by Dana Perry
“Did she tell you afterward whether or not she found out anything significant from it?” I asked.
“Not really. She read the file, asked me some questions and then we talked a bit about my father being the chief back then. After that, she thanked me and she left. She was a real nice person though. She seemed especially interested in how I dealt with following in my father’s footsteps as a police officer. I guess we kind of bonded over that since she had the same thing with her own father. But that was the last time I talked with her.”
“And you say this was about six months ago?”
“Right. It was during the winter. I remember because she was worried about driving back to New York in a snowstorm.”
Six months ago.
It was six months ago too that Maura Walsh had transferred to her father’s old precinct and become partners with Billy Renfro.
Was there some connection?
“Could I talk to your father about the Patrick Walsh death?” I asked Palumbo. “Since he was the police chief when it happened, maybe he could fill in a few more details about it for me.”
“Oh, he’s dead. About five years ago. From a heart attack.”
“I’m sorry to hear about that. Was he still the chief when he died?”
“Yep. He left the force here briefly to join the NYPD himself. Not long after the Walsh boy died. But then he came back to Saginaw Lake and finished out his career as chief here. I took over from him. All I really know about the Patrick Walsh death was what I heard from him. And he didn’t talk about it very much. I guess because it was so tragic. Can’t imagine what it’s like for Walsh now to lose his other child too. He’s had all this success with the NYPD, but all this sadness in his life too. I guess I’ve been lucky. I have a good job and a good family. You really appreciate that when you hear about all the bad fortune that happened to the Walshes.”
“Didn’t you ever think of leaving this town? Maybe joining the NYPD, like you said your father did?”
“Not me. I’m staying right here. No NYPD for me.”
“Why not?”
“My father’s experience down there was pretty bad.”
“What happened?”
“Not sure. He never told anyone. But he didn’t stay there very long. Like I said, he came back here and went back to being chief until the day he died.”
I thought about everything I’d just learned.
That his father had left the force to take a job with the NYPD after he investigated the death of the seven-year-old son of Walsh, who was a prominent police official with the NYPD.
And that six months ago, Maura Walsh had come to Saginaw Lake to ask questions and read the police file about her little brother’s death – at the same time as she was starting a new assignment at her father’s old precinct.
Was that all a coincidence?
Two coincidences?
Seemed hard to believe.
But then I had no other idea either about what any of it meant.
“Can I read through the police file you have on the Patrick Walsh case too?” I asked Palumbo. “It might have some details I can use in my story about the Walsh family and the loss of both of their children.”
“Sure.” He smiled. “I don’t see why not.”
Sixteen
The Saginaw Lake police file on the death of Patrick Walsh wasn’t very long and much of it seemed pretty routine at first glance. Like you’d expect with an incident that wasn’t a crime, simply a terrible tragedy.
First, there was the police investigation – the report of the officers on the scene, interviews with family members or possible witnesses and evidence and photographs from the incident. Then the medical findings: summaries from the EMT responders who got there first; plus records from the hospital and doctors and other medical personnel there.
I read through the opening pages quickly, looking for something – anything at all – that I could use for my story.
I stopped at the report from the first officer at the scene, filed by Dale Palumbo’s father, Police Chief Walter Palumbo.
At 16:37 hours, this department received a 911 call of a shooting at 221 Magic Leaf Lane. Myself and Deputy Greg Stovall arrived at the location at 16:46 hours. The lights were on, the front door was open and a TV set was playing inside.
We entered the domicile. In the living room, we found the victim – Patrick Michael Walsh, 7 years old. He was lying unconscious on the floor where paramedics were engaged in what turned out to be a futile effort to revive him. Also in the living room – standing over the paramedics as they worked – was the father of the boy, Mike Walsh, and his wife Nora.
It was determined that the boy had suffered a gunshot wound to the head, from a single bullet fired by a 9 mm pistol lying next to the boy on the floor. The pistol belonged to the father, who was a police officer with the NYPD in New York City.
A few minutes after we arrived, the medical team on the site pronounced the boy dead.
The parents – particularly the father – were extremely emotional, almost hysterical. The father threw himself on the boy’s body crying at one point and talking to him. I and Deputy Stovall were forced to pull him away and comfort him so that the body could be removed to the morgue by the ambulance team.
The mother was also very emotional – which was understandable given the situation – and needed to be sedated by the medical personnel at the scene.
There was no one else in the house at the time of the shooting, the parents said. A sixteen-year-old daughter, Maura Walsh, was out with friends and had not yet been told about the death of her younger brother. An officer was designated to attempt to contact her to break the news.
Walsh and his wife Nora said seven-year-old Patrick apparently climbed onto a shelf in a closet and found a service revolver belonging to his father, according to the report. He then must have begun playing with it and accidentally pulled the trigger, shooting himself in the front of his head.
