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

by McEvoy, Colin

  She drove down to Atlantic City with a friend that day and spent the entire day there, without giving Ballard and his phone calls another thought. She didn’t get home until very late that night, and it was only then that she learned what Ballard had done.

  Looking back on their conversation, Marilyn now believed that the moment Ballard learned Denise had been at the Phillies game with another man was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

  That was the moment, she believed, that he decided he was going to kill Denise.

  That wasn’t the only realization Marilyn had reached, she told Trooper Judge. Looking back on Ballard’s insistence that she meet him for coffee that morning, Marilyn now felt that Ballard had planned to use Marilyn to get to Denise’s house and then get Denise.

  “I do believe in my heart that he would have used me to get to Denise’s house, and he would’ve just killed us both,” she said.

  Oh my God, she thought. I could not be here for my children. I could’ve just said, “Oh, I’ll meet him for coffee.” I could be dead right now.

  It was obvious to Judge that Marilyn was feeling a great deal of guilt over what happened.

  “Marilyn, if you had gone that day, you wouldn’t be here,” he said. “Don’t blame yourself for not going. It’s a good thing.”

  “Maybe things could’ve been different,” Marilyn said tearfully. “Maybe I could’ve talked him out of it. Maybe…”

  “It’s not going to help you to keep going through it in your mind,” Judge said. “It’s not your fault. You did the best that you could.”

  Judge stressed to her that Ballard had bought the knife and gone to Denise’s house that day with a purpose. He had planned the whole thing out.

  “He was going to do it no matter what,” he said. “A person like this, you can’t talk sense into him.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Some time after Trooper Judge’s interview with Marilyn ended, the state police were finally issued an arrest warrant for Michael Eric Ballard on four counts of homicide and four counts of murder in the first degree. By also charging him with the general term of homicide, a future jury could convict Ballard of a lesser murder charge if they did not agree with first degree. At 2:20 p.m. June 27, Judge and one of his supervisors, Corporal Paul Romanic, went to St. Luke’s Hospital to serve Ballard with the warrant.

  They also brought along two search warrants, one for the bandages and stretcher sheets used in Ballard’s transport to the hospital, and the other allowing them to take photographs of Ballard himself.

  The two troopers arrived at Ballard’s hospital room and found him lying awake, with his wrists handcuffed to the bed. Trooper Judge informed him that he was under arrest, and the news did not appear to come as any great shock to Ballard. But he did express some confusion when Romanic started taking photographs of his injuries.

  “Why are you taking pictures?” he asked. “I ain’t contesting this.”

  That was good news to the troopers. Ballard’s blunt admissions to Dr. Costello the night before had certainly indicated that he wasn’t trying to hide the fact that he had killed the four victims, but this was the first indication he was going to cooperate with the police.

  “We’re just being thorough,” Judge said in response.

  Ballard gave the trooper an icy stare and then, in what seemed like an impatient manner, launched into a succession of quick, brief statements.

  “Just give me the papers,” he said. “I’ll sign it. I’ll plead guilty. I shouldn’t have lived through it. Make the report. Blame the parole board. What do you want to know?”

  “Why all this happened,” Judge responded. The trooper didn’t really need to discern a motive to get a conviction, but any information along those lines could prove invaluable to an inquisitive jury.

  “Any explanation as to why is not worth it at this point,” Ballard said. “It’s all led up to this. Ask the parole board. Ask Dr. Valliere. Ask Mondello. Ask Denise.”

  The trooper did not recognize the first two names, but based on Ballard’s constant repeating of the phrase “Ask the parole board,” they assumed Dr. Valliere and Mondello were people Ballard had dealt with during his first sentence in prison, or during his parole.

  “What do you want?” Ballard asked again, pointedly.

  “I want a confession,” Judge responded.

  “I already said I’d plead guilty, what’s the point? They’re dead and I’m here bleeding,” Ballard said. His eyes drifted away from the troopers and up to the muted television mounted on the wall, which was tuned to the Philadelphia Phillies baseball game.

