Victim

by Gary Kinder

  The conflict between my father and myself was mostly one of personality. I am not the type who is likely to get calluses on his hands from hard work. I am the type of personality you’re likely to find in an office on the 50th floor of the Rockerfeller Building, dressed in a conservatively modern 3 piece suit, drives a Mercedes 450 SLC or more likely a Dino Ferrari and lives in a Park Ave. penthouse, and here lies the basis of our conflict.

  Since his teenage years, Pierre had had a thin scar on the left side of his head that ran from the forehead back, creating a natural part in his hair. When he was examined for legal sanity after the murders, he told the psychiatrist that he had injured his head in a motorcycle accident when he was fifteen or sixteen and had spent two months in the hospital recovering. He said that after being released from the hospital, he had blacked out several times a week, implying that he suffered from seizures.

  Pierre had never been in a motorcycle accident.

  One Sunday morning after church when he was thirteen, Pierre was standing in front of the chapel with a small group of boys who were taking turns riding a bicycle. When it came Pierre’s turn, he steered the bicycle into a lamppost.

  Though he was bleeding from a cut on his head, Pierre never lost consciousness. His parents had him taken to Casualty at nearby San Fernando General Hospital, where a young Canada-trained physician, Dr. Edmund Chamely, put twenty stitches in the eight-inch laceration. After sewing up the wound, Dr. Chamely examined Pierre’s eyes for signs of brain compression or swelling, and tested his reflexes and his motor and cranial nerves. His examination revealed that Pierre had not suffered a concussion, and X rays showed that there was no skull fracture. When questioned later about the incident, Dr. Chamely pulled Pierre’s medical file and wrote the following notes on the injury:

  Fell off bicycle—3/6/66

  No concussion. Suffered laceration 8” to left scalp with blood loss. When examined on the ward, there were no neurological abnormalities. Patient was in no distress. Sensorium was clear. Recovery was uneventful.

  Pierre was kept on the general surgical ward overnight for observation and was released the following day.

  Recalling parts of his Trinidad childhood in a letter, Pierre once claimed that as a young child he was “dumb” and that his teachers complained to his mother

  on how playful I was and was not learning anything. Then one day my mother took it upon herself and she decided that I would learn something. So with a strap in her hand and my school books I was called to the table every night to read, memorize poetry and do arithmetic and any failures were met repeatedly with the strap. After a few months I had moved from the bottom of the class to around 5th place in the end-of-term tests. From then on there was no turning back. I will be forever thankful to my teachers and my mother to this day for the education that I now possess.

  Pierre never made it past the tenth grade. After passing the island’s Government Common Entrance Exam, he entered St. Benedict’s College, a private school, at the age of eleven. With a passing mark being 45 percent, Pierre ended his first term at St. Benedict’s with a 49. His second term he scored 39.5. After finishing with an average of 31.5 in his third term, his mother removed him from the school in January of 1966 and enrolled him at Southern Academy, a government school supported and run by the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. In his first term at Southern, Pierre’s grades were only average, dropping each term after that. In July 1967 his mother received a rare letter from the principal:

  It is with much regret that I must bring this matter to your notice. The complaint has come to my office that Dale has grown extremely talkative and lazy and that he has refused to do Geometry and Latin. I sincerely hope that you will have a serious chat with him and that he would have mended his ways and resolved to fit into our programme here at Southern Academy by the time School re-opens in September.

  When school reopened in September, Pierre flunked six of his eight subjects and that was his last term at Southern. But his poor grades were not the reason he was expelled from the academy. One of Pierre’s teachers, Bernice James, said: “I don’t remember too much about Dale. I can remember that he had a fiery temper, and this could get you into trouble obviously. I also remember his name being called in connection with the theft of something at some time. That much I remember, but I can remember nothing else about the incident.”

  A recommendation form later sent to the school by a potential employer was returned with a notation penned by another of Pierre’s teachers: “Was guilty suspected of dishonest conduct.”

