Homicide

by David Simon

  * * *

  A final postscript: In 1988, 234 men and women died violent deaths in the city of Baltimore. In 1989, 262 people were murdered. Last year, the murder rate jumped again, leaving 305 dead—the city’s worst toll in almost twenty years.

  In the first month of 1991, the city is averaging one murder a day.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book is a work of journalism. The names of the detectives, defendants, victims, prosecutors, police officers, pathologists and others identified in the text are, in fact, their real names. The events described in the book occurred in the manner described.

  My research began in January 1988, when I joined the Baltimore Police Department’s homicide unit with the unlikely rank of “police intern.” As often happens when journalists hang around one place long enough, I became a piece of furniture in the unit, a benign part of the detectives’ daily scenery. Within weeks they were acting as if allowing a reporter to gawk at the chaos of criminal investigation was entirely natural.

  So that my presence would not interfere with the investigations, I agreed to look and dress the part. That meant cutting my hair, purchasing several sport coats, ties and slacks and removing a diamond-stud earring that had done little to endear me to the detectives themselves. Throughout my year in the unit, I never identified myself to anyone as a law officer. But my appearance, coupled with the presence of other police, often led civilians and even other police to assume that I was, in fact, a detective. To journalists trained to identify themselves while reporting, this may be perceived as a crime of omission. But to declare myself at crime scenes, during interviews or inside hospital emergency rooms would have dramatically impaired the investigations. In brief, there was no other way to research this book.

  Still, the ethical ambiguity was there every time I quoted a witness, an emergency room doctor, a prison guard, or a victim’s relative who assumed I was a law officer. For that reason, I have tried to accord these people as much anonymity as possible, balancing questions of fairness and privacy with the need for accuracy.

  All of the detectives on Lieutenant D’Addario’s shift signed release forms before seeing any portion of the manuscript. Other characters central to the book also gave approval for their names to be used. In order to obtain these releases, I promised the detectives and others that they would be allowed to review relevant portions of the manuscript and suggest changes for purposes of accuracy. I also told the detectives that if there was something in the manuscript that was not essential to the story but that could nonetheless harm their careers or personal lives, they could ask that it be deleted and I would consider the request. In the end, the detectives requested remarkably few changes, and the handful to which I agreed involved mundane items, such as one detective’s comment about a woman in a bar or another’s criticism of a specific superior. I allowed no changes that involved the handling of a case or in any way altered or muted the book’s message.

  In addition to the individual detectives, the police department itself had a limited right to review the manuscript—but only to ensure that undisclosed evidentiary material in pending cases (bullet calibers, manner of death, clothing of victim) was not being released in instances where such facts, if kept secret, might later help identify a suspect. No changes or deletions resulted from the department’s review.

  Representatives of the Baltimore state’s attorney’s office and the state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner also reviewed relevant portions of the manuscript for purposes of accuracy only. Like the detectives, they could suggest, but not insist on, changes.

  Most of the dialogue in this narrative—perhaps 90 percent—comes from the scenes and conversations that I personally witnessed. In a few instances, however, important events occurred on shifts when I was not working or when I was busy reporting on the activities of other detectives. In those instances, I was careful not to use direct quotes for long portions of text, and I have tried to use only those quotes that were specifically recalled by the detectives. And when a character is shown to be thinking something, it is not mere presumption: In every case, subsequent actions made those thoughts apparent or I discussed the matter with that person afterward. And by reviewing the material with the detectives, I have tried to ensure that their thoughts have been portrayed as accurately as possible.

  For the unprecedented and unparalleled cooperation of the Baltimore Police Department, I am indebted to the late Police Commissioner Edward J. Tilghman as well as the current commissioner, Edward V. Woods. I am also grateful to Deputy Commissioner for Operations Ronald J. Mullen; retired Colonel Richard A. Lanham and Deputy Commissioner Joseph W. Nixon, both of whom headed the Criminal Investigations Division for portions of 1988; Captain John J. MacGillivary, commander of the Crimes Against Persons section; Lieutenant Stewart Oliver, administrative lieutenant for the persons section; as well as the multitude of BPD commanders, line officers and technicians who went out of their way to assist me.

