Chase Darkness with Me

by Billy Jensen

  She saw Henryk that night. In his army surplus outfit, he walked east on Decatur and found the street he was looking for, Albany Avenue. He turned south and then maybe realized how far off he actually was, as the numbers on the apartment buildings started at 6 and 8.

  “He was carrying a bag and holding a piece of paper in his hands, like he was looking for an address.”

  Other people saw him too. A stranger walking through Bedford-Stuyvesant at night, wearing army fatigues and carrying a bag just fourteen hours after the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history was not going to go unnoticed.

  Perry watched as Henryk walked south on Albany to a phone booth at the corner of Albany and Fulton. She then saw him walk back, down Albany toward Decatur.

  “I saw him coming up the block,” Perry recalled. “There were some guys following him.”

  Perry told me she saw three men. She said they had started following him south of Atlantic Avenue, home to what she called the “very desolate” Albany Projects.

  She didn’t see the shots, but she heard them. When she looked toward the building at 119 Decatur, she saw people scatter. Then she saw Henryk on the ground.

  “He still had the paper in his hands when he got shot.”

  She couldn’t give me a description of the three men who were following Henryk. I asked twice but knew—for whatever reason—it wasn’t going to happen.

  I knocked on every door within two blocks of the murder scene. Across the street and about ten doors down, I found one man who wouldn’t give his name but was willing to talk about what he heard that night.

  “Six, seven, eight shots, one after another,” he told me. “Not a machine gun, more like a 9mm.” He got out of bed and dialed 911.

  “The cops came pretty quick. There was a body across the street. The guy was dressed in army fatigues, lying on the sidewalk in front of the steps. His backpack was up on the step, at the door.”

  He told me the police had been there a year ago and had knocked on all the doors just like I was doing. “They were talking to people. But they were almost not expecting to get a lot of information. Everyone was kind of shocked about it. The people congregating outside the police tape were asking ‘Who knew him?’ It was strange to see a white guy. At first, I thought he was a soldier.”

  Joyce told me the police responded within one minute of the first 911 call. They recovered multiple casings, all from the same gun, indicating Siwiak was fired at multiple times but was only hit once. According to the certificate of death, M.E. case No. K01–4192, death was caused by “gunshot wound to the chest with lung and musculoskeletal injuries.” Siwiak’s wallet, with cash, was found on his body.

  Lucyana wrote to the Polish consulate, with the only result being a twenty-minute meeting and no follow-up. She contacted the police, who she said told her, “probably a black criminal shot him, that’s it.”

  But Lucyana doesn’t believe it. “Criminals stop it this evening, in New York, almost completely,” she said.

  “I think you see, he was in this army jacket and pants. There were many, many policemen came from other states. And probably they met him and ask him. Maybe [he was] looking like Arab. He have ID in pocket. He never understood about if police say ‘hand up.’”

  “So you’re saying you think a police officer shot Henryk?” I asked her.

  “Yes. Maybe he want to explain and show ID and put his hand in his pocket and they shot in this moment.”

  Ewa Siwiak agreed with her sister in-law. “Police in New York said it was a robber and nothing more. But my husband had five dollars in his pocket.”

  According to Joyce, Siwiak actually had close to seventy dollars in his wallet. But he swiftly rejected the idea that he was shot by a police officer.

  “It was a unique caliber gun,” Joyce told me. “If it was a cop, it definitely wasn’t a cop’s firearm.”

  Joyce said the police canvassed the area for three days but found only one witness who remembered seeing Siwiak walking in the neighborhood. “Do I believe there is someone out there that saw something?” Joyce asked. “Yes.”

  Maybe I would have a little more luck. I had already found one person who saw him walking, the same number as the entire New York Police Department had uncovered, although I wasn’t sure if it was the same person or not, because Joyce wouldn’t reveal his witness’s identity.

