by R. G. Belsky
She had clearly been obsessed with Wylie for a long time. Waiting for the right moment. And, for her, that moment had come at the confrontation she had orchestrated in front of TV cameras inside Wylie’s apartment.
One of the doormen from Wylie’s apartment was missing. They found his body stuffed inside an air-conditioning shaft in the basement. The working theory was that Borrell had flirted with him, seduced him, lured him down to the basement with the promise of sex, and then killed him so she could steal a key and get up to Wylie’s apartment.
Then she must have confronted Wylie with the gun when he came home. Subdued him at first that way, tied him up, and then given him enough drugs to keep him totally under her control while she tortured him the way she had her other victims. It was all academic now, of course. The authorities were just filling in the blanks, connecting the dots to close the case.
In Borrell’s hotel room, the closet was filled with her clothes. All of it very sexy stuff. There were low-cut blouses and sweaters. Short skirts. Spiked heels and boots. These were the tools of the trade for this killer—luring her victims into her trap before she killed them.
There was a picture of Melissa Ross in the drawer of a table next to her bed. Melissa was with Borrell in the picture. They were holding hands and kissing. They both looked very beautiful and very happy. There was a notation on the picture that said: “From the top of Rockefeller Center.” They must have gone to visit there like any other tourists, and gotten their picture taken at the Top of the Rock. On the back of the picture was a notation. Two of them actually. The first one said: “Melissa and me. I have finally found my true kindred spirit. Someone just like me to share my life with.” But that had been hastily crossed out at some point. Underneath it, in a different color ink and apparently written at a later time, a second notation said: “I thought Melissa was just like me. But she’s not. There is no one just like me. I am unique. And I am truly alone in this world. I know that now. And so does Melissa.”
Even though she was dead, authorities continued the search for something in Claudia Borrell’s past that might explain what her motivation had been to kill so many people. But no one could come up with a simple answer. There were stories about the mother and father perhaps pushing her too hard to excel in school because of her genius IQ; about a neighbor who might or might not have molested her at some point when she was growing up and sparked her hatred of men; and about a fascination she had with violent video games that somehow could have had such a profound psychological effect on her that she started killing people for real. But none of it ever gave any hard answers as to why Claudia Borrell did what she did.
The bottom line seemed to be that there was no real motivation for all the horrible crimes she committed. That she was simply—as Danny Jamieson had once described her—“someone who just enjoyed watching people die. And reveling in the power of life and death she held over them. A murderer who killed for no other reason than the satisfaction she got out of it. A true thrill killer.”
There was no evidence found—in the hotel room or in Wylie’s apartment—of an escape plan for Borrell that day. No indication of how she expected it all to end. The conclusion was that her only goal was revenge on Bob Wylie. Her obsession with destroying Wylie’s life had been more important to Borrell than her own life, and she was ready to sacrifice herself for this big final moment.
No one ever got a final body count for Claudia Borrell.
There were certainly the five men in New York. Melissa Ross. Probably Kate Lyon, even though the doctor’s body was never found. Her own family. Bobby Jenkins, the kid she went to high school with in Illinois who became her first victim. Wylie’s wife and children. Of course, there were likely even a lot more than that that we didn’t know about yet.
If Borrell had been determined to show that a woman can be as horrific a serial killer as a man, she had accomplished that goal.
She would go down in history as the most deadly female serial killer ever—one who ranked right up there with Ted Bundy and Richard Speck and Son of Sam and all the others she had compared herself to. Like them, Claudia Borrell would live in infamy forever.
CHAPTER 54
THERE were many repercussions from the Claudia Borrell story, starting with Bob Wylie.
Wylie recovered from his physical injuries, but his political career was over. That image of him on live TV pleading and crying to the woman who abducted him had left a lasting image with the public that erased any persona of a tough law enforcement official. His poll numbers plummeted, and he pulled out of the race.
The horrific incident seemed to have destroyed Wylie in other ways too. I met him at an event sometime later, and all the swagger, self-confidence, and charisma he’d had before were gone. I never thought he was a bad guy. On the contrary, he did a lot of good things. But he had done one bad thing—a terrible lapse in moral judgment on that long ago night at Munson Lake—that caught up with him in the end.
Claudia Borrell had succeeded in what she had set out to do—destroying the man she held a life-long grudge against, with a punishment maybe even worse than death.
* * *
Changes were happening at my paper too.
Marilyn Staley stopped by my desk and asked if I wanted to have a drink with her after work. I’d only gone out for drinks with Marilyn a few times in all the years we’d worked at the News. So I figured she had something pretty important to tell me.
“I’m announcing my resignation tomorrow,” she said after taking a few sips of wine.
“Why?”
“I see the writing on the wall. It says Stacy Albright. I can’t work with her, and she can’t work with me. So I need to leave.”
“You’re better than Stacy.”
“As a newspaper editor I am.”
“What else is there?”