  “I’d like to speak to you to find out why,” Judge said. “Why it all had to happen like this.”

  Because Ballard had invoked his right to counsel the night before—and the police could not officially question him without an attorney present—Judge explained that, if Ballard was willing, they could get an attorney for him that day so they could discuss what happened.

  But by now, Ballard had little regard for the troopers and was engrossed by the Phillies game, or at least pretending to be.

  “Let him watch the game,” he said, referring to whatever attorney Judge might get for him.

  Judge suggested they could instead get an attorney for Ballard the next morning and set up an interview then. But the trooper could see that Ballard seemed uninterested in speaking to the police at all, and Judge recalled their exchanges the previous day when Ballard refused to answer his questions.

  “I can have a lawyer here first thing tomorrow morning,” Judge said. “But I don’t want to waste everyone’s time by getting an attorney down here for you to just tell me to stick it.”

  Ballard looked Judge in the eyes. He was through with talking to the trooper, and decided to throw Judge’s own words back at him.

  “Stick it,” Ballard said to the trooper. “I want to watch this game.”

  * * *

  Ballard was still not fit to be released from the hospital, so a judge was brought in to St. Luke’s to arraign him at bedside. Wayne Maura, one of the fourteen magisterial district judges representing the various regions of Lehigh County, arraigned him on four counts each of criminal homicide and murder in the first degree.

  District Attorney John Morganelli announced that a press conference would be held later in the afternoon, where information about the homicides and the arrest would be released. Details about the crime had been fairly scant so far in the press accounts. Since the murders had taken place on a Saturday, representatives from the police and district attorney’s office were less available to speak to reporters, and the newspapers had to contend with earlier deadlines and a smaller-than-usual cadre of journalists working.

  The stories that ran Sunday morning in the Express-Times and Morning Call reported that a suspect had been taken into custody, but did not identify him by name. The stories also had no official police confirmation for the names of the four victims, although they indicated that the home was owned by Denise Merhi and that her father and grandfather lived there with her. And Steve Zernhelt’s brother David, who lived in nearby Allentown, confirmed to both papers that his brother was one of the victims.

  “He was trying to do everything he could to help,” David Zernhelt had told the Express-Times. “I always believed in my brother … I know he died a hero.”

  But the press had plenty of unanswered questions about the murders, the motive, the suspect, and much more. Morganelli, who had a reputation for being press-friendly, arranged for a press conference at the Pennsylvania State Police barracks in Bethlehem. Northampton County Coroner Zachary Lysek and State Police Lieutenant Brian Tobin were present along with the district attorney.

  A large number of print reporters, photographers, and television camera crews crammed into the modestly sized meeting room, where the three law enforcement officials sat at the head of the table. Lysek began the press conference by revealing the names of the four victims and their causes of death.

  “
All four victims died from multiple stab wounds,” he said. “The manner of death on these four cases is classified as homicide.”

  Morganelli identified the suspect as Michael Eric Ballard, a name that would become infamous in the Lehigh Valley region from that moment forward. Ballard was in custody and was facing four counts of criminal homicide and four counts of first-degree murder, the district attorney explained. Based on what he’d witnessed personally at the crime scene and the subsequent investigation by police, Morganelli said it was absolutely clear he was dealing with four cases of premeditated, first-degree murder.

  “It’s also a capital case,” he went on to announce. “The fact that he has engaged in multiple homicides is an aggravating factor under the Pennsylvania death penalty act. We will seek the death penalty in this case.”

  The authorities provided a partial picture of Ballard’s connection to his victims. They revealed there was “some type of relationship” between Ballard and Denise, but gave few details beyond that. There were also numerous questions the reporters asked that the authorities did not answer. Who had called 911 to report the killings? How had Ballard gotten into the house? What was his condition at the hospital? What was his possible motive?