  I knocked on the doors along the houses of Decatur and Albany again, climbing up the twelve steps to the front door of each row house, the presence of the church down the street giving me a false sense of comfort.

  Of the people who answered their doors, most claimed no knowledge of the shooting. Those who did remembered it only as “the Polish guy with fatigues on.” I turned a corner, and a man in a tan sedan pulled up next to me and actually asked me if I was lost. A six-foot-four, skinny white guy with a dopey haircut walking around Bedford-Stuyvesant might very well have looked like he was lost.

  I told Joyce that I had walked the neighborhood and asked everyone I could find about the murder.

  “You took a really big risk,” he said. “You probably talked to someone who knows who did it.”

  I gave Joyce all the information of the people I spoke to, hoping they might help, but no arrests came.

  Lucyana brought her brother’s ashes back to Krakow, where the Siwiak family and his children’s schoolmates attended a funeral. “My mother tries to understand his death,” Lucyana said to me. “In ocean of death, his death was just one drop more. But she can’t understand. She saw the TV. She thinks he died in the World Trade Center.”

  Lucyana said that Ewa was coping the best she could as her children live life without a father.

  “She told me about her son. He’s thinking about his father’s death. He keeps saying that ‘I was very, very bad boy, and God said—’” Lucyana opened up her handheld translator, typed in the word kara and pressed translate. She showed me the word that appeared on the screen in English. “—and God said ‘penalty, punishment.’”

  I pleaded with Joyce to give me any information I could publish that might jostle some answers from the neighborhood residents. The caliber of the gun. The identity of the witness he talked to. The descriptions of the three men who had followed Siwiak. Anything. He told me it was an ongoing investigation and he couldn’t release details.

  In the newspaper, people read the story to the end. But in Siwiak’s story, there was no end. It was my first of a thousand dances with the guy who got away with it.

  After the story was published, I began receiving letters from people asking if I could help investigate the unsolved murder of their daughter, their sister, their son. A wave of sorrow and anger and a small, miniscule bit of hope washed over me. For five years, I had been reaching out to people to tell their stories. Trying to convince them that the story would be in careful hands. Now people were coming to me. People who had lost the thing they held most dear. It was overwhelming. But I knew this is what I was going to do for the rest of my life.

  • • •

  A few months later, a woman named Donna Kakura sent me a small article in the New York Post. The headline read POLICE SUSPECT VILLAGE SUICIDE. It was about her brother, a man named Brian Boothe. He was found dead on Christmas Day in his Manhattan apartment, the victim of a knife wound to the neck.

  Kakura told me her other brother, Tommy, had committed suicide just three months earlier, pumping carbon monoxide into the car he had been living in. The Post and the police thought they connected the dots: a gay male spending Christmas Eve alone, whose brother had recently taken his own life… It had to be suicide.

  “Brian did not commit suicide,” Donna told me.

  “We kept saying ‘It’s got nothing to do with it,’” his mother said to me. “Brian was the least affected by Tommy’s death.” He hadn’t spoken to his brother in years.

  His mother shared
with me stories about Brian from when he was little. About him putting on song-and-dance shows in the backyard. She remembers his beekeeping phase, along with the day the bees got loose and flew away and Brian cried. She remembers him staying home on Thanksgiving while his family went to the parade because he wanted to help cook, and the time he waited anxiously as the family tried his fresh-baked cookies, only to see everyone spit them out, realizing too late that he had confused baking soda for baking powder.

  And grown-up Brian seemed happier than ever. He had a good job in human resources. He was planning a family ski trip. A friend whom he had had lunch with the day before his death said Brian was gleeful and anxiously awaiting the birth of his other brother’s baby girl, who they planned on naming Cassidy.

  After work on Christmas Eve, Brian went to the Gap to buy presents for his two nieces. He stopped at a Rite Aid drug store, then the dollar store for wrapping paper, before returning to his apartment. He called his mother to finalize plans for Christmas dinner and then went out for a drink.

