Finding Amy (20 page)

Part of their strategy as well was the element of surprise. If Gorman wasn't expecting to have to deal with them until he was back in Maine, he might be shocked by their sudden appearance. This, in turn, could throw him off balance, and he might inadvertently say things he normally wouldn't.

They were also eager to test Gorman's reactions to some of their newly discovered information, now that they knew many things that only he, or he and their witnesses, could know. In particular, now that the detectives knew about the Westbrook traffic stop, they wanted to see which version of the story he would give about the night Amy disappeared. Would Gorman stick to his earlier story that he dropped Amy off at the Pavilion, was back in twenty minutes, and stayed in for the rest of the night, or would he give them the same story he'd been giving his friends and relatives about Sharma and Cook having left with Amy while he stayed home?

Given Gorman's demonstrated familiarity with the criminal justice system and the police interrogation process, and based on his prior behavior, they also believed he would be interested in speaking with them to test
their
knowledge of things. It was a common practice with experienced criminals. With sociopaths. Gorman had engaged in various forms of testing and disinformation throughout the investigation. It would be, the detectives expected, a battle of wits in which their job was to be more clever.

Driving like teenagers on a road trip, they left Maine around 9:30 on Thursday morning, reaching South Carolina early Friday morning, at 2:00 a.m. They slept for four hours, leaving around 6:00 a.m. with about four more hours to drive.

They fought their way through the morning snarl of Atlanta traffic and reached Troy with only an hour to spare—an hour they got only because Troy is in another time zone. Troy is a quiet southern town of about fifteen thousand, located about fifty miles from Montgomery, which is home to Troy State University.

Although they had had a telephone relationship with the Troy Police Department (primarily with Detective Sergeant Calista Everage) since the initial request for Gorman's records, Young and Harakles had no idea what kind of a reception they would receive. Scott Harakles said that when you go into a situation where you have to lean on other agencies, you never know what you'll get—often there is a coldness or hesitation. But the reception and support they got in Troy were exceptional.

Because time was short, they were quickly provided with an interview room and taping capability. They immediately began taping an interview with Gorman, putting into play their plan to use Harakles as the interviewer. As expected, Gorman didn't want to deal with Danny Young. From the first, he'd known that Young didn't believe him. He tried to get rid of Young and speak with Scott Harakles alone, probably thinking he'd have a better shot at manipulating the younger detective. He couldn't split them up, and the interview proceeded with both detectives, Harakles sitting directly in front of Gorman with Young sitting behind Harakles.

Gorman began the interview as his usual cocky and arrogant self, projecting the attitude he'd exhibited all along—oh, yeah, you cops don't know anything. Harakles asked Gorman to tell them again about the night he dropped Amy off, and he responded, “I already told you all about that.”

Harakles said, “Yeah, well, I haven't heard it, so just humor me and tell me what happened.”

Gorman responded, “You know … I dropped her off and came straight home …” and went over the story again. As Gorman talked, Harakles felt the last uneasiness about leaving his family vanish, replaced by excitement.

Once they'd gotten him to repeat his story, and had seen that it was unchanged and that they had him on tape, locked into his lie, in Harakles's words, they took off their gloves and went at him with what they now knew—asking, Okay, so what about this, and what about that? Challenging his timeline, his lies, his accusations against Jason and Kush. The detectives wanted to see him dance, and they got what they wanted.

Suddenly Gorman the cocky loudmouth, the born manipulator, the slick liar, began to come apart. When Harakles asked what Gorman had to say about telling Jamie that his roommates had killed Amy, Gorman's eyes widened, and he abandoned his arrogant slouch. Looking like he'd seen a ghost, he told the investigators, “I think I need an attorney.”

Since it was now legally a case with custody and interrogation, the investigators had to stop asking questions, but Harakles told Gorman, “No more questions, okay, but I'm going to talk and you're going to listen.” Then he laid out what they had and told Gorman he was going down.

