by Dana Perry
And so Maura Walsh slowly bled to death, alone in that dark alley.
Which made it all even more tragic.
This last part really got to me. I could imagine what it must have been like for Maura Walsh – lying there in the dark, terrified, in terrible pain and knowing she was going to die. I understood what she felt in those last minutes of her life because the same thing had happened to me when I’d been attacked in Central Park twelve years earlier. Someone found me in time to save my life, but Maura Walsh hadn’t been so lucky. She’d remained conscious for fifteen minutes to an hour, the ME’s office said. I just hoped it was closer to fifteen minutes and that she didn’t suffer for the whole hour. A massive search of the area afterward turned up nothing. No suspect, no real evidence, no witnesses. The police had questioned known persons who were in the Little Italy neighborhood that night; suspects with a background that fit this kind of crime; ex-cons who might have had some sort of grudge against Maura Walsh – all to no avail.
The prevailing theory these days was that it was a random shooting. She stumbled into the midst of an ongoing crime or just ran into some lunatic looking for someone to kill. That person accosted her, stripped her of her gun, shot her and left her to die.
Back at my desk, I called up a YouTube video of the press conference the police had held the day after Maura died.
Her father, Deputy Police Commissioner Mike Walsh, was front and center at the press conference. He was a tall, silver-haired man who stood ramrod straight in his uniform, staring straight ahead without any visible emotion as everyone talked about his daughter’s death.
I had come across a newspaper article about the Walsh family when I was looking through all the materials on Maura Walsh’s background. It had run in the Tribune some time ago. The headline was: CARRYING ON A FAMILY TRADITION: MAURA WALSH IS TRUE BLUE ALL THE WAY. There was a picture of an athletic-looking, red-haired young woman standing in front of a police station house. Maura Walsh, with her father standing proudly next to her. It had been taken right after she graduated from the Police Academy and received her first NYPD assignment. I’d seen other pictures of her, but in this one she looked so young, so pretty and so full of hopeful ambition for the future.
The article described how the Walsh family’s connections with the New York City Police Department went back for generations. Maura Walsh’s grandfather was a cop, his father before him and so on. Some of them went pretty far up in the NYPD hierarchy too. One had even been a police commissioner.
Maura Walsh had been following in that tradition. She graduated Phi Betta Kappa from Baruch College with a degree in criminal justice and then with honors from the Police Academy. She had an exemplary record during her five years on the street as a police officer and seemed to be on the fast track to becoming a detective soon. She’d been transferred six months earlier to a new post at the 22nd Precinct on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. That was particularly noteworthy because it was the same precinct where her father had once been the commanding officer.
I watched the entire press conference now about Maura Walsh’s murder. Most of it was pretty standard stuff. Updates from police officials about the search for her killer and medical details about her fatal wounds and then more detail about her movements that night prior to the shooting.
At one point, a reporter asked Deputy Commissioner Walsh to describe his emotions at this painful moment. I was surprised Walsh was even there at the press conference, so soon after his own daughter had just died. But I was even more surprised by his reaction.
“I’m terribly proud of my daughter,” he said, still staring straight ahead. “She always wanted to be a police officer. Always wanted to follow in the Walsh family’s tradition of police service. There are no regrets. Maura knew the dangers involved in the job and accepted them. She was a street cop. She was risking her life every moment out there. A street cop is like a foot soldier in war – our first line of defense against the enemy. I’m proud of my daughter. Proud that she died heroically in the line of duty. Proud that she died doing what she loved best. Proud that she was so able to nobly carry on the tradition of police duty in our family. She was a Walsh. And the Walsh family is true blue all the way.”
Wow, I thought to myself, all the woman did was get herself killed.
There was video and stories too from the funeral for Maura Walsh a few days later. It was held at a church on East 67th Street. Hundreds of cops attended in their dress blues. They listened to a procession of eulogies about what a wonderful person she had been – and the accolades, awards and acclaim she’d won as a police officer during her five years on the job. “Maura was an angel,” one speaker said, “a shining angel who left us much too soon.”
In the front of the church was the Walsh family. Maura’s father and mother, her grandfather who’d spent four decades on the police force, assorted cousins and uncles and other relatives who belonged to the NYPD. I watched Walsh Sr. when the camera focused on him during the eulogies for his daughter. Not a tear, no emotion, nothing at all. Just like he’d been at the press conference the first day. Almost as if he was satisfied his daughter had died in the line of duty.
To find out more about Walsh, I googled some old newspaper articles about him.
There were a lot of them.
The New York City newspapers first made him a hero and nicknamed him “Prince of the City” during a big police corruption scandal years ago, when he was an up-and-coming young officer in the NYPD. Prince of the City, of course, was a hit movie at the time, which starred Treat Williams as a hero New York City cop battling crooked cops who were once his friends.
Just like in the movie, there was a real-life split going on in the department back then between the good cops and the bad cops. The cops who did their jobs honestly, fairly and by following all the rules versus the ones who ripped off drug dealers, took payoffs and brutalized people.
