by John Glatt
“Alex asked me to look for a garbage Dumpster,” Picado said, “to throw a bag he had out. I saw a firehouse with a Dumpster, and he threw out the bag. Later he told me it was some clothes he had been wearing [in the attack].
“Then I started driving to Miami. I got to 95 and just went straight down.”
FORTY
“ONLY A MONSTER CAN DO THIS EVIL THING”
Rye Brook police chief Gregory Austin was in Maine on a family vacation when he received a call about Ben Novack Jr.’s murder. He immediately headed back to Westchester County to take charge of the investigation.
There are few major crimes in the affluent village of Rye Brook, twenty miles north of New York City. The last murder the twenty-eight-member police department had to investigate was in 2003, and it remains unsolved.
It was obvious that Ben Novack Jr.’s brutal murder would require far larger resources than the Rye Brook Police Department had available, so several other Westchester County law enforcement agencies were called in.
At 9:50 A.M. Detective Roger Piccirilli of the Westchester County Division of Public Safety arrived at the Rye Town Hilton to process the crime scene. He was then briefed by Detective Sergeant Terence Wilson of the Rye Brook Police, who had already been appointed lead detective for the investigation.
“We conducted a walk through two hallways and a staircase,” recalled Detective Piccirilli. “Rye Brook police had noted some stains on the carpet. They decided [it was linked] with what had happened in Room 453.”
The crime scene specialist then donned a Tyvex suit and went into the Woodlands Suite to supervise the photographing and documenting of the murder scene.
“My initial observations were that there were no signs of a struggle,” said Piccirilli. “At the far end of the room by the window was a white male lying on the floor with his hands and legs bound by duct tape. There was duct tape covering his mouth.
“In the whole bedroom there was nothing knocked over and nothing to indicate any sort of struggle. All the activity was on the bed. On the left side was a very large amount of blood.”
Stepping into the parlor, the detective observed a table with Ben Novack’s business papers on it and a laptop computer. Nearby was a blue pouch with about $15,000 in cash inside, alongside a television remote wrapped in a plastic bag.
Detective Piccirilli noted how there were no cabinet drawers pulled open or items on the floor, the obvious signs of a robbery.
He then went over to the wet bar at the far side of the parlor, observing red staining on the sink.
“Again I noted no signs of a struggle,” said Piccirilli. “It appeared [the blood was confined] to two areas of the wet bar and where the victim lay on the floor.”
The crime scene specialist also noted there were no signs of any forced entry into the suite, and none of the windows were damaged. He then led his team outside, where they photographed and swabbed possible blood stains on the two hallways and stairway by the Woodlands Suite. To protect the crime scene, all fourth-floor guests would now be accompanied to and from their rooms by police.
Later that morning, Piccirilli returned to the Woodlands Suite to retrieve evidence. On the bed, he found Ben Novack’s blood-soaked gold Rolex watch, which had come off his wrist during the attack. Next to it was the temple piece of a pair of sunglasses.
* * *
At 12:45 P.M., Rye Brook Police detective John Arnold interviewed Narcy Novack. She told the detective that Ben had seemed unusually nervous over the last few days. He had picked at his fingers until they bled and was not sleeping.
The previous night, he had stayed up working, finally going to bed at 6:30 A.M. Half an hour later, Narcy had left him asleep in the bedroom, going to the other end of the hotel to supervise breakfast for the Amway guests.
“She told me that her husband had asked her to cuddle a little bit in the morning,” Detective Arnold later wrote in his report. “A little after 0700 hrs [sic] she ran out to go to the breakfast.”
Narcy explained that there had been such a big crowd for the breakfast that the hotel had run out of china and had resorted to using plastic plates. Knowing her husband would strongly disapprove of this, she had called his cell phone to inform him. When there was no answer, she had returned to their room to tell him.
“She entered the room through the suite doors,” Detective Arnold wrote. “She was going to use the bathroom in the parlor area, because the toilet was ‘plugged up’ in the bedroom. She did use the bathroom … when she entered the parlor area she called out to her husband and said, ‘Novack, you’re not going to like this,’ but he did not answer.”
