I had such a sick feeling in my stomach during the entire telling of this story, like it was going to end up meaning something later on—you know that feeling you get in books when you read something like this and your little inner voice tells you that later on it will mean something?
The wedding soup was finally being dished out into huge soup bowls. We both sat and looked at each other across the wooden table while dipping our chunks of Mancini’s bread into the hot soup—Mancini’s is the best Italian bread in Pittsburgh, and all Pittsburgh people know that Mancini’s bread must be present at any soup, stew or spaghetti meal, especially on a very cold, windy, winter night at the dinner table. It does something for the soul, because we all know that the Mancini family made it themselves just for us. I felt connected to Chris at this tiny moment in time….
It isn’t like Chris to cook anything. From what I know of her by now, she isn’t domestically inclined, her apartment doesn’t have much furniture or accessories and she likes it that way, easier to clean. As far as I’m concerned, this Italian wedding soup day was inspired by a conversation we had a week earlier about her aunts, Angeline and Josephine, who raised her. That’s about all she ever told me, they raised her, and the way she described them they sounded like two devout Catholic women who had never married, but I don’t know that to be truth. We never discussed it any further.
Having been raised Catholic and schooled Catholic the first fourteen years of my life, I always felt confined and smothered by nuns who hated men. I now looked upon Catholics as strange people who had a belief system that I didn’t agree with. In fact, I strongly disagreed with it.
My memories of the classroom are of screeching nuns who questioned you every Monday morning about your dating activities over the weekend with strange things like, “So you know you can get pregnant through your clothing don’t you?”….hell, I believed that one for years and years.
I lasted one year at St. Benedicts Academy—the ninth grade. I got thrown out because I cut school to sleep in an empty Greyhound bus overnight and be the first person in line for the Beatles concert in Pittsburgh in 1964. My photo appeared on the front cover of the Pittsburgh Press after I had informed my mom that she’d better call me in sick because I was going, no matter what she had to say. So that did it for the Catholic schools.
The most poignant memory I have of Catholic school was that we had to wear the official Catholic uniform of suffering, which was the heavy wool pleated skirt that came down to your mid-calf, with wool knee socks that covered the remaining portion of the leg. The skirts were always three sizes too large because they had to look blousy, along with the blousy white shirt, so we rolled them at the waistline until they were short enough above the knee that they looked more fashionable and gave the leg some much-needed air. This wool uniform was required, regardless of the summer heat. It was a form of good Catholic suffering. Suffering was essential in Catholic life, and for all, not just for a few.
Catholics were obsessed with suffering, in one form or another. You had to suffer. If you didn’t suffer, you weren’t worthy of your life. Since I had no interest in earning sainthood, I didn’t want to suffer, and I fought it to the bitter end. The other suffering part was that if you weren’t good then you were very bad—very bad. Bad things would happen. Thus, the Catholic nun theory that sex was evil, and the aborted babies they were possibly hiding in the convent walls had nothing to do with that theory at all. I only knew that Catholics were confused people. I didn’t much care to figure them out either; I just wanted out of their kooky religion. I believe I was looking for the word “cult” back then but never found it.
I didn’t see much of Chris on a daily basis. She was usually on her way out the front doors of the building to jog in the park. She would say “Hi” and whisk by me in the stairwell in her jogging get up. Then I would run into her later on in the day when I returned home from a long day traveling the roads of Ohio and West Virginia as a sales rep.
I have a two-year-old son to worry about, and I’m currently consumed with the possibility that my job as a manufacturer’s rep will cease sooner than I anticipated.
I’ve been working for a Styrofoam cup and container company as a regional sales rep, setting up distributorships for their products. I have a company car and a decent salary, but it’s still difficult paying the bills and having any leftovers for babysitters and food.
I spend many evenings visiting my parents, who are not far from where I live. My mother is happy to have me for dinner as often as I like so she can see her grandson.
