Blind Faith

by Joe McGinniss

  “Newspaper? What do you want a newspaper for?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you. Drivin’ back down from New Jersey I heard on the radio there that there was some sort of robbery and a shootin’ on one of their parkways. Some man got hit over the head. Some lady got killed. And they broadcast it like it was somebody very important was involved. You got some kind of relative up there, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir, I sure do. My stepbrother Bill Henderson up in Perth Amboy.”

  “Well, would you do that favor for me, Andy? Would you give him a call, say tonight or tomorrow, and ask if he could send you down a paper? I’d sure like to read more about this thing.”

  “Sure thing, Ferlin. I’ll give him a call.”

  “Did you call him?” O’Brien asked.

  “I did. The next day. We talked about family, about how everybody was doing, and I asked him could he send me a Daily News, because I knew he got the Daily News.”

  “Why’d he get the Daily News?” O’Brien asked. “He do the Jumble words?”

  “He is a sportsman,” Myers said. “And he also plays the horses. And I said, ‘If you can get me one for Saturday or Sunday I would appreciate it.’ And he said he would see what he could do. But he never did locate the paper. And when Ferlin came back in a few days later, and I told him I had some good friends in Toms River, he said maybe I should call them, and I did. And Ferlin was standing by me the whole time, wanting to know what they’d say.”

  “Happy Birthday,” O’Brien said.

  “That’s what I said,” Myers said.

  “Right,” Gladstone said. “A few days early. Or late. Or whenever. Listen, Andy, I’m getting tired of your bullshit. I want the truth. You knew all summer long, you knew right from the start, that what they were planning was the murder of Maria Marshall.”

  “I did not,” Myers said. “That’s not so.”

  “Andy,” Gladstone said. “You didn’t pull the trigger. You weren’t even there. If you tell us the truth, the whole truth, right now, we might be able to do something for you down the line. I’m not saying no time, and I’m not making any promises at all, but I am telling you that this might be the last best chance you’ll ever have.”

  But Myers stiffened. “No, sir,” he said. “I didn’t know anything about anything. All I knew was an investigation was going on.”

  “It’s midnight, Andy,” O’Brien said. “You’re still here. You’d better call home again.”

  This time, they gave him a phone in the conference room.

  “Vivian,” he said to his wife, “I’m still here. They want me to say something I can’t say.” There was a pause, during which all three detectives could hear the shrill sound of Vivian Myers’s voice at the other end of the phone.

  Myers took the receiver from his ear and covered the mouthpiece with his hand. “She says the pizza on the stove is getting burnt. She wants to know how much longer I’ll be.”

  “Thirty years,” said Mancuso, who had been sitting quietly at the end of the table, taking notes.

  “That all she said, Andy?” O’Brien asked. “The pizza?”

  “She also said that Ferlin called. He wanted to know where I was.”

  “You tell her,” O’Brien said, “next time he calls, tell him to come down here and we’ll help him find you.”

  There were tears in Andrew Myers’s eyes. “Vivian,” he said. “I think maybe I should have got a lawyer.” Then he hung up.

  He turned to the three detectives. “What now?” he said.

  “Now,” said Gladstone, “we’re going to place you under arrest.”

  It took an hour for the paperwork to clear, but at 1:30 A.M. on Saturday, September 22, Andrew Myers earned the dubious distinction of being the first person arrested for involvement in the killing of Maria Marshall. The charge was conspiracy to commit murder.

  Gladstone called McGuire in Toms River on Saturday morning and learned that the Riccios had said little, though they did acknowledge that Myers was an old friend and that he had attended the birthday party in May. Marshall, however, had been a different story. When he’d heard the names of Grandshaw and L’Heureux, O’Brien said, Rob had almost spilled his drink and then had refused to answer any further questions, invoking Raymond DiOrio’s name.

  Next, Gladstone went to Andy Myers’s house to tell Vivian that her husband had been arrested. Bail, he said, had been set at $1.5 million. She didn’t think she heard him right and he had to repeat the figure. She turned pale.

