Vulgar Favours

by Maureen Orth

  The Harmony Lofts building, where David lived, was like a scene out of Seinfeld. Young urbanites, including “Kilo Bale,” the drummer with the rock band Flip, lived there and were on friendly terms, visiting one another’s prime loft spaces. David could frequently count on his neighbor across the hall, graphic artist Perry Del Ghingaro, to look after his dog, Prints. Jennifer Wiberg, the building’s caretaker, was also friendly with David, whom Perry said at one time had glowingly described Andrew as “very wealthy and very intriguing.” Yet Perry also characterized David as “very select.” Both he and Wiberg felt “very honored” to make David’s guest lists. “We were the only people in the building invited to his soirees.” On Saturday Perry Del Ghingaro and Jennifer Wiberg both met “Andrew from California” in the elevator. Again, Andrew was not particularly pleasant and did not engage in conversation.

  The weekend wore on, and Andrew was not getting his way. Around midnight Friday, Stan Hatley and a friend ran into Andrew and David walking toward the Saloon from the Gay Nineties. Andrew was anything but cordial to his once bar buddy Stan. “The meets and greets and talks were very forced,” Stan remembers. “Hey, what are you doing?” he asked. “Nothing,” Andrew answered curtly. “I just came out to visit Jeff.” Stan thought Andrew looked “despondent and subdued.”

  Saturday night David and Andrew went to dinner at the popular Monte Carlo restaurant, but then separated. Once again, after hitting the bars, Andrew was alone. He apparently spent Saturday night at Jeff’s apartment in Bloomington, not far from the Mall of America, but nobody knows for sure. David’s next-door neighbor, Scott Carlson, was awakened about 3 A.M. by loud yelping sounds he heard coming from David’s loft, number 404. They lasted several hours, until 7 A.M. He later told police he thought David “might be having sexual intercourse with his homosexual partner,” a “white male with black curly hair, about five feet, eleven inches,” whom he had been dating “for about a month.” Later that morning David called a lawyer friend to cancel a brunch they had set up.

  About 10 A.M. on Sunday, Andrew was at Jeff’s when Jerry Davis, Jeff’s pal from work, called to leave information for Jeff about Jerry’s gay-softball-league game that afternoon. Jeff rarely missed these games. Andrew politely took the message and wrote it down for Jeff on a yellow legal pad, signing the note, “Love, Andrew.” About 12:30 that afternoon, Joe, who had lent his expensive Andrew Marc leather jacket to Andrew the night before DIFFA, saw Andrew and David going into a book-and-record store on Calhoun Square in the Uptown area of Minneapolis.

  While alone at Jeff’s, Andrew apparently took the opportunity to call friends in San Diego. He left a message for Dominick Andreacchio saying he hoped to see him soon in San Francisco. And for the first time in months, he called Norman Blachford to say good-bye. He told Norman that he realized their relationship was really over and that he was moving to San Francisco and would stay in touch. Blachford was somewhat puzzled by the call. He already knew that Andrew was leaving.

  Jeff drove Jon Hackett directly from the bed and breakfast to his job at the Old Navy Store in the Mall of America. On the way Jeff said that he had to talk to Andrew about something “pretty important,” but that it would only take about half an hour. “Jeff didn’t say he knew what it was about,” says Jon. Jeff also said he would not be around on Monday or Tuesday; he had “personal business” to transact. Hackett says he did not question him further. He did not feel it was right to pry into Jeff’s personal business. Jeff next showed up at Jerry Davis’s softball game, making fun of the “prissy queen” ballplayers. Jerry thought he was in a mean mood, but another coworker, Ben Guzzi, who was there with his wife, later described Jeff as pretty upbeat. Jeff went home early to bake a cake for Jon Hackett’s birthday. A few friends were coming over, he said.

  The only other sighting of Andrew that afternoon was at about 5:30, when a tenant saw him get into the elevator by himself and get off on David’s floor. He didn’t want to make small talk. When Jon Hackett returned to Jeff’s apartment at about 6 P.M., he took a nap, and Jeff turned the phone ring off. Jon Hackett slept through Andrew’s call, but at 8:00 Andrew left Jeff a voice message without identifying himself, just giving Madson’s number and saying, “Give me a call, because I’d like to see you.” Jeff immediately called him back.

