What was her management philosophy? “Tell me what you can do, not what you can’t do,” she replied. The biggest mistake she made during the early stages of her business career was being trustful. She’d been an innocent and believed that because she was honest, everyone was honest—and nothing could have been further from the truth. Also, she assumed that everyone had the same perseverance that she had, and this also proved to be false. “There are so many people who have the best of intentions,” she said, “but never follow through.” It didn’t make them bad people, just ineffective people—these were folks who had poor time-management skills, who either overbooked their days or grossly underestimated the amount of time it would take to complete a task.
How did she compensate for her overestimate of peoples’ honesty and stick-to-itiveness? “I learned to put everything in writing,” she explained. “It saves so much confusion. Being able to concisely state terms, dates, activities, exceptions, et cetera, in writing with required dates to be met usually resolves the issue. Sometimes people just need a frame of reference or a date to work toward.” She understood that marketing was a business that never allowed one to rest on her laurels. She constantly had to educate herself to the latest trends and techniques or risk being passed by the competition.
What was her biggest complaint about Columbus? “Clouds and orange barrels—and not necessarily in that order,” she said.
She was asked where her favorite place to business lunch was. Being diplomatic, she said there were far too many to choose just one. She did, however, list the ingredients that make a restaurant a suitable place to conduct business: “The important thing for a business lunch, though, is that the place is not exceedingly noisy, the wait staff is not interrupting your conversation every few minutes to ask if everything is okay, and the table is larger than the size of the plate.”
She said that she enjoyed travel and golf as relaxation. Her most recent vacation, she told the reporter, was to Sarasota, Florida, where “the Gulf and the golf” were both great.
As a closing note she said that her neighbors still had more money than she did, but at least she was closing the gap.
She was asked what her “dream job” would be, and she answered, “I’d like to be the owner of an art gallery in a warm, sunny climate.”
Joyce vacationed in the Sarasota area before she moved to Florida permanently in the late 1990s. She sold her house in Ohio and moved to Manatee County in suburbia. After a stint doing contract work with NovaCare Employee Services in Bradenton, she landed a $45,000 per year job as the marketing director for the Asolo Repertory Theatre, a job she held from August 1999 until 2001. In addition to good money, the job served as a letter of introduction to a “who’s who” of the area’s arts community. It was a tough club to get into. You didn’t need a lot of money, but you did need to pay your dues—and that meant community involvement.
Joyce Wishart’s friend Lois Schulman described it this way: “You have to do things for charities that need your help. You have to give away your talents to make Sarasota a better place.”
Joyce had no problem with that. She volunteered with Artists Helping Artists and served on the county’s Arts Council. She further ingratiated herself with the ladies by being quick with numbers. She became the go-to gal for anyone with an accounting problem. She could take an idea, whether it was hers or someone else’s, and project the economic feasibility.
Anyone who might have thought Joyce, being a divorcée from the Midwest, might have trouble fitting in with the artsy crowd in Sarasota had it backward. Her friend Denise Roberts, who was the executive director of the Sarasota nonprofit Family Law Connection, remembered meeting Joyce in 2001 and thinking how elegant she was, maybe too elegant and too cultured for the group. “She was Vogue and I was Target,” Roberts remembered thinking when they met.
But Joyce made everyone feel comfortable. It was as if she had always been one of the ladies of Sarasota culture. She seldom talked about life in Ohio. It was as if her first fifty years hadn’t happened. When she started over, she started over. The ladies frequently complained about their husbands or their ex-husbands, but Joyce did not join in on those conversations.
It was after leaving the Asolo that she opened up her own art gallery. That was September 2001. The opening earned a blurb in Sarasota Magazine. Marsha Fottler, in her “Shop Talk” column, said Provenance, opening in October, was perfect for those seeking fine art at discount prices: “Now collectors who are downsizing, redecorating, or editing their inventory have a place to send their fine art for resale,” Fottler wrote. “And buyers will be able to acquire original paintings, sculpture and photography at big savings.”
