Never Let Them See You Cry

by Edna Buchanan

  Both disliked the news coverage. It made their “gentle and loving” affair seem sordid, he complained.

  Kathi accused reporters of making her appear unsympathetic. She was angry at Hirschhorn for saying she hated Lance. They were happy, she said, and she loved him. I asked if she thought their marriage would have endured forever. “What’s forever?” she answered. “I have lost a lot of faith in forever. I can’t even bring myself to date. How could I ever trust another man? You don’t know how many times in the heat of the day, with the mosquitoes, I have sat by my husband’s grave.”

  Russell worried about his future parole. “I don’t know what I’m going to be like when I’m sixty-four. I don’t know what kind of job I can get I don’t want to depend on my sister or my kids when I get out.”

  Kathi worried about “trying to make a life for a little girl. I don’t know how I’m going to fly, run my husband’s business, keep house and be a mother.” Because she had received threats, she said, she spent each night of the trial with different friends. A surprise awaited her on the day the defense accused her of “dangling her body in front of Jerry Russell like a carrot before a rabbit.”

  “You need this more than I do,” that evening’s hostess declared, presenting Kathi with a huge stuffed carrot that had decorated her kitchen.

  “It was funny,” Kathi said. “You have to admit, it was funny.”

  Eight years later, in 1990, I looked up and saw a familiar face at a library fundraiser on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Erika Anderson, still elegant and stately. I asked how she was. “Angry,” she said.

  All the legal efforts have accomplished nothing. Erika Anderson has not seen her granddaughter, Lisa, for years.

  Lance is dead.

  Jerry is behind bars.

  But for those left behind, it is never really over.

  4

  The Twilight Zone

  The middle ground between light and shadow … it is an area we call the Twilight Zone.

  —ROD SERLING

  Into the daily life of reporters and cops seeking only the facts come occasional events that defy rational explanation. They are more chilling than a man with a gun.

  How do you explain the premonitions, the dreams, the ironies and otherworldly occurrences? Specifically, how do you explain them to an editor, in his brightly lit and high-tech tower? His eyes invariably narrow as you report that the story you are writing involves a voodoo curse come true or a dead man apparently returned from the grave.

  Mamie Higgs opened her door and screamed. The visitor was Alex Monroe, her father. The last time she saw him he lay in a coffin. He had been murdered four months earlier, and she had identified the corpse. She had paid for his funeral. The entire family had attended the open-coffin services. Now he was alive at her door.

  Even as they embraced, she looked to see “if there was any graveyard dust on him.” The man in her father’s grave was somebody else.

  The man in her father’s grave was Alex Monroe—the other Alex Monroe.

  There were two Alex Monroes—both sixty-two years old, both five feet nine inches tall, both 140 pounds. Each Alex Monroe had a scar on the left side of his face. They lived six blocks apart in Miami.

  They had never met.

  Mrs. Higgs had identified the Alex Monroe shot dead during a fight in a grubby downtown neighborhood as her father. “The scar was in the same place, from the temple to the cheek. He had the same small ears, the same salt-and-pepper hair.”

  Now her father had returned months later from a stay in North Carolina. As he strolled down a Miami street a passing friend slammed on her brakes, shrieking, “You’re dead!”

  He denied it. “I’m not dead,” he said. “I just came from North Carolina.”

  Mamie Higgs had borrowed from her credit union to bury her father. Now that he wasn’t dead, she wanted her money back.

  Made sense to me.

  I tried to mediate, calling the funeral home in her behalf. The director was adamant. “We simply carried out a service.”

  A compromise of sorts was finally worked out. Mrs. Higgs was promised free services when her father really does die.

  People do not come back from the dead, but if they don’t, how do you explain Earl Allen?

  Earl Allen did not feel well. He had suffered dizzy spells for two weeks and had a severe headache, but not severe enough to make him stay home instead of going night fishing with Charlie Fletcher and two other chums. They took Charlie’s twenty-two-foot boat into the Intracoastal Waterway.

  Allen complained about his terrible headache, suddenly stood up and pitched overboard, headfirst. His companions were not sure whether he fell or dove into the water.

