Kill For Me (5 page)

All items one could certainly use to cover up a murder.

Detective Harry Augello was born and raised near Paterson, New Jersey, unburdening him of that familiar accent that comes with a life in the South. Just about every detective working the Rozzo case was from somewhere else.

“Yeah,” Augello said later, “we all get tired of shoveling snow up north and move south. Then we get tired of the humidity and move back north.”

Augello came from a background of working in concrete, a bricklayer in the bricklayer’s union. However, he was born into “a family of cops,” he said. A friend of Augello’s who worked for the Paterson Police Department (PPD) showed him a newsletter one day that went out to cops. The Clearwater Police Department (CPD) in Florida was always hiring. Augello couldn’t find a job in law enforcement up north. So, like Ski, Augello paid his own way through the Florida Police Academy, and in 1993, he got hired by the PPPD.

Fellow cops say Augello is “very direct and detail-oriented.” Some might complain that he has an abrasiveness to him, a certain rough-around-the-edges type of demeanor that brands him to be a bit snarky and coarse. But that really is not Augello’s way. For those who know him best, they understand that he is a man driven by getting to the truth as quickly as he can. Physically, the detective is a bit stocky, but not large. At six feet tall, a feather over two hundred pounds, the New Jersey–born cop sports short light brown hair, which is receding a bit as the years catch up to him.

Sandee Rozzo’s mother, Sandra Pool, showed up at Bayfront Medical Center early on the morning of July 6, 2003, after getting rattled out of bed with a call that Sandee had been hurt and was fighting for her life—that ring in the night nobody wants to hear. When Augello found Sandra wandering around the ER, dazed and seemingly confused, a terrible aura of despair hovering about her like storm clouds, it didn’t take the seasoned detective long to realize that Sandra Pool had been told by the hospital’s chaplain that her daughter had expired.

“She was extremely upset,” Augello said later.

What mother wouldn’t be?

All Augello could say was, “Sorry for your loss, ma’am.”

There was an exhausted, scratchy melancholy in Sandra Pool’s voice as she sat, and just after meeting the detective, she mentioned a name that was becoming all too synonymous with Sandee Rozzo’s murder.

“Humphrey killed my daughter,” Sandra Pool stated emphatically, struggling through tears, quite sure of herself. So the name was Humphrey, not Humphries. “He threatened to kill Sandee and my granddaughter if she told anyone about the rape and attack…. During the two days Sandee was held captive, Humphrey obtained all of my Sandee’s credit cards, personal information, and the family information. He knew where all of us lived and worked. Sandee was in fear of her life.”

“If anything ever happens to me…”

Sandra Pool packed her four kids in a U-Haul and moved to Florida from the Brookline/Pittsburgh area of Pennsylvania in 1973. It was Sandee’s father, a man Sandra Pool said she was running from, who wanted to name his daughter after her mother.

“Sandee was the first girl born in two generations to my ex-husband’s family,” Sandra Pool later said. Italians are like that: they like to keep things going inside the dynamic of the family, especially names. “He didn’t even think we were having a girl. We didn’t have a name for the baby as I was on my way to deliver. I asked him to pick a name. He finally said, ‘Pick Sandy…Sandy Lee.’”

And so Sandy Lee Rozzo it was.

That turned out to be January 17, 1966, the day Sandee was born. Then just nineteen years old, Sandra Pool remembered, “It was eighty degrees outside. We had a crazy winter that year.”

Sandee ultimately changed the
y
to a double
e
later in life to avoid any confusion with her mom.

Detective Harry Augello allowed Sandra Pool and other family members there with her to have some time by themselves. In doing that, he went back to the room where Tony Ponicall was waiting.

“Would you mind if I brought someone in to swab your hands for gunshot residue?” It was part of the procedure of crossing Tony off their list. The more forthcoming he was, the quicker they could move on. No doubt, the gloves in Tony’s 4Runner were going to be next.

Tony said sure. “Anything I can do to help.”

