Chase Darkness with Me

by Billy Jensen

  “Who was the affair with?” they inquired. Elkins said he couldn’t remember her name. “What did she look like?” they pressed. He couldn’t remember. They asked him why his phone number had been in the address book found alongside the woman’s body. He said he had no idea. They asked for a DNA sample to compare it with the fetus in the barrel. He refused to be swabbed. They left without arresting him. They told him they would be in touch.

  My call was when Elkins began digging his grave. The visit from the detectives drove the final nail into his coffin.

  The murder tale unfolded in the weeks that followed. The fifty-five-gallon drum had been manufactured in Linden, New Jersey, in March 1963 to October 1972. Writing on the drum showed that it had been delivered to the synthetic flower company Melrose Plastics, a company of which Howard Elkins had been part owner.

  The crime lab then focused on the address book found with the body. Using an infrared light that could decipher indentations or faded characters on the page, they discovered a series of numbers that had been written on the first page. Those numbers corresponded to alien registration green card, which a search revealed had belonged to an El Salvadoran immigrant named Reyna Angélica Marroquín, who worked at Melrose Plastics in 1969.

  Written in the book were also faded words that the lab technicians couldn’t make out, as well as a phone number for a woman named Kathy Andrade. The detectives located Andrade, and she spilled the whole story. Her friend Reyna was having an affair with her boss, a man named Howard Elkins. One day, Reyna called Andrade and said she was scared. Reyna said she had told Elkins’s wife about the affair and that Elkins was angry. After that phone call, Andrade never heard from Reyna again.

  Howard Elkins murdered Reyna and stuffed her body in one of the hundreds of barrels he had access to at Melrose Plastics. Maybe he was thinking of taking it out on a boat and dumping it in the ocean. But it was far too heavy for one person to lift—when it was discovered, the barrel weighed close to 350 pounds, and it would have weighed even more right after Reyna’s death. So Elkins chose to roll it under his house and leave the body beneath the family room. Then he and his family lived above Reyna’s corpse for three years. He watched TV, read the paper, drank his coffee. He celebrated holidays and birthdays, all above the corpse of the woman he had an affair with, got pregnant, and murdered.

  Elkins lived with that secret for thirty years. I thought of the blood that must have drained from his face and into his throat when I said those words: “They found a barrel. And they opened it, and inside they found a body.”

  Reyna’s body was shipped back to El Salvador. The detectives continued to examine Reyna’s address book, and the crime lab was finally able to decipher those faded words. They read “Don’t be mad I told the truth.”

  A body was found one day. I spoke to the killer the next day, and he admitted his guilt within the week via a shotgun blast to the head.

  It would never be that easy again.

  • • •

  Every weekend, I got to cover another crime for the Times: a stabbing at a high school football game. The Amadou Diallo cops coming home after their acquittal. I was on my way to becoming one of the crime beat reporters who my dad would read every day after work. And I was doing my job well enough that when an editor at the New York Post asked Mancini if there was anyone who could help out on nights and weekends, he offered me up again. I was going to work for the king of tabloid crime. The paper behind the relentless coverage of Bernie Goetz, the Robert Chambers murder, and the most famous headline in the history of crime: HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR.

  But my first assignment for the Post changed everything.

  “We need you to go to Stony Brook Hospital,” said the voice on the phone. Two teenage girls had been driving around Suffolk County when they encountered a pair of closing railroad crossing signals. The girl behind the wheel decided to tempt fate and go around the gates. She didn’t make it, and the train smashed into their car. The girls were taken to the hospital in critical condition. The Post wanted their story.

  I turned off my newly purchased cell phone, walked into the emergency waiting room, and immediately spotted the mother and father of one of the girls. They were the only ones who were weeping. I sat down for a minute, trying to think of what I was going to say to them. I finally walked over and kneeled down next to the man.

