Who Killed Chrissy?: The True Crime Memoir of a Pittsburgh girl's Unsolved Murder in Las Vegas (13 page)

I
locked the door to my apartment, but I knew someone was coming for me. I knew I
was next because Fred knew that I knew he did it. I removed the drawers from
the small dresser and pushed it out of the bedroom and over in front of the
door. I tried to push the sofa but it wouldn’t budge, so I stacked the drawers
up on top of the dresser against the locked door.

I
called Kathy Roberts and told her what happened and asked her to come and get
me as soon as possible. She said their car was in the shop and they wouldn’t be
able to come and get me until Sunday afternoon, the best they could do, and
their house was too far away to travel by taxi, so I settled for her offer. 
She said, “You can come over Sunday afternoon and then spend the night and
we’ll drive you to the airport Monday morning.”

Great,
but I had to spend this night and the next night at Woodbridge, and I was so
terrified now that I could only sit in the chair in the middle of the living
room and stare at the dresser against the door. I sat up all night and could
not close my eyes for one minute.

I
did not eat anything and by dawn I was hungry and tired.  I had to prepare
myself for lock up in my apartment, and I knew I had to walk to the convenience
store for supplies.

I
had to drag all the piled up furniture away from the door, walk to the end of
the apartment complex and down the highway to the convenience store to purchase
supplies to get me through.

It
was hard to move at this point, my body was arthritic when I moved, and I had a
hard time pushing the furniture around. Stepping outside into the abominable
heat put me in slow motion like a cartoon, and I had to push myself to
move—gotta move….gotta move….gotta walk to the store. Walking through the
complex was undeniably the walk of the last death for me. I knew that Fred was
lurking amongst the bushes or in the laundry rooms and he would jump me in
broad daylight, no one would hear anything and I would be attacked and killed,
dragged into the desert and left to rot, just like Chris. I felt his presence
the second I stepped outside my doorway. I didn’t see him but I knew he was
there waiting for me somewhere between the long winding trail through the
complex to the end where I could emerge onto the highway sidewalk. 

As I
reached the end of the complex and stepped onto the highway sidewalk I feared
if I ran into him now that he’d throw me off the narrow sidewalk into speeding
traffic. I tried walking faster but my shoes were made of sticky rubber, like I
was dreaming. I could see the convenience store a couple hundred feet in the
distance, but before I reached the parking lot I came upon two dumpsters
sitting on the side of the sidewalk and something stopped me in front of them.
I wanted to lift the lids and see if Chris’s stuffed bag of photographs were in
there, and then I pulled myself back thinking I was momentarily insane. I
envisioned Fred dumping the envelope in there after he killed her and felt that
if I could climb into the dumpster that I’d find them. I had to keep my focus
on making it to the convenience store and decided against climbing into the
trash.

I
sped through the store like lightning and picked up supplies; quickly rushed
the cashier through the checkout, grabbed the grocery bag and took off, almost
running back along the skinny sidewalk to the complex and back to my apartment.

I
stayed locked down with piled up furniture in my apartment until Sunday
afternoon when Kathy came to pick me up. 

More
terror and monsters were coming for me.

Newspaper article in the Las Vegas Sun, Saturday, June 26, 1982
(transcribed copy follows)

Las Vegas Sun – Saturday
June 26, 1982

Woman, 25, found slain in bathtub

By Harold Hyman, SUN Staff Writer

Metro Police Friday were investigating the mystery
slaying of an attractive woman from Pittsburgh found murdered in her apartment
in the Woodbridge Inn, 700 E. Flamingo Road.

Identity of the 25-year-old unmarried woman will not
be disclosed until relatives are found and notified of her death, police said.

The woman, who moved to Las Vegas approximately one
month ago, was discovered dead at 3 p.m. by a maintenance worker and an
apartment security guard.

They used a passkey to open her door after the
maintenance worker smelled a strong odor from inside the second floor flat and
got no response when he knocked.

Police said the woman may have been dead as long as a
week.  She was last seen alive by neighbors in the large apartment complex one
mile from the strip approximately one week ago, they said.

The slaying was unusual in that the woman was found
lying against the bathtub in her bathroom with her head submerged in the tub
filled with water. Her body, nude from the waist down, was out of the water,
police said.

Cause of death was not immediately apparent but a
large amount of blood in the bathtub water indicated she may have suffered a
massive head wound of some type, police said.

She wore only a blouse and bra, they said.

Her body was taken to the Clark County morgue where an
autopsy is scheduled Saturday to determine exact cause of death.

The woman’s apartment was termed “immaculate” and not
in disarray.

Police said it appeared the woman had not been robbed
and that they had established no motive nor suspects in the slaying.

The woman was said to have lived alone and kept to
herself during the one month since she moved into the Woodbridge, a large
complex of more than 300 apartments whose residents are primarily resort
industry workers.

Her reasons for coming to Las Vegas had not been
established by police Friday but investigation of the slaying is scheduled to
be intense during the weekend.

Police also said they had been unable to learn whether
she had a job in Las Vegas.