  Morganelli declined to answer most of the questions, but he did reveal that Ballard had previously been convicted for the murder of Donald Richard. Both the Express-Times and the Morning Call had archived stories about the Richard murder dating back to 1991, and both papers made note that after Ballard’s fifteen-year term in state prison, he had been incarcerated again for a two-year stint from 2008 up until April 2010 for a parole violation.

  Tony Nauroth, the reporter with the Express-Times, made particular note in the lead of his story that Ballard had been released just barely two months before the four murders in Northampton borough.

  Outside of the press conference, the Associated Press spoke with Denise’s cousin Desiray Dolly, as well as her friend Nicole Young. Both confirmed that Denise and Ballard had previously dated. Desiray said she had met Ballard at a birthday party two years earlier, and that he made her feel unnerved.

  “He just gave you that kind of feeling, that uneasy feeling,” Desiray told the AP. “He was offering us, ‘If you ever need [alcohol], just let me know.’ Constantly touching, putting hands on shoulders.”

  Both Desiray and Nicole told the Associated Press that they thought Ballard and Denise had dated for only a brief time and that he had left her alone afterward.

  “I just don’t get it,” Desiray told the media outlet. “He didn’t give any kind of warning that I know of.”

  The Morning Call, however, interviewed a neighbor of Denise’s who reported that there were prior incidents between Ballard and Denise’s family, and that she had recently contacted Northampton police. The neighbor, Rebecca Germani, also knew that Ballard had served time in prison for a previous murder.

  “I don’t know how he got out,” she told the newspaper. “He only did fifteen years prior for slashing somebody’s throat.”

  Multiple reporters camped themselves outside the Northampton double home where the four victims had been slain, and they would remain there for the next several days. “Reporters were gawking at our house for days,” as Jaime Zernhelt later put it. Janet and her children couldn’t bear to speak to them and politely asked that the press respect the family’s privacy. The reporters wanted to know what past relationship, if any, Steve Zernhelt and his family had with Michael Ballard, but Janet couldn’t even hear the word “Ballard” without feeling sick, much less talk about him.

  The truth was that the Zernhelts had barely known Michael Ballard at all. In fact, Janet wasn’t sure Steve had ever even met him prior to that horrible day. She knew him only as one of Denise’s boyfriends, and assumed they had broken up long ago because she hadn’t seen him in a while.

  Janet and Ballard would politely say hello when they encountered each other, but they had only spoken at length once, when Janet was trimming the shrubs outside her house one day. Janet honestly couldn’t recall what they even talked about, but she remembered that he gave off a vibe that made her feel unsettled. In fact, Janet recalled that she had actually warned her daughter Jaime to avoid talking with him or being around him whenever she visited home from college.

  “Steer clear of him,” Janet had previously warned. “That guy gives me the creeps. I just have a feeling about him.”

  * * *

  “This guy’s a rabid dog and he needs to be put down, and I’m going to put him down with a death sentence,” John Morganelli had said at the press conference.

  The Associated Press picked up the quote, and it ran in several newspaper stories across the country about the grisly quadruple homicide in Pennsylvania. Morganelli’s provocative statement spoke not only to his strong feelings about the death penalty, but also to the shock the community was feeling about the heinousness of the crime and the desire for justice to be served.

  Despite the passion and confidence of Morganelli’s statement, though, the effectiveness of capital punishment in the state of Pennsylvania was spotty at best. Since 1976, when the state’s current capital punishment law was enacted, hundreds of inmates had been sentenced to death, and only three had been executed.

  The first was Keith Zettlemoyer, who in 1980 kidnapped and killed a friend who was going to testify against him in a robbery trial. Then there was Leon Moser, a former seminary student who killed his ex-wife and their two daughters after Palm Sunday services at their church in 1985. The most recent was Gary Heidnik, who kidnapped half a dozen women, imprisoned them in his Philadelphia basement, then raped and tortured them to death. Reportedly one of the inspirations behind the “Buffalo Bill” serial killer character in The Silence of the Lambs, Heidnik was executed in 1999.