Walsh was one of the good guys. There were always a lot more good guys than bad ones on the force – it was the few rotten apples who spoiled everything, he was on record as saying. I knew from my reporting that it wasn’t always easy being a good guy and a lot of cops tried to straddle the line – keeping their own noses clean but looking the other way when they saw corruption and wrongdoing happening around them.
Not him though.
There had always been an unwritten rule in the department known as the Blue Wall of Silence. That’s not an official term, just an expression used to describe cops’ unwillingness to testify against other cops. Never give up your partner, never give up any fellow cop. It was a long and deeply entrenched tradition in the police department, and most cops adhered to it in one form or another.
So, when a corruption scandal exploded – involving confiscated drugs that were being re-sold from the police evidence room back on to the street – no one wanted to talk. No one wanted to testify. No one wanted to cooperate. No one wanted to stand up and do the right thing.
The police commissioner at the time set up a special task force to investigate the matter, and Walsh was one of the top investigators on it, assigned to root out police corruption in the NYPD. Some people told him he was committing career suicide. He said he didn’t care. He said you could never go wrong by doing the right thing.
There was a total of eighteen police officers arrested in the scandal. Another forty-two cops were either suspended, resigned or fired from their jobs before it was over.
One of the men who went to jail was Walsh’s old partner. His name was Al Furillo, and he’d accepted about $10,000 in illicit money to not come forward about drug dealing by other cops in his precinct. It turned out that Furillo had a thirteen-year-old daughter who was dying of leukemia, and he desperately needed the money to pay medical bills.
Some people thought Walsh might go easy on him because of the extenuating circumstances and because of their past relationship.
But Walsh personally testified against Furillo at the trial, and it was that testimony w
hich helped convince the jury to convict him. He was sentenced five to twelve years in prison. Six months after he went to jail, his daughter died. Nine months after that, Al Furillo was beaten to death by another prisoner.
If Walsh was shaken up or remorseful over what had happened to his old partner, he never talked about it publicly. I found a statement from him when he was asked about his actions during the corruption probe where he said:
“There are times in your life when you have to make decisions between what is right and what is wrong. You can never let outside influences confuse you. Not friends. Not career aspirations. Not fear of being unpopular or of being ostracized or even of physical violence. Nothing and no one is more important than your integrity. As long as you have your integrity, you can hold your head up high. Without integrity, you are lost.”
No personal emotion of any kind in that statement… but then he hadn’t shown any public emotion when his own daughter died. So why would he act any differently for his old friend and partner?
I picked up my phone and called my police source who was trying to set up an interview for me with the deputy commissioner. He said he was still working on it, but he would get back to me as soon as he could. He added that Walsh wasn’t exactly the easiest person to work with. Thinking of the emotionless-sounding man I’d watched earlier, I could understand that.
“I just saw him at the press conference the day after the murder,” I said. “I’m sure he really loved his daughter and all, but it was hard to tell from that.”
“I think they had a very complicated relationship.”
“Complicated how?”
“I’m not sure. But there was definitely some kind of weird dynamic going on there though. Maura never wanted to talk about her father. If you asked her about him, she immediately changed the subject.”
“Why do you think that was?”
“Who knows? Just some kind of messed up father-daughter relationship. But that happens – hey, you know how father-daughter relationships sometimes have a lot of problems.”
“Nope,” I said. “I wouldn’t know anything about that at all.”
Three
My father died before I ever got a chance to meet him.
He was a fireman, and he was killed trying to rescue a family of five people from a burning building. The family got out, but it was too late for my father. He was hailed as a hero afterward for saving their lives and sacrificing his own in this brave and selfless effort. It was a memorable, moving story that brought tears to my eyes as a little girl every time my mother told it to me.
Except sometimes my father wasn’t a fireman at all – he was a soldier who bravely charged an enemy bunker and single-handedly wiped out a machine gun that had been decimating the men in his platoon. He gave his life for his country. His body was buried with full military honors and his coffin wrapped in an American flag.
Or maybe he was a police officer who held off a gang of armed bank robbers so that a group of terrified hostages in the bank could escape, before he himself was gunned down. There was a full-dress police funeral afterward where the mayor and the governor and a lot of other important people extolled my father’s actions as those of a courageous and dedicated servant to the people.
You see, all of these were things told to me by my mother when I was a little girl growing up and asked her why I didn’t have a father like all the other children did.
I believed her then, never questioning the details or the facts or the variations in the story, because that was the kind of father I wanted to have too.
It wasn’t until I was a bit older – and presumably wiser – that I discovered the truth about my father.
He wasn’t gone because he had died heroically in a fire, or on a battlefield, or thwarting a bank robbery.
He was just gone.
It turned out that he had walked out on my mother – and abandoned me too – right after I was born.
And my mother made up all these stories about him because she never wanted to admit the truth to anyone, not even to her own daughter.
