Death on the River

by Diane Fanning

  It didn’t take long before she was fired from Mahoney’s, but she did bounce to a different position at the Silver Spoon Cafe, a restaurant on Main Street in Cold Spring known for its burgers, vegetarian options, and seven flavors of hot chocolate. It was there that she met Joel Goss, a musician, writer, director, and producer. He introduced her to the performers in his circle. Soon she was taking the stage with many of them to sing backup.

  Joel saw her as a cute little blonde with a delightful accent whose habit of hanging around the bar to listen to music after work brought a lot of attention to her. As a result, men constantly hit on her. He thought she handled those encounters well, avoiding conflict and hard feelings.

  One night, he saw a couple of guys pestering her, asking to buy her drinks. She told them, “You can buy me a drink if you drink one, too.”

  Joel sidled up to her and said, “You think you can hold your liquor better than they can and you don’t want them to think you owe them something at the end of the evening, right?”

  Angelika lowered her head. When she lifted her chin, she grinned and said, “Yes.”

  When Angelika lost her job at Silver Spoon, she moved up the street to Joel’s regular hang-out, Whistling Willie’s American Grill, with its vintage mahogany bar and 150-year history. There she continued to perform backup for other artists including Joel, trumpeter David Dash, and singer/songwriter Derek Dempsey.

  Joel appreciated her photography and talked to Angelika frequently about it. When her camera was stolen out of her car one night, he gave her his old camera so that she could keep shooting. Joel came to her rescue again, when she was having technical trouble with her photo-editing software, downloading his program onto her laptop.

  Another facet of Angelika that interested Joel was her old-world sense that spirits were always roaming among us. He thought it natural that she’d wound up in the Hudson Valley, the home of the Headless Horseman and generations of ghost stories in every village.

  One snowy evening, Angelika visited Joel and his family at their home. She was instantly besotted with the betta fish Joel’s son owned. She stood in front of the aquarium staring at it for a long stretch of time. When Joel approached her, she said, “I can feel a lot of ghosts in your house.”

  “Does that bother you?” he asked.

  “No.” She vigorously shook her head. “Not at all, except for one of them. He is over in that corner,” she said, pointing across the room. “I won’t go near that corner. He is angry or upset and I don’t want to get near him.”

  * * *

  Angelika’s stint at Whistling Willie’s lasted eighteen months—the longevity had more to do with the patience and forgiveness of her employer than with her performance. Her boss was pleased that although she had a pronounced accent, she had no trouble at all speaking and understanding English as a bartender and waitress. Her breadth of comprehension was vast and her perception of nuance in the language exceeded that of even some native speakers.

  She aggravated her employer, though, with her lack of work ethic. She hid downstairs to avoid working, conducted leisurely phone calls to get out of cleaning up, and often refused to accept table assignments when she wanted to leave early.

  However, Angelika was quick to pursue platonic friendships with customers and coworkers. She had a knack for making and keeping friends with ease. “She could walk into a roomful of strangers and know everyone’s name by the time she left,” Mike said. Coworkers and regular customers sought her out, and she fostered a sense of belonging in the community.

  * * *

  In the few years she’d spent in the United States, she’d been thoroughly Americanized. The customs of her adopted country quickly became second nature to her—even making her a big football fan. She loved cheering the chosen team at Mike’s football parties and worked hard at being a great hostess. But Mike was still bothered by her temper. Her angry moments were more extreme than those of anyone else he’d ever encountered.

  Angelika visited Latvia every two years. As 2010 was an off year, her younger sister Jelena visited her and stayed in Mike’s home. Mike said that while there Jelena played guitar but didn’t speak very often.

  In May 2010, Mike and friends were making their annual trek to the Fest for Beatles Fans in New Jersey. Founded in 1974, the event is billed as the “Original and Longest Running Beatles Celebration.”

