Ronnie Stica had been missing since early evening, September 22, 1977. The good-looking, sandy-haired youth had no reason to run away, as the police had suggested.
A junior, Rennie had dropped out of high school the previous year with his mother's approval, having opted for a period of work and earning money. The youth was a great collector, having amassed a sizable coin collection and "newspaper firsts" collection.
Ronnie was an athlete, a body builder, and a star pitcher; his room full of trophies and plaques attested to bis abilities as a player. Though not a great student, he realized that school was not everything, that education could be attained through other means.
Nancy's four children, Susan, Joey, Ronnie, and thirteen-year-old Bobby, had been close to one another in a way Nancy had never been able to experience in her own youth. Nancy spent her very early years in Brooklyn's Italian and Jewish neighborhoods with her parents, her twin brother, and her sister. Both parents died within a year of . one another in 1942, leaving the children alone and without means.
Nancy had been adopted by an Italian family in Lodi, New Jersey, a quiet, northern New Jersey town that is still predominantly Italian. She had been separated from her siblings, who were taken in by relatives.
Nancy met her first husband, Leon Stica, in high school and married him after graduation when he became a policeman in the Bergen County Police Department.
Life had been difficult for her; her emotional foundation was not always able to support her in times of stress. Although she wrestled with marital problems and eventually a divorce, her children remained close and loving - until Ronnie was discovered missing that warm fall evening.
Ronnie had been expecting potential buyers to come around and inspect his car late that evening; he hoped to sell it before be and his sister, Susan, entered night school that October to get their diplomas. Afraid to damage the car, he chose not to drive it at all.
When Nancy got home from her job at a nearby department store where she was a clerk, Susan, who lived with her husband, Johnny, downstairs in the white wooden house, asked Nancy if she might borrow her mother's car to run some errands. Ronnie made the same pitch almost simultaneously, wanting to meet some friends at De Vries Park, a housing development, for an hour. Susan agreed to drop Ronnie off and go about her business.
"It would be terrible," Nancy lamented in jest, "if my children ever had to walk anyplace. God forbid you should have to walk two blocks." She recalled the time Ronnie had taken a cab home without the funds for the fare, leaving Nancy to pay.
Susan and Ronnie drove to De Vries Park, chatting and joking with one another. Ronnie said he was to meet some "buddies" for a while and then he'd grab a lift home, call his brother Joey for a ride if Susan was still out with the car.
Tall and well built, Ronnie struggled out of the small yellow Firebird, finding relief in stretching his legs again. Susan watched him walk toward a fellow she recognized as a recent acquaintance of his, a local boy named Dave Menicola. The athletic-looking boy nodded at Ronnie, and Susan drove off, having seen her brother alive for the last time.
At home Nancy was tired. The department store ha been undergoing renovation, forcing the staff to work twice as hard, leaving her exhausted. She crawled into bed early that night.
The next morning Nancy noticed Ronnie wan't around, and she assumed he had stayed the night at his girl friend Carol's house. Nancy liked Carol and was glad her son had found himself a positive relationship.
It wasn't until Nancy returned home from work that evening that she got word that something was awry. The phone rang and it was Carol, looking for Ronnie. "Didn't he stay with you last night?" she asked. "No. I haven't seen him at all," the girl friend said. "I was wondering why he hadn't called."
Nancy had a sickening feeling in the pit of her stomach. She immediately began calling relatives and friends, trying to place Ronnie.
No one had seen him. As a mother's instant fears pervaded her consciousness, Nancy, dizzy and nauseous, had to sit down. Ronnie was a strong boy, she told herself, so it was unlikely that he had gotten into any serious trouble. Unless he had hurt someone and was too frightened to tell her.
After several hours of calling and searching, the weakened mother got into her car and drove to the Lodi Police Department. With tears streaming down her face, she told a policeman that her seventeen-year-old son had been out all night and had not been heard from since the previous day.
The policeman said that teen-agers had a habit of getting into trouble and forgetting about their parents.
"I wouldn't worry too much," he told her. "Sons have a way of finding their way home."
"Ronnie always calls," Nancy insisted. "Even when he's going to be a half hour late, he calls."
The policeman took down her name but asked very few questions. Nancy was frustrated and angry, feeling the police weren't going to do anything. The volatile woman stormed out of the station, as she would do again, several times, in the following months.
Nancy had tried to reach Dave Menicola whom she had never met but had heard about from Ronnie and Susan. The woman who answered the Menicola phone told Nancy in broken English that she was Dave's grandmother, and that Dave was not around. He was in the hospital.
"Why is he in the hospital?" Nancy gasped, frightened to hear this response.
"I don't know, they don't tell me anything. They think I'm stupid," the pitiful-sounding woman said.
"Which hospital is he in?" Nancy asked.
"I don't know," came the woman's reply. "They think I'm too stupid to be told these things."
