Yet very late that night, Detective John Shirvell went through the murder scene. He saw a couple of empty boxes in Butch’s bedroom with labels that indicated they had contained a .22 Marlin rifle and a .35 Marlin rifle. A .35 had been the murder weapon. Kelske told detectives that Butch collected guns and had even staged a robbery. It looked as if this might be a case of familicide. Within a few hours, they read Butch his rights. He waived his right to counsel.
A new set of detectives pressed him on details in his statement that failed to add up to what they had found at the scene. They said the murders had occurred at night, at the very time that Butch claimed to have been in the house. Cornered, he began to reconstruct his story, but he hadn’t thought it through very well. With each new lie used to patch holes, more holes opened up.
The reason he’d implicated Falini, he said, was because the man had put a gun to his head around 3 AM. He’d murdered the entire family right in front of Butch, leading him from one room to the other until they were all dead. Falini had brought another man, but Butch could not provide a physical description. He also said that he’d picked up items of evidence, such as cartridges from his rifle. When the detectives said, “It didn’t happen that way, did it,” Butch finally broke down.
“No,” he admitted. “It all started so fast. Once I started, I just couldn’t stop. It went so fast.”
He said that after the massacre, he’d cleaned himself up and set out to establish an alibi. He’d showered, collected the spent cartridges and his bloody clothes, wrapped them into a pillowcase with his Marlin rifle, and drove into Brooklyn, where he dumped it all into a storm drain. The rifle he tossed into a canal. He arrived at work at his grandfather’s Buick dealership around 6:00 AM. For DeFeo, it was over. He was booked. But he wasn’t finished telling his story.
Butch, the oldest of the DeFeo siblings, had always been “problem child.” By his teens, he’d developed a strained relationship with his father. His parents had generally taken care of issues by giving him whatever he wanted and purchasing expensive items like a boat or a car. This generosity had not stopped Butch from stealing from them, anyway.
He would later claim to have experienced occasional blackouts, although no mental health experts had documented any such condition. He insisted he did not recall murdering his family. It wasn’t long before he’d blamed his sister. He said that Dawn had shot his father and then their mother had killed the others before he’d had to shoot her to defend himself.
Yet he wasn’t finished. He soon claimed that the police had coerced a false confession out of him. Neither he nor his sister had killed the family. Ultimately, Butch said that he was God, so he’d had the right to kill. He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.
Dr. Daniel Schwartz, a psychiatrist for Butch’s defense team, affirmed his delusions and paranoid belief that his family had it in for him. In a psychotic state, he’d heard their voices plotting against him and had acted out in self-defense. Thus, he wasn’t responsible. Schwartz’s diagnostic criteria included Butch’s statement that he had not heard the gun firing, stating that it supported a state of dissociation. Schwartz did not think that Butch had been malingering. Because he’d felt nothing about his family’s deaths, he had to be insane. Even the way he’d hid the evidence had been irrational.
Yet, the prosecutor also had a psychiatrist, Dr. Harold Zolan. He had little trouble diagnosing Butch with an antisocial personality disorder: Butch knew right from wrong and appreciated the consequences of his acts. His psychiatric record from adolescence indicated that he was passive-aggressive. He’d had a great deal of trouble with his father. None of these items rose to the level of insanity.
On November 21, 1975, one year and one week since the murders, DeFeo was found guilty of six counts of second-degree murder. He got concurrent sentences of 25 to life, and he is currently serving them at Green Haven Correctional Facility in Beekman. His appeals have all failed. More lies and convoluted tales have come forth, especially because it’s difficult to believe that no one woke up when the rifle was discharged so many times, except one sister. However, there is no evidence to corroborate any other version of the story.
Fiction and Murder
MARK DAVID CHAPMAN HAD LONG BEEN a fan of John Lennon, the iconic musician and founder of the Beatles. However, he’d grown annoyed with Lennon over the years. This anger hardened into a need to teach the musician a lesson. He considered other celebrities that he might also target, but Lennon seemed the most accessible.
