Blind Faith

by Joe McGinniss

  Then Rob came through the tollgate. L’Heureux was so deep in reverie he almost missed him. Besides, there was a lot of traffic for practically one o’clock in the morning.

  It was about two miles from the tollbooth to the picnic area. He waited for what he estimated as two minutes, in order to give Rob time to arrive. Then he pulled out onto the parkway. Christ, there was a lot of traffic. That fool Marshall had said that this was practically a deserted stretch of road at this time of night.

  The traffic, in fact, was so thick when L’Heureux reached the ramp that led to the picnic area from the parkway’s extreme left lane that he couldn’t get to it and was forced to pull off onto the shoulder to the right so he wouldn’t miss it entirely. Then he had to sit for what had to be another sixty or ninety seconds at least, waiting for the traffic to thin out, before he could cut across the parkway and pull into the dark and thickly wooded location that he’d helped to choose as the place where Maria Marshall would die.

  “Okay, Ferlin,” Gladstone said. “What happened next?”

  “I pulled in and stopped and I could see Marshall’s Cadillac parked at kind of an angle to me, the door on the passenger’s side was open, and Marshall was layin’ on the ground, kind of toward the rear wheel.

  “Uh, Ricky came runnin’ and I reached over and opened the door and Ricky put some things on the floor. He said, ‘Just a minute,’ and then he run back around, squatted beside Marshall’s car and I could hear the air hissin’ out of the tire. He run back to my car and got in and I eased out of the exit into the southbound lane.

  “After we went through the toll, he turns on the map light and he begins lookin’ through Maria Marshall’s purse. He took out some money—it seems like there was twenty-dollar bills in there—and fumbled through there. I said, ‘Man, get rid of that purse, get it out of the car!’ I was hesitant about bein’ on the parkway, because to me it was just a one-way road with gates every now and then and lots of police. So I made an exit. He asked me what the hell I was doin’. I said, ‘Throw that purse out the window, let’s get out of here.’ He was complainin’ that there was only, I think, four hundred dollars inside, and he said Marshall never did have the fifteen thousand in his pants.

  “And, uh, in my nervous condition I had went the wrong way once I got off the parkway and after a while I seen the sign that said Toms River, three or four miles, or somethin’, so I realized I was travelin’ in the opposite direction of Atlantic City, so I pulled to the shoulder of the road and turned around, and, uh, I don’t know how I did it but I got back up on the parkway, going to Atlantic City.

  “At first, Ricky didn’t want to throw the gun away. He said, ‘If some fuckin’ cop stops us, we might need it again,’ but I guess he thought better of that because when, uh, we come up on what looked to be like a bridge with a lot of water under it, I assumed it to be salt water, and I figured that was a good place to throw the gun, Dew rolled down the window as we got to what we thought would be almost the middle of the water and heaved the gun out the window.

  “Then we drove back to the motel and washed up. And I’m wantin’ somethin’ to eat and he’s wantin’ somethin’ to fuck, so we go back downtown. He done have a good killin’ and he was ready to have some sex. So we wound up in Bally’s Casino there on the boardwalk, must have been about three A.M. by this time, and I had me a plate of scrambled eggs that had a fly in ’em, and then we picked up these two hookers on Pacific Avenue and went with ’em somewheres and I got a blow job with a rubber on for a hundred bucks. Some old flophouse they took us to, and Ricky he wan’t up there any time before he’s back bangin’ on the door, sayin’, ‘Let’s go, let’s go.’ He’d always claimed to be able to fuck for four or five hours so I figured he’d be up there half the night.

  “Anyway, we drive on back to the Airport motel and didn’t sleep but for a couple of hours and was on the road early the next day and we drove straight through all the way to Shreveport. We didn’t talk much about the incident at all, Ricky just said it went smooth. He was sure in a good mood, though. Fact, I even sold him a car on that trip home. He agreed to pay me twenty-five hundred for an old ’62 Nova that I’d been tryin’ to unload.”

  Here, Ferlin actually laughed. “That damn car was so sorry that it broke down before he even got it out from in front of my house. Fact, that was my last sight of him, down under that damn old Nova, still workin’ on it when I walked through my front door.”

  (Again, it should be noted that Ricky Dew consistently denied any involvement whatsoever in these events.)

  The only other questions the detectives had for Ferlin concerned Gary Hamilton and his real role in Louisiana. Ferlin said it was his impression that Hamilton had been sent down by Seely to help put together a story that would provide Rob with an innocent explanation for any documentable contacts he’d had with “Ernie Grandshaw.”

  “I wrote up a scenario,” he said, “which I gave to my sister to type, right there in Garner’s office. I figured nobody knew about me bein’ up there in July, since Greene had been the one to register, and I figured that the fewer contacts between me and Marshall the better. If we could knock out one out of three, that weren’t bad.

  “For that last night when I met him in the casino, I put in that he paid me eight hundred in cash, ’cause what he was supposedly doin’ was tellin’ me he wouldn’t be needin’ no more investigation because everythin’ with his wife and family had worked out so fine.

  “The eight hundred was supposed to cover my extra time and expenses. Seemed like if we both had that same odd number in both our stories, it’d make them more believable.