A consignment gallery accepted works from artists or collectors. Wishart determined prices by doing Internet research. If there was a sale, she kept half the money.
The pieces on display at the Provenance revealed a curator of eclectic taste. Wishart chose works she liked, seemingly regardless of category. There were lithographs, etchings, watercolors, European paintings, modern sculpture, and American folk art.
Although she was relatively new to the community, she fit right in with the half-dozen ladies of the town who were at the heart of the city’s cultural scene.
She even hosted monthly get-togethers, serving drinks and dinner for the ladies right there in her gallery, where the gals would gossip, talk about their lives, and exchange recipes. There was always candlelight, and Wishart prepared the meal right there in her kitchenette.
According to Kathryn Shea, one of the women, Wishart seldom led the conversation, but she did act as moderator. She took particular delight in the group’s lampooning of then–commander in chief, President Bush.
Fottler told the Herald-Tribune, “I never heard her be critical of anyone. Some of us are not like that. She would always try to find a way to resolve an issue, or to see it from a different perspective.”
Less than a month after opening her own art gallery, Wishart learned that she was battling breast cancer. She told the ladies over dinner.
“I’m going to beat it,” she said at the time, and she did.
During her chemotherapy treatments her friends pitched in, giving her rides to and from the doctors, and keeping the gallery open when she was too weak to work.
Her hair, naturally brown, fell out. She bought a red wig, and then purchased clothes to go with it. When people told her how good she looked, she would reply, “You should see me in the morning. I look in the mirror and say, ‘My God, where did the alien come from?’”
There were times when she was so weak that her friends feared that she wasn’t going to make it, and she endured a full year of treatments before she was declared cancer free. Friends recalled that one of the pleasant aspects of her ordeal was that her dark brown hair grew back a beautiful red color after chemotherapy—seemingly in imitation of the wig she’d been wearing.
Of course, a beautician may have been responsible, but the notion that nature had given her red hair to compensate for her ordeal became a part of her story—and she conveniently continued wearing all of the clothes she’d bought to go with her wig.
During one of her monthly dinners, Wishart admitted that the gallery was not turning a profit, nor did Wishart anticipate that it would for its first five years. During the past year she had been trying to expand her business, which she hoped one day to franchise. At the time of the murder, Wishart was preparing for Arts Day. She had spoken on the phone to some of her old friends in Ohio and had expressed her excitement.
Chapter 6
“Bike Man” and Other Suspicious Characters
On Friday, January 23, Detectives Jack Carter and Jeffrey Steiner interviewed a man named Greg Parry, forty-three years old, who said he might have been one of the last people to see the victim alive.
The interview took place at the Sarasota Opera House, not far from the crime scene. Parry was the opera’s director of marketing and communications. Greg knew Joyce from when s
he was a marketing rep for the Asolo Rep Theatre, before she left to start her own business.
He saw her on Friday at about four in the afternoon. The detectives were impressed, as law enforcement felt that was less than an hour before the murderer had entered the Provenance Gallery.
If one put the pieces together, Parry could have been the well-dressed man, seen by Lois Ross, talking to the victim on the afternoon of her murder.
Parry said he also talked to Wishart several times on the phone on the previous Tuesday. Wishart wanted to put a couple of posters from the opera house on display for an upcoming show, and Parry had them. The posters were for Puccini’s Madama Butterfly from 1980 and Orpheus in the Under world from 1983.
“I walked in, door was open, and there was no one in the front. I walked to the back and found Joyce seated at her computer, talking to another woman,” Parry said.
“Was it unusual for her to have her door open like that?” Detective Carter asked.
“Not at all. If it was a nice day, she wanted the front door to look welcoming.”
He described the woman as white, gray curly hair, maybe five-five, stocky not fat. Joyce might have introduced her as “Ingrid” or “Inga,” but he couldn’t be sure. The woman left before he did.