  “What’s the charge?” she said.

  “The charge,” Gladstone said, “is conspiracy to commit murder.”

  She was sitting on a couch and he was sitting on a chair across from her. They were separated by a coffee table so crowded with bowling trophies that Gladstone could barely see her through the glitter of gold and silver plate.

  She said she’d never heard the name Robert Marshall in her life. She said she had no idea that her husband had gone to New Jersey to see the Riccios after telling her he was going to Texas. She said she thought Andy should probably have a lawyer. Gladstone agreed.

  Then she said that Ferlin had called again to see if Andy were home yet. She was afraid, she said, that someone would try to hurt her or her daughter as a means of discouraging Andy from cooperating with the police.

  What surprised Gladstone most about all these apparently typical semisuburban ranch houses he was visiting was the obvious attention paid to security. There had been a high brick wall around Grandshaw’s house. Here, there were wrought-iron bars on all the windows. Not the sort placed there for decorative purposes—the kind that were put up to keep intruders out.

  The security, Gladstone thought, and the cars. At Grandshaw’s house, there had been a customized van that was worth at least twenty-five thousand dollars, as well as a Cadillac. And Grandshaw was supposedly a self-employed, part-time steelworker. Here, in the driveway of a hardware store clerk who earned maybe two hundred dollars a week at his job, there were a Chrysler Le Baron and a Lincoln Town Car. And Ferlin L’Heureux, who didn’t seem to have a full-time job, was said to drive the flashiest cars of all.

  On Sunday afternoon, Gladstone got a call from a Shreveport detective who’d just been to see Myers at the Caddo Parish jail. “He wants to talk,” the detective said. “He’s got more to tell you.”

  He began talking as soon as the detectives arrived, shortly after 6 P.M. He said he now remembered that L’Heureux had made three trips to Atlantic City, in June, July and September, and when he’d come back from his July trip he’d told Myers an elaborate story about hitchhikers and a stolen car and an auto accident, and having to leave town in a hurry. He had said that if Marshall called, Myers should repeat that story and explain that that was why “Ernie Grandshaw” had not been able to complete the investigation.

  He also said he now remembered that Marshall had called him on Tuesday, September 4, the day after Labor Day, asking, “Where’s your friend? He’s not up here yet.” Marshall had seemed surprised, Myers said, because in an earlier call he had told Myers to give “Grandshaw” the message that “there’s an extra fifteen in it for him if he completes the investigation by Labor Day.”

  Myers was not in good shape. He was crying intermittently, and twisting about in his chair, and already they’d taken away his belt and shoelaces because of his seemingly overwrought emotional state.

  At 6:45, a man named Bascombe Reade arrived at the jail and said he was there to represent the interests of Mr. Myers on behalf of the law firm that had been retained by Mrs. Myers. He requested permission to sit in on the remainder of the interview. Gladstone agreed.

  With each new question, Myers grew noticeably more upset, until he was approaching incoherence. At one point, Reade (who, as it turned out, was not himself an attorney but a paralegal employed by the firm) said to Myers, “Hey, either tell these fellows the truth or keep your mouth shut. I’ve picked up three inconsistencies already.”

  Gladstone said, “Andy
, all we want is the truth. You tell us the truth now, we’ll take that into account. It’ll help you further down the line.”

  “Yeah, Andy,” O’Brien said. “You’re going up north with us. There’s a grand jury up there ready to indict. You’re going on trial up there, Andy. A murder trial.”

  “The truth is all we want, Andy,” Gladstone said. “Just tell us what happened, what you know. At this point, telling us the truth can only help you.”

  Myers then began to cry again. Through his tears he started blurting out phrases. “…Ferlin said it was gonna be a robbery…He told me there was gonna be a robbery on the parkway…in a dark place…she was gonna be shot…he was gonna get hit in the head…”

  At this point, Reade insisted that the questioning go no further until he’d had a chance to speak to Myers privately. The two conferred for more than an hour, at the conclusion of which Reade told Gladstone that he would have to insist that the interview be terminated because his client “knew more than what he was telling,” and because, Gladstone later reported, “he feared Myers would get in further trouble.”

