The Officer's Daughter

by Elle Johnson

  The voice inside me said, There is no God.

  Chapter Sixteen

  After several phone calls to the Bronx criminal court, I found out that the transcript of the criminal trial was missing, most likely destroyed by a flood in the late eighties. But there was a transcript from the pretrial hearing motions. The original had been typed on onionskin paper, a paper so thin it could not be put through a copy machine, except by hand, one page at a time. My sister helped me hire someone in New York to scan each delicate page—897 pages in all—then email it all to me. I skimmed through the pages as they rolled off my printer. The hearing covered motions brought by the defense regarding the handling of evidence in a way that might be more helpful to his client. Like excluding the defendant’s confession and other subsequent spontaneous utterances to law enforcement officers that confirmed his guilt, or not showing the jury a videotape of the crime scene that included Karen’s lifeless body on the ground. I put the pages into two five-inch D-ring binders and read them over and over, trying to piece together exactly what had happened in the aftermath of the robbery.

  CHAMBERS BAR WAS A favorite watering hole in the predominantly Irish neighborhood of Upper Manhattan known as Inwood. Katherine Kupper was at Chambers sometime between midnight and four or five a.m. on Sunday, April 12. Ms. Kupper told a member—possibly retired—of the NYPD that she knew details of what had happened in that Burger King in the Bronx the night that girl, the detective’s daughter, was killed. This member of the NYPD—possibly retired—called the Manhattan night watch, as it was known, and officers responded to the location of Chambers Bar. They spoke with Ms. Kupper, then transported her to the Bronx Detective Task Force office in the 48th Precinct, where she became an unofficial confidential informant, or CI. “Unofficial” because the detective didn’t want to have to put her in danger by disclosing her identity. Ms. Kupper revealed that she was a family friend of one of the parties involved in the Burger King robbery, Santiago Ramirez, and that she knew the details of what had happened.

  NYPD detective Michael O’Connor arrived at the 47th Precinct at eight a.m. on Sunday, April 12. Detective O’Connor, a sixteen-year veteran of the force with eleven years as a detective, was assigned to lead the task force of more than fifty detectives and officers investigating the death of Karen Marsh. Detective O’Connor was informed by Sergeant Axberg, a supervisor working the midnight-to-eight-a.m. shift, that a confidential informant had identified a suspect in the case. This was the first time Detective O’Connor knew anything whatsoever about Santiago Ramirez.

  By ten a.m., Detective O’Connor, his partner, Detective Sheehy, Sergeant Axberg, and several other detectives had knocked on the door of 2446 University Avenue in the Bronx, looking for Santiago Ramirez. As a precaution, they posted one detective outside the building and others at the back and on the roof. O’Connor took the front door. He put his hand into his coat pocket, then slipped it through a hole he had made in the lining for the purpose of retrieving his revolver from the holster undetected. He kept his weapon drawn and concealed in his coat pocket. He knocked on the door. An eighteen-year-old girl still wearing her nightclothes, Josephine Ramirez, also known as Josie, answered the door. She was nervous. She said Santiago was her brother. She told the detective he wasn’t home. Surreptitiously, O’Connor returned his firearm to the holster through the hole in his pocket and entered the apartment. Concerned that family members might alert the suspect the police were looking for him, Detective O’Connor asked Josie and her aunt and uncle, who were also in the apartment, to go with the officers to the precinct to answer questions.

  Detectives O’Connor and Sheehy interviewed Josie and explained that the police already knew what had happened and who had done the crime at the Burger King. He said it would be in Josie’s best interest if she told them whatever details she knew about it. Josie burst into tears. She became hysterical and began to sob uncontrollably. Detective O’Connor put his arm around her. Josie cried on his shoulder and said over and over that it had been an accident, her brother had told her it was an accident. Detective O’Connor told her not to worry, he would take care of everything, she had no reason to be afraid. After an hour, Josie stopped crying and told the detectives everything she knew. Detective O’Connor asked where her brother was and Josie told them: at their grandparents’ house in Anaheim, California.

