Fatal Jealousy: The True Story of a Doomed Romance, a Singular Obsession, and a Quadruple Murder

by McEvoy, Colin

  While Johnson watched over Ballard, Judge was on the phone with the Pennsylvania State Parole Board seeking a detainer against Ballard. He had violated his parole by leaving the Allentown Community Corrections Center, and getting a detainer would allow them to hold Ballard until homicide charges could be brought against him.

  * * *

  Later that night, Dr. Costello returned to check on Ballard, who was still resting in his hospital bed. Despite everything they had learned about Ballard from the police, the medical staff still knew little about the car crash that had brought Ballard here, and the doctor needed to learn as many details as he could so they knew how to best provide treatment. The police did not ask Costello to question Ballard on their behalf, nor did he feel pressured to obtain information for them, although Trooper Arthur Johnson was still outside the room guarding Ballard.

  Ballard had been uncooperative with police so far, but he seemed more willing to talk to Costello. They spoke for a few minutes about his injuries. The doctor asked about how Ballard had obtained certain wounds, and eventually asked how Ballard sustained the deep puncture wound on his leg.

  “I was stabbing some dude, and the knife slipped down and cut my knee,” Ballard replied in a cold, casual tone of voice.

  Costello was taken aback, and their conversation came to a complete halt. Trooper Johnson, who was standing in the doorway, had also heard Ballard’s statement and became immediately alert. Costello left the room a few minutes later, and Johnson asked him to make a written statement about Ballard’s startling admission.

  Around 1 a.m., Trooper Judge returned to the hospital to speak with Ballard, with the hope that the statement he’d made to Costello indicated he was ready to speak. Ballard didn’t close his eyes or pretend to sleep this time, and Judge informed Ballard that he wanted to speak with him about a homicide investigation and read him his Miranda rights. But Judge had no more luck than before, as Ballard quickly exercised his right to remain silent. He said he would not answer any questions without a lawyer.

  Ballard slept for a few hours, and Costello returned at 5:30 a.m. to reassess his patient’s condition. Once again, the doctor had not been asked to question Ballard on behalf of the authorities, but the police had continued to keep a trooper—this one named Steven Furlong—standing just outside the doorway to take note of anything Ballard might say.

  With a nurse present, Costello performed an examination on his patient and started asking basic questions, including whether Ballard knew why he was in the hospital. Ballard’s response was just as frank, and shocking, as a few hours earlier.

  “Because I murdered my girlfriend and her family and then the neighbor who came over later,” he replied, matter-of-factly. “I was in the process of stabbing them when the knife slipped and stabbed my knee.”

  Costello repeated Ballard’s statement back to him, and Ballard nodded in confirmation. Furlong had trouble hearing Ballard, but could clearly hear Costello as he repeated the information. Costello asked a few more questions, and Ballard seemed better able to articulate how he’d sustained his injuries now than he had been before. It was clear to the doctor that Ballard’s alertness and levels of consciousness had greatly improved.

  Costello, and the nurse who had been present with him, both again made written statements to the police about Ballard’s unsettling confessions.

  CHAPTER 7

  It was December 6, 1991, when the Allentown communications center received a call from a co-worker of a man named Donald Richard. The caller was concerned because Richard, who was fifty-two, had not shown up for his job at the Allentown State Hospital in three days, and attempts to reach him via phone had been unsuccessful.

  The communications center dispatched marked Allentown police cars to Richard’s apartment on North 12th Street in the city’s downtown. Although that block consisted of mainly single-family homes, Richard’s house was divided into separate apartments on the first and second floors.

  There was no answer when the police officers knocked on Richard’s apartment door. After obtaining a warrant, they eventually entered the apartment, where they immediately detected a rancid odor in the air. An odor that could only belong to a decomposing body.

  Inside the apartment, lying on a sofa, was the corpse of Donald Richard.

