The CBS Murders Page 3

  Once out on Twelfth Avenue and heading south, Nash forced himself to slow, to keep within the speed limit, to obey the red lights. The last thing he needed at that moment, with Barbera’s body in the back of the van, was to be picked up for breaking a traffic law. He needed time to consider what course to follow now. His original plan, to kill Barbera undetected and then drive her through the Lincoln Tunnel and dispose of her body where it would never be found in the New Jersey swamps, was impossible now, he was convinced. The alarm must be out, and the exits from the tunnel blocked, cars and vans being checked. (He was wrong, as it turned out. That alarm still was some time in the future, and he could have gone through the tunnel and emerged safe. But there was no way he could have known that.) He had to come up with an alternative. He drove south along the avenue as far as Forty-fourth Street, turned east there for two blocks, turned north on Tenth Avenue, drove a block, and then turned west on Forty-fifth Street. He stopped halfway down the block, parking at the curb in front of number 436. It had taken him, even with all his extra care and caution, less than eight minutes to reach his destination from the pier.

  The building on West Forty-fifth Street was home to Vinny Russo catering, purveyor of breakfasts and lunches to the movies and television shows being filmed on location in the city. Like many longtime businessmen and inhabitants along the West Side docks, Russo had known Nash for years and had a certain tolerant fondness for him. Some months earlier, when Nash had mentioned that he was setting up a small electrical contracting business and needed some desk space to operate out of, Russo had told him, sure, he could put a desk and a telephone in a back corner of Russo’s shop. Nash had taken possession, installed the telephone and an answering machine, and every few days, when he was in Manhattan, he would stop by to pick up his messages, what few there ever were. The shop normally was closed well before six in the evening and, Russo later insisted, Nash did not have a key, he had never given him one nor permitted him to have one. That day, though, there was no need for a key.

  Leaving the van, and Barbera’s body in the back, out at the curb, Nash rushed to the door of Russo’s shop. It was unlocked and open. There had been a major water leak within the past hours, and the building’s superintendent, Alberto Torres, was inside, finishing the repairs, cleaning and mopping up. He and Nash had been friends for years. When he saw Nash, though, he was surprised not just at his appearance at this unexpected hour but also at his condition. Nash was in extreme distress; he was shaking, out of breath, and drenched with sweat; he looked as though he had just come out of a shower or a steam bath. Nash barely greeted Torres. He made straight for his desk, picked up the phone, and dialed a number in Keansburg, N.J., the home of his twenty-nine-year old nephew, Thomas Dane. Nash knew that if there was one person in the world he could depend on in time of need, it was Dane. Dane idolized him, looked on him not just as an uncle but also as his best friend, a father. There was nothing Dane would not do for him.

  The line was busy.

  Nash hung up, dialed again, this time his own number in Keansburg. His common-law wife of seventeen years, Jean Marie, answered. He told her he was trying to reach Dane, it was urgent that he talk to him, but the line was busy. He told her to walk the two and a half blocks to Dane’s house, tell him to get off the phone because Nash was trying to get through. She did as she was told.

  Dane was talking to his girlfriend in Manhattan, had been talking to her for about ten minutes, when Jean Marie Nash rang the doorbell and gave him Nash’s message. Dane went back to the phone and told his girlfriend, “I’m sorry. My uncle is trying to reach me. I have to hang up. But I’ll call you back after I talk to him.”

  On Forty-fifth Street, Nash waiting nervously and impatiently, counting the minutes he knew it would take his wife to reach Dane. Outside, he could hear the shattering screams of the sirens as police car after police car raced north to Pier Ninety-two.

  When he figured enough time had passed, he dialed Dane again and this time got through. He told Dane it was vital that they meet. He was in Manhattan and would be heading for New Jersey within a few minutes. Dane should meet him just off the parkway on the way to Keansburg, a spot where they had met several times before. Dane agreed and hung up. He called his girlfriend back and told her, “That was my uncle. I have to meet him later on.” Then, for the next eight minutes, he conversed with her, picking up where they had left off.

  For some moments after his call was completed, Nash sat silently at his desk, holding his head in his hands. Suddenly he looked up at Torres. “Alberto,” he said, “my God, I just shot three people. They’re all dead. You have the keys to the fence of the parking lot next door. Can I put the van in there?”

  Torres was stunned, unbelieving, appalled. He stared at Nash. What he didn’t know was that there was a body in the back of the van. Nash didn’t tell him that. He shook his head. He wanted no part of this, did not want to become involved in any way. “I can’t do it,” he said. “The people who rent the lot, they come in very early in the morning, and if anybody’s parked there but them, I’ll lose my job.”

  Nash just looked at him. He did not persist. He got up, walked slowly out of the shop, and returned to the van. He headed downtown, for the Holland Tunnel in lower Manhattan, deciding that might be safer than the Lincoln Tunnel in mid-town. It was barely a half hour since the murders, and over the van’s radio came a constant stream of reports. He knew the alarm must be out, and he could not chance driving through the tunnel with Barbera’s body in the back. He would have to get rid of it before he crossed into New Jersey.

