Who Killed Chrissy?: The True Crime Memoir of a Pittsburgh girl's Unsolved Murder in Las Vegas (2 page)

Since I personally have never been
able to return to Las Vegas after Chris’s murder, I found it difficult to
believe the level of courage that Terri Jentz had to muster within herself to
return to her haunting, horrifying, unsolved crime scene.

This is the stuff of nightmares, my
friends, real nightmares that regular people never believe will happen to them.
Unless you experience it first hand, you will never know how it feels.

I know that I must write this book
for Chris, and I must write my story for myself as a cathartic exercise that’s
been long overdue in my lifetime.

I have not given Chris much thought
through the years; I have never tried to conjure up a vision of her, or a
memory of her, and I know why—because the fear would bite me hard again. I left
it alone; I left it lie buried.

This book has been a six-year
journey.

When you reach an advanced age
and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order
and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they
occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been
indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed
that plot?...As you’re moving ahead, it just unfolds, often in random twists.
Just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your
consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within
you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance become
leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served
unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others….

It is as though there were a
single intention behind it all, which always makes some kind of sense, though
none of us knows what the sense might be, or has lived the life that he or she
quite intended.

I have to
remind myself of this when I don’t know how to get where I want to go, or when
I’m not sure where my current interests are leading.

If you worry
about finding your path, ask yourself this: what if your path isn’t clear to
you because it doesn’t exist yet?

–Joseph Campbell

151
Riverview Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

–M. Scott Peck

“I
’m lying naked on my bed with Marty.” Chris
spins around and grabs the 12-inch stainless steel knife off the old porcelain
sink, points the sharp edge so it’s touching her hipbone, then presses it
against her stomach and drags the blade across the bottom edge of her gray tank
top. As she runs the point of the knife up across her breasts then circles and
runs it back down across her stomach, she is grinning with delight.  I am
bug-eyed and ready to jump up out of my chair but I stay put and wait for her
to stop playing with the knife, and I can’t speak. She has moved from the sink
to the old stove where she’s cooking up wedding soup, and I’m absorbing the
wonderful smell of chicken broth while trying to process why this story is
emerging from her.

“Marty lays me out on the bed and
runs a knife all around my body,” she blurts out.

I don’t know what to say; it
freezes me up in my chair, and I can’t imagine why she’s telling me this
story—which I find frightening and odd.

The uncomfortable wooden chair
feels like I’m sitting on a cement block, and I am studying her while she stirs
the simmering broth.

I’m not sure this is a lovemaking
scene; maybe it’s a just a story she made up, but I am thinking as she’s
talking, and I feel strange and uncomfortable and I want to walk out…For a
moment she shuts up and I sit there thinking to myself that she’s nuts. I don’t
want to think this about her, I truly don’t, but I don’t know what else to feel
right now as I sit in silence wondering what she will say next. This isn’t the
kind of story that I like hearing from female friends; I prefer romance and
drama with some glamour added….

I look upon Chris as smaller than
me, although she is about five foot six. She appears short because her hips are
wide and she has a “rumble butt,” which she hates; she told me so.  She has the
tiniest waist I’ve ever seen—and I envy her for it—along with the tightest
toned stomach muscles.  Her thighs are thick but match her larger athletic
calves and strong ankles.  Her upper body appears frail—toned, but still frail—small
breasts and delicate arms with tiny wrists, like I could grab them and twist
them off her body.

I love Chris’s crooked smile; it’s
a smile that invites you to enter her strange world of what I sometimes think
is a fantasy realm that she has been fabricating since her childhood. Her
wide-eyed enthusiasm is always present; she is curious about everything.

I’m only a few inches taller than
Chris but somehow I feel much taller standing next to her. I’m just bigger
boned and longer legged than her, and we are opposite for looks—her having
classic Italian features, black wavy hair, tight lipped, olive skinned, and me
having blonde hair and ivory skin. I’ve been told I am the spittin’ image of
Stevie Nicks or the other singer, Blondie. I have been involved in the modeling
and entertainment industry since my teens in Pittsburgh.  The two main
influences in my early teen years were two Pittsburgh women, mother and
daughter, named Virginia and Dana Pugar, who happened to be friends with my
family. They were models and airline stewardesses and appeared in the Ivory
Soap TV commercials that featured mothers and daughters washing dishes
together. These glamour girls unknowingly molded me in my early teen years. I
poured pure peroxide on my mousy brown hair at the age of thirteen, determined
to become the blonde bombshell of a woman that Dana was in my mind.  She had
the sassy personality and looks of Cybill Shepherd, and that’s who I wanted to
be—frivolous, blonde and casting my fate to the pure romance of life, which,
upon thoughts of it, smelled like a magnolia blossom to me, sweet and fresh and
peachy….

