The Golden Girl

by Dana Perry

  Now we were really getting down to it.

  “So, Maura was at your house that day when Patrick died?”

  “Later she was.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We were at Maura’s house first. We were both pretty out of it though as we’d drunk a lot of booze that day. That’s what I meant when I said I was so close to it. The Patrick Walsh death. I mean, it could have happened right in front of me. I used to have nightmares about that day. Thank goodness, we left when we did.”

  I was confused. There was nothing about this in the police reports I’d read or in the accounts I’d seen elsewhere. Only that Maura was at Melissa Soroka’s house when it happened. And there was nothing about Melissa Soroka being at the Walsh house. Chief Palumbo had gone to interview Maura after the Walsh boy’s death, and presumably talked to Melissa too. But no one ever found out exactly what they told him. Except now I was going to find out.

  I asked her a few questions, but mostly I just let her tell the story herself.

  The story about the day Patrick Walsh died.

  “Like I said, Maura and I were pretty wild and crazy in those days when we were teenagers. And one of the things we wanted to do was drink. Neither of us were very experienced at it. But we were young and looking for thrills. So that day we broke into her family’s liquor cabinet and started drinking what was there.”

  “Wait a minute! There was alcohol in that house?”

  “Lots of it.”

  “But her father doesn’t allow stimulants of any kind – not coffee or sugar, and certainly not alcohol – for members of his family.”

  “Well, he did then. Maura and I got snookered on what we found. Her worse than me. That’s what caused the problem. Maura was supposed to take care of her little brother that day. At least for a few hours. Her father was busy doing something and her mother wanted to run out to the store for some things. But then I came over, and Maura and I found the liquor. I know it sounds irresponsible now, but we figured Patrick was fine. He was in another room playing like he was Superman. I always remembered that – he was dressed in a Superman outfit. He was so cute. Then we started drinking, and we both drank too much. Way too much. Maura actually blacked out at one point. She told me later that she never remembered anything about… well, she couldn’t remember any of it.”

  Oh my God, I thought to myself. This was the secret. Maura Walsh got drunk and allowed her little brother to die? Or maybe, even more horrifying, she got drunk and accidentally shot her little brother?

  “Her mother came home to find us like that. She got really upset with Maura. For good reason, I guess. They had a huge fight and Maura walked out with me. She was still pretty out of it so I took her back to my house. She crashed on my couch and fell asleep. Until we found out from the police about what had happened back at her house.”

  “Where was Patrick Walsh when you and Maura left the house?”

  “He was fine. Absolutely fine. I remembered that afterward. Who knew what was going to happen? But afterward Maura blamed herself for her brother’s death.”

  “You just said she wasn’t there when he died?”

  “But she didn’t know that. Not then. She never found out until a few months ago. All these years she thought Patrick got the gun and shot himself with it while she was there but blacked out. That it happened when she was supposed to be watching him.”

  “Why did she believe that?”

  “Because that’s what her father told her happened.”

  I was confused.

  “But you said she wasn’t even there when Patrick shot himself. That he was fine when you and she left the house. Didn’t you tell her that?”

  “I never saw Maura again after that day. The family disappeared after that. I always assumed she knew the truth. But she didn’t. She didn’t remember anything that happened after all the drinking. She believed what her father told her. That she got dead drunk and wasn’t watching her little brother like she was supposed to when he found the gun. That’s why she thought her brother’s death was her fault. She’d been living with that guilt ever since.”

  “How did you find out about this? You said you never saw her again after that day because her family moved away so quickly.”

  “I didn’t then, but I found out differently from her few months ago. When Maura came to see me. My God, it was such a surprise to find her at my door after all this time.”

  Of course. Maura Walsh would have come here for answers, like I was doing right now.

  “That’s when she told me the story of how she’d blamed herself for Patrick’s death all this time. And her father had too. She’d spent her whole life trying to make it up to him for costing the life of his son like that – the son he envisioned following him into the NYPD one day. That’s even why she joined the police force, she told me. Her father demanded that she become a police officer like all the other members of the Walsh family before her. She didn’t want to do that, she wanted some kind of a different career. But he said she owed him this because of letting her brother die. She had to take his place. So she eventually gave in and joined the force. She desperately wanted to do anything for her father to make up for what she had done that day which allowed her brother to get his hands on the gun. Until she found out the truth recently. She knew now she wasn’t responsible for her brother’s death. She knew now she wasn’t even there when it happened. Her father had lied to her all these years, and he made her feel guilty. Maura was furious at her father and wanted to quit the NYPD, she said. But, before she did that, she also said she wanted to make her father pay a price for what he had done to her.”

  It was a pretty mind-boggling story that Walsh had done something like that to his own daughter, but it finally explained why she was so angry with him once she found out the truth.

