The CBS Murders Read online

  So now they had Nash and they had the van, and both were safely ensconced in Kentucky, for the moment at least. But there was the realization that unless they did something fast, they could lose both. It would not take long for the news to travel south that the van was not, after all, a stolen vehicle, that it legally belonged to Nash. When that happened, he would get into it and drive on his way. They moved on two fronts to stop that.

  There was the bench warrant out on Nash as a fugitive from justice for failing to surrender on April 13 and begin serving his twenty days for the conviction for cloning a taxicab medallion. Into court went a Manhattan assistant district attorney to obtain approval for a request to Kentucky for Nash’s extradition back to New York on that fugitive warrant. Normally, such a request would be taken under advisement; the court would consider the merits. When the charge was minor, as inconsequential as this one, it might normally have resulted only in laughter and sarcasm, not official approval. But this was different. The assistant district attorney made his motion. It was granted on the spot. Down to Kentucky went the request for extradition. And down to Kentucky went Detectives John Wales and Bobby Patterson to bring Nash back, if the Kentucky court agreed to honor the extradition request.

  Down to Kentucky, too, went Detective Richie Chartrand and a Manhattan assistant district attorney, and with them went FBI Agent Bob Paquette and a federal lawyer. They wanted a look through the van and what might be in it. “We get down there,” Chartrand says, “and we make an application for a search warrant. The judge is a very precise and accurate man. He not only wants to know why we want to search the van, he wants to know where the van is, and it’s in a Kentucky State Police garage, and he wants to know how many yards and how many feet from the roadway it is, at what intersection that is. We provide him with that very precise information and he grants us a search warrant. And now we do a search of the vehicle. We do many searches. We spend eleven and a half hours searching the van. We have a team of pathologists from the Kentucky State Police. We have forensic experts. We have a seven-man and one-woman search team. And every time we go into the van, we come back out with more. We do everything according to the book, what was retrieved, who retrieved it, who took possession of what, and we photographed everything before it was removed from the van.”

  The list of items that was discovered and removed from the van runs to pages and numbers more than 150. It included some very interesting and incriminating things. Though Nash had tried to do a thorough job of cleaning the interior at the same time he was painting the van, there was much he had missed. And so Chartrand, Paquette, and their search teams and experts came up with a set of New York license plates, the same plates that had been on the van when it was registered to park on Pier Ninety-two and that had been spotted by the FBI near Barbera’s apartment. They found wooden matches. They found eleven rounds of live .22-caliber ammunition in the back and another live round in the pocket of a light-colored wind-breaker. They found splashes of blood on the floor in the rear, on the doors and door handles, on the ceiling; and elsewhere in the van. Nash had tried to scrub them away when he cleaned the van, but enough traces remained for good samples to be collected from every spot where the blood was discerned. In the well underneath the driver’s seat, they discovered a spent .22-caliber shell casing. Impressions were taken of the van’s tires, and scrapes of paint from the outside. They found a parking ticket from the Newark Airport long-term parking lot under the visor.

  “Everything,” Chartrand says, “was put into the custody of Paquette and myself, with the exception of the shell casing. I took possession of that.” And Gallagher says, “He painted the van, changed the plates, drove all that distance, and the asshole’s asshole is approximately ten inches from the missing fourth shell casing all the while. After shooting Barbera, the shell casing apparently ejected into the van. No wonder we went crazy looking for that fourth shell casing.” It was only right. The rules of the game were that the murders belonged to the New York cops, and the FBI was helping out only because its major witness in a fraud case had been among the murdered. The casing, of course, might be directly related to the murders.

  Chartrand and Paquette made the next plane north, heading back for New York. Chartrand took the shell casing to the police lab for examination; Paquette took the blood samples and other evidence to FBI labs for analyses. What came back was damning. The shell casing found in the well of the van identically matched the shell casing found in Jenny Soo Chin’s car and the three shell casings found next to the bodies of the three CBS victims. All five had been fired in the same .22-caliber pistol. The impressions of the tire tracks were a match with the tire tracks found on the pier. Some of the blood samples matched Margaret Barbera’s blood; while there were no blood samples available from Jenny Soo Chin, other samples found in the van were consistent with the blood of an Oriental woman.

  “You’ve got one hell of a case against the van,” an assistant district attorney told Chartrand when he laid it all out for him. “But that’s it. What about Nash?”

  Nash was in jail in Kentucky, waiting for a hearing to decide whether the state would honor New York’s request for extradition. Wales and Patterson arrived to take him into custody and return him, should the court agree. Nash appeared at the hearing with a local attorney, Larry Cleveland of Frankfurt. The judge read the request, looked at Nash. Did Nash agree to waive extradition and permit himself to be escorted back to New York? Cleveland responded that Nash did, indeed, waive extradition. The judge looked at Cleveland, looked at Nash, and asked where Nash had found his lawyer, since he was a stranger in the city. Nash said he had looked through the telephone book’s listing of lawyers and chosen Cleveland. Was there any particular reason? the judge asked. Because, Nash replied, he had once had a good time in Cleveland and so the name might be a good omen. The judge looked at him. He had read the papers, knew the reports, knew that some of the papers were calling the man before him Donald Bowers. So the judge said, “Tell me, did you choose the name Nash because your parents once had a good time in the back seat of a Nash?”