When they left that interview room, they could have gone straight home. They'd gotten what they came for. But they were there, so they went on working.

Their next interview was with Sean Littlefield, who had gone to Alabama with Gorman. The investigators had high hopes that Gorman would have told him something, since Littlefield was a good enough friend to have gone to Alabama with him and had been on the scene as Gorman was unraveling, but Littlefield didn't have much to offer. Littlefield told them that he and Gorman left for Alabama in Littlefield's car a week before Thanksgiving, driving pretty much straight through with Gorman doing most of the driving because Littlefield was sick. He said that Gorman's mother called frequently, reporting in one of her earliest calls that Gorman's driver's license was being suspended or revoked.

Littlefield described an occasion before they left Maine when Gorman stopped at the Pavilion nightclub, leaving Sean in the car, and went in to ask if they had cameras so he could prove that his car had been there the night he said he'd dropped Amy off. Gorman also checked out the presence of cameras at the Stein Gallery across the street. Littlefield told them that, in the beginning, Gorman maintained his story that he'd dropped Amy off and that all he'd done that night was kiss Amy.

Later, Littlefield said, after the Portland paper reported that police investigation showed Gorman hadn't dropped her at the Pavilion, Gorman's story changed. Littlefield overheard Gorman on the phone, telling a local friend that Kush and Jason had killed her, that he had told them about the spot behind his mother's house and they had put her there and gone back later to bury her. Littlefield said that Russ did tell him that Amy had been shot in the head, but that Jason and Kush had done it. At that point, no one outside the investigation except the killer knew that Amy had been shot in the head.

Littlefield also told them that his former girlfriend, Tiffany, had talked a lot about Gorman and his connection to the case. Tiffany had told people at her school that she knew what had happened and who did it, and that she could get a lot of money from him (Russ) but she wouldn't, because she thought he was cute.
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Littlefield also told them that the first week they were in Alabama, Gorman got a gun, a .25. That he got a second, similar gun just before the standoff and would sit around and play with the guns. Littlefield told them that when Gorman had to leave his grandmother's house because his uncle was getting out of prison, they were invited to stay with Erika Walker, a family friend.

When Young and Harakles finished taping their interview with Littlefield, they turned to the local police department for advice about who else it would be wise to speak with, including local people the two detectives had learned about in their interview with Littlefield. Having let Gorman run, hoping that he'd talk, they now wanted to find the people he might have talked with—friends, relatives, people he'd hung out with, and girls he'd slept with.

The cooperation of the Troy Police Department was amazing—another gift in the case. Detective Sergeant Calista Everage seemed to be on a first-name basis with everyone in town. As Scott Harakles put it, the Everages were a police family but they were also members of the community, and they knew their people. Calista Everage just asked the two visiting detectives who they wanted, took down a list of those people, secured their cooperation, brought them to the station, and marched them, one by one, into the interview room. For Young and Harakles, that generous assistance was another example of the unprecedented bond between police agencies that Amy's case had forged.

The next person they interviewed after Littlefield was a long-distance truck driver in her late thirties named Erika Walker, a longtime friend of the family known to Gorman and others as “Mamma E.” Walker was a rough-edged, tough-talking woman who had her own history with the Troy police, a history revolving around substances like mushrooms and crystal meth. She was an emotional woman, very volatile and unstable. In Harakles's words, “sketchy, bouncy, all over the place.” She also had a good and valuable story to tell.

Walker was another of the witnesses in the case who was deeply pained by the conflict between their belief that they had to tell what they knew—Walker was the mother of a daughter herself—and their sense that in speaking with the police, they were betraying a close friend or relative, in Walker's case this kid that she'd known for most of his life. At first, she was reluctant to talk, expressing concern that either Gorman might come after her or someone who knew him might retaliate against her if she told the detectives what she knew.

After Young and Harakles reassured her that Gorman was going to stay in jail, and played on her evident desire to cooperate and clear her conscience of what was obviously troubling information, she quickly gave up her reluctance.
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Danny Young just told her, very directly, “Come on … you know you want to tell us.” And Young had a way about him that made people trust him.

