Eventually she terminated the interview, using her kids as an excuse, but she didn't shut the door on future conversations, telling the detectives maybe they could do this later. Although they abandoned their efforts to elicit the truth from Westbrook, the search of her house continued for most of the day and into the night.
Joyce and Stewart would stop by several more times—spontaneous visits rather than interviews by appointment, because people have a harder time telling the police they won't talk face to face than over the phone—hoping to catch her at a time when they could persuade her to tell the truth.
On Tuesday, December 11, detectives returned to the medical examiner's office to discuss her findings and get confirmation that dental records had positively identified the body as that of Amy St. Laurent. Dr. Greenwald confirmed from further examination of the skull by herself and Dr. Sorg that the cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head and that the death was, unquestionably, a homicide.7 State and Portland police recognized that it was critically important that the cause of death, and the circumstances surrounding it, be kept secret.
Mary Young, during her conversation with Tammy Westbrook in which Westbrook revealed her son's confession, had urged Westbrook to report the conversation to the police. Westbrook had refused, saying, “I can't. He's my baby.” So Mary Young made another phone call to Danny Young. She was Tammy's friend, and she sympathized with Tammy Westbrook's agony and her dilemma, but Mary Young was also the mother of a teenage daughter. What Gorman had done to someone else's daughter wasn't something she could just let ride.
Mary Young made her call at 9:30 in the morning on December 11. Detective Young got a page informing him of Mary Young's second call while he was in the meeting with the medical examiner. It was a big meeting, with Fern LaRochelle and Bill Stokes from the attorney general's office, Matt Stewart, Scott Harakles, Rick LeClair, Warren Ferland, MSP spokesman Steve McCausland, and Lieutenant Brian McDonough from the state police, Deputy Chief Tim Burton, Lieutenant Loughlin, Tommy Joyce, and evidence technician Chris Stearns from the Portland police department, and lab technicians from the state crime lab. When he could, Young left the meeting to return the call.
Young went back into the meeting clutching his notebook and shaking his head. “You won't believe the phone call I just had.” He dropped into his chair, pushed his glasses back up his nose, and galvanized the meeting with the information he'd just gotten from Mary Young.
In this call, she told him several things:
Tammy Westbrook was afraid her phones were tapped and preferred to use pay phones.
Her son had called her on her cell phone while she was on her way to the mall the day after the body was discovered and admitted that he did kill Amy St. Laurent by shooting her in the head.
He was seeing her face (Tammy's) while he was doing it.
Tammy had called the grandparents to let them know Russ's name was in the newspaper.
When Russ was a baby, Tammy was doing drugs and so this is her fault. Her fault that her son turned out the way he is.
Tammy said Russ had told her she was lucky she wasn't the one he'd killed.
Tammy said that “he didn't mean it, it was an accident.”
Mary Young also described Westbrook's anguish as a mother having such information.
Mary Young's call was like a shot of adrenaline to the tired detectives, putting the excitement and thrill of catching Amy's killer back into the air. It gave them the confirmation they'd been hoping for. It also gave them details they could use in their investigation, details only the killer would know. They had let Gorman run so he would talk, and now, finally, he was talking.
Suddenly, after seven weeks of drudgery, dead ends, and discouragement, they were on a crazy roller-coaster ride where information just came flying at them. Later that day, Mary Young called again to report that Gorman had called his ex-girlfriend Kathleen Ferguson, the mother of his young daughter, who lived across the street from Mary Young. Gorman had told Kathleen the following things: That the police wouldn't find DNA, because Amy wasn't raped. That there would be no gun residue and that his gun wasn't used. That after he killed her, he washed her body. Russ had made the call from a number belonging to friends of his relatives.
While the detectives in Maine were having another eureka day, having finally gotten a solid break in their investigation, down in Troy, Alabama, a stressed-out Gorman was becoming increasingly erratic. He made statements to various people that the reason he had two guns was that he was never going to be taken alive and he was never going to be taken back to Maine and put in jail.