  Before leaving the jail, however, Reade told a couple of Shreveport police officers to whom he spoke that Myers had told him that the murder was “an insurance job.”

  On Tuesday, September 25, Gladstone received a call from a lawyer named Lawton Garner, who said he represented Ferlin L’Heureux. He said he had become aware that New Jersey law enforcement agents were in the Shreveport area, expressing interest in Mr. L’Heureux’s possible involvement in the murder of a New Jersey woman. He wanted to inform Lieutenant Gladstone that Mr. L’Heureux had assured him that he had no involvement in the murder whatsoever. It was Mr. L’Heureux’s view that he could shed no light on the matters that appeared to be of concern to the New Jersey authorities and that therefore he would not be making himself available for any sort of questioning or interview.

  Ernie Grandshaw, however, having become aware of the fate of Andrew Myers, had agreed to talk. Accompanied by his attorney, he met Gladstone, O’Brien and Mancuso at Shreveport police headquarters on Tuesday evening.

  “I’ve known L’Heureux for about fifteen years,” he began, “ever since he used to be a deputy sheriff. See, I do construction work and ever’ now and then somebody wants him to do a job and he knows nothin’ about construction work so he comes to me for information as to how to do it and what it costs.

  “Now, in June I was workin’ a job just across the river in Bossier City, and Ferlin comes by the jobsite and he asks me to pick up some money he said he had comin’ in for some investigation services he’d been doin’. He said when he had ’em send it he didn’t know whether he’d be in town or not so he just had ’em send it in my name.

  “Tell you the truth, this happened twice. One time I went with him right then and the other time he brought me some kind of paper with the information on it and I picked it up for him later that day.”

  Gladstone showed Grandshaw the note Myers had written on the Caddo Hardware memo pad.

  “That was it. That’s what Ferlin gave me. See, both of ’em were from some northern address and I believe one was for twenty-five hundred and the other one for three thousand. I wouldn’t guarantee that, but I believe that’s right.”

  “Did he give you any money for doing this?” Gladstone asked.

  “He never has paid me for what I done for him,” Grandshaw said. “It’s always a favoritism deal.”

  “Did you think you were going to get money for doing this?”

  “No, sir. Not knowing Ferlin, I sure didn’t.”

  “Now, you recall when we came to your house last week?”

  “I surely do, sir. Both occasions. So does my wife.”

  “Did you get in touch with Ferlin to let him know we’d been there?”

  “Yes I did, I made it a point to because I knew he was the onliest man who would pull somethin’ like this on me, get me mixed up in somethin’ this bad.”

  “What did you tell him, or what did you ask him?” Gladstone said.

  “I asked him what in the hell was goin’ on. I asked him what he done pulled and what he had me mixed up in.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He wouldn’t comment on much of nothin’. All he done was look like his momma had slapped him. Turned kind of pale. Yes, he looked like he was pretty well shaken.”

  “Do you know Andrew Myers?” Gladstone asked.

  “No, sir. I’m not even familiar with the name.”

  Grandshaw repeated that he’d never been to New Jersey in his life, that he’d never met, spoken to, or even been aware of the existence of either Robert or Maria Marshall, and that Ferlin had never discussed with him any aspect of the “investigation” for which the money from New Jersey was being sent.

  They let him go that night but the next day they gave him a polygraph test. The results indicated to Gladstone that Grandshaw had not told them the whole truth: that, in fact, he knew who had fired the shots that had killed Maria Marshall and that he was aware of the involvement of other people in the conspiracy that had led to her death.

  Gladstone informed Grandshaw’s lawyer of the results of the polygraph test and the lawyer said that under those circumstances he would have to advise that his client have no further contact with the New Jersey authorities. That was fine, Gladstone said, but he should inform Mr. Grandshaw that unless he told everything he knew, he would soon be arrested on the same charges that Myers faced.

