by Colin Evans
Establishing exactly why the skull had been detached from the torso, and by whom, was a mystery that would exercise many an official mind over the coming months. Certainly the authorized explanation offered later has a hollow ring to it, making it easy to side with those OCME staff members who suspected the removed object had been destined for someone’s desk, a paperweight, maybe, just the kind of ghoulish ornament to impress the hell out of overawed visitors. All of which would have been fine and dandy had it not been for one slight hiccup—when Lehary was stripping the last vestiges of flesh from the skull he came across a misshapen .32-caliber copper-jacketed bullet.
This changed everything. An immediate disinterment order was issued and on July 8, workmen at Potter’s Field carried out a hasty exhumation. Only at this stage did the OCME issue a teleprinter message to all law enforcement agencies in the tricounty area, advising that a young woman’s body had been found and asking if the general description tallied with any of their missing persons’ reports.
Eventually, the teleprinter message found its way to the New Jersey State Police headquarters in Trenton. After consulting their records, they, in turn, relayed it to the Princeton police department, as the physical details seemed to approximate those of a woman who had mysteriously vanished from that area five months earlier. Her disappearance had been the culmination to a strange and tumultuous saga.
When Laura Miller became engaged to Lieutenant Colin Carpi on February 23, 1957, the announcement was reported in the society columns of the New York Times. Similarly, their wedding just a few months later, on June 22 at the Church of the Messiah in Gwynedd, some twenty-five miles northeast of Philadelphia, was another highlight of the local social calendar and earned another mention in the Times. Friends and relatives alike agreed that theirs was a match made in heaven. Both the ravishing brunette and the handsome naval officer came from privileged backgrounds. Lynn’s family was rooted in Philadelphia banking circles, while Colin’s father had been executive vice president of the Penn Central Railroad. Their schooling had followed predictably similar Ivy League lines. Colin graduated from Princeton with the class of ’53 with a BS in engineering, and two years later Laura emerged with equal distinction from Smith College.* Following graduation, she took a position as a clerk at the Eisenhower White House. Colin delayed his entry into the job market with a spell at Harvard’s Graduate School of Business Administration. From there he enlisted in the U.S. Navy and at the time of his marriage was attached to the Bureau of Aeronautics in Washington, D.C. After leaving the White House, Laura remained in the Washington area, gaining a position on the faculty of the Potomac School, in McLean, Virginia.
When the couple decided it was time to start a family, they returned to the Princeton area. Colin, restless and eager to put his business training to good use, had left the armed forces and entered the world of management consultancy. In 1964 he took the bold step of branching out on his own. Meticulous study of the financial pages, bolstered by his own research, had convinced him that the home furniture market was an area sorely overlooked by venture capitalists. Unloved and untapped, it offered the potential for huge profits. Carpi, buttressed by an impressive array of investment bankers, singled out a Pennsylvania company called Lewisburg Chair & Furniture Corp as ripe for investment, handed over $4.5 million, and took control. Under Carpi’s leadership, the company changed its name to General Interiors, and expanded at breakneck pace. His cash flow projections were right on the money and the benefits of life in the fast lane soon showed in the Carpi household. There were four fine children, all at private school, Laura was a regular item on the “must be seen at” social circuit, and Colin found himself featured in the February 1967 issue of Fortune magazine, held up as a shining beacon of how modern entrepreneurial vision was shaking up an industry notorious for its conservatism. Yes, life in the mid-1960s was very good for the Carpi family. But it didn’t last.
The hairline cracks began appearing early on. Carpi’s aggressive takeover campaign of rival furniture companies had tested the nerve and the patience of his fellow directors; but when General Interiors’ sales figures started heading south, the boss found himself unceremoniously ousted. Carpi didn’t sulk. Instead, he bounced right back by setting up his own financial consultancy business. It did well. Although Carpi had survived one major crisis, another loomed. His marriage was in freefall. In 1967, quite by chance, Laura had taken her youngest child, David, to an optometrist named Dr. William Moskowitz for treatment. Over the course of several visits, Moskowitz, by his own admission, became “intimately involved” with Laura. Nor was this any casual fling; far from it, as together, he and Laura set about writing a book on child therapy. Colin exploded. He angrily confronted Moskowitz about the relationship and reportedly kept tabs on the couple, constantly lurking nearby whenever he suspected an assignation was about to occur. Even Moskowitz’s wife, Helen, marveled at the level and intensity of Carpi’s obsession.