  A picture of the suspect was brought to the precinct. Between two and five p.m., a witness who had been present at the Burger King during the homicide of Karen Marsh was shown what’s known as a photo array—that is, six pictures of possible suspects in the case—and identified the picture of Santiago Ramirez as that of the shooter.

  At five thirty p.m. on Sunday, April 12, 1981, Detective O’Connor went to the Bronx Criminal Court and obtained an arrest warrant for Santiago Ramirez. Detective O’Connor drove the arrest warrant to the FBI office in New Rochelle, New York, where FBI Special Agent Joe Higgins prepared the necessary documents to obtain a warrant for flight to avoid prosecution.

  Four hours later, at six thirty Pacific standard time, Special Agent Charles Sullivan of the FBI’s Santa Ana, California, office was off duty, working in his yard when he got the call to come in to work. Sullivan changed his clothes, then went to meet Special Agents James J. Mahoney, William Wright, and Carlos Molina to execute a federal arrest warrant on a man wanted for murder in New York, one Santiago Ramirez.

  They drove their own vehicles and met around nine fifteen in the evening at an apartment building at 2119 West Ball Road in Anaheim, California. There were four modest, one-story apartments in several buildings, each with its own numerical address. After speaking with the apartment manager, the four FBI special agents devised a plan for how to approach apartment C, where the suspect was believed to be hiding out. Mahoney would cover the rear door of the apartment while Molina, Wright, and Sullivan would enter by the front. They drew their .38-caliber revolvers and held them ready, pointing at the ground. Molina carried a 12-gauge Remington 870 model shotgun with a three-foot barrel pointed at the sky. They could see a low-light table lamp on inside the apartment, but that was it.

  Guns in hand, Agent Wright knocked on the door. An older woman in a bathrobe answered: Grace Topher, the suspect’s grandmother. The agent told her they were with the FBI and asked if Santiago Ramirez was in the apartment.

  “He’s asleep, in the back room,” she said.

  The agents told her they had a warrant for Santiago’s arrest for unlawful flight from New York for murder. They were going to arrest him. As Mahoney stood ready at the back of the apartment outside, Sullivan, Wright, and Molina made their way to the bedroom. The door was open. The room was dark. Wright reached around the doorjamb, flipped on the light, and there he was.

  Santiago Joseph Ramirez. Male. Hispanic. Light-skinned. Black hair. Five foot five and 150 pounds. He had a distinguishing feature: a space between his front teeth. He was lying on his back in the bed—head on a pillow, arms outside a white sheet with his hands crossed on his chest. His eyes were open. He looked at the agents. His grandfather was lying in the bed next to him. Sullivan knelt down next to Santiago and said, “You’re under arrest for unlawful flight from New York for murder. We’re from the FBI.”

  Santiago didn’t move. He said, “It was an accident. I didn’t mean to shoot her.” To the agents, Santiago didn’t appear to be visibly upset. He wasn’t crying. He wasn’t hysterical. He spoke in a normal tone of voice. The agents ordered Santiago to “get out of the bed.” Santiago got up; he was wearing underwear—undershorts and a T-shirt. The agents handcuffed Santiago with his hands behind his back. When they brought him out into the living room, his grandmother asked him, “Why did you do it?”

  Santiago said, “It was an accident, Grandma. It was an accident.” After hearing that, the FBI agents thought they had better read him his rights. They handed Santiago a copy of the Miranda warning. He put on a pair of glasses to read them. Then the agents took Santiago into custody.

 
; April 4, 1981

  Josie Ramirez woke up and found her brother, Santiago, in the living room. He was crying. He pointed to an article in the Daily News about a robbery at a Burger King restaurant and said he was involved. His friends Luis and Frankie had been with him. Santiago kept saying it was an accident. Josie left the apartment and came back with her brother’s girlfriend, Miriam Torres, who stayed in the apartment with Santiago for the rest of the day. Josie went out to a dance that night and didn’t come home. She stayed over at a friend’s house. When she returned to the apartment on Sunday, April 5, her brother was gone. Her mother told Josie there was a shotgun in the trunk of her brother Santiago’s car. Josie got the shotgun from the car and brought it into the apartment and kept it there overnight. On April 6, Frankie was supposed to pick up the shotgun, but he didn’t show up. Josie spoke to Frankie on the phone and told him she was going to throw the shotgun away. Frankie said it wasn’t hers to throw away, it belonged to Luis. Josie gave the shotgun to Frankie and he gave it back to Luis on the seventh or eighth of April. Frankie spoke to Josie one more time to let her know that “everything was all right.”