Another detective showed up at the hospital to collect Tony’s house keys so the PPPD could get into the townhome and have a look around. As Tony was handing over the keys, Augello explained that they also needed to photograph Tony’s body. Augello noticed some cuts on Tony’s back, between his shoulder blades. He looked down and saw that Tony’s legs had blood droplets all over them.

“What happened here?” Augello asked, looking at Tony’s back.

“When I went into the garage and saw Sandee slumped over, I reached inside, through the shattered window. I was wearing only my boxer shorts. The perimeter of the window was still attached to the roof and door moldings.”

Sounded legit.

“We need you to come over to the Technical Services Building on Forty-ninth Street, Mr. Ponicall, for additional evidence collection. Would you be willing to do that?”

Tony thought about it.

Augello said they needed his clothes, too.

“Can I drive myself?”

“Yes.”

Augello followed Tony closely, watching him. The PPPD provided Tony with a new set of clothes once he got to the Technical Services Building. They needed to send his out for forensic testing.

“I’m going to be staying at a friend’s house,” Tony said after Augello told him he was free to leave. “You can reach me by my cell number when I can go back into my home.” By now Tony had been up most of the night. It was close to 6:15
A.M
. when they finished at the Technical Services Building.

Augello shook Tony’s hand. Told him to take it easy. The PPPD would be in touch. Then Augello hooked back up with Detective Cindy Martin and headed over to the townhome to help out.

Tony Ponicall drove back over to his townhome after he left Technical Services. He wanted to see if he could be of any help. After thinking it through, how could he—in the scope of what had happened—run off to a friend’s house and go to sleep?

Poor Sandee.

Detective Paul Andrews and Detective Scott “Ski” Golczewski stood outside the townhome, staring at the garage. Forensics was there collecting any trace they could find. There were footprints—Tony’s—left in blood on the concrete floor near countless tiny shards of broken glass. Standing there in the driveway, looking into the garage, thinking about the crime scene, Ski and Paul spotted several shell casings near the yellow folded-up cards with numbers that forensics had placed next to potential pieces of evidence.

The shooter didn’t seem too concerned about leaving behind what could be very important evidence.

Those expired shell casings.

Novice?

Perhaps.

“Somebody really wanted her dead,” Paul said. It was clear in the way the bullets had been fired.

“Sure did,” Ski agreed.

“The scene didn’t appear to be a robbery gone bad,” Paul Andrews said later. Sandee’s purse, her keys, all of her valuables, were still there. The person who killed Sandee Rozzo had done it for personal reasons.

“She was targeted.”

Ski nodded his head, agreeing again.

Viewing the crime scene as experienced investigators, Paul Andrews and Ski could easily tell that it was no crime of passion. A jilted lover doesn’t unload a magazine of rounds, seemingly firing willy-nilly while walking up to a target. He might roll up and pull a South Bundy Drive, à la Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, slashing Sandee’s throat and angrily stabbing her multiple times, or maybe sneaking up from behind and attacking as she got out of her vehicle. But to unload a clip of bullets, suffice it to say (as the evidence left behind seemed to scream out) the shell casings were in a line heading toward the vehicle, like a trail of bread crumbs?

The evidence, thus far, pointed more to a hired hit or a planned, premeditated murder. Sandee Rozzo’s killer waited for her to pull in and then—boom!—unloaded the pistol.

Ski and Paul let Tony back into the house. Tony said something about a note somewhere that Sandee had written to herself. He wanted to show it to the detectives.

It was near daybreak.

By now, Ski had pretty much taken over the case as lead detective. Like Mike Lynch, Ski was from New York. Born in Yonkers—that accent still there nearly forty years later—before he moved to upstate, Westchester County, arguably one of the more upscale sections of the state.

For Ski, police work, or civil service of any kind, was in his DNA; his father had been a Yonkers firefighter for thirty years.

“He always told me to get a civil service job,” Ski commented later. “He said that way you’d always have work.”

As he grew up, the choice wasn’t hard for Ski: Firefighter or police officer? It was going to be one or the other.

Ski leaned more toward law enforcement as the years passed.

Why?

“Because there were more cool cop shows on television in the seventies and eighties than there were firefighter shows,” he told me.