Chapman had a history of drug addiction and mental illness and had been hospitalized several times for suicide attempts. He supposedly went in and out of lucid moments. He fixated on Lennon after he decided that the former Beatle was “selling out.” From a book he’d read about Lennon’s life, he considered Lennon to be a phony: Lennon preached love, peace, and “no possessions” while enjoying the privileged lifestyle of the rich and famous. Chapman was also upset by a remark Lennon had made in 1966 that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. Chapman considered this to be an unforgiveable blasphemy.
Responding to themes in a novel by J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, he grew obsessed with taking a stand against hypocrisy. He formed a plan and purchased a .38 caliber revolver.
Chapman traveled to New York City in October 1980 to find Lennon, but decided against doing anything. Two months later, in December, he returned, determined to carry out his plan. He wanted to strike out in a way that would capture the world’s attention. He was armed with deadly hollow-point bullets.
On December 8, Chapman purchased a new copy of The Catcher in the Rye and went to the Dakota, the apartment building that bordered Central Park where Lennon lived. Late that afternoon, he spotted Lennon and asked him to autograph an album cover. Lennon graciously complied before leaving for a recording session. Chapman remained in the vicinity, watching for his chance. When Lennon returned a few hours later, Chapman walked up behind him and fatally shot him four times in the back.
Afterward, Chapman waited patiently for authorities to arrive, offering The Catcher in the Rye as his statement. “I’m sure the big part of me is Holden Caulfield, who is the main person in the book,” he said. “The small part of me must be the Devil.” He was ready to try for an insanity defense.
He underwent hundreds of hours of psychiatric exams and interviews, administered by over a dozen mental health professionals, many of whom were ready to testify that he was psychotic. However, Chapman ultimately pled guilty to murder, insisting that God had commanded him to make the plea. He received a sentence of 20 years to life.
Chapman was highly suggestible. After seeing Around the World in 80 Days, he took an extended trip around the world. Upon reading The Catcher in the Rye, he viewed himself as the protagonist Holden Caulfield. He even acted out some scenes prior to the shooting. After viewing Ordinary People, he initially changed his mind about killing Lennon, but The Catcher in the Rye had a more sustained influence. Reportedly he believed the murder would transform him into Holden Caulfield.
He has come up for parole eight times, the latest in August 2014. In his most recent appeal, he bragged about killing Lennon. He did express remorse about one thing, though: "I’m sorry for being such an idiot,” he said, “and choosing the wrong way for glory.”
*****
ANOTHER NEW YORK-BASED KILLER also had an association with a published book—his own.
John Henry Abbott was a troubled boy, the product of a series of foster homes and institutions for delinquents. In 1963, he got a 5-year sentence in Utah for theft and fraud. He killed a fellow inmate and received another sentence. In 1971, he escaped and robbed a bank. He was arrested and convicted of armed robbery. While serving his time in a federal penitentiary, he read a lot. Then he started writing to authors. One was novelist Jerzy Kosinski. Another was Normal Mailer. Abbott was especially interested in The Executioner’s Song, based on two-time killer Gary Gilmore, who’d been executed in Utah.
Mailer was
impressed with Abbott’s letters, as Abbott described what prison life was like. With Mailer’s help, Random House signed Abbott to a book deal. In the Belly of the Beast was based on his letters from prison. He received an advance against royalties of $12,500 and Mailer touted him as an “important writer.”
Abbott was returned to Utah to finish his sentence there. He was considered for parole. Mailer offered to employ him as a research assistant, so parole was granted in 1981. Abbott moved to a halfway house on East 3rd Street in Manhattan.
His book gained momentum from impressive reviews and media coverage about being a “reformed man,” thanks to channeling his aggressive impulses into his art. No one seemed to notice that Abbott had dedicated the book to Carl Panzram, an unrepentant rapist and angry multiple killer. Abbott, the new celebrity, was about to prove that he wasn’t ready for civilized life.