She laughed. “Oh, Gil, you naive man.”
“I’m serious. I’ve seen you in meetings with Stacy. You usually manage to one-up her. You’re still in charge. You’re the boss at the News, not Stacy.”
“I’ve won some battles with her,” Marilyn said. “But I’m losing the war. This business is changing rapidly, in case you hadn’t noticed. It’s not just about the best front page anymore, the kind of thing you and I do well. It’s about new platforms and social media and interaction with the audience. Oh, there’ll still be newspapers for the Internet and on tablets and smartphones. But that’s not the kind of news I know. So I’m going to walk away. I have an opportunity to do some teaching. Maybe write a book. Spend more time raising my children. It’s been a fun ride, but it’s over now. Anyway, I wanted you to know before it became public. I figured I owed you that, Gil. After everything you and I have gone through over the years.”
I sat there stunned. Marilyn and I were not exactly close friends. And we’d certainly had our differences and battles. But she was my ally at the paper. The one person there I felt comfortable going to for journalistic advice and support and guidance. And now she was leaving. I’d be left with Stacy, which meant there was no one I could trust as a journalist.
“It’s something you might want to think about doing too, Gil,” Marilyn said to me. “You’re a good reporter. Hell, you’re a great reporter. Even after you broke a big story, you always had an answer for me when I asked my favorite question: ‘What have you got for tomorrow?’ You never let me down. But how long are you going to be able to keep doing this job? What’s your life going to be like in five years here? Ten years?”
I ordered another round, and we sat there for a long time swapping stories and reliving old memories.
But I couldn’t escape the feeling that Marilyn’s life wasn’t the only one changing; mine was too, whether I wanted it to or not.
* * *
I met up with Wohlers for breakfast one morning after everything had started to calm down. We went to a diner near his precinct on the East Side. I watched in amazement as he consumed what was described on the menu as the “Hungry M
an’s Special”—consisting of three eggs, pancakes, toast, hash brown potatoes, bacon, and sausage.
“You think I need to go on a diet?” he asked.
“I never said that.”
“My wife did.”
Wohlers looked at a piece of bacon on his plate, picked it up, and then put it down—like he was thinking about the idea.
“Could stand to lose a few pounds though, I guess.”
“Wouldn’t hurt.”
Eventually, of course, he snatched the bacon off the plate and popped it into his mouth.
“Some things about the whole Borrell story still don’t make sense to me,” I said.
“Like what?”
“The whole Melissa Ross connection. Borrell said Ross launched her own investigation to find out what happened to her biological parents. That’s how Ross found out about Patty Tagliarini’s car crash—and eventually discovered the Wylie connection, presumably from talking to people there just like I did. Then revealed it all to Borrell during one of her shrink sessions. Except there’s no evidence Melissa Ross ever was in Ohio. No receipts in her files, no phone calls to Ohio in the months leading up to the murders, no record of any flight or train or bus reservations to Ohio. Nothing at all to indicate she had any connection with Ohio until she turned up dead in the same lake where her biological mother had died.”
“Well, Borrell found out somehow,” Wohlers said.
“I checked. There was a woman asking questions about the Tagliarini accident in Ohio a while back. I tracked down some people who remember her. She was a blonde woman, they said. An extraordinarily attractive blonde woman. But not Melissa Ross.”
“You think it was Claudia Borrell?”
“That makes more sense than the story she told us about Melissa Ross coming to her with the information. All about how the eddies of time and the universe had brought her and Melissa Ross together in this grand design. I mean what are the odds that, to talk about her grudge against Wylie, Ross goes to the one psychiatrist who has her own grudge against Wylie? What makes more sense is Borrell found out the information herself, tracked down Tagliarini’s biological daughter, and told Ross about it. Not the other way around.”
“But we found Melissa Ross’s files in her office.”
“She could have faked those files. Knowing we’d find them sooner or later. This woman lied about everything. We can’t believe anything she says she did.”
Wohlers thought for a while about what I’d just said.
“Assuming you’re right,” he said finally, “how would Borrell have found Ross was the daughter of the woman Wylie dated in high school?”
“I did. And she’s smarter than me.”
“Good point.”
That’s when I brought up the big question I still had about Claudia Borrell.
“Why did she do it? Why did Borrell put herself in a situation like that at the end? Why did she let herself get cornered inside that apartment where there was no possible way out for her?”
“She wanted to go out in a blaze of glory,” Wohlers said. “Make her statement on TV, become famous—or infamous—to the world before killing herself. She knew there was no way out for her. She didn’t want to go to jail. So she committed suicide. She decided to end it on her terms. She was crazy.”
“Crazy yes. But really smart. She was always one step ahead of everybody. That’s why I don’t understand what happened in Wylie’s apartment. I kept waiting for some twist, some unexpected shock plan she was going to spring on us—like she’d always done in the past. But there was nothing. She just died.”
“We got lucky,” Wohlers said.