  However, in all three of those cases, the inmates had waived all appeal rights and actually asked that their executions be carried out. All others sentenced to death either received a lesser sentence on appeal, died of natural causes in prison, extended their legal battles indefinitely, or were eventually exonerated. In more than thirty-five years, no inmate in Pennsylvania had been executed against his or her will, and of the 191 on death row as of October 2013, few if any would see their sentences carried through.

  Morganelli had always been a vocal proponent of reform when it came to the state’s death penalty process. In 1993, just two years into his tenure as Northampton County’s district attorney, Morganelli filed an unprecedented lawsuit against then-Governor Bob Casey Sr. seeking to compel the governor to sign two death warrants for men who had been convicted in capital murder cases in the Lehigh Valley.

  One was Martin Appel, a twenty-eight-year-old man who had shot and killed three bank employees while robbing an East Allen Township bank in 1986. The other was Josoph Henry, who in 1987 murdered a nineteen-year-old Lehigh University freshman in her Bethlehem dorm room. Henry broke into the dorm seeking money for his drug habit; when the victim woke up in the middle of the robbery, he raped her and then strangled her with a Slinky.

  Morganelli was successful in his litigation, but Casey appealed it and the matter remained in the courts for a lengthy period of time. Eventually, Casey was succeeded by Republican governor Tom Ridge, who signed the Appel and Henry warrants. Nevertheless, both cases remained in legal limbo for several more years until the death penalty decisions were ultimately thrown out. They both eventually received new sentences of life imprisonment.

  Appel had actually requested the death penalty after he was arrested, but years later, following his sentencing, he changed his mind and fought the punishment. Morganelli wrote a book about the case called The D-Day Bank Massacre, and in it he raised a question with interesting ramifications about Pennsylvania’s capital punishment law: Did Appel request death because he knew, by exploiting the system, that it was the best way he could avoid it?

  Both the Appel and Henry convictions came before Morganelli was elected district attorney in 1991. Since that time, he
had never secured a death penalty sentence for a defendant himself, although he came close on several occasions.

  The closest he had come was with Christopher Bissey, a twenty-five-year-old drug dealer who shot two teenage girls to death near Lehigh University in 1995 because one of them owed him four hundred dollars for a cocaine purchase. It took only two hours for a jury to convict Bissey of first-degree murder, but one of the twelve jurors could not embrace a death penalty verdict, so Bissey received life imprisonment instead.

  Since then, Bissey had become a singer with a prison rock band called Dark Mischief, whose concert was filmed and aired on VH1 as part of the cable network’s series Music Behind Bars. It was a source of outrage across the country from victims’ advocates and conservative commentators who felt that men like Bissey should have been put to death, not given national exposure.

  Morganelli and the prosecutors working under him had made more recent efforts at death penalty convictions, but they were equally unsuccessful. In 2007, Ali Davis and three other gunmen broke into a house in Easton and shot to death a twenty-one-year-old man and two young women. Prosecutors said they were gang-related killings committed in retaliation for other gang murders in New Jersey, although none of the victims was directly involved in that crime.

  Davis, who was twenty-one at the time, and who had already shot another man to death on the streets of Easton in an unrelated 2007 crime, was the first of the four defendants to face trial in 2010. The death penalty was sought for all of them. Davis was found guilty after three hours of jury deliberation, but when it came to the sentencing phase, they deadlocked on whether to impose the death penalty, resulting in a verdict of three consecutive life sentences. The other three defendants eventually took pleas of life imprisonment as well.

  Then came Eugenio Torres, twenty-one, who tortured his girlfriend’s three-year-old son Elijah Strickland to death while he was supposed to be babysitting him at an apartment in Wilson Borough, right next to Easton. The boy was badly beaten and burned with scalding hot water. Prosecutors had said he had at least ninety-three bruises all over his body as well as a fractured skull, a lacerated liver, and third-degree burns. Torres said the whole thing was an accident, and that the burns and injuries occurred when he slipped and dropped the boy while they were taking a bath.