Authors: David Simon
Garvey had asked for a quality prosecutor in that case and he got one. Bill McCollum, an experienced attorney with the career criminals unit of the state’s attorney’s office, reinterviewed the paramedics who handled the call and learned that Carlton Robinson, on the way to the hospital, had openly acknowledged that he was dying. Months later, the paramedics remembered the November 9 shooting call because of the date—they, too, noted that it occurred on the day that the state’s vaunted handgun law took effect.
In the end, a jury in Judge Bothe’s court found Warren Waddell guilty of first-degree murder, a verdict that resulted in a life-without-parole term predicated on the fact that Waddell had only recently been paroled on a charge of homicide. At this writing, however, the verdict has been overturned by a Maryland appeals court because of prejudicial comments made by Judge Bothe in the presence of the jury; a new trial date has yet to be scheduled.
Still, the case against Waddell remains a viable prosecution, a victory snatched from the jaws of defeat by good legal work, and Garvey, for one, allowed himself some measure of satisfaction at the end of the first trial.
As a sheriff ’s deputy led Warren Waddell down the marble stairs to the basement lockup, the defendant stared sullenly at the detective for a second too long. Garvey responded by leaning over the railing and calling to the convicted man in a stage whisper: “See you later, dickhead.”
McCollum, who was talking to another attorney a few feet away, suddenly made the connection. “You didn’t just say what I thought you said?”
“Fuck yes,” said Garvey. “Somebody had to.”
Alone among the three squads of D’Addario’s 1988 command, Terry McLarney’s crew is still intact.
Eddie Brown moves steadily from case to case, seemingly impervious to the passage of time. Rick James, who worked hard and long on the March murder of cab driver Karen Renee Smith, has now moved far enough from Worden’s shadow to be called a veteran. In fact, James’s 1988 campaign was nearly as successful as Rich Garvey’s: Alvin Richardson, who raped and murdered that two-year-old boy in November, was convicted in a jury trial and sentenced to life in prison, and Dennis
Wahls, who led police to the stolen jewelry and implicated himself in the cab driver’s murder, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and accepted a life sentence. Clinton Butler, the man whom Wahls named as the man who actually beat Karen Smith to death, was tried twice in Baltimore courtrooms. Despite Wahls’s testimony and other corroborating evidence, the first jury was hung, the second found Butler innocent.
Donald Waltemeyer’s career case went to trial in 1989, as prosecutors brought Geraldine Parrish into Judge Bothe’s court for the murder of Albert Robinson, the alcoholic from Plainfield, New Jersey, found dead by the railbed in Clifton Park in 1986. Geraldine knew Albert Robinson from her storefront church in Plainfield, and years earlier she had convinced him to sign a life insurance policy that named her as the beneficiary. Of the four murders with which she was charged, the slaying of Robinson proved to have the most corroborative evidence. A trio of prosecutors told jurors an incredible, at times almost comical, tale in which Geraldine and a handful of other conspirators drove to New Jersey and lured Robinson into a car with promises of alcohol. Hours later, they shot him and left him for dead in a copse near Atlantic City. Robinson survived with only superficial wounds, but he was so drunk that he remembered nothing of the incident. A few months later, the gang returned to New Jersey, lured the drunk into the car once again, and this time drove him to Baltimore, where a teenage friend of one of Geraldine’s nieces finished the job on the B&O railbed, leaving Rick James with a stone whodunit.
Geraldine disappointed no one at the trial. At one point, she threw a conniption in the jury’s presence, flailing in her chair and spitting foam from the corners of her mouth. A bored Elsbeth Bothe ordered her to behave, ending the demonstration. Later, on the witness stand, Geraldine claimed she was duped by men who made her turn over the insurance policies and identify the prospective victims for them.
She wasn’t convincing, and in this instance a jury had little problem agreeing on a verdict. Geraldine Parrish was sentenced to life in prison, after which she pleaded guilty to the remaining three murders and received concurrent life sentences. No one was more relieved to see the case end than Donald Waltemeyer, who returned to the rotation full time immediately after the trial.
Waltemeyer’s partner, Dave Brown, no longer lives in a state of perpetual torment. For the last two years, Donald Worden has granted the younger detective a certain grudging acceptance, if not respect. It is true,
however, that in the summer of 1989 the Big Man began charging Brown twenty-five cents apiece for his phone messages.
As for Terry McLarney himself, he continues to cling to the brotherhood. In 1989, he ignored a persistent cough until he could barely stand, then spent months recuperating from a bacterial infection around his heart. He was not expected to return to homicide, which is to say he was back in four months, looking leaner and healthier than he had in years.