  “Hi,” I said just above a whisper. “I’m Bill Jensen from the New York Post,” I said. “I’m so sorry. Could I ask you a few questions?”

  He raised his head and gave me the most shattered look anyone has ever given me. Then he shook his head.

  I found a pay phone in the lobby and called the Post.

  “The family doesn’t want to talk,” I said.

  The voice on the other end didn’t hesitate.

  “Go in and ask them again.” Click.

  I placed the receiver back on the cradle and walked around the hospital hallways for what seemed like days, trying to assemble enough courage to go back into that room. If hospitals had bars, I would have been drinking. After fifteen minutes, I approached the man and woman again.

  “I’m sorry, but we are just trying to get some information. Do you think we could talk?”

  The woman looked at the man, and the man gave me the same look as before. I waited a beat, then got out of there as quick as I could without running. I called the Post back.

  “Hey, I’m sorry. They really don’t want…”

  He cut me off. “It’s okay,” the voice said. “We just got back the girl’s rap sheet, and it’s a mile long. It’s fine.” Click.

  I hung up the phone and walked out of the hospital, earning the most shameful forty dollars I ever earned in my life. I don’t even know if the girls survived the night. Limping home, something bubbled up from the pit of my churning stomach: This was not what I wanted. I was on course to be a crime beat reporter, writing rubbernecking articles about bad things that happened to people but not doing anything to help. At that moment, I was done. I wanted to write stories that actually helped change things. I wanted to try to solve murders. I wanted to get that feeling back. The feeling I got when I was a kid and my dad showed me the cover of paper with the headline WE HAVE HIM stamped over the .44 Caliber Killer’s head. The feeling of solving the crime. I wanted to see some order given to this chaos.

  I made the decision right then and there: I would only write about unsolved crimes.

  3.

  The Murder in the Shadows

  Brooklyn, 2002

  The Long Island Voice shut down in 2000, the precursor to many other newspaper shutterings to come. After two years of toiling about at editor jobs for trade magazines, I got a call from Robbie Woliver, the former music editor at the Voice. He was starting a new newspaper—something unheard of after the crash of 2000. He had an investor and needed to build up a staff, and he wanted me as his managing editor. I was excited to make my day job news again.

  We took over the old Island Ear, a free music and entertainment biweekly newspaper that you could pick up at 7-Elevens and bars on Long Island. But we were not just going to concentrate on arts and music. We wanted to turn it into an edgy newsweekly with hard-hitting stories, and we needed to make a big splash. I was tasked with finding the one Long Islander we knew would make headlines. The Long Islander who showed up higher on Google searches than Teddy Roosevelt and Walt Whitman.

  After a series of phone calls with her lawyer, Woliver and I found ourselves at dinner with Amy Fisher, the Long Island Lolita. In 1992, the teenage Fisher earned worldwide infamy when she shot Mary Jo Buttafuoco, the wife of her thirty-six-year-old lover, in the head. Fisher was now out of prison after serving a seven-year sentence, and Mary Jo had forgiven her. Meanwhile, Joey Buttafuoco, the man in the middle of this true-crime drama, had since gone to jail for statutory rape against the then sixteen-year-old high school student. The story had cap
tivated the nation. We wanted to know if Amy would be interested in writing a fashion column for the paper. She had told Matt Lauer in her first postprison interview that she wanted to work in the fashion industry. To prepare for the meeting, I had bought a bunch of fashion magazines to get ideas for her column, poring over them and jotting down notes. After spending hours inside Vogue, Harper’s, and even Women’s Wear Daily, I considered myself adequately prepared to speak to the idea and come away from dinner with a new fashion columnist who would make headlines. But before the appetizers were served, Amy told us she didn’t want to write about fashion. She wanted to write about crime. Woliver and I both looked at each other and smiled. Her first cover story, in which she explained why she shot Mary Jo, got the now-rechristened New Island Ear on the map. News outlets from across the globe heralded the return and rehabilitation of the Long Island Lolita and introduced our newspaper to the world.

