Evil Season (6 page)

On Friday, January 23, Detectives Jack Carter and Jeffrey Steiner interviewed a man named Greg Parry, forty-three years old, who said he might have been one of the last people to see the victim alive.

The interview took place at the Sarasota Opera House, not far from the crime scene. Parry was the opera's director of marketing and communications. Greg knew Joyce from when she was a marketing rep for the Asolo Rep Theatre, before she left to start her own business.

He saw her on Friday at about four in the afternoon. The detectives were impressed, as law enforcement felt that was less than an hour before the murderer had entered the Provenance Gallery.

If one put the pieces together, Parry could have been the well-dressed man, seen by Lois Ross, talking to the victim on the afternoon of her murder.

Parry said he also talked to Wishart several times on the phone on the previous Tuesday. Wishart wanted to put a couple of posters from the opera house on display for an upcoming show, and Parry had them. The posters were for Puccini's
Madama Butterfly
from 1980 and
Orpheus in the Under world
from 1983.

“I walked in, door was open, and there was no one in the front. I walked to the back and found Joyce seated at her computer, talking to another woman,” Parry said.

“Was it unusual for her to have her door open like that?” Detective Carter asked.

“Not at all. If it was a nice day, she wanted the front door to look welcoming.”

He described the woman as white, gray curly hair, maybe five-five, stocky not fat. Joyce might have introduced her as “Ingrid” or “Inga,” but he couldn't be sure. The woman left before he did.

He gave the posters to Joyce; she thanked him, placed the posters on a shelf near her desk, and escorted him out the front door and onto the sidewalk. They conversed briefly about a vase on display on the right-hand side of Wishart's window. After saying their good-byes to one another, she reentered the gallery and he returned to the opera house, seeing nothing suspicious on his way.

Detectives wanted to know Parry's relationship with Wishart. He said they'd had drinks together a couple of times on a group basis, and sometimes he “stopped by her gallery, due to its proximity.”

Parry told the detectives that Wishart had been preparing a show that was to open February 6, featuring local octogenarian graphic designer Alex Steinweiss, who was best known as the innovative designer of record album covers, such as Oscar Levant's recording of Gershwin's
Rhapsody in Blue
and the Philadelphia Orchestra's performance of the
Peer Gynt Suite
. Before Steinweiss, record albums—78 rpm's in those days—had plain covers of dull brown or green paper. “They were unattractive and lacked sales appeal,” Steinweiss said in a 1990 interview. It was a simple idea—a graphic image should accompany a piece of music—but Steinweiss was the first to think of it.

Parry told the detectives that he thought there might be a surveillance camera on the rear of the opera house that might point across the parking lot and Palm Avenue to show the front of the Provenance. He jotted down the name of the security guard at the opera house, who would know for sure. (It later turned out that there
was
a surveillance camera on the back of the opera house, but it was inoperable.)

“Where were you at five o'clock on the evening you last visited the gallery?” Carter asked.

“I had just left the opera. I wanted to do a spin class at the YMCA. It's on stationary bikes, lasted an hour. I was back at work at seven.”

“Have you ever been to Joyce Wishart's house?”

“Once. Christmas, 2000. A little get-together for the theater marketing directors. Before the holidays.”

Parry explained that he was not a U.S. citizen. He was Canadian and had been a resident of the United States, and Sarasota, for three and a half years. “My frequent residency status is up for grabs,” Parry concluded.

After speaking with Parry, detectives checked the crime scene and found the two posters on the shelf near Wishart's desk, right where he said they would be. Police were routinely asking male witnesses to provide a DNA sample, so they could be crossed off the suspect list. Parry talked to his lawyer before complying, but eventually he gave investigators a DNA sample.

