CHAPTER 13
Help from All Over
NOTES—Etan Patz
1. License plate 36806—AEL or ABl belongs to a Yonkers man….
3. Doesn’t think Etan is living—sees skeletal remains in shallow water….
7. Sees a buoy or navigational aid—#19—red with white flag or light—body or remains is near area.
—Bill Sillery’s notes on Denise Cealie’s visions
Bill Sillery was just finishing up with the commanding officer at NYPD’s Missing Persons. He’d been in meetings all day, as he usually was on these frequent road trips, and he wanted nothing better than to start back to Albany. If he left right now and caught the 4:30 train he’d make it home by seven. He wasn’t sure if he should even bring this last bit of business up. What the hell, he thought, I’ll probably regret it later if I don’t.
In late 1987, William J. Sillery had been working for the state government more than fifteen years, and was head of both the New York State Missing and Exploited Children Clearinghouse as well as Criminal History Operations and Special Operations. He looked the part—conservative dresser, short, neatly groomed graying hair, the appearance of a responsible professional administrator, who after a long career now oversaw three programs and a staff of more than a hundred. Just now, though, he found himself shifting uneasily in his seat. He knew what he was about to say would undoubtedly raise eyebrows.
“I’ve got this bizarre thing that happened a while back, some information that came to me from a rather unorthodox source, and quite frankly, I don’t know what to do with it, but I don’t feel right just sitting on it. It’s about the Etan Patz case.”
Detective Al Doyle perked up. Everyone in Missing Persons knew all too well about the Patz case. Sillery told his story, about hearing from a cop he respected and dealt with regularly at one of the police departments upstate. This cop had passed on a letter from a woman who said she was a medium. A good friend of hers had done some valuable work for the department and sent her to them.
“Hundreds of psychics have taken a crack at the Patz case,” the detective said, laughing. “Every one of them has a different story and they all contradict each other.”
Sillery repeated what the woman had told him when they’d first spoken a few months earlier. “She’s not just any kind of psychic. She’s a medium. It’s different. I’m not saying I believe in all this, but mediums supposedly communicate with people on the other side. It’s a different skill set.” He knew that would get a look, but he forged ahead.
“I know, I know, it sounds crazy; that’s what I thought too, but just listen.”
Sillery told Doyle of the mysterious clues the letter contained—about Etan being taken somewhere in a cab, about skeletal remains buried in shallow water near where two bridges could be clearly seen. The writer saw a license plate with very distinct numbers, the name “East Park,” and a navigation buoy in some kind of water marked by the number 19 and a red-and-white flag. The letter said a body or its remains would be found there.
The letter had also listed this medium’s phone contact, so he’d called her, a young woman named Denise Cealie. Sillery introduced himself and told her he wanted to know more. He didn’t know what to believe, but he was willing to listen with an open mind. If nothing else, he found the whole topic fascinating, and of course he’d followed the Patz case over the last eight years.
Cealie explained that she both saw things and sometimes heard voices. They came to her mostly at night, she said, not full conversations, just cryptic phrases that weren’t spoken so much as they appeared, kind of like jigsaw puzzle pieces, leaving her to fit them together on her own. Her information had come solely from the voices at first, until one day she’d actually heard from Etan himself, introduced to her by a boy she’d known growing up, who’d died as a child.
She knew how it sounded, and she’d heard horror stories of people like her who approached the cops with this kind of information. She didn’t want to cold-call the NYPD. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to tell anyone. But she also felt like a witness, and if she’d seen a person murdered in her backyard, she’d have certainly felt obliged to report it.
“If someone can take this further,” she’d told Sillery matter-of-factly, “great. If not, then at least I’ve passed it on.”