  Frank Providence attended Southern Academy at the same time as Pierre and agreed with other students that while in school Pierre had stolen money, books, and a cassette player. Providence described Pierre as “a fella didn’t talk much. Use to keep to himself. You might be around and he might be around, but he just there. He was a kinda background mon. Always here and there, kinda lurking.” Providence added that if someone else had something that Pierre wanted, he would either talk them out of it, or take it from them. “‘Where you get that?’” he imitated Pierre. “‘Look nice.’ If you turn your back, next thing you know, your thing missing.”

  At the age of fifteen, having completed the equivalent of the tenth grade with substandard marks, Pierre left school never to return.

  After being expelled from Southern Academy at the age of fifteen, Pierre became an apprentice at the huge Texaco oil refinery north of San Fernando. In the company’s long history not a single apprentice had ever been dismissed. Two months after he began work Pierre was caught stealing from another apprentice and was suspended for one week. In a report of the incident a supervisor wrote that Pierre “has shown signs of being sorry for what he has done and promised that such a thing will never happen to him again.”

  Three months later, after five more apprentices had reported having money stolen, Pierre was again caught. An apprentice had complained that his wallet was missing, and during the ensuing shakedown, Pierre had tried to return the wallet without anyone seeing him. In a detailed statement to his supervisors Pierre denied having stolen the wallet, claiming he actually had “hidden” it. He didn’t say why he would want to “hide” the wallet of another apprentice.

  Having already been suspended for a similar offense, Pierre was dismissed from the Texaco apprentice program. After he was gone, there were no more reports of theft.

  Explaining his dismissal from Texaco in a letter years later, Pierre did not mention hiding the wallet:

  One payday after I had cashed my check I took the liberty of strolling around the immediate downtown area. While I was there my wallet was lifted but I never missed it until I got back to the work area. When I did miss my wallet I got very annoyed. So while we were at PT I saw the perfect opportunity to recover my loss and I seized it. There were no witnesses neither was any evidence found on me but none the less the circumstantial evidence weighed very heavily against me and I was released from my apprenticeship. My parents were very embarrassed and took it very hard; especially my mother, but I never told them what had actually happened. Personally I felt terrible about the whole thing and sort of secluded myself for a while. I have a terrible ego as far as my image is concerned.

  When Pierre was six or seven years old, he had stolen from a neighbor’s porch a small cage containing a yellow and black songbird called a semp. Another neighbor had seen Pierre take the bird and notified the owner, Mr. Patterson, an older man who refused to confront the small boy or his parents about the incident.

  “It was only a bird,” he later explained, “and he was such a little child to me. I would never do such a thing. But that Dale was a scampish fella.”

  Now that Pierre was sixteen, no longer in school, no longer an apprentice at Texaco, he spent his days at home, playing cards with the boys who “limed” under the lamppost across the street. His father had warned him not to associate with the boys who gathered there, but Pierre ignored his father. One afternoon, returning from work early, Pierre’
s father caught him playing cards and chased him until Pierre jumped a fence and ran away to his great-aunt’s house. There he remained for months, paying only occasional visits to his family, usually during the day when his parents were not at home.

  One morning Pierre returned to Pleasantville, broke into the Samuel house across the street, picked the lock on the Samuels’ dressing table, and stole a white hand-purse from the drawer. The purse held eighty-eight dollars, money Mr. Samuel was saving for the payments on his new taxi. When one of the Samuel boys recalled having seen Pierre in their yard that day, and two neighborhood boys saw Pierre the following day in San Fernando buying new clothes at a department store, Mrs. Samuel went to the aunt’s home and found Pierre.

