CHAPTER 5
More than 170 miles away, Jaime Zernhelt’s phone was ringing.
At age twenty-five, Jaime was the youngest of Steve and Janet’s three children. She lived in Laurel, Maryland, not too far from where she worked as an elementary school teacher. This morning, she had several friends and family members over at her home to celebrate the birthday of her fiancé, Lenny Mierzwa. Her two brothers were also there: Justin, twenty-eight, who lived right down the street, and the twenty-six-year-old Ryan, who lived in Philadelphia.
Everybody was having such a good time that Jaime had almost missed the phone ringing, even though it had been ringing for quite a long time. Perhaps, Jaime thought, it was her parents. They had considered coming down for the party today, but Steve Zernhelt had decided everybody would have a much better time without Jaime’s parents hanging around.
“You kids have fun,” her father had told Jaime on the phone that morning. “You don’t need us adults there.”
When Jaime answered the phone, however, it wasn’t her parents at all, but rather a neighbor who lived across the street from them on Lincoln Avenue. Jaime knew the neighbor; after all, she had grown up in Northampton borough and lived there all her life before going off to East Stroudsburg University to study education.
The neighbor sounded panicked and terrified as she spoke the words that Jaime would never forget.
“Your dad’s been stabbed,” she said. “But they’re working on him.”
Jaime fell to the ground, shaking. She was horrified, but also couldn’t fully comprehend what had happened. Stabbed? she thought. Stabbed? What happened? It doesn’t make sense.
Somebody—she didn’t know who—picked her up off the ground and led her outside to the car. Jaime was in shock, but she must have explained to others at the party what she had just been told over the phone, because the next thing she knew she was in a car heading to Northampton. Lenny, Justin, Ryan, even her dog Ziggy were in the vehicle with her, while her cousin Eric drove and Eric’s girlfriend rode along.
It proved to be the longest car ride of any of their lives. Jaime’s phone wouldn’t stop ringing as concerned family members and friends kept calling, some checking on her, others giving her information and trying to keep her calm. They all kept saying the same thing: “Your dad’s okay. They’re working on him.” The whole time, Jaime just kept praying that her father really would be okay.
But after they were about an hour into the drive, not quite out of Delaware yet, Jaime’s uncle Jimmy called. He had heard what others were telling them in the previous phone calls, that Steve was all right, but he insisted that the kids had to know the truth. While on speakerphone so the whole car could hear, Jimmy said he didn’t want them to have any false hopes, didn’t want them to be wishing and hoping for something impossible.
“I’ve got to let you know,” he said. “He’s gone.”
Jaime couldn’t believe it. She wouldn’t believe it. She shook her head forcefully, trying to forget what her uncle had told her.
“It’s not true,” she said. “He couldn’t say that. He didn’t mean it.”
But looking into her brothers’ eyes, she could see that they knew it was the truth. They looked like they were going to be sick to their stomachs, but Justin and Ryan nevertheless tried to maintain strong, stoic faces for Jaime’s sake. They had always tried to be strong for her, tried to be her protectors, but she could see in their eyes that they knew the truth, and it made her realize it, too. Her father was dead.
They pulled over at a rest stop and Jaime immediately rushed into the bathroom, where she leaned over the sink and looked into the mirror. She stared at her reflection wishing this would all just go away. That she could wake up from this nightmare.
She thought of her father. They had always had a great relationship. A perfect one, she thought. She couldn’t have asked for a better father. Growing up, her dad had always wanted to do everything with his family, whether it was swimming at the pool, playing sports, family dinners—anything just as long as they were together. When she was a young girl, Jaime used to wear a little tool belt and help her dad do work around the house. When she got older, he went out of his way to attend not only her brothers’ basketball and football games, but also her cheerleading events all through middle and high school. She had always looked up to him and he was always there to guide her, right up to when he and Jaime’s mother put her through college.