Other than the topic of conversation, Sillery thought she’d come across like a perfectly straightforward, sane person. He was curious about the clues she’d provided. He wondered if the number 19 referred to some kind of marker. Sillery took notes, and then, with a great deal of skepticism, he did some follow-up research on his own. He called around looking for navigational maps and finally spoke with the Coast Guard’s Office of Navigation. Was there a buoy or navigational aid in the water with such a flag or number? Yes, the woman said after checking, we have one aid numbered 19, a light structure in the East River off Astoria, Queens, not far from Hallett’s Point. Intrigued to learn he’d found his buoy in New York City waters, he spoke to someone at the city’s Parks and Recreation Department and asked about “East Park.” There was an East River Park several miles farther down, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, running along the FDR Drive and under the Williamsburg Bridge.
Sillery looked at the two detectives. “And here’s the wildest part. Hallett’s Point, where the number 19 light structure is? It overlooks a particular area in the water that’s got a hell of a lot of history. Literally. It’s a narrow channel where hundreds of ships have sunk over the centuries. You’ve got tides hitting each other from at least three different directions, and together they can wreak havoc. It’s called Hell Gate.”
“Hold on,” Doyle said, and he picked up the phone. He talked to someone for a few minutes, then hung up.
“Stu GraBois’s sending his people over to get you,” he said. “He’d like to meet you.” Two men appeared soon afterwards and Sillery was escorted to One St. Andrew’s Plaza.
By late 1987, along with a full, unrelated caseload, Stuart GraBois had been working the Patz case for over two years, and within New York law enforcement circles the two names were usually mentioned in the same sentence. He cast the net as wide as he could for new leads, and lobbied aggressively for support. At cocktail parties, he was wont to corner anyone with the resources to help his cause. He would stop at nothing. No matter whom Bill Sillery might have approached with Denise Cealie’s information, they probably would have picked up the phone to call Stu GraBois.
And it wasn’t just the Patz case that made people turn to GraBois. Over the last several years, federal interest in sex crimes in general, and child exploitation cases in particular, had grown. Interstate travel of abused children, the possibility of linked networks; child porn mailed cross-country through the U.S. postal system; these cases were all getting more scrutiny. Within the Southern District of New York, the uptick of new cases was being funneled to GraBois, because of his experience in the Patz case. Eventually, he was asked to oversee all the cases generated by the Sexual Exploitation of Children Task Force, a joint venture between New York police and the FBI that also called on the U.S. Marshals, the Customs Service, and the Postal Inspection Service.
Now GraBois was learning about heinous crimes he’d never before even conceived of. Earlier that year, he’d prosecuted a New Jersey man whose victims were infants as young as four months. The crimes against such small victims so appalled him that GraBois had gone at his defendant particularly hard, asking for the absolute max after the man had pled out. And in one sense the defendant got the max. He shot himself the week before sentencing, and left a lengthy note blaming GraBois’s tough stance.
“I’m assuming prosecution will not be proceeding with this case,” said the judge at the subsequent court hearing where the defense moved to dismiss.
“That depends, Your Honor,” GraBois answered coolly. “I need to see proof first. Does defense have a coroner’s report?” He had no sympathy for the defendant—and he wanted to be sure the man wasn’t pulli
ng a scam.
GraBois had also heard plenty of far-fetched stories like Bill Sillery’s. Soon after he’d finished with the baby molester, the prosecutor and one of his investigators had even flown to Chicago to hear from an institutionalized woman with multiple personality disorder who claimed she’d witnessed her father sacrificing Etan in a ritualistic cult murder. Although none of her personalities would speak to him when he got there, GraBois comforted himself with the knowledge that at this point, anyone with information on the case knew he was the one to call—even someone who was hearing it from the great beyond.
“What do you mean, she has information?” GraBois asked Sillery now. The man didn’t seem like a wacko, but he’d have him checked out before going much further, just on the basis of how seriously he was taking this woman’s claims. “She thinks she has information, or she has firsthand information?”