  They saw him come up swimming, against the tide, toward the shore, but suddenly he disappeared about thirty feet from some mangroves. That’s when they began yelling for help.

  A security guard at a nearby high-rise heard their cries and called police. It was 12:49 A.M. Metro-Dade Officer Bart Cohen and his partner arrived one minute later. They radioed for the Coast Guard. An Indian Creek Village police boat arrived first, sweeping the area where Earl Allen was last seen. The dark water, lit only by their searchlight and a three-quarter moon, yielded nothing.

  “There was nobody swimming, no calls for help,” Officer Cohen said. A Coast Guard eighteen-footer arrived an hour and a half later. Cohen climbed aboard, and close to where he was last seen, they spotted Earl Allen, fifty-nine, floating facedown beneath the surface, 150 feet away. Cohen radioed that they were about to recover the victim’s body. As the Coast Guard boat came alongside, the “body” appeared to lurch toward the boat. The policeman assumed it was the movement of the water. A Coast Guardsman snagged the back of Earl Allen’s shirt and maneuvered him to where Officer Cohen could grab his arms and pull him into the boat. He did, and then the “dead man” began to move.

  “He’s alive!” gasped the disbelieving cop, his own pulse pounding. “Nobody could believe it,” said Cohen, a six-year police veteran and a former lifeguard. “It totally amazed me. He had definitely been underwater, facedown.”

  Earl Allen spit up water “like a fountain.”

  When they delivered him to waiting paramedics, Earl Allen sat upright on the stretcher to look around him. “It’s unbelievable,” Police Sergeant John Cini said. “Nobody can stay underwater an hour and a half and live.”

  His theory was that Earl Allen had been drinking and perhaps that’s what saved him. He could have been so intoxicated that “he went into a coma and didn’t require the same amount of oxygen.”

  Made no sense to me. Police regularly blame drownings on victims who were drinking.

  Hospital officials declined to advance any theories. “Generally speaking,” said assistant Dade County medical examiner Dr. Erik Mitchell, “for a person underwater, it’s just a matter of a few minutes until brain damage and death.”

  Examined at the Veterans Administration Hospital, Earl Allen had suffered no apparent ill effects and was released twelve hours later. He had no other means of transportation, so I drove him home. We talked on the way.

  Earl Allen was not brain damaged, though he did seem sort of loose and happy-go-lucky. He said he had stood up in the boat, caught his foot in the carpeting and tripped. He remembered “hitting the water.” His next recollection was the policeman dragging him into a boat as he wondered, “Where am I?” He vaguely recalled being treated by the paramedics.

  Earl Allen denied being drunk. He only had about eight cans of Old Milwaukee, he said, during the entire outing, which had begun in late afternoon. “It takes more than that to get me drunk,” he said. He had experienced no long tunnels or bright white lights, nor did he seem surprised by his own survival. A World War II veteran of the navy, he had survived thirteen major battles, including a “torpedo coming right for the ship—it went under the bow” and kamikaze attacks. “When the Japs start diving into your ship, now that’s nerve
wracking,” he said matter-of-factly.

  We were exiting the expressway at that moment and my car suddenly went dead on the ramp. When it wouldn’t start, we hiked to a nearby house to call for help. While we waited, I tried it again. This time the engine started, and I took my passenger on home. Standing in the afternoon sunlight, slightly stooped and grinning, he waved a casual goodbye as though all that had happened was nothing unusual.

  Just another day in the life of Earl Allen.

  And what about the precognitive dreams? Like the young policeman’s nightmare that quickly became reality.

  Rick Trado, twice honored as Miami Beach’s most outstanding cop, was cited as a hero for freeing the unconscious driver of an overturned truck that gushed gasoline.

  The dream came eighteen months later.

  “I woke up in a cold sweat,” he told fellow officer Thomas Moran as they carpooled to headquarters that Sunday morning at dawn. “I had a dream. I stopped a car, and the guy got out and shot me.” Nearly an hour later, Trado stopped a car.

  The guy got out and shot him.