  Once in lower Manhattan, he drove around for a bit, stopping finally at a phone booth in front of a McDonald’s, directly across the street from 26 Federal Plaza, the New York home of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He called Dane again, and this time he followed an old habit of his when using a phone booth. He called the operator, gave her the number, and asked her to bill the call to his home phone in Keansburg. The New York Telephone Company made a record of the call. When he reached Dane, he said he was about to leave the city and wanted to make sure Dane would meet him as planned. Dane told him not to worry, he would be there.

  There was still the question of what to do with Barbera’s body. Driving up from Federal Plaza toward the Holland Tunnel entrance, he spotted a dim alley, Franklin Alley. He drove into it, opened the sliding side door of the van, and dumped the body well into the alley, then backed out and continued on his way, through the tunnel and out of New York.

  Dane was waiting for him at the agreed spot. Nash ordered his nephew to follow him to Newark Airport. Once there, Nash drove into the long-term parking lot. Dane followed. Nash parked the van, got into Dane’s car, and they drove out of the lot and headed for Keansburg.

  Weeks later, Richie Chartrand questioned Thomas Dane about that meeting beside the parkway and that trip to and from Newark Airport. “Did you meet your uncle that night?” Chartrand asked.

  “Yes, I met him,” Dane said.

  “And what was the topic of conversation?”

  “Well, he told me that he’s not happy at home and that he’s going to leave his wife and going to go away.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “We went to the parking lot at the airport.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You brought Donald’s other car with you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How did you get to the airport?”

  “Well, Donald followed me.”

  “Well, what did he follow you in?”

  “I don’t know. I never paid any attention to what he was driving.”

  “So he just followed you in another vehicle?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What other vehicles did he have access to?”

  “Well, he had a taxicab and a van.”

  “Well, was he driving the van?”

  “I don’t know. I never saw.”

  “Well, now you go into the airport
. You go in and he goes in and you come out and he doesn’t. Did he leave the van there?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Did you drive him from the airport?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Why do you think he left the van there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  5

  It was after midnight when Detectives Bobby Patterson and Eddie Fisher reached quiet, tree-lined Grandview Avenue in Ridgewood, Queens, a modest, middle-class neighborhood. They stopped in front of number 613, a low, nondescript apartment house indistinguishable from those around it, lining the streets of the area. All through the evening, Patterson had been dialing Barbera’s telephone number. There was never an answer. From that and from what had been found on the pier, and from Sicca’s story, it seemed likely that she was the woman who had been abducted and, perhaps, murdered. They had come in person now to find out if, indeed, the apartment was empty and she was missing. Cops from the 104th Precinct, which covered the area, were waiting for them. Patterson had called them to let them know he and Fisher were on the way and, because of jurisdiction, to ask them to meet the Midtown North detectives.

  And then the case and the investigation became a little more complex and tangled, took on a new facet. The cops from the 104th knew Barbera, had come to know her very well over the past months. On January 5, her close friend, perhaps her only real friend, Jenny Soo Chin, a forty-six-year-old New Jersey housewife and sometime bookkeeper, had disappeared about seven in the evening after leaving Barbera’s apartment, where she had spent the previous night. When Barbera learned that Chin had never reached her home in Teaneck and that her husband and four children had heard not a word from her, she got very worried. She went to the precinct and demanded an investigation, and in New Jersey, Chin’s family reported her missing to the Bergen County authorities. But Barbera did not stop with a mere report. She posted fliers with Jenny Soo Chin’s photograph and description on trees, lampposts, and in stores throughout Ridgewood, asking for information from anyone who might have seen anything that January evening. She hired a private detective to do a little investigating on his own. And she hounded the cops in the 104th, calling constantly, visiting often, incessantly prodding them to do something, anything, to find Chin.

  At the 104th, Detective Rudy Gregorovic caught the missing-persons case. Over the next weeks, he went up and down Grandview Avenue and through the neighborhood, talking to everyone he could find. Nobody had seen anything. He, and the cops in Bergen County, talked to Edward Chin, Jenny Soo’s husband, and to her sister and brother. The sister and brother were very concerned, wanted to help in any way they could, even offered to put up a reward for information. But Gregorovic and the New Jersey police, with whom he compared notes often, were struck by Edward Chin’s stoical manner. He seemed bothered more by his wife’s relationship with Barbera than by her disappearance. During the three years the two women had known each other, his wife had grown ever more dependent on Barbera, had spent more and more time with her, in her home in Teaneck and in Barbera’s apartment in Queens, had taken a job Barbera had gotten for her, one she was not particularly qualified for, had gone on vacations and trips alone with her, had grown increasingly distant from her husband and family.

  Nearly a week after Jenny Soo Chin vanished, what had appeared at first to be simply a missing-persons case, where the missing person might well have been missing because of her own actions and for her own personal reasons, took on a more troubling and serious complexion. On January 11, Chin’s red Pontiac station wagon was found, abandoned, far west on Thirty-sixth Street in Manhattan, only a few blocks from the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. Inside, there were bloodstains on the door and window handles, on the armrest in the front, and on the carpet. And there was a spent .22-caliber shell casing on the floor in the front of the car. There was no sign of Jenny Soo Chin.

