasn’t it just the kind of absurd plot twist that occurred only in a movie of the week?

  A short time later, Gargiulo would begin appearing at his many hearings as an official pro per (meaning “on one’s own behalf”) defendant, and an amateur trial blogger would begin attending the hearings and writing them up on her site, often paying for copies of the court motions Gargiulo filed and uploading them. The blogger’s work was convenient for me, as I could read all of them from my couch in Brooklyn while drinking tea in the evening after work, although I could handle them only a few pages at a time or I’d feel sickened. I needed to alternate them with a few minutes of some schlock on TV like Real Housewives, something to remind me that life could be frivolous and madcap, not simply threatening and high stakes, careening between death and devastation and injustice every moment.

  The Housewives are in Palm Springs, and there are tears and drunkenness and someone takes off her top in a pool. Gargiulo makes a motion to exclude statements gathered from him “through fear and coercion” during a secret jailhouse maneuver called the “Perkins Operation.” One housewife with a tiny dog jokes about how infrequently she and her affable husband have sex. Gargiulo makes a motion to receive law library privileges in jail. I was hanging on to functional mental balance for dear life.

  I would analyze Gargiulo’s handwriting—his motions were now written by hand in a creepy, chunky lettering, alternating between capital and lowercase characters. Sometimes he’d stay between the lines, sometimes he wouldn’t. I’d study the childlike way his Ys slanted down angrily to the left, the strange jaunty lean of his double Fs. It felt bizarre that I should be able to get this close at such a remove, like how I had watched him in the courtroom from the back row.

  His requests were commonplace and outrageous at once: one motion asked that he be allowed to have one hand free and uncuffed while in the attorney room at the jail—as a “high-powered” inmate, he is required to have both hands cuffed at all times when he is outside his cell. Another asked that he be allowed to possess graphic crime scene photos from the murders as part of discovery at the jail. The prosecution promptly filed an opposition to this motion, calling Gargiulo a “serial, psychosexual thrill killer who engages in the systematic slaughter of beautiful women because he takes sexual pleasure from it.”

  • • •

  Later, I would come to understand that Gargiulo’s pro per decision had likely been based on more than a narcissistic desire to call the shots. Lindner probably had a little bit to do with it—the two of them had been butting heads audibly in court, and Lindner was experienced enough to know that he didn’t need to take it. He hadn’t stepped down, from my understanding, but when Gargiulo had requested a new court-appointed lawyer after nearly three years of working together, he was told it was Lindner or pro per. He had chosen pro per.

  For many defendants, I would learn, one of the most appealing things about representing yourself in trial was the privileges it afforded you in jail, namely, use of the law library, a computer, and the one phone in the jail that wasn’t tapped by wardens. Even though contraband cell phones were commonplace, law library and computer access could still act as powerful tools when it came to protecting one’s self from the violence and gang activity that went on inside.

  Since a few days after his arrest in June 2008, Gargiulo had resided in LA County Men’s Central Jail (MCJ), a Brutalist behemoth downtown built in 1963, just up the tracks from Union Station, next to the river. It was designed as a temporary holding facility for men awaiting trial or those whose sentences were less than a year, and in the past decade prisoner numbers had swelled enormously, making the total LA County Jail population the largest in the world and a nationwide symbol of the perils of prison overcrowding. A report by the ACLU called the place “a dungeon,” documenting its “pervasive pattern of brutal abuse of inmates by sheriff’s deputies” and calling for its immediate closure.

  I had seen enough gruesome prison shows to imagine what might go on inside a place like MCJ: rape, riots, stabbings—sometimes even murder. The California prison gang system was well documented, too. There were four main groups I had read about: the Aryan Brotherhood, the Black Guerilla Family, Nuestra Familia, and the Mexican mafia or “La Eme,” which was one of the biggest ones at MCJ. On the outside, the gangs ravaged swaths of LA and other California cities with violence, drug trafficking, intimidation, and extortion. On the inside, there was more of the same, plus jockeying for dominance and intricate systems of covert communication and honor codes.

