Authors: Ken Englade
As the investigators began straggling back, they also had little to add. No one had reported seeing an adult entering or leaving Rozanne’s all day, although two neighborhood girls claimed they had seen Rozanne’s son, Little Peter, playing peacefully in the front yard that afternoon. The remarkable thing about that bit of intelligence was the fact that the boy had been alone. According to the neighbors, Rozanne
never
allowed her son outside except under her direct supervision.
One of those who had reported seeing young Peter was the teenager from across the street, Page Billings, the same neighbor who had permitted Gailiunas to use her telephone earlier in the evening. The other was Dana Keller, a junior high school student who lived several doors away. Dana reported seeing young Peter outside at 3:45 and Page saw him at 5:20. Those reports puzzled McGowan.
Once Gailiunas’s lawyer arrived, the doctor told Corley that he had been at home that evening waiting for Rozanne to bring their son to his house for dinner, but the boy called at six-fifteen and said Rozanne was “sick.” Realizing that the situation was urgent, Gailiunas said, he asked his mother, to whom he had been talking when Little Peter’s call clicked in, to telephone the paramedics and direct them to Rozanne’s house. He denied being at the house earlier in the day.
“Ever since she moved out,” Gailiunas added gloomily, “I was afraid something like this was going to happen.”
“Who do you think did it?” Corley had asked.
Gailiunas did not pause. “I think it was either Larry Aylor or his wife, Joy,” he said.
When Larry’s lawyer arrived, he came barging into the small interrogation room in which Larry was sitting and slammed the door behind him.
Slapping his card down on the table, he leaned close to Larry and said, “All right, boy, I’m going to ask you a question and don’t you fuck with me.”
“What’s that?” Larry stammered, surprised at the lawyer’s belligerence.
“Did you shoot her?” he asked.
“No!” Larry replied.
“Okay,” the lawyer said, adding he would need a $1,500 retainer before he could represent him.
Reaching into his back pocket for his wallet, Larry made out a check and handed it to the attorney.
“Now,” the lawyer said brusquely, “are you willing to talk to these guys?”
“Sure,” Larry replied, “as long as they don’t accuse me of shooting Rozanne.”
Nodding sagely, the lawyer opened the door and beckoned to Investigator Corley, who was waiting outside.
“He’ll talk to you now,” the lawyer said, walking out of the office.
It was the last Larry saw of the lawyer or his $1,500.
As calmly as he could, Larry explained to Corley about his plans to meet Rozanne that evening and about how he had been trying, without success, to telephone her. But the only time anyone answered the phone, he said, it was Little Peter. He had been talking to the boy when he heard a voice commanding him to hang up.
“About what time was that?” Corley asked.
“I think it was a little after six,” Larry said.
“Do you have any idea who it was that yelled at him?” Corley asked.
“I think it was Dr. Gailiunas,” Larry said without hesitation.
Several days later, when Gailiunas and Larry were alone, the doctor insisted that he had not killed his wife. “Did you tell them that I did?” he asked Larry.
Larry glowered at him. “Yes!” he said, and walked away.
In addition to the doctor and the contractor, there was someone else investigators needed to talk to that night, someone who could perhaps give them some very vital information about what had happened at 804 Loganwood. That was Little Peter.
When it was apparent that there was going to be no speedy resolution to the crime, investigators called Gailiunas’s mother and asked her to bring the boy to headquarters so officers could talk to him. Grudgingly, she agreed.
After Peter arrived, Corley took the boy into his cluttered office and tried with only limited success to get him to open up. A hyperactive child with a short attention span, Little Peter wanted to talk about everything but the events leading up to the time he had found his mother. Although he was untrained in the techniques of interrogating a child, Corley nevertheless was able to establish that Rozanne had made him take a nap that afternoon as punishment for misbehaving in his ice-skating class. After he awoke late in the afternoon, he went into his mother’s room and found her “sick.” When Corley questioned him further about that, the boy replied that “she was tied up so she wouldn’t fall in that stuff,” obviously referring to the vomitus on the floor.
Corley, however, was unsuccessful in getting the boy to answer his questions about the presence of anyone else in the house that afternoon, and was about to give up when Gailiunas walked into his office. Without preamble, the doctor asked his son, in Corley’s presence, “Who told you to hang up the phone?”
“You did,” Peter replied.
But when Gailiunas repeated the question, his son gave a different answer: “Nobody.”
Dissatisfied with the results he had obtained, Corley asked a female officer, Cynthia Coker, to give it a try. Coker, who also had no special training in handling children, and had no children of her own, thus no personal guidelines on how to respond to a four-and-a-half-year-old, had only marginally better luck.
Under the guise of a late-night play session, Coker questioned the boy about who had been in the house that day. Little Peter first told Coker that nobody had been in the house before his mother had gotten sick, but later told her that his father had been present both before and after Rozanne “got sick.” The “after” visit apparently referred to when Gailiunas arrived with
his
mother, Peter’s grandmother.
While she harbored inner doubts about the value of the statements she had taken from the boy, Coker placed enough credence in what he had said, backed by Larry’s claim that he thought Gailiunas was the murderer, to form a basis for a request to have the boy temporarily placed under protective custody so he could not be influenced by his father or his grandmother until someone with training could question him more closely. That never happened. McGowan decided that the boy did not know anything of value and a youth expert was never summoned to interview him.
It was three
A
.
M
. Wednesday before McGowan, who was supposed to have finished his shift at eleven o’clock the previous night, got back to his office from 804 Loganwood Drive.