As the 1960s came to end, so too did the Carpis’ marriage. By March 1970 Laura had walked out of the family home, taking the kids with her, and putting the family’s future in the hands of the lawyers. For the remainder of that year and the beginning of the next, the Carpis traded figurative blows in what became a bitterly contested custody battle. By February 1971 it appeared as if Laura was getting the upper hand. But no one was prepared for what came next. On February 8, 1971, with victory in the matrimonial battle almost within her grasp, the thirty-seven-year-old mother of four just vanished.
She simply evaporated, or so it appeared. That same evening, her disappearance was reported to the police and a routine alert issued. Whether details of this alert ever reached New York remains unclear. All the evidence suggests that no one at the OCME had ever heard of Laura Carpi. Until Lehary found that bullet inside the skull.
There was still, of course, no conclusive proof to say that the skull belonged to Laura Carpi, but on July 22, 1971, a team of Princeton detectives, accompanied by Laura’s dentist, Dr. Richard McClelland, arrived in New York. McClelland, who had carried out extensive and expensive work on Laura’s teeth just prior to her disappearance, had already studied the OCME’s dental charts, and while everything pointed to them representing the teeth of Laura Carpi, until he saw the skull itself, he wasn’t prepared to commit himself. A few seconds of close inspection yielded the clinching identification.
The pathologist who had authorized the original death certificate, Dr. John F. Devlin, now conducted a full autopsy. He could find no injuries to the rest of the badly decomposed corpse; all the trauma was restricted to the skull. Closer exploration showed that the bullet had penetrated the base of the skull and the cranial cavity—execution-style—and then continued forward from the back of the head to lodge behind the face. Since family photographs showed Laura as having very thick hair, perfect camouflage for the entry wound, and because the bullet remained inside the skull and therefore made no exit wound, it had been all too easy to miss. Devlin had been sloppy, no doubt about it, in not examining the skull more thoroughly, but the pressures at the OCME were unique and, at times, overwhelming. Helpern first, and then DiMaio, had railed constantly about the appalling workload imposed on their staff. Long hours, not enough sleep, too many autopsies; was it any wonder that mistakes occasionally crept into the system? Devlin had buckled briefly under this welter burden and would suffer the humiliating consequences. But for now, he needed to issue a fresh cause of death. It was understandably terse: “Bullet wound of head, base of skull and spine. Homicidal.”
Two days after the body of Laura Carpi had been identified, and one day after the autopsy confirmed that she had indeed been a homicide victim, a suspect was arrested and charged with her murder.
Interestingly enough, this wasn’t the first time that someone at the OCME had missed a bullet wound to the head. Back in the Gonzales era, a machinist named George Saleeby had been charged on August 1, 1953, with felonious assault after two people in an apartment block had been wounded
in two separate sniper attacks. Saleeby, age forty-three, had a long history of mental instability, and for most of his adult life had been undergoing psychiatric therapy of some kind. When arrested, he made no attempt to deny the shootings; instead, he astonished detectives by admitting he had also shot “the other guy!” This turned out to be sixty-year-old Frank Soska who on July 27 had been found unconscious on his apartment steps suffering from a head injury. He died that same day. The pathologist concerned, Dr. Emanuel Neuren, an acting assistant medical examiner, had decided, after hearing from family members that Soska suffered from severe heart disease, that the small pool of blood found at the scene was the result of Soska’s hitting his head on the steps as he collapsed from cardiac arrest. With nothing to suggest otherwise, he declared this a natural death and Soska was buried. Following Saleeby’s confession on August 6, Soska’s body was exhumed from Ferncliff Cemetery, Hartsdale, this time for a full autopsy to be carried out by Gonzales. Sure enough, he found a .22-caliber slug that had pierced the top of the head and lodged in the right side of the brain. As noted in the previous chapter, small bullet wounds to the head are the bane of medical examiners, and Gonzales was quick to defend his assistant—a summer substitute at the OCME—by saying that even very experienced pathologists had sometimes failed to detect bullet wounds, especially within the hairline. (Saleeby was later incarcerated in a mental institution.)
