by R. G. Belsky
But the daughter stayed onstage, too—and, at some point, she walked up to the microphone and stood next to her mother.
And at that moment, just when I thought this press conference couldn’t get any weirder, it sure did.
“What are you doing?” the daughter, Miranda, screamed at her mother.
“I’m doing what I have to do.”
“Why are you doing this to Daddy, you bitch?”
“Miranda …”
“You’re going to ruin everything!”
“Your father ruined everything a long time ago. It just took me until now to realize that.”
“I hate you!” Miranda yelled and then began pummeling her mother with her fists.
The place was in total chaos now.
This was like Big Brother and Jerry Springer and Maury Povich all rolled into one.
The ultimate reality TV show.
Except this really was happening.
And it sure made good TV.
CHAPTER 29
“FROGMEN IN THE water,” Cassie O’Neal said on air, standing with a microphone at the shore of the Hudson River. “That’s what they called the police unit of expert divers that goes looking for bodies or evidence or anything else connected to a crime case.”
She was interviewing the head of the police diving unit, who was standing next to her.
“This must be a very tough job, Commander,” she said.
“Trying to find something—possibly something very small—in water like this always is,” he said.
“I can imagine,” Cassie said to him. “I was scuba diving once down in the Bahamas, and I lost my face mask as I came toward the beach. The water was only about three feet deep. And I pretty much knew where I’d dropped it. But I spent nearly an hour looking for it. I couldn’t see underwater, the current kept taking it further away—when I finally found it, the damned thing was maybe twenty feet away already from where I’d started looking. It was pure luck that I found it at all.”
This was Cassie at her best. A pretty woman playing dumb and helpless—which wasn’t that hard for her to do—who won people over with that persona. The people she interviewed. And the viewers of Channel 10, who seemed to love her, according to all the ratings numbers I saw. Maybe Cassie really did know what she was doing. Maybe she was smarter than all of the rest of us.
“That’s what these guys have to do,” the commander said. “Only on a much bigger scale. Whatever we’re looking for could have moved hundreds of yards away from the original drop point after a few days in the water. Or it could be wedged under a rock. Or it might have broken up and be in pieces. There’s all sorts of possibilities, most of them not very good.”
He looked out at his men in the water.
“They start in one spot and make a complete search of every square inch within that radius. Then they expand the search a bit wider. They keep doing that until they’ve been through every place it might be underwater. If it’s still there, we’ll find it.”
Cassie shook her head in astonishment. “I’m glad I don’t have your job,” she said.
“And this is spring weather too.” The commander smiled, looking up at the bright sun in the sky. “Just think what it’s like in December.”
We were broadcasting live from the search site in Tarrytown, NY, preempting all the normal Channel 10 daytime programming. So was pretty much every other station in town too and all the cable news channels. There were also all sorts of other people at the scene livestreaming it, blogging and tweeting the search details. This was the media event of the day, and no one wanted to miss a minute of the drama that was being played out here.
A mob of onlookers and curiosity seekers had gathered on the shore and were watching the whole thing too.
One of them was Nancy Atwood.
I guess she wanted to be here for whatever the cops found at the scene she’d pointed them to. For better or worse, she wanted to know the truth about her husband. That’s what she said at the press conference, and she was playing it out until the end. We tried to talk to her, of course, but she refused to make any comment to anyone. She simply stood there with a grim, determined look on her face—the same look she’d had at the press conference—as the divers continued to search the water.
I wasn’t sure how long the search was going to go on for, or—more importantly—how long Faron would allow me to keep broadcasting live from the scene at the expense of our regular daytime programming.
But, as it turned out, I didn’t have to worry about making that decision.
“I think we found something,” one of the divers called out from the river. “It’s a bag.”
All of the media rushed close to find out more.
“Still intact?”
“That’s affirmative,” the diver said, holding it up for everyone to see.
“What’s inside?”
“Looks like a jacket. A man’s sports jacket.”
“Anything else?”
“Wow, look at this!”
One of the divers held something else up. It was a piece of wood. From a wooden statue.
The same kind of wooden statue used in the murder of Grace Mancuso.
“Good job, guys,” the commander said. “Come on home.”
There is often a moment in a case where the evidence all begins to come together in a rush. I had seen it happen a lot of times over the years. You found out one thing, then another, and suddenly it all began to make sense. That was what was happening now.
The jacket the divers found at the bottom of the river—just where Atwood’s wife had said he’d gone that night she followed him—was definitely his. Nancy Atwood identified it as the one he was wearing when he left the house that morning. There were blood stains on it. The blood stains were Type O Negative. Grace Mancuso’s blood was O Negative. The lab was running further DNA tests.
The piece of wooden statue was a perfect match for the broken piece in the Mancuso woman’s apartment. There was blood on it too.
They even had a fingerprint match now. One of the sets of prints found in the apartment turned out to be Bill Atwood’s. No question about it—Atwood had been in the apartment, even if he continued to claim he didn’t know her. They had proof of that now.