  “Even after I was arrested, Hamilton come to see me and I told him that if he would give me the address and location of the investigator’s buildin’ that Mrs. Marshall had employed, I could make up a story that said I came back to New Jersey in September in order to steal the investigator’s file on Marshall and any photographs that might have been taken, so that Mrs. Marshall couldn’t use it in a divorce proceedin’.

  “That was all fictitious, too, of course. I didn’t know whether there were photographs or whether there weren’t. That’s just what I was goin’ to say, I just wanted to get it straight with Hamilton, so Hamilton could get the story to Marshall and Mr. Seely, so our stories would be the same at the time Marshall was arrested—if he was arrested.

  “I just assumed, until you boys played me that tape, that Marshall was goin’ to follow the scenario. Sonofabitch. I guess I never did understand how stupid and crazy he really was.”

  19

  It was a good story, Bob Gladstone thought, as those kinds of stories went. It checked out. The dates checked with the motel registrations. The trips checked with the phone-call activity. The payments checked with withdrawals made from Marshall’s line of credit at Harrah’s Marina.

  Even the pocketbook checked. Maria’s pocketbook had been found just where L’Heureux had said it was thrown from the window, and there would have been no way for him to have known that unless he’d been in the car at the time, because the prosecutor’s office had never publicly disclosed any information about the pocketbook.

  Best of all, Ricky Dew seemed plausible as the shooter. Everything Gladstone had ever heard about Dew made his involvement seem plausible, even if there were no actual proof.

  L’Heureux’s story was good enough to justify the deal. And as part of the deal he would testify against Marshall in court. And with L’Heureux’s testimony, supported by that of Felice, and by the enormous amount of documentation that Gladstone and his men had so painstakingly accumulated over the preceding three months, there was no doubt in Gladstone’s mind that the case against Marshall was strong enough to lead to conviction.

  Only one aspect of the story posed a problem. That was L’Heureux’s account of Dew’s reason for having contacted him—the business about the seventy-five-thousand-dollar contract on L’Heureux’s life, put out by someone in New Jersey through someone in Dallas because L�
��Heureux had failed to deliver for Rob Marshall.

  That opened a lot of doors better left closed. It provided a link in a chain at a point where no further links were desired. Investigation of it could lead back to people who did not want to be part of the story.

  The county prosecutor seemed quite content to take to court a case that accepted as pure coincidence Marshall’s meeting with Myers at Riccio’s party. The prosecution’s case, as tried in court, would move forward, not backward, from that point. This meant it would not have to concern itself with John Riccio or his relatives, or Patsy Racine/Ragazzo, or—except insofar as she testified in the prosecution’s behalf—with Felice.

  No attention whatsoever would have to be paid to the possibility of any loansharking or drug connections or to the connections between different layers of Toms River society, such as friendships between influential political figures and adulteresses, particularly adulteresses suspected (at least, initially) of at least peripheral involvement in a murder plot.

  And, moving forward from the Riccio party, the case was clean. The chain of circumstance was clear and well documented and entirely consistent with the eyewitness testimony L’Heureux would give.

  Except for that one sticky point about Dew.

  What would have been nice was if there had been some other way for Dew to have learned about L’Heureux’s involvement with Rob Marshall, and if the whole story about the seventy-five-thousand-dollar contract put out on L’Heureux’s life had just been, well, some sort of joke.

  Suppose, for example, L’Heureux had mentioned to Travis Greene during their July trip that the real reason he was coming back and forth to Atlantic City was that he had been hired by a man to kill his wife for a lot of insurance money.

  Greene and Dew were acquainted. Quite well acquainted, according to the Shreveport FBI. It would have been entirely possible that between late July and the start of September Greene could have mentioned to Dew that Ferlin was involved in a lucrative contract up north but was having a bit of trouble closing the deal. That alone could have been enough to have prompted Dew’s call—nothing more than Ricky’s desire to cut himself in on a piece of the action.

  As an “alternative reason” that explained Dew’s interest in the venture, it was not perfect. For one thing, in this version there was no money in the deal for Dew, save whatever share he might someday claim of whatever insurance proceeds Rob might eventually collect.

  Would a casual mention by Greene—with no payment of any kind in advance—have been enough to prompt Dew to call L’Heureux with such apparent urgency, to fabricate the bizarre story of the contract on his life, and then to jump in a car and drive fifteen hundred miles in order to shoot a complete stranger in the back? Just on a whim?

  No, the Greene connection was not airtight by any means. L’Heureux’s original story, in fact, seemed more plausible in many ways. Unfortunately, it also seemed dangerous. It was the kind of story that might complicate the lives of a number of people.

  The beauty of having the connection come, almost accidentally, through Greene was that it kept unnecessary players off the field. Players who had managed to make it understood that they would prefer not to be players at all, in this instance, but only spectators. Or, better yet, to be able to pretend that they did not even know that this particular game was being played.

  The other nice thing about the Greene connection was that no one stood to benefit from subjecting it to scrutiny or challenge. Thus, the whole messy notion of a contract put out on Ferlin’s life because he had failed to deliver for Rob Marshall in New Jersey could just disappear—as long as Ferlin was able to remember to forget it.