Helpern, who headed up the OCME at the time of the Carpi incident, had of course been around during the Soska fiasco, and gut instinct told him that the Carpi blunder was potentially much more explosive. So he went to work. All public entities, if they are to survive and prosper, develop an instinct for damage limitation, and the OCME is no different from any other. Not a word about the Carpi debacle found its way to the media. Somehow Helpern managed to keep a lid on the story for more than two years. So far as the New York press was concerned, Laura Carpi might never have existed.
Down in southern New Jersey it had been an entirely different story. Wealthy people who disappear under mysterious circumstances invariably generate torrid headlines and plenty of speculation, and Laura Carpi was no exception. While the local press crawled all over Laura’s life history, hard pressed Princeton detectives had more limited aims: they just wanted to piece together Laura’s movements on what they believed was the last day of her life.
At 8:35 on the morning of February 8, 1971, after the children had gone off to school, Laura had taken a call from William Moskowitz. Since the separation, this had been a daily ritual, him phoning every morning, as much to provide comfort and reassurance as anything else. He knew Laura was scared out of her wits. With the custody battle building to a turbulent crescendo, she had expressed concerns about her estranged husband, fearing that he would “go after her.” On this particular morning she sounded on edge, but she and Moskowitz stayed talking until 8:47 A.M. Before hanging up, Laura arranged to meet Moskowitz later that morning at eleven o’clock at his Somerville office, a small town north of where she lived.
Just a few houses away, a neighbor, Mrs. Joan McAlpin, also tried to phone Laura that morning. She wanted to know if Laura would watch the McAlpin children while she (Mrs. McAlpin) went out briefly. But each time she dialed between 8:35 to 9:05 A.M. the line was busy. After that she got no answer and eventually abandoned the idea, assuming that Laura must have left the house for some reason.
When the police asked around, they found only two people who admitted visiting Laura’s house on that dark, rainy morning: one was the mailman; the other was Colin Carpi.
According to his own account, he stopped by to drop off a five-hundred-dollar support check, as per his lawyer’s instructions. After slipping the check through the letter box, he had gone home and talked on the phone to his mother for about three quarters of an hour. Then he’d driven to Manhattan and the Morgan Guaranty Bank at Forty-eighth Street and Park Avenue, where he kept a safe-deposit box. After extracting some documents from the safe-deposit box, he then drove back to Princeton, stopping off at his lawyer’s office before going home. His first inkling that anything was amiss came when his eldest daughter, Jennifer, age eleven, had called from school to say that Laura had failed to pick her up and she wanted her father to come for her. That evening the Carpi children moved back in with their father.
Acting on a missing person’s report, the police searched Laura’s home. They found it neat and tidy, with no obvious signs of a break-in or theft. If Laura’s disappearance was linked to a bungled robbery, as some feared, then the burglar had been very picky or hopelessly amateurish, for the dining-room table groaned beneath a display of untouched and obviously expensive silver. In the foyer, a pile of mail lay on the floor, directly beneath a mail slot in the front door. On top of the pile, and slightly to one side, lay a plain white envelope without stamps or postmark and addressed to Laura. Inside was the support check that Colin had left that morning. Thus far there was little to arouse any great concern. But a few minutes spent upstairs in the bedroom changed all that. Laura’s clothes still hung in her closet. Patently, she had not packed for a trip, the strongest evidence yet that her disappearance had been sudden and unexpected. A further cursory examination failed to reveal anything else of interest, leaving detectives no alternative but to seal the house in readiness for a thorough forensic examination in daylight hours.