  After a daylong party in the hotel room, complete with free-flowing alcohol, Mike suffered the frequent side effect of those circumstances that night. He wasn’t able to perform sexually. Most women blew those occasional failures off or blamed themselves, but not Angelika. She grew furious. She felt insulted and no longer considered Mike a real man.

  She refused to sleep in the same bed with Mike and moved all of her clothing and belongings into the guest room after they returned to Poughkeepsie. The intimate part of their life was over. At work, she sought romantic relationships with the same vigor that she’d employed in making friends. She was casual in dispensing her sexual favors. She got busy looking for a male replacement for Mike, even dating one 60-year-old patron.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Angelika seemed incapable of forming a lasting relationship with a man. It was as if she needed a male in her life to feel complete but really didn’t like them all that much. She expected them to support her financially, be in sync with her sexual appetites, and do everything her way. The moment she didn’t get precisely what she wanted, when she wanted it, she saw her partner of the moment as more of a nuisance than an asset. When that happened, she usually was off trolling for a new man without any downtime.

  Before long, Angelika met a man named Pat. At home, she gushed about him to Mike. They had a lot in common. First and foremost, he, too, was a photographer. She was also excited that Pat owned a kayak and loved to hear her talk about her experiences kayaking on the Baltic Sea in Latvia and on Lake Zoar in Connecticut.

  She spent an increasing amount of time with Pat, with them hanging out and going on photo shoots together. Pat was the photographer of the picture that raised a lot of eyebrows when Angelika later posted it on Facebook while Vince was missing—the shot of her in a kayak on the Hudson River, under an ominous sky.

  When Pat and Angelika decided to live together, Pat went to Mahoney’s to talk to Mike about their plans. Mike was polite and didn’t say what he was really thinking, but he was relieved that, at last, someone was taking Angelika off his hands.

  Pat was living with his sister at the time and moved Angelika into her house with him. His sister said there was no way that his girlfriend could live there, too, and she kicked Pat out on the street. The couple ended up settling in a tent on the Highland side of the Hudson River.

  Angelika and Mike’s breakup flowed along in an amicable fashion, up to the point when Mike made a demand. Everything went sideways when he insisted that she return the Hyundai Elantra—the insurance was in his name and he wasn’t comfortable letting her continue to drive it. Angelika was furious and wanted to get back at Mike in some way. On July 4, 2010, she drove to Mike’s house, accompanied by Pat in his car, to return the Hyundai and pick up her belongings. Mike waited patiently as she gathered her things, even though he was due at work. He certainly didn’t want to leave her alone in his house, knowing what she’d done to Richard Graswald.

  When she finished packing up her stuff, she said, “I want the cat,” referring to Myetka, a black cat with white spots given to the couple by Mike’s sister.

  “You’re living in a tent,” Mike said. “There’s no way you can take care of a cat.”

  “I want the cat,” she insisted.

  “No way are you taking our cat to a tent on the Hudson River.”

  “No!” she shouted, stomping her foot. “If you don’t let me have the cat, I’ll break into the house and take it.” She lay down on the driveway right behind Mike’s car, daring him to run over her.

  Mike tried to get her to move, but she refused. He looked to Pat, hoping for so
me assistance. But Pat just sat in his car, looking shocked and stunned by the drama unfolding over the custody of the animal.

  Finally, Mike relented. If he hadn’t, he knew she would stay there and make him late to work. He watched her drive away with Myetka, hoping the cat would be okay. He was still unnerved, however, by her threat of a break-in. The next day, he had a security system installed.

  He was right about the difficulty of caring for a cat when your home was a tent. Three or four days later, Angelika returned, cat in tow. She begrudgingly admitted that she couldn’t keep Myetka.

  Rodney Van Dunk, a friend of Angelika’s, told the media that in the aftermath of leaving Mike she spent a lot of time at a bar, which he said was sometimes frequented by swingers just over the state line in New Jersey. She was a weekly regular who arrived with three or four girls, all dressed up to meet men, he claimed: “She was like a vulture looking for a sugar daddy.”

