by David Simon
The new gospel of the Latonya Wallace case-with Edgerton as its author and Pellegrini, his first convert-accepted all those earlier arguments and yet seemed to explain the strange, illogical placement of the body: The killer had not come through the alley. Nor had the child been carried through the premises of 718 Newington-the obvious alternative. The elderly couple who lived at that address and discovered the body were well accounted for and their home had been checked carefully by detectives. No one believed that they were involved, nor was it possible that the body could have been carried through the house without their knowledge.
Only after looking at the scene from a dozen different angles did Edgerton seize on a third possibility: The killer had come from above.
A week ago, when the body was discovered, several detectives had walked up and down the metal fire stair that began on the roof of 718 Newington and descended two flights to the back yard, ending a few feet from the kitchen door and the death scene itself. The detectives checked the stairs for a blood trail or other trace evidence and found nothing. Edgerton and Ceruti had even climbed up to the single-story rear landings of nearby rowhouses to check old pieces of clothesline for comparison with the ligature marks on the child’s neck, but none of the men had given any systematic thought to the idea of rooftops. Only after a dozen visits to the scene did the idea begin to shape itself in Edgerton’s mind and on Sunday morning, three days after the discovery of the body, the detective began putting the theory to paper.
Edgerton taped two sheets of letter paper together and divided the space into sixteen long rectangles, each representing one of the sixteen adjoining rowhouses on the north side of Newington Avenue. In the center of the diagram, behind the rectangle marked 718, Edgerton crudely drew a small stickman to mark the location of the body. Then he indicated the location of the fire stairs at 718, extending from the rear yard to a second-floor landing and then the roof, as well as other fire stairs and ladders on other properties.
Ten of the sixteen rowhouses had direct access to the roof from inside. Latonya Wallace could have been lured into one of the homes on the north side of Newington, molested and murdered, then carried out one of the second-floor windows onto the flat, tar-covered landings above the rear additions. From there, using the fire stairs, the killer could have carried the body to the third-floor roofs, walked a short distance across the common roof and then descended the metal stair into the yard of 718 Newington. That theory alone could explain why the body was dumped near the back door in the fenced yard of 718 and why the killer did not take the lesser risk of leaving the body in the common alley, or a more accessible yard. From the ground, 718 Newington made no sense. But from the roof, 718 Newington was-by virtue of its secure, metal stair-one of the most accessible yards in the block.
On that same Sunday, Edgerton, Pellegrini and Landsman explored the tops of the Newington rowhouses, looking for evidence and trying to determine which houses had direct access to the roofs. The detectives checked the roof caps of each house and found all to be either sealed with tar or otherwise secure. But from the rear second-floor rooms of ten homes, an occupant could have crawled from the window and taken a fire stair or ladder to the roof.
Edgerton marked those homes-700, 702, 708, 710, 716, 720, 722, 724, 726 and 728-on a steno pad, noting as well that 710 and 722 were vacant buildings that had already been checked by detectives. He crossed those houses off, as well as 726 Newington, which had been renovated recently into one of those skylight-and-track-lighting yuppie wonders, the block’s sole concession to a decade-long campaign to attract homeowners and rebuild Reservoir Hill’s slum properties. That house was being prepared for sale and was unoccupied, leaving seven viable rowhouses with access to the roof.
On Tuesday, the new theory was granted even more credibility when Rich Garvey, reviewing the color photos from the death scene, noticed the black smudges on the child’s yellow print pants.
“Hey, Tom” he said, calling Pellegrini over to his desk. “Look at this black shit on her pants. Does that look like the usual kind of dirt to you?”
Pellegrini shook his head.
“Christ, whatever the hell that stuff is, the lab ought to be able to tell you something. It looks like it might be oil-based.”
Roofing tar, thought Pellegrini. He walked the photograph down to the fifth-floor crime laboratory to check it against the child’s clothes, which were being examined for hairs, fibers and other trace evidence. A chemical breakdown of the jet black smudges could take weeks or even months and might only yield the class characteristics of the substance. Pellegrini asked whether it could be determined if the stuff was petroleum-based or if it was at least consistent with roofing tar. Yes, he was told after a preliminary examination by the chemists, probably so, although a full analysis would take time.
Later that day, Edgerton and Pellegrini finished comparing the rooftop diagram with the results of the canvass of the 700 block of Newington, checking the seven likely rowhouses against the occupant lists and criminal histories. The detectives concentrated on those addresses where male occupants either lived alone or were not entirely accounted for on the days of the child’s disappearance, along with those houses occupied by males with criminal careers. Among confirmed alibis, female residents and otherwise law-abiding citizens, the process of elimination took them quickly to 702 Newington.