A.I.W.F.—Alan I. W. Frank Company, my employer, is faltering; it sounds like a bankruptcy brewing—time to start looking for another job.
I am well aware that Chris is health conscious and sports minded, two interests that I personally never have time to think about. I am a single mom who worries daily about how to pay the bills, and I have no excess time on my hands for self-interests such as dating, partying, or going to the gym. Personal time is not on my daily schedule.
Chris is without a doubt a professionally trained masseuse, and I don’t know where she learned it or who she learned it from. I once had a severe muscle spasm in my left arm and she worked on it for half an hour until it was completely worked out of the muscle; I felt fabulous.
Chris gets a deal on a used massage table from a woman she knows at one of the massage parlors in Pittsburgh. These are not health clubs; they are called parlors because no one believes there’s anything legitimate going on there. Unfortunately, after she has someone help her haul the table up three flights of stairs to her apartment, she gets a phone call from the owner who quickly lets her know that he doesn’t want it sold. This massage parlor king of Pittsburgh, known as Dante Tex Gill, has just been indicted for tax evasion by the Feds and has fears of someone else taking over his turf in Pittsburgh. Someone who worked in one of his parlors has sold the equipment without Tex’s permission and he is livid. He threatens Chris with having bouncers come over to her apartment and remove the table.
Chris ignores the threats and keeps the table. I don’t hear anything more about the incident, but I am wondering why she is willing to take all that risk for a crummy massage parlor table. That table is her gem.
I’m standing outside our building one evening at dusk and a car pulls up to the curb. Chris comes jogging out the front doors and lands squarely on her feet in front of me.
“This is Chucky Werner,” she introduces me to the guy who has just pulled up to the sidewalk in front of our building. I say hello to Chucky and note that he looks nothing like what I had previously assumed Chris’s taste in men was. I had only caught a glimpse of Marty once in the hallway and he looked like a gym guy, a physically fit fighter type. I didn’t remember his face but thought at the time that I saw him that he was attractive and somewhat sexy, carried himself with a confident, cop arrogance and the look of someone who had secrets, possibly an ex-military guy.
Chucky, on the other hand, was somewhat out of shape and more on the nerdy side. I thought he was cute in his own way, with a quirky smile, glasses and always dressed in business attire. Marty and Chucky are at opposite ends of the spectrum for personality, looks and careers.
Chris later confided in me that Chucky Werner was her soul mate and advisor. I felt it when she spoke of him that she admired and respected him. After all, Chucky owned his own insurance company, so I assumed at the time that he was older than Chris and more my age.
I saw more of Chucky than of Marty around the apartment building, and that was just fine with me. However, I could see that Chris sometimes drove Chucky insane with her belligerence over mundane issues, and many times I felt that he was getting weary of trying to mentor her on how to become less naïve and make smart decisions concerning her dating practices, her unstable attitude towards life and her flightiness.
Chris was fascinated with gemstones and gold and many times expressed an interest in developing a business in wholesale jewelry. Chucky nurtured Chri
s’s obsessive curiosities by educating her on what he knew, and I believe he bought her gifts of expensive jewelry on a regular basis. It seemed to me that anyone having more life experience than her was someone she wanted to know and investigate with curiosity and awe, but in no way did Chris want to listen to anyone’s advice about anything. At times the expressions on her face reminded me of a child seeing a lit up Christmas tree for the very first time….
I believe that Chucky was the one positive force in Chris’s life that could have changed things forever, could have made a difference had she chosen to absorb what he had to teach her at the time. Chris listened to no one. She knew she was tough and she knew she was strong, and at the same time she had a childlike innocence that permeated the hardened shell that defined her presence. I saw it and I felt it. My son loved going upstairs and playing with “Chrissy’s cat,” and she loved picking him up, tickling him and bouncing him around in her arms. I saw this and I knew that Chris was not what she was displaying to everyone around her. One afternoon I captured that exact image of Chris on my Polaroid camera in front of our apartment building. She picked up my son and tickled him as they both giggled like small children.