At that moment, Bill Atwood was the top trending topic on social media, along with popular hashtags like #lockhimup and #justicefordoraandgrace. There were still a lot of unanswered questions about both murders. But the evidence was closing in on Atwood from all sides, and the public salivated for more, like a lynch mob with a rope eager to exact quick vengeance.
And the noose for Atwood was getting tighter …
CHAPTER 30
“SO, THE COPS think Atwood kills Grace Mancuso, goes back home to Tarrytown—then panics in the middle of the night, gets up, and drives to dump the incriminating evidence in the Hudson River?” Jack Faron asked.
“That’s the theory,” Maggie said.
We were at the afternoon Channel 10 news meeting. But this was no ordinary news meeting. Faron was there, and he hardly ever came to my news meetings. Even more surprising, Brendan Kaiser was there too, eager to find out every new detail about the case.
I’d gotten a pretty impressive email from Kaiser even before the meeting too. It said: “You’ve led the way for us on this story all along. Great stuff, Clare! I can see now why so many people told me that you were the best reporter we had. You’ve made all of us at this station very proud. Congratulations again on breaking this big story for us!”
Yep, he sure was happy. Of course, this made Atwood—not him—the target of the Mancuso murder investigation. I wondered how Kaiser would have reacted if all the information had pointed to him, instead of Atwood.
“Anything that links him directly to the Gayle woman’s murder too?” Faron wanted to know now.
“Not yet,” Maggie told him. “But we’ve already established they had a romance in college before he left for a year in England. There has to be a connection betwee
n both murders.”
“I agree,” Kaiser said, speaking for the first time since he’d been at the meeting. “I think that’s it then. We have the answers we were looking for. Let’s just run with all this at 6 tonight on the newscast. Then we can move on to other stories.”
Everyone else in the room nodded in agreement with him, except me.
“There’s something still missing here,” I said.
“What are you talking about?” Kaiser said.
“Why would Atwood kill Mancuso? What was his motive for murder?”
“She was blackmailing him,” Faron said. “You already did the story from the woman at Revson who said Mancuso bragged to her that she was sleeping with—and planned to extort a huge amount of money from—a very important man, a man who had an extremely high profile in the media. A real ladies’ man, the woman said Mancuso told her, that she planned to destroy. That has to be Bill Atwood.”
“But what did Mancuso have on Atwood that she was using to blackmail for all that money?” I asked.
“Sexy videos?” someone suggested.
“Steamy emails?” another one said.
I shook my head no.
“It still doesn’t make sense. Atwood’s weathered a lot of sex scandals worse than that. The Underhill woman said he didn’t even seem to care if she told anyone about their hotel room romp. That he thought that kind of a reputation just made him even more popular with a lot of voters—like JFK and Bill Clinton and Trump had with their own sex scandals. It wasn’t that big a deal to him. No, there has to be another reason Mancuso was blackmailing Atwood. Something else she was holding over him. Something Atwood was afraid enough of her making public for him to resort to murder. I’m just not comfortable until we find out what that is.”
“There’s always loose ends on every story,” Faron pointed out, and he was right.
“Loose ends,” I said, “that’s the problem. “We still don’t know why those other names—including yours, Mr. Kaiser—were on that list. And why Atwood would ever leave a piece of evidence like that list, including his own name, at the scene. And why kill Dora Gayle weeks earlier, who he hadn’t seen or heard from in more than thirty years?”
But what I thought didn’t really matter a few minutes later, because events dictated what happened next.
“Breaking news!” Maggie shouted, looking down at a text on her phone. “The police just arrested Bill Atwood!”
In the end, it was Maggie who came up with the final answer we were looking for.
She burst into my office with a big grin on her face, punched her fist triumphantly into the air, and shouted to me: “Yes!”
Being a trained investigative journalist and all, I was pretty sure she’d come up with something.
“We tracked down Dora Gayle’s roommate at NYU,” Maggie said excitedly. “The woman she shared an apartment with during her senior year of college. She says Dora dropped out of school right before the end of her senior year. Guess the reason she dropped out? Dora Gayle was pregnant!”
“Bill Atwood’s baby?”
“Has to be.”
I nodded. “Dora used to talk about having a daughter, people said. And about someone taking her baby daughter away. It apparently happened a long time ago and no one ever knew where the daughter was or if she even really existed. So now we know that she did.”
“And Atwood murders Gayle to make sure she doesn’t reveal this secret from his past,” Maggie said.
I made a face. “C’mon, why would he care? Even if he did have a baby with this woman all those years ago when they were in college, so what? Like I said before, Atwood’s weathered much worse sex scandals than this. It’s interesting, damn interesting. But I’m still not sure what this has to do with any of the rest of it. And what does Grace Mancuso have to do with any of it?”
That’s when Maggie hit me with the real blockbuster revelation she’d come up with.
“Dora Gayle’s baby would be how old today?” Maggie asked.
I did the math in my head. “A little over thirty, I guess.”