Not only was it home to the block’s most prolific collection of derelicts, criminals and dopers, but a review of incident reports in the sex offense unit turned up an intriguing item from October 1986, when a six-year-old girl was removed from the house by social workers following indications of sexual abuse. No charges had resulted from the report, however. As for the house itself, 702 Newington had a second-floor tar landing with a wooden ladder that extended to the third-floor roof, and detectives noted during the Sunday search that the rear second-floor windows appeared to have been pushed open recently. A metal screen had been partially cut away from its frame, allowing access to the landing. Moreover, at the rear edge of the third-floor roof, Pellegrini found what seemed to be a fresh imprint in the tar from a dull object, perhaps one covered by a fabric.
On the basis of their criminal histories, six older male occupants of 702 Newington and other residents of the block were brought to homicide on the day the body of the child was discovered-all part and parcel of the preliminary canvass. In those early interviews, the men offered nothing to arouse suspicion, but neither did they endear themselves to the homicide unit. Before being interviewed, the occupants of 702 Newington spent a full hour sitting in the fishbowl, laughing uproariously and challenging each other to perform feats of flatulence.
That performance seems almost understated now, as the detectives work their way through the rubble of 702. Once a stately Victorian home, the structure is now nothing more than a gutted shell without electricity or running water. Plates of food, piles of abandoned clothing and diapers, plastic buckets and metal pots filled with urine clutter the corners of the house. The stench of the squalor becomes more oppressive with every room, until both uniforms and detectives are going downstairs at regular intervals for a cigarette and a breath of winter air on the front steps. In every room, the occupants accommodated for the absence of running water by urinating in a communal container. And in every room, paper and plastic plates laden with food have been deposited in layers, one on top of the other, until a week’s feedings can be traced in archaeologic sequence. Cockroaches and water beetles bolt in every direction when debris is moved, and despite the heat in the upper floors of the house, no detective is willing to shed an overcoat or sport jacket for fear that the garment will be overrun.
“If this is where she was killed,” says Edgerton, moving through a room given over to discarded food and wet, mildewed rags, “imagine what her last hours were like.”
Edgerton and Pellegrini, and then Landsman, arriving later from Whitelock Street, begin to search in the rear second-floor bedroom that belongs to the older man
suspected in the earlier rape of the six-year-old. Brown, Ceruti and the others work their way through the third floor and front rooms. Behind them come the lab techs, taking photographs of each room and any items recovered, dusting for fingerprints on any surface suggested by a detective, and administering leuco malachite tests to any stain that vaguely resembles blood.
It is slow going, made worse by the incredible amount of clutter and filth. The back bedrooms alone-those with direct access to the roof-take nearly two hours to cover, with the detectives moving each item individually until the rooms are slowly emptied and the furniture overturned. In addition to bloody clothes or bedsheets and a serrated knife, they are searching for the star-shaped gold earring, nothing less than the proverbial needle in the haystack. From the rear bedroom in which the window screen had been knocked out, they take two pairs of stained denim pants and a sweatshirt that shows positive on a leuco test, as well as a sheet with similar stains. These discoveries prod them to continue through the early morning hours, turning over rotting mattresses and moving battered dressers with broken drawers, in a methodical search for a buried crime scene.
The search and seizure raid that began a little before midnight stretches to three, then four, then five o’clock, until only Pellegrini and Edgerton are left standing and even the lab techs are beginning to balk. Dozens of latent prints have already been lifted from doorways and walls, dresser tops and banisters, in the unlikely chance that one will match those of the victim. But still Edgerton and Pellegrini are not content, and as they work their way to the third floor, they call for more items to be dusted.
At 5:30 A.M., the adult male occupants of the house are handcuffed together and herded single file into a Central District wagon. They will be taken downtown and dumped in separate rooms, where the same investigators who spent the night picking through the rowhouse will begin an unsuccessful effort to provoke each man into acknowledging a child murder. And though they have not yet been charged with any crime, the suspects from 702 Newington are treated with an almost exaggerated disdain by the detectives. Their contempt is both unspoken and unsubtle, and it has little to do with the murder of Latonya Wallace. Maybe one of the half-dozen men killed the little girl; maybe not. But what the detectives and uniforms know now, after six hours inside 702 Newington, is evidence enough for an indictment of an entirely different sort.
It isn’t about poverty; every cop with a year on the street has seen plenty of poverty, and some, like Brown and Ceruti, were themselves born into hard times. And it has little to do with criminality, despite the long arrest sheets, the sexual abuse report on the six-year-old and the teenagers huffing cleaning products in the living room. Every cop at 702 Newington has dealt with criminal behavior on a daily basis, until evil men are accepted without any excess of emotion as the necessary clientele, as essential to the morality play as the lawyers and judges, the parole officers and prison guards.