After that, Walker relaxed and agreed to talk. About a week after he had arrived in Troy, Walker told them, Russ was visiting, and he said to her, “Mamma E, I need to clear my conscience about something.” She poured him a cup of coffee and said, “Well, go ahead and talk.”

He took a deep breath and said, “I did kill that girl up there. We went for a walk and I was tripping and all of a sudden she said something to me that kinda slapped my face and I just went off on her and after I got done with her, I shot her in the head.”

As Mrs. Walker was talking, Danny Young was thinking, “Boy, I sure hope the tape is working.” With all his experience, he still listened with a sense of disbelief at what he was hearing. Even for seasoned detectives, getting information like this is exciting. Their training in interviewing and interrogation really comes into play when they're getting great stuff, and they have to control their emotions, their body language, and their facial expressions so their elation doesn't show. When a breakthrough moment happens, even as the information is coming in, detectives will check and recheck to be sure they're following protocol and that all the equipment is working, always fearful that this vital evidence will somehow be lost. Luckily, everything was working fine for Young and Harakles, and they recorded a second, more detailed version of Gorman's confession than the one he had made to his mother.

Gorman told Mamma E that after he killed Amy in a fit of rage he then realized that he had done something wrong, so he cleaned himself up and he cleaned her up to make sure there was nothing of him left on her and then he dug a hole and put her in it, hoping that the ground would freeze before they were able to find her.

In response to the detectives' questions, Walker also told them the following: That Russ told her he had a big .45 gun at the house and asked if she wanted to see it. That he had walked Amy beside the pond to set the mood.
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That Russ also told her he had slapped or punched Amy—at one point he even got down on the floor and demonstrated for Mrs. Walker how he had pinned Amy to the ground and beaten her. That after he had Amy on the ground, he pulled the gun out of the back of his pants and shot her.

At one point, in the middle of the interview, Mrs. Walker told the detectives she wanted to go outside and smoke. In response to her cooperation and in order to keep up the good relations, they had let her go, but they sweated bullets until she returned to the interview room, worrying that she might change her mind about talking and leave before she finished the story.

She did return to finish the interview. She told the detectives that with respect to women, Russ Gorman was a real whore dog. She'd known him to go with one girl, bring her home, and go right out and get another. Although he never came right out and told Mamma E that he'd had sex with Amy, those had been his intentions, and he also assured her that he'd kept himself protected. That later he had burned his clothes and burned Amy's so that there would be nothing of him left at the scene. That when he'd buried her, he had carefully put the grass back. And he hinted about getting rid of a gun by dropping it off a pier. Walker told the detectives that Russ also told all this to his mother, and told his mother why he had done it.

What Gorman had told Mrs. Walker meshed with the information Young and Harakles had learned from Amy St. Laurent's autopsy. It also gave them a better picture of their victim's last moments of life, and of the callous brutality of the man who had assaulted and murdered her. The gunshot, the assault, the carefully replaced clumps of grass, and the missing clothes were all pieces of information only the killer would know.

Back in Portland, an exhausted Sergeant Joyce had actually made it to the CID Christmas party, which is where he was when Danny Young called him to report on the Erika Walker interview. Sergeant Joyce grabbed Lieutenant Loughlin and they retreated into a corner while Joyce shared the news. The two of them stood there, stunned by this news of a second confession, as Christmas sounds echoed around them.

Everywhere you go, radios, elevators, store speakers are blaring holiday music. Who's got time for Christmas? It's incredible, the amount of work. The stresses and strains of a major case. The tensions between personnel. Do we search? Interview him now? Later? What about … what about … what about? A billion questions are thrown at me. On the phone with the press, the attorney general's office, the chief, state police, detectives, the mother, the mother's friends, the father, the VWA (victim witness advocate). Dozens of messages await me constantly. The guys are exhausted and we're worried about Dan and Scott out there on the road.