“Grace Mancuso was thirty-three.”
“But she’s from Pennsylvania. We know who her parents are.”
“I checked that out. Went back looking for birth records with the Pennsylvania Department of Records and then tried the Mancuso parents again. Guess what I found out? Grace Mancuso was adopted.”
“Jesus, are you thinking …?”
“That’s right. The Mancusos adopted her the same year Dora Gayle was pregnant with her baby. The baby she said someone took away from her. I found out that the adopted baby the Mancuso family got—the one who grew up to be Grace Mancuso—was from a hospital in New York City. It all fits together, Clare. This could be the link. Why Dora Gayle’s name is on that list found in Grace Mancuso’s apartment. Because Dora Gayle was her mother. Her biological mother.”
“Which means if Bill Atwood was having an affair with Grace Mancuso, he was having sex with his own daughter! Did he know that? Did she know?”
“Oh, I think she knew,” Maggie said. “I think it was all deliberate on her part. She found out somehow about Atwood being her biological father. Then she seduced him into bed—which wasn’t difficult, given Atwood’s penchant for sex with attractive young women—in order to blackmail him once she told him the truth about who she was. Atwood might have survived other sex scandals. But he could never survive this one. If the public found out he was having sex with the woman who was his own daughter, he would be ruined politically and couldn’t get elected dog catcher.”
“The ultimate sex scandal,” I said.
“It was a diabolical plan by Grace Mancuso to shake down the man who was her biological father for big money.”
“He was either going to have to pay her off or let her destroy his life and career by going public with the scandalous revelation that he was having a sexual relationship with his own daughter. My God, that would have been devastating news for him to find out when she finally told him what he had done.”
“And that must be the reason Atwood killed her,” Maggie said.
CHAPTER 31
THERE IS A pretty amazing video of Bill Atwood being interrogated by police after his arrest.
We ran it on Channel 10. But so did all the other TV stations, newspaper websites, cable networks, and pretty much everyone else. The damn thing went viral very quickly. It was a news phenomenon for a while in terms of massive crime coverage. Kind of like O.J., Jodi Arias, and Amanda Knox all rolled into one.
No one ever discovered how the video got out. The NYPD made videos of all their interviews now—in part to protect themselves against possible police brutality or harassment charges—but these videos were only supposed to be used for court or other law enforcement purposes. Except—in this era of instant social media at anyone’s fingertips—it’s not really that shocking someone got ahold of a copy and blasted it all over YouTube and the rest of the Internet.
Everybody thinks they know everything there is to know about police interrogations. They watch Law & Order reruns, and that makes them an instant expert. They know about the good cop-bad cop routine. They know about getting to the guy before he “lawyers up.” They know about reading him his rights. They will look at you solemnly and tell you with great authority: “The interrogation is the most important moment in the prosecution of any criminal case.”
These people know nothing about police interrogations.
Over the years, covering cops and the crime beat, I’ve learned each interrogation was different. You never knew exactly what was going to happen in that little room. Just because a suspect has a high-priced lawyer, it doesn’t mean he won’t still pour his heart out to the police. Every interrogation has a life of its own.
I remember the big story that taught me that lesson. A college student disappeared on the Upper East Side after a night out on the town. The search for her made the front page for days, until the body turned up in the East River. Beaten, raped, and
then drowned, according to the Medical Examiner’s report.
The cops’ hunt for the killer went nowhere at first. Then they got a break. Someone remembered seeing the girl at a singles bar the night she disappeared. Spotted her leaving with a guy. And, miracle of miracle, remembered the license plate of the car. The problem was the car turned out to belong to a rich kid named Eric Theibold. Theibold’s father ran a big corporation, his mother was a patron of the city arts and a major social force. Both of them showed up with their son for the interrogation, bringing with them a lawyer from the top criminal defense firm in town. No way Eric Theibold was going to give anything up in this interrogation, everyone figured.
Except it didn’t turn out that way. The kid sat there while his family and his lawyer explained why he wouldn’t answer any questions. Then he started talking. By the time he was finished, he’d confessed to the murder of the girl and also to six other unsolved cases involving young girls. It turned out that he hated his mother, and he imagined it was her when he was killing the women. He confessed because he enjoyed the pain it caused his mother to hear this, the psychiatrists’ report said later. Go figure.
Then there are the ones you think will be easy but aren’t. They picked up a guy once who put a woman tourist into a coma by hitting her in the head with a brick. Six witnesses saw him do it, and his fingerprints were all over the brick. They get the guy in the interrogation room and figure this one’s a piece of cake. But he doesn’t say a word every time they ask him a question. Just keeps asking for a lawyer. Some legal aid lawyer finally shows up, and it turns out she’s an ambitious one—looking to make a name for herself on this case. She confers with him, says he wasn’t read his rights properly and demands the charges be thrown out. Eventually they were, on legal technicalities. Later, I asked the lawyer how the guy knew so much about the law. She said he told her he found out by watching a Clint Eastwood movie.