  It seemed that Angelika didn’t look at it that way. She appeared to want the emotional and financial security of a committed relationship with a man she could love. With that mind-set, she was ready to fall for the charismatic Vincent Viafore when he came into her life. With gorgeous blue eyes and crazy dance moves that made everyone laugh, Vince checked all the boxes.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Mary Ann Pavone and Vincent T. Viafore both lived in the Bronx and worked in Manhattan. Vincent had just gotten out of the army when he met Mary Ann at a Saturday night dance in 1962. “We were just two crazy teenagers who eloped,” Mary said of their whirlwind romance. They had a proper wedding in a church afterwards to keep her parents happy.

  A year later, their first child was born: a daughter they named Laura. Vincent Alexander Viafore was the second child born to the couple in Bronxville, New York, on August 22, 1968. Laura was almost in kindergarten when Vince stole away her only-child status. In 1970, the family moved to Dutchess County and settled in Wappingers Falls, a village that had experienced explosive growth in the preceding decade. Wappingers Creek ran through the 1.2-acre community and continued flowing for about two miles before its convergence with the Hudson River.

  The family moved into a new development in a home on Granger Place, in a quiet middle-class neighborhood of rolling hills, cookie-cutter homes, and big yards for play. Their small ranch house had green aluminum siding and a large aboveground pool in the backyard enclosed by a chain-link fence. After only knowing city life, when Vince first arrived at his new home he was intimidated by the yard. He was afraid to walk on the grass. Their property abutted a nice stretch of woods that scared him, too, at first, but when he grew a little older he’d spent hours playing with friends there.

  Every Sunday, the family went to church and brought home bagels. During football season, they’d all gather in front of the television to watch the games. Each member of the family had their own team: Dad was a Pittsburgh Steelers fan, Mom rooted for the Miami Dolphins, Laura loved the New York Jets, and Vince’s team was the Dallas Cowboys.

  Vince’s maternal relatives were of Italian or Sicilian ancestry, and his paternal ancestry was a mix—his grandmother was Polish and his grandfather Italian. With that background, pasta was a big part of the family menu. It was served every Sunday with sauce that in the Italian tradition was called gravy. Vince’s maternal grandmother, who lived in Yonkers, looked after him whenever his mother was working. He spent Christmases with his paternal grandmother, who lived in Lakeville, Connecticut.

  In October of 1976, Vinny’s parents started a business called Construction Layout Men. Two years later, they got a DBA and started operating under the name Ridgewood Construction.

  Childhood friend Stacy Speirs met Vinny when they were both three years old and attended story time at a local day care. The two of them hit it off right away, and the friendship would be formative for both of them throughout adolescence. “Vinny was always a very mischievous boy,” Stacy remembered. She said that he was “hell on wheels” riding his Big Wheel, always ready to go down steeper ramps at higher speeds and often ending up with cuts, scrapes, and bruises for his recklessness.

  They lived less than two blocks apart in the neighborhood of Rockingham Farms. Vinny and Stacy went back and forth from each other’s homes constantly. As it was a new neighborhood, the trees hadn’t had enough time to grow and block the view between houses. When Stacy headed to Vince’s, her mother would call Vince’s mom and let her know her daughter was on the way. Mrs. Viafore would watch out the window for her arrival. She did the same when Vince went to the Speirs home.

  * * *

  For a decade, Stacy and Vinny would attend each other’s birthday parties. Because Stacy’s birthday was near Halloween, her mother hosted a costume party for her each year. When Stacy was eight years old, she chose a vampire costume for the celebration. When Vinny arrived, he was dressed in the same costume. Stacy burst into tears. She wanted to be the only vampire at the party. Vinny, seeing her distress, immediately took off his costume and said, “You be the vampire, I’ll just be me.”

