Final Vows

by Karen Kingsbury

  Before Cathy could give Dan’s appearance further thought, he turned toward them and suddenly, as if he’d been given some private cue from an unseen director, began bawling. The women looked at one another, each having noticed the man’s dramatic onset of emotion. As they moved closer, they could see that the man was not just crying, he was also beginning to sweat.

  Must be some sort of side effect from the surgery, Cathy thought to herself as she watched tiny droplets of sweat begin racing down Dan’s forehead and neck. Dan’s loud crying and profuse sweating continued for five minutes while the women stood uncomfortably about the small room. Then, as suddenly as the emotional outburst had started, Dan stopped crying and looked pointedly at Cathy.

  “I wanna know something, Cathy,” Dan said, his voice devoid of the grief he’d shown only moments earlier. “You work for the cops. Why would they do a gunshot residue test on me?”

  The question startled Cathy, who had been expecting to comfort Dan about Carol’s death, not talk about the procedures of a homicide investigation. “Well, Dan,” she said slowly, “Carol was murdered. Any trained detective knows enough to check people who were with the victim at the time of her death.”

  Dan shook his head impatiently. His eyes were dry but sweat drops still rolled down his forehead. This time he sounded angry when he spoke. “Why me? They think I had something to do with this? They think I killed her?”

  For reasons Cathy couldn’t explain, she had a sudden urge to turn and run far away from this man who was drilling her with questions. Her experience with Dan Montecalvo had been limited, but during the few conversations they’d had, Cathy had always thought him to be a reasonable man, despite his drinking problem. But the man in front of her no longer fit that image. In fact, he was irrational, unusually anxious about standard police procedures.

  Cathy realized she’d taken too long answering his question because suddenly Dan looked as if he were ready to jump out of his chair and scream at her.

  As the other women stood nervously behind her, Cathy cleared her throat and forced a smile, praying that her voice would not betray the strange nervous feeling growing in the pit of her stomach. “Like I said, Dan, it’s standard procedure. They eliminate you as a suspect so they can move on and catch the person who’s responsible,” she said quickly. “Understand?”

  Dan dropped his forehead into his hand and began massaging his eyebrows with his thumb and forefinger. Ten long seconds later, he looked up so suddenly, so ferociously, that a gasp caught in Cathy’s throat and she unconsciously took a small step backward. “Tell me this then,” he snapped, narrowing his eyes. “The police are still in the house. Why? It’s been nearly twenty-four hours. What would the police still be looking for?”

  Again Cathy felt a strange urge to run from the room. This was not the conversation she had imagined having with Dan about his wife’s murder.

  “Sometimes it takes a few days to go over everything at a crime scene, Dan,” she said softly.

  “What?” Dan sat up straighter in the chair and began nervously running his hand through his greasy dark hair. “A few days? I’ve gotta get out of here. What are they doing there?”

  “Dan, you need to be thankful that they’re doing a thorough search. They have to dust for fingerprints, check for weapons, collect hair samples. It takes time.”

  Dan shook his head again, his face contorted in frustration. “They’ve been there long enough.” Then he looked pointedly at Cathy. “Cathy, can you ladies ask one of those doctors to let me out?” Dan smiled, glancing at each of the three women in the room. When he spoke again he sounded calmer, more controlled. “Tell ’em I have some business to take care of. I mean, I gotta get home. The police could be tearing the place up.”

  Cathy was sure the doctors would laugh at the request. Dan had just come out of major surgery. He’d just lost his wife in a homicide. No doctor would allow him to leave the hospital and return to the scene of the crime so soon. Still, because she was beginning to feel like she would suffocate if she didn’t leave his room, she agreed to the request.

  Cathy motioned to the others. “Sure, Dan. We’ll ask them. We have to get going anyway. Just wanted to stop in.” She paused. For a moment, Cathy had to struggle to choke back the sob lodged in her throat. Tears began trickling down her cheeks. “We’re so sorry about Carol. We’re praying for you, Dan.”

  Dan nodded impatiently. “Yes. Please ask the doctors about that, will you? I’ve really gotta get out of here.”

  As the other women mumbled their quiet good-byes and turned to leave, Cathy was struck by a strange thought. She and her husband had recently bought their house from a man whose wife was killed in a traffic accident. The man was so devastated by her loss that he could no longer live in the house they had shared. In fact, he had no interest whatsoever in even setting foot in the house after she had died.

  As Cathy left Dan’s hospital room that evening she realized that this was how she had expected Dan to feel, too. After all, Carol had been shot and killed in their home. Cathy knew from her years of investigating murders that when a bullet enters a body near the head or neck, it sprays the victim’s blood several feet and in all directions. She was almost certain that Carol’s blood would still be on the floor and walls of their home. What reason could Dan possibly have for wanting to return to that kind of scene so soon after the murder?

  Cathy tried not to imagine an answer to the question, but as she slipped into bed that night her thoughts made it very difficult to sleep.