Gailiunas and Larry were still there, but rather than try to question them then, McGowan spoke to them only briefly and asked them to call later in the day to make an appointment to come back in a couple of days for a formal interview. He felt comfortable in letting them go because, although each had blamed the other, laboratory tests showed that neither had fired a weapon recently.
Also, McGowan’s instincts told him that neither of the men had been the shooter. In most such cases, those close to a victim are generally regarded as prime suspects. Although neither Gailiunas nor Larry was out of the woods yet, the circumstances of the crime did not scream “crime of passion” to the veteran investigator. If Rozanne had been shot during a lover’s spat, he reasoned, the house would have yielded some evidence of a struggle, which it did not. Also, he would have expected to find Rozanne crumpled on the floor rather than methodically tied spread-eagled across a bed. Despite the fact that Rozanne was found nude, there was no indication her shooting had been a sex crime either. Instead, given the details at the scene—really the
lack
of details—McGowan suspected that he would find that Rozanne had been shot by a stranger in a random act of violence. And that frightened him because it meant that somebody else might be in danger. He would not concede, not even to himself, for many, many months that it could have been a contract killing.
But before he could come to any hard conclusions about Larry and Gailiunas, McGowan would have to verify alibis, interview and re-interview other people, study the crime-scene findings, go over the evidence, even if it was pitifully little—in essence, sift and talk and examine and deduce: the basic ingredients of good detective work.
When McGowan finally left the yellow-brick police headquarters to drag himself home, he had a sinking feeling that the Gailiunas shooting was going to be a ballbreaker case, one that would strain his talents to the limit. He was right; before he could close his file on Rozanne, the investigation would consume almost a decade of his life.
8
Before either Larry or Gailiunas could come back for his meeting with McGowan, the investigation of the shooting of Rozanne Gailiunas took the first of several dramatic turns. It was not an unexpected change, but it was crucial nonetheless. On Thursday, October 6, the case became a homicide. Some forty-eight hours after Rozanne was wheeled into the operating room, after consecutive brain wave tests showed no resumption of normal activity, the breathing apparatus was shut off. At 8:56
P
.
M
., two days and almost two and a half hours after she had been found, Rozanne Gailiunas was officially declared dead. She had never regained consciousness. At the time she died, Rozanne was thirty-three years and twelve days old.
Not long before she was shot, Larry and Rozanne had been discussing the status of patients being kept on life-support equipment and Rozanne had expressed her dislike for the procedure. Larry remembered this as he and Rozanne’s sister, Paula, sat in Rozanne’s hospital room, keeping watch over the unconscious victim. A few minutes earlier, doctors had told the two of them that Rozanne’s case appeared hopeless. Larry and Paula had discussed the situation and decided to ask that the equipment be turned off.
Lightly holding Rozanne’s arm since her hands were still covered with plastic bags in an attempt to preserve microscopic evidence that might help investigators identify her attacker, Larry whispered, “Rozanne, you told me if you were ever on one of these machines to take you off. Well, that’s what we’re here for.”
When he said those words, Larry recalled later, Rozanne lifted her left hand and moved it toward the back of her head in one of her characteristic gestures. She then turned toward him and her eyes opened briefly. Tears ran down her cheeks as she died.
Not surprisingly, the mainstream Dallas news media did not immediately place a lot of emphasis on the attack on Rozanne. On October 5, the day after the incident, the
Dallas Morning News
and the
Times Herald
were understandably more interested in the state’s effort to execute a killer named James David Autry. The attempt had been postponed after Autry already was strapped to a gurney and the intravenous tubes, designed to carry the lethal drugs into his system, had been plunged into his arm.
However, the Richardson newspaper, the
Daily News
, reported Rozanne’s attack on the front page in a story headlined “Details Sketchy on City Shooting.” The major source for the unsigned article was a neighbor of Rozanne’s, who called the newspaper with the tip. The next day, Thursday, October 6, the
Daily News
fleshed out its account, identifying Rozanne and pinpointing the site of the attack. But there was little hard news to report because the city’s police department had spread a curtain of secrecy over the incident.
On that day, Dallas’s two daily newspapers were still unaware of the Richardson case. Instead, the
Morning News
and the
Times Herald
were much more concerned with a killing in the Casa Linda neighborhood in Northeast Dallas, a considerable distance from Rozanne’s. Ironically, the two crimes had much in common. In Casa Linda, early on Wednesday, October 5, less than twenty-four hours after Rozanne was shot, a ten-year-old girl went to wake her mother and found her murdered. The woman, Margie Jo Wills, had been bound and strangled. It was the Richardson newspaper that first brought out the similarities of the attacks, noting that four comparable incidents had occurred in northeast Dallas since March.
The
Morning News
did not report the attack on Rozanne until after she had died, and then it was in a five-paragraph story buried deep inside the suburban edition.
On Friday, October 7, just a little more than twelve hours after she died, Rozanne’s body was wheeled into the morgue at the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences, near Parkland Hospital, for the required postmortem examination.
Conducting the autopsy was Dr. M. G. F. Gilliland, a petite, birdlike, humorless woman with a low tolerance for anyone who disagreed with her.
Methodically, Gilliland ticked off Rozanne’s particulars: “brown hair…brown eyes…five-feet-five inches tall…127 pounds…no significant scars…natural teeth in good repair…”
Moving systematically down Rozanne’s body, Gilliland lifted her right hand and gazed at a ring encircling the pinky finger. The pathologist described it as a “yellow metal serpent ring with two red stones.” It was the only thing in the report that hinted that the stiffening body with the shaved head and the half-open eyes—officially case number 2749-83-1299—had ever been a living, vibrant woman.