An old friend from Florida who had known Gorman for years, Angela Pannell, was concerned about Gorman's state of mind after talking with his mother. She called him at his grandmother's home in Troy, trying to convince him to go back to Maine and deal with things. According to Pannell, Gorman told her that there was no way he would go back to Maine unless it was in a body bag. He'd kill himself first.
On that same Tuesday, while Danny Young was having his watershed conversation with Mary Young and describing it to his colleagues, Gorman had a dramatic encounter with a man in a Blimpie's parking lot. The man was coming out with a sandwich when he saw Gorman sitting in a car. As he passed the car, Gorman leaned out the window and ordered him not to stare. The man with the sandwich was Andy Bowen, the football conditioning coach at Troy State University. Not the type of man to be intimidated. He challenged Gorman, asking what Gorman was going to do about it.
In response, Gorman got out of the car and pointed a handgun at Bowen. A woman pulled Gorman back into the car, screaming at him not to shoot. After a few words were exchanged, Bowen walked back to his truck. Gorman drove away and Bowen contacted the police, describing Gorman and informing them that the man who had threatened him had driven off in a red Dodge Neon with Maine license plates.
Following the gun incident, Troy police searched for Gorman to arrest him on a criminal threatening charge. Gorman's dangerous behavior ended the Maine detectives’ debate about putting the warrant to arrest him for violating his probation back into the system. They asked the Troy police to arrest him and hold him for return to Maine.
There's a bustle over by Danny Young's crowded desk. Voices are elevated and Matt's head is really red, his forehead furrowed in deep concern. He's pacing. I glide over and see Matt's face red in appeal and then he says, hastily, “This is not good, Lieutenant!”
Tommy and I lock eyes and he knows what I'm asking without uttering a word. Cavalierly, he says, “Yeah, hey, Gorman just stuck a gun in a guy's face down in Troy and the cops are looking for him.” He chuckles.
Matt's got steam coming out of his ears and Tommy's acting very relaxed. Partly, Tommy's just jerking Matt's chain, but partly it's because he is cool with this. He's been making hard decisions in hot moments for a long time. Matt is extremely methodical, responsible, and not so flexible. Day to day, these two intense control freaks manage to put their personality differences aside in the interest of solving the case, but at moments like this, their truce can get a little frayed.
Many voices put their two cents in. I know this is serious—Gorman is crashing—but if he hurts someone, the blame will be on us. People will have the luxury of second-guessing our strategy and they'll disparage us with a vengeance. There will be legal and potential career implications. Meanwhile, there is chaos and Tom is thriving in the midst of it while Matt is truly in pain.
Casually, Tom rises from his desk and strolls over to Danny. “Dan, I think it's time we put that warrant back in the system.” Dan, Matt, and the others look relieved. I'm relieved. As I head toward Chitwood's office to update him on the case, I call back, “Tom, keep me posted.”
Following the incident in the Blimpie's parking lot, Troy police got a tip that the red Neon was parked at a Troy address. Surveillance was set up at the residence, but Gorman evaded police all night and into the next day. On the twelfth, the vehicle left the staked-out residence and went to a
second residence a mile away. When the vehicle left the second residence, police stopped it, but Gorman was not in the car. The occupants told police that Gorman was in the attic of the residence they had just left, and that he was armed.
As investigators in Portland followed the incident from nearly fourteen hundred miles away via frequent updates from Sergeant Calista Everage—a Troy, Alabama, detective—Troy police arrived at the residence to arrest Gorman on a fugitive warrant. Gorman held guns to his head and threatened to shoot himself.
As Gorman held the guns to his head, the Portland detectives debated whether Gorman would pull the trigger. With typical sick cop humor, they started a betting pool.
“Tom, stop for a minute. First, where the hell did you get a tie like that? They don't even sell that shit in Kmart, and the sixties are over. Is that your dad's stuff?” He's wearing a blue and white checked shirt and a brown striped tie. Tom's notorious for dressing like Sipowicz on NYPD Blue.