At twenty-eight years of service and counting, Donald Worden is still a Baltimore police officer, still the center of McLarney’s squad. And he is now a married man. The wedding was in the summer of 1989 and most of the shift was there. Toast followed toast, and the entire wedding party concluded the festivities at Kavanaugh’s, with Diane gracing a barstool in her wedding dress and the Big Man holding court in a well-tailored tuxedo.
Marriage meant that Worden had to put in at least one more year to qualify his bride for full benefits, but that milestone came and went, and he is still working murders. He has stayed close to the Monroe Street case file and followed up on the few leads that have come into the unit in the last two years. Still, the death of John Randolph Scott in an alley off Monroe Street remains an open investigation—the only unsolved police-involved shooting in department history. The officers concerned remain, for the most part, on the street, although some, including Sergeant John Wiley, were subsequently reassigned to administrative duties within the department.
But other outcomes are more gratifying. Once last year, Worden was driving out to a shooting scene in the early morning hours when he passed the downtown bus station and noticed a clean-cut U.S. Navy seaman walking with a ragged-looking man on West Fayette Street. The combination seemed strange to Worden; he filed it away in that memory of his, and when the sailor turned up dead later that morning, beaten to death during a robbery in a nearby parking garage, Worden walked over to Kevin Davis, the primary on the case. Worden gave Davis a full description of the suspect; the two men got back in a Cavalier and found their man within hours.
The newspapers said the crime was solved by sheer luck, proving once again how little this world understands about what it means to be a detective.
* * *
A final postscript: In 1988, 234 men and women died violent deaths in the city of Baltimore. In 1989, 262 people were murdered. Last year, the murder rate jumped again, leaving 305 dead—the city’s worst toll in almost twenty years.
In the first month of 1991, the city is averaging one murder a day.
This book is a work of journalism. The names of the detectives, defendants, victims, prosecutors, police officers, pathologists and others identified in the text are, in fact, their real names. The events described in the book occurred in the manner described.
My research began in January 1988, when I joined the Baltimore Police Department’s homicide unit with the unlikely rank of “police intern.” As often happens when journalists hang around one place long enough, I became a piece of furniture in the unit, a benign part of the detectives’ daily scenery. Within weeks they were acting as if allowing a reporter to gawk at the chaos of criminal investigation was entirely natural.
So that my presence would not interfere with the investigations, I agreed to look and dress the part. That meant cutting my hair, purchasing several sport coats, ties and slacks and removing a diamond-stud earring that had done little to endear me to the detectives themselves. Throughout my year in the unit, I never identified myself to anyone as a law officer. But my appearance, coupled with the presence of other police, often led civilians and even other police to assume that I was, in fact, a detective. To journalists trained to identify themselves while reporting, this may be perceived as a crime of omission. But to declare myself at crime scenes, during interviews or inside hospital emergency rooms would have dramatically impaired the investigations. In brief, there was no other way to research this book.
Still, the ethical ambiguity was there every time I quoted a witness, an emergency room doctor, a prison guard, or a victim’s relative who assumed I was a law officer. For that reason, I have tried to accord these people as much anonymity as possible, balancing questions of fairness and privacy with the need for accuracy.
All of the detectives on Lieutenant D’Addario’s shift signed release forms before seeing any portion of the manuscript. Other characters
central to the book also gave approval for their names to be used. In order to obtain these releases, I promised the detectives and others that they would be allowed to review relevant portions of the manuscript and suggest changes for purposes of accuracy. I also told the detectives that if there was something in the manuscript that was not essential to the story but that could nonetheless harm their careers or personal lives, they could ask that it be deleted and I would consider the request. In the end, the detectives requested remarkably few changes, and the handful to which I agreed involved mundane items, such as one detective’s comment about a woman in a bar or another’s criticism of a specific superior. I allowed no changes that involved the handling of a case or in any way altered or muted the book’s message.
In addition to the individual detectives, the police department itself had a limited right to review the manuscript—but only to ensure that undisclosed evidentiary material in pending cases (bullet calibers, manner of death, clothing of victim) was not being released in instances where such facts, if kept secret, might later help identify a suspect. No changes or deletions resulted from the department’s review.
Representatives of the Baltimore state’s attorney’s office and the state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner also reviewed relevant portions of the manuscript for purposes of accuracy only. Like the detectives, they could suggest, but not insist on, changes.
Most of the dialogue in this narrative—perhaps 90 percent—comes from the scenes and conversations that I personally witnessed. In a few instances, however, important events occurred on shifts when I was not working or when I was busy reporting on the activities of other detectives. In those instances, I was careful not to use direct quotes for long portions of text, and I have tried to use only those quotes that were specifically recalled by the detectives. And when a character is shown to be thinking something, it is not mere presumption: In every case, subsequent actions made those thoughts apparent or I discussed the matter with that person afterward. And by reviewing the material with the detectives, I have tried to ensure that their thoughts have been portrayed as accurately as possible.