The only thing that bothered Ski about police work was, well, a shoot-out. Television dramatized shoot-outs. The thing that bothered Ski more than anything was not getting shot himself, but having to perhaps shoot someone else.

After high school Ski enrolled in Westchester Community College and began chasing a job in law enforcement. One of his criminal justice professors told him about a part-time police officer’s job for Westchester County, but it was seasonal.

So he applied and did that for four years.

Then he applied to the New York Police Department (NYPD), but the list to get in seemed endless. Waiting and waiting. Ski wanted to get out there and beat the streets, work his way up the chain of command. Investigations intrigued him. He wanted in now.

A friend’s dad was retiring. It was the early 1990s. The dad and Ski’s friend were moving south, down to Florida.

“You wanna come?” Ski’s friend asked him one day.

Why the hell not! What did he have back home?

Within a year of applying in Florida for a law enforcement job, Ski was asked to go to the academy—but only if he paid for it himself. And there was no guarantee of a job waiting on the other end. After all, the country was suffering from a semirecession. Jobs were scarce.

By June 1995, Ski was asked to join the PPPD.

“It kind of happened real quick down here,” he said.

Ski worked in the Patrol Unit for a few years, then traffic duty. By September 1998, he interviewed for a detective’s position in the department. By March 1999, he was working inside the PPPD’s DU.

Interviewing witnesses and suspects became something that interested Ski. The more he did it, the more he realized there was an art to how you went about it. He’d been to seminars and conferences and learned how to gain the trust of a suspect/witness.

“You have to be someone’s friend,” Ski said, commenting on the style of interviewing he preferred. “You have to build a rapport. The goal is to get them to talk to you. No matter what you’re talking about, just keep talking. As long as the person is talking, you’re going in the right direction…. Even children—sometimes you have to sit on the floor with them, play a game for an hour before they are willing to talk to you about the terrible things that happen to them. Or, even sitting across from a homicide suspect or a rapist. If you can just get that person to keep talking, about anything, you’re going to get more with honey than with vinegar. Doing this job for all these years now, I learned that the first statement out of a suspect’s mouth is a lie. And if you get pissed off at it, or upset about it, you end up butting heads with that person.”

So you allow the lie to pass and keep them talking.

Still, Ski was quick to point out, one of the most important aspects of interviewing people was having a plan before you went in.

Right now, as Ski partnered up with Tony Ponicall, who had driven back to the scene of the murder, that was exactly what Tony was doing.

Talking.

The fact that Tony had left the scene and driven himself to the hospital, Ski said, told him that Tony wasn’t running from the situation; he was right there involved in it.

“That gave him a little gold star in his column,” Ski observed later. “Yet, we still had to ask ourselves—is he going to the hospital to be helpful, or is he going down there to find out what the police know?”

It was the former, Ski realized when Tony returned to the scene later that morning. And the idea that Tony had locked up before leaving the scene, originally viewed as suspicious, was wrong. Tony had never unlocked the front door of the townhome to begin with. And since the garage had been taped off, no cops on the scene could enter through there, so it was
assumed
that Tony had locked up before taking off and following the ambulance.

Tony sat down inside the townhome and went through everything he could recall with Ski. How he thought the shots were fireworks. How he felt bad that he didn’t go outside right away.

“Listen, Tony, is there anyone that you know of who could have done this to Sandee?”

Tony had been in a daze, Ski said. Numb. Up all night. Stressed. Tired. Beaten down considerably. But that question seemed to brighten him up. He knew something. His eyes went wide. He was awake now.

Standing, Tony said, “Oh…man, I need to find this folder. It has something in it I need to show you. It’s got the guy’s name and info in it. His name is Tracey.”

“Tony, relax,” Ski said. “Sit down.” Ski pulled out the folder. “Is this what you’re looking for?”

The PPPD had already searched the house and were going through things. But Ski had come across a folder of Sandee’s with all sorts of court records and documents in it, writings and other items. He wondered what it all meant.

“That’s it!” Tony said. “That’s the guy. He raped her.”