He's moving jerkily and I know he has good info for me, so I play to hold it all off, knowing I'm about to get a present. It's chaos out in the bay behind him.
“Ooookay, Tom, what is it?”
“Gorman's in a standoff in Troy and has two guns to his head,” he says, smiling.
Bam! My fist goes onto the desk. “I hope that prick kills himself!”
“Hey, we're making bets in the bay if he's going to do it.”
“Tom, send the Grim Reaper south. I don't want Diane, Dennis, and the family going through the pain and foolishness of a trial.”
Tommy grins, liking the idea. “You think?”
As part of our constant black humor, the Grim Reaper had developed anthropomorphic attributes here in the office. It became the device to illustrate how we felt about certain crime scenes, to avoid lurid details. Sometimes we appealed to the Reaper to hold off his work while we caught up on other cases and crime scenes.
This time, I wanted to employ him. Send him down to see Gorman if it meant we could avoid a trial. A trial would be such a brutal extension of the family's pain and suffering. The system is slow, rigid, and confusing and a theatrical defense attorney can easily manipulate a jury into “reasonable doubt.” I dislike trials, as they are not always about truth and the jury never gets to see the entire picture.
The standoff continues as Danny communicates with Troy. I tell Tommy I'm in for a ten on Gorman, just to keep it interesting. Tommy says Gorman won't do it, because he's a coward. I agree, but I'm still in for ten.
“By the way, Tom, did you get that Reaper sticker off the crime scene van?” At a recent death scene, I noticed the sticker, sickle and all and wearing a Sherlock Holmes hat, on the van.
“Yeah, Joe, we got it off.”
From the tone of Tom's voice, I knew I had to check. This shit was fine for our survival but I didn't need some family member viewing that thing through tears. Guess who would be dealing with it? Lieutenant Loughlin, that's who. And Chief Chitwood.
“Lemme know about that freak Gorman, Tommy. Lemme know.”
I went back to work. Four and a half hours later, the standoff ended. Gorman was in custody and alive. I was out ten bucks and it looked like we were going to have a trial.
Troy police safely evacuated the other residents of the house, friends of Gorman's family, two adults and a three-year-old child. The Troy police emergency response team and officers from the county sheriff's office closed State Highway 29. After a five-and-a-half-hour standoff during which, at one point, Gorman was holding two loaded guns pointed at his head and threatening to kill himself, negotiators from the Troy Police Department managed to end the incident peacefully. Gorman surrendered his first .25 caliber semiautomatic pistol for a soda and the second for a cigarette, and the Troy police took him into custody. Detective Young was notified and began extradition proceedings.
Chapter Fourteen
T he standoff had ended and Gorman was in an Alabama jail, but the excitement wasn't over for the evening. The detectives and their supervisors had been engaged in an ongoing debate about whether Danny and Scott should go to Troy to interview witnesses or whether they should rely on the very able support they were getting from Chief Everage and Detective Sergeant Calista Everage (the chief's sister). “ALABAMA” had been up on the dryboard in the conference room along with the long list of potential witnesses to be interviewed, waiting to rise higher in the priority list or for the detectives to have time to deal with it.
Now, with Gorman in custody and Littlefield also in jail for shoplifting, and with many other friends and relatives in whom Gorman might have confided, Alabama had risen to the top of the list. Everyone agreed it was important to the case for the detectives to have face-to-face contact with the Alabama witnesses while the information was still fresh.
On that Wednesday evening, the decision was finally made that Young and Harakles should go to Alabama to interview Gorman before Probation and Parole arrived to bring him back to Maine, as well as to speak with other local witnesses. There was only one problem: with not much more than a twenty-four-hour window to conduct interviews before Gorman was returned to Maine, Scott Harakles stunned them all by declaring: “I don't fly.”
It was incongruous. Harakles was a Maine state trooper. True, he appeared younger than his thirty-two years, but he looked like everyone's image of a big, tough cop, built like a football player with a firm jaw, broad shoulders, and a crew cut. He had all the command presence necessary to get the world to line up and obey. But he was a family man in a major way. He had two young kids. It was two months since 9/11. He had recently had a bad time in an MSP plane, and he didn't want to get on another.