Narcy said she had then walked into the bedroom and “tripped over” Ben’s body. After looking down and seeing him lying on the floor “in need of medical attention,” she had started screaming and called the front desk. Then she’d rushed out of the suite, banging on nearby doors for help.
Detective Arnold then asked if Ben had any enemies. Narcy said he had, including some at the Miami Beach Police Department. She explained that after retiring from the Reserves, Ben had wanted his photograph displayed on the ceremonial wall of honor, alongside those of the other retired officers. After his request was denied, there had been “a big battle,” ending with Ben asking the mayor to intervene.
“Narcy stated that she did hear her husband on the phone,” wrote Detective Arnold, “mentioning something about spilling the beans if they do not put him on the wall.”
At 4:15 P.M. Rye Brook Police detective Steven Goralick arrived at the room, with instructions to make Narcy as comfortable as possible. By this time Narcy was talking about suicide, saying she wanted to swallow some pills and end it all. Goralick then arranged for a rabbi to come and counsel her, after she told him she was Jewish.
* * *
At 5:24 P.M. the acting chief medical examiner for Westchester County, Dr. Kunjlata Ashar and her assistant arrived at the Woodlands Suite to view Ben Novack Jr.’s body. They rolled him over on his back, and his horrific injuries were photographed. Then his hands and feet were bagged, to preserve any evidence. Still bound in duct tape, he was put in a body bag on a gurney and taken to the Medical Examiner’s Office for an autopsy.
* * *
At 7:30 P.M. senior investigator Edward Murphy of the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office, arrived at Room 481 to interview Narcy Novack. He had just spent an hour interviewing May Abad, and had many questions for her mother.
“I introduced myself and extended my sympathy,” said the former New York City homicide cop. “I told her how the investigation was going to proceed. We were going to be starting from scratch, and I needed to know everything about Ben Novack: his personal life and anyone that he owed money to. She was very agreeable and said she’d do anything to help investigators find out who killed her husband.”
For the next two hours, Murphy, who was later joined by Detective Alison Carpentier, interviewed Narcy, looking for any leads.
Once again she told the detectives that Ben had enemies, saying he had recently been “hanging out” and “doing business with weird people.”
She said her husband often attended comic book trade shows, and had recently agreed to pay $43,000 for a Batman comic book. Then, about three weeks ago, he had gotten into a dispute with a comic book dealer who’d shown up at their residence. According to Narcy, Ben and the dealer, whom she did not know, began to negotiate prices for a comic book. She had heard shouting, and the dealer saying, “Now, you are going to Jew me down!”
Then Ben had had her retrieve a “bag” of cash, which he gave to the dealer, who then left.
During the interview, Lieutenant Christopher Calabrese of the Westchester County Police Department brought in the gold Rolex watch and temple piece from a pair of sunglasses, which had been found on the blood-soaked bed.
“I placed the watch in front of Mrs. Novack,” Lieutenant Calabrese later reported. “She looked intently at the watch and stated, ‘the watch belonged
(past tense) to her husband, he always wore it … yes he was wearing it last night.’”
He then showed Narcy the broken temple piece from a pair of knockoff Valentino sunglasses. She said it came from a pair of her sunglasses that had broken on the flight over. When the detective asked how it had gotten on the bed, Narcy replied that Ben had been trying to mend them.
“He liked to fix things,” she told the detective, “so he might have just decided to fix them in bed.”
When Calabrese asked where the rest of the sunglasses were, Narcy looked “perplexed.” After a pause, she said that she had lost them on the plane. He followed up by inquiring how Ben could possibly have been trying to fix them without the rest of the sunglasses, and Narcy had no answer. When he repeated the question, she replied, “I don’t know.”
At around 11:00 P.M. Narcy Novack and her daughter, May, were taken downstairs to Room 262 to spend the night. Detective Sergeant Terence Wilson offered to post a uniformed officer outside their door in case the killer was still out there, but Narcy said it would not be necessary.