The contempt shown to the men of 702 Newington comes from a deeper place, and it seems to insist on a standard, to say that some men are poor and some men are criminals, but even in the worst American slum, there are recognizable depths beyond which no one should ever have to fall. For a homicide detective in Baltimore, every other day includes a car ride to some godforsaken twelve-foot-wide pile of brick where no taxpayer will ever again breathe air. The drywall will be rotted and stained, the floorboards warped and splintered, the kitchen filled with roaches that no longer bother to run from the glow of an electric light. And yet more often than not, the deprivation is accompanied by small symbols of human endeavor, of a struggle as old as the ghetto itself: Polaroid snapshots stapled to a bedroom wall showing a young boy in his Halloween costume; a cut-and-paste valentine from a child to his mother; school lunch menus on the ancient, round-top refrigerator; photographs of a dozen grandchildren collected in a single frame; plastic slipcovers on the new living room sofa, which sits alone in a room of battered, soiled remnants; the ubiquitous poster of The Last Supper or Christ with a halo; or the air-brushed portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr., on posterboard, on paper, on black velvet even, his eyes uplifted, his head crowned by excerpts from the March on Washington speech. These are homes where a mother still comes downstairs to cry on the front steps when the police wagon pulls up outside, where the detectives know enough to use formal titles of address, where the uniforms ask the kid if the handcuffs are too tight and put a protective hand on his head when he negotiates his way into the back of a cage car.
But in one rowhouse on Newington Avenue, two dozen human beings have learned to leave food where it falls, to pile soiled clothes and diapers in a corner of the room, to lie strangely still when parasites crawl across the sheets, to empty a bottle of Mad Dog or T-Bird and then piss its contents into a plastic bucket at the edge of the bed, to regard a bathroom cleaning product and a plastic bag as an evening’s entertainment. Historians note that when the victims of the Nazi holocaust heard that the Allied armies were within a few miles of liberating the camps, some returned to scrub and sweep the barracks and show the world that human beings lived there. But on Newington Avenue the rubicons of human existence have all been crossed. The struggle itself has been mocked, and the unconditional surrender of one generation presses hard upon the next.
For the detectives inside the rowhouse, contempt and even rage are the only natural emotions. Or so they believe until the early morning hours of the search, when a ten-year-old boy in a stained Orioles sweatshirt and denims emerges from the clutter of humanity in the middle room to tug on Eddie Brown’s coat sleeve, asking permission to get something from his room.
“What is it you need?”
“My homework.”
Brown hesitates, disbelieving. “Homework?”
“It’s in my room.”
“Which room is that?”
“It’s upstairs in the front.”
“What do you need? I’ll bring it.”
“My workbook and some papers, but I don’t remember where I left it.”
And so Brown follows the boy to the largest bedroom on the second floor and watches as the kid pulls a third-grade reader and workbook from the cluttered table.
“What kind of homework is it?”
“Spelling.”
“Spelling?”
“Yeah.”
“You a good speller?”
“I’m okay.”
They walk back downstairs and the boy is gone, lost in the sweltering mass of the middle room. Eddie Brown stares through the doorway as if it were the other end of a long tunnel.
“I tell you,” he says, lighting a cigarette, “I’m getting too old for this.”
THREE
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 10
It has been 111 days since Gene Cassidy was shot down at the corner of Appleton and Mosher streets, and for 111 days Terry McLarney has been walking around with the weight of the Baltimore Police Department on his back. Never has there been an open file in the murder or wounding of a Baltimore police officer; never has there been a failed prosecution. Yet McLarney knows, as does every other cop in the department, that a day of reckoning is coming. For years, city juries have been willing to award second-degree verdicts in the shooting of police officers; the boy who shot Buckman six times in the head got second-degree and was already on parole. The doper who killed Marty Ward, shot him in the chest in a drug raid gone bad, also walked with second-degree. McLarney knows, as does every other detective, that it’s only a matter of time before the unthinkable happens and one gets away. McLarney tells himself it is not going to be on him, and it is not going to be on Cassidy.
But the days are bleeding away without any fresh leads, without anything to corroborate a case that the prosecutors say is still too weak to give to a jury. The folder for the Cassidy shooting is thick with office reports, but in truth, McLarney has no more on his suspect than he did back in October. In fact, he has less. In October, at least, he was convinced that the man locked up for shooting Gene Cassidy had actually don
e the crime.
Now he can’t be sure. Now, as the case edges closer to a May trial date, he has moments when he actually catches himself in silent prayer. The appeals are short, petitional and blunt: prayers offered on street corners or in the back of the office coffee room, prayers to a Roman Catholic God who did not hear from Terry McLarney when he himself was out there bleeding on Arunah Avenue. Now, at odd moments, McLarney finds himself muttering the kind of single-issue requests with which He is forever deluged. Dear God, help me put together a case against the man who shot Gene and, rest assured, you will not be burdened with my problems again. Respectfully submitted, Detective Sergeant T.P. McLarney, CID Homicide, Baltimore, Maryland.
The late night calls from Gene only added to the pressure. Unaccustomed to a permanent darkness, Cassidy would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night wondering if it was morning or afternoon. Then he would call the homicide unit to learn what was new, what else they had on this boy Owens. McLarney would tell him the truth, tell him that the case against Anthony Owens was still nothing more than two reluctant, underage witnesses.