The next morning the police returned, accompanied by a friend of Laura’s, Helen Harper, who knew the house well. One anomaly jumped out at her right away: a large dining-room rug had gone missing. This was ominous. Just two days before her disappearance Laura had thrown a dinner party, and the following day Helen had returned to help Laura clean up the house. The rug had been present then. A microscopic examination of the oak floor beneath where the rug had lain revealed four tiny stains. To the naked eye they looked like blood, but only laboratory analysis could confirm this, one way or another. Andrew J. Nardella, a forensic chemist for the New Jersey state police, continued his search for clues. On the base of the dishwasher he found another smear of what again looked like blood. These discoveries forced the investigators to reevaluate a find from the preceding night—a pink-handled mop left drying in the kitchen sink.
This mop, together with all the samples, was sent to the laboratory for analysis. The results were mixed. As Nardella had suspected, all the stains found on the mop, the floor, and the dishwasher were human blood, but, as he’d feared, all the samples were too small to type using the technology of the day. Nevertheless, these discoveries did fuel the suspicion that something awful had befallen Laura Carpi, a suspicion amplified by Laura’s lawyers. They told the police of a recent stormy meeting with her husband in their presence, at which Colin had reportedly threatened Laura. Also, they alleged that one week before her disappearance, Colin had burst into Laura’s house and become so violent that she had been forced to fend him off.
The marital abuse angle received a further shot in the arm with the comments of another guest at Laura’s final dinner party. Mary Eager had been Colin’s former secretary, and a couple of days before the party, she said, Laura had phoned and asked if she would come and stay the night before the party, because the custody battle had become so acrimonious that she feared Colin might harm her. Mrs. Eager felt torn and confused by this development, as in all the two years she had worked for Colin she had never known him to be anything other than “kind and calm.” With her loyalties divided, it came as a profound relief when she heard that Helen Harper had stepped into the breach and would stay overnight with Laura.
In the days and weeks after Laura’s disappearance, Colin held up well under questioning. He professed a total ignorance of her whereabouts. Investigating officers had to tread carefully. Although the circumstances of the case did, superficially at least, raise legitimate questions, there was still nothing concrete to say any crime had been committed. Without a body, the authorities were reluctant to jump the gun and start filing charges, just in case they wound up with egg on their face
s.*
But five months on, with the discovery of Laura’s body, it was an entirely different story. Just two days after the remains of Laura Carpi were positively identified, her husband was charged with her murder. During the interview process, Carpi agreed to submit to a polygraph test, safe in the knowledge that no matter what the outcome the results would not be admissible into evidence.
Adored by law enforcement agencies, loathed by libertarians, regarded with thinly disguised skepticism by much of the judicial system, the polygraph, or lie “detector,” remains one of the most controversial weapons in the crime fighting arsenal. Some invest it with an almost mythical ability to ferret out the truth, for others it’s nothing more than an overhyped bundle of plugs, pens, tubes, and graph paper, thrown together and masquerading as science. Somewhere in between these polar extremes lies the reality.
Throughout history mankind has searched for ways to trap liars. Priests in India (ca. 500 B.C.) would herd suspected thieves into a darkened room with a “magic donkey,” whose tail had been daubed with lampblack. The suspects were then ordered to pull the donkey’s tail, having been warned that when the genuine thief pulled the tail, the magic donkey would speak and be heard throughout the temple. When the room was emptied a few minutes later, the person who still had clean hands—having not pulled the tail—was branded the thief and punished.
The Chinese came up with an even simpler method. Suspected liars were fed a handful of dry rice. If they could spit it out, so the reasoning went, they were telling the truth; if the rice stuck to their tongue, they were thought to have something to hide. As crude as it may seem, this Chinese “truth test” operated on exactly the same principle to that used by the modern polygraph—the belief that when people lie, their body reacts in ways that they cannot control. Whereas Chinese interrogators were on the lookout for a dry mouth as an indicator of lying, the polygraph operator searches for deception by studying changes in blood pressure, rates of breathing, pulse, and perspiration.