This was the Chris I wanted to know.
TWO: THE DRIFTER
“Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.”
–Aldous Huxley
My son’s father, Rick, was in town performing at the Hukelau nightclub on McKnight Road in the North Hills, a suburb of Pittsburgh. I met Rick in 1975 at the Holiday Inn, Monroeville, Pennsylvania, while sitting in the audience with my fiancé, Stephen Lange, a conservative Jewish guy from the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh. Stephen and I had dated for five years before getting engaged, and the wedding was planned for that upcoming June. My father had given us complimentary tickets to see the Drifters at the Holiday Inn. Little did I know that tickets to a show would change my life forever, and send me on a path in life that would change my values, my morals, and my entire being—the rest is history, as is the world famous singing group, the Drifters, who have spawned hundreds of phony performers. Rick had his own group and was at one time a member of the Drifters that recorded on Atlantic Records, thus qualifying him to use the name.
I had spent four years on the road with Rick and the Drifters, touring the U.S. and Canada. We lived in Toronto, Canada for a while and then rented an apartment in Pittsburgh because of numerous scheduled performances at the Hukelau nightclub. It was short lived though, as I never felt like it was a home to any degree. It had more of the feeling of being a place for band members to stay between gigs if needed, as the lifestyle of entertainers was fast and furious, never knowing when they would be called out of town or left to sit for weeks without gigs when agents didn’t provide work.
The Hukelau was a Hawaiian themed dinner show club and was owned by Anthony “Wango” Capizzi, a notorious Pittsburgh mob boss who Rick developed a business partnership with in the form of an entertainment booking agency called Fullhouse Productions. I never knew the scope of this relationship, but years later it would become part of my life, as I, too, became a major player in the business of entertainers in Pittsburgh and the entire Tri State area of Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia.
Many major nightclub venues in Pittsburgh were owned by mob bosses in one form or another. The famous Holiday House in Monroeville, for instance, was a major hub of activity by Pittsburgh’s notorious crime bosses, including Michael Genovese and a few others. I have no idea who actually owned the place. It was an era of strong mob activities and somehow it was all connected to Cleveland,
Ohio. I never had any interest in figuring out the food chain and how it worked; I was just trying to survive and pay my bills. I would occasionally hear things from Rick and
Anthony at lunches, dinners and social events. Women were not included in the business of mob bosses.
From 1975 until 1979 I had a back and forth life of coming and going, in and out of Pittsburgh. I would leave and go on the road with Rick for a while, then we’d fight and argue, and I’d come back to Pittsburgh and stay with friends until he’d convince me that he would change as a person, or when I felt that I could help him change. I have always been the type of person who enters into relationships thinking the person may have some problems, but there is always the possibility of them changing and reforming their attitude. When you fall in love, you rarely ever experience the true character of the person until a situation arises that requires character, then it’s slowly revealed to you as you experience and learn what the person has inside of them. This relationship was no exception, and after my realization that I was doomed to just stay on the road and travel aimlessly from town to town with this man, I knew that wasn’t going to work. He was obviously lonely to a certain degree and was filling in that emptiness with different girlfriends while he was on the road. I don’t believe the relationship was ever more meaningful than that to him. The whirlwind romance was full of drama, excitement and constant emotional stimulation that ignited many emotions in both of us and ultimately progressed into obsessive, possessive behavior that lacked any real substance. It was void of all the basic elements such as trust, respect and fortitude.
Upon leaving Pittsburgh in 1975 when Rick had me give up my apartment and my job at the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad, I had wanted out. I was tired of Pittsburgh; I was tired of Steve Lange, my boyfriend who never did anything exciting in his life, including dancing or drinking. He was getting on my nerves full time, and pushing me to be like him. He wanted a plain girl with plain tastes, and as time went by this realization built up inside of me, and I knew I wasn’t that girl. By then the wedding was planned, somehow; I don’t remember how it got that far, but I wasn’t happy; I knew I wasn’t happy. I hadn’t finished experiencing life; I wasn’t ready for settling into cups and saucers and handpicked plates with Stephen. I was bored and losing it with him. I was ready to be plucked out of the mundane Pittsburgh atmosphere, and I ran. I left my family crying, and everyone else crying, and I didn’t care—I did not care. I was totally numb to all the tears and all the begging.