On the surface, it wasn't a big deal. Harakles wasn't the only detective assigned to MSP Criminal Investigation Division 1. His supervisors suggested that the simplest solution was for another detective to fly to Alabama with Young. Young wasn't happy with that idea. He and Harakles had become extremely close over the weeks they'd worked together. Many of their days had been twelve to sixteen hours long. Despite the age and experience gaps, they had become partners, and a partner isn't fungible.
It wasn't just their personal relationship. Danny and Scott lived and breathed the case. They felt, and Lieutenant Loughlin agreed, that their joint view of the case and thorough knowledge of witness statements, the timeline, and autopsy results were important elements of the investigation and would be invaluable in speaking with witnesses in Alabama.
Lieutenant Loughlin also worried that splitting them up so far into the case might make them lose momentum— that not only would they lose Harakles's valuable body of knowledge, insight, and excellent interviewing skills but that, with a major personnel change so late in the game, Danny Young might also lose his intensity and focus. Sure, Young was a professional police officer, a highly regarded detective in a paramilitary organization. He was trained to take orders and obey the command staff. He was also human. He had been working relentlessly on the case from the first night of Estabrook's phone call, and that level of commitment and dedication arose in part from the fact that it was “his” case. Now Harakles had become “his partner,” and it was “their” case. The same human qualities that fueled dedication and energy also fueled possessiveness. They had to be acknowledged and respected.
There was something else at play as well. Included in the qualities that made the pair such good detectives were stubbornness and tenacity. Harakles would be the first to admit that he was stubborn, especially when people were trying push their agenda on him. Now that Amy's body had been found, it seemed that everyone had an opinion or wanted a piece of the case; and now that it was a confirmed MSP case, people up the food chain were taking an interest. Chief Chitwood's habit of playing to the media, so different from the more cautious policy of the MSP and the attorney general's office of revealing little information, had led to discussions about pulling the case away from Young and the Portland police.
Those discussions made the partners feel threatened and distracted
from all the real work that needed to be done. By early Wednesday no decision had been made, but the two detectives joined the debate that evening with the feeling that their backs were against the wall. Higher-ups were pushing them around generally and, in particular, pushing them to go to Alabama without giving them a chance to discuss it when they knew the case best. They didn't feel the same sense of urgency others did, but after ten minutes’ discussion, they decided they should go.
“Matt, are you out of your friggin’ mind? No. Absolutely no, we are not splitting these guys up. Not now!” The hair bristles on my neck. I can literally feel the problem.
The standoff is over, and Gorman is in custody. We've got work to do in Troy, and now Matt's telling me Detective Harakles will not get on a plane. He had a bad experience recently in an MSP fly and is adamant about not going. He and Danny want to go, but they want to drive.
Matt says, “My bosses are saying Harakles either gets on a plane or they are assigning someone else. Plus they are crazy to drive!”
I agree. “Well, shit, Matt, I think it's crazy to drive, too.” It's 2022. We've all just been through this tense standoff. We're still at work and all we want to do is go home. But we've got this difficult situation.
“What time is the flight, Matt?”
“0830,” he says. “They've gotta move if they're gonna beat the probation guys who will be down the next day.”
“Matt, what is the freaking rush? Gorman's not going anywhere.”
“Well, they have an obligation,” Matt says, “and we need to interview down there before he's on uncomfortable ground. Probation is going to pick him up soon.” He goes over reasoning and strategy, and I agree. Matt is a prudent man.
However, I'm sick of everyone poking their noses into our world after all the work our guys did on this. We've been at this almost eight weeks and I'm thinking, What? Command staff and outside forces are going to start influencing this now? There are so many players watching or wanting a piece of this. Our own and the MSP brass and administration, other cops, the public, the news. Inside I'm shouting no! If it were up to me, I'd just send ’em by car if that's what they want.
Finding Amy Page 18