  Chapter 7

  At two o’clock in the morning, three hours after Carol Montecalvo’s murder, field evidence technicians from the Burbank Police Department had begun performing a thorough search and investigation of the murder scene. At that time, based on the information they had received from Dan, the Officers were working under the assumption that a burglary had occurred. Evidence technicians looked for specific details concerning point of entry, signs of forced entry, missing valuables, fingerprints, and so on.

  Inside the Montecalvo home the first clue as to how the burglars made entry into the home had been discovered when Officer Brian Cozakos, one of the first to arrive at the scene, walked through the house and observed the back door. Hours later he would write this in his report: “I walked out through the open rear den sliding window and checked the rear back yard.”

  Since Cozakos was the first officer to approach the rear of the house, it became clear that the sliding glass door that led to the backyard had been open before the police arrived. The deduction, then, was quite simple. Point of entry must have been through the back door.

  Next there was a question of whether or not the entry had been forced. When Dan told police that his house had been locked up as he and Carol took their walk, what he really meant was that the front door and the back screen door had been locked. Dan smoked cigarettes; Carol did not. On a typical night, their rear sliding glass door was open to allow the cigarette smoke out and fresh air in. Therefore, if burglars had entered the Montecalvo home through the back of the house, they would not have had to do anything to that door because it was already open.

  There were many ways of determining whether entry had been forced. Police looked for pry marks near or around door jambs, broken windows, missing lock mechanisms. Although many officers at the scene probably looked into whether there had been forced entry, the responsibility for making a judgment call on the issue rested on Detective Patrick Allen Lynch.

  Lynch had received a call at home sometime after 11:30 that night advising him to report to a murder on South Myers Street and take charge of the investigation. As he drove to the scene, Lynch remembered that the city’s last homicide had been months earlier. That was about par. There were usually just one or two murders each year in Burbank. He also wondered if this murder would be similar to that of either of the two murders that took place in 1987. Both were still unsolved and therefore a continuing source of frustration for the homic
ide detectives. Lynch knew that his department had the wherewithal to solve murders. He alone had more than ten years experience with the department, in addition to forty hours of special homicide education and another sixty hours of advanced homicide investigation training. But all of that preparation hadn’t helped in the last two murders.

  As Lynch began checking the back screen door for signs of forced entry, he felt a surge of hope that this murder would be solved. The screen had been slit just inches from the locking mechanism. In his official report of the crime scene, Lynch wrote this about that detail: “The rear sliding screen had a cut or tear slightly above the lock assembly, which would allow someone to unlock the screen door.” They had proof of forced entry.

  There was something else the police noticed. Just off the main hallway, a safe had been left open and in front of it, a metal cash box lay empty on the floor. Since the box was empty, police recorded another telltale sign that the house had been burglarized—missing money. Later, Dan Montecalvo would confirm this by telling Officer Sorkness that the box had held eight hundred dollars in bills and as much as twenty dollars in coins.

  With evidence as to point of entry, forced entry, and missing property, Burbank police began to suspect that this murder was related to the unsolved homicide that had occurred a year earlier and only a few blocks away. That case involved an off-duty sheriff’s deputy, Charles Anderson, who was shot and killed when he surprised burglars in his home. Because the two cases appeared similar, Burbank police notified the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Although Burbank police had jurisdiction in murders that occurred within city limits, county sheriff’s investigators were still working with Burbank police to solve the Anderson murder because the victim had been one of their men. So when they heard about the newest case, several sheriff’s deputies and evidence experts rushed to the scene.

  One of those experts was fingerprint specialist deputy Linda Arthur, who prior to investigating the Montecalvo murder had dusted for fingerprints at more than three hundred murder scenes. She had thirteen years experience and had attended the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia, for the best basic and advanced latent print courses available. When she arrived at the home on South Myers, she used a powdery black chemical called Ninhydrin to dust the rear door, front door, telephones, open safe, and empty cash box. Another technician dusted for prints in the bedrooms and living room. The sootlike powder highlighted the curves and ridges of the freshest fingerprints and palm prints. Immediately, Linda Arthur realized that there were several fresh prints on both the rear door and the cash box. Fresh prints were another detail that suggested a burglary had occurred.

  Deputy Arthur was also in charge of lifting three shoe prints from the kitchen floor. A report listing evidence collected that night stated that two Kodak boxes containing three electrostatic shoe prints were officially tagged as evidence on April 20, 1988. Detective Lynch was apparently concerned enough about the shoe prints that he requested fellow detective Kevin Krafft to get inked impressions of the shoes worn by all police or sheriff’s personnel for the purpose of elimination.

  While sheriff’s and police investigators pieced together proof that the house had indeed been burglarized, Burbank police officer Ronald Caruso was finishing initial interviews with the Montecalvos’ immediate neighbors. He and two other officers had learned that one neighbor had heard his ladder fall off his backyard brick fence while another neighbor, immediately next door to the Montecalvos, had noticed his window screen lying on the ground. Caruso found that information particularly interesting. Perhaps the burglars had tried the neighbor’s house first and been frightened away. At three o’clock that morning, Caruso wrote a note about the screen and gave it to Detective Krafft.

