Final Vows

by Karen Kingsbury

  “I’ll be back,” he said to the clerk as he turned and ran from the store.

  Back in the office he dug through the box of evidence until he found Carol’s May Company credit card. Dan had said they’d been shopping at the store the night of the murder. One telephone call later he knew he was on the right trail. Store records showed that Dan and Carol did purchase a bottle of men’s cologne the evening of March 31, 1988. Brian picked up the phone again and called the store’s personnel department.

  “This is Detective Brian Arnspiger from the Burbank Police Department,” he said. “I need to know if a Kevin Bennington worked at your store on March 31, 1988.”

  “March 31, 1988?” the woman asked.

  “Yes,” Brian answered, trying to be patient.

  “That was more than a year ago, sir.” The woman at the other end sounded bothered by the request. “I’ll have to put you on hold.”

  Brian watched two minutes tick slowly by on his office clock before the woman finally returned. If Brian was right and Bennington worked at May Company that night, it would be perfectly understandable that his fingerprints would be on a cologne box in the Montecalvo home. The woman returned to the phone.

  “Yes, he was employed with us at that time.”

  Brian was lacing the hole together. “What department did he work in?”

  “Cologne and cosmetics.”

  The loophole was sewn shut.

  With the New Year Brian had mixed feelings about the Montecalvo case. He was making progress, gathering pages of evidence. But everything he’d found so far was purely circumstantial. Brian began looking for a break in the case, something that would push it over the edge and give the police enough evidence to arrest Dan.

  The break came January 13 just after 11 P.M. At that time, two Glendale police officers witnessed a brown sedan weaving precariously down a busy San Fernando Valley street. Switching on his car’s lights and sirens, Officer John McKillop tried to stop the swerving car. Instead the driver began leading them on a chase that did not end until the driver crashed his car into a utility pole at the corner of Fletcher Avenue and San Fernando Road and tried to flee on foot.

  Both officers got out of their car, drew their guns, and chased the man, ordering him to stop running or they would shoot. The man stumbled to a stop and turned around, his hands struggling to stay over his head.

  “Keep your hands where we can see them,” McKillop barked, noticing that the man appeared to be drunk but not seriously injured from the crash. “Stay where you are.”

  Carefully, their guns pointed at the man, the officers approached him.

  “Let’s see some identification.”

  The man groped about his jacket for a wallet and, after several unsuccessful attempts, finally found it and handed it to the officer.

  “Take this,” McKillop said, passing the wallet off to his partner. “Find his license, check it out.” Then he pulled the man’s hands behind his back and walked him back to his car. McKillop looked past him into the car and saw a handgun on the floor of the vehicle’s passenger side. In one smooth motion he reached into the car and pulled it out. The gun was loaded.

  McKillop snapped a pair of handcuffs on the man’s wrists and propped him up against the car. Moving quickly and expertly, McKillop leaned back into the car and checked the glove compartment. “What have we here?” the officer mumbled as he retrieved a large wad of cash and a pager. McKillop sorted through the stack of small bills and discovered that it totaled nearly five hundred dollars. Loaded gun, excess cash. The man must have been involved in a robbery.

  McKillop stood again and faced the man. “You’re under arrest,” he stated without emotion. “You have the right to remain silent . . .”

  Back in the police car, McKillop’s partner had found the man’s driver’s license. He was nearly fifty years old, slight build with dark hair. The officer was satisfied that the man they had pulled over was the same man pictured on the license.

  “What do you have on a Dan Montecalvo of Burbank?” the officer asked. A minute later when the dispatcher had answered him, the officer felt a rush of adrenaline.

  The man was the primary suspect in the murder of his wife.

  Brian Arnspiger was in his office the next morning when Sergeant Kight walked in and told him the news.

  “Where’s his car?” Brian was already up, slipping a jacket over his shoulders.

  “Over at the Glendale police yard in the East Valley. Why don’t you and I go take a look.”

  “I’m with you.” In a matter of minutes, the two men were headed toward the East Valley.

  McKillop had already booked Dan’s gun into evidence, but because he was suspected of a murder in neighboring Burbank he stopped short of searching the entire car. That was a job for the Burbank Police Department.

  The morning was still young, chilly and overcast, when Brian and Kight arrived at the police impound lot. The first place Brian looked was inside the car’s trunk.

  “What’s all this stuff?” Brian stepped back, taking in the scene. The trunk appeared to be strewn with garbage.

  “Looks like a bunch of junk,” Kight said, moving aside numerous papers as he searched for evidence.

  Brian picked up one of the sheets of paper and then another. “Wait a minute,” he said, reading bits and pieces of the typewritten, double-spaced document. “Look at this. It’s some kind of story or something.”

  Brian quickly found what he was looking for. It appeared to be the front page of the document. Brian held the piece of paper where he and Kight could both read the first paragraph:

  The following is a true story. It is a story of a man salvaged by the incredible love of an exceptional lady. A lady who met a violent death and how that death and the ensuing police investigation nearly destroyed his faith in God, people, and in life itself. And how he drifted back into the world of hate blinded by a rage that threatened to consume his very existence.