No one knew the exact details of what happened. But the little boy was dressed in a Superman T-shirt with a tiny cape – and the family said he loved that costume. One investigator speculated that the little seven-year-old believed that bullets would bounce off him like they did for Superman in the movies and TV and comic books. And that’s why he had begun playing with his father’s gun.
The final police report concluded that the boy’s death was a tragic accident – and it was ruled accidental death by firearm.
All of that made sense.
There was a notation from Deputy Stovall – Palumbo’s partner that night – in the file about the victim’s sister. Stovall said he wanted to interview Maura Walsh to see if she could shed any more light on the events leading up to the deadly incident. But there was no indication if – or how – that was ever done.
It was an accidental death, plain and simple.
No questions really needed to be asked.
Except I had a few questions.
Like why was Walsh so emotional that night, according to the account I’d just read? He showed almost no emotion a few weeks ago when his daughter was murdered. But, on this night, he was so hysterical they had to pull him away from the body. Two totally different reactions to losing a child. Sure, the circumstances of the first death were different than the second, but not that different – it still bothered me.
Also, how did a seven-year-old boy manage to get his hands on a loaded gun? The police officers I knew who had kids kept their weapons unloaded at home. Or, if they didn’t, they made sure they were stowed away carefully so no one in the family – most of all, young children – could get access to them. And yet little Patrick Walsh did just that.
Did this Deputy Stovall ever track down Maura Walsh and talk to her about everything from that day? If so, what did she tell him? And why wasn’t it in the report?
Finally, and most importantly, why was Maura Walsh up here asking questions about her brother’s long-ago death at the same time she transferred to the 22nd
Precinct, her father’s old precinct?
I didn’t have any answers to those questions.
Patrick Walsh’s death came before Dale Palumbo’s time on the Saginaw police force. And his father, who had handled the case, was dead. That left the deputy, Greg Stovall, who Palumbo now told me had left the force not long after the incident. All I knew about him was that he had wanted to talk to the teenaged Maura Walsh after her brother’s death.
Maybe he had some answers.
Seventeen
When I left the Saginaw Lake Police Department, I called the Tribune office and asked for Michelle Caradonna.
“Tribune newsroom!” she said when she picked up the phone. “You make the news, we break the news.”
“Do you always answer the phone like that, Michelle?”
“What the hell, it never hurts to advertise. How are you doing upstate there in Red Butt or wherever you are?”
“Saginaw Lake.”
“Whatever.”
“I need some help. I want you to track down some information for me in the Tribune library, or on our online information service or anyplace else you can think of.”
“C’mon, Jessie, I’m not your secretary.”
“This is really important. I need someone smart working on this stuff, not just a clerk in the library or whatever I can google up here on my phone. I promise I’ll owe you big time if you do this for me, Michelle.”
“You sure will,” she muttered.
I told her I was trying to locate a Greg Stovall who had been a Saginaw Lake Police Officer in 2009 – then quit the force and moved away. I gave her the details I knew about Stovall, including his approximate age and description I’d gotten from Chief Palumbo – as well as his original hometown of Elmira, New York.
“So, how’s everyone there?” I asked Michelle when I was finished.
“Well, Lorraine quit this morning.”
“Again?”
“Right, she’s already resigned three times this month.”
In addition to worrying about getting fired, Lorraine periodically announced she’d had enough and was handing in her resignation. Then she’d go back to work. No one took it very seriously.
“She’s still there, right?”
“As we speak, Danny is in her office. He’s screaming at Lorraine. And Lorraine’s screaming at him. Something about wanting to be treated with the kind of respect she deserves. Oops, Danny just kicked a wastebasket across the room…”
“Anything else going on?”
“Well, Danny’s got a new girlfriend. This one looks like she’s about seventeen years old. I met her last night, and I wanted to ask her if it was all right for her to be out on a school night.”
I should probably explain here that Danny was not just an ambitious editor, he was also an ambitious – and amazingly successful – pickup artist when it came to attractive women.
Especially young women.
He’d been divorced once – a few years ago – and now he moved from one woman to another, never staying in a relationship for more than a few months. All of them were very young. Danny never went out with a woman who was over thirty. And he preferred his women to be under twenty-five.
No one quite understood how he was so successful with the ladies. He wasn’t particularly good-looking, he was a bit overweight and his personality could be abrasive. But Danny – well, he just had this incredible way with them. He picked them up everywhere. Bookstores. Museums. Department stores. His favorite targets were struggling artists, actresses and dancers. He’d wine and dine them and somehow get them into bed.
Danny never messed around in the office though. He told me once that was a hard and fast rule of his. His breakups were usually quick and ugly, and I think he knew it would be a disaster if he ever tried anything in the newsroom. So he was never anything but professional with me and all the other women at the Tribune.
“Sounds pretty routine,” I said to Michelle.
“Just another day in the Tribune newsroom.” She laughed.