  This project would also not have been possible without the invaluable assistance of Director Dennis S. Hill, chief public information officer for the Baltimore department, and Lieutenant Rick Puller and Sergeant Michael A. Fry of the department’s legal affairs unit.

  I would also like to thank Chief Medical Examiner Dr. John E. Smialek and others in the medical examiner’s office for advice and assistance; and Dr. Smialek and Michael Golden, spokesman for the state health department, for providing access to the OCME. In the city prosecutor’s office, I am indebted to State’s Attorney Stuart O. Simms, Chief of the Violent Crimes Unit Timothy V. Doory, and Chief of the Trial Division Ara Crowe.

  On the editorial side, this book comes into the world only through the determined and devoted efforts of John Sterling, editor in chief at Houghton Mifflin, who saw the possibilities from the outset and simply refused to let any of them slip away. His patience, talent and expertise are responsible for much of what may be called good writing in these pages; I plead guilty to the rest. This book also benefited immensely from the efforts of Luise M. Erdmann, who proved that manuscript editing, when done well, is more art than craft. My thanks also to Rebecca Saikia-Wilson and everyone else at Houghton Mifflin who gave this project such strong support.

  I am also grateful to my editors at the Baltimore Sun, who granted me leave to complete the work and were unswervingly supportive of the project, even after I blew a deadline or three. My thanks to James I. Houck, managing editor; Tom Linthicum, metropolitan desk editor; Anthony F. Barbieri, city editor; and writing coach Rebecca Corbett, who has been a source of advice and encouragement ever since I began making nightshift police rounds at the Sun eight years ago.

  I would like to thank Bernard and Dorothy Simon, my parents, whose help over the last three years was essential, as well as Kayle Tucker, whose love and unstinting support was of equal value.

  Most important, this book could not exist without the assistance of homicide shift lieutenants Gary D’Addario and Robert Stanton and the forty detectives and detective sergeants who served in their 1988 commands. They took the real risk here, and I hope they feel now that it was in some way worth it.

  Finally, a note on one last ethical dilemma. Over a period of time, familiarity and even friendship can sometimes tangle the relationship between a journalist and his subjects. Knowing that, I began my tenure in the homicide unit committed to a policy of complete nonintervention. If the phone in the main office rang and there was no one but me to answer, then it was not meant to be answered. But the detectives themselves helped to corrupt me. It began with phone messages, then grew to spelling corrections and proofreading. (“You’re a writer. Take a look at this affidavit.”) And I shared with the detectives a year’s worth of fast-food runs, bar arguments and station house humor: Even for a trained observer, it was hard to remain aloof.

  In retrospect, it’s good that the year ended when it did, before one of the detectives provoked me to intervene in some truly harmful way. Once, in December, I found myself
crossing that line— “going native,” as journalists say. I was in the back seat of an unmarked car cruising Pennsylvania Avenue, accompanying Terry McLarney and Dave Brown in their search for a witness. At one point, the detectives suddenly pulled over to the curb to confront a woman who matched the description. She was walking with two young men. McLarney jumped from the car and grabbed one man, but Brown’s trenchcoat belt became caught in the car’s shoulder harness and he fell back into the driver’s seat. “Go,” he yelled at me, still struggling with the harness. “Help Terry.”

  Armed with my ball-point pen, I followed McLarney, who was struggling to get one man up against a parked car while the second eyed him angrily.

  “DO HIM!” McLarney yelled at me, gesturing toward the second man.

  And so, in a moment of weakness, a newspaper reporter shoved a citizen of his city against a parked car and performed one of the most pathetic and incompetent body searches on record. When I got down to the guy’s ankles, I looked up over my shoulder at McLarney.