“She’s got this vision in her head of a place somewhere on the water, and you can see two bridges from this location. Somewhere, on a pier or breakwall, she sees the number 7 or 8. She thinks Etan is buried right under there.” Sillery talked about Hell Gate and described other tidbits Cealie had offered up: the mental pictures that Etan’s killer was a cab driver who drove him from the point of pickup to an unknown location. That he’d already been interviewed by the police, and that she thought the letter M—a name sounding like Michelob—connected the man significantly. The remains, either a body or bones, would be found in a location strewn with garbage, including some kind of shirt, all of which was near shallow water. She saw a wooden post or stick in the ground, too, and some kind of hook. Sillery read off a long list of observations. It sounded like the typical “one from column a, one from column b” psychic list where odds were good that something amid all the details would pay off.
GraBois listened to the account and immediately presumed either Denise Cealie was a quack or she must somehow be involved in the kidnapping, either explicitly or indirectly. Maybe she wanted to get it off her chest, and had come up with this tactic. If, on the other hand, she really thought she was getting her information from across the great divide, well, GraBois had been approached by psychics in the past, and he usually dismissed them out of hand. He’d found they often had their own agendas and were searching less for lost children and more for legitimacy by affiliating themselves with reputable law enforcement. But he wanted to know more, especially since Sillery had bothered to do such intriguing follow-up.
Over the next week, GraBois did his own research, using contacts in Albany to check out Bill Sillery. The man was in good standing, a career government man with no crackpot history. Now GraBois wanted to learn about the area Denise Cealie was describing. Could such a location exist? He had to narrow it down from the entire length of the Hell Gate channel and a vague mental image of two bridges. He talked it over with a fellow prosecutor down the hall one day, his friend Louis Freeh.
Freeh put on his coat. “Let’s go across the street and talk to Jim. He’ll have some ideas.”
James Kallstrom ran the FBI’s Special Operations Division. He was renowned as the guy who once put a bug the size of a quarter under a sofa cushion at mobster John Gotti’s favorite hangout, the Ravenite Social Club. Special Ops could not only find the needle in a haystack, but they could then get close enough to hear it confess to a gangland slaying. In Kallstrom’s office, Freeh introduced GraBois, who wondered if he’d see some eye-rolling from the small group in the room when the problem was explained, but Kallstrom quickly agreed to send up a plane to take surveillance pictures. Days later, the photos came back with views of the two bridges spanning Hell Gate channel that directly corresponded to Denise Cealie’s vision. Spray-painted on one of the bridges was the number 1978. Weird, thought GraBois, shaking his head as he looked at the pictures.
In mid-December, GraBois called up Sillery and asked if he could get Denise Cealie to meet with him in New York. He also arranged to have NYPD detective Al Sheppard there, who was assigned to what had become known as the Devil’s Squad. Originally tasked to investigate child porn cases, the squad had morphed into the realm of the occult, which overlapped when pedophilia cases were tied to cults and ritualistic crimes. Sheppard and GraBois had worked together on other child exploitation cases, and the prosecutor asked him to weigh in on Denise Cealie and her special gifts.
A few days before the Christmas break, both Sillery and Cealie took a day off from work and trained down to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, where GraBois was able to form his own impressions.
On the short side and a little stocky, Denise Cealie looked to be in her late twenties, with shoulder-length wavy dark brown hair, large, expressive eyes, and a pleasant smile. Neatly attired in dress pants and blouse, she was perfectly “normal”-looking; no tarot cards, incense, or zodiac references. She had no criminal history and was gainfully employed as a special ed schoolteacher. She presented herself well and spoke as an articulate schoolteacher would.
“Start from the beginning,” GraBois said simply, “and tell me your story.”
Cealie talked of becoming aware of her “gift” as a teenager, that her mother accepted it, her father not at all. For a year or two now, she said, she’d been hearing about Etan, from the voices, then from the boy himself. Sometimes she heard the voices in her head, sometimes out loud. There were also “pictures” that presented themselves, so that she knew what things looked like. And no, she’d known almost nothing about the Patz case when this started, and still didn’t. She’d brought notes with her and referred to them as she began to repeat the details she’d already given to Sillery.