  Beneath that paragraph was the title, Grief Denied, by Daniel Montecalvo.

  Brian and Kight exchanged a glance and then continued reading the first page.

  The hate flowed like an acid through my veins. . . . Nightmares turning into daymares, drifting in and out of insanity, trying to hold on, my grasp growing weaker. . . . Engulfed by physical pain, a constant reminder of the emotional void left by the death of my wife, Carol. . . .

  It wasn’t always like this . . .

  The second page was somewhere in the jumble of papers and miscellaneous items strewn throughout the trunk of Dan’s car. The two men stared at each other for a moment, trying to fathom the information this manuscript might contain.

  “Incredible,” Brian said, still gazing at the page in his hand.

  “Should be a real page-turner,” Kight muttered as he began sifting through the trunk, retrieving any piece of paper with Grief Denied typed at the top.

  Brian began working beside him. “Something tells me we’ll be needing the pages in order.”

  An hour later the ninety-one-page manuscript had been pieced together and confiscated as evidence. When Brian had finished reading it twice through he was confident it would provide the break he’d been looking for. The manuscript was a first-person account of Dan’s life and the events that led up to Carol’s murder. Brian had hoped Dan might have used the manuscript to confess his part in Carol’s murder. Instead, Dan had used it to tell his version of the story.

  But some of what Dan wrote would obviously hurt his case. On page thirteen, he had written this: “Another escape was lying, and I became a chronic liar. Again this was to escape reality. Reality was ugly and I preferred not to see it.”

  Those three sentences gave Brian enough evidence to obtain a search warrant on Dan’s house. The judge who granted the warrant agreed with Brian. If Dan had been a self-proclaimed chronic liar in the past, there was a reasonable chance he hadn’t changed. The circumstantial evidence—Carol’s li
fe insurance policies, Dan’s gambling debts and prior record—combined to make him a suspect, but it was his own words that ultimately convinced the judge a search was necessary.

  The search warrant was approved just before noon on January 14 and Brian intended to spend the rest of the day combing every inch of Dan’s apartment. He was on his way out the door when the phone in his office rang.

  “Arnspiger.” Brian sounded curt, anxious to start the search.

  “Hey, Arnie, this is McKillop over at Glendale. My partner and I made the arrest on Montecalvo yesterday.”

  “Yeah, great break for us,” Brian said.

  “Something you might want to know,” McKillop said.

  “I’m listening.”

  “After the arrest we took him to the hospital section at County,” McKillop said, referring to Los Angeles County Jail’s thirteenth floor medical ward. “I was filling out some paperwork on him when he called me over. The guy’s not too smart.”

  “So I’m learning,” Brian said. “What’d he want?”

  “I walk over and he says, ‘You don’t know who you’re dealing with.’ ”

  “Sounds like the Dan I know,” Brian cut in.

  “Wait. There’s more.” McKillop’s voice took on a more serious note. “Then he says, ‘I’m going to get you and I’m going to get your family.’ ”

  Brian let out a deep breath and shook his head. Although the charges would be dropped and Dan would later deny making the statement, the detective knew the information would be important when they had enough evidence to take the case to trial.

  “Remember that, will you?” Brian said. “Someday you’re going to need to tell a courtroom full of people that same story.”

  “You bet.” McKillop paused at the other end. “Hey, Arnie, do me a favor. Get that guy behind bars.”

  “I’m trying,” Brian said softly, understanding McKillop’s concern. “I’m trying.”

  Chapter 20

  The information in Dan’s Grief Denied manuscript told Brian more than he’d hoped about Dan’s background, including details about his early criminal days and the reasons he robbed banks.

  According to Dan’s story he walked away from the confinement of the Massachusetts Youth Detention system in 1958 at age seventeen, under the assumption that he would live with relatives in nearby Boston who had agreed to take him in. Dan hoped that finally his troubled past was behind him.

  Instead he found himself in a prison of another kind. As quickly as he’d been set free from the juvenile center, Dan was suddenly trapped by the confines of a society that did not look kindly on those with little education and a criminal background. Rather than work to fight the odds that had quickly piled up against him, Dan continued to blame others for his place in life. When he was turned down for a job, Dan blamed the manager for not giving him a chance. When each branch of the United States Armed Services turned him away because of his criminal record, Dan blamed the system.

  Finally the list of rejections became too long for him to bear. Instead of working at finding an honest way around them, Dan drew from the repertoire of skills he had acquired in detention camp. He lied. He did this by concealing his criminal record on an application for the U.S. Army’s National Guard. He was accepted, but his falsified record was discovered less than six months later and, although he had caused no trouble during that period, Dan was discharged for fraudulent enlistment.

  Brian found one aspect of this story interesting. After six months with the National Guard, Dan would have been trained in first aid. Yet when Carol was shot, Dan made no attempt to give her artificial respiration. Brian made a note of his observation.

  Dan’s walking papers in hand, he left the National Guard office that afternoon and headed for the nearest bar. During the next few weeks, he drank so much that each morning he had no memory of anything that had happened the previous day. He told himself that alcohol was an escape. In reality, the walls of his personal prison were growing thicker with each sip.

  Drinking was not the only way Dan found a false sense of freedom. He also began lying.