  He was, of course, laughing hard.

  David Simon

  Baltimore

  March 1991

  POST MORTEM

  To properly credit the idea for this book, we journey back twenty years to a Christmas Eve I spent with Roger Nolan, Russ Carney, Donald Kincaid and Bill Lansey, observing some routine mayhem and preparing to write a brief feature article on the holiday observances of those charged with working murders. I, for one, enjoy the perversity of a silent, holy night punctuated by a double-cutting in Pimlico, and I thought there might be a few readers of the Baltimore Sun who might also be willing to appreciate the small wit of the thing.

  So I brought a bottle up to headquarters, slipped past the security desk, and joined the homicide squad working overnight as they handled a street shooting, a drug overdose and the aforementioned knife fight. Later, with much of the work done and an early morning choral concert of holiday music playing on the office television, I sat with the detectives as Carney poured cheer.

  The elevator doors rang and Kincaid appeared, back from the last shooting of the shift—a desultory affair that landed the victim in an emergency room bed with a gunshot wound to an upper leg. He would live to see New Year’s.

  “Most people are getting up right now, going under the tree and finding some kinda gift. A tie, or a new wallet or something,” mused Kincaid. “This poor bastard gets a bullet for Christmas.”

  We laughed. And then—I will never forget the moment—Bill Lansey said:

  “The shit that goes on up here. If someone just wrote down what happens in this place for one year, they’d have a goddamn book.”

  Two years later, Bill Lansey, bless him, was dead of a heart attack and I wasn’t feeling all that good about things myself. Despite record profits, my newspaper was challenging its labor union with a contract of givebacks in medical coverage and provoking a strike—an economic stance that was to become thematic in journalism over the next couple decades. I hated my bosses just then, and being one to nurse a grudge I sensed it might be good to conjure a leave of absence, something that would hold my job at a daily newspaper but avoid the newsroom for a time.

  Remembering Lansey’s remark, I wrote to the Baltimore police commissioner, Edward J. Tilghman. Would it be possible, I asked with feigned innocence, to observe his detectives for a year?

  Yes, he replied, it would.

  To this day, I have no direct explanation for his decision. The captain in charge of the homicide unit was opposed to the idea, as was the deputy commissioner for operations, the number two in the department. And a straw poll of detectives in the unit quickly revealed most thought it a terrible notion to allow a reporter into the unit. My good fortune was that a police department is a paramilitary organization with a rigid chain of command. It is not, in any sense, a democracy.

  I never managed to ask Tilghman about his decision. He died before the book was published—indeed, before I’d finished my research. “You need to ask why he let you in?” Rich Garvey later offered. “The man had a brain tumor. What other explanation do you need?”

  Maybe so. But years later the CID commander, Dick Lanham, told me there was something more subtle in play. In response to questions about my status, Tilghman said his own years as a homicide detective were the most enjoyable and gratifying of his career. I suppose I’d like to believe his motivation for letting me inside was as pure as that, though Garvey was probably onto something as well.

  In any event, I entered the unit in January 1988 with the improbable rank of police intern, working New Year’s Day with the men—and all nineteen detectives and supervisors were male—of Lieutenant Gary D’Addario’s shift.

  The rules were fairly straightforward. I could not communicate what I witnessed to my newspaper and I had to obey the orders of the supervisors and investigators I followed. I could not quote anyone by name unless they agreed to be so quoted. And when my manuscript was complete, it would be reviewed by the department’s legal affairs division—not to censor my work for general content but to assure that I did not reveal key pieces of evidence in cases still pending. As it turned out, no changes resulted from this review.

