I had one excellent source at the Calista Police Department, Damon Malonas, a Greek-American police officer and talented Sunday painter I’d featured in an article. He liked me enough to tell me what he knew about the shakedown activity on the West Side. Because I’d brought him in, I was assigned to assist the two-man investigative team working the story.
The lead writers had their sources. Damon was mine. Every so often we’d meet at a Korean restaurant after his shift. If anyone found out he was spilling to me, he could be in serious danger. Damon had taken a chance, but as he put it the first time he broached his concerns, ‘I feel a lot safer talking to you than taking my story to CPD Internal Affairs.’
I emailed him requesting a meeting. Bulgogi East, a grilled-meats restaurant on East Monroe, was a fairly busy place, but they had a quiet backroom with tables set against the walls. Damon felt safe there. It wasn’t a cop hang-out. And the staff there seemed to like me, probably because I’m of Asian heritage.
He didn’t have any new leads, but said he’d be willing to help me out by pulling the old file on the raid at A Caring House, and also find out how I could get hold of Captain Walter Loetz, likely long retired.
When I asked Damon if he knew anything about an arson investigation concerning the fires, he shook his head but promised to check with his brother-in-law.
‘He’s a fireman. If he knows something, I’ll put you in touch.’
He got back to me the next day on Walter Loetz, retired and now living in an Akron suburb. Turned out this guy ended his career at a lot higher rank than captain. He retired as Deputy Chief of Operations.
I looked him up, found his phone number, thought about cold-calling him, then decided to check first with Jase.
‘I think I ought to read the file first,’ I told him. ‘I’ll get further with Loetz if I can show I’m familiar with his notes.’
Two days later, to my great surprise, I got a call back from Penny Dawson. The SFAI Alumni Office had passed on my message, but Penny sounded perturbed. What could I possibly want with her? She’d been living down in the Florida Keys the last fifteen years. It had been decades since she’d set foot in Calista.
‘Are you sure I’m the right Penny Dawson?’ she asked.
‘You were a friend of Courtney Cobb?’
I could hear her intake her breath. ‘Is Courtney OK?’ she asked, voice subdued.
‘Don’t know. I’m trying to find her.’
‘Are you calling about A Caring Place on Locust?’ I told her that I was. ‘Haven’t seen or heard from her since the night the cops yanked us out of there. They hustled us into separate cars. I’ve no idea where they took her.’
I told her I was concerned about Courtney, and that other people were as well. I told her the Cobb family refused to say anything about her, even to say whether she was still alive. I told her a friend of mine saw some artwork in the house and was trying to find out who had done it.
‘They’re still there – the wall paintings?’ She sounded almost breathless.
‘Yes, they’re still there. What can you tell me about them?’
Long pause. ‘You’re coming at me out of the blue.’ She sounded even more distraught than before. ‘Let me think about this and call you back.’
‘Sure …’ I didn’t want to lose her. ‘Tell me a good time to call you, Penny. Can you give me your number?’
‘I’ll get back to you,’ she said and hung up.
There was no caller ID on my phone. She either kept hers off or turned it off before she called me. Now I’d have to wait until she chose to call back … if she ever did.
I have to admit I was stunned. I wasn’t prepared for her call and didn’t think I’d handled it well. I hesitated before telling Jason, afraid he’d think I’d screwed up. He was nice about it.
‘Look, you found her. Now we know she lives in the Keys. I think she’ll call you back. Really, how can she resist asking what this is all about?’
A week passed without my hearing from her. I couldn’t find any Dawsons listed in the Keys. I was starting to despair I’d never hear from her again, but brightened up when Damon called to say he had the August 16, 1993 file on the raid, and was in the process of copying it for me as we spoke.
‘Fairly scanty,’ he said. ‘About what you’d expect on a one-night operation. There’s the warrant application and some handwritten notes initialed by Loetz.’
He paused. ‘About the fires, seems my brother-in-law knows stuff, but he’s hesitant to talk. I vouched for you, so he’s willing to meet. His name’s Tony Delgado, real straight-arrow type. He’ll meet you tomorrow night at eight p.m. in the parking lot behind the Haggerty Mall. He’ll bring the photocopies with him. Park in the far north corner and leave your side window open. He’ll pull up next to you. Then you can talk car-to-car.’
