The CBS Murders Page 2

  It was not. Nash suddenly appeared around the side of the van. In his hand he was holding the long-barreled pistol, the .22 with its silencer attached. Schulze began to run. Nash caught up with him in seconds, after a chase of no more than a few yards, grabbed his arm, brought the pistol up to Schulze’s right ear, snapped, “You didn’t see nothin’,” and then fired. Sicca heard another soft pop. Schulze fell to the pavement, dead.

  Nash started after Benford. But Sicca was sure that before that chase began, Nash had looked in his direction. “I had the feeling he was looking at me.” Terrified, Sicca climbed into his car, huddled low behind the wheel so as not to be seen, afraid to look and perhaps make eye contact with the killer. He started the engine, put the car in reverse, and began to back out of his spot. But his eyes were drawn back to the scene, unwillingly. Nash was chasing Benford, who was running toward the end of the pier. Nash caught up with him, grabbed Benford by the arm. Benford tried to break loose. Nash raised the pistol, fired into Benford’s head. There was another soft pop. Benford fell. He, too, was dead.

  Nash turned back toward the van.

  Sicca raced his engine, backed out, drove as fast as he could toward the exit ramp and down it. As he neared the gatehouse at the bottom, he glanced in the rearview mirror. Terror swept through him. The van was behind him, separated by only one other car. He was certain the killer must have seen him on the pier and so must be after him. All Sicca wanted was to get away as fast as he could. He reached the gatehouse at the bottom of the ramp. Normally, when only long-term parkers are in the lot, the gatehouse would be closed and empty. But this had been a ship day and so the attendant was still on duty to collect parking fees from anyone who might have lingered after the Rotterdam sailed. Sicca thrust his ticket into the hands of the attendant, William Streiter, and in a panic, shouted, “The guy in the van behind me! He just hit three people up on the pier!” Then he was out and onto the street, heading north and praying.

  In his booth, Streiter stared after Sicca in bewilderment. The van went by, not bothering to pause even to hand over the parking ticket. Streiter shrugged. He figured that what Sicca meant by his words was that there had been a minor traffic accident up on the pier, that the van had crashed into a couple of cars. He picked up the phone in the booth to call security, to ask a guard to go up to the pier to see what kind of damage had been done. There was no answer. He kept trying.

  Out on Twelfth Avenue, Sicca was racing north. His eyes were pinned hypnotically to his rearview mirror, watching. He caught sight of the silver van emerging from the ramp, watched as it turned south on the avenue. He took a deep breath. Maybe the killer hadn’t seen him after all. He made a U-turn and headed back to the pier, drove up the ramp and out onto the scene of the massacre.

  As he got out of his car, Sicca noticed that another CBS technician, Robert Schlop, a film and videotape editor, was partway along the pier, halted, staring at Kuranuki’s body, which sprawled on the ground ahead of him. Sicca and Schlop saw each other. “Hey,” Schlop shouted, “I think this guy’s hurt! You’d better call an ambulance!”

  “The police,” Sicca said. “I think he’s dead. And if you go on down the pier, you’re going to find two more.”

  Schlop stared at Sicca for a moment. Sicca turned quickly away, racing for the phone. He called police emergency, 911, and gasped out the news of the murders. Schlop followed a little behind, heading for another phone. He called CBS, asked for the news department, shouted the news, and told the news editor he’d better send a camera crew to the pier right away.

  3

  It took Chartrand, with Johnston and Hart, only a few minutes to reach the pier from Fifty-fourth Street. But by the time they got there, it was, Chartrand remembers, “chaos.” There were uniformed cops everywhere and more arriving every minute. There were television camera crews and newspapermen. Though it had gotten the call from its own man, CBS was beaten to the scene, and to the air, by New York’s independent stations, whose mobile news units, cruising as always through the city, their radios tuned to police frequencies, picked up the first alerts to go out from the 911 operator and raced to the scene.

  Within the next hour, nearly all the ranking brass from the city’s police department were on the pier, along with most of the city’s high elected officials. “Everybody was there,” Chartrand says. “The commissioner, the chief of detectives, everybody. I think even some son-of-a-bitch from Teaneck, New Jersey, showed up with scrambled eggs all over his cap. Guys from the Port Authority police. I never knew until then that they had guys with stars. Theoretically, the piers were under their jurisdiction, and we stayed away unless they invited us in or unless there was a serious crime, like auto theft or murder. Of course, this was a serious crime, so we settled the matter of jurisdiction right then.”

  Lieutenant Dick Gallagher had received the call at home, had received a second call a few minutes later as he was heading for his car, that call filling him in on what sketchy details were available. He raced across the George Washington Bridge and down the Henry Hudson Parkway, wondering all the time what was going to greet him when he reached Pier Ninety-two. “They told me,” he remembers, “that the three dead guys were from CBS. They didn’t know much more than that. And all I could think was, Jesus, have we got some kind of violent network feud on our hands.” He wasn’t the only one to have that thought at this stage; it occurred to almost everyone else, and if it were so, the implications were appalling.