  Officer Trado had stopped a speeder on the Julia Tuttle Causeway stretching between Miami and Miami Beach. The motorist routinely stepped out, then charged the patrol car, firing a .357 Magnum. As Trado reached for his service revolver, a bullet hit his right hand, shattered the wooden stock of his gun and slammed into his biceps. The gunman shot out the front tires of the patrol car and fled.

  Simultaneously, the wounded officer’s radio began to broadcast reports of a robbery that had just occurred and a description of the suspect. Officers were warned to use caution, the robber was armed.

  Trado already knew that.

  Pandemonium broke out, as it always does when a cop is shot. The shooter had escaped. A huge manhunt was under way. I raced out to the scene, then to the hospital emergency room. The atmosphere was one of relief. The wound was not life threatening. Hit in the hand, Trado was about to go to surgery, but everybody considered him lucky, all things considered.

  I found Rick Trado lying on a table in the emergency room, pale and in pain, his right arm swathed in blood-soaked bandages. It is always shocking when a cop is shot, more so when it is a cop you know, a cop with a toddler son and a pregnant wife.

  “I felt so helpless,” he said. “When the bullet hit me, I couldn’t control my fingers.” He lowered his voice. “Edna, you won’t believe this. I dreamed this this morning. I dreamed I stopped a car and the guy shot me.”

  Back out on the street, an army of 150 police from at least eleven agencies sealed off an eight-block area, using dogs and helicopters to track the suspect. During the confusion I spotted Tommy Moran. His first words: “Edna, you won’t believe this. On the way in, Rick told me he woke up this morning in a cold sweat. He dreamed he pulled over a car and the guy shot him.”

  The bullet wound was more serious than it first appeared. Hundreds of tiny fragments, splinters from the shattered wood, were embedded in the nerves, bones and muscles of his hand, causing massive infection and complications. He nearly lost the hand. Extensive surgery never restored its full use.

  The injury ended his career prematurely, a loss to us all. The man who shot him was captured, declared insane, hospitalized, “cured” and released.

  Dreams do come true. Unfortunately many of them are terrifying.

  Connie Thomas, troubled by bad dreams in the night, pleaded with her husband, Meldren, not to take the blue boat he had named Sea Breeze out the next morning. He reassured her, even delayed his departure long enough to fix her a hot breakfast. Then he and his brother-in-law, W. L. Gavins, set out for a day of fishing. It was Saturday, the day before Easter. Their wives knew something was wrong when the men did not return at dusk. Gavins was to sing “When the Gates Swing Open, I’ll Walk Right In” at sunrise services in the morning.

  His worried wife drove to the Crandon Park boat ramp and found her husband’s old pickup truck still parked there. She called police, who took the report, assuring her that it would be forwarded to the Coast Guard. The sisters prayed through the night. At five A.M., with still no word, they called the Coast Guard. Their call was the first notice rescuers had of a missing boat. The policeman had left the report on his desk to be reviewed by a sergeant the following Monday morning. If approved, it would then have been forwarded, through proper channels, to the Coast Guard. Petty officials had struck again, blinded by their own bureaucratic routine and red tape. Always frustrating, this time they were deadly. Now it was too late.

  Easter Sunday afternoon the crew of a fishing vessel spotted Gavins, floating facedown. The second corpse was found hours later. The men had taken life jackets, but neither wore one. Whatever happened to them happened fast, like something out of a bad dream.

  Some dreams, if heeded, are providential.

  Henry Sims, seventy-two and many times a grandfather, slept in his Miami home, dreaming of a fire twenty-five years earlier in Live Oak, Florida.

  His brother-in-law had been at work in a field. His wife joined him to pick peas. When she looked back, the house was burning. A wood stove had ignited the wall. Other men had to hold back Henry Sims’s brother-in-law as the blazing house caved in. The oldest boy and the baby perished inside.

  This night in Miami twenty-five years later, Henry Sims saw it all again in his dreams. “I was dreaming about them. I never dreamed nothing like that before.” The dream so moved him that he awoke, a sob in his throat.