  Wednesday, September 26, was also the day when Gladstone got the warrant that enabled the three detectives to search Ferlin L’Heureux’s house. They found nothing of interest and Ferlin himself was nowhere in sight. He was, however, represented at the search by both Lawton Garner and his son Moss, who was also an attorney, and by his own sister, Bonnie, who worked as a paralegal in the Garner office, and by a blond man wearing a gaudy cowboy shirt and expensive new leather cowboy boots, who was introduced to them as Gary Hamilton, “a member of the firm.”

  What Gladstone noticed most about Hamilton, other than his clothes, was that he remained utterly silent throughout the search, not even engaging in the small talk or pleasantries that seemed to come so naturally to the others. Only much later would it occur to Gladstone that the likely reason for Hamilton’s reticence was his desire not to reveal that he lacked a Louisiana accent.

  On Thursday, September 27, Gladstone finally got access to the Louisiana telephone records that would disclose toll calls made to and from the home of Ferlin L’Heureux.

  Between June 17 and June 19, the records showed, nine calls had been made from L’Heureux’s home to various numbers in Atlantic City, including three to the main number at Harrah’s Marina and two to different pay phones within the hotel. Before June 17 there were none and between June 19 and the night Maria Marshall was murdered there were none.

  The lack of calls prior to June 17 was consistent, Gladstone thought, with Myers’s story that L’Heureux and Marshall had not spoken for the first time until the second week of June, and with the fact that the first money order had not been sent until June 13.

  The absence of any calls after June 19 suggested to Gladstone that from that point forward L’Heureux may have recognized that he was engaged in a criminal enterprise and did not want there to be any traces of contact between Marshall and himself. Thus, the use of Myers to relay messages.

  With Ferlin L’Heureux, Gladstone realized, they were not dealing with a stupid man.

  That night, Gladstone, O’Brien and Mancuso, who by now had been in Shreveport for nine days, went out to a club called Chevy’s that had been highly recommended by several Shreveport detectives. Gladstone had the feeling that he was slowly working free from his blindfold and getting a first, hazy sense of the picture the pieces might someday form.

  They could assume, he told O’Brien and Mancuso, that it had been L’Heureux, signing in as Grandshaw, who had been at Harrah’s in June and at the Airport Motor Inn in September. And that, acc
ording to Myers, L’Heureux apparently had also made a trip to Atlantic City to meet Marshall in July. That it had been L’Heureux who had called Marshall’s office on the morning of September 6, and that it had been Marshall, leaving the office for the presumably greater security of a pay phone, who had called him back eight minutes later.

  Felice had told them that Marshall had said that he’d love to “dispose of” his wife, but of course he had only been kidding. She had mentioned a name to him. A few months later, at a party given by a friend from the neighborhood, who happened to be John Riccio, who was big in the sanitation business and was closely related to the Quadrozzis and Gigliottis, Marshall happened to meet Andrew Myers, who happened to be sitting alone at the bar after having flown fifteen hundred miles north to be at the party, while his wife thought he was in a hospital in San Antonio.

  Ten days later, Myers put Marshall in touch with an “investigator” whose last name he didn’t even know and who just happened to drop by the hardware store the same day that Marshall had called to ask for assistance.

  On at least two occasions, Marshall had sent money to this “investigator,” who made sure to use an alias in all of his dealings with Marshall. On the second of these occasions, Marshall, too, had sent the money under a false name.

  The more they talked, the more the detectives could see a picture dimly emerging. But it was all so circumstantial: dots on a page that seemed to form a picture, but with no one to connect the dots.

  “There’s no question,” Gladstone said, “Ferlin is our man. He’s the one we’ll have to try to put the heat on.”

  At that moment, Mancuso interrupted. There was dancing at Chevy’s, although the three New Jersey detectives were not there to dance, they were there to talk about their case. But Mancuso, staring through the gloom and smoke and dim lighting, observed a large, bulky figure bounding energetically across the dance floor. He’d seen the same pictures that had been shown to Myers and he thought he recognized the man.