On July 17, just six weeks after his release, he accompanied two women to the Binibon restaurant in the East Village. He asked Richard Adan, a young actor and playwright who was helping out his father’s business by working as a waiter, to direct him to the restroom. Adan said that only employees were allowed to use it, due to insurance issues. Abbott grew belligerent and they took the argument outside. There, Abbott pulled a knife and stabbed Adan to death.
The following day, The New York Times Book Review published a glowing review of Abbott’s book. No one yet knew what had transpired, but the literary community was about to be roundly humiliated for its naïve belief in the redemptive power of art. Abbott, now a two-time killer, had fled.
A manhunt commenced. On September 23, Abbott was located in Louisiana. He was convicted of first-degree manslaughter. He received 15 years in prison. He used the time to pen another book with a collaborator, My Return, which he published in 1986. He dismissed the fatal incident as “necessary,” said it had been quick and therefore painless, and added that Adan hadn’t had much talent, anyway. In other words, this “literary giant” had no concern for another person’s life, or the pain caused to him and his loved ones. Art had clearly not bettered this offender.
On February 10, 2002, Abbott hanged himself in his prison cell.
Un-Happy Land
Julio Gonzales was jealous and controlling. When Lydia Feliciano got involved with him, she unwittingly lit a slow fuse to disaster. In 1990, fed up with Gonzales’s demands, Lydia finally broke up with him. She’d put up with him for seven years and it just wasn’t fun anymore. She’d had it. She wanted to be left alone. What she failed to understand is that controlling men have to make all the decisions. No one leaves them, not without paying a price.
Gonzales made several attempts to get Lydia back, but she wanted to get on with her life. She no longer was interested in a future with him. She thought that if she just avoided him, eventually, he’d lose interest. But he didn’t.
Gonzales knew where Lydia worked—the after-hours Happy Land social club in the Bronx, at 1959 Southern Boulevard, off East Tremont Avenue. The two-story club had no liquor license and was not equipped to deal with crowds, but the club owners allowed people to congregate anyway. Although ordered closed due to fire codes sixteen months earlier, on the night of March 25, 1990, it was open. If something did happen, there was only one way out, a door on the main floor. Stairways that went down from the second floor were steep and narrow.
Gonzales arrived at the club, angry. Lydia was working there as a coat check girl. The club was crowded with people celebrating Carnival. He insisted that she come back to him and they argued. A bouncer ejected Gonzales.
No one did that to him!
We know that many men intent on punishment where there is potential for numerous victims tend to be inflexible and controlling. They exaggerate slights and dehumanize their targets. They believe they’re entitled to do what they want and that others must pay for humiliating them. Gonzales grabbed a plastic container, vowing to return.
Around 3:30 in the morning, he purchased gas from a gas station near the club, carried it back to the building, and poured it around the bottom of the only door through which patrons could leave. Then he lit a match. He stood back to watch the wooden structure catch fire. As it spread, Gonzales crossed the street to observe the panic, satisfied that Lydia would feel the fire burn her and understand her error before she perished. However, Lydia had already gone home. She wasn’t even in the club.
Instead, as the fire raced through the substandard structure, people started to scream and rush down the stairs. Some were trampled in their haste to get out. Many succumbed to smoke inhalation. A few collapsed with their drinks still in their hands.
“Some looked like they were sleeping,” said Firefighter Richard Harden of Ladder Company 58, for reporters. “Some looked horrified. Some looked like they were in shock. There were some people holding hands. There were some people who looked like they were trying to commiserate and hug each other. Some people had torn their clothes off in their panic to get out.”
Just five people managed to get out of the single exit, several engulfed in flames, while sixty-one men and twenty-six women died. Officials who saw them described them as mostly waxen-looking figures. A family of ten siblings was among the victims. There were even some high school kids. The word was that, if you had money, you could get in.
Before the day was over, Gonzales was found in his rooms. He smelled like gasoline, so he was arrested. Under interrogation, he admitted what he’d done, justifying it with, “I got angry. The devil must have gotten into me and I set the place on fire.” He was charged with eighty-seven counts of murder, along with other charges, including arson and numerous counts of depraved indifference to human life.