  Still, Jeff was willing to blow off Andrew entirely, and he suggested to Jon that they go to a movie. “No way,” Jon said. He wanted to dance on his birthday. At about 9 P.M., Jeff left in his 1996 Honda Civic to meet Andrew in a coffee shop. He said he’d rendezvous with Jon between 10 and 10:30 at the Gay Nineties. That never happened.

  PART

  TWO

  17

  Murder

  THE FIRST BLOW to Jeff Trail’s skull landed with knockout force. It was delivered with an expensive claw hammer that had been out on the dining room table in David’s loft. David had been doing some renovation work to the kitchen, so he had his tool box handy. Jeff apparently raised his arms to shield himself, because he was hit several times on his left wrist and hand. He then crumpled to the ground as he was furiously struck by a total of twenty-seven repeated blows to the face, head, and upper torso with both the blunt and claw sides of the hammer. Either a hammer blow or the force of his own weight falling on his Wenger Swiss Army watch caused it to stop at 9:55 P.M.

  David’s caller I.D. noted that someone—presumably Jeff—had called David’s loft at 9:08 P.M. from the nearby coffee shop where Jeff had planned to meet Andrew. The caller I.D., connected to the loft’s intercom, also shows that David received a call from the intercom at the Harmony Lofts entrance at 9:45 P.M. David did not have a buzzer system, so Jeff would have had to have called and waited for someone to come down and let him in—either Andrew or David, who habitually walked his dog before the ten o’clock news came on, and may have been on his way out to do so at 9:45.

  It takes at least three minutes to get from David’s loft down to the front door, and an equal amount of time to take the elevator back up. Whatever conversation took place once Jeff was inside the apartment was brief. There is a dent in the wall to the left of the door, suggesting that one of the hammer blows missed Jeff. But another, which connected while the door was open—before a neighbor heard it slam shut—sent a splattering of blood across the hallway. Pieces of brain matter lodged in the door frame itself.

  Jesse Shadoan, David’s neighbor across the hall, later reported to police that about the time Jeff arrived he heard someone shouting: “Get the fuck out!” Then he heard the door slam shut and thumping noises that went on for from thirty to forty-five seconds, after which he heard footsteps racing down the hall and water running. He stuck his head outside his door but saw no one. No other residents reported hearing anything.

  When Andrew had requested meeting with Jeff on Sunday night, both of them were in precarious financial shape, Andrew far more seriously than Jeff. But Jeff was also overextended, addicted as he was to expensive toys—several TV’s, a karaoke machine, a $300 blender from Williams Sonoma, two top-of-the-line tennis racquets, several $600 suits. Jeff was in debt mainly to his parents, but people in San Diego, Robbins Thompson for one, believe that he also owed Andrew several thousand dollars.

  Andrew might therefore have been pressuring Jeff to sell steroids for him in the Midwest, where great profits could be made; Andrew may have come to Minneapolis to collect what Jeff owed him; or perhaps he offered the steroids as a way of paying Jeff money that Andrew owed him. In any case, Jeff was unwilling to let him stay around, either as a pal or a business associate or the boyfriend Jeff told his sister that Andrew wanted him to be. Andrew had tried several times in the recent past to extend his stays in Minneapolis, but Jeff had always told him no.

  If Jeff didn’t want to have anything to do with him, and if David was rejecting him once again, Andrew was cornered. He had lavished time, attention, and money on both of them; he could not bear to think that he had been used. Now the two men he most cared for in the world were tu
rning their backs on him, banishing him to struggle alone, insecure, depressed, and overweight. It was all their fault. They were forcing him to expose the sham of his grandiosity like a mangy peacock.

  The years of pathological lying, combined with the habitual use of crystal meth and an addiction to violent pornography, had left Andrew dangerously unbalanced under all the layers of lacquered pretension. The moment in which Andrew lost hope and picked up the hammer encapsulated not only all of his envy and self-pity but also his cold-blooded willfulness to keep the con going. He would not allow these ingrates to cast him out. He would keep the mask on. He had never allowed even Norman Blachford a measure of emotional control, even though Norman was granting him his every material wish. How dare Jeff and David dump him? He suddenly unleashed his fury.