  Mexican Mafia members all knew the way to slip out of handcuffs; they had a way of whistling they would use to alert other inmates when a deputy came onto the floor; and they were all to carry a weapon or homemade handcuff key on their person at all times. They knew sign language, as well, and could instruct each other in how to build shanks and handcuff keys from common items such as an inhaler without saying a word. With Gargiulo’s special status as a pro per defendant, he would have been in the perfect position to become a player for the Mexican Mafia, helping them carry out business and money laundering on the outside by speaking in code over the private phone; in return, he could earn their protection.

  • • •

  There was a new district attorney—Marna Miller had gone on leave—a new co-counsel, and a new court-appointed investigator for Gargiulo. The judge went on hiatus to appellate court—there was a new one in the interim—and then he came back again. I’d learn about each step from the amateur trial blogger or sometimes from an occasional group email that the district attorney’s office sent to friends and family members of the victims. “Gargiulo Case Update” the subject line would read, and each and every time it would rattle me for a second, especially if I got it on my phone while leaving yoga or in the bathroom at a bar or in the middle of whatever regular life event I was occupying, floating along with my mind elsewhere instead of on the fact that I had a personal connection to a serial killer trial taking place across the country. Silly me.

  The information the emails contained rarely registered as much as those first few pieces of news did, though. There were diminishing emotional returns on that kind of thing—mostly I had reached a point where the trial just seemed forever in the future, like an imaginary point in a faraway ocean that could never be reached in our lifetimes. We could talk about it and plan for it and get all our battleships in a line, but ultimately forces beyond our control would determine if and when we’d ever get to use them.

  Still, I kept up with it all. Mostly because at this point, to quote Lindner, it felt like “the right thing to do.” There were still a few things left that I wanted to see, wanted to hear, wanted to learn. I felt that at some point, my process—whatever it was—would arrive at some natural endpoint like a car slowly pulling into the driveway. It had to, right?

  • • •

  But what if it didn’t? Where was all this information being filed in my brain? Was I knocking other things out of place to make it fit? Was I putting it into the “justice being served” folder? The “old friends” file? The “closure” file? It didn’t feel like any of those, really. When I thought about all of that for too long—prison gangs, manipulation, all of us being toyed with by an alleged serial killer, the way Gargiulo appeared to drag things out and make us anxious for his next move, the way there didn’t seem to be any way to stop him—I wanted to scrunch up my eyes and make it all go away. Would I ever be a person who didn’t think of Ashley and her death every day? Did I want to be?

  The fact that Gargiulo continued to exist when Ashley didn’t felt outrageous. Sometimes it seemed that the world was a crazier and much more dangerous place than I had ever realized. Or maybe it just looked that way when I stared a
t it the wrong way: evil was deep and calculating and as unrelenting Homer’s wine-dark seas. But thinking like that too long felt like getting inside the killer’s head, and I couldn’t let myself do that.

  16

  THIRTY-SEVEN POINTS OF SIMILARITY

  THERE WAS, HOWEVER, a contingent inside the LA County District Attorney’s Office that was making it their business to understand all the details I was reluctant to examine: trying to figure out how Gargiulo thought, how he saw the world, what views he’d had from his former apartment, how he had spent his days, how he might have chosen and “hunted” his prey, and everything that had gone on leading up to his alleged calculated plan of attack.

  This sort of speculative thinking became even more relevant during the period when Gargiulo was pro per. Prosecutors often try to anticipate the arguments of opposing counsel as a strategic measure. However, during the pro per years, the potential issues were even more unpredictable. The opposing counsel was the alleged killer, who ostensibly knew more about the crimes than anyone else—because he had been there. A potential expert witness was dispatched on a multiyear project to visit all the relevant locales of the crimes and submit her findings. When the report was finally filed, it turned out to be very good news for the prosecution.

  Retired FBI Special Agent Mary Ellen O’Toole, a forensic behavior scientist, had visited and studied the crime scenes of Tricia Pacaccio, Ashley, and Maria Bruno and the attempted murder site of Michelle Murphy, the woman who had fought him off. The report had delivered the opinion that all of the crimes had been committed by the same offender. This was huge, because Gargiulo’s DNA was already linked to the Pacaccio, Bruno, and Murphy crime scenes, and now the link to Ashley’s case would be even stronger, even though his DNA had not been recovered at the scene of her murder.