I convinced my parents to pay for Victoria Modeling School in downtown Pittsburgh, which was the only place to go if you wanted
to learn how to walk and talk with class. I also attended the Pittsburgh
Playhouse for acting.

My other friend growing up was
Cathy Cahill. I was convinced she was the younger sister of Elizabeth Taylor,
who I worshipped after first seeing her in National Velvet, which was also
about horses, my other passion in life.

Coupled with periodic worship of
Natalie Wood and Vivian Leigh, I found that living in the movies kept me
wanting more and more glamour. These women were all hopeless romantics,
searching for true love and being discarded along the way by men who only
wanted their beauty. How does one know this at such an early age? You don’t.
You only know that romance and glamour brought attention and high emotional
drama in and out of your life on a regular basis. The highs and lows kept you
wanting more and more. 

I have known Christine Casilio for
over six months now since moving into the spacious apartment at 151 Riverview
Avenue near Observatory Hill on the North Side of Pittsburgh.

It’s an old building that I stalked
for a year while waiting for a vacancy, a building that is the last structure
on Riverview Avenue before entering Riverview Park. This park holds sacred
memories for me from my childhood—skating on the frozen pond in winter, testing
the cracked ice for weakness, trying to bust through it with your blades,
getting half soaked, then standing cold and wet by the barrels of raging fires
near the woods. Wild ice skating, no restrictions, nothing holding you back
from sliding into the danger area where thin ice was waiting to be smashed
through, and no one there giving you instructions or rules to follow—you were
on your own on the ice, you could make your own decisions on whether to take
the risk or not.  No restrictions, only pure romance of the mind, pure
unadulterated joy of life’s passionate pursuits.

Finally my voice emerges, “What do
you mean Chris—you’re naked? You’re talking about a real knife? Why would you
be doing that kind of weird shit?” I still can’t imagine why she’s telling me
this, maybe for the shock value, maybe because she wants to show me how brave
she is. In the short time that I’ve known her she impresses me as the type of
person who always wants to show or prove how tough she is. I understand the
“North Side thing”—I, too, was raised on the North Side of Pittsburgh, where
everyone was scrappy, tough and prone to trouble, alcohol abuse and breaking
the law. I went to St. Cyril of Alexandria school on Brighton Road in the
fifties until graduating eighth grade in 1964. We had to attend mass every
morning in grade school, and we had the toughest nuns in Pittsburgh.  They had
to be tough. The North Side boys were bold and followed no one’s rules. Sister
Augusta had to occasionally pick up a desk and hurl it across the room at Chick
Conley or Bart Klemz, and she was my favorite nun. She was young, tough and
pretty, and eventually left the convent when I left the grade school.  She
confided in a few of us girls that there were things going on with the priests
that were wrong, she knew they were wrong and she had to get out.

“What kind of craziness is that, I
mean, why would you enjoy a sharp knife being dragged all over your body;
doesn’t it hurt?”  I stare in amazement at her, swatting my blonde bangs away
from my eyes and lighting a cigarette.  I’m agitated and nervous, which will
inevitably lead to a chain smoking frenzy and will piss her off because she
doesn’t smoke and doesn’t like smoke. She seems amused, flashing her crooked
smile—she has shocked me, made me pay attention to her; it pleases her. She’s
dancing around the oversized kitchen, palming the little meatballs, rolling and
tossing them into the bubbling pot. The wonderful aroma of chicken broth and parsley
fill the kitchen, and I just want to eat Wedding Soup now and forget everything
else. My son is at my Mom’s house, and I’m sure she’s feeding him a lunch of
leftover roast beef, carrots and potatoes.  The thought makes me hungrier than
I already am.