Obviously
they had her age wrong; she was 23 when she died. 

I
don’t know where they got the idea that she had moved to Las Vegas. I don’t
know who would have told them that.

The
article claims that the investigation would be intense over the weekend. I can
only say that after the initial contact with the two detectives, no one
attempted to contact me any further.

The
strangest part of this article was the wording. The choice of words such as
mystery slaying, murdered and unusual, tell me that the police knew this was a
murder, but for some reason they never pursued the case. The reporter who wrote
this article could not have, and would not have used such wording unless the
detectives gave it to him that way. When a reporter arrives at a crime scene he
knows nothing until the police provide him with their views and opinions on
what they found.

There
was no mention in this article about the jacket that was supposedly yanked up
over her head, which is what the detectives told me.

Second Las
Vegas Sun article, Monday, June 28, 1982,

(transcribed copy
follows)

Dead woman identified

By UPI

Monday, June 28, 1982

A 25-year-old woman
whose body was found in her Las Vegas apartment last week has been identified
as Christine Casillo of Pittsburgh, Pa., authorities said Sunday.

Results of an autopsy
were pending to determine the cause of death, possibly a head wound.

Police say the woman’s
body was discovered Friday by a maintenance worker who entered with a pass key.
Investigators said the woman had been dead for some time.  She was last seen
alive a week before the body was discovered.

Officers said she
moved to Las Vegas a month ago and lived in the Woodbridge Inn on East Flamingo
Road, a 300-apartment complex east of the Las Vegas “Strip”.

Authorities said the
dead woman was nude from the waist down. The body was found lying against the
bathtub with the head submerged in the water.

Police said there was
no sign of forced entry and no indication that the apartment was robbed.

Again, Chris was 23 at her death,
not 25. This article misspells her last name: the correct spelling is Casilio,
not

Casillo.

I
was packed and ready to go when Kathy pulled up
outside my apartment.  I couldn’t wait to leave this place of horror, this
murderous, hideous slime pool of people. I knew I would never return to Las
Vegas, and I knew that for a fact. If I could just make it back to Pittsburgh
to see my family again, and my child—my glorious child who was missing me for
sure—I would promise God that I would never leave again. So I promised him
right there as I was loading my suitcases into Kathy’s car, and I started saying
The Hail Mary over and over….

Please
God, let me go back to Pittsburgh, let me see my family again, please God. I
promise I will never leave my son again, I promise I will devote my life to him
and him alone. Please God.

As I
loaded my luggage in the trunk of Kathy’s car, I wondered why the two police
detectives hadn’t asked me to spend the night at the police station. Had they
not seen the terror and pure fright on my face? Had they not any compassion for
victims? I was a victim, a second-hand victim of someone I knew, who was
brutally murdered and left rotting in an apartment; why didn’t they have any compassion
for me? I was so traumatized that I couldn’t think straight; I was convinced I
was going to be murdered, too. Couldn’t they see this? I was frozen and so
scared I was sick to my stomach.

I
remembered when they were leaving my apartment after questioning me, I
desperately wanted them to tell me I could come with them, that I’d be safe,
that they would protect me from the murderer, but they did nothing to help
me—they did nothing, they offered nothing, they just left me standing there
wondering how I was going to survive the night in my apartment.  They simply
didn’t care—they offered me nothing, and after they walked out of my apartment
I never heard from them again.

I
knew no one in Las Vegas except Kathy and Larry Roberts. Two people I met while
at the pool at Caesar’s Palace, who were total strangers, who I knew nothing
about. I only knew what they had offered me and that they were from Los
Angeles, and were vacationing in Vegas for a month, and had rented a house in
the suburbs. 

Upon
entering Kathy’s car, I suddenly had a feeling rush over me that I was jumping
into a situation where I could be killed. I didn’t know where these people
lived, and I was being taken away in a car to a house in the middle of nowhere
by two strangers. I felt vulnerable and stupid, but it was all that I had left
at this point. I couldn’t stay at Woodbridge and endure one more second there,
and I couldn’t bring myself to stay in another motel room, I just couldn’t do
it.

The
suburban housing plan was about a half hour out of the city, and when we
arrived I felt relieved and safer. The neat little yellow brick ranch house
looked like all the others on the street, similar to my mom’s street, a plan
built by the same contractor who must have liked the first one and decided to
make them all alike. Kathy pushed the remote control for the garage, it lifted
up, then down and we were sealed in. I took my small overnight bag and my one
larger suitcase to the guest room. I stayed there and read a book until
dinnertime, and then sat down with both of them to eat roast beef and mashed
potatoes, a welcomed meal with all the flavors of my mom’s home cooking. There
was little conversation, as they didn’t have much to offer me in the way of
opinions or otherwise, and they sensed I didn’t want to talk about it. I sensed
they were just the type of people who had little interest in other people’s
lives, and I attributed that to them being from Los Angeles. I didn’t expect to
run into people who were Pittsburghers, who wanted to know all your personal
business. I wasn’t in the mood for it at this moment.