He gave the posters to Joyce; she thanked him, placed the posters on a shelf near her desk, and escorted him out the front door and onto the sidewalk. They conversed briefly about a vase on display on the right-hand side of Wishart’s window. After saying their good-byes to one another, she reentered the gallery and he returned to the opera house, seeing nothing suspicious on his way.
Detectives wanted to know Parry’s relationship with Wishart. He said they’d had drinks together a couple of times on a group basis, and sometimes he “stopped by her gallery, due to its proximity.”
Parry told the detectives that Wishart had been preparing a show that was to open February 6, featuring local octogenarian graphic designer Alex Steinweiss, who was best known as the innovative designer of record album covers, such as Oscar Levant’s recording of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and the Philadelphia Orchestra’s performance of the Peer Gynt Suite. Before Steinweiss, record albums—78 rpm’s in those days—had plain covers of dull brown or green paper. “They were unattractive and lacked sales appeal,” Steinweiss said in a 1990 interview. It was a simple idea—a graphic image should accompany a piece of music—but Steinweiss was the first to think of it.
Parry told the detectives that he thought there might be a surveillance camera on the rear of the opera house that might point across the parking lot and Palm Avenue to show the front of the Provenance. He jotted down the name of the security guard at the opera house, who would know for sure. (It later turned out that there was a surveillance camera on the back of the opera house, but it was inoperable.)
“Where were you at five o’clock on the evening you last visited the gallery?” Carter asked.
“I had just left the opera. I wanted to do a spin class at the YMCA. It’s on stationary bikes, lasted an hour. I was back at work at seven.”
“Have you ever been to Joyce Wishart’s house?”
“Once. Christmas, 2000. A little get-together for the theater marketing directors. Before the holidays.”
Parry explained that he was not a U.S. citizen. He was Canadian and had been a resident of the United States, and Sarasota, for three and a half years. “My frequent residency status is up for grabs,” Parry concluded.
After speaking with Parry, detectives checked the crime scene and found the two posters on the shelf near Wishart’s desk, right where he said they would be. Police were routinely asking male witnesses to provide a DNA sample, so they could be crossed off the suspect list. Parry talked to his lawyer before complying, but eventually he gave investigators a DNA sample.
A check of the victim’s security contract by Detective Mark Opitz revealed that Wishart’s friend Mary Jane Goldthwaite was the person to contact in case of emergency. She was also the keeper of the Provenance’s spare key, which she kept unidentified on a magnet on the refrigerator. That key had gone nowhere in years, Goldthwaite maintained, and had nothing to do with how the killer got into the gallery. Goldthwaite said she was Wishart’s golf buddy and knew Wishart had an ex-husband, who was long gone. Wishart didn’t talk about her love life much. Five years before, Wishart said, she had dated “a rich man in Ohio.”
A check of Wishart’s records showed where she had her hair cut. Her stylist, Robert Bombardier, was interviewed and said he’d cut her hair only once or twice. He “barely remembered her.”
On the afternoon of January 23, Detective Steiner called Sarasota Memorial, Doctors Hospital of Sarasota, and Manatee Memorial to see if anyone had gone there with cuts to the hands. This turned out to be difficult to determine. The computer at Sarasota Memorial and at Manatee didn’t sort patients by injury type. At Doctors Hospital, the emergency-room (ER) records were hand searched; no knife injuries had come in.
That Friday night, one of the victim’s friends, Kathy Killion, hosted a get-together for all of Joyce’s friends, some of whom were meeting each other for the first time. The ladies drank wine and shared stories of the woman they loved.