I was thinking about all that now – probably because of my discussion about the relationship between Maura Walsh and her father – while I did my morning workout in the bedroom of my apartment on Irving Place in the Gramercy Park section of Manhattan. It was a big bedroom, and I’d filled it with a lot of exercise equipment. Some days I went to a gym a few blocks away on Park Avenue South too for my morning workout regime. But I always did the workout either here or in the gym – and sometimes in both places when I really wanted to stretch myself out – without fail.
My workout routine varied, but I tried to do at least an hour before I left for work. I started with sit-ups and push-ups. Then twenty minutes of pedaling on a stationary bike. After that, I ran on a treadmill – generally while watching the morning news on TV. At the gym, I did leg curls and lifted weights and other stuff I couldn’t do at home. I swam there too, doing laps in an Olympic-sized pool at the club.
Sure, all of this sometimes left me exhausted before I even got to my desk, but it was worth it for me. I’d started doing all these exercises during my long recovery period from the brutal attack I’d endured in Central Park. I hadn’t even been able to walk then, but now I was almost healed, except for a stumble once in a while when one of my legs gave out, or the rare times when I needed to use a cane. But, all in all, Jessie Tucker was in pretty good shape for a woman who had almost died.
When I was finished exercising, I poured myself some coffee in the kitchen, toasted and buttered a bagel, then went back into the living room. I ate my breakfast in front of the TV – taking in the headlines about traffic tie-ups, fires, crimes, political controversies and, of course, the weather. The breaking news was it was going to be another hot one in New York City today. TV news loved to play up weather stories even more than we did at the Tribune.
I still had a bit of time before I needed to leave for work. So, after I finished the bagel, I took my coffee over to my laptop. Then I called up some of the old stories written about myself and Central Park. I did that sometimes. I wasn’t exactly sure why. Maybe to show myself again how far I’d come since that terrible night.
There were two batches of stories.
The first was the story of my initial near-death attack. All about the heroic young woman – that was me – who bravely fought her way back to life and captured the city’s heart. The arrest of the man who did it. His confession, his trial and his subsequent death in prison.
The second group of stories was from what had just happened to me a few months earlier. The truth about who had attacked me – and why. And how I’d broken that story myself in the Tribune, even though I almost died again in the process of doing so.
But I’d survived.
Twice now.
And I was stronger for it.
I closed the file on the computer about myself and called up the picture I’d seen of Maura Walsh – standing in front of a police station in her police uniform with her father and looking so full of life.
“I don’t think she got along too well with her father,” was what my source had told me.
I’d always felt sorry for myself because I had no father, but maybe having no father wasn’t the worst thing in the world. Maybe even worse was having a father who didn’t act like your father.
I had no idea what the problems were in Maura Walsh’s relationship with her father and it probably had nothing to do with how she died on the street that night. But, looking at the picture of Maura Walsh again now, I felt a sense of real compassion for this woman.
I wished I’d had a chance to know her.
But it was too late to do that now.
Too late to save Maura Walsh’s life.
All I could do for her now was find out the truth about why she died.
Just like I’d found out the truth about myself.
Four
I met Maura Walsh’s partner Billy Renfro that afternoon at McGuire’s, a ba
r on the Upper East Side around the corner from the 22nd Precinct.
It sure was another scorcher of a summer’s day in New York City. The temperature had already hit ninety-eight, according to my iPhone. The latest forecast said it might reach a hundred. I wasn’t quite sure why Renfro was drinking in the middle of the day around the corner from his precinct, but I suppose you have to cut a guy some serious slack to grieve when his partner has been murdered. I grabbed a napkin from the bar, used it to wipe the sweat from my cheeks and forehead and then plopped down on the seat next to him.
I knew Billy Renfro from my time on the police beat. I’d worked with him on a few stories over the years. He was probably between forty-five and fifty years old now, with a house in Queens and a boat that he talked about sailing to Florida the minute he put in his retirement papers. I always remembered Renfro as a good guy, a good cop.
“How’s it going, Billy?” I asked.
“I’ve been better.”
“Are you back on the street?”
“Since last week.”
“New partner?”
“Yeah, some kid who barely looks old enough to be my son. Like I really need someone like that to watch my back out there. They keep getting younger and younger every year. Or maybe I’m just getting too old for the job.”
“Maura Walsh was young enough to be your daughter,” I pointed out to him.
“Maura was different.”
“Different how?”
“She was just different. She was good. A good cop. A good person. How could something like this have happened to her?”
We sat back and talked more about Maura Walsh over a few beers. I didn’t have to ask Renfro too many questions, I just let him talk. He seemed to want to talk about her. As if talking about her made it feel like she wasn’t really gone for good – just away somewhere for a while.
He explained how they’d been together on the street for six months. He told me about her first day with him; about the time she managed to slap handcuffs on a four-hundred-pound suspect who was sitting on top of him; about the time she walked into a bodega for a soda and broke up a robbery, capturing two gunmen single-handedly; about how she liked Chinese food and salted pretzels and those hot dogs with sauerkraut that street vendors sell in New York City; about the conversations they had together and the fun and the good times. The not so good times too – about Maura Walsh being a woman cop and how she had to deal with a lot of hassle because of that.