  Growing up, Vince was an altar boy and an avid participant in Boy Scouts, in part because of his dad. Vince’s father came with him on overnight camp-outs and helped build the small cars to race on the little tracks. He met lifelong friend Kevin Beisswinger at Scouts. They also played on the same neighborhood Pop Warner football team, went to the same schools, and were part of the same bowling league.

  * * *

  Stacy fondly recalled growing up in a neighborhood where all the kids could ride bicycles without worry and everybody knew everyone. She said that most of the residents were transplants from New York City and had created the “Norman Rockwell” environment they’d sought out when they fled to the suburbs. Gena Vanzillota, who also grew up in the community with Vince, told the New York Times: “Half the neighborhood was Italian, the other half was Irish. It was almost like a little Bronx or Yonkers.” In warm weather, the neighborhood kids staged “World Series” wiffle-ball tournaments and went hunting for crawfish in the stream. In the fall, they held “Halloween Wars”—a battle between the Rockingham Farms community and the development next to theirs called Angel Brook. Vince lived on the street that connected the two neighborhoods. As a result, he had friends on both sides of the playful conflict. For the most part, he took the side of the neighborhood where he lived, but he couldn’t resist joining his Angel Brook friends for some egg, shaving cream, and toilet paper attacks on Rockingham Farms homes from time to time.

  Winter drove the kids inside for Monopoly and other board games in the basement. As Vince and Stacy grew up, their feelings for each other evolved. Vince was Stacy’s first crush, she admitted. One night down in the cellar, Vince kept trying to get up the nerve to kiss Stacy, but he was so shy that he kept backing down. Stacy took matters into her own hands and initiated the kiss. It was her first real kiss.

  After eighth grade, Vince followed his sister, Laura, to Roy C. Ketcham High School, while Stacy stayed in the Catholic school system. His high school friends described him as gregarious, a popular member of the wrestling team who would flit from table to table in the cafeteria like a “social butterfly.”

  Even though their paths no longer crossed very often, Vince was still there for Stacy in times of need. Ugly rumors began to spread through the gossip mill at Stacy’s parochial high school. Stacey was labeled a “slut” and shunned by many people who she had thought were friends. Stacy’s world was crushed, and she felt humiliated.

  When the stories eventually reached the public high school, Vince didn’t believe a word of the vicious tales. He sought out Stacy to tell her, “I don’t believe what they’re saying about you.” That simple statement healed a lot of Stacy’s pain, letting her know she was not alone. Vince took it even further, defending his old friend and her reputation to everyone who spoke a harsh word against her.

  Vince graduated in 1986. In the yearbook, next to his photo, his personal message read: “When the summer is gone, and school is almost on, pas
s the brew around, and you’ll get through safe and sound.” He had no idea of what he wanted to do with his life after college. He attended Dutchess County Community College for a year before leaving. He held a couple of jobs for a short time until his father connected him to a job with engineering and design firm Parsons Brinckerhoff, which contracted with the New York State Office of General Services Design and Construction Department. He continued his education while he worked, taking classes that helped him advance in his career. Vince worked as a Certified Code Enforcement Official, inspecting fire alarm systems and elevators, and later as a Project Manager. He would work at Parsons Brinckerhoff until his death.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  By 1990, Vince’s parents had separated and Mary Ann’s financial problems had begun. She obtained her estranged husband’s power of attorney and arranged for a fifty-thousand-dollar second mortgage on the family home. On September 30, 1994, Mary Ann filed an uncontested divorce petition. The marriage was dissolved a month and a half later.

  While his parents’ marriage was ending, Vince began dating a woman named Susan Giordano in the early nineties. Soon they were married, but, almost as if his parents’ troubles were foreshadowing his own life, Susan filed for divorce in February of 1997.

  “As a married couple they were like oil and water,” Mary Ann said. “Susan was a fiery little thing, but I liked her.” After splitting up, the two remained friends, both on Facebook and in real life. When Susan’s mother passed away, Vince supported Susan as if they were still married, assisting with the preparations for the funeral.