  There was another question I had. Why did Maura Walsh suddenly go looking for answers about what she did or didn’t do that day her little brother died? Why now after all this time did she question the story she’d always been told? The story she believed all her life. Melissa Soroka didn’t know. She said Maura only kept talking about how she’d been living all her life with the guilt that her irresponsibility in getting drunk caused her brother’s death. Now she knew that wasn’t true and had come to get Melissa, her teenage friend, to confirm the real events of that day.

  “Back then, when this all happened, didn’t you tell this story about you and Maura to the authorities? About how you had been at the house earlier, and Patrick Walsh was still fine and playing with his toys when you left?”

  “I told the police when they asked me questions about Maura. I told them everything I just told you.”

  “Chief Palumbo?”

  “No, it wasn’t him.”

  “Who?”

  “The deputy.”

  “Greg Stovall?”

  “Yes, that was his name.”

  Fifty-Eight

  Greg Stovall had been one of the first people I talked to about Maura Walsh. I thought I was done with him, but he’d lied to me. Stovall said he never got a chance to talk with Melissa Soroka because his boss, Police Chief Walter Palumbo, ordered him off it. Except I now had found out that wasn’t true. So what else had Stovall lied to me about?

  I knew where to find Greg Stovall again at his landscaping firm in Elmira, but I decided to wait before confronting him. I wanted to talk to the two EMT workers first.

  Except there was only one now. One of the men on the two-person EMT team had died of cancer several years earlier, I discovered. Timothy Fenton, the other EMT at the Walsh house that day, was still around though. He’d left the EMT job to go to medical school and he was now a doctor at a hospital in the Saginaw Lake area. I met with him in the hospital cafeteria.

  “Sure, I remember the Walsh boy’s death,” he said to me. “I wasn’t an EMT for very long – I always knew I wanted to do something more in the medical field, so it was just a starting point for me – but I saw a lot of trauma
tic stuff on those EMT runs. Never worse than the Walsh house though. The father crying and screaming at us, the mother pleading for someone to save her son – and that poor little boy lying dead on the living room floor. God, it was horrible. I still get chills when I think about it. But that was all a long time ago. Why are you writing about this now?”

  I told him about the murder of Maura Walsh in New York City, and gave him my cover story of doing a profile on the family.

  “That’s terrible,” he said when I told him about Maura. “That sure is a cursed family. Both children gone now.”

  “Did you see her that day in the house?”

  “The daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nah, no one else was there except the mother and father. I didn’t even know there was another child. Of course, we were pretty frantic – trying to see if there was any way we could save the boy and all. But it was hopeless. He was dead by the time we got there.”

  Fenton went though more details, which seemed to go along with the account I’d read in the police report on the Walsh boy’s death.

  “Anything else you remember from that day which was… well, unusual?” I asked.

  “There was one thing,” Fenton said. “I’m sure it didn’t mean anything. At least in terms of the boy’s death. But on the ride to the hospital – and then to the morgue – with the body, I noted bruises on the boy.”

  “Bruises? But he was shot, right?”

  “Oh, yes. His whole head was pretty much blown away. That’s not where the bruises were that I saw. They were on his arm and other parts of his body. It looked to me like his arm might have been broken at some point in the past, although I couldn’t be sure. But the bruises and scars were all from a while ago so – like I said – they couldn’t have had anything to do with his death.”

  “What do you think caused them?”

  “Well, in a case like this, I normally would have said some kind of abuse.”

  “Someone had hit him?”

  “There were signs of that kind of physical abuse. On more than one occasion.”

  “From who?”

  “I never had enough information to make that kind of judgement.”

  “Could the bruises have been from his father?”

  “Well… yes, I assumed – based on what I saw from the body – that the boy might have been beaten in the past by his father.”

  “Did you tell anyone about this?”

  “Of course I did. I put it in my report.”

  “Your report…”

  “Oh yes, I was very conscientious about putting everything into the medical records on my EMT job. I guess I was getting ready to be a doctor already back then. But it was all in my report, if you want to read it. Not that it really means anything, of course. The only thing that mattered at that point was the gunshot wound to the little boy’s head that killed him.”

  “Was there ever an autopsy done to officially determine the cause of death?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Isn’t that routine procedure in a death case like this?”

  “Usually. But it was pretty obvious the boy died from the bullet wound in his head. And I’m sure the father used a lot of his NYPD pull with the authorities in Saginaw Lake to make sure their little boy wasn’t cut up for an autopsy. I remember they just wanted to bury him. I could understand that.”

  So no official cause of death.

  And bruises on the boy’s body from some time earlier.

  This was getting weirder and weirder.

  There was something else that didn’t make sense to me too. I’d made copies of all the documents in the police file about Patrick Walsh’s death, including the reports from the EMTs. I’d brought them with me for the interview. I took out Fenton’s report now and read through it quickly, looking for the part about the bruises. I couldn’t find anything. I read it again, more carefully this time. Nope. Nothing there. Just a straightforward account of them arriving at the house, finding the boy dead of a gunshot wound on the floor and transporting the body to the hospital.