  He had been stabbed eight times—with a serrated knife, by the look of it—three times in the neck, twice in the back and once each in the chest, left shoulder, and lower lip. Blood was splattered all over Richard, the sofa, and the wall behind it. Sitting on a short end table next to the sofa were two opened, unfinished bottles of beer.

  Once it was clear that they were dealing with a homicide, the responding police officers called evidence technicians to process the scene. Two different sets of fingerprints were discovered on the beer bottles, one of which matched Richard. The other likely belonged to his killer.

  Equally significant was what the investigators did not find: Richard’s wallet was missing from the apartment, and his car, a blue-and-gray 1991 Mustang, was nowhere to be seen. The Allentown police issued a nationwide alert with the license plate number and a description of the car, asking any police department that spotted it to stop the vehicle and consider the occupant potentially armed and dangerous.

  Meanwhile, Detective Sergeant Dean Schwartz was called in as lead investigator. Having served nine years on the Allentown Police Department, he handled many of the major crimes that reached the department’s detective bureau, including homicides, robberies, and rapes. Schwartz began his investigation by interviewing neighbors and co-workers who knew Richard, and a picture of the man’s life slowly began to develop.

  Schwartz learned that Richard was a gay man who had been seeing several men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five prior to his death. One man who’d previously lived with Richard referred to him as a “trick” and suggested he regularly engaged in sex with other men for money. After looking Richard up in the criminal database, Schwartz learned that on at least one occasion, emergency responders had been called to Richard’s apartment because a man in his early twenties—apparently Richard’s boyfriend—had become dangerously drunk and needed medical attention.

  According to some interviewees, Richard made it a practice of distributing keys to various young men to come in and out of his apartment. With no sign of forced entry at the apartment, it seemed entirely possible that one of these men could wind up one of the prime suspects for Richard’s murder.

  But by December 8, there was no longer any need to pursue this lead. Donald Richard’s stolen car had been found.

  Schwartz received a call from the Washington County Sheriff’s Office in Fayetteville, Arkansas, informing him the department had stopped a Mustang matching Allentown’s nationwide alert. Inside the vehicle, they had discovered Richard’s wallet, as well as a serrated knife stained with blood.

  They had also apprehended the driver: an eighteen-year-old man named Michael Ballard.

  Ballard had been placed under arrest on charges of theft and receiving stolen property. The Allentown Police Department immediately began the process to extradite Ballard back to Pennsylvania on those theft charges.

  A check on Richard’s credit cards revealed that nearly twelve hundred dollars’ worth of purchases of food, gasoline, and other items had been made at various stores from Pennsylvania to Arkansas over the last several days. Ballard hadn’t covered his tracks very well. He left a trail of illegal credit card purchases from Pennsylvania all the way to Arkansas, even going so far as to take his friends out to fancy, expensive dinners. Some of the purchases seemed completely random: They later learned he had even stopped to buy a stuffed teddy bear as a gift for an ex-girlfriend.

  Also among the items recovered from Ballard was literature from the Ku Klux Klan, including writings condemning homosexuality and those who would condone sodomy. One of the pamphlets cited verses from the biblical book of Leviticus that homosexuals should be put to death. Whether Ballard was actually a mem
ber the KKK was not immediately clear.

  It was also unclear what relationship Ballard had with Richard, if indeed he had one at all. But Ballard’s connection to the crime scene was obvious, and the case against him was about to grow that much stronger: His fingerprints matched the second set found on the beer bottles in Richard’s apartment, and DNA testing of the blood found on the knife matched that of Richard himself.

  It was more than enough to charge Ballard with criminal homicide. Shortly after Ballard was committed to the Lehigh County Prison, however, Schwartz learned that his case was about to grow even stronger. He had received a phone call that a nurse from the prison wanted to speak to the police right away.

  Ballard had just confessed to her that he had killed Richard.

  * * *

  Schwartz sat down with Monica Fabian at the Allentown Police Department headquarters on December 13 at 10:42 p.m., just over an hour after she had met Ballard for the first time at the Lehigh County Prison. Visibly nervous and distressed, Fabian described for Schwartz exactly what Ballard had told her.