For the unprecedented and unparalleled cooperation of the Baltimore Police Department, I am indebted to the late Police Commissioner Edward J. Tilghman as well as the current commissioner, Edward V. Woods. I am also grateful to Deputy Commissioner for Operations Ronald J.
Mullen; retired Colonel Richard A. Lanham and Deputy Commissioner Joseph W. Nixon, both of whom headed the Criminal Investigations Division for portions of 1988; Captain John J. MacGillivary, commander of the Crimes Against Persons section; Lieutenant Stewart Oliver, administrative lieutenant for the persons section; as well as the multitude of BPD commanders, line officers and technicians who went out of their way to assist me.
This project would also not have been possible without the invaluable assistance of Director Dennis S. Hill, chief public information officer for the Baltimore department, and Lieutenant Rick Puller and Sergeant Michael A. Fry of the department’s legal affairs unit.
I would also like to thank Chief Medical Examiner Dr. John E. Smialek and others in the medical examiner’s office for advice and assistance; and Dr. Smialek and Michael Golden, spokesman for the state health department, for providing access to the OCME. In the city prosecutor’s office, I am indebted to State’s Attorney Stuart O. Simms, Chief of the Violent Crimes Unit Timothy V. Doory, and Chief of the Trial Division Ara Crowe.
On the editorial side, this book comes into the world only through the determined and devoted efforts of John Sterling, editor in chief at Houghton Mifflin, who saw the possibilities from the outset and simply refused to let any of them slip away. His patience, talent and expertise are responsible for much of what may be called good writing in these pages; I plead guilty to the rest. This book also benefited immensely from the efforts of Luise M. Erdmann, who proved that manuscript editing, when done well, is more art than craft. My thanks also to Rebecca Saikia-Wilson and everyone else at Houghton Mifflin who gave this project such strong support.
I am also grateful to my editors at the
Baltimore Sun
, who granted me leave to complete the work and were unswervingly supportive of the project, even after I blew a deadline or three. My thanks to James I. Houck, managing editor; Tom Linthicum, metropolitan desk editor; Anthony F. Barbieri, city editor; and writing coach Rebecca Corbett, who has been a source of advice and encouragement ever since I began making nightshift police rounds at the Sun eight years ago.
I would like to thank Bernard and Dorothy Simon, my parents, whose help over the last three years was essential, as well as Kayle Tucker, whose love and unstinting support was of equal value.
Most important, this book could not exist without the assistance of
homicide shift lieutenants Gary D’Addario and Robert Stanton and the forty detectives and detective sergeants who served in their 1988 commands. They took the real risk here, and I hope they feel now that it was in some way worth it.
Finally, a note on one last ethical dilemma. Over a period of time, familiarity and even friendship can sometimes tangle the relationship between a journalist and his subjects. Knowing that, I began my tenure in the homicide unit committed to a policy of complete nonintervention. If the phone in the main office rang and there was no one but me to answer, then it was not meant to be answered. But the detectives themselves helped to corrupt me. It began with phone messages, then grew to spelling corrections and proofreading. (“You’re a writer. Take a look at this affidavit.”) And I shared with the detectives a year’s worth of fast-food runs, bar arguments and station house humor: Even for a trained observer, it was hard to remain aloof.
In retrospect, it’s good that the year ended when it did, before one of the detectives provoked me to intervene in some truly harmful way. Once, in December, I found myself crossing that line— “going native,” as journalists say. I was in the back seat of an unmarked car cruising Pennsylvania Avenue, accompanying Terry McLarney and Dave Brown in their search for a witness. At one point, the detectives suddenly pulled over to the curb to confront a woman who matched the description. She was walking with two young men. McLarney jumped from the car and grabbed one man, but Brown’s trenchcoat belt became caught in the car’s shoulder harness and he fell back into the driver’s seat. “Go,” he yelled at me, still struggling with the harness. “Help Terry.”
Armed with my ball-point pen, I followed McLarney, who was struggling to get one man up against a parked car while the second eyed him angrily.
“DO HIM!” McLarney yelled at me, gesturing toward the second man.
And so, in a moment of weakness, a newspaper reporter shoved a citizen of his city against a parked car and performed one of the most pathetic and incompetent body searches on record. When I got down to the guy’s ankles, I looked up over my shoulder at McLarney.
He was, of course, laughing hard.
David Simon
Baltimore
March 1991