  But Gallagher and the high brass still were on their way, their speculations only that, when Chartrand reached the pier less than fifteen minutes after the first shot had been fired. He took one look at the chaos, at the growing mob scene that could have been out of some Hogarthian nightmare, at what appeared to be the lack of any organized control. He immediately stepped in and took charge. He could see the bodies of Kuranuki, Schulze, and Benford where they had fallen, lying in pools of blood around their heads, untouched yet except for a cursory examination to confirm that they were dead. Neither the medical examiner nor the police photographers had arrived, and nobody was about to disturb anything until they had. It was almost impossible, with all the people milling about and more arriving every minute, to see much more than that. Chartrand could not rid his mind of the thought that maybe there still were more bodies farther out on the pier or concealed behind some of the parked cars.

  He did what had to be done. He ordered the area cleared, moving the television crews and the newsmen away from the scene and holding them at bay off to one side; maybe they could see something from there and maybe they couldn’t; he didn’t care, as long as they stayed out of his way.

  Sicca and Schlop were brought over and introduced to him, along with Streiter, who had been summoned from his parking booth at the bottom of the ramp. Chartrand exchanged a few words with them, just enough to hear about the van and the driver who had carried a long-barreled pistol and had shot Kuranuki, Schulze, and Benford. An alarm went out for a light-colored van, which was all anybody knew at that moment. Whatever else Sicca particularly, and Schlop and Streiter had to say could wait for later; there were things that Chartrand had to do first before he could pay much attention to their stories, before he could question them in full. They were handed over to other cops, separated so that when he finally did hear them their stories still would be fresh, they would not have had an opportunity to compare notes and, perhaps, try to resolve discrepancies, if there were any. They were isolated and kept waiting until he had time for them.

  He turned to the bodies then. And as he did, both the medical examiner and the police photographer arrived. “The bodies had not been searched until then,” Chartrand says. “So while we did the photographs and before the medical examiner went to work, we did the search of the bodies and the immediate areas around them, and each search was done by a uniformed officer in my presence, so that I would know what was found. The reason it was done that way was because I wanted it done that way, because normally you try to assume t
hat whatever case you go out on, you’re going to wind up with. So if you treat them all like your own from the beginning, you can do a better job.” Chartrand’s assumption was, of course, correct. It was his case from the start.

  Slowly and carefully they went over the bodies and, inch by inch, over the pier, now illuminated by blinding portable lights brought in by the police. Three shell casings were discovered, one near each body. And near Kuranuki’s body they came upon a pair of woman’s shoes, a plastic hairband and an open purse, some coins, car keys, and other things scattered around it. An examination of the keys showed they belonged to a BMW, and there was a BMW only a few feet away.

  Chartrand took the keys. “I did what every normal person does,” he says. “I tried to open the car from the driver’s side. And I couldn’t get it open. So we had to open it from the passenger side.” (The next day, a police locksmith pulled the lock from the driver’s side of the BMW and found a sliver of wood, a piece of a matchstick, jammed well up into it.)

  If neither Chartrand nor anyone else had any idea where or how the BMW, the purse, and the shoes fitted into the carnage that had taken place on the pier, still, naturally enough, their attention increasingly focused on the car. But those thirty-odd other cars on the pier, some of whose owners were now appearing to claim them and drive home after work, could not be ignored, either. There was no telling if one or more of them might be a piece of the puzzle as well. “We began a check of every vehicle on the pier,” Chartrand says. “Who they belonged to, what they were doing up there, everything. Some of them belonged to long-term parkers, some to people who had left them while they went on the cruise. It took a long time. Many of the people who were coming up to get their vehicles that night were denied their vehicles. They couldn’t get them. It was an inconvenience, of course, but a necessary one.”

  It was, though, that $20,000 German car that really intrigued them. The conviction that it must be central began to grow. In his initial brief exchange with Sicca, Chartrand had been told of the woman being dragged around the van, and the van had been parked alongside the BMW. Who was the woman? The car had New Jersey license plates, and the registration in the glove compartment listed it as belonging to a Margaret Barbera of 631 Cumberland Road in Teaneck, N.J. The driver’s license and other identification found in the purse, and the application filled out with Kinney System, Inc., operator of the pier parking lot and dozens more around the city, were all in the name of Margaret Barbera of 613 Granview Avenue in the Ridgewood section of Queens. That discrepancy caused hardly a lifted eyebrow. It is not an unknown practice for some New Yorkers to register their cars in New Jersey or Connecticut, where insurance rates are a lot lower or where, if they are deeply in debt, the car can be protected from the claims of New York creditors.

  Still, it did present a minor problem. “There was as a result,” Chartrand notes, “a little difficulty in establishing if this is the person who is gone.” There was no Margaret Barbera listed in the Teaneck phone book, but there was a Queens telephone number as well as the Queens address on the application she had filed with Kinney, and it matched the Queens number found on various items in the purse. Over the next hours, the number was called several times. There was never an answer.

  In that purse, too, the police found Camera Service Center identification. Detectives were sent to the shop on West Fifty-fourth Street. They were told that, indeed, Margaret Barbera worked there, had worked there for just a week. And she had left work just before six. She must have been going to the parking lot on Pier Ninety-two because she had told people that she had rented a spot there for her car.