Jaime realized she and her brothers were supposed to visit her parents just next weekend. Her dad had just bought a family-sized raft, and they were all going to take it out to the lake. He had been waiting to take it out on the water until they could all go together.
After a few minutes, Jaime returned to the car, where the rest of the long drive was relatively silent. When they pulled up to their childhood home in Northampton borough, the scene was chaotic. The house was sealed off with yellow police tape. News vans and reporters milled on the street, and a helicopter flew overhead.
They pulled up to the front of the house, where Coroner Zachary Lysek confirmed what her uncle had told her a few hours earlier. Jaime collapsed into a nearby man’s arms and started sobbing on the front lawn.
My daddy was murdered, Jaime thought. He’s gone.
CHAPTER 6
While Trooper Raymond Judge continued to take the lead on the quadruple slaying investigation, Trooper McLean Peeke, the head of the barracks’ forensic services unit, was tasked with gathering the physical evidence.
Peeke was brought onto the investigation around six o’clock the evening of the murders, and his first stop was the scene of Ballard’s car crash on Route 329. With a search warrant yet to be obtained, all Peeke could do was place plastic over the crashed car’s windows, so he headed over to the scene of the murders themselves around 7:35 p.m.
Without a search warrant, Peeke couldn’t yet collect any evidence, but he could survey the inside of the house. Coroner Zachary Lysek led Peeke through the residence, and although he couldn’t obtain any physical items, he was permitted to take photographs and videotape in the rooms where the victims were located: the living room, the kitchen, the back bedroom, and the basement.
Meanwhile, at St. Luke’s Hospital, Dr. Costello ordered a rapid blood transfusion for Michael Ballard. He ultimately required three liters of blood and five liters of crystalloid fluid. Eventually, Ballard became stabilized enough that he was ready for surgery. He was transported to a hospital operating room at 6:45 p.m., where the deep stab wound to his leg was to be treated.
The blood transfusion and the surgery ultimately saved his life. Afterward, Ballard was placed into the post-anesthesia care unit, where he would wait until the anesthesiologist determined he was ready to be transferred to the hospital’s intensive care unit.
By this time, Costello had been approached by Trooper Gregg Dietz, one of the senior investigators in the state police’s Bethlehem barracks criminal investigation unit. The doctor was notified that four people had been brutally murdered in Northampton borough, and that Michael Ballard was the prime suspect. But that made no difference to Costello, just as it would make no difference for any doctor in his situation. Ballard was his patient, and he had to be treated. That was that.
Dietz had earlier asked whether he could question Ballard in the trauma bay, but Costello said it would not have been medically appropriate at that time. By now the police were understandably anxious to interview him and Dietz raised his request again, but Costello refused. Ballard was still recovering from the anesthesia, he explained, and anything he said at this point would be considered suspect.
The trooper asked if he could take Ballard into custody once he was released from the post-anesthesia care unit, but again Costello refused. Typically, he explained, patients coming from the trauma bay remain in the ICU at least twelve to twenty-four hours before they are released. Michael Ballard may have been a suspected murderer, but the doctor had to treat him like any other patient.
However, Costello did not wish to obstruct the police investigation, either. At the request of one of the police officers, he placed brown paper bags over Ballard’s hands so that the bloodstains could be preserved as potential evidence. Hospital staff also gathered Ballard’s bloodied clothes and placed them in bags for the state police to take, and police collected the discarded gauze used to wrap Ballard’s wounds.
Although the police could not take Ballard into custody, the hospital itself had a policy of restraining patients who had been fitted with a breathing tube so they could not pull it out once they regained consciousness. After Ballard’s hands were bagged, they were firmly tied down to the bed. The state police assigned a trooper to guard Ballard’s door, but it was clear to them that the suspected killer was not going anywhere.
* * *
News of four brutal slayings was enough to shake Northampton borough to its core.