Exasperated, Nancy slammed the phone down and reached for the directory in search of hospital numbers. It took awhile before she tracked down Dave Menicola at Hackensack Hospital.
All the while, Nancy's mind raced with frightening possibilities. Could Ronnie have injured this boy, sending Mm to the hospital? Not Ronnie ... It just didn't seem possible.
She finally had the twenty-year-old Menicola on the phone.
He told Nancy he had been to a party the night before and had accidentally cut himself on a broken bottle.
"Where was Ronnie?" she asked.
"I don't know. He didn't go to the party. He headed over to the wall, last I saw him."
"To the wall? How did he get there?" Nancy pursued, dragging on a cigarette.
"Walking. I guess he walked," Menicola said.
"Walked? Ronnie walked to the wall?" came the incredulous reply. "Ronnie would never walk anywhere," Nancy told the boy, "much less to the wall. He'd take a taxi first."
Nancy didn't like the sound of the boy's voice. Too steady, she thought. Too cool. He had his story comfortably in his head. Something told her he was not telling the truth.
Nancy went to the police station and told them what she had discovered. She explained that Menicola was the last person known to have been with Ronnie, and now he claimed not to know where Ronnie had been the previous night. She entreated them to check with Hackensack Hospital and make certain that Menicola's story was on the level. The police said that there was no law against lying, and if the kid was in the hospital, they couldn't just check up on a patient without substantial reason.
The next day Nancy found out where the supposed party had been held, and that night she called the people whose house it had been held in. She explained who she was and wondered if they knew David Menicola had hurt his arm.
The woman who answered said there had been no party at their house that they knew of, and if one of their son's friends had cut his arm and been taken to a hospital during an incident in their home, they would certainly have known about it.
Nancy, driven to distraction by the police's insistence that Ronnie had run away and would return shortly like the thousands of other kids reported missing, went back to the detective who had been assigned to the case and told him about the party and the lies.
The man carefully took down everything Nancy reported, and said the police would investigate in the
usual manner.
"Everything will get checked," he assured her.
In the meantime Nancy's life had reached a tragic low. She struggled to work, she cared little about herself, she found herself snapping at people uncontrollably. Susan, Joey, and Bobby were with her as much as possible, trying everything possible to find Ronnie. Instead of familiar banter and joking, silence permeated their family life, and stayed like an uncomfortable guest.
Nancy had a recurring dream for the first several weeks after Ronnie's disappearance. Three teen-aged boys, all without faces, stood around a body which lay quietly on the ground. That body was Ronnie's, Nancy knew, and they were burying him.
Nancy called relatives out of state, just in case Ronnie might be traveling across country. Two cousins were law-enforcement officers and they checked their own departments for information. They informed Nancy that Ronnie's name was not yet listed on the national missing-persons list.
She went to the Lodi police and broke into the captain's office.
"I won't leave here until I find out what is happening with my son," she demanded. "I won't leave till I'm sure you're doing something."
The captain tried to calm her down.
"Did you ever put out a missing-person alarm on Ronnie?" she inquired.
The captain replied affirmatively.
"I want to see a copy of the bulletin," she demanded.
Nancy sat and waited in the small smoke-filled office for twenty minutes until the captain returned.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Locascio, we can't find the copy of the report. It must have been misplaced in the files."
"I know why you can't find it." Nancy rose and challenged the slow-moving official. "It's because you never did it. You bastards never put it through," she screamed.
Despite the official's assurances, Nancy continued to believe her son's name had not been put on the national list.
Nancy went to Chief Andy Veto's office next and demanded that he telephone Dave Menicola while she stood in his office. He agreed to call and talk with the boy if Nancy would sit quietly. He didn't want her to speak with him.
Voto called Menicola and after thirty minutes of exasperating discussion with Dave and his frightened mother, he got them to agree to a brief interrogation in his office.
Roughly handsome and of medium height, Menicola seemed more nervous of his anxious mother and the mood emanating from Nancy than he was of the officer's questions. He told the chief that he had cut his arm on a piece of glass. It wasn't exactly a formal party he'd gone to, he explained; he was just messing around with some buddies. One of them took him to Hackensack Hospital where the attending doctor said he'd have to spend the night due to the extent of the cut. While he talked, his mother sat on the edge of her seat, chain-smoking, as if ready to leap to her son's defense.
Voto finished his questioning and accepted the story, thanking the pair for their cooperation.