‘Great! I love intrigue.’
‘He’s a little jumpy, Joan. He’s never dealt with a reporter. Do your best to calm him down. I think it’ll be worth your time.’
The mall parking lot was practically empty when I arrived, not surprising since most of the stores had closed. There was a cluster of cars near the multiplex, but otherwise a vast wasteland of empty pavement. I followed instructions, drove to the far north corner and parked. I checked my watch. I was five minutes early.
Tony Delgado swooped in beside me at eight fifteen. He drove a vintage Chevy that looked immaculately restored. He rolled down his window. He had the lean, taut face of a cardinal in a Renaissance painting, contradicted by a cherubic smile.
‘You’re Joan?’ I nodded. ‘Sorry I’m late. We live on the West Side. Don’t shop much around here. Anyway, got something for you.’ He stuck his arm out of his window. I reached out, took hold of a manila envelope. ‘From Damon. He sends best regards.’
‘Thanks.’
‘So you wanna know about the fires, huh?’
‘Anything you can tell me.’
‘They’re keeping us busy. Which is good. Most of the guys like that. Lotsa overtime. But, see, maybe we shouldn’t be liking it so much, if you know what I mean.’
‘Not sure I do.’
‘I can’t tell you much. There’re all sorts of rumors. They brought in a crack arson investigation team from the state capital. We don’t know them. They’re working independent. They got their own headquarters someplace – an undisclosed location. It’s headed up by a guy name of Nick Gallagher, a legend in the field. No one’s sure what they’re up to, but like I said, there’re all these rumors.’
‘What kind of rumors?’
He grinned. He didn’t strike me as being at all jumpy. ‘That there could be firemen involved. Otherwise, why so secretive?’
‘Why would firemen set fires?’
‘Because they’re nuts. Because they love fire. Because it’s love of fire that drew them to the department. To set them, then put them out. Save people. Become heroes. That’s part of it, but it’s really the flames they love. Not the smoke, but the flames. Flames turn them on. Anyway, that’s what people are whispering about, ’cause, see, firemen-arsonists are Gallagher’s specialty.’
Oh man! I felt tremors shoot up my legs. If what he’s saying is right, this really could be a big story.
‘Anything else you can tell me?’
He shook his head. ‘Nothing – at least, not now. Thing is, when there’re a lot of fires, unscrupulous people will use them for cover. They think like “Hey, there’s a mad arsonist setting fires, so why don’t I set one in my business and collect the insurance?”’
‘You think that’s what’s happening?’
‘Maybe. Bunch of fires’ll bring the pyros out. The imitators and amateurs set the dangerous ones. Yeah, sure, we like the overtime, but we know if this keeps up, sooner or later some of us are going to get hurt.’
He said he had to get going, pick up his kids.
‘Nice meeting you, Joan. My advice, try and find Gallagher. He’s the guy you wanna talk to.’
And with
that he revved up his engine, and sped away, leaving me alone in that forlorn mall parking lot with dark thoughts about firemen-arsonists and Damon’s manila envelope in my lap.
The police file may have seemed scanty to Damon, but I found it fascinating. Loetz noted that he’d been bitten and scratched by the girls (referred to by their initials, C.C. and P.D.), but decided not to charge them since they were underage and ‘clearly disturbed.’ He described Dr Theodore Schechtner as ‘vicious’ and fingered him as the cult leader. He described Dr Elizabeth Schechtner as ‘clearly subservient to her husband.’ His only mention of the murals was that he found the two girls in ‘the attic orgy room decorated with erotic wall paintings.’
Erotic! Really? Where did that come from?
He also mentioned that during the raid C.C.’s father was in a car parked outside the house. Loetz wrote: ‘I asked him to be there so he’d see there was no mistreatment of his daughter.’
He wrote that the two minors, C.C. and P.D., at the request of their parents, were each turned over to separate male/female pairs of experienced deprogrammers from Cult Intervention & Recovery Services, Inc. of Buffalo, New York, while the other minors were turned over to Calista Child Protective Services for placement in licensed foster homes.