  AS A SEASONED manipulator who had dominated David in rough sex, Andrew now had to convince him that Andrew could always say that David had been present during Jeff’s murder—or perhaps even pin the murder totally on him—whether he had been there or not. How could David disprove it? After all, it took place in his loft. But even if David had been there, too horrified to intervene—and that possibility seems unlikely—wouldn’t Prints have barked? It would seem so, but Andrew was a skillful dog handler, and Prints liked him.

  But why wouldn’t Madson try to escape? Certainly Andrew could count on David’s abhorrence of violence to keep him in check. If he got out of line, Andrew could put the handcuffs and leg restraints and duct tape that they had once used for pleasure to a more practical use. By the same token, if David naively thought he could call on his famed powers of persuasion, he may have reasoned that he could cajole Andrew into telling the authorities a story and turning himself in. But if David wasn’t 100 percent sure that Andrew didn’t have Mob connections, or if David felt under threat, then he would have had to tread lightly and try to reason with the unreasonable. David did not have many options.

  The first thing that had to be done was to get the body away from the front door. It had fallen on an Oriental area rug David had kept in the entryway. Jeff’s body was then rolled up in the carpet, dragged ten feet past the dining room table, and rested against the back of the living room sofa.

  Most of the nine-hundred-square-foot loft was open space—only the bathroom, at a right angle to the front door, was completely walled off. The kitchen area was next to the bathroom against one wall, and the dining room table mostly occupied a middle area between the kitchen and the living room. A partition defined the sleeping area behind the living room in the front of the loft. The sofa, which faced several feet away from, and parallel to, the dining room table, was the other border for the living room area. Jeff’s body resting against the sofa could be seen from the front door and the whole kitchen dining area. His legs were sticking out and covered with a neatly folded, off-white afghan.

  There was a lot of blood to clean up. Cloth and paper towels were used to wipe up the floor. Nevertheless, two sets of bloody footprints—one barefoot, one shod—were left on the hardwood floor. Jeff’s watch and navy ring were removed and thrown into a plastic drawstring bag, along with a bloody Banana Republic T-shirt and the bloody hammer and towels, and the bag was placed under the table. Jeff’s pager, which would be activated repeatedly and fruitlessly over the next few days, was left on his corpse.

  JON HACKETT WAITED for Jeff at the Gay Nineties, wondering why he never showed up. At 3 A.M. he went to Jeff’s apartment. Having no idea that Andrew was staying with David Madson, he did not immediately call there. When he woke up at 8 A.M. and realized that Jeff was still not home, he started calling hospitals and the jail. He also called Jeff at work, but there was no answer. All day Monday Jon tried to reach Jerry Davis, Jeff’s closest friend at Ferrellgas, but he was out seeing customers and did not respond.

  Jon asked his father, a jail administrator, whether he could call the police if he got the vehicle identification number, or VIN, of Jeff’s car. His father said yes. But the Bloomington police weren’t interested—they said that if he couldn’t reach Jeff’s parents, he’d have to wait seventy-two hours before filing a missing-persons report. “They advised me that Jeff was a big boy—twenty-eight—he could do whatever he wanted to.” Jon Hackett knew Jeff had not told his parents he was gay—Jon hadn’t told his parents either—so he was loath to call the Trails. He hoped that Jerry Davis would call them.

  Jon attended classes on Monday and went back over to Jeff’s at 8 P.M. “Everything was just as I left it. A light was still on over the stove. Nothing had changed.” He searched records and tracked down Jeff’s bank number. After listening to Andrew’s message on Jeff’s answering machine, he called David’s number twice late Monday night but got no answer. He hoped to hear from Jerry, but Jerry did not return his calls all day.

  On Tuesday, Jeff’s employers began to be concerned and Jon was finally able to talk to Jerry Davis, who hadn’t heard from Jeff either, which he said was unusual. Jon kept trying the hospitals and the police, who finally said, “Who are you? Are you his lover?” Jon said, “Well, yes. He’s still missing. I want to file a missing-persons complaint.” Both Jon Hackett and Jerry Davis begged the police to intervene, but the police told them, “We can’t do anything until we hear from a family member.”