  The reality of Dan’s life grew even less attractive in 1960, two years after his release from the juvenile detention system. Perhaps in an inevitable move of following in his father’s footsteps, Dan began robbing banks. Until then, Dan’s legal run-ins had been dealt with by the youth detention system because he was a minor. Dan’s spate of bank robberies was a rite of passage, elevating him from the role of juvenile offender to that of criminal.

  Dan seemed to like his newfound career. After hitting a bank in Boston he realized he’d found a job that not only paid well but also required very little effort. He began to slick his hair back and think of himself as a gangster, fantasizing, convincing himself that he had Mafia connections and an involvement in organized crime. Even though this fantasy was not true, he began to see himself as invincible, able to rob any bank he chose. He was a hero of the criminal underground world. There was one problem. He was the kind of bank robber producers make comedies about.

  When he robbed his first bank, in Boston, he wrote a note demanding that the teller give him all the money in the drawer. This is a typical approach for a bank robber. However, Dan’s note was written on the back of a deposit slip from his personal checking account. The slip contained not only his name, but his address and telephone number as well. When Dan realized what he had done, he had just one choice—pull up stakes.

  His next bank robbery was in Cleveland, Ohio, and was relatively successful compared with his previous effort because this time he did not leave identification behind. But by then he had decided it was probably a good idea to leave town after robbing a bank, anyway. His next stop was Baltimore, Maryland.

  Feeling quite confident, Dan checked into a hotel at the same busy city intersection as two of the area’s largest banks. On a bright, sunny Tuesday morning he walked across the street and robbed the nearest one. Dan knew as he walked back to his hotel room with several thousand dollars that this had been his most lucrative hit of all. What he didn’t realize was that he’d written the hold-up note on hotel stationery, which in addition to being free and fancy, also contained the establishment’s name and address.

  What with a full supply of hotel stationery and another bank right next door, Dan decided against leaving town that afternoon. Instead he waited one week—while the police in that town were undoubtedly on vacation—and wrote another hold-up note on yet another sheet of hotel stationery. Then he walked to the other bank at that intersection and robbed it. The hit made Dan even richer, and he savored his success by staying at the fine hotel another two weeks, still oblivious of the information the stationery held. At the end of the second week, one of the Baltimore bank robbery detectives probably stopped staring at the two hold-up notes and came up with an idea: Their suspect just might be living at that hotel. The police then paid Dan the kind of visit he never expected to get. It was one that brought with it the possibility of eighty years in the state penitentiary.

  With his bumbling spree of bank robberies behind him, Dan was taken to county jail, where he plunged into a deep canyon of depression. During those days, he figured that his sloppy style of leaving a paper trail behind at each bank robbery was less oversight and more the result of a secret self-destructive desire to get caught.

  Perhaps for that reason, Dan waived his right to a trial and pleaded guilty to four counts of bank robbery. The judge took pity on him because of his willingness to admit to the crimes and sentenced him on April 23, 1970, to just twenty-five years instead of the maximum eighty.

  Dan was immediately transferred to Kansas to serve his sentence at the U.S. Penitentiary in Leavenworth. In an effort to survive in a system controlled by powerful gangs and homosexual rapists, Dan continued to boast of his imaginary mob connections. He certainly looked the part, with his weasellike brown eyes and dark hair slicked back from his face. And his thick Boston accent completed the image. By
then Dan had perfected the art of lying and his stories about his Mafia involvement became legend throughout the prison. Soon other inmates began to fear and respect Dan as a mobster. He no longer needed to worry about his safety. If his fellow inmates had known the truth, that Dan had no connections whatsoever with organized crime, they would have been shocked.

  According to Dan he kept himself busy during that time by “shining lights on the system’s failures.” He would complain to the warden about corrupt guards and illegal activity among inmates. Though there are no records of Dan’s efforts to improve prison life, Dan says his activities resulted in his being shackled in the middle of the night and transferred to another penitentiary in Springfield, Missouri.

  The authorities at Leavenworth gave a different reason for moving him. Dan’s prison records show he was transferred to Springfield for his own safety after having gotten in debt with several of the tougher inmates during cell-room card games. Dan’s gangster reputation no longer mattered when he was unable to pay up on his debts.

  Either way, Dan wound up at Springfield, where he became the target of a National Prison Project sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union in conjunction with Amnesty International. Its mission was to set free all persons its organization deemed wrongly incarcerated by the judicial system. The ACLU believed Dan was such a person because of his troubled background. A liberal judge bought the argument and Dan was released on parole just four years after being sentenced.

  Back on the streets again, Dan moved to Tacoma, Washington, and ended up celebrating his first night in town at a local bar. He returned the next day and the next, each time drinking himself into a stupor. Then, on August 6, 1974, not quite a month after his release, he was arrested for impersonating a police officer and for aggravated assault with a gun on an officer. Again, Dan’s version of the incident differed from the police report. Although he was too drunk to remember the incident, Dan insisted he was minding his own business and carrying only a toy pistol. Police records said nothing about the gun’s being a toy, but the judge showed pity by dropping the charges and placing Dan in an intensive alcoholism treatment program.