A small town of 9,926 people—located just ten miles north of Allentown—Northampton was once a major center of cement manufacturing. Atlas Cement Company had its headquarters there until 1982, and supplied some of the materials that went into the construction of the Empire State Building and the Panama Canal, among other well-known sites. Now, like many surrounding Pennsylvania towns, the borough’s manufacturing days were mostly in the past, although a handful of smaller cement producers were still active in the region.
Northampton still honors its cement manufacturing history through the local Atlas Cement Museum, as well as through the Northampton Area School District, whose sports teams were called the Konkrete Kids. It was a relatively high-performing school district, with a 99 percent graduation rate and 83 percent of those graduates going on to college. The community beamed with particular pride on the school’s wrestling team, with its two national titles, seven state team titles, and twenty-one individual state titles.
The town’s small business district isn’t as successful as it once was, when the art-deco-style Roxy Theatre was a bustling movie house and, later, a live music venue where Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel played early in their careers. Dating back to 1921, the theater remains a centerpiece of the borough’s Main Street, but it now only operates as a second-run movie theater featuring three-dollar shows.
The modest Main Street had seen better days, but still, more of the storefronts were open than not, and it still looked so much like a charming slice of Americana that it was used to portray a typical 1950s Main Street setting in the opening of the 1992 film School Ties.
The people of the borough also seemed to take pride in their history, with the nearby Canal Street Heritage Walkway trail following the Lehigh River for more than a mile, boasting some of the more picturesque sights of the area.
Northampton officials chose to have their own police department instead of relying on the state police like many of their neighbors, but serious crimes were rare in the quiet town. Police Chief Ronald Morey had been with the department since 1984, and in that time, prior to this new multiple homicide case, there had been only three murders in the borough.
Two had occurred in 1985. First there was James McBride’s murder of his wife, Kelly, which District Attorney John Morganelli had successfully prosecuted himself. Then there was the fatal shooting of fifty-one-year-old borough resident John Joseph Mayerchak by a prostitute he frequented, Lucinda Andrews, who remained free for twenty-five years before a cold-case investigation led to her arrest. After those two killings, the borough went more than a decade without a murder—until 1997, when Donald Reiman Jr. was lured to the Hokendauqua Creek dam by his girlfriend, Barbara Kitchen, and killed there by another one of her lovers, John Mead.
Another decade had passed before Denise Merhi and three others were stabbed to death inside one of the borough’s unassuming homes, a crime that was practically unheard of not only in Northampton borough, but anywhere in the Lehigh Valley region.
“People were shook up, especially because it was four victims. It was something very out of the ordinary,” Chief Morey later said. “But then again, stuff like that, it’s sad to say, it’s happening more and more every day.”
The Merhi home was about two blocks from Main Street and about half a mile from the Northampton Area Library, High School, and Middle School. Lincoln Avenue was a street of well-kept modest homes; a prominent Gothic-style church—St. Paul’s United Church of Christ—sat almost cattycorner to the residence.
It was considered an excellent place to raise a family—a neighborhood unaccustomed to even the most petty crimes, much less multiple murders.
“I’ve lived here for twenty years,” Ruby Stonewall, a neighbor and family friend, told the Morning Call, one of the region’s two local newspapers. “Things like this don’t happen here.”
Even newer residents were stunned by the slayings. A couple that had moved to the neighborhood less than six months ago from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was especially aghast.
“We moved here because we were told it was quiet,” the wife told the Express-Times, the other local paper. “Now we’re ready to move back.”
Such expressions of shock appeared regularly in both newspapers for days. It was one of the biggest stories to ever hit the region, and certainly a noteworthy one for the quiet little Northampton borough. No one could recall another quadruple murder in the county’s history.
The story was covered heavily by news agencies in Philadelphia, less than seventy miles away, and also gained mention in newspapers across the country including the Washington Post, the Seattle Times, and Long Island’s Newsday.
The region had seen multiple murders in the past. In fact, the Express-Times compiled a list of such crimes in the past twenty-five years. But in terms of the number of simultaneous victims, the Northampton quadruple homicide topped it.