  FOUR AND A HALF hours after the robbery, from 3:57 a.m. to 4:15 a.m., the Bronx District Attorney’s office made a video of the crime scene.

  The video begins by first following the path of gunman Frankie Alemar as he enters the Burger King and vaults over the counter. The shooter, or holder of the shotgun, did not go in that direction. The video shows his path, moving along the tables and through a door into the kitchen, where he would have encountered several employees and ordered them to lie down on the floor. The video then moves through the now empty kitchen area to the spot where Karen Marsh was standing, then shows “where in fact Karen Marsh died, and then depicts in rather gory detail her deceased body,” according to the defense attorney attempting to keep it from being entered into evidence. The tape then pans back and forth among various patches of blood on the walls and around the room where the shooter had stood over some seven-odd people lying on the floor. The video then goes to the manager’s office, in disarray, where Frankie Alemar had demanded money. After receiving the money and hearing the shotgun blast, Alemar left the manager’s office. The video follows his path out of the manager’s office and into the kitchen, where it ends on the dead body of Karen Marsh.

  In the pretrial hearing motions, the defense contended that the video’s sole purpose was to inflame the hearts and minds of the jury; that the repeated pans of the scene could have no other purpose but to present and reinforce in the mind of whoever would view this the horror and shocking result of this particular incident.

  The defense attorney was right—I wasn’t even watching the video, but just the idea of it inflamed my passion. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. That video was somewhere in an evidence box in the archives of the police department or the district attorney’s office. I could have tracked it down. From writing for Law & Order, I had contacts throughout the criminal justice system in New York who could have helped me locate those materials. Hungry for details, I wanted to reconstruct what had happened from every angle and perspective on record. I hoped more information would douse the fire of my curiosity, not feed it. The aftermath didn’t end with the crime scene, the arrest, or even the conviction. For me, the aftermath was ongoing.

  I wondered how it had been for the rest of my family. My father, in particular, who supervised parolees who were robbers and killers. I thought about how he had burst into tears when he heard the news, then seemed lost and conflicted once we learned it had been an accident. It would stand to reason that the trauma of Karen’s murder might have affected the way he dealt with his parolees. But I knew it was the other way around.

  I don’t remember when. I don’t remember where. And I don’t remember why. But I remember that sometime before my father died, in 2005, he told me he had gone to a parole hearing for one of Karen’s killers. He said he’d told the parole board words to the effect of “This boy destroyed my family. But it was a mistake. He’s a young man, and he can still make something of his life. We should let him out.”

  This sublime act of forgiveness was a stunning request: the hard-boiled parole officer advocating for a convicted killer. The fact that it was my father took my breath away. It was proof that everyone has the capacity for change or, at the very least, a change of heart. While unexpected in some ways, this turn in my father exemplified the complexities and contradictions of his personality. He was controlling yet protective, and sometimes someone to be protected from. Unpredictable.

  I wished I could have talked to him to find out what he was thinking. I wanted to understand how he had arrived at the conclusion that he needed to forgive someone he had once plotted to kill. The passage of time could have worn down the jagged edges of his trauma. Or maybe the last thirty years on the job as a parole officer had influenced his decision to lobby for the killer’s release. I realized my father must have gone to some trouble—pulling strings and calling in favors—to be allowed to have his say at the hearing. This memory complicated things regarding my decision to write a letter to the parole board about Santiago Ramirez. I didn’t doubt that my father had done this, but I wanted something or someone to corroborate this recollection so I could figure out my own course of action.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I went back to Queens for the Thanksgiving holiday. My mother still lived in the house where I was born and raised. I loved being home. The warm, familiar feeling of my old room. The place where I had been forged, that knew me best, that held my memories, but no longer, thankfully, held me.