  “There’s nothing in the report about the bruises on the body,” I said to Fenton.

  “Sure there is.”

  “I’m reading it right now. No mention of any bruises.”

  “Well, I wrote the report, and I included my observations about earlier bruises on the boy’s body.”

  I handed him the report. It had been signed and dated by him on the day of Patrick Walsh’s death. All very official. Except it turned out that it wasn’t at all.

  Fenton read through his long-ago report – casually at first, but then his eyes widened with surprise.

  That’s when I knew.

  I knew for sure how far someone had gone to cover up the true facts of Patrick Walsh’s death.

  “This is not my report,” Fenton said.

  “You signed it.”

  “That’s not my signature,” he said. “And not what I said. Someone filed a false report under my name.”

  Fifty-Nine

  Greg Stovall wasn’t as friendly to me as he was the first time. I think he must have figured out that I knew about him now when I pulled up again in front of his landscaping business in Elmira. Once I told him I needed to talk to him again about the Patrick Walsh death, he said he was too busy to spend any more time with me. I said that wasn’t good enough. I said it was urgent we discuss Patrick Walsh right now.

  “What’s so urgent about a simple accidental death case that happened a long time ago?” he asked.

  “I don’t think it was that simple anymore. And I’m not even sure it was accidental.”

  That got his attention.

  “What do you want from me?” he asked warily.

  “The truth.”

  “I told you the truth. I told you everything I know about that case. It was Chief Palumbo who did it all. Whatever happened – or didn’t happen – was because of Palumbo. Like I told you before, I had more questions about that case too. But I never got any answers. That’s why I left the force.”

  Of course, he’d told me all that. It had been his plan all along. Make me think he was the good guy, and Chief Palumbo the bad guy. Or at least the only bad guy in this. I wasn’t sure Palumbo was a bad guy. Or Stovall either. But I did believe they had not done their jobs properly. And that was because they’d succumbed to temptation. In Palumbo’s case, the temptation had been a chance to join the NYPD – his lifelong dream. So what was Stovall’s temptation that got him to cover up evidence in the investigation of Patrick Walsh’s death? Looking around at the landscaping business he had here, I had a pretty good idea it had to have been money for him.

  “I’ve been to see Melissa Soroka,” I said. “The woman you said you never got a chance to interview. Only thing is, she remembers talking to you. She says she told you everything she knew about that day of the shooting.”

  I figured that would shake him up, and I took a chance and hit him up with something else too.

  “I talked to the EMT guy on the scene that day. Timothy Fenton. He filed a report on everything he knew that went into the police file. Except… well, the report in the police file isn’t the one he submitted. Someone substituted a fake report there. Do you want to comment on that?”

  I wasn’t sure that it was Stovall who had switched the EMT reports in the file. It could have been Palumbo. But I knew I’d hit pay dirt by the way Stovall responded to me.

  “Look, I don’t have to talk to you at all. You’re not a police officer or anyone official. You’re just a lousy newspaper reporter. You have no authority whatsoever. You want a comment from me? Okay, here it is: I don’t know what you’re talking about. Now get the hell off my property! Or I will call the police!”

  “Really? I’m not sure I’d do that if I were you. I mean, most police are honest and responsible and want to hear the true story. Not like you and Chief Palumbo were when you were on the Saginaw Lake force.”

  “Screw you…”


  He pretended like he was taking out his phone to call the cops on me. I just waited him out. He started to punch in a few numbers, then stopped. No, he didn’t want the police here. I figured maybe I could use that to get him to open up to me about what he really knew and had done.

  “I’m not here to make trouble for you. I only want answers from you. You’re right when you say I have no official authority to ask you questions. But I do have the power of the press. I can write an article in the New York Tribune about all of this. Then the police would definitely be interested in you. I’m not sure what the criminal penalties are for what you did – or if the statute of limitations has run out – but I think it would pretty much mess up the nice little life you’ve built here for yourself,” I said, looking around at the landscaping company he owned. “All I want is the truth. Give me some truthful answers, and I’ll be gone. Okay?”

  He didn’t answer me.

  “What happened to Patrick Walsh?” I asked.

  “I don’t know any more about the shooting that day. And that is the truth.”

  “What about the bruises they found on the boy’s body?”

  “What about them?”

  “Did they have anything to do with his death?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “So you do believe the Walsh boy’s death was accidental?”

  “What else could it have been?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I’m telling you, I don’t know anything.”

  “But someone did convince you and Chief Palumbo to put a lid on the investigation, to avoid an autopsy and even to alter the official police report to make sure the death looked just like a ‘simple, accidental shooting’, as you put it so eloquently before.

  “Now in Walt Palumbo’s case, it’s easy to figure out what happened. Someone with authority in the NYPD – and that would have to be Walsh – pulled strings to get him a job there. A job Palumbo always wanted. Or at least thought he did. Even got him assigned to Walsh’s favorite precinct, the 22nd where he’d been commanding officer.