In leaving Pittsburgh with Rick in 1975, I did not appreciate anything about Pittsburgh, where I grew up. When I returned, pregnant, in 1979, I was slowly developing the appreciation that Pittsburgh was a family oriented town, with so many quaint neighborhoods and people, but I attribute that to the nesting hormone, or whatever you want to call it; I was ready to nest with my baby. The itch would return soon after having my son. I was going to want out again, and I felt it creeping in on me.
I believe that my son saved me from a horrible life with a person who was only concerned for himself. If I had not become pregnant, I would have stayed on the road with the group and traveled until I couldn’t stand it anymore. Touring is something that is only exciting for about two years, and then you have an overpowering need to stay in one place and just rest. The unconditional love for a child can do wondrous things if you open your heart to it.
My son was the first grandchild and was showered with attention by my parents. I needed their moral support, and they wholeheartedly gave me the comfort and stability that I craved. My tumultuous relationship with the Drifter for four years was sometimes too much for them, and at one point, I was disowned. It lasted six months when I didn’t speak with them and they couldn’t find me. I think this created a fear in them and they needed to be in contact, so they un-disowned me so I would stay in touch with them.
There was a culture shock in the black and white relationship with Rick that my parents did not comprehend. They were traditional middle class folks who basically expected people to tell the truth and do the right thing. I was never raised to dislike any ethnic group of people, although my mother told us stories about her sisters being disowned by her Croatian immigrant parents because they had married Italians. I also had a girlfriend in high school whose Italian parents said they would disown her if she married a Jew. She did marry a Jew.
This was all so silly and stupid to me, always.
I allowed Rick to visit my son at my apartment sometimes. It all depended on whether we were arguing and fighting at the time. I did not want him interfering with my life, as I had no plans on going back with him. He was a possessive, chronic liar who had swept me off my feet and then destroyed my mind, degraded my self-worth, and smashed any hope I ever had of living a normal sane life—he was an empty narcissist.
Rick never had any good intentions towards the promised relationship that he preached when I first met him. He sat on my parent’s living room sofa and told them we were going to get married, while he himself was still married to someone else. And yes, he had lied to me about that, too. He lied about everything in his life. He seemed to roll along and invent his daily life as it played out, a self-created myth without substance or character.
I did continue to depend on Rick in certain capacities though, due to the fact that I was a single mother with a bi-racial child in Pittsburgh, a racist city. Since he was spending time here with Wango Capizzi and the Hukelau nightclub, I did find myself calling him up if I needed something. He was always willing to help me out in small ways, but never willing to take the responsibility of being a father to our son. It didn’t matter; my family was all I needed.
Chris had stopped in my apartment to meet Rick for the first time and challenge him to spar with her, which made me laugh because I knew Rick’s capabilities as a fighter; I had seen him in action. His knuckles looked like crooked mountains sticking up from his thin hands. This sparring session lasted five minutes. Rick got her in a chokehold right away and it was over. Her spindly arms looked like they would break in his grasp, as he spun her around the apartment and she kept coming back for more. Once she realized he had knowledge on the subject of fighting, she craved his attention for instructions and training any time he stopped over. It was a source of entertainment and laughter for me, watching them play in the living room for hours, and each time he would overpower her and she would sit and figure out other moves to beat him. Then I would tease her and say things like, “Hey Chris, you’re touching a black man, what would Martin think of you tainting yourself like that?”
Who Killed Chrissy?: The True Crime Memoir of a Pittsburgh girl's Unsolved Murder in Las Vegas Page 3