  Shift after shift, with detectives looking on warily, I filled notepads with what seems to me now a frantic stream of quotes, case details, biographical data and general impressions. I read through all the detectives’ case files from the previous year, as well as the H-files on some of the biggest cases I had chased as a police reporter: the Warren House shootings, the Bronstein murders, the Barksdale warfare in the Murphy Homes back in ’82, the Harlem Park jacket slaying from ’83. I couldn’t believe I could just walk to the admin office and pull entire case files, then sit at a desk and read them at leisure. I couldn’t believe I wasn’t thrown off crime scenes, or out of interrogation rooms. I couldn’t believe the department brass wasn’t going to change its collective mind, confiscate my ID card and toss me onto Frederick Street.

  But days became weeks and the detectives—even those cautious souls who would change their very tone when I walked up on their conversations—soon lost the will to perform, to pretend to be someone other than who they were.

  I learned to drink. I dropped my Amex card now and then, whereupon the detectives more than matched me round for round, showing me I still had a lot to learn. Staggering from the Market Bar at closing one night, Donald Worden—who had allowed me to follow him on calls and through cases, but always with a certain veiled contempt—glared at me as if for the first time and drawled, “All right, Simon. What the hell do you wanna see? What the fuck do you think we’re gonna show you?”

  I had no answer. Notepads were stacked on my desk, a dog-eared tower of random detail that confused and intimidated me. I tried to work six days a week, but my marriage was ending and sometimes I worked seven. If the detectives went drinking after work, I was often in tow.

  On night shifts, I would work doubles, coming in at four and staying through the midnight shift until early morning. Sometimes, coming off midnight, we drank at dawn, and I would stagger home to sleep until night. I learned to my amazement that if you forced yourself to drink the morning after a bad drunk, it somehow felt better.

  On one February morning, I was hungover and late for morning roll call when Worden phoned to wake me with the news that a dead girl had been found in a Reservoir Hill alley. I was at the crime scene ten minutes later, staring at the eviscerated body of Latonya Wallace and the beginning of an investigation that would become the spine of the book.

  I began to focus on that case. On Pellegrini, the new man. On Edgerton, the lone-wolf secondary on the case, and on Worden, the gruff conscience of the unit. I talked less, listened more and learned to pull out the pen and notepad discreetly, so as not to upset the delicate moments of ordinary squadroom life.

  In time, because I read the casework voraciously and sat through multiple shifts to note the comings and goings of detectives, I became in some small way a clearinghouse of basic in
formation:

  “Where’s Barlow?”

  “He’s in court. Part eighteen.”

  “Is Kevin with him?”

  “No, he’s at the bar.”

  “With who?”

  “Rick James and Linda. And Garvey went, too.”

  “Who caught the one on Payson last night?”

  “Edgerton. He went home after the morgue and he’s coming back at six.”

  But mostly, I was comic to these men, an amusing twenty-something distraction— “a mouse tossed into a room full of cats,” by Terry McLarney’s description. “You’re lucky we’re so bored with each other.”

  If I went to a morning autopsy, Donald Steinhice would throw his voice and watch me eye the cadavers warily, just as Dave Brown would drag me to the Penn Restaurant to eat that nasty chorizo-and-egg platter so as to measure the fortitude of a novice. If I sat through a successful interrogation, Rich Garvey would turn to me at the end to ask if I had questions of my own, then laugh at whatever reportorial impulse resulted. And if I feel asleep on midnight shift, I would wake to find Polaroid photos of myself, head back in a chair, mouth open, flanked by smiling detectives imitating fellatio, their thumbs stuck through open zippers.

  McLarney wrote my green sheet, the semi-annual evaluation so detested by working police in Baltimore. “Professional kibbitzer,” he wrote in summation of my standing. “It’s unclear what Intern Simon’s actual responsibilities are, however his hygiene is satisfactory and he seems to know a good deal about our activities. His sexual appetites remain suspect, however.”

  At home, with a mattress on the bedroom floor and most of the furnishings in the possession of my ex-wife, I spent hours filling a computer with stream-of-consciousness rambling, emptying the notepads, trying to organize what I was witnessing into separate casefiles, biographies and chronologies.