“Except nothing about what she did that last day makes sense. Especially the way she killed herself. She jumped out of a window and mangled her body and face in a twenty-three-floor fall. Borrell was extremely vain. She loved the way she looked, flaunted her beauty and sexiness at every occasion she could. Why would she mess herself up like that at the end? Even if she did want to die, wouldn’t she plan it out in a different way? I don’t think she was the suicidal type anyway. She loved herself too much.”
“Maybe she didn’t plan it that way. Maybe things just happened the way they did.”
“Except things didn’t ‘just happen’ for her. She always had a plan. Except for this time when she needed a plan the most, and there was no plan. Or maybe there was a plan, and we’re just missing the plan.”
I shook my head in frustration.
“Think about it, Lieutenant. Sixteen years ago in Illinois, she brazenly walked into a police station, gave herself up, and confessed. Why? Because she knew she could escape again anytime she wanted to. Which is exactly what she did. She had a plan. Now she does the same thing again. Brazenly summons us to the deputy mayor’s home, confesses, and seemingly lets herself get trapped with no escape. Why? Because she had a plan to get away afterward just like she did in Illinois. That was part of the game for her. To prove that she could get away from us anytime she wanted. She had to have had some kind of goddamned escape plan for this.”
“Then it didn’t work,” Wohlers said. “She underestimated us this time.”
“Or maybe we’re still underestimating her.”
“The bottom line is Claudia Borrell is dead. Case closed.”
“Is it?”
Wohlers put his coffee down and stared at me across the table. “What the hell are you saying?”
“How do we really know she’s dead?”
“You were in that apartment,” he said. “You saw the woman with the gun. That was Claudia Borrell, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then she fled into another bedroom, locked the door behind her, and went out the window, right?”
“Maybe.”
“Oh, c’mon . . .”
“What if there was another woman in the apartment? A dead woman, someone about Borrell’s age and description, and with blonde hair, of course. Maybe someone she picked up, like she did with Melissa Ross or Kate Lyon. She kills the woman before we get there. Then later she throws the body out the window, hides somewhere until—in all of the confusion—she somehow manages to sneak out of the apartment.”
“With all of the cops and CSI people and everyone else around?”
“No one was looking for her anymore. They assumed she was dead. Maybe she found some hiding place, or set one up beforehand, where she could wait until everyone was gone. Maybe that was her plan all along. Make us think we had her, while she somehow slips away to kill again someday. That’s what the Claudia Borrell in Illinois did. That’s the Claudia Borrell we knew too. Not someone who jumps out of a window to commit suicide.”
“What about the dental records? The fingerprints?”
“Those were on file in Illinois. What if she switched them somehow? Got into the files and put the dental records and fingerprints of the dead woman there?”
“How would she get those?”
“She was a doctor, remember. Or at least pretended to be one. Maybe the dead woman was one of her patients. Maybe she got the records of this woman a while ago, went to Illinois, and made the switch. We’re assuming that everything she did at the end was spontaneous. But what if she planned it? Spent weeks, months setting this up right down to the last detail. Like she did with the other murders. Doesn’t that sound a lot more like the Claudia Borrell we knew than the one who conveniently killed herself?”
“This is all just speculation,” Wohlers said. “All the evidence says that was Claudia Borrell’s body we found in the water.”
“Except for one other problem. I think I wounded her, Lieutenant. One of the shots I got off, it looked to me like it hit her, maybe in the shoulder or side. She jerked back against the wall before she ran out of the bedroom. I’m pretty sure she was wounded. Except there were no bullet wounds in the body.”
“There’s no evidence that you hit her with any of those shots.”
“Then that bullet should be in the wall or the floor or somewhere els
e in that room.”
“We dug several bullets out of the wall and floor in there afterward. They were all from D’Nolfo’s gun. The ones you fired.”
“How many bullets did you find?’
“Christ, I don’t know.”
“What if you counted the bullets you found? And compared them to how many shots I got off with the gun? And what if one bullet was missing? Wouldn’t that mean something?”
Wohlers shrugged. “Bullets go missing at crime scenes all the time. They get lodged into a crevice or behind something and no one ever finds them. Or maybe the number of bullets does match the number of bullets fired from D’Nolfo’s gun. Maybe you did hit her, and the bullet just grazed or passed through her—and went into the wall behind her. That’s possible too. None of it really proves anything, none of it really matters. No investigation is perfect. But, at some point, you just need to put it behind you and move on to the next case.”
“I guess you’re probably right,” I said.
* * *
“I keep having this dream,” I told Dr. Landis. “I’m in a bar. I spot her the minute she walks into the place. A real knockout. A blonde fox. Wearing tight jeans, a low-cut top, and spike heels that put her on eye level with me. And, best of all, I love the blonde hair. Long yellow hair that cascades over her shoulders, falling loosely down her back.
“She just walks over to me in the crowded bar and starts talking. I buy her a drink. Then another.
