The CBS Murders (3 page)

He did what had to be done. He ordered the area cleared, moving the television crews and the newsmen away from the scene and holding them at bay off to one side; maybe they could see something from there and maybe they couldn't; he didn't care, as long as they stayed out of his way.

Sicca and Schlop were brought over and introduced to him, along with Streiter, who had been summoned from his parking booth at the bottom of the ramp. Chartrand exchanged a few words with them, just enough to hear about the van and the driver who had carried a long-barreled pistol and had shot Kuranuki, Schulze, and Benford. An alarm went out for a light-colored van, which was all anybody knew at that moment. Whatever else Sicca particularly, and Schlop and Streiter had to say could wait for later; there were things that Chartrand had to do first before he could pay much attention to their stories, before he could question them in full. They were handed over to other cops, separated so that when he finally did hear them their stories still would be fresh, they would not have had an opportunity to compare notes and, perhaps, try to resolve discrepancies, if there were any. They were isolated and kept waiting until he had time for them.

He turned to the bodies then. And as he did, both the medical examiner and the police photographer arrived. “The bodies had not been searched until then,” Chartrand says. “So while we did the photographs and before the medical examiner went to work, we did the search of the bodies and the immediate areas around them, and each search was done by a uniformed officer in my presence, so that I would know what was found. The reason it was done that way was because I wanted it done that way, because normally you try to assume that whatever case you go out on, you're going to wind up with. So if you treat them all like your own from the beginning, you can do a better job.” Chartrand's assumption was, of course, correct. It was his case from the start.

Slowly and carefully they went over the bodies and, inch by inch, over the pier, now illuminated by blinding portable lights brought in by the police. Three shell casings were discovered, one near each body. And near Kuranuki's body they came upon a pair of woman's shoes, a plastic hairband and an open purse, some coins, car keys, and other things scattered around it. An examination of the keys showed they belonged to a BMW, and there was a BMW only a few feet away.

Chartrand took the keys. “I did what every normal person does,” he says. “I tried to open the car from the driver's side. And I couldn't get it open. So we had to open it from the passenger side.” (The next day, a police locksmith pulled the lock from the driver's side of the BMW and found a sliver of wood, a piece of a matchstick, jammed well up into it.)

If neither Chartrand nor anyone else had any idea where or how the BMW, the purse, and the shoes fitted into the carnage that had taken place on the pier, still, naturally enough, their attention increasingly focused on the car. But those thirty-odd other cars on the pier, some of whose owners were now appearing to claim them and drive home after work, could not be ignored, either. There was no telling if one or more of them might be a piece of the puzzle as well. “We began a check of every vehicle on the pier,” Chartrand says. “Who they belonged to, what they were doing up there, everything. Some of them belonged to long-term parkers, some to people who had left them while they went on the cruise. It took a long time. Many of the people who were coming up to get their vehicles that night were denied their vehicles. They couldn't get them. It was an inconvenience, of course, but a necessary one.”

It was, though, that $20,000 German car that really intrigued them. The conviction that it must be central began to grow. In his initial brief exchange with Sicca, Chartrand had been told of the woman being dragged around the van, and the van had been parked alongside the BMW. Who was the woman? The car had New Jersey license plates, and the registration in the glove compartment listed it as belonging to a Margaret Barbera of 631 Cumberland Road in Teaneck, N.J. The driver's license and other identification found in the purse, and the application filled out with Kinney System, Inc., operator of the pier parking lot and dozens more around the city, were all in the name of Margaret Barbera of 613 Granview Avenue in the Ridgewood section of Queens. That discrepancy caused hardly a lifted eyebrow. It is not an unknown practice for some New Yorkers to register their cars in New Jersey or Connecticut, where insurance rates are a lot lower or where, if they are deeply in debt, the car can be protected from the claims of New York creditors.

Still, it did present a minor problem. “There was as a result,” Chartrand notes, “a little difficulty in establishing if this is the person who is gone.” There was no Margaret Barbera listed in the Teaneck phone book, but there was a Queens telephone number as well as the Queens address on the application she had filed with Kinney, and it matched the Queens number found on various items in the purse. Over the next hours, the number was called several times. There was never an answer.

In that purse, too, the police found Camera Service Center identification. Detectives were sent to the shop on West Fifty-fourth Street. They were told that, indeed, Margaret Barbera worked there, had worked there for just a week. And she had left work just before six. She must have been going to the parking lot on Pier Ninety-two because she had told people that she had rented a spot there for her car.