 

 

A check of the victim's security contract by Detective Mark Opitz revealed that Wishart's friend Mary Jane Goldthwaite was the person to contact in case of emergency. She was also the keeper of the Provenance's spare key, which she kept unidentified on a magnet on the refrigerator. That key had gone nowhere in years, Goldthwaite maintained, and had nothing to do with how the killer got into the gallery. Goldthwaite said she was Wishart's golf buddy and knew Wishart had an ex-husband, who was long gone. Wishart didn't talk about her love life much. Five years before, Wishart said, she had dated “a rich man in Ohio.”

A check of Wishart's records showed where she had her hair cut. Her stylist, Robert Bombardier, was interviewed and said he'd cut her hair only once or twice. He “barely remembered her.”

On the afternoon of January 23, Detective Steiner called Sarasota Memorial, Doctors Hospital of Sarasota, and Manatee Memorial to see if anyone had gone there with cuts to the hands. This turned out to be difficult to determine. The computer at Sarasota Memorial and at Manatee didn't sort patients by injury type. At Doctors Hospital, the emergency-room (ER) records were hand searched; no knife injuries had come in.

That Friday night, one of the victim's friends, Kathy Killion, hosted a get-together for all of Joyce's friends, some of whom were meeting each other for the first time. The ladies drank wine and shared stories of the woman they loved.

 

 

On Saturday, January 24, 2004, three days after the body was discovered, a bit of excitement erupted on the street outside the Provenance Gallery. At about 4:30
P.M
., an officer guarding the shop, Cliff Cespedes, was looking at the parking garage across the street when he saw something that grabbed his attention. On the garage's third floor at the southeast corner, Cespedes saw a man's silhouette move slowly into view, then slowly back out of view, as if fearful of being seen. Cespedes called “Zone 3” and notified them that he had a suspicious person at the scene of the Wishart murder. He also called dispatch and asked for units to be dispatched to the scene.

With Cespedes was Officer Ronald Dixon, who got in his car and drove up to the garage's third floor to investigate. Cespedes, in the meantime, visually secured the southeast perimeter of the garage. About two minutes later the suspicious man exited the garage through the stairwell at the southeast corner. Cespedes was on him immediately. The man, who was wearing a Bay Plaza jacket and had a radio, identified himself as forty-five-year-old Stephen Garfield (pseudonym), the head security guard at Bay Plaza. Cespedes called dispatch back and canceled the request for backup.

Later, when writing about what he had seen, Officer Cespedes still thought that it was “peculiar” the way the man had slowly appeared in the shadow and then slowly backed away.

It was as if he were attempting to conceal his presence,
Cespedes wrote. He made a mental note to keep tabs on Garfield.

 

 

As Stephen Garfield was observed moving in mysterious ways, Detectives Jack Carter and Jeffrey Steiner checked nearby buildings to see if any surveillance cameras might have picked up the front of the Provenance during the crucial period of time. They talked to Captain Powell Holloway, the security supervisor at the nearby Zenith Building, which had such a camera. Holloway said he would have a CD with the pertinent footage—3:00
P.M.
on January 16 to 6:00
P.M.
on January 17—to police in a matter of hours. The images provided were not as helpful as had been hoped.

As Detective Carter later noted, “The image quality of individuals approaching the storefront are polluted to a large extent by the reflections of the interior lights against the front windows during evening hours and by the back lighting against individuals during daylight hours.”

 

 

A few hours after the Garfield incident, the area outside the gallery was used by Chief Peter Abbott and Captain Tom Laracey for a brief press conference. For reporters looking for fresh headlines, there were slim pickings. “Homicide . . . multiple stab wounds . . .” Not much else. Nothing they didn't already know.

There was some noise as reporters raised their voices while questioning, but the press was respectful of the crime scene and everyone remained obediently outside the police tape.

Later that night, at eleven-thirty, Officer Tom Shanafelt was guarding the gallery, when he was contacted by a twenty-four-year-old pedestrian who identified himself as Mark Saunders. The guy said he might know something helpful. Saunders lived down the street a ways, but he was frequently down on this end of Palm.

