Bitter Blood (11 page)

Once more, Childers had to report to Davidson that the results were inconclusive, causing his normally placid lieutenant to explode with curses. Tom was leaving the next day for Albuquerque and wouldn’t return to deal with family matters for another month—a month of not knowing whether he had something to do with the killings.

The second week of the investigation began with a break that gave Davidson a better idea of what happened on the day of the murders as well as a new clue that might prove valuable.

A citizen called to say he was a sport bicyclist who rode regularly past the Lynch house. His route was marked for distance, and he timed himself as he rode. On Sunday morning, July 22, he passed the house without noticing anything unusual. A short time later, as he reached the entrance to Sleepy Hollow Golf Course, only a mile away, he heard two distant shots in rapid succession, followed a few seconds later by a third. The golf course entrance was one of his distance marks and he was looking at his watch. It was 10:47.

The man hadn’t connected the shots with the murders at first, because he thought the killings had occurred on Monday. He also remembered something else that might be significant. About a quarter mile from the Lynch house he had seen an empty, battered car—yellow with a dark top, maybe an Oldsmobile, 1960s model—parked by a road sign.

A trooper sent to the spot found a wrapper from a Budweiser twelve-pack and several empty cans. Had somebody parked there drinking beer and plotting murder?

The new information not only gave Davidson the exact time of the shootings, it told him that Janie had been alive when her mother arrived. The first two shots had been for Delores, the third, delayed, shot no doubt had been aimed at Janie when she came to investigate and the killer discovered her in the backyard. The fourth shot, fired inside the house, would have been too muffled for the bicyclist to hear.

Next morning, Tuesday, July 31, Davidson held a meeting of detectives in his office. He reviewed everything they had learned, including a new wrinkle—rumors that Tom was a heavy gambler. Assignments were divided. Davidson wanted all of Delores’s friends and acquaintances questioned, as well as people who had worked at the Lynch house. He also wanted all of Janie’s friends interviewed, particularly anybody she had dated. Even though Delores seemed the primary target, an angry suitor rejected by Janie couldn’t be discounted as the killer. Weeks of work lay ahead.

The detectives had been back to the house on Covered Bridge Road every day checking for specific items or clues they might have overlooked. Davidson had spent hours there alone, poking around and contemplating, as if he hoped the house itself might tell him something about the evil it had seen. He didn’t like the house. It gave him a strange feeling. “It was a lonely damn place,” he recalled later. But he was not ready for the radio call he got from Childers on Wednesday morning, August 1.

“What are these crosses doing down here?” Childers asked, his voice agitated.

“What are you talking about?” Davidson said.

“These damn crosses on the floor.”

“Are you guys going crazy?”

Davidson thought it a joke, but Childers made dear it wasn’t. He and Nobles had entered the house through the garage and spotted six small crosses fashioned of palm leaves arrayed on the hallway floor, as if some kind of hex. Frightened, they retreated hastily. If Davidson wasn’t playing a practical joke, as his detectives knew he was prone to do, somebody had been in the house—or other forces were at work.

Neither Davidson nor Childers believed in ghosts, and both had paid little attention when Helen Stewart mentioned strange experiences she had had in the house. Helen thought the house haunted and didn’t like to be in it alone. She’d heard footsteps when no one else was there, she said, had answered voices that never responded. After Chuck Lynch’s death, she’d spotted faint impressions of male footprints in the Persian rugs where Delores allowed no feet to tread. “That house was spooky,” she adamantly insisted.

Joyce Rose, Delores’s friend, who had been to the house many times, didn’t think it haunted, but she didn’t like the house and had mentioned having strange sensations there. “You could feel the tension and misery in that house,” she said.

Childers and Nobles returned with weapons drawn and made a cautious and thorough search. The only explanation they could offer for the crosses was that they had been tucked into the back of a picture on the hallway wall and had fallen when a departing officer slammed a door, but that wasn’t a satisfactory explanation, and the mystery of the crosses would forever perplex them.

During his search that day, Childers opened the lavatory cabinet in the bathroom off Delores’s bedroom and spotted a revolver and a box of shells. It was Delores’s .32 that had been thought stolen. The find was a disappointment. A recovered stolen weapon could be the piece of evidence linking a killer to the scene. Now that possibility was out.

Later that day, Davidson got a call from Albuquerque police asking if he had Tom Lynch under surveillance. Tom had reported strange cars in his neighborhood and was frightened. No, Davidson said, he had no officers in New Mexico. Perhaps the killer was stalking Tom, as Davidson had warned. He told about the rumors of Tom’s gambling and asked for help in looking into that.

On August 5, Davidson got his best lead in the case to date. A woman called to report her suspicions that her daughter’s boyfriend might be the killer. The boyfriend, José Peralta, was a Cuban refugee who had drifted into Kentucky with another refugee, Felipe Alonzo, to work in the stables of horse farms. After arguing with his girlfriend, he hit her with his fist and threatened her with a gun. The girlfriend’s mother said that on the weekend of the Lynch murders, Peralta and Alonzo had stolen riding apparel from a horse farm near the Lynch house, and Peralta had come in with blood on his clothing. Friends of Peralta had told her that he pulled a robbery in another Kentucky town, that he carried a derringer in his boot, and that he bragged of killing people in Cuba.

The detectives grew excited when they learned that Janie had been to the stables a couple of times while Peralta worked there. They got even more excited when they discovered that his friend, Alonzo, drove a beat-up yellow car.