  It was time to talk to the witnesses. Over the next hours and all through the night, Chartrand and others went through their stories, concentrating especially on Sicca, since he was the only actual witness to the shootings. He was questioned three times that night: a brief interrogation on the pier while Chartrand was busy with the bodies and the search of the crime scene; a second, lengthier conversation on the pier by Chartrand after he had completed that search; and a long session, lasting several hours, back at Midtown North. Sicca, Chartrand says, “was very astute. He was not the type of person who could be swayed or influenced. He laid it out for us. He told us what he saw and what he didn’t see. And he was very, very accurate. His description of the killer wasn’t very good because he never got a really good look. He was deathly afraid for his own life. He was afraid that his presence on the pier at that time had been detected by the shooter, and he was trying to look to see what was going on and still trying to remain unseen. And when he drove off the pier and looked in his rearview mirror and here’s the van right behind him, one car away, he was petrified. He was terrified that he was going to be taken. There’s no question that anyone who confronted the shooter while he was fleeing was going to die, or that he was going to make every effort to see that he died.”

  At the end of those first hours in the evening of April 12, then, the police were faced with a massive and grisly puzzle and they had only a few pieces, not nearly enough yet to make much sense of it, hardly enough even to begin to put the first pieces together. They had the bodies of Leo Kuranuki, Robert Schulze, and Edward Benford, all run down in that Pier Ninety-two parking lot and killed by single shots from a .22-caliber automatic. They were convinced that there had been a silencer attached to the pistol; the soft pops heard by the only witness, Angelo Sicca, indicated that. They had the shell casings from the pistol, casings found near the bodies. They had Sicca’s story that a woman, perhaps shot and killed, had been abducted and thrown into a white or silver van. The indications were that the woman’s name was Margaret Barbera; she was the owner of a BMW that had been parked next to the van, and it appeared to have been abandoned; its driver’s door lock had been jammed; her purse and, perhaps, her shoes were lying near Kuranuki’s body and the BMW. At this point, nobody had the slightest idea why she had been marked as the killer’s intended victim, if, indeed, that was what she was. It could have been, for all they knew, the violent end to a lovers’ quarrel, or she might have been the victim of a hired assassin; nobody could be sure of anything. They knew that the killer had escaped in a light-colored van and had headed south once he was out of the parking-lot ramp. They had, from Sicca, a sketchy description of him as a tall, slim man somewhere between thirty and forty, but Sicca had said that description was only a guess, that the light was dim, that he was making every effort to hide from the killer’s gaze and so never really got a good look. He was just making a guess, but he could be completely wrong about it.

  It was not much to go on. But there was a need to move rapidly. They were faced, even in those first hours, with a public outcry, and it would swell in volume as the days passed. This was the worst case of multiple homicides, aside from the internecine killings in the underworld, that the city had seen in years. The victims were three innocent, respectable men, bystanders, who had sought only to come to the aid of somebody in possible distress, and their reward had been death. The fact that they were employees of one of the most powerful organs of communications in the land, CBS, made the pressure for a quick solution even greater. CBS was not only playing the story for all it was worth in news value, as were all the other television stations and the newspapers, but also the network was offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the killer. The case thus became top priority for the police.

  4

  Had Donald Nash kept his head, there might have been no slaughter on Pier Ninety-two that April evening. There would have been only a single murder, the one he had been hired to commit. And the chances are, he would have gotten away with it. When Leo Kuranuki approached with his question, “What’s going on?” if Nash had replied, “It’s nothing. My wife and I were having a little argument, that’s all. It’s all over now. Thanks anyway,” Kuranuki probably would have turned away, and that would have been that.

  But Nash lost his cool. He had been edgy ever since reaching the pier. Fi
rst, there was the very fact of the murder he was about to commit and the wait for his victim to arrive. And then there was the hitch in his plan, that car parked on the left side of the BMW, the spot he had meant to be his. If he had been able to park there, the van’s sliding door would have been directly opposite the driver’s door of the BMW. It would have been a simple matter to lean out and shoot Margaret Barbera while she was unlocking her car, then haul her into the van through the open sliding door without ever having to leave the shelter of the van’s interior, then slide the door shut. It would have been over in an instant. Nobody would have seen anything, and the most anybody could have heard was the soft pop of the silencer-equipped automatic, a sound that would have made hardly an impression on that vast pier. But that other car was there. He had been forced to park on the passenger side of Barbera’s car and then, once he had shot her, drag her around the van. That had put him in the open, naked to any eyes during those critical moments. Kuranuki, Schulze, and Benford had seen him then. Kuranuki had approached with his question. Nash was sure he had no other choice but to kill the three witnesses.

  In panic, he sped off the pier. Sicca had nothing to worry about. With his limited vision and his preoccupation with too many other things, he had not noticed Sicca, and so the car up ahead meant nothing. Nash wanted only to flee from that place as fast as he could. He raced by the gatehouse, past Streiter, not bothering to slow and hand in his parking ticket. Streiter paid him no attention. He was turning over in his mind what Sicca had said about somebody hitting three people up on the pier, was reaching for the phone to call security and ask them to check on it.