Accompanying Loetz’s notes was a copy of his sworn search warrant request:
WARRANT APPLICATION
Confidential female informant, C.D., familiar with the house at 1160 Locust Street, East Calista, recognized C.C., a minor child, from a newspaper story. Incentivized by the offering of the reward money by the C. family, she went to a phone booth and called the contact number in the story to report that C.C. was being forcibly held in a windowless attic room in the house. Mr C., father of the minor, C.C., subsequently called Police Commissioner Hawkes who assigned me to investigate. I posted an officer in an unmarked car across the street. This officer (report attached) observed possible use of force by the two adults in the residence and the presence of seven minor children. Further investigation revealed that the residence is apparently not licensed as a halfway house, and although the adult occupants are licensed psychologists, they are not licensed as foster parents. Although the officer did not see C.C., this is understandable, if, as informant claims, she is being forcibly held in a windowless attic room.
A warrant to search is hereby requested on the basis of the above information.
Sworn under penalty of perjury, Walter D. Loetz, Capt CPD
WARRANT GRANTED: HON. NEVILLE D. BROWN, JUDGE, CALISTA CRIMINAL COURT, AUGUST 16, 1993
The story behind the raid was starting to come together: a female informant with the initials C.D., apparently living in the house, reported that Courtney Cobb was living there in order to collect the $50,000 reward offered by her parents. I now also had the name of the deprogramming company. I looked it up. It had filed for bankruptcy in 1998 and was defunct.
Loetz, it was clear, had done an efficient job skewing his warrant request to Judge Brown. He had also skewed his accompanying notes using the terms ‘orgy room,’ ‘erotic wall paintings’ and ‘forcibly held’ in order to justify his arrest of the Schechtners. In Calista, a police captain was a ranking officer normally assigned to a command position. That he had been assigned to the case, led the raid and personally pulled the two girls out of the attic suggested he was under pressure from Commissioner Hawkes to take speedy action. That Loetz had done so could account for his subsequent rise at CPD where, as Deputy Chief of Operations, he qualified for a very comfortable pension.
I called Loetz. At first he wasn’t keen to talk.
‘I’ve been stung a few too many times by so-called journalists,’ he said.
So-called!
He sounded like a hard-ass. To soften him up, I told him a little about myself and that I was working on a story about rumors concerning a raid he’d conducted a quarter-century before. He finally relented, said I sounded ‘nice,’ and that I should come by the following morning.
He lived in a vine-covered brick house across from a golf course on a pleasant residential street in upscale Fairlawn Heights. There was a decent-sized expanse of grass, a two-year-old Volvo parked in the drive, and a doormat with the name Loetz woven into the brush. Loetz greeted me at the door. He looked to be in his mid-seventies, tanned cheeks, white arching eyebrows, a fringe of white hair on either side of a bald pate. He was wearing a navy-blue tracksuit. I noted a certain courtliness in his manner as he ushered me into what he called ‘my den.’
It was a typical suburban man cave – oversize TV, shelf of old sports trophies, signed photos of himself with high city officials, a framed newspaper article about his career, a cluster of family photos, a bag of golf clubs in the corner. Through the window I saw a swing set in the backyard.
‘For the grandkids,’ he said. ‘I’ve got six. Make quite a racket when they’re all here at once.’
I asked about Mrs Loetz. He told me she had dementia and was living in a nursing facility two miles away.
‘I visit her every day,’ he said.
Yes, indeed, he recalled the Locust Street raid. ‘I got scratched up pretty good,’ he said. ‘You don’t forget a thing like that.’
‘I understand there was an informant.’
He grinned. ‘She was after the reward money. I heard they paid it to her, too. Why not? Her info was on the mark and those families got their daughters back.’ He studied me. ‘What’s your interest in this, Joan? It was a cut-and-dried operation.’
‘I’m interested in the artwork in the attic. Remember it?’
He nodded. ‘It was weird, scary, like all those characters were staring out at you from the walls.’
‘You used the word “erotic” in your report.’
‘Don’t remember that. The plan was to get those kids out of there, out of that couple’s control. We accomplished that. No complaints, except from their defense attorney who tried to make me out to be a liar. But you see, it wasn’t about that couple – what was their name?’