  “I said to him, ‘Dale, I guess you know what brought me here.’ And he said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Yes, you know, you know what brought me here.’ And I said, ‘Why did you take the money, why did you go into my house and take the money?’ He tried to put up a little defense by saying it wasn’t so, but that is all. So I say: ‘Why did you do a thing like that? If this thing had reach the police, maybe you would not have been able to go to the States with your mom. You are a nice boy, Dale. Remember your sisters, they are all trying to reach somewhere. You must behave yourself and don’t do things like that’”

  Mrs. Pierre reimbursed Mrs. Samuel the eighty-eight dollars.

  Pierre later wrote his own version of the incident:

  I came home one day to check things out. On this particular day I took the shortcut from the bypass through the Samuel’s backyard and went home to pay my visit as I intended. After visiting, where one of my sisters implored me to return home, I left and went back to my aunt’s. About the very next day Mrs. Samuel came down there and accused me of stealing eighty dollars from her house. The allegation was so damned preposterous that I was infuriated. The house showed no signs of breaking and entering and neither was the place where the money was supposed to have been kept. You would not believe the hate and revulsion I felt for Mrs. Samuel as I watched the fat bitch sitting there with a straight face lying on me.”

  The next day another neighbor’s entire record collection, stolen the week before, was found at Pierre’s aunt’s house.

  Carol Smith, a pleasant girl with a round body and a plump face, lived across the street and down four or five houses from the Pierres. While Pierre lived in Trinidad, his only relationship with a girl was a platonic association with Carol. After learning of the murders, Carol talked about Pierre as a teen-ager just prior to his leaving for the United States.

  “The first day I didn’t really see the papers, a friend told me about it. Then I sat down for about four days reading this thing over and over and over and over to make sure it was really Dale. They say that when you reach the States, and you bunch up with certain people you done get bad. I said, ‘Well, he done had his bad ways already, so it just kinda bring it out more then.’ You see, he was always a wicked fella. Like if you pitching marble, he will take all the marble and run home. Or if you buy something new? He will take it and run home. Or else throw it away, or hide it. And he is a very good liar, too. They say he used to handle a lot of money, and a tape recorder and thing, but I don’t know about that.

  “The boys across the street was a kinda influence over Dale, too. Because, you see, he liked what they were doing. He wanted to be a top mon, too. He might not be in the thing itself, but when those boys come and say, ‘Well, we rob a store,’ he will want to get in the action. You know? He will question them, what they did, how they enter, and then now you find, well, he will go and sit down and think about what they tell him. He will try to have an imagination of the store and how they did the job.

  “He and his father really didn’t used to pull either, because Dale was just kinda a boastful fella then, if you understand. He brag and want to be a big mon. And his father was very quiet. He never interfere with anybody. But Dale had a kinda big shot alive about him then. No matter what it was, he wanted to be top mon. He wanted to have a big house, with everything in it. A big car. He wanted to have the biggest car Trinidad could ever have. Everybody must look up to Dale then, and when Dale coming down the road they must hoi’ up and look at Dale passing.

  “When he learned he was going away to the States, he made big plans. He said he was glad to be leaving, and when he come back all of us would be surprised. He would be somebody in high society, somebody we would read about, and when he come back people would say: ‘Hello, Dale. How’s it goin’?’”

  During the months preceding his family’s departure for the United States in June 1970, Pierre kept mostly to himself. “I stayed to myself because I preferred it that way,” he later wrote,

  and partly because of Mrs. Samuel’s accusations. I felt that Mr. and Mrs. Samuel were trying to get me into trouble, so I stayed away from anyone and everyone that was a potential threat. People on the block, especially the Samuels, were devious, underhanded snakes as far as I was concerned. That fear was further compounded by the embarrassment I felt about the Texaco incident. At this time there was so much going through my mind I doubt I could remember it all. My main thought was to make a big success of myself when I came to the U.S. just so that I would be able to go back there and flaunt it in their faces. Nothing would please me more than to see the look of pain and disgust on the Samuels’ faces should I turn out to be successful, and as I lay in that backroom all I thought about was how and in what ways I was going to achieve my goal. I was thinking whether or not I was going to get caught up with the hippies and lose sight of my goals; whether or not I was going to end up like Sam Cooke—being shot because of involvement with a white woman. I was also wondering whether or not being transplanted into a society as free and as loose as America was described to me to be, would cause me to degenerate and become a bum. As these many thoughts raced through my head I would repeat to myself: I won’t let it happen. I will be successful. I will not lose sight of my goals.