  It was another two weeks before anyone learned anything more about her disappearance, and what they learned indicated violence, indicated that what had been found in that abandoned car in Manhattan might very well mean that Chin had vanished for good. These were weeks when Barbera did not let up on her steady badgering of the cops, who were making little progress, and of her own private detective, who was making none at all. Two fourteen-year-olds, a boy and a girl, who lived on Grandview Avenue, were out that evening on their way to a friend’s. They saw something that, initially, they paid little attention to. But then they saw the fliers that Barbera had plastered around the neighborhood. They called her. She called the 104th. Gregorovic went to talk to the teenagers. On that January evening, they told him, as they had been walking toward their friend’s house, they had seen a woman who seemed to fit Chin’s description walking along the avenue. A man was following her. She turned the corner into Linden Street and walked toward a station wagon parked a little way along the block. As she bent to unlock the car door, the man came up behind her, grabbed the door and pulled it open, threw her inside across the front seat, and jumped in after her. She screamed. The car door slammed, and a moment later, the car sped away. The man, they said, was tall and slim and had a dark ski mask pulled down over his head and face. Later, under hypnosis, the girl repeated the story and gave essentially the same description.

  But when Gregorovic went back to the area and stood in the spot where they had been, at about the same time of night, he wondered about the description. They must have been at least a hundred feet from the station wagon, and the light was very dim. That they had seen something, and probably what they described, he did not doubt. But the description of the man? That kind of lighting can play tricks with the vision.

  So Jenny Soo Chin was not only gone but also probably kidnapped and most assuredly seriously injured if not killed. The questions remained: Where was she, or her body? Who had done the violence? Some of the cops who had talked to him began to speculate about a possible role in all this for Edward Chin, given what seemed a very strained relationship with his wife. But it was only speculation, and nobody did much about it since there was nothing except that uneasy sense, and a statement by Barbera to Gregorovic that he ought to ask some hard questions of Edward Chin, to back them up.

  By late February, Jenny Soo Chin had been gone for more than six weeks without a trace. Her family in New Jersey, and Barbera, hired a psychic, Dorothy Allison, to go on a hunt. Accompanied by cops from the 104th and from Bergen County, Allison directed a psychic hunt beginning at Barbera’s apartment building in Queens, across the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge into Manhattan, and on to the spot on the West Side where the car was found. But all Allison could dig out of her psychic sense was a very strong feeling that Chin was in the water, but what water and where she didn’t know.

  More than a month later, that April night on the street in front of 613 Grandview Avenue, Patterson and Fisher heard all this from the cops of the 104th. And they heard something else. During one of her many conversations with Gregorovic and other cops, Barbera had said that she was somehow involved, perhaps as a witness, in a federal investigation. She didn’t go into any detail and they didn’t press the line, since it didn’t seem to have anything to do with what they were investigating, Chin’s abduction and disappearance.

  Barbera’s apartment was on the fourth floor of the building. Roused from sleep, the superintendent led them up the stairs and unlocked the door. The apartment was a one-room studio, with separate kitchen and bath. It was, Patterson remembers, “a mess. It was this tiny little apartment but it had like six rooms’ worth of stuff crammed into it. The coffee pot was still going. The iron was plugged in. There was a cup of coffee on a little counter that had like two sips taken out of it. It appeared that somebody had left in a big hurry. We learned later that she had a habit of doing things like that, getting distracted and going out and leaving the iron and things on. She was that kind of person. We didn’t know it then, of course, so we didn’t know what to make of it. But looking around, it was obvious to me that to really do a thorough search
of the place would have taken me at least a day, maybe two.”

  There wasn’t time for that then, and they weren’t there that night to do it. “We were really there only to look for clues, some identification. After all, we had a person who said he saw a woman being dragged into a van on the pier, and we had her car on the pier and her purse and things like that, and we traced the car back to her. So we figured it had to be her. We didn’t know exactly what had happened to her, but we figured right from the start that she’d been abducted and maybe she was dead. So we were looking to get any information we could as far as her family and background were concerned, and we were looking for something to tie her in with somebody else, like boyfriends. As far as we knew then, it could have been a domestic kind of thing on the pier, a boyfriend who was angry with her or something like that.”

  They searched quickly, though “it was a kind of a half-assed search,” Patterson says. When they opened a closet, they were staggered by the accumulation that piled, it seemed, almost from floor to ceiling, from front to back. There were mounds of stamps, for she was a stamp collector. There were piles of coins, for she was a coin collector. There was jewelry, and some of it looked very good and expensive. “We found bank statements all the way back to 1973 that she’d never opened. I guess she never bothered to open her bank statements. She just threw the envelopes into that closet when they arrived and forgot about them. We found income-tax returns she’d done for people and never bothered to send in. We found financial ledgers and records, but we didn’t look through them. We found photographs, lots of them. There were the tourist kind, of things in Europe and other places. There were photos of her, though we didn’t know that for sure at the time, but we figured it was probably her. We found a lot of photos of a Chinese woman, some of her alone and some of the two women together. We didn’t know who the hell the Chinese woman was then. We took a bunch of the photos with us, along with some other stuff, so later we could match things up.”