“I saw a suspicious man out here, along this stretch of street. I don't remember exactly when, but it was about three days before the body was found,” Saunders said.

“Why was he suspicious?” Shanafelt asked.

“I saw the guy out here asking someone for money.” Saunders didn't know who was being asked, another unknown white male.

Saunders said, “I didn't know the guy and came right out and asked him what he was doing. He told me he was waiting for a friend.”

“Okay, he was panhandling and loitering. Anything else suspicious about him?” Shanafelt asked.

Saunders admitted that seeing a man panhandle on Palm Avenue was not unheard of, but this guy was new.

“The last I saw of him he was walking toward the art gallery,” Saunders said.

“Can you describe him?” Shanafelt asked.

Saunders said the man was about forty years old, five-eleven, 190 pounds. His hair was black; he wore nice clothes.

“What do you remember about the clothes?”

“I just remember he was wearing a designer black leather jacket.”

A panhandler in a designer leather jacket? That was odd.

Investigators went through the recent case files to see if their guy had done anything else to attract attention to himself. One interesting case was a report that had come in at two in the afternoon of January 15, the day before the murder.

Jolie McInnis had been in a building on North Palm Avenue, only a few blocks away from the murder scene. McInnis told responding officers that she'd been at the rear of the building, looking out the window. Behind the building was a private parking lot, and back there was a man going through the Dumpster.

McInnis called out, “This is private property. You can't go through there.”

Hearing that, the man slammed down the lid of the Dumpster and said, “I know what's good for you. I'll slit your fucking throat.”

McInnis got away from the window and called the cops. She described the man as five-ten, thirty-five years old, wearing olive green pants and a blue nylon jacket. He had brown hair and she said she could identify him if she saw him again. The man was last seen walking east on First Street. Police searched but found no one matching the description.

 

 

Detectives Carter and Steiner continued canvassing Palm Avenue for potential witnesses. Cheryl Gilbert, who worked at Chasen Reed, on the corner of Main Street and South Palm, said she last saw the victim at around noon on Friday. Gilbert was on her way to the bank and waved at Wishart through her shop window. Robert Wilson, of Wilson Galleries on South Palm, said he knew who the victim was, but he had never had any dealings with her. He had a manager, he said, who knew Wishart, but that guy quit two weeks earlier, saying he found the job too stressful. Doug Carpenter and Morris Apple, proprietors of Apple-Carpenter Gallery on South Palm, said they knew the victim well. Carpenter and Wishart had worked together recently on a Palm Avenue brochure. They agreed she was a nice lady, but they knew nothing of her friends or associates. Werner Meier, of Design Impressions, said he didn't know the victim, but his wife might have.

Mary Bates, of the Palm Avenue Gallery, knew Wishart to be thoughtful and helpful. Bates kept her promise to call the police when she saw anything suspicious; from then on, every transient who looked in her store window was reported. One of those drifting window-shoppers was a fellow named Mark, who, when contacted by cops, reported a couple more transients whom he thought suspicious. Cynthia Retz, of Gallery 53, said she knew nothing, but she asked if it was true what people were saying about what was done to the victim. And on and on, it went.

 

 

A witness named Nikki Meyer spoke to Detective Mark Opitz on January 24, saying that she was a friend of Wishart's and had had dinner with her on several occasions. Wishart had confided in Meyer that there was one particularly valuable work of art in the Provenance, which she did not keep displayed.

“It was a Renoir etching of a ballet dancer,” Meyer said. “She kept it in a zippered folder.” Wishart said the etching was worth up to $12,000. Meyer didn't know if Wishart had a customer interested in the Renoir.

Meyer told Opitz she was optimistic that police would be able to find out if there were customers interested in the etching because “Joyce was compulsive about logging everything in on her computer.”

“Did Ms. Wishart ever express anxiety about being in her gallery alone?”

“Not at all. On the contrary, Joyce felt very secure in her gallery.”