* * *
Just before midnight, a police officer accompanied May Abad and Matthew Briggs to the hotel safe-deposit box to pay off the Convention Concepts Unlimited staff. May Abad then took the box into a small room, where she removed cash for the three freelancers and Briggs. She also took out $2,200 for Briggs to run a scheduled event for a church organization in the Bahamas the following week, which would go ahead as planned.
* * *
Early Monday morning, as the killers arrived back in Miami, Rye Brook Police chief Gregory Austin issued a media release appealing for any information about Ben Novack Jr.’s murder. Chief Austin said his detectives were now investigating the homicide with the help of the Westchester County District’s Attorney’s Office and the Department of Public Safety.
“Based on the information available at this point,” read the release, “this incident appears to be centered on Mr. Novack. Investigation is on going.”
The chief also announced a special tips line, promising that any information provided would remain confidential.
Around 9:50 A.M., Dr. Kunjlata Ashar performed an autopsy on Ben Novack Jr.’s body at the Westchester County Medical Examiner’s Office in Dana Road, Valhalla. She was assisted by two other medical examiners. Detective Sergeant Terence Wilson of the Rye Brook Police was there as an observer.
Dr. Ashar began by cutting the duct tape that still bound Ben Novack’s hands and legs and logging it into evidence for forensic investigation. She then took off the heavy gold chains around his neck, a diamond-studded gold ring, and a gold pinkie ring.
Dr. Ashar began by taking a cursory look at the numerous injuries to Ben Novack’s head.
“His head had every kind of blunt force injury as well as sharp injuries,” she later testified. “The back of the head had three lacerations to the left side.”
One of the injuries on the top of the head was star-shaped, clearly bearing the imprint of the side of a dumbbell. Later, when his head was shaved, the doctor found a tiny blue piece of material from the weapon embedded in the wound.
“I looked at all the fractures,” she said. “There were fractures on the front of the skull as well as the back. One was a depressed skull fracture.”
The medical examiner also noted the horrific injuries to both eyes.
“His left eye had an incised wound that went inside the eyeball and it had collapsed,” she said. “The eyeball is usually filled with fluid, and when cut, the fluid comes out and [the eyeball] shrivels up. The right eye had mixed sharp and blunt injuries and an incised wound. There were three other additional incised wounds on the eyelid.”
She then opened up Ben Novack’s body using the traditional Y-shaped thoracoabdominal incision and inspected his internal organs and ribs.
“He had multiple fractures on the right side as well as the left,” said the pathologist.
She also found twenty fractures to his ribs, which were so badly smashed they resembled chicken bones.
In total, Dr. Ashar counted a total of thirty-four blunt force injuries and twelve sharp-force injuries to Ben Novack’s battered body. He had actually died choking on his own vomit, after Garcia wound the duct tape tightly around his mouth and throat.
In her autopsy report, Dr. Ashar listed the cause of death as “Blunt and sharp injuries of body with fractures of skull and ribs, contusions of brain and lungs; hemorrhages; aspiration of gastric contents; found bound and gagged. Homicide.”
* * *
Back at the Rye Brook Hilton, Westchester County District Attorney’s Office investigators Michael LaRotonda and Art Muhammad had learned that $105,515 in cash from the Amway convention was in the hotel front desk safe. Under the present circumstances, the hotel management was “uneasy” having such a large sum of money there, and wanted it removed as soon as possible.
Narcy Novack offered to take the cash back to Fort Lauderdale, but the detectives suggested she deposit it in a local bank instead, for security purposes. At 10:30 A.M. they drove her to a nearby Wachovia Bank, where she had a joint account with Ben, and the cash was counted and deposited.
At the bank, Investigator LaRotonda observed a teller handing Narcy Novack a pile of money, which she put in her bag. Later, back at the hotel, the investigator saw Narcy’s bag on a table and looked inside and saw $5,000 in cash.