  Our next big issue was the first anniversary of 9/11.

  The terrorist attacks of 2001 are the most analyzed crime in American history. The New York Times and Washington Post had teams of reporters uncovering who the hijackers were, how they got into the country, and how they received their training. CNN focused on Osama bin Laden and the inevitable war that followed the attacks. Every local newspaper searched for their local angle—hijackers attending flight school in Phoenix, eating at Pizza Hut, and buying box cutters in Maine. Every news outlet would be devoting weeks of coverage to the anniversary, commemorating the worst mass murder in American history.

  I had to find the gravedigger.

  That’s the term uttered by every editor to every reporter when they’re looking for a fresh angle to a well-tread story. It comes from when the hordes of reporters descended upon Washington for President Kennedy’s funeral after he was assassinated in November 1963. They were all telling the same story, except New York Herald Tribune reporter Jimmy Breslin. Breslin decided to tell the story of Clifton Pollard, the man who was digging the president’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery. He filed a somber tale about a working man tasked with the final job after one of the most infamous murders in history.

  I found my gravedigger of 9/11 in the story of Henryk Siwiak. The forty-six-year-old had lost his job in Poland, and that country’s failing economy and 15-percent unemployment rate was making it impossible to find another. He had a wife and two children, one of whom was college bound. He came to New York in the fall of 2000 and took any job he could find, sending whatever money he could make back to his family.

  On the morning of September 11, 2001, Siwiak was scouring downtown Manhattan, looking for work, when two planes smashed into the World Trade Center towers. He continued answering want ads and calling on businesses, even after the towers fell. When he realized that no jobs were going to be offered amid the chaos, he walked across one of the bridges connecting Manhattan with Brooklyn and got back to his apartment on Beach Street in Rockaway, Queens. Then he made phone calls to his wife and son back home in Poland.

  “I’m okay,” he told them before recounting the story of how he saw one of the planes fly into the towers and how he heard the rumbles when the buildings came crashing down.

  At 11:42 p.m. on a pleasant tree-lined street six miles from the World Trade Center, Henryk Siwiak fell to the ground with a bullet in his chest.

  There were 2,997 people murdered in New York City on September 11. The public and the authorities know who killed 2,996 of them.

  A year after Siwiak was killed, I traveled to Rockaway Beach and sat at the kitchen table in the hot-pink apartment of Lucyana Siwiak, Henryk’s sister. A soap opera was playing on the television, and her brother’s death certificate lay on the table in front of her.

  She told me that when Henryk lost his job as an inspector with the Polish National Railroad and made the decision to come to America, he settled in the same Rockaway neighborhood as Lucyana, who had come to America six years earlier after her health food store in Poland went under. He left his wife and children behind in Poland and set out for the New World.

  “He saw possibility for himself,” Lucyana told me, her English aided by a handheld digital translator she had placed on the table next to the death certificate.

  Though he had a fevered interest in science, Henryk failed to go to college after high school. Instead, he earned a technical school degree. He married a scientist named Ewa, who was now a middle-school biology teacher, and the couple had an eleven-year-old son and a daughter who was nineteen and about to enter college the following year.

  I called Ewa in Krakow, Poland.

  “He lost more than one job,” she said almost with a laugh. After losing his inspection post, Ewa said Henryk “decided to go and try something else” and went to America.

  Even with the language barrier, his plan to provide for his family was working. Siwiak performed odd jobs and did temp work in construction, laboring at a determined pitch. He earned close to $1,000 every month and sent half back to his family.

  “Did you see the news on TV about the attacks?” I asked Ewa.

  “Oh, it was horrible,” Ewa said. She watched the news with her son. “We thought about our own husband and father [Henryk].”