  I unpacked the clothes in my suitcase into the same dresser drawers I’d had since elementary school. I slept in the bottom half of my old bunk bed on a decades-old mattress that shouldn’t have been comfortable but still was. The top bunk had been moved across the hall into my sister’s room, where ten years earlier my father had died while on home hospice with lung cancer that had spread to his blood, bones, and brain. After that, my mother and I started a new tradition of lying awake under the covers in our own beds and talking into the wee hours of the night across the darkened hallway.

  That Thanksgiving eve, in the late-night stillness, we talked about Karen’s murder. I asked her if my father had attended any of the parole hearings. Even though he’d never said anything about it to her, my mother remembered that I had told her he’d mentioned it to me. I told her about the pretrial transcript and all the surprising and disturbing things I had learned about the case. She murmured a wounded sigh when I told her that the suspect had reloaded. That Santiago Ramirez had at times laughed during the proceedings. That the defense brought a motion to have Uncle Warren removed and banned from the courtroom. I asked if my father had attended any of the trial. My mother didn’t remember.

  But she did remember that the mood in our house was tense. She reminded me that Karen’s funeral took place on my father’s fifty-first birthday. I could almost hear him saying, “Ain’t that something. Hell of a way to spend a birthday.” He would have been angry that his day was hijacked by a tragedy and he wouldn’t be in control or allowed to celebrate the way he wanted. My mother said I was full of piss and vinegar. Snapping at her—which was nothing new. But surprisingly, also talking back to my father. As she recounted this, I felt a twinge, remembering the anger and resentment I’d felt. She said she’d had to force me to sign a birthday card and give him the gift she had wrapped and put my name on for him. I had said he didn’t deserve anything. My mother said she understood that I was grieving and struggling to process Karen’s murder, but she didn’t want my father’s feelings to be hurt. She remembered something else. She referred to it as “the incident” with my father. All at once I knew what she was going to say.

  A memory I had blocked came flooding back. Of that morning’s light streaming through the blinds and laid out like ribbons on the living room floor. My father’s bay rum cologne over coffee grinds and cigarette smoke. The ticking of the miniature gr
andfather clock on the mantel interrupted by the sickening dull thud of bone under skin meeting flesh over bone. A punch, a fall, a struggle. Limbs and bodies scuffled. Images took shape alongside my mother’s words.

  My father was headed to the Bronx. He made breakfast for himself, left an unscraped plate, eggy skillet, and a white paper towel oiled to a slick yellowed brown by bacon grease on the kitchen counter. My mother pointed to the mess he had left, his dirty dishes not even stacked in the sink, and asked, “Aren’t you going to clean that up?”

  My father wheeled around and started beating her. I could picture it, though not exactly. He might have punched her or backhanded her across the face or blunted her chin with the heel of his hand. My mother insisted he hit her with an open hand, not a closed fist. I imagined the smack of skin on skin and my mother’s startled exhalation of breath when the assault began. I didn’t remember if I was nearby: in the foyer, dining room, or kitchenette; or if I had been listening to the confrontation unfold and had run down from upstairs. The details eluded me, hidden in a place where they couldn’t hurt me, even as the feeling of rage came roaring back.

  My mother said she’d called my name, then cried out, “Come help me!” She said I ran in quick. I remember seeing my father standing over my mother, curled up on the couch.

  She said I yelled at my father, “Don’t you touch my mother again!” Then I went after him. Pushed him down onto the couch. My mother slipped out from under his fallen body. My palms pulsed with the sense memory of my imperfect blows, how the meat of his muscle gave way to the heel of my hand sinking into his chest and biceps, his shoulder and neck. I punched as hard as I could, but it wasn’t hard enough. I didn’t draw blood, but I wanted to. I wanted to destroy him, but I couldn’t. He curled defensively into a ball—knees up to his forehead, forearms wrapped around his shins. In the shadow under his arm, one black eye looked out at us sideways like a shark.