‘Schechtner.’
‘Yeah, see, it wasn’t about them. It was about getting those two girls out safe and sound. Really just the Cobb girl. The Commissioner, Jim Hawkes, wanted that girl found. I found her and delivered her.’
‘Did Mr Cobb and Commissioner Hawkes have a relationship?’
‘I heard they were golf buddies. Commish wanted this taken care of and he knew I could take care of it. So tell me, Joan – what’s the story with those paintings?’
‘That’s what I’m wondering. I’ve seen photos of them. They’re certainly not erotic. From what I’ve been able to find out, Courtney Cobb painted them. Did she say anything when you took her downstairs?’
‘She was hollering. She acted crazed, like she was high on meth. But soon as we got outside and she saw her dad, she shut down and went limp. This deprogrammer couple hustled her into their car and drove off. Then her old man came up to me, thanked me for rescuing her. I remember something he said – “I know you can’t take money, Walt. You’re honest as the day is long. But if there’s ever any way I can help you, now or in the future, don’t hesitate to call.” He handed me his card and drove off.’
‘Did you ever call him?’
Loetz shook his head. ‘I loved CPD. Wasn’t interested in a corporate security job. Still, was nice to know someone so important felt he owed me a favor.’
Loetz was slick, but I didn’t believe he’d never cashed in Cobb’s offer. The ultra-sincere way he gazed into my eyes told me he was lying. Maybe he didn’t take money from Cobb but got paid off in some untraceable way, such as box seats at professional sports events or scholarships for his daughters at the fancy private girls’ school, Ashley-Burnett.
There comes a moment in an interview when it’s time to bear down. So far Loetz hadn’t told me much. I had a hunch he was concealing something, and that if I was going to get to it, I’d have to provoke him.
‘There’s corruption in CPD. Guess that’s always been a problem. We
’re hearing rumors of a police shakedown operation on the West Side. I’m working that story.’
‘If that’s why you’re here, you’re wasting your time. I’ve been out of the department ten years.’
‘I’m here about the raid, Mr Loetz. It doesn’t pass the smell test. The Schechtners were charged with serious stuff, then suddenly they were let off. Like you said, it was all about getting the Cobb girl out of there. But funny thing – she hasn’t been seen since.’
Loetz stared at me. ‘Not sure what you mean by that.’
‘No one’s seen or heard from Courtney Cobb since the night you pulled her out of that house. I’m sure her family knows where she is, but they refuse to talk about her. Don’t you find that strange?’
He shrugged, but I could tell I was making him uneasy. ‘Families … sometimes hard to figure them out.’
‘How did you figure the Cobb family?’
‘I figured them for desperate. They wanted their daughter back and she didn’t want to go back.’
‘Did you think those deprogrammers were legit?’
‘No idea. The family hired them.’
‘You took the other kids down to CPS. Why not the two in the attic?’
‘That wasn’t the deal.’
‘Oh, so there was a deal. What kind of deal?’
‘Deliver Courtney to her dad. Everyone else, the kids, the Schechtners …’ He shrugged again.
‘Collateral damage?’
‘Wouldn’t put it that way. The other kids were well placed.’
‘The Schechtners were ruined. No one would touch them. You’d branded them as satanists.’
He didn’t respond.
‘Wanna know what I think, Mr Loetz? This whole operation was about pleasing the Commissioner who had a personal relationship with the very wealthy, very powerful Horace Cobb.’
‘You can sum it up that way if you want. Like I told you on the phone, I’ve been stung by reporters lotsa times.’
‘Let’s talk about the way you summed it up, when you went to Judge Brown for a warrant and later wrote up your report. You described the attic as an “orgy room,” the murals as “erotic wall paintings.” You claimed two girls were being “forcibly held” when there was absolutely no proof of that. On the contrary, later there was sworn testimony that the girls were there voluntarily and were in the process of applying to become liberated minors. You also claimed that the house, A Caring Place, wasn’t licensed, but then it turned out that it was. You swore out your warrant application under penalty of perjury, but seems like there may have been some exaggeration involved.’
The Murals Page 6