  L’Heureux signed his plea-bargain agreement on December 15, 1984.

  Four days later, in Stanton, Louisiana, fifty miles southeast of Shreveport, half a dozen officers from the Ocean County prosecutor’s office, the New Jersey State Police, the Caddo Parish, Louisiana, Sheriffs Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, clad in bulletproof vests and carrying fully loaded semiautomatic weapons, surrounded a hamburger stand called Jumbo’s and arrested Ricky Dew, who recently had married the woman who owned the restaurant. Dew was charged with the murder of Maria Marshall and was held without bail, pending extradition to New Jersey.

  At 2:30 that afternoon, as he was returning from Grog’s Surf Palace in Seaside Park with a full load of expensive Christmas presents for his sons, Rob’s car was stopped by police on Route 37.

  Gladstone had received a report that Rob had been inquiring at a local travel agency about flights from Miami to Costa Rica, from which extradition might prove complicated.

  Two uniformed officers and two in plainclothes approached the car and told him to get out and to stand alongside it, with his legs apart and his hands spread out on the roof.

  It was raining, and Rob was not pleased at having to get wet while the policemen patted him down for concealed weapons. Also, it didn’t look good. It was undignified, being arrested out in public like this, where clients, or club members, or maybe someone from Rotary might drive past.

  “You couldn’t have waited,” he said. “You couldn’t have waited one lousy week so I could have had Christmas with my boys.”

  “Hey, scumbag,” one of the arresting officers said. “They don’t get to have Christmas with their mother, why should they have it with you?”

  Sal Coccaro had received a call that morning from the Dover Township chief of police. “They’re taking him today, Sal,” the chief said. “You may want to be there for the boys.”

  And so it was Sal who called Lehigh, Sal who drove to the mall and told Roby as he worked at Feet First, and Sal who drove to the junior high to tell John that his father was being arrested for having arranged the murder of his mother.

  Rob was arraigned two days later, in Ocean County Superior Court. Roby, Chris and John were present. Their father wore a prison jumpsuit on which he’d stenciled I LOVE YOU in Magic Marker. He waved and smiled to the boys and gave them a “thumbs up” sign. Bail was set at two million dollars.

  Three days after that, on Christmas Eve, Carl Seely appeared in court to argue that bail should be reduced. In opposition to his motion, the prosecutor’s office produced a twenty-four-page sworn statement from Ferlin L’Heureux, which purportedly implicated Marshall in the murder.

  After reviewing the statement in chambers, the presiding judge ordered it sealed. He also ordered that Marshall be held without bail.

  At the same time, the prosecutor’s office announced that it would seek the death penalty against Rob.

  Sal Coccaro stopped by the Marshall house that evening. The Christmas tree was lit and presents were stacked underneath. Many of the presents said, “To Dad.” An album of Christmas carols was playing.

  “What happens now?” Roby asked. “Are we wards of the state?”

  “What happens if he’s convicted?” Chris asked. “Do you think they’d really put him to death?”

  Not even Sal had any answers.

  Later that night, alone in the house—and that’s what it had become, their house in Toms River, no longer a home—Chris and Roby stayed up to talk.

  “We’ve got to stand by him, Chris,” Roby said. “One hundred percent. He’s all we have and he needs us more than ever.”

  “I don’t know, Roby. I’m not sure I can.”

  “You’ve got no choice.”

  “Yes, I do. We all do.”

  “He’s your dad, too, Chris. Not just mine. And this is no time to desert him.”

  “Yeah, Roby, but Mom was yours, too. Not just mine.”

  They both fell silent. Then Roby spoke.

  “You’ve gotta believe, Chris. You’ve gotta have faith.”

  “I wish I could,” Chris said, “but I don’t.”

  “Well,” Roby said, “I’m backing Dad all the way, no matter what.”

  “That’s fine, Rob. I’ll never try to talk you out of that. But do me the same favor, too. Let me go my own way. Let me kee
p trying to figure it out. Don’t try to make me join the team.”

  The two brothers sat looking at each other for a long time. Then they stood to say good night. This time, instead of hugging, they shook hands.

  Part Three

  THE

  TRIAL

  20

  Shortly before the start of the trial, a longtime resident of Toms River—a native, really, who had been raised in the town and had witnessed its transformation from the sleepy village by the sea it once had been to the urb-less suburban maelstrom it became—wrote a letter to an acquaintance who had expressed curiosity about a possible connection between the town’s collective values and the story of Rob and Maria Marshall.

  “Actually,” the native wrote, “except that Rob Marshall happened to be there with his wife’s dead body and he could hardly claim he’d never seen her before in his life, he’s only functioning exactly the way the commercials tell him to behave. Get it, get it now, get it at any cost, and then get another one.”

  In this respect, the native suggested, he was not very different from a lot of other people in town. Which perhaps explained why the murder of Maria was perceived in Toms River as more than just a sensational event—one redolent with possibilities for scandalous gossip; indeed, with huge gobbets of such gossip being tossed up on shore with every tide—but as an episode that brought definition to a town where none had existed before.