  Certainly by then, those working the scene had what appeared to be plenty of evidence that there had indeed been a burglary at 315 South Myers Street. There was the point of entry, proof of forced entry, missing money, fresh fingerprints and shoe prints, and signs that a burglar had been in the neighborhood. With this in mind, at 5:55 that morning, Detective Krafft wrote a report containing this synopsis of the case: “Evidence has been located appearing to indicate that this is in fact a confirmed 459 PC attempt.” In other words, at that point, the Burbank Police Department believed it had evidence enough to prove a burglary had occurred.

  Not until one o’clock that afternoon would anyone consider that Carol’s death might not have been caused by a burglar. That occurred when Detective Lynch did a computer check of Dan Montecalvo’s background. As a list of criminal charges, a number of which took place while he was still a minor, appeared on the screen, Lynch’s eyes widened. Multiple bank robberies, concealed weapons, impersonating an officer, breaking and entering. Lynch took a moment to absorb this new information. Then, putting aside his earlier convictions that a burglary had occurred at the Montecalvo home, he leaned out into the hallway.

  “Hey, Krafft, come here,” Lynch said, his voice loud enough to be heard by many of the Burbank police officers who had been at the scene the night before. “I think we’ve got our burglar.”

  Chapter 8

  Despite being the occasional butt of former Tonight Show host Johnny Carson’s one-liners, Burbank, California, is not only beautiful, but it is also statistically the safest place to live in the Los Angeles area. As far as its residents are concerned, Burbank’s quaint beauty and safety make up for the fact that it is getting on in years, lacking the glamour of Beverly Hills and the fast pace of Los Angeles. Even as violent crimes increased in Los Angeles at the beginning of the 1990s, Burbank, with its nearly 100,000 people, continued to be a seventeen-square-mile haven.

  In July 1991 the Burbank Chamber of Commerce ran a banner headline across its newsletter that read, “Burbank: The Safe Place to Live and Work.” The accompanying story supported the statement with facts and data. Not surprisingly, people in Burbank were very pleased with their police force and the safe environment they had seemingly provided.

  On the average, Los Angeles residents were not as fond of their police force. This sentiment was particularly apparent in early 1991 when a black man driving a speeding car was stopped and beaten by four Los Angeles police officers. The incident sent public opinion of the big city’s police force to an all-time low. But in nearby Burbank, police were still considered the good guys.

  In fact, months after the beating, which received nationwide attention and brought police forces of other major cities under scrutiny as well, a survey was performed by an impartial pollster asking Burbank residents what they thought of their local law enforcement. A tremendous 92 percent said they were “extremely pleased” with the department and the performance of its officers.

  This statistic might have been the result of Burbank’s ethnic imbalance. Throughout the 1980s, nearly 85 percent of Burbank’s citizens were white. In fact, in 1989, when a reporter contacted the Burbank Elks club to ask how many members were black, she drew this response from a white man who had lived there all his life: “We have no coloreds here, dear. Burbank is an all-white community. The coloreds have their own clubs over in Los Angeles.”

  So it was possible that Burbank residents were not deeply affected by the racial tension between citizens and police in nearby Los Angeles because they lived in a nearly minority-free community. But whether it was a result of ignorance or safety statistics, Burbank liked its police force.

  Of course, in some ways the city’s safety was only fitting, what with Disney Studios occupying a major portion of the business district. Crime had no place in a city that prided itself on having produced make-believe fantasies such as Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty.

  The lack of crime in Burbank had a way of throwing off statistics. For instance, in 1990 Burbank experienced a 100 percent increase in homicides. This happened because instead of the one murder that took place the year before, there were two in 1990. If, in that same year, Los Angeles had suffered a 100 percent increase in homicides, an additional 98
3 people would have died.

  The difference between Burbank and Los Angeles was so vast that to step across the invisible boundaries separating the cities was to more than double the chance of being a crime victim. This was also true back in 1911 when Dr. David Burbank sold 9,200 acres east of Los Angeles to developers who then made it into a city and named it Burbank. The picturesque city, wedged between what is today the Hollywood Hills and Verdugo Canyon, was a flat, lush oasis surrounded by a protective semicircle of mountains.

  In fact, throughout the 1920s the only crime in Burbank was being manufactured on movie sets throughout the city. Over the next thirty years, Burbank with its green meadows and warm climate became the national headquarters for film and communications giants such as Warner Brothers, Disney, and NBC. By then, Burbank had also become home to Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. As Burbank grew, so did the feeling that life was better and safer there.

  But that notion dissolved in the 1950s when organized crime invaded the area. Almost overnight, many of the country’s best-known crime families made Burbank their headquarters. Organized crime became so entrenched in Burbank that on April 21, 1952, the California Crime Commission jolted the city out of its complacency by charging that “the people of Burbank are virtually without protection against the inroads of organized crime.”