  An intake nurse, Fabian had been working in the community services wing near the front of the prison when Ballard had been brought in that night. He had just been extradited from Arkansas and, when she first saw him, he was at the booking counter receiving a mental evaluation to determine whether any special observations or conditions were necessary for his incarceration.

  Afterward, around 9:30 p.m., Ballard was brought before Fabian for a routine medical evaluation. Once they were alone together, Fabian began asking the familiar questions she asked at all evaluations: Do you have any health problems? Is there any history of health problems in your family? Have you been hospitalized in the past year?

  Ballard appeared distracted, but quietly answered all of her questions, at least at first. Then, without provocation, he changed the subject altogether.

  “I did it,” Ballard said.

  “Did what?” Fabian asked, genuinely confused.

  “I did it,” Ballard repeated. “I killed him.”

  Fabian was completely shocked. It had been the last thing she had ever expected to hear. Unsure of how to respond, Fabian tried to turn their focus back to the medical evaluation and started asking her routine questions again. But Ballard pressed on, seemingly determined to discuss what he had done.

  Ballard explained that he had been serving in the US Army in South Carolina but had been recently discharged. He didn’t explain why, nor did he explain why he’d moved from Arkansas to Allentown after his discharge, except to say that he was leaving his home state due to “problems” there.

  Ballard continued that he had moved in with his dad’s cousin Vera—an older woman he had always called an aunt—and had gotten a job working as a telemarketer. It wasn’t the most rewarding job, but he worked hard at it, and quickly developed the second-best sales record of the people in the office.

  “I thought maybe I would have a better chance of starting a life over here,” he said.

  But after a short time, Vera asked him to move out, having discovered Ballard reading a newspaper issued by the Ku Klux Klan.

  “Are you involved with the Klan?” Fabian asked.

  “No, I just get the newspaper every now and then,” Ballard insisted. “I just read the stuff.”

  One of Ballard’s co-workers had given him a telephone number to call, and it turned out to be a long, pre-recorded diatribe of racial propaganda from the Klan. Ballard didn’t consider himself a prejudiced man, but he listened to the entire audio recording out of curiosity, then reached out to one of the people associated with the Klan and agreed to attend a meeting.

  Ballard drove out to Reading, a Pennsylvania city about forty miles southwest of Allentown, for a rally held by Roy Frankhouser, a Grand Dragon and the state’s leading KKK member. A crowd of a few dozen attended, and Ballard stood out like a sore thumb because, as the only non-member, he was the only one not wearing the Klan’s signature white robes and headgear.

  Ballard never joined the group, and later could not explain why he had decided to attend the meeting at all. But he did bring back to Allentown some of the Klan’s literature, which was discovered by his aunt. She was deeply disturbed by the literature, especially because her daughter was married to a black man, Ballard told Fabian. Not wishing to deal with any possible family repercussions by having Ballard around, his aunt asked him to move out.

  One of Ballard’s co-workers agreed to let him stay at his place until Ballard found somewhere else to live. But what with his problems in Arkansas, his discharge from the army, and now having been thrown out of his aunt’s home, Ballard was feeling directionless. Like he wasn’t living at all, simply existing.

  “I was lost as hell,” he later said. “I had no goals. No direction.”

  Ballard explained to Fabian that one night two Sundays ago—which would have been December 1—he had gone drinking at several Allentown bars and was taking a walk outside when a blue-and-gray Mustang passed him by. Then it passed him another two times. Ballard took notice because he admired fast cars and liked the look of the Mustang.

  The car then pulled over not far from him and Ballard approached it to take a closer look at the vehicle. The driver rolled down his window, Ballard claimed, and introduced himself as Donald Richard. They exchanged a few friendly words as Ballard admired the car, then Richard offered to have a drink with Ballard.