“It was open,” he later testified. “I observed currency on its side in thousand-dollar straps. There were five of them.”
* * *
Later that morning, senior investigator Edward Murphy asked Narcy Novack to come to the Westchester County Police Department headquarters in Valhalla to give a full written statement before returning to Florida.
“[She] agreed,” said Murphy, “indicating that she wanted to be as helpful as possible to the law enforcement officials investigating her husband’s death.”
But first, Narcy said she had to take care of some personal errands, including getting a new charger for her cell phone. Detectives Murphy and Carpentier then drove Narcy and May Abad in an unmarked police car to a nearby Verizon store to buy one.
* * *
At 11:30 A.M. Chief Austin held a press conference at Rye Brook Village Hall. The tiny hall was packed with local and national TV news crews and reporters.
Standing at a lectern, the youthful police chief said the attack did not appear to be random. There were no reports of screams from the room, he told reporters, and no valuables were missing.
“We feel the person who did this was not a stranger who anonymously, randomly picked him up,” said Chief Austin, “but had some sort of connection which we haven’t determined yet. We have no suspects at the moment.”
The chief said there were “visible signs” that Novack had been beaten to death but refused to elaborate on the weapon used. He said an autopsy was now taking place and he needed to see the results before releasing any further details.
Answering reporters’ questions, Chief Austin said Ben Novack Jr. and his wife had checked into the Hilton on Thursday night, to work together on the conference. He refused to name the victim’s wife, warning that security at the hotel had been heightened, and no reporters were being allowed inside.
He said detectives were now busy reviewing hotel surveillance video for any leads and interviewing Amway delegates and anyone who had been staying on the fourth floor on Saturday night.
“We’re hoping people at the hotel may have seen something or heard things,” said the chief. “We’re trying to put the pieces together.”
A few hours later, Chief Austin gave a telephone interview to The Miami Herald, providing one further detail about the murder.
“He was bludgeoned with some sort of blunt instrument,” Austin said. “We have no suspects at this time.”
* * *
On their way to Westchester County Police headquarters, Investigator Murphy told Narcy that he did not expect her to identify Ben’s body, as it was in su
ch bad condition. But Narcy said she wanted to see her husband one last time.
“She insisted on seeing her husband at the morgue,” Murphy later wrote in his report, “and making the identification.”
Murphy and Detective Alison Carpentier then drove Narcy and May Abad to the medical examiner’s office, arriving at 3:50 P.M. The two women were led into the morgue, where Ben’s butchered body was laid out on a gurney, a blanket strategically placed across his face, where his eyes had been gouged out.
Unprepared for such horrific injuries to her stepfather, May was physically sick, and had to be taken away. Her mother just coldly stared at her husband’s body without a hint of emotion.
“Narcy stood at the window with me for fifteen minutes,” said Murphy. “She was very calm. She didn’t say much.”
After Narcy officially identified the body, she and May were driven to the Westchester County Police headquarters in Hawthorne, New York, to be formally interviewed.
* * *
Just after 5:00 P.M. Charlie Seraydar called Ben Novack Jr.’s cell phone. When there was no answer, he called May Abad.
“Narcy and May were at the police station,” Seraydar recalled, “and then May handed her phone to Narcy, who started saying that she had come back to the room and found Ben dead.”
Narcy then got off the phone, saying the police wanted to interview her, and May would explain everything.
“So May gets on the phone with me,” said Seraydar, “and we talk for about fifteen to twenty minutes. Then she says, ‘I’ve got to go. The cops want to talk to me.’”
When detectives questioned May Abad, she told a different story from her mother. She claimed that Narcy had not come down for breakfast until around 7:20 A.M., and then had left at around 7:40 A.M. to go back to the suite.
After making her statement, May texted Charlie Seraydar, asking if her mom and Ben had been fighting.
“And I just sent her a text message back,” said Seraydar, “and I said, ‘Call me.’ And that alerted me that the cops already knew that there was something going on.”