GraBois was gracious and took pains to minimize any outward sign of his doubt in her tales from the supernatural, but he peppered her with questions. Who did she know in New York? How often did she come there? Did she have a boyfriend there? How could they verify her statements? He was looking to uncover any tie she might have to the case, but it wasn’t immediately apparent.
“Can we get a car?” Cealie finally got the chance to ask her own question. It was getting late and she was itching to move out, to look for the site. And off they went, GraBois and Sillery, Al Sheppard and the medium, in the direction of Hell Gate. GraBois knew where it was in the water, but not how to get there, and they drove across to Brooklyn, then uptown through Queens, until they reached a point in Astoria that looked out over the East River. At Cealie’s request, they piled out of the car and regarded a scene that included two bridges spanning the water. One was the Triborough Bridge, connecting the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens via Ward’s Island. The other was a picturesque steel arch railroad bridge named after the Hell Gate channel it rose 135 feet above. At low tide, the channel descended six feet farther and looked more like a glassy lake sheltered from the wind, but when the tides clashed, sparring from the Hudson and East rivers, the Long Island Sound, and the Atlantic Ocean via the Hudson estuary, its name was appropriate. Cealie searched the skyline with a puzzled look.
“Something’s not right,” she said. “This doesn’t look like the picture.” Then her face cleared. “We have to cross over,” she said.
GraBois was too annoyed to make “crossing over” jokes. He squinted at the sun, estimating no more than a few hours of daylight left, and he wasn’t sure where this wild ghost chase was going to end. Cealie was pointing to the other side of the steel span bridge. Ward’s Island was a sparsely populated speck on the map, once a pauper burial ground, and still home to a psychiatric institution for the criminally insane. That was where Cealie wanted to take them now.
“In the picture that I see, that bridge is on the left, not the right. We’re on the wrong side.” The scenery all looked the same to everyone else, snow covering the most distinguishable characteristics, and it was miserably cold. Cealie shrugged her shoulders, they got back in the car, and since they couldn’t actually cross the railroad bridge, they had to laboriously work their way around, then across the Triborough Bridge. Once on the other side, Cealie assuredly started to direct
them, convincing GraBois she’d been there before, despite her protests to the contrary. She’s playing us, he thought, but he let himself be guided to see where they’d end up. They finally approached the southern tip of the island.
“Stop the car!” Cealie screamed suddenly. She was pointing at a chain-link fence that surrounded the outer edges of the land.
“Bill, you need to go over to that fence,” she commanded Sillery. He did as she asked, aware that he had no boots, just the dress shoes he’d worn down from Albany. When he got to the fence he could see an embankment to the water’s edge, a rocky, muddy scramble from where he stood. He looked back at Cealie and followed her hand as she motioned him down the fenceline to a short section he hadn’t noticed where the fence had pulled away to allow access to a narrow path that led precipitously down to the rocks below. Cealie waved him toward the water.
“Go down, go,” she yelled, and he carefully picked his way on the almost vertical trail, sliding partway until he reached the bottom, rough stones and gravel that led to the shoreline. He took just a few steps forward before he stopped short, flabbergasted.
He stumbled frantically back up, motioning the others out of the car. GraBois told Cealie to stay back and he and Al Sheppard joined Sillery.
“You’ve got to see this.” He wouldn’t say anything more.
Sheppard went down first, as GraBois and Sillery watched him struggle to keep his balance before disappearing down the trail.
“Holy shit, holy shit.” GraBois and Sillery heard his epithets and GraBois quickly followed. At the bottom, all three finally stood stock still, taking in the sight. In the background lay a clear view of the two bridges, and closer, the water lapped at the rocky shoreline. But only a few feet directly in front of them stood a makeshift wooden cross. Draped over it, the worn pattern of teddy bears running in a wide strip across its middle, was the tattered remnants of a child’s sweater.
After Etan Page 22