  Witnesses said they saw Brian at Phoenix Bar in the East Village at 6:15 p.m. Later that night, he was placed at Wonder Bar. Brian’s last known stop was the Cock on Avenue A, which he left around 1:00 a.m. The Cock is “a place you would go at the end of the night if you wanted to pick up,” Brian’s best friend, Tom Gestal, told me.

  But no one saw Brian leave. And no one saw Brian come home. There was no doorman at his Stuyvesant Town apartment, just a buzzer system. He lived on the eighth floor.

  When he failed to show up for Christmas dinner, Donna’s husband, Joe, and brother Jimmy drove to his apartment. Jimmy would sometimes crash at Brian’s place and used his key to get in. They opened the door and found Brian’s body in a pool of blood in the bedroom doorway.

  There was no sign of forced entry or a struggle. Three beer bottles were on the kitchen counter.

  The weapon, possibly a knife from Brian’s kitchen, was found in the apartment. Donna told me she thought that it had been found in the bag of gifts, since the family had yet to receive the stuffed animal Christmas presents back from the police.

  Brian’s laptop and cell phone were missing, but $160 was found in his wallet in his dresser drawer.

  The New York Post story cited unnamed police sources who said “it was probably a suicide.” The Daily News referred to unnamed “authorities,” who said Brian “may have taken his own life.”

  The autopsy concluded that he had died of a knife wound to the left side of his neck, which lacerated his trachea and esophagus. The family wanted to get an investigation going. They wanted to set up a reward. They wanted to get Crime Stoppers involved. They just wanted some action. But Brian’s death was still being classified, unofficially, as a suicide by the NYPD.

  “We can’t put up an award if the medical examiner hasn’t declared it a homicide,” a medical examiner’s office spokesperson told me.

  Brian’s death was finally declared a homicide in the middle of April (I guess they realized that he couldn’t have stabbed himself in the neck like that), and the family got their wanted posters by mid-May. By then, the killer’s trail was ice-cold. Anyone who might have remembered Brian or who he might have been chatting with at the Cock that night was long gone.

  “I am 99.9 percent sure he picked someone up at that bar,” Gestal told me. “I hung out with that guy so much. I know his moves.”

  The niece Brian so gleefully looked forward to meeting was born seven weeks after his murder. Instead of Cassidy, they named her Brianna.

  Life went on. So did his killer. A killer I was sure would kill again. A killer who might have been in town for the holidays, went to the bar, found his victim, killed him, and was gone by New Year’s. I wrote the story and tried to catch him—or at least put pressure on the police to do so.

  I failed. My second villain slipped away. But I was about to get a lot more chances to bring murderers into the light.

  Donna introduced me to the Long Island chapter of the Parents of Murdered Children, a group that provides resources for family members whose loved ones were victims of a homicide. She invited me to their annual luncheon at the Milleridge Inn in Jericho, where they presented me with an award for telling Brian’s story when no one else would. After lunch, all the family members of all the victims went out on the front lawn, carrying balloons with the names of their loved ones written in Magic Marker. Then they all let them go into the air. Hundreds of them, flying over Jericho Turnpike and out toward the Long Island Sound. Some of the families stayed on the lawn and watched until they couldn’t see their balloon anymore. I drove home shaken.

  A week later, the letters started arriving, almost all of them ending with two words: “Please help.”

  When the mother of a murdered child writes you—a mother whose child’s killer is still on the loose—it’s hard not to get involved.

  The difficult task of the American homicide detective is compounded by the ever-growing mountain of bodies. The five thousand murders that go unsolved each year pile on top of each other. If a detective is working on a murder investigation and five more people are killed that week, they have to drop what they are doing and investigate one of the new ones before the trail goes cold. The image of a detective taking home files every night to work that one case that haunts them is not Hollywood fiction. It happens. But it’s just one or two cases. If you get killed in America, there is a 38 percent chance your killer won’t be caught.