Peralta sold goods at a flea market in Louisville, and the detectives went there, bought riding paraphernalia from him, and took it straight to the horse farm, where it was identified as stolen. Davidson thought his men were closing in on the killers.

Suspicions about the Cubans were buoyed on August 24, with the discovery of two pairs of black riding gloves, similar to those stolen at the stables, in a field behind the Lynch house, an indication that the thieves might have been at the house.

Two days later, Davidson was ready to move against Peralta. Warrants in hand, a group of officers raided his house and arrested him for burglary.

Alonzo was brought in the next day and questioned by Childers and Nobles. He denied knowing anything about the murders and agreed to a polygraph test, which he passed the following day.

“We can write ’em off,” said Childers.

On August 29, the detectives confronted Peralta, who insisted he knew nothing about any murders. He agreed to a polygraph test with the stipulation that the questions not stray into burglary.

“After Peralta passed the polygraph,” Nobles later recalled, “me and Sherman hit the Patio Lounge in Louisville and got drunk.”

That same day, two weeks after his thirty-seventh birthday, Tom returned to Louisville to begin removing his family’s belongings from the house on Covered Bridge Road, the house his mother had intended Janie to have. Now it was his, and he wanted to sell it as quickly as possible. Two days after his arrival, Nobles drove him seventy miles to Covington to take his third polygraph examination. Disappointed at the results of the first two tests, Davidson wanted to try another operator this time.

The operator, Louis Mathias, Jr. asked five relevant questions.

1. Regarding the shooting of your sister and mother, do you intend to answer truthfully each question about that?

“Yes,” said Tom.

2. Did you yourself shoot your sister and mother?

“No.”

3. Did you have someone shoot your sister and mother?

“No.”

4. Did you know your sister and mother were going to be killed before it happened?

“No.”

5. Do you know for sure who shot your sister and mother?

“No.”

Mathias noted reactions to question four, but Tom had explained that he felt something was wrong that weekend when his mother didn’t call, and Mathias thought that could have been the reason for the reactions. After studying the polygrams, Mathias reported his opinion: Tom had answered all questions truthfully.

Less than six weeks after the murders, Dan Davidson already had eliminated all suspects. One question was bothering him: Where do we go from here?

When Davidson’s mind was troubled, the one spot that offered serenity was the big lake on the grounds of the Kentucky State Reformatory, just over a hill from his office. There he had landed many a lunker bass and gigged many a fat bullfrog while cleansing his mind of tribulation and restoring order to his thinking. The lake had offered him such comfort and pleasure that he told his wife he wanted his ashes scattered over it from the Kentucky State Police plane when he died. As the fall of 1984 approached, Davidson found himself going to the lake with increasing frequency as he fretted about the Lynch murders, a lonely figure hunkered in his tiny boat, rod and reel in hand, rehashing details of the case over and over, searching for answers.

After the Cuban refugees had been eliminated, his detectives, left without primary suspects, had plodded doggedly on, tracing and questioning friends of Delores and Janie, tracking down many of Janie’s former dental school classmates, some of whom had moved as far away as Florida. They were searching for anything that might provide new clues but were having little luck.

Many of Janie’s friends, they found, were suspicious of Tom. Janie frequently had expressed displeasure about her brother’s turning to his parents for financial help to get him out of his first marriage. She blamed him for causing their mother distress with his problems.

Most suspicious of all was Phil Pandolfi, who had been in love with Janie. He had returned to the dental school in such a dazed state over Janie’s death that he had trouble concentrating on his studies. Frequently, he drove to Harrod’s Creek Cemetery and sat by Janie’s grave for hours. He planted geraniums and marigolds, the only marker.

Once Phil even forced himself to face again the house where he’d felt such fear and sensed such evil. He sat on the steps where the killer had clambered to fire the first shot at Janie, and he condemned himself for not paying heed to his fears and doing something to get her away from there. If only she’d come to New York to see him as she’d promised…Several times, Phil had been troubled by a dream about Janie. He was sitting with all their friends in the cafeteria at the dental school and she strolled in. “She was so beautiful, dressed in white, her skin and hair aglow. I said, ‘Janie, why did you have to die?’ She just smiled. ‘I’m not dead.’”

On October 18, Albuquerque police called with the results of an extensive background check on Tom. They’d found no evidence of heavy gambling or wrongdoing. Four days later, Davidson called Tom to report on developments and asked if he gambled. Nothing more than losing a few dollars at the track now and then, Tom said.

On October 26, Phil Pandolfi wrote to Tom.

I’m sorry it has taken me so long to contact you, but I just did not know the right time. Janie was very special to me and I loved her very much.

Janie and your mother were wonderful people. Your mother always made me feel at home when I went out to the house.

I really do not know what to say but I want you to know how I felt about them. A day does not go by that I don’t think about her or miss her. It just does not seem fair because everything seemed so perfect.

If there is anything that you need or want to know don’t hesitate to contact me. Is it possible for me to have something of Janie’s to remember her by? I think it would help a little.

He made a handwritten copy of the letter, and on the back he wrote: “This is a copy of the letter I sent to Janie’s brother. I might have indicated to him that I know something so if anything should happen to me this letter may (most likely) have been the cause. My past history does not suggest that anyone else would be out to get me.”

His suspicions of Tom grew deeper when he received no reply.

The strain of having half its detective force assigned to a single case began to show on the Oldham County Police Department, and Lennie Nobles had to be pulled off the Lynch investigation from time to time to ease the burden. By November, he was heavily involved in a pressing child abuse case, but at night he occasionally was troubled by dreams of Delores’s face crying out to him, “Lennie, find my killer.”