Because You Loved Me (8 page)

The questions detectives posed to Jeanne Dominico’s exhausted fiancé, Chris McGowan, didn’t much bother him as he sat sipping stale water from a Styrofoam cup, wondering how the love of his life had died in such a tragic manner. Chris wanted to help any way he could. Still,
Why all the questions,
he thought as he sat and stared back at the detective,
if Jeanne had died of an accident? What is going on here?

“I knew then,” recalled Chris, “that Jeanne hadn’t fallen. I had my suspicions back at the house, but there was so much going on, I didn’t have time to think about it.”

Throughout the night, the conversation—and Chris viewed it as nothing more than a relaxed interview—turned back to the kids. Where were Nicole and Drew? Detectives wanted to know if Chris could reach them. A cell phone number? A neighbor who might know where they were?

“I don’t know…I have to find them, though.”

“You have no idea where they are right now?”

“No. Nicole called me earlier and left a message that she and ‘her friend’ were out doing their stuff. I think they went bowling, shopping. I just don’t know where.”

Chris then explained that Nicole’s “friend” was a boy named Billy Sullivan she had been dating. They had been together all week. He told detectives he would gladly play back Nicole’s voice mail from earlier that night, if only he had his cell phone.

“I left my phone on the kitchen table at Jeannie’s.”

“OK. That’s fine. We can’t get your cell phone right now.”

From memory, Chris recalled Billy’s number.

“I’m not sure if it’s right, because I have it in my cell phone on speed dial.”

“That’ll do.”

Both detectives walked out of the room—and so it went like that throughout the next few hours: detectives walked in and asked a few questions, then left the room for a while, only to return again wanting to know more.

“Did Jeanne have any enemies?” began the next set of questions. It didn’t come across as pushy, or desperate, Chris remembered, but it still seemed like an odd thing to ask. For the first time, without anyone telling him specifically, Chris said he knew Jeanne had been murdered.

Why else would they be asking me such a thing?

“No. Absolutely not! The last person on this earth to have an enemy would be Jeanne.” Yet, as quick as the words fell off his tongue, Chris thought of Jeanne’s ex-husband, Anthony. “That motherf…,” Chris said, “if he came back and…I will…if he did this to Jeanne.” Chris slammed his fist on the table.

“OK, Mr. McGowan, we got it. What about Drew and Nicole?”

“Nicole is a model student. Model daughter.”

The mention of Drew in terms of the crime, however, made Chris uncomfortable. He couldn’t fathom for a minute that Drew had something to do with Jeanne’s death. But as he sat and thought about the times Drew had openly displayed his temper in the house, a lightbulb went off.

“He was a hothead,” recalled Chris, speaking of Drew’s temperament lately. “As I sat there and detectives asked me questions about him, I began to go over in my mind the things Drew had been doing and how at odds he was with his mother up until the day she was murdered. It’s sad to say, but I thought for a brief moment it
could
have been Drew. I really honestly did. I feel bad about that now, but that is what I thought then.”

“Tell us about Drew,” asked one detective after Chris brought it up.

“Well, I know the kid has a hot temper. It was either his way or no way. I’ve replaced a couple of doors in the house because Drew—‘Mr. Tough Guy’—put his fist through the door after getting pissed off at his mother.”

As a single mother, Jeanne had her hands full with two teenagers. Raging hormones. Problems at school. Peer pressure. Neighborhood kids. There wasn’t a home in America inhabited by teenagers that hadn’t suffered from the same teenage angst at one time or another. Yet every argument, misunderstanding or bad word said about Jeanne was now going to be analyzed under a different light.

After Chris answered a few more questions about Drew, detectives left the room. When they returned, one of them, wearing latex surgical gloves, asked Chris if he would agree to give a buccal swab DNA sample.

“Not at all,” said Chris, opening his mouth. “Absolutely.”

With a cotton swab, the detective scraped the inside of Chris’s cheeks.

“Thanks,” the detective said, popping the cap back on the buccal swab, walking out of the room.

Billy and Nicole arrived at the house somewhere near 10:15
P.M
. The scene was still bustling with people, crime scene investigators and plainclothes detectives. Facts were becoming clearer as the investigation progressed, but investigators were still scratching their heads wondering how a woman of Jeanne’s stature could have ended up dead on her kitchen floor. The surreal ambience that hung in the air all evening, as community members stood stunned, wondering how such violence could take place in an otherwise unassuming neighborhood, seemed to grow as rumor and speculation fueled conversation.

“The whole thing is unbelievable,” truck driver Douglas Milroy, shaking his head in disbelief, told a
Nashua Telegraph
reporter as he looked on. Milroy lived down the street from Jeanne near the corner of Dumaine and Deerwood. He had watched Nicole and Drew grow up. “It’s like a Sunday-night movie.”

Parker Smith was standing in the street in front of Jeanne’s when he recognized Billy’s car “creeping” its way up the opposite end of Dumaine. Jeanne’s house was close to the corner of Dumaine Avenue and Amherst Street, Route 101A, the main drag running off Route 3. Police had Dumaine blocked from Amherst. Just east of Dumaine, about one city block, was the corner of Deerwood Drive and Amherst, where the 7-Eleven convenience store sat across the street. Standing in Jeanne’s backyard, you could see the 7-Eleven and the bank. Billy had obviously, Parker assumed, driven by the roadblock, turned right on Deerwood and connected with Dumaine on the back end.

“He was driving slowly,” recalled Parker. “I saw him and Nicole coming up the road from the opposite side.”

Nicole’s window was down. As Billy moved his car closer to the house, Parker said several police officers stood in front of the car with their hands up, motioning for Billy to stop.

“Hold on…,” said one officer. “Stop!”

Then, according to Parker, several officers rushed to each side of the vehicle as Nicole and Billy got out of the car.

“What’s going on?” asked Nicole.

(“Pardon the expression, but it was like deathly quiet at that moment,” remembered Parker. “At that point, I didn’t know what to think—if they were going to tell her right there or not.”)

Most who knew Nicole and Jeanne were concerned for Nicole and wondered how she was going to react to what had occurred.

Officers quickly surrounded the two lovers after they got out of Billy’s car.

“Who are you?” asked an officer.

“Nicole…why? What’s going on here?” She seemed surprised by the commotion. Concerned. Worried.

Detective Denis Linehan, who had partially questioned Chris McGowan, had left Chris with Detective Mark Schaaf at the NPD and returned to the scene shortly before Billy and Nicole arrived. While Linehan was talking to Assistant Deputy Medical Examiner (ME) Wayne DiGeronimo, he noticed Billy and