by Billy Jensen
“This is him,” he said. “This is the .44 Caliber Killer.”
I studied the man’s face for a couple of seconds, scrunched up my nose, and said, “He looks like a turkey.”
That was my first observation about a criminal: “He looks like a turkey.”
I turned five that summer. In my ultrasuburban middle-class household, the fight for my family’s attention was a tooth-and-nail affair between Star Wars, Reggie Jackson, and the New York Blackout. My two much older half sisters were charging into their teenage years, with Leif Garrett posters on their walls and starry eyes for the discos like Studio 54 they hoped to dance at one day. My dad was three years into owning his own house-painting business, and my mom was just trying to keep everyone together and get us to sit down at the dinner table to eat another creation from her McCall’s cookbook.
But the shadow of the .44 Caliber Killer hung over everything. For the previous twelve months, the killer had been striking across the outer boroughs of the city, killing six and wounding seven with his trademark high-powered revolver. New York police were in the midst of their biggest manhunt in history. He was taunting them with letters. “I am the ‘Monster’—‘Beelzebub’—the ‘Chubby Behemoth,’” he wrote. “I love to hunt. Prowling the streets looking for fair game—tasty meat.” And yet they still couldn’t catch him.
Girls were dyeing their hair blond (his female victims were almost all brunettes), and boys were warned not to take their girlfriends to lovers’ lanes, which were his favorite hunting ground. My sisters weren’t quite old enough to go to the discos, but I remember them being scared. I remember everyone being scared.
Our suburban bliss, nestled in a pocket of split-level homes adjacent to the famous Levitt subdivisions built for the GIs returning from WWII, was splintered. For the most part, I have only hazy memories of that time. Waiting by the screen door for my dad to come home from work. The action figure aisle at Toys“R”Us. “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” by Elton John and Kiki Dee playing on the tinny speakers of our light-blue VW bus. They are all fuzzy, faded, nebulous snapshots in my mind.
But I remember August 11, 1977, in technicolor—the day after they caught Son of Sam, the .44 Caliber Killer, David Berkowitz. I remember the front page of the newspaper, WE HAVE HIM in larger-than-life letters shouting across the top of the front page. This was the guy who was killing all those people. The guy who thought he could get away with it forever. And they got him.
What I remember most is the curious feeling of relief throughout my household, throughout my town, throughout the city. This wasn’t the Muppets or superheroes. This was real. Chaos had been returned to order. Things had been set right in the world.
I liked that feeling.
• • •
My dad never shied away from telling me about anything. He seemed like he was ten feet tall, with forearms the size of footballs, intense pale-blue eyes, and a mustache that made everyone think he was a cop (and he really didn’t like cops). He was a barrel-chested brawler who had run away from home when he was fifteen, did time for punching a detective in the face, and later acquired a heroin addiction but was able to pull himself from the abyss and transform himself into a hard-working family man.
I spent every afternoon after school alone in the basement, surrounded by Chewbacca, G. I. Joe, and the Six Million Dollar Man, waiting for Dad to come home. He would arrive around 5:00 p.m., covered in dust from sanding lead paint off the houses of rich people in Great Neck or Garden City, take a quick shower, open a Budweiser, maybe take a Darvon if his head was pounding from one of his migraines, fall into his recliner, and open that afternoon’s Newsday. At 6:00 p.m., the channel was tuned to 7, ABC Eyewitness News. He read the newspaper cover to cover with the news in the background, pausing to look over the paper at our twenty-four-inch RCA if anchorman Roger Grimsby said something that caught his interest.
I sat on the carpet, acting out adventures with my action figures and Matchbox cars: Screeeeeeech! Zap! Pow! Bam! Bam! Bam!
My sound effects were louder than they needed to be. With each Bam! I would look up to see if my dad was looking down at me. Sometimes he was, but most of the time, he was deep into a story. Usually a crime story. When he would look at me, he would tell me little bits of information, crowbarring nonfiction victims and villains into my brain alongside Scooby-Doo and the Wonder Twins.
“Billy, look at this kid,” he said one day, showing me the photo of John Pius, a thirteen-year-old newspaper delivery boy who was found beaten to death in the woods behind Dogwood Elementary School in Smithtown. The autopsy discovered he had choked on pebbles that had been shoved down his throat.
“Look at these sick bastards,” he would say another day, showing me the five gunmen who crashed a party in Plainview, raped two women, urinated on guests, and made off with $8,000 in cash and jewels before bashing their way into the Seacrest Diner on Glen Cove Road. There, they ordered patrons to strip and forced some to have sex with each other.
“Now look at this frickin’ guy,” he said a few years after that, pointing to a wild-eyed Ricky Kasso. Nicknamed “the Acid King,” the seventeen-year-old stoner murdered his friend Gary Lauwers on a muggy June night in the woods of Northport. Kasso screamed, “Say you love Satan,” to Lauwers as he stabbed him. “I love my mother,” Lauwers whimpered back.
The tales unfolded each day—from the shock of the crime to the rush of the manhunt to the satisfaction of the arrest and the frustrations of the trial. And I sat on the carpet in between my dad and the television, riveted. Each was a cautionary tale. “Remember this,” my dad would say and show me a picture from the paper.