New Jersey serial killer nurse Charles Cullen—who has admitted to killing at least forty patients—committed at least eight of those murders in the Lehigh Valley and at least another eight in neighboring counties in New Jersey. And Lehigh Valley resident Ali Davis also has been convicted of four murders, the only other four-time killer in the region’s history, as far as the authorities know.
But Cullen’s killings occurred over a stretch of sixteen years at ten hospitals before he was arrested. Likewise, Davis’s murders were committed in two separate incidents, both in the city of Easton. Davis, who was twenty when he committed his first murder, gunned down a man in the street on May 2007, and then six months later worked with three accomplices to break into a house and murder three people in a gang-related shooting. That triple homicide, which occurred directly across from one of the city’s middle schools, was one of the most shocking crimes the Lehigh Valley had ever seen.
That is, until the murders alleged to be committed by Michael Ballard. The notion of four people meeting such brutal ends all at once sent shock waves through the entire region.
* * *
By 9:40 p.m., about five hours after Ballard’s car crash, he had recovered enough to breathe on his own again and his breathing tube was removed. That meant Ballard could finally speak, but Dr. Costello was not ready to let the police ask him any questions until he questioned Ballard himself and determined his level of consciousness.
Costello conducted a cognitive exam using the Glasgow Coma Scale, a typical neurological scale used to determine a patient’s state of consciousness. He also checked Ballard’s eye movement, motor skills, and verbalization.
“Can you tell me your name?” the doctor asked him. “Can you tell me where you are? Can you tell me what happened to you? Can you tell me who the president of the United States is?”
Ballard answered all the questions correctly in complete sentences, and Costello gave him a score of fourteen on the coma scale, the highest possible level. At last, he was ready to be interviewed by the police.
Raymond Judge and Gregg Dietz were called into Ballard’s room to conduct the interview. The two troopers introduced themselves and Ballard nodded in recognition. But as soon as the
y started asking questions about Denise Merhi’s house in Northampton borough, Ballard closed his eyes and would not respond.
It was clear to Judge that Ballard was faking sleep or unconsciousness. And although he wasn’t fooling the troopers, it was obvious they weren’t going to get any answers out of him. At least not right away.
Trooper Christopher Maner was selected to watch Ballard as he slept and to alert Trooper Judge if he awoke. Around eleven o’clock that night, Costello returned to Ballard’s room to check on him. The doctor recalled that a vial of purple fluid was found inside the leather knife holster Ballard had when he arrived at the hospital, so he asked Ballard if there was anything he had ingested that the doctors should be informed about.
Ballard responded that he had consumed a Long Island Iced Tea—a drink well known for its high alcohol content—as well as straight vodka and various multivitamins earlier in the day. Costello ordered a blood alcohol content test for Ballard and it eventually came back at 0.113, over the legal limit for drunken driving in Pennsylvania of 0.08. The test was conducted more than six hours after the murders took place, so the blood alcohol content would have been even higher at that time. His testosterone levels also were higher than usual—possibly from having taken steroids or other supplements—which could have increased his aggressiveness.
After the test, Ballard fell back asleep. Around eleven-thirty that night, Trooper Arthur Johnson was sent to relieve Trooper Maner to stand watch at Ballard’s bedside. Ballard awoke just after midnight and looked directly at Trooper Johnson.
“What’s your story, dickhead?” he asked.
Johnson identified himself as a trooper with the Pennsylvania State Police who was assigned to observe him.
“How’s that going for you?” Ballard shot back.
As Johnson started to tell Ballard that he would like to talk to him about the events from earlier that day, Ballard closed his eyes, once again pretending to be asleep. It was looking less and less likely that he would cooperate with the authorities.
Fatal Jealousy: The True Story of a Doomed Romance, a Singular Obsession, and a Quadruple Murder Page 4