All along Nancy had wanted more help than she felt the police would provide. Next she wrote the Internal Revenue district offices in several states, explaining in her letter that her son was missing and that she realized, due to the Privacy Act, they could not tell her directly if Ronnie was in their area. Nevertheless she sent along a letter that could be forwarded to him, if he could be located. The letter read:
December 24, 1977
My Darling Ronnie,
It's been 3 months now since we have seen or heard from you. We don't know if you are dead or alive. I'm afraid something awful has happened to you. If you are alive and you do get this letter, please, Ronnie, get in touch with us. We are desperate to find you. My hand is shaking so badly I can hardly write. We have had two detectives looking for you for some time now. We are putting your picture on TV and posting a $1,000.00 reward for your whereabouts. Please, please, Ronnie, if you are reading this, contact us in some way. We love you so much and we want to know where you are. I can't make myself believe you just ran away and left all your possessions behind. Tomorrow is Christmas and next week is your birthday, but it won't be the same without you. Ronnie, I love you so much. My life is so empty. Please take the pain away from my heart. I love you.
Mommy, Daddy, Joey, Susan, Bobby, Johnny, Suzanne, Baby Joey, John and baby Sue, Uncle Tom and everyone in town is praying to know you're well.
Copies of the letter were sent across the country. Nancy paid to have Ronnie's picture put into newspapers and had to handle the appeals as paid advertising.
At the same time Nancy had gone to tea-leaf readers, psychics, palm and tarot card readers. She attended psychic fairs where practitioners would give her bits of information at $5-$10 a hit.
Each time Nancy would hear a different description of her son's location and situation, she would go home and cry. One psychic told her Ronnie was in the Nevada desert, having been taken there by a motorcycle gang and was wrapped in a yellow-flowered blanket. Another said he was in a commune in Ohio. Yet another said he was in a nearby cemetery, in a crypt with a broken lock.
Nancy and her kids searched the Lodi cemeteries for a crypt with a broken lock. Crypts with gates ajar were found, but most were open due to the extreme cold and heavy snows. Nothing was found after two days of cold searching.
In scanning the papers daily, Nancy would respond to any item that reported the finding of a body. One day she found an article that said a large box wrapped in Christmas foil had been found with a body inside, but the corpse had been cut into six-inch slices. What most alarmed Nancy was the fact that the box was found at the end of her ex-husband's street. After two days of calls and worries, Nancy was told the body was that of a woman who had been a prostitute.
Nancy had read about Dorothy Allison in the National Enquirer and tried to reach her in nearby Nutley. She had called Detective Lubertazzi at the Nutley Police Department and was told that Dorothy was overbooked and working on several cases at the time. Detective Tortora of the Bergen County police said he had met Dorothy and would try to bring the two women together.
When Tony Tortora called from Dorothy's house, Nancy had an intuitive feeling that important things were about to happen. She remembered seeing Dorothy's photograph in the papers and believed the woman to be sincere, unlike some of the other psychics she had dealt With. At the very least, they were paesans.
Nancy and Joey, her twenty-year-old son and an aspiring musician and lyricist, drove to Nutley. Dorothy greeted Nancy warmly, giving her instant encouragement and solace. Nancy was grateful to Dorothy for her strong support and came to rely on her from that moment on. Dorothy quickly became part of Nancy's family and life.
Nancy, Joey, and the two detectives sat around the kitchen table while Dorothy went to work on Ronnie Stica.
"Do you know anyone with a pilot's license? Or an airplane?" Dorothy asked.
"No," Nancy said.
"No one that flies a plane or spends time at airports for some reason?" Dorothy questioned.
"No one in my family has anything to do with planes," Nancy said.
"Ralph. I get the name Ralph. Anyone you know?"
Nancy and Joey tried to think of a "Ralph" they knew, but could not.
Nancy had brought a pair of Ronnie's glasses with her, so that Dorothy could hold something he had worn. After she held the pilot's glasses for a while, she put them down on the Formica table and began pursuing other images.
"Nancy, I see a yellow building. Ronnie had something to do with that building. Let me see what more I can tell you. It has the word 'water' on it."
Nancy remembered that the building where Susan had dropped Ronnie was several stories high and was a pale yellow color. She had no idea where the word "water" came from.
"I see a yellow car with a black roof," Dorothy continued. Nancy recognized that as her own Firebird, the car in which Susan and Ronnie had driven.
It was when Dorothy began to speak of the "wall" that Nancy felt she had at last found a true psychic. Everything Dorothy said fit the description of the infamous "wall" where the kids h
ung out, smoking and drinking. It was a large retaining wall alongside a part of the Passaic River, and Dorothy saw it as if she had been there.
Dorothy could see from Nancy's excitement that she was close to the reality of the situation. She wanted to get up and go to Lodi, but the detectives had other appointments. Nancy agreed to drive around with Dorothy that next Sunday, which was Palm Sunday.
As they were saying good-bye, Dorothy told Tortora privately to look for a piece of a blue car in the vacant area behind the airport.
"Something fell off the car," she told him. "That blue car is important. Ronnie was in that car that night."
She also told him to look for anything with the word "eclipse," either a street sign or an advertisement. She felt Ronnie's body was not too far from the "eclipse."
Dorothy Allison - A Psychic Story Page 23