The lessons I learned:
— John Pius was attacked by four boys whom he had run across while they were stealing a frame for a minibike. They thought he was going to tell on them, so they attacked him, shoving the rocks down his throat to silence his screams. My dad’s lesson: “Mind your business, but if you are going to say something, make sure no one can trace it back to you.”
— The five gunmen who turned the diner into a twisted rape room all fled Long Island, only to sheepishly come back and give themselves up. Why? Because inside that diner, there were some family members of some men who were “connected.” They learned the identities of the gunmen and sent a message to them via their friends and family: come back to Long Island, or your family will be dead. My dad’s lesson: “The mob can get you even if you run. Don’t mess with the mob.”
— Ricky Kasso turned out not to be an obsessed Satanist but an acid dealer who killed Lauwers over a drug deal gone bad. My dad’s lesson: “Be careful who you hang out with…and don’t take acid.”
I didn’t have podcasts or documentaries telling me about the most horrific crimes of the era. I had Dad.
2.
The Body in the Barrel
New York, 1999
The call came on a Saturday morning. 7:00 a.m. The voice on the other end was brisk.
“Are you working?”
Yes.
I was always working.
I needed money. Any money I could legally get my hands on. It had been sixteen months since my daughter was born. Fifteen months since my dad died. Twelve months since I had signed my life away to a thirty-year mortgage for a tiny house in a good school district. My first full year as an adult—1999. A desperate, no-safety-net adult who couldn’t afford to turn down any opportunity to make money.
“What do you got?” I answered, my eyes still closed.
“Syosset. A family just moved into a house,” said the voice. “They’re cleaning out some junk in a crawl space and find a fifty-five-gallon barrel. They opened it, and inside was a body.”
The voice was an editor from the New York Times metro desk. I had just started getting these calls. The Times was shorthanded on the weekends and needed stringers to go out and get details on breaking news. Newspapers hired us
hacks to go out and do the legwork. We didn’t touch a keyboard. It was all in your notebook. Canvass the neighborhood, interview sources, get color for the story. And then you called the paper and asked for rewrite. On the other end was a veteran reporter who would take all the information and build a story. John Mancini, the editor at my day job, where I wrote about hockey fights, local punk bands, and Reiki workshops for the Long Island Voice, knew I needed money, and twenty bucks an hour bought a lot of diapers. He gave my number to a former colleague of his at the Times and unleashed me with three words of guidance/warning/don’t-screw-this-up: “Accuracy, accuracy, accuracy.”
I had covered stories for the Times before. A tornado on the North Fork. A monkey stolen from a pet store.
But on this Saturday morning, it was different. I got the call I had been hoping for. I was going to report on a murder. My first murder.
I knocked on the door of the split-level house in Syosset. When the door swung open, I could tell by the look on his face that Hamid Tafaghodi, the man who had just handed over $455,000 for the American Dream on Forest Road, was not pleased with the unadvertised amenity in the crawl space.
He had been cleaning out a lot of the junk the previous owners had left behind—wire hangers, cardboard boxes, and a child’s ride-on toy sat at the curb in front of the house. Then he spied a barrel under the family room. It was heavy. He told the seller of the house to remove it. Ronald Cohen had his movers roll it out to the street, but the garbage men wouldn’t take it, saying there was a chance it could contain toxic waste. Unaware that the rejection was in all likelihood the start of a negotiation and a few twenty-dollar bills might have rid him of the problem, Cohen watched the garbage truck roll away. With his real estate agent next to him, he took a screwdriver and pried open the lid. Inside, he saw a shoe. Then he saw a hand. Then he called the police.
By the time I got there, the homeowner was past being shaken but was weary and not talking. Needing quotes for the story, I started questioning the neighbors.
“Did you know the people who lived in the house before?”
“Had you ever had any dealings with them?”
“Did you ever suspect something like this would happen on your street?”
I collected lukewarm memories from freaked-out residents.
“I just can’t understand how this can be undetected for so long,” one said. “Wasn’t someone declared missing? Wouldn’t it smell?”
I found a pay phone, dialed the Nassau County Police Department, and three transfers later was talking to the detective in charge of the case. He told me the barrel had been found in a crawl space underneath the family room. The body in the barrel was a young woman. And the body was well-preserved. Apart from the woman’s belongings—including a faux leopard coat and an address book—there were also pellets of a dye that police had learned were used in the manufacturing of plastic flowers. The pellets filled up the empty air pockets in the barrel. Coupled with the tight seal, her body was mummified.
“Is there any idea of how she died?” I asked.
“Nothing we’re ready to say,” he told me. “I might have more for you later.”
My notebook half-full, I called up the Times and asked for rewrite. But this time, there was no one available.
“Um, well.” I hesitated, then asked the editor, “Can I write it?”
“Yeah,” he replied. “We need it by three.”
I raced the eight miles to my mom’s house in Westbury and sat down in my dad’s chair inside the cramped office he had built in the garage. Sales contracts to houses he never got to paint hung on the corkboard behind me. They were in his handwriting, and my mother couldn’t bear to take them down.