  On 9/11, they waited for two hours before Henryk finally got back to his apartment and phoned them. “We were very happy when he called us,” Ewa said. Like many New Yorkers, even though he had seen the plane hit the towers, Siwiak was still unaware of the magnitude of the situation—that coordinated attacks on New York, the Pentagon, and a crash in rural Pennsylvania meant the country was under attack. Ewa filled him in, and Siwiak comforted his son.

  Lucyana told me that Siwiak had settled into his apartment on the night of 9/11 when his phone rang. It was a callback from a help wanted ad he had answered in New York’s Polish newspaper Super Express: “Men to Clean Stores in Brooklyn and Queens. English Not Necessary.”

  Siwiak was told by the employment agency that had posted the ad to meet a man named Adam in a white car at the Pathmark supermarket at 1520 Albany Avenue in Brooklyn.

  Because he had never met the man, Siwiak told the agency he would be wearing his favorite coat, a camouflage army jacket with matching pants that he had bought at a local surplus store.

  “He liked very much these clothes,” Lucyana told me. “They were very comfortable.”

  With the entire city on edge and in chaos, not knowing whether a series of car bombs would start in the morning or a chemical attack would be unleashed at midnight, Henryk walked out the door.

  He had never been to that part of Brooklyn before, and much of the transit system was shut down. But he got directions from a woman who lived in his building and went off to his new job.

  The next day, his sister received a phone call from the police. Henryk’s body had been found on Decatur Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, nowhere near the Pathmark he was supposed to be cleaning.

  “Any idea what he was doing so far away from where he was supposed to be?” I asked Lieutenant Tom Joyce, the head of the seventy-ninth precinct’s detective squad.

  He told me that the woman Henryk had asked for directions was actually his landlord.

  “She showed him on the map where Albany Avenue was,” he said. But unbeknownst to her, “the point she was directing him to was the start of Albany Avenue. That’s what’s so sad about this, that he was so far off.”

  At around eleven o’clock, Henryk got off at either the Utica, Ralph, Kingston, or Throop Street stops, more than four miles away from where he should have been. For a man with limited English in a city reeling from an attack, it might as well have been a thousand miles. “Adam,” the man he was supposed to meet, told police he waited for Siwiak for an hour outside the Pathmark before giving up and going inside to clean.

  Meanwhile, Henryk walked down Decatur Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant, lost.

  The main thoroughfares surrounding Bedford-Stuyvesant
are full of storefront churches. The Church of God of Prophecy. Pleasant Grove Tabernacle. Spiritual Israel Church and Its Army. Greater Mount Zion Pentecostal. Violent crime was down 61 percent since 1993, its “Bed-Stuy: Do or Die” reputation shrinking block by block, empty storefronts replaced by quaint coffee shops and bookstores.

  The residential blocks surrounding the quiet intersection of Albany and Decatur feature brownstones and gated gardens, a stone church and a funeral home. The crack cocaine epidemic lasted longer here than in most neighborhoods, but by 2001, it had receded into the shadows.

  On the night of 9/11, Bed-Stuy was like every other neighborhood in America, scared and confused.

  Joyce shared the police report with me. It was sparse. I drove to Bed-Stuy, a neighborhood I had never been to, parked my car on the street, and began walking the area.

  I approached every person I saw with a photo of Henryk in my hand.

  “Hi, do you remember the shooting that happened on 9/11?” I asked two men walking down Decatur.

  “Nah, man,” one of them replied.

  “Hi, can you take a look at this photo?” I asked another man on Albany. “This was the guy that was shot on the night of 9/11 in the neighborhood.”

  He squinted at the photo, paused for a beat, then shook his head.

  “Hi, have you ever heard any stories about a guy who was shot on this street the night of 9/11?”

  I received a sneering no.

  I must have asked fifty people. Then I found Sharonnie Perry, the district director for the local congressman, who was working out of a storefront a few blocks away from the murder scene. She remembered the night well.

  “Things were a little tense and everything,” Perry told me, saying that there were “at least twenty-five to thirty people outside,” late into the night.