The CBS Murders (2 page)

His name was Donald Nash; he had been born Donald Bowers but had adopted his mother's maiden name, according to stories around the West Side docks where he was long a familiar figure, at the insistence of his relatives, the overlords of the International Longshoremen's Union's “Pistol” Local 824 during its heyday, who considered him unworthy of bearing the same last name.

He drove slowly through the lot. He knew precisely where he was going and what he was going to do, what he had been hired and paid to do. He had thought about it and planned it meticulously for a long time. If all went as he had worked it out in his mind—and he knew no reason why it wouldn't, for he had been in that lot, a long-term parker himself, often enough over the past week to know when people came and left and where they parked their cars—then he would have done what he had come to do and departed within the next thirty minutes. And after that, if anybody looked for him—and there was no reason why they should—he would be where anybody could find him and nobody would ever think of looking. He would be serving a twenty-day sentence in the Manhattan Correctional Center.

About halfway down the lot, he spotted what he was looking for, a 1980 Blue BMW 320i. He slowed, started to turn in next to it, on the driver's side. And then he was faced with the first unexpected hitch in his carefully conceived plan. Nearly every day for the past week, he had been in and out of that lot, morning and evening, observing the regularity with which people arrived and departed, noting that most invariably left their cars in precisely the same location every day. He had been counting on those inbred patterns. But now, for the first time, the spot on the left side of the BMW was taken. He stopped the van, considered, made his decision, threw the gears into reverse, backed a little, and then turned head on into the spot on the right, the passenger side of the BMW; it was, at least, still unoccupied. He might have made things a little easier for himself had he backed in, but every other car on the lot was parked head in, and his van, the only one on a lot filled with sedans, was conspicuous enough as it was without making it stand out even more by parking the wrong way.

He turned off the engine, got out, walked around to the driver's side of the BMW. Taking the match-stick from his mouth, he jammed the matchstick tightly and deeply into the lock, far enough in so it could neither be seen nor easily removed. He returned to the van.

While he waited, he finished his preparations. He made certain the sliding panel door on the right side of the van was unlocked and slid open easily. Within the protection of the driver's seat, he removed a .22-caliber automatic from its hiding place, removed a silencer from his pocket, and fitted the pieces together. He loaded the automatic, then placed it on the seat next to him. He settled back. He knew he did not have long to wait.

Two blocks south, on West Fifty-fourth Street just in from Twelfth Avenue, thirty-seven-year-old Margaret Barbera, an attractive, dark-haired woman with strikingly large dark eyes, was closing her desk, saying good night, and starting out the door of the Camera Service Center. For just a week, she had been the company's bookkeeper. Nobody in the firm knew much about her, though. She kept to herself, had lunch alone, arrived in the morning and left in the evening right on time, and revealed nothing about her personal life. But, then, she had never been one to open herself to strangers, and she had few friends. Ruth Clapp, the office manager who had interviewed and hired her three weeks earlier, would say later that Barbera had answered an ad in
The New York Times
for a bookkeeper, and though nobody had yet had time to check out her references, they had appeared on the surface to be more than adequate, and she had demonstrated in her week of employment that she had known how to deal with figures and account books. About the only other thing that Mrs. Clapp knew was that Barbera had asked for a delay of a couple of weeks before she started the job. She had had some trouble with her last employer, she explained, not going into what kind of trouble, and probably would have to appear as a witness against him in some pending court case, and further, she wanted time to clean up work she was doing for her own personal clients. Her request had been granted, and she had begun work on Monday, April 5.

If Barbera was worried or if she had any premonitions of danger as she walked out the doorway that night, she kept them to herself. The last sight anyone in the camera shop had of her was as she passed through the doorway and turned west, heading for the parking lot at Pier Ninety-two, where she had reserved a monthly space the previous week, to retrieve her BMW and drive home to her apartment in Queens.

At almost the same moment, three blocks north on West Fifty-seventh Street, Leo Kuranuki, Robert Schulze, and Edward Benford were just leaving their jobs at the CBS studios in the middle of the block between Tenth and Eleventh avenues and heading for their cars at Pier Ninety-two. All three were in their fifties and all were veteran employees of the network, Kuranuki as a studio maintenance manager, Schulze as manager of videotape maintenance, and Benford as a broadcast technician. Both Kuranuki and Schulze were bachelors and sedentary men, somewhat overweight and out of shape. Benford, married and with an eighteen-year-old son in college, was a skier, hiker, and golfer in his spare time, though his activities had been somewhat curtailed after a heart bypass operation a couple of years before.

They had just about reached the ramp to the parking lot when another CBS employee, Angelo Sicca, who worked in the construction shop and knew Schulze well, came around the corner about fifty yards behind them, saw them, and called out for them to wait up for him. Apparently they didn't hear his shout and continued up the ramp, Sicca following at a distance.

Margaret Barbera reached the piertop parking lot first, walked through it toward her car, went around to the driver's side, fished in her purse for the key, removed it, and tried to insert it into the lock. It wouldn't go. The lock was jammed. She went around to the other side, the passenger side, and started to put the key in the lock.

Nash was watching from inside the van. He was ready. As Barbera stood beside her car, Nash, holding his .22 automatic in one hand, leaned out the window of the van, placed the pistol against the back of her head, and fired one shot. Barbera was dead before she hit the pavement.

Kuranuki, Schulze, and Benford were well into the lot, heading for their cars. They stopped suddenly and turned. Sicca, too, was in the lot, approaching his own car. He heard a soft pop. He turned to look in the direction of the sound. He saw Barbera slumping to the ground, saw Nash getting out of the van, bending over her, beginning to drag her around the front of the van, onto the ledge that borders the area, and disappearing. He could see nothing else, but he heard what he recognized from his own long experience with vans as the sound of the sliding door in the side opening, heard a hollow thud, heard the door slide shut.

Sicca unlocked his own car and started to get inside. He glanced around and saw Kuranuki leave Schulze and Benford and move toward the van, concern on his face. Kuranuki disappeared around the side of the van but Sicca heard his voice, asking, “What's going on?”

Nash saw him, stopped, stared at him. “You didn't see nothin', did you?” he demanded. And then, not waiting for a response, he raised the pistol, brought it within inches of Kuranuki's head, and fired. Sicca heard another soft pop. Kuranuki was dead.

Ten or fifteen feet away, Schulze and Benford saw it all with disbelief, hardly comprehending yet what they had stumbled into, what they had just witnessed. They turned and started to move quickly away. Sicca saw them, didn't realize that they were in a panic, were beginning to flee for their lives. He thought they were just going to their cars and Kuranuki would be appearing from around the van any second. “I thought that was the end of it,” he said.

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.