Authors: Ken Englade
As soon as he arrived at Rozanne’s house, McGowan was told the nature of the incident. Since he was the senior officer present, he assumed command. Without even going inside the house, he began issuing orders dispersing his troops. Some he sent inside to make a search of the house, to make sure there were no additional victims, and to get a quick look before the crime-scene team arrived. Others he ordered onto the streets. Canvass the block, he told them, find out what you can from the neighbors.
As he was giving his orders, a car pulled up in front of the house. A man slid out from behind the wheel and a middle-aged woman got out the other side. Knowing that his officers would check them out, McGowan kept his attention focused on getting the investigation underway. A few minutes later, when he had a breather, he turned to Corley.
“Who were those people?” he asked softly.
“The man says he’s the husband of the woman who lives here,” Corley replied.
“And the woman?” McGowan asked.
“His mother,” Corley said.
McGowan nodded and started toward the man. At the same time, the man began walking in his direction. They met on the driveway and shook hands.
“I’m Dr. Peter Gailiunas,” the man said.
After introducing himself, McGowan asked Gailiunas to go with Corley to give him a statement, necessary in view of the situation.
“Okay,” Gailiunas said briskly, “but in the meantime, can my mother take my son home?”
McGowan glanced at the boy, who was clearly shaken and confused by the events swirling around him.
“Sure,” McGowan said, already advised by his investigators that Little Peter had been asleep in his room at the time of the attack and had seen nothing or no one. “Why not?”
Dismissing Gailiunas to Corley, McGowan turned his attention again toward the scene and what he needed to do to get the investigation quickly and efficiently underway. It was not yet seven
P
.
M
. and darkness was a good half hour away. It will probably be daylight again before I get home, he said to himself. He wasn’t off by much.
A few minutes after Gailiunas left with Corley, another car pulled up and two men got out, one middle-aged, the other in his mid-thirties.
As Gailiunas had been minutes earlier, they were intercepted by a uniformed officer and asked what they wanted.
“My name is Larry Aylor,” the younger man said, “and this is my father. I’m Rozanne Gailiunas’s boyfriend.”
Before the officer could speak, Larry demanded, “What happened? Did the doctor beat her up or shoot her?”
Faced with the new development, the officer scurried off to find McGowan.
“Sergeant,” the uniformed officer said, “there’s something you ought to know. That guy over there,” he said, pointing at Larry, “claims he’s the woman’s boyfriend.”
McGowan looked at him in surprise.
Boyfriend
, he thought. What the hell’s going on here? I just met her
husband
. Shaking his head, he told the officer to take a statement from the man and that he would talk to him later.
The officer reported back to Larry, who was not happy with the news.
“Come this way, sir,” the officer said, leading Larry toward a patrol car that was parked nearby. En route, they passed the other patrol car in which Gailiunas was sitting with Corley. As Larry drew abreast, Gailiunas looked up. The two men glared at each other.
After Larry’s call, it had taken Sandy Miller only a few minutes to get some information and call him back.
“Larry,” she said in a very serious voice, “there’s been a problem at Rozanne’s.”
Her message confirmed Larry’s worst fears. “What kind of problem?” he asked.
Miller did not answer him directly. “Did you know that Rozanne and her husband had a big fight last night?” she asked.
“How did you know that?” Larry asked in surprise.
“Rozanne told me when I talked to her earlier today,” said Miller, who had become close friends with Rozanne in the weeks since she filed the divorce papers. “Peter went to her house and they really got into it over the settlement.”
Larry felt himself go cold. “Is she okay?” he asked in a thin voice, collapsing on the sofa.
“I don’t know,” Miller said. “But you need to go over there.”
Larry said he would leave immediately.
“Oh,” Miller added quickly. “One more thing. Do you carry a gun?”
Years before, Larry had formed the habit of keeping a pistol in his truck. In Dallas, as in most large cities, it was not unusual for thieves to break into houses under construction to steal plumbing and lighting fixtures. Since Larry visited his houses at strange hours, he did not want to walk into a theft-in-progress without having something he could use to defend himself. “Yes,” he said.
“Well, don’t take it with you,” Miller advised. “And don’t go alone. Can you get someone to go with you?”
Larry said he would call his father, who had moved his family back to Texas after a restless three years in Virginia.
The ambulance with Rozanne in the back pulled into the emergency entrance at Presbyterian Hospital at 7:10
P
.
M
., about the time Gailiunas and Larry drove up to Rozanne’s house and precisely thirty-four minutes after the paramedics had first arrived on the scene.
Rozanne, whose pulse and respiration were still strong, was wheeled into the emergency room where doctors made a quick examination of her wounds. What they found was one bullet entrance hole squarely in the back of her head and another on her right temple. They could find no exit wound for either bullet. But when they examined the temple wound more closely, they saw that the bullet had not entered very deeply. In fact, it was resting just below the skin. A nurse grabbed a pair of forceps and probed the wound, easily removing a small, deformed slug. In one quick motion, she dropped the tiny piece of lead into a metal bowl, where it landed with a dull thunk.
RPD Officer Ken Roberts, who had joined May at the hospital, grabbed the bowl. Looking around for a container in which to store the evidence, Roberts spotted a small bottle of the type used to collect urine samples. Carefully, he lifted the pellet from the bowl and transferred it to the bottle, corking it with the rubber cap and dropping it into his pocket. Later, he sealed it and added his initials to a label verifying when and where it had been found.