  ON MONDAY DAVID did not show up for work, even though he had an important meeting at 9 A.M. That afternoon David’s next-door neighbor, Kathleen Sullivan, came down the Harmony Lofts elevator. When it opened on the ground floor, she was face to face with David and Andrew. “Hi,” she said to David, smiling. “Hi,” he answered desultorily. She thought he seemed “crabby or unhappy.” Andrew said nothing.

  On Tuesday morning, while having breakfast, Kathleen Sullivan looked out her window and saw two men, one of whom she thought was David, walking a dog along the river, where David usually walked Prints. The dog was on a leash—not David’s usual custom. The man walking the dog was in shirtsleeves; the man he was with was wearing a jacket. Both were too far away to identify.

  Meanwhile, at John Ryan Company, David’s coworker and friend Linda Elwell got a call from the woman who was David’s contact for a big bank job he was doing. “I tried calling David all day yesterday. He has assignments due, and we have no idea where he is,” the woman told her. “I really have a bad feeling.” Linda said that she and Laura Booher would go check on him at his loft.

  At 12:15, Linda and Laura went to David’s loft, and as Laura knocked on the door she thought she heard whispering inside. The dog began pawing and scratching, but no one answered. Linda, who had been with David recently when he found his car scratched, was afraid that Greg Nelson might have come after David. Nelson was the obvious object of her anxiety.

  The two women returned to the office and called the police to file a missing-persons report—Linda was afraid that David might have fallen in the bathtub—but police suggested meeting them at the building instead. About 2:30 P.M., two patrol officers arrived, but they did not go past the foyer. “They put up so many barriers,” says Linda Elwell, telling them that the locks and door could be damaged and that they and David would have to negotiate payment. They also said they might hurt the dog if it became aggressive.

  The police were going by the book. From their point of view, the rules of forced entry depend on “probable cause.” In order for anything found in a forced entry to be admissible as court evidence, there must be probable cause for police to have entered and searched the premises. In this case the police did not feel justified. David had been seen the day before. As for Prints, if he gave them any trouble, they explained, “Don’t worry, lady, we’ll just shoot him.”

  Linda and Laura didn’t want the responsibility for anything happening to Prints, so they left a message for the building superintendent, Jennifer Wiberg, asking her to go into the apartment with her passkey. The women then asked neighbors if they had seen David. One tenant told them she had seen him walking his dog the day before, and that calmed them somewhat. But Linda left an additional
message for Wiberg: “Based on my gut you may wish to bring police protection.” Meanwhile, another coworker of David’s had telephoned Monique Salvetti to express concern. Monique promised to drop by the loft on her way home from work.

  About 3 P.M., Ginger Beck, a first-floor resident whose large corner loft looks out on both Second Avenue North and Third Street, says she happened to see David and Andrew walking toward the building on the Third Street side. She can’t remember if Prints was with them. “David’s face looked blotchy, as if he had been crying. He was disheveled.” But Andrew was gesturing and “talking a mile a minute.”

  Jennifer Wiberg, the building’s caretaker, got the message from Linda and Laura about 4 P.M. Accompanied by her neighbor Perry Del Ghingaro, who also knew David, Wiberg knocked loudly on 404 and called for David. Prints started barking as he always did when someone was at the door, but there was no other response. Using her passkey, Wiberg opened the door.

  “Oh, my,” she exclaimed. “Oh, God.” She immediately saw what appeared to be a body rolled up in the Oriental rug. The thought raced through her mind that the body looked larger than David, but the corpse had already started to swell. “Son of a bitch,” Del Ghingaro said. “Someone killed David.”

  Wiberg called Prints and waited out on the stairwell—in shock—while Perry Del Ghingaro gingerly took a closer look. He saw blue-jeaned legs and feet in white tennis shoes sticking out and noted the large amount of blood. They returned to Jennifer’s apartment and called 911. It took between fifteen and twenty minutes for the police to respond. The uniformed officers were the first police to go into the apartment, just long enough to smell the odor of the decomposing body and verify that no one was there. Then they called homicide. Police headquarters was in the old City Hall building just a few blocks away.