I had the property record and phone numbers of the last three people who had previously owned the home with the dead body in the crawl space. I picked up my father’s old-school beige touch-tone and dialed the number of the first family on the list. A woman answered. “I’m sorry, I can’t talk right now,” she said after I told her why I was calling. “The police are here.”
On to the next one.
I dialed the number of the next name on my list. No answer.
On to the next one.
The last number was for the original owners. They had bought the house in 1957, when it was brand new, when Long Island had graduated from the tract housing of the Levitt homes to split-levels: a garage and a family room on the bottom level; kitchen, living, and dining rooms on the middle floor; and sleeping quarters at the top. This family had lived in the house for fifteen years, moving out in 1972.
The area code was for Boca Raton, Florida. I dialed, and a man answered.
“Hello,” I said. “Can I speak to Mr. Howard Elkins?”
“Speaking.”
“This is Bill Jensen from the New York Times.”
“Yes?”
“Hi. Ah, the reason I’m calling is someone just purchased your old house in Syosset, on Long Island.”
“Yes?”
“And while they were cleaning it out, they found a barrel. And they opened it, and inside they found a body.”
“You’re kidding,” he said, drawing out the last word. “You’re kiiiiiidding.”
“No,” I said.
I read him the details I had gotten from the detective. “The body was that of a woman with long, black hair. She was four foot nine and fifty-nine pounds but had shrunk over time, with the lab later surmising that in life the woman was four foot eleven and ninety-five pounds.”
I paused for him to say something. He didn’t. I kept going.
“She was wearing a skirt, a button-down sweater, high socks, and a midheel shoe. A leopard-skin coat was stuffed next to her body in the drum, which also held residue of coloring dye that was used to make artificial flowers.”
I paused and waited for him to say something. He didn’t. I kept going.
“And there was a locket around her neck, with the inscription ‘To Patrice, love Uncle Phil.’ And she wore a wedding band with the inscription M. H. R. XII 59.”
I paused for the last time.
“Do any of those details mean anything to you?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
“Where was the crawl space?” I asked, steering the conversation to the house, trying to get him to say anything more than a one-word answer.
“We built a room off the kitchen to the back of the house,” he explained. “A big den with a fireplace. It was built up to the level of the living room and the kitchen, so there was a crawl space.
“Unbelievable,” he added. He stretched out the middle of the word. “Unbelieeeeevable.”
“When was this?” he asked. “When did this happen?”
“Yesterday,” I said.
I told him that a man had moved into the house, found the barrel, and told the previous owner to get rid of it. I told him that the seller and the real estate agent opened the barrel and saw a hand and a shoe.
“Unbelievable,” he repeated.
“Do you have any idea how that might have gotten there?”
“No,” he said.
“Did you ever go into the crawl space?” I asked.
“What for?” he said.
This answer made me pause, but not long enough. I had yet to learn the power of uncomfortable silence. As a person, you’re conditioned to fill in those gaps in conversation. As a reporter, you let the last word linger. Hang in the air, weaponized and out there all alone. Waiting for the truth to meet it. I should have let it linger, but at that point, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.
“Who could have gone into that crawl space?” I asked.
“Outside of the gardeners and landscapers and the contractor who built the addition, I can’t think of anyone else who had access to the house,” he said. “We did have maids on and off over the years.”
I thanked him for his time, hung up the phone, and opened my clunky brick of a laptop to write up the story. I was ready to send to the Times when I got a call from the detective.
“The woman was almost full-term pregnant,” he told me.
This was now a double murder.
A missing pregnant woman would have been the lead story on the six o’clock news. Had anyone ever looked for her?
I dialed Elkins again. He didn’t answer.
I furiously typed up the new details of the story, noting that the barrel was made in 1963, “and originally contained pigments used to tint plastic and paints, which were no longer made after 1972 or 1973.” That at least gave the murder timeline an end date.
I emailed the story to the desk editor and called him to confirm.
“You have it,” I said before adding: “Also, I know on my checks it says William Jensen, but I write under Bill Jensen.”
“We don’t give bylines to stringers,” he told me. He apologized. The byline would read “By the New York Times.”
My name wouldn’t be on it, but I had just written my first murder story.
I swung my father’s chair around and stared up at his contracts pinned to the wall. Every day since he died, something would happen that made me want to pick up the phone and tell him about it. That day, I felt it more than ever. I could practically hear him bragging about my story to all the guys on his crew.
The next day, I bought five copies of the Times. It was Sunday, and I had to cradle them with two hands.
The headline read NEW HOMEOWNER FINDS BODY OF PREGNANT WOMAN IN A BARREL.
Six days after the story ran, Howard Elkins entered a friend’s garage carrying a newly purchased shotgun. He crawled into an SUV and blew his head off.
My phone call had sent his thirty-year secret crashing down on top of him. Five days after my story ran, Nassau County homicide detectives paid him a visit at his Boca Raton retirement condominium community. They asked him about the plastic flower pellets. About his house. About the barrel. He said he didn’t know it was there. They asked him if he ever had an affair. He finally admitted to having one.