On Saturday, January 24, 2004, three days after the body was discovered, a bit of excitement erupted on the street outside the Provenance Gallery. At about 4:30 P.M., an officer guarding the shop, Cliff Cespedes, was looking at the parking garage across the street when he saw something that grabbed his attention. On the garage’s third floor at the southeast corner, Cespedes saw a man’s silhouette move slowly into view, then slowly back out of view, as if fearful of being seen. Cespedes called “Zone 3” and notified them that he had a suspicious person at the scene of the Wishart murder. He also called dispatch and asked for units to be dispatched to the scene.
With Cespedes was Officer Ronald Dixon, who got in his car and drove up to the garage’s third floor to investigate. Cespedes, in the meantime, visually secured the southeast perimeter of the garage. About two minutes later the suspicious man exited the garage through the stairwell at the southeast corner. Cespedes was on him immediately. The man, who was wearing a Bay Plaza jacket and had a radio, identified himself as forty-five-year-old Stephen Garfield (pseudonym), the head security guard at Bay Plaza. Cespedes called dispatch back and canceled the request for backup.
Later, when writing about what he had seen, Officer Cespedes still thought that it was “peculiar” the way the man had slowly appeared in the shadow and then slowly backed away.
It was as if he were attempting to conceal his presence, Cespedes wrote. He made a mental note to keep tabs on Garfield.
As Stephen Garfield was observed moving in mysterious ways, Detectives Jack Carter and Jeffrey Steiner checked nearby buildings to see if any surveillance cameras might have picked up the front of the Provenance during the crucial period of time. They talked to Captain Powell Holloway, the security supervisor at the nearby Zenith Building, which had such a camera. Holloway said he would have a CD with the pertinent footage—3:00 P.M. on January 16 to 6:00 P.M. on January 17—to police in a matter of hours. The images provided were not as helpful as had been hoped.
As Detective Carter later noted, “The image quality of individuals approaching the storefront are polluted to a large extent by the reflections of the interior lights against the front windows during evening hours and by the back lighting against individuals during daylight hours.”
A few hours after the Garfield incident, the area outside the gallery was used by Chief Peter Abbott and Captain Tom Laracey for a brief press conference. For reporters looking for fresh headlines, there were slim pickings. “Homicide . . . multiple stab wounds . . .” Not much else. Nothing they didn’t already know.
There was some noise as reporters raised their voices while questioning, but the press was respectful of the crime scene and everyone remained obediently outside the police tape.
Later that night, at eleven-thirty, Officer Tom
Shanafelt was guarding the gallery, when he was contacted by a twenty-four-year-old pedestrian who identified himself as Mark Saunders. The guy said he might know something helpful. Saunders lived down the street a ways, but he was frequently down on this end of Palm.
“I saw a suspicious man out here, along this stretch of street. I don’t remember exactly when, but it was about three days before the body was found,” Saunders said.
“Why was he suspicious?” Shanafelt asked.
“I saw the guy out here asking someone for money.” Saunders didn’t know who was being asked, another unknown white male.
Saunders said, “I didn’t know the guy and came right out and asked him what he was doing. He told me he was waiting for a friend.”
“Okay, he was panhandling and loitering. Anything else suspicious about him?” Shanafelt asked.
Saunders admitted that seeing a man panhandle on Palm Avenue was not unheard of, but this guy was new.
“The last I saw of him he was walking toward the art gallery,” Saunders said.
“Can you describe him?” Shanafelt asked.
Saunders said the man was about forty years old, five-eleven, 190 pounds. His hair was black; he wore nice clothes.
“What do you remember about the clothes?”
“I just remember he was wearing a designer black leather jacket.”
A panhandler in a designer leather jacket? That was odd.
Investigators went through the recent case files to see if their guy had done anything else to attract attention to himself. One interesting case was a report that had come in at two in the afternoon of January 15, the day before the murder.
Jolie McInnis had been in a building on North Palm Avenue, only a few blocks away from the murder scene. McInnis told responding officers that she’d been at the rear of the building, looking out the window. Behind the building was a private parking lot, and back there was a man going through the Dumpster.
Evil Season Page 5