“Listen, Michelle, I really need this information about Greg Stovall in a hurry. So if you could—”
“Yes, ma’am,” she said sarcastically. “I’ll get right on it, Ms. Tucker.”
I was definitely going to pay for this when I got back.
After I finished with Michelle, I called Peter Ventura.
“Peter, I’m out of town on an assignment. Upstate in a town called Saginaw Lake. Could you just make some checks for me with your sources about someone who came from here?”
“Yeah, I’ve got a little time on my hands, Jessie. The bars don’t open for another hour yet.”
He was kidding, I think.
“Who are you looking for?”
“His name is Walter Palumbo, and he was the police chief of Saginaw Lake about eleven years ago. After that, he joined the NYPD. But he only lasted there for a short time. He quit after that, then returned to Saginaw Lake where he wound up getting back his old job as police chief. But that was a while ago.”
“You want to know where Walter Palumbo is now?”
“I know where he is. He’s dead.”
“What exactly are you looking for then?”
“I want to know why a man makes a big career move like that, leaves a little town for New York City, uproots his entire life – and then, very quickly afterward, changes his mind and goes back again. I’m not going to find that in the official records, Peter. But maybe you can track down someone who’s still around who might had crossed paths with Palumbo back then when he was with the NYPD. Albeit, very briefly.”
“What’s this story all about, Jessie?”
“Maura Walsh.”
“What does a small-town police chief have to do with Maura Walsh’s murder?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
Eighteen
Greg Stovall didn’t turn out to be hard to find. He owned a landscaping business about a hundred miles away in Elmira, New York – where he was originally from. It was situated over several acres on a road about a mile outside the center of the town.
Stovall said he’d started the landscaping company after he left the police force. It had grown so much in recent years that he had a dozen employees now. They did landscaping work for people in town – cutting grass, trimming trees, maintaining flowers and gardens – and also had a wide variety of plants and trees and shrubs for sale at the store.
“I always loved gardening,” Stovall explained to me as he gave me a tour of the place. “Except I was never able to do much of it when I was a Saginaw Lake police officer. Then, after I left the force, I decided I wanted to do something that I really loved doing. So I started this business. We do pretty well. Especially in the spring when everyone wants to plant stuff and make their gardens look beautiful. Then in the summertime we do lawn mowing and hedge trimming and all that. In the fall, it’s picking up leaves. And even in the winter we keep going by selling Christmas trees and wreaths and other decorations. But you didn’t come all the way up here to ask me about growing grass and plants, did you, Ms. Tucker? What do you want to ask me?”
“I have a few questions about an old police case you worked on – the death of a little seven-year-old boy named Patrick Walsh from a gun accident.”
If I expected him to be surprised, I was wrong. He nodded.
“I wondered when someone might come around to ask me questions like that,” Stovall said. “Especially because of what happened.”
“What do you mean?”
“The death of the sister. In New York. Maura Walsh.”
“You know about it?”
“Sure. I might not be a police officer anymore, but I still relate to other people doing the job. It’s a tricky thing about being a cop – you tell yourself you’re not anymore, but there’s a big part of you that still bleeds blue, if you know what I mean. The death of any police officer is especially difficult for me to hear about. But this one was even worse for me. Because I knew
her.”
“You knew Maura Walsh?”
“Of course I did. She and her father and the family came up to Saginaw Lake every summer. She was just a teenage girl then. I saw her and the mother and the little boy around town a lot. I didn’t see the father as much, he was working in the city and coming up on weekends and vacations. But I knew all about him. For a police officer in a small town like me, it was pretty impressive having a NYPD big shot around. I tried to talk to him a few times, but he wasn’t very receptive.”
“What did you talk about with him?”
“Oh, I had dreams about joining the NYPD then. Becoming a real police officer, not just some guy directing traffic or whatever in Saginaw Lake. But he wasn’t much help. He was kind of a cold fish, as I recall.”
Yep, that sounded like Walsh.
“What do you remember about that night his son died?”
He told me pretty much the same story I already knew from the police file. The 911 call; the little boy lying on the floor with his father’s service weapon next to him; the emotional scene with the parents; and the paramedics and EMT people declaring Patrick Walsh was dead.
I brought up the fact I’d found out from the file that Maura Walsh wasn’t in the house when it happened.
“What did she say when you contacted her later?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“You don’t remember?”
“I never talked to her.”
I was confused.
“The police report said you were attempting to track her down after the shooting to break the news to her and find out if she had any information on the events leading up to what happened.”
“Chief Palumbo did that,” he said.
“And what did she tell him?”
“He said she didn’t know anything.”
“That’s all?”
“All he told me.”
I started to ask Stovall what he meant, but I didn’t have to. He told me more without any prompting at all. I figured out afterward that he’d been troubled by this for a long time himself, and the news of Maura Walsh’s death had brought it all back to him again.