It was time to talk to the witnesses. Over the next hours and all through the night, Chartrand and others went through their stories, concentrating especially on Sicca, since he was the only actual witness to the shootings. He was questioned three times that night: a brief interrogation on the pier while Chartrand was busy with the bodies and the search of the crime scene; a second, lengthier conversation on the pier by Chartrand after he had completed that search; and a long session, lasting several hours, back at Midtown North. Sicca, Chartrand says, “was very astute. He was not the type of person who could be swayed or influenced. He laid it out for us. He told us what he saw and what he didn't see. And he was very, very accurate. His description of the killer wasn't very good because he never got a really good look. He was deathly afraid for his own life. He was afraid that his presence on the pier at that time had been detected by the shooter, and he was trying to look to see what was going on and still trying to remain unseen. And when he drove off the pier and looked in his rearview mirror and here's the van right behind him, one car away, he was petrified. He was terrified that he was going to be taken. There's no question that anyone who confronted the shooter while he was fleeing was going to die, or that he was going to make every effort to see that he died.”

At the end of those first hours in the evening of April 12, then, the police were faced with a massive and grisly puzzle and they had only a few pieces, not nearly enough yet to make much sense of it, hardly enough even to begin to put the first pieces together. They had the bodies of Leo Kuranuki, Robert Schulze, and Edward Benford, all run down in that Pier Ninety-two parking lot and killed by single shots from a .22-caliber automatic. They were convinced that there had been a silencer attached to the pistol; the soft pops heard by the only witness, Angelo Sicca, indicated that. They had the shell casings from the pistol, casings found near the bodies. They had Sicca's story that a woman, perhaps shot and killed, had been abducted and thrown into a white or silver van. The indications were that the woman's name was Margaret Barbera; she was the owner of a BMW that had been parked next to the van, and it appeared to have been abandoned; its driver's door lock had been jammed; her purse and, perhaps, her shoes were lying near Kuranuki's body and the BMW. At this point, nobody had the slightest idea why she had been marked as the killer's intended victim, if, indeed, that was what she was. It could have been, for all they knew, the violent end to a lovers' quarrel, or she might have been the victim of a hired assassin; nobody could be sure of anything. They knew that the killer had escaped in a light-colored van and had headed south once he was out of the parking-lot ramp. They had, from Sicca, a sketchy description of him as a tall, slim man somewhere between thirty and forty, but Sicca had said that description was only a guess, that the light was dim, that he was making every effort to hide from the killer's gaze and so never really got a good look. He was just making a guess, but he could be completely wrong about it.

It was not much to go on. But there was a need to move rapidly. They were faced, even in those first hours, with a public outcry, and it would swell in volume as the days passed. This was the worst case of multiple homicides, aside from the internecine killings in the underworld, that the city had seen in years. The victims were three innocent, respectable men, bystanders, who had sought only to come to the aid of somebody in possible distress, and their reward had been death. The fact that they were employees of one of the most powerful organs of communications in the land, CBS, made the pressure for a quick solution even greater. CBS was not only playing the story for all it was worth in news value, as were all the other television stations and the newspapers, but also the network was offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the killer. The case thus became top priority for the police.

4

Had Donald Nash kept his head, there might have been no slaughter on Pier Ninety-two that April evening. There would have been only a single murder, the one he had been hired to commit. And the chances are, he would have gotten away with it. When Leo Kuranuki approached with his question, “What's going on?” if Nash had replied, “It's nothing. My wife and I were having a little argument, that's all. It's all over now. Thanks anyway,” Kuranuki probably would have turned away, and that would have been that.

But Nash lost his cool. He had been edgy ever since reaching the pier. First, there was the very fact of the murder he was about to commit and the wait for his victim to arrive. And then there was the hitch in his plan, that car parked on the left side of the BMW, the spot he had meant to be his. If he had been able to park there, the van's sliding door would have been directly opposite the driver's door of the BMW. It would have been a simple matter to lean out and shoot Margaret Barbera while she was unlocking her car, then haul her into the van through the open sliding door without ever having to leave the shelter of the van's interior, then slide the door shut. It would have been over in an instant. Nobody would have seen anything, and the most anybody could have heard was the soft pop of the silencer-equipped automatic, a sound that would have made hardly an impression on that vast pier. But that other car was there. He had been forced to park on the passenger side of Barbera's car and then, once he had shot her, drag her around the van. That had put him in the open, naked to any eyes during those critical moments. Kuranuki, Schulze, and Benford had seen him then. Kuranuki had approached with his question. Nash was sure he had no other choice but to kill the three witnesses.

In panic, he sped off the pier. Sicca had nothing to worry about. With his limited vision and his preoccupation with too many other things, he had not noticed Sicca, and so the car up ahead meant nothing. Nash wanted only to flee from that place as fast as he could. He raced by the gatehouse, past Streiter, not bothering to slow and hand in his parking ticket. Streiter paid him no attention. He was turning over in his mind what Sicca had said about somebody hitting three people up on the pier, was reaching for the phone to call security and ask them to check on it.

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.