  With that, the judge ordered Nash turned over to Wales and Patterson. He summoned the two detectives to his office to wait while he signed the papers. In the office with them was Larry Cleveland, putting in a claim for a few hundred dollars as his fee for representing Nash, a claim against $2,500 in $100 bills found in Nash’s wallet when he was picked up. The judge took Cleveland’s request under advisement. Until he, or somebody else, knew whether the money Nash had actually belonged to him, he wasn’t about to start disbursing it among the claimants. He signed the papers so that Wales and Patterson could take custody of their prisoner. Wales, the eternal jokester, suddenly interjected, “Your Honor, I want to ask you something. About deathbed statements, declarations, that kind of thing.”

  The judge said, “What?”

  Wales said, “Suppose we’re riding in the plane. I know you admonished us not to talk to the defendant here, and our district attorney in New York told us the same thing. But suppose we’re in the plane and the pilot comes over the loudspeaker and says, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve developed engine trouble, both engines are going out any second and the plane is going to crash.’ And all of a sudden, the plane does a turnover and starts heading down. As it’s going down, Nash turns around to me and says, ‘Listen, I want to make a clean breast of things before we go out. I really killed all those people.’ And at that point, the plane levels out and flies straight. Would that be considered, would that be eligible to take into court? Did I violate his Miranda rights? And what if my brother happens to be the pilot on this plane? It’s an amazing coincidence, but what if it was so?”

  The judge stared at Wales. “You’re kidding,” he said. “You’re brother’s really a pilot on this plane?”

  Laughing, Wales remembers the scene. “He thinks,” Wales says, “I’m going to do that. He thinks I can make the plane go into a tailspin. It’s a commercial plane, a hundred people on tha
t plane. Then he knew I was kidding. But it was a thing there for a minute.”

  The two New York detectives took Nash out to the airport and boarded the plane with him. On the plane, too, was an army of New York reporters, flown down to witness the events in Frankfurt. On the first leg of the trip, from Frankfurt to Roanoke, Va., Wales and Patterson kept Nash separated from the reporters. It wasn’t hard. Nash had nothing to say to anyone. “Our entire conversation was, ‘You want a drink?’ ‘You want a sandwich?’ ‘You want to go to the bathroom?’ That was it. He just sat there staring out of the window, staring into space,” Wales says.

  In Roanoke, there was a layover for an hour or so. Back in New York, word had just reached Chartrand from the police lab that the shell casing found in the van was a match with those found on the pier and in Chin’s car. Wales heard the news when he called the office from the airport in Virginia. But, he was told, this was strictly secret. The news was going to be held tightly, not let out to anyone.

  Back on the plane, Wales and Patterson, knowing what Nash did not know, had a feeling of some elation. And they thought they knew something the reporters didn’t know, either, which made them feel even better. “The reporters on the plane,” Wales said, “they see us and they come back where we’re sitting. They want to talk to Nash. So I said, ‘Listen, the guy’s a prisoner. We’re instructed by the court and we’re not going to talk to him. You can’t really ask him anything pointed, and I doubt if he’s going to answer you, and we don’t want you to annoy the guy. But if he wants to talk to you, that’s okay with us. We have no objections at all.’ So now, one of the reporters says to him, ‘How do you feel now that the bullets match? The bullet found in your van matches the bullets found on the pier?’ I don’t know how they knew about it. They must have got it from somebody down in ballistics. When this guy says this, Nash, there was a visible change in him. His eyes are misty. You could see how upset he was. Now, like he realized. He thought it was all bullshit, that we got him on the misdemeanor thing. Now he realizes that we’re doing some more things, things that he doesn’t know about, especially with the bullets. It was like he was all of a sudden all screwed up. Let me tell you, we were annoyed with the fucking newsies for doing that. It put us in a bad position. Now we’ve got a guy we might have a problem with. We don’t want him to try to escape or go crazy or go wild. But he never said anything. But you could see an actual visible change in his mood. He looks like he seemed almost ready to cry.”

  They landed in New York. Nash was hustled to the Brooklyn House of Detention. Theoretically, he was there only to serve his twenty days.

  21

  They had a very good case against the van. Now they began to build an even better case against Donald Nash. Some of the pieces came through the drudgery of good, solid police work. Some came almost through accident, because somebody knew somebody, because somebody remembered something that hadn’t seemed very important at the time.

  Everything was done according to the rules. When a search warrant was needed, a search warrant was obtained before anyone went anywhere. When somebody had to be warned of his Miranda rights, he was warned of his rights. Nobody was about to do anything that would jeopardize this case.

  With those search warrants in hand, the New York cops, the FBI, and local New Jersey cops descended on Nash’s house in Keansburg. Scuba divers went to work in the creek that flowed behind it, laboriously sifting through the mud, screening whatever they brought up. In addition to all the junk that filled the creek bottom, they dredged up a.22-caliber shell casing. It matched the five they already had, and it had been fired from the same pistol. Into and around the garage went the investigators, and immediately several very interesting things attracted their attention. On the floor of the garage was the outline of the van in black paint, the same black paint that had been used to recolor it. And, indeed, Nash’s nephew Thomas Dane admitted that he had gone shopping with his uncle for that paint and had helped him with the job. There was nothing suspicious about it, Dane maintained. The van had a number of chips and scrapes and dents, and grease stains that just wouldn’t come off, so repainting was the only solution.