The second bullet was somewhere inside Rozanne’s brain. Realizing it would have to be removed, ER workers began feverishly preparing her for surgery. One nurse shaved her head, while another jabbed a needle into her arm and drew a vial of blood, which was sent to a commercial laboratory for analysis. It would be tested for drugs since doctors would need to know what, if anything, was already in her system before administering anything else.
By then, it was 7:25
P
.
M
., give or take a couple of minutes, not even an hour after Duggan and Moore had first arrived at 804 Loganwood.
At 7:40, Rozanne was X-rayed and hooked up to a Portable Chest Unit, which would help her breathe. The idea was to do whatever was necessary to keep her alive and as strong as possible until a surgeon could open her skull, get into her brain, and determine the extent of the damage.
At 7:43
P
.
M
., the on-call neurosurgeon, Dr. Morris Sanders, arrived and began readying himself for the operation.
At 7:55, Rozanne was given a CAT scan to try to pinpoint where the bullet had come to rest in her brain and to get a preliminary estimate of the extent of brain damage she had suffered.
When told by the uniformed officer that he would have to give a statement, Gailiunas announced that he would not say another word until he could get a lawyer. When the patrolman reported this to McGowan, the sergeant shrugged. Over the years, he had come to realize that was a fairly predictable reaction at the scene of a violent crime, especially if the person involved was a professional. The perceived need for an attorney, he had come to realize, was in direct proportion to a person’s level of education.
Telling the officer he would be back shortly, Gailiunas walked across the street and knocked on the door of the house occupied by Page Billings, a seventeen-year-old student beautician, and her mother.
“I want to use your telephone,” Gailiunas asked without preamble when Page opened the door.
As she was showing him where the instrument was, Gailiunas looked at her sternly and said sharply, “You didn’t see me over here today, did you!” She did not reply.
When they got to the phone, Gailiunas asked Page and her mother to leave him alone so he could make his call in private. Even though they waited outside, they could hear him through the door. He called his lawyer and asked him to meet him at Rozanne’s house. Before he left, he again glared at Page and her mother and told them: “Whatever you know, you need to keep to yourself.”
Page regarded his words as a threat. Standing in the deepening twilight, the frightened teenager watched the doctor crossing the street in long strides.
Unlike Gailiunas, Larry told police that he was willing to cooperate.
“Good,” the officer said, escorting Larry to a patrol car for the ride to police headquarters.
But once he got into the stationhouse and met Investigator Ken McKenzie, Larry changed his mind about being helpful.
Looking at the scratches Larry suffered in the bike accident earlier in the afternoon, McKenzie stared at Larry and asked him, “Why did you do it?”
“What?” Larry asked, not sure he had heard correctly.
“I asked, why did you shoot her?” McKenzie said belligerently.
Larry stared at him. “I’m not saying anything more until my lawyer gets here,” he said, crossing his arms defiantly.
Asking for a telephone, he called Sandy Miller and asked for her help. Digging through her files, she came up with the name of a criminal defense lawyer and recited it to Larry.
“You’d better call him,” she said. “He’s the only one I know of available at this time of night who would be able to help.”
Larry thanked her and broke the connection. He then called the lawyer and briefly explained the circumstances.
“I’ll be there in thirty minutes,” the lawyer said.
While Gailiunas and Larry were waiting for their respective lawyers to arrive, Rozanne was wheeled into one of the hospital’s operating rooms.
At 9:30, after she had been anesthetized, Dr. Sanders looked closely at the wound for the first time. What he saw was not encouraging. The bullet that had been fired into the back of her head, even though it was of a small caliber, much smaller in fact than the eraser on the end of a pencil, had evidently struck the perfect place to do the maximum amount of damage. It had entered the parietal area of her skull, below the crown and just to the right of center. The slug then apparently traveled downward and diagonally through the brain, coming to rest above and behind her left eye. From his long experience with gunshot wounds to the head, Sanders knew that as the bullet progressed it had literally cooked the tissue in its path, turning affected portions of the brain into mush.
The surgeon sensed immediately that the prognosis was extremely poor, that she was very close to death and probably would not survive for long. But he would do what he could. As he went to work, his immediate concern was to remove the bits of skin, bone, and hair the bullet had driven into the sensitive brain as it pierced her skull.
At 10:50, an hour and twenty minutes after surgery began, an operating room nurse sewed up the surprisingly small incision on the back of Rozanne’s shaved head and wheeled her into the intensive care unit. She was classified as living because a machine was doing her breathing for her. But she was brain dead, which meant that her brain had ceased performing its vital functions. The condition was irreversible. Even if she lived, she likely would be nothing more than a vegetable.
7
While some officers began working door-to-door through the neighborhood, others began a methodical search of the house looking for clues. It was this group that ran into the first roadblocks; the inspection produced precious little. There were no fingerprints, no shoeprints, no cigarette butts, no empty glasses, no drops of semen or saliva—none of the usual things that might provide a lead to the identity of the murderer. The only blood found in the house was Rozanne’s, and there was remarkably little of that considering the brutality of the crime. The only clues of significance in the house were the shell casing that Duggan had first spotted on Rozanne’s pillow and the short lengths of rope that remained twisted around the bedposts.
The shell casing from the house, the other shell casing retrieved by Officer May, the two slugs, and the rope would be all the officers would have to work with for a long, long time. Overlooked as a possible clue—indeed considered part of the house’s natural decor—was a small, inexpensive potted plant sitting on the floor against the wall by the front door. The significance of that pot would not become apparent for more than five years, and then its import would have to be spelled out to Detective McGowan.