As the trial approached, Gonzales, an unemployed Cuban refugee, tried for an insanity defense, but it was too late. He’d already admitted that he’d been intent on damage. Later he tried to say that a voice had commanded him to do it, but two mental health professionals for the prosecution insisted that he was faking it.
The jury decided that Gonzales was sane at the time he set the fire, and they convicted him. For each count, he received 25 years to life, to be served concurrently, due to the fact that the incident was a single act. He would become eligible for parole in 2015. It was the worst mass murder in U.S. history.
Mayor Dinkins vowed to crack down on the nearly 200 other illegal social clubs in the city.
The Genesee River Strangler
THE GENESSEE RIVER GORGE OUTSIDE Rochester is a scenic recreation area that features three picturesque waterfalls. Twenty-two miles long, this places is touted as the "Grand Canyon of the East.”
On March 24, 1989, two hunters came across a frozen female body, clad in jeans and a sweatshirt. The police dragged the corpse from the water. The autopsy indicated that this woman had been strangled and kicked, possibly bitten. This victim turned out to be Dorothy “Dotsie” Blackburn, 27, a substance abuser and prostitute who worked Rochester’s seedy Lyell Avenue. Her sister had filed a missing person report a week earlier.
A year passed before another dead woman, Dorothy Blackburn, was found in this area. Several more prostitutes were killed during that summer and dumped just outside Rochester.
On October 21, three sportsmen went into the Gorge and discovered the remains of a skeletonized headless corpse along the riverbank. As her remains were collected, nobody realized that the killer, a fisherman, was watching.
Six days after that one, nearing Halloween, a boy saw a foot sticking out from beneath a pile of debris near a YMCA building. He summoned the police, who uncovered a decomposing corpse. It was Patty Ives, a prostitute.
The press began to write about “the Rochester Strangler” and “the Genesee River Killer.” Due to mounting community pressure, detectives asked the prostitutes for assistance.
On average, around three-dozen women worked this area. Patrol officers sat in unmarked cars, watching them. One reported a john named “Mitch.” He was strange, she said. He’d mentioned the strangler, had taken her pretty
far into the countryside, and had wanted her to pretend she was dead. He’d given her the creeps.
Other prostitutes soon went missing. Frances Brown was discovered dumped in the Gorge, down a steep slope. Her cause of death was asphyxia, and bruises on the body.
Then an older man whose twenty-six-year-old girlfriend, June Stott, had been missing for eighteen days reported her. Since she wasn’t a prostitute, the police did not believe she was vulnerable.
On Thanksgiving, Mark Stetzel was out walking his dog. He wandered into a marshy area near the industrial piers. The dog ran down a trail, so he followed. Under some stiff carpeting, he saw a bare foot.
The cops and evidence techs responded at once. So did first assistant district attorney Chuck Siragusa. If they had a genuine serial killer in the area, he wanted to stay on top of these cases.
The decedent showed evidence of decomposition and having been moved. When they turned her over, they saw that she’d been cut from the top of the chest between her breasts all the way into the vaginal area, like a gutted deer. It looked as if the vaginal lips had been removed. Yet the analysis at the morgue indicated that there was no semen in or on the body.
This victim was the missing June Stott. So much for being safe. Because she was not a prostitute, this suggested that other women were also in danger.
Captain Lynde Johnston decided to call the FBI. In just a year, he had eleven unsolved cases of prostitute murders in and around Rochester. He was put through to Special Agent Gregg McCrary of the Behavioral Science Unit. McCrary, who documents the investigation from a behavioral perspective in a book I co-authored with him, The Unknown Darkness: Profiling the Predators Among Us, invited New York State Trooper Lieutenant Ed Grant, a graduate of the FBI’s training program in criminal investigative analysis, to join him.
Shadows of Death (True Crime Box Set) Page 13