  The idea of moving to New York caused me more excitement than I was capable of keeping under wraps. As you may well imagine the one thing I looked forward to mostly was to make Mrs. Samuel green in the face. Even as I hung around the house keeping myself out of sight I would get a morose feeling at times which I would quickly dispel simply by thinking about my planned success and the Samuels’ ultimate jealousy. My thoughts, whether of the deepest or shallowest nature, consisted of nothing but plans for vindictive success [Pierre’s italics]. The only fear I can recall having was that maybe I would be kidnapped or killed by some crazy.

  I don’t remember the exact date but it is either June or July 7, 1970. It was about 3 o’clock pm and I remember that it was very hot. My cousins were there and so were some of the family friends and two of my friends from down the street. I am still in Trinidad. I am all packed and ready to leave for America. All the neighbors are peering out of their windows as pictures were taken of myself with my cousins and with various members of the family and of the house. We then packed into the two cars that were to take the selected few to the airport—Piarco International Airport. I am supposed to board a PanAm 707 on a non-stop flight to LaGuardia Airport in New York City. My baggage was checked in, my passport and Visa cleared, and I bid my last farewell to everyone and everyone is wishing me a safe flight. I then boarded my flight, when it was called for the third time, which was to bring me to New York.

  As I sat in my window seat on the left side of the aircraft, I could see my family and friends still waving to me. I could remember thinking about getting to meet the hippie girls we heard so much about in Trinidad. I was thinking about all the money I was going to be making and that I was going to buy a sports car. Then the aircraft took off and I almost cried.

  When I arrived in New York, around 7pm, as I stepped out of the aircraft the first thing I noticed was the chilly wind blowing. I was already looking for snow when I saw the frost come out of my mouth when I laughed. The very next thing to confront me was the size of the airport. I canno
t exactly remember my reactions but I stood there looking at everything. I remember getting my baggage and heading for a telephone where I made my call to the number I had and was able to get in touch with my father’s roommate, because my father was not expecting me. There was some question as to my coming before the rest of the family.

  By the time I got to Brooklyn it was dark and I felt completely lost and disoriented by the complexity of everything. I can remember thinking what if the driver just took my money and dumped me off anywhere he felt. That fear was short lived because I soon arrived at the address. I finally met my father’s roommate—it seemed as though he was looking out the window for me. He told me that I would have to spend the night at his apartment until he could check with some people to locate my father. He told me that my father had moved to a larger apartment as he was expecting us to come soon.

  I can still remember my first day in the USA—when I opened the refrigerator the foods—especially the fruit—looked different—the pops were in cans insted of bottles like I was used to. I can remember turning on the radio and the very first things I heard was the news, as for music the very first song I heard was “Band of Gold” by Freda Payne. The radio station I was tuned in to was WABC—New York. I spent most of that day looking out the window at the people and cars as they passed by. I had thought about going for a walk but quickly discounted that idea for fear that I may get lost or kidnapped or something.

  Finally my father’s friend came home from work and informed me that he had located my father. He also asked me whether I had gone out to check out the “chicks,” whereupon I asked him if he was raising chickens. He broke out laughing and I couldn’t understand why. I asked what he was laughing at and he said he was talking about the girls not chickens. So I told him I did not go out and why I did not. He assured me that there was nothing to be afraid of in that neighborhood and that most of the residents there were West Indian anyway. So I packed my suitcase and we left to find my father. My father’s friend elected to give me a mini tour of the general area first to check out the chicks as he said.