  Ballard later said he found nothing unusual about the exchange; back home in Arkansas, people would often wave or stop and strike up a conversation while they were driving by. The two went to a nearby bar for a beer and started chatting. They made small talk for a while, chatting about football and whether the New York Giants would make it to the Super Bowl that year.

  After talking for about ninety minutes, Ballard explained that he needed to find somewhere new to live. Richard told Ballard he owned an apartment complex on 12th Street with a few vacancies he was interested in renting. It sounded perfect to Ballard, so the two made arrangements to meet at Richard’s apartment the next night so that Richard could show him the available rooms.

  The next day, as he was leaving his co-worker’s apartment to meet up with Richard, Ballard noticed a double-edged boot knife with a six-inch blade sitting in a beer stein next to the door. He picked it up and slipped it into the back of his belt. Later, Ballard would insist that he hadn’t expected to use it; nor was he bringing it along for self-defense. He simply thought it was “cool looking,” Ballard claimed, so he decided to pocket it.

  When Ballard met up with Richard later that day, Richard invited him into his own apartment before taking him to see the vacancies, and then offered Ballard a beer. Ballard accepted and took a seat on Richard’s sofa. As he started sipping the beer, however, Richard walked across the room and turned the apartment light off.

  Richard then took a seat next to Ballard on the sofa and, according to Ballard’s later recollections, started rubbing his hands against Ballard’s chest and crotch.

  “Do you want me to go down on you?” Richard asked, according to Ballard. “I’ll go down on you. Relax. Just relax. Take it easy. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Ballard told Fabian that he had never had another man approach him in such a way. He panicked, just “freaked out,” he told the nurse. He had no idea what to do.

  “The next thing I knew, I saw him laying on the sofa with a knife in his throat,” he said.

  Ballard told Fabain he had blacked out and didn’t remember stabbing Richard. The knife—the same one Ballard had stolen from his co-worker’s apartment less than an hour earlier—had been jammed into Donald Richard’s throat right up to the handle.

  “I don’t remember pulling the knife,” Ballard said. “The next thing I knew, it was just in his throat. I was all covered with blood.”

  Ballard claimed he was terrified at the sight of Richard’s dead body, at the realization of what he had done. In a state of panic, Ballard claimed, he pulled the knife out o
f Richard’s throat, then took Richard’s wallet and keys and rushed out of the apartment.

  He told Fabian he stole the Mustang and decided to drive straight to Arkansas, figuring his father would somehow know what to do. He really wasn’t thinking about escaping, according to Ballard. That’s why he didn’t bother getting rid of the knife or think twice about using Richard’s credit card for fancy dinners.

  Ballard later described the feeling as that of a young, scared child yearning for safety. And, as a child would, he decided that home was the safest place he could go, even if home was twelve hundred miles away. He hadn’t slept for three days after the murder.

  “I wish now I would’ve walked instead of driving,” Ballard said to Fabian. “Maybe I wouldn’t have been caught.”

  Fabian sat listening to Ballard in total shock. She had no idea what to say, so instinctively she told Ballard not to tell anybody else what he had told her. She knew from experience that talking to people in prison about the details of their crimes was dangerous, because the other inmates would later use the information to try to get their own sentences reduced. Donald Richard’s murder had made a big splash in the paper, so she knew there was a strong possibility that this scenario could happen in Ballard’s case. She also knew he wouldn’t be particularly safe in prison if word got out that he might be associated with the Ku Klux Klan.

  “For your own safety and your own protection, keep quiet what you said here,” she said. “I’m not going to say anything.”

  “Fine, I just want to be protected,” Ballard replied. “I’m really scared about being in jail. I don’t want anyone trying to hurt me.”

  With that, Fabian asked the officer standing in the nearby hall to escort Ballard off to be housed in the prison. They had been speaking for just under twenty minutes.

  “OK, fine, thank you for your time,” Ballard said before he was taken away. Fabian went straight to the police that night.