  In the outside walls of the garage, toward the rear, there were a number of small holes, like the holes made by bullets fired through during target practice. But there were no holes on the inside. However, when the garage was measured, the outside proved to be larger than the inside. The investigators went to the inside rear and found a door leading to a small storage room, now nearly empty. The walls of that room were peppered with bullet holes, and on the floor there were other shell casings, all from the same gun. An intensive search was made for that gun, of course, but it was never found. Not that it was needed. With all those shell casings that had been fired from it and that could now with a certainty be tied to Nash, it would have been nice to have but it was, in reality, extraneous.

  Almost at the same time, other cops were checking on that Newark Airport parking ticket that had been found under the visor of the van. With it, they could now prove not only that the van had been in the long-term parking lot on the night of the murders, but that it had entered some time after those killings, long enough after so that Nash could have had plenty of time to do what he was then suspected of doing. They went through every parking ticket from the lot for that period, accounted for every one except that ticket that had been issued to the car that had followed Dane into the lot. Now they had that one, from the visor of Nash’s car. It had been issued to a silver van; it was found in a black van.

  There was more. “By chance,” says Chartrand, “I get a phone call from a guy I used to work with, a retired detective. He says, ‘My future son-in-law works in a sporting-goods store in Rockland and he remembers this fellow that you now have arrested, that he came into the sporting-goods store and he purchased ammunition.’ He tells us the type of ammunition. We ultimately go back up there and they have a record of the transaction.”

  It was all closing in around Nash. The FBI computer check showed that his van had been parked near Barbera’s house. That van had become a regular parker on the pier within days of Barbera, had entered and left in a pattern that showed it was tracking her. There was the record of phone calls, available because of Nash’s ingrained habit of charging calls to his home phone. There was the series of calls from public phones out in Ridgewood, within blocks of Barbera’s house. There was the call from his office on Forty-fifth Street to his home in Keansburg, and a second call within a very short time of the murders from the booth across the street from FBI headquarters in lower Manhattan to Dane, and that call had been made only a short distance from the alley where Barbera’s body was found.

  It was, of course, all circumstantial. The one witness to the murders on the pier, Angelo Sicca, could not identify Nash, and the two teenage witnesses to the abduction of Jenny Soo Chin likewise were uncertain of the identification. But circumstantial evidence, when there is enough of it and it is good enough, can be just as damning and just as convicting as direct evidence, and the circumstantial evidence here was just that.

  There were, of course, two witnesses who could have rung the final knell, whose testimony alone could well have been enough to convict Nash. But Alberto Torres, the superintendent on West Forty-fifth Street, had a very serious lapse of memory. He could remember nothing, he knew nothing, he had seen nothing; in fact, he said, he hadn’t even been in New York on the evening of the murders. And Henry Oestericher knew nothing about the murders or about Nash. All he knew were stories about Margaret Barbera and the very bad things she had done to his friend and client Irwin Margolies. It would have been nice to have had their real stories. But even without them, there was little hope for Nash.

  There was now no question that Nash was the shooter. But there still was the major question: Who had supplied the gun and aimed it? As the evidence against Nash mounted, so, too, did the indications that the man who had bought and paid him had to be Irwin Margolies, despite the original convicti
on that white-collar criminals just don’t do such things. Going through Nash’s telephone records, the cops came up with a series of calls, from December until March, from Nash’s phone or from Dane’s, which Nash used frequently, to Oestericher’s private office number. Some of those calls were made when Oestericher was not in residence, but when Margolies was using that office as his own. Some of those calls made while Oestericher was there to answer were followed almost immediately by calls from Oestericher to numbers where Margolies was known to be. All circumstantial, of course. What was needed was a direct link between Nash and Margolies, but unless Oestericher decided that truth was the better part of valor, it didn’t then seem likely that they would come up with one.

  There were other directions to go, certainly, with regard to the jeweler. He was, even after the murder of Barbera, still proclaiming his innocence in the matter of the Candor-Maguire fraud, still asserting that it had all been Barbera’s doing, that she had stolen the jewelry and the cash, that she had masterminded and carried out the swindle without his knowledge, that he was an innocent victim of her scheming, and that her murder must have been the result of some private peccadillo of which he knew nothing. If he was concerned that something might emerge to tie him directly to Nash, he gave no sign.

  What would have helped, certainly with the fraud investigation, were the Candor books that Barbera had made away with and hidden. One of Jenny Soo Chin’s relatives told police that Barbera had stored a suitcase she said contained very important records in the Chin garage in Teaneck. But a few weeks before Chin’s abduction and murder, Barbera had retrieved the case. It had not been seen since. The constant and thorough searches of Barbera’s apartment had failed to uncover it or any records, though much else had been found and gone through, mostly of a private nature not relating to her work at Candor.