  The mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers writing the please help letters told me about how the police were not calling them back. They asked what they could do to get the media to pay attention. They talked about how everyone had moved on and forgotten.

  I began writing about as many victims as I could. The doctor who was suffocated in her home in ’96. The brunette who went missing while walking to a bar the night before Halloween in ’81. The torso with the heart-shaped peach tattoo found in a state park in ’97. The flight attendant who was raped and murdered while on a layover in Boise in 2000. The elderly woman who was found stabbed to death inside her burned-out Wantagh home in ’85.

  I talked to family members and witnesses and possible accomplices.

  “He got mad and hit me in the stomach and said ‘we ain’t going to the law,’” Pee Wee Walton said of one of the men who assaulted Nancy Santomero and Vicki Durian before they were murdered outside a music festival in West Virginia in 1980. “We’ve got to clean this place up,” he heard another man say. “We might want to party here again.”

  “I know you are watching over us,” read one of the messages written on the utility pole at the intersection where fifteen-year-old Jessica Savarese was murdered by an anonymous driver in 2004. “The emptiness inside is killing me,” read another.

  I maneuvered from hit-and-run stories that veered into wonky government sagas to tales of unidentified remains found near the million-dollar homes on the Gold Coast of Long Island.

  “In all likelihood, she was killed elsewhere and carried here,” the Nassau County chief of detectives said to me as we walked through the Muttontown preserve woods to where a skull was found in 2001. A few hours after the skull, detectives found what was left of her skeleton, crunched in a fetal position between two trees.

  I created a section in the newspaper—which had now morphed from the New Island Ear into a weekly called the Long Island Press—that I called “Long Island Confidential,” a hat tip to the James Ellroy novel. Each week, I penned a feature story, profiled a cold case, and maintained a running list of Long Island’s top ten fugitives, a subjective list chosen by me.

  Every week, I hoped my reporting, my prying, or just my shaking of the trees might lead to a new piece of information to get the family closer to an answer. Every week, I came back with nothing.

  The killers were still out there, not only escaping justice for the stories I told but free to kill again, believing they
had the right to take someone else’s life. That thought makes my teeth gnash and my lip snarl and my jaw fill with a scream. A scream that always has the same chorus. What they took away, seemingly so easily, was a person. “This was a person!”

  A person who could watch a sunset and feel the wind against their cheek. Smell fresh-cut grass or listen to a Bowie song. A person who could scrape up enough money to buy themselves a hot-fudge sundae. A person who could still close their eyes and dream.

  That’s what the media refuses to understand. No matter how down and out someone may seem, no matter how many drugs they took or arrests they had or rock bottoms they hit—they could have still done all those things. Those things that make us human.

  And one day, someone came along and took all those things away. Every single one of them. And left them with darkness.

  I envy the people on TV with their hands in the air praising glory to God on high. I wish I could believe in an afterlife. More than anything. For me, death is not a door or a window. It is the most terrifying thing I can think of. It’s the definition of nothing.

  And no one should be given the right to deliver another into that abyss before their time. Those were the villains I wanted to chase. To make things right, yes. But also to maybe save the next person from that nothingness coming too soon.

  4.

  Have You Seen This Man?

  Long Island, 1978–1998

  When I started first grade, I rebelled hard against the early bedtime that came with elementary school. I was now supposed to wake up at 8:00 a.m. every day? And for what? Nap time replaced by math? Picture books like Where the Wild Things Are replaced by chapter books like Frog and Toad are Friends? I guess I wasn’t convinced it was worth it, and bedtime became a problem. My mom handed nighttime duties over to my dad. And Dad started to tell me a story. His story, beginning from when he was a little boy all the way up till when I was born.

  The first night started with 1950s postwar picket-fence stuff: Cub Scouts, diving under desks for air raid drills. Then he came to the part of the story about Paul Jud.