  He opened his eyes and could still smell the smoke. It was 4:20 A.M. He sat up in bed and realized that the smoke was real.

  He jumped up, thinking first of the children. He opened a door and saw nothing but black smoke. His hand clamped over his mouth and nose, he made his way to their room. He led his handicapped daughter Marie, forty-five, and granddaughters Sheila, thirteen, Kim, twelve, and Jaklin, sixteen, to safety. His shouts awoke his grandsons, Nathaniel Williams, twenty-two, and Anthony Sims, fourteen, and a visitor, Bobby McGredy, twenty-two, in another bedroom. Williams needs braces and crutches to walk. His teenage cousin Anthony snatched him up and carried him outside.

  Henry Sims’s wife was still away, at the hospital where he had also spent the evening with an eighteen-year-old granddaughter, Louise, a dialysis patient. At ten P.M. he had decided to go home for the night. Their home and possessions were lost, but had Sims not been there the loss would have been far greater.

  Sometimes the warning is far less explicit, but no less ominous.

  Three young women and a teenage boy died in a bloody wreck on U.S. 27. Two other boys were critically hurt. Two of the dead women were elementary school teachers. The third had joined the weekend outing, to an Optimist League football game in Tampa, at the last minute, to replace Maria Zarabozo, twenty-six, who had suddenly refused to go. She had had a premonition.

  A school secretary and close friend of the two teachers, Zarabozo had accompanied them on many vacations. All three wore identical silver rings, souvenirs from a trip to Peru. But this time, she told me, a dream the night before had changed her plans. The identical dream had come in the past, always signaling death and tragedy. In the dream, she walks down a path and encounters a strange small boy in white. “Every time he comes into my dreams I know that something bad is about to happen, either to me or to somebody close to me.”

  She told her friends. They insisted she accompany them. She refused.

  “Don’t pay attention to premonitions,” one of them scoffed. “If something is going to happen, it’ll happen.”

  She saw them off. “I hugged and kissed each one goodbye,” she told me, weeping. They had laughed.

  “Do you think you’re not going to see us again?” one asked.

  She shrugged. “Maybe.”

  The woman who died in her place agreed to go at the last moment, to help with the driving. Nine miles north of Andytown and five miles south of Bean City in Palm Beach County, a south-bound tractor trailer, hauling frozen vegetables to sup
ermarkets, sideswiped a Dodge towing an airboat on a trailer. The huge truck swerved out of control, crossed the northbound lane, slammed into the guardrails, careened back onto the road and crashed head-on into the young teachers’ car, which burst into flames. The burned bodies were identified by the identical silver rings that matched their friend’s.

  The small boy in white first began to haunt Maria Zarabozo’s dreams in Cuba when she was seven—before an aunt’s fatal accident. She wishes she had never seen his small pale face. “I wish this didn’t happen,” she said tearfully. I believed her, but she was alive.

  Other nightmares are dead right and need no interpretation. A Miami man’s dream of death solved his own murder and led police to his killer. Rafael Gonzalez, owner of a wholesale fish and poultry market, had a terrifying nightmare one Friday. He told employees that in his dream he was robbed and shot by a former employee named Roberto Alvarez. The vivid dream was so chilling that when the former employee appeared on Sunday, asking to buy shrimp, Gonzalez refused to open the door.

  Tuesday night another knock came. The next morning a customer saw blood seeping from beneath the locked door of the market. Gonzalez had been shot three times. The cash box was empty. Police had no suspects. A shocked employee told detectives about the dead man’s dream. Cops and reporters are skeptical at best about dreams, premonitions and psychic phenomena, but this was at the height of Miami’s 1981 murder epidemic and detectives were crime-weary and overworked.

  “It’s spooky,” Homicide Sergeant Richard Napoli told me, “but I’ll take help from anywhere.”

  Dubious detectives, who had no other leads, visited Alvarez, who agreed to be fingerprinted. Then police found a witness, a neighbor, who had seen former employee Roberto Alvarez leaving the market around the time of the murder. Crime-lab experts matched Alvarez’s fingerprints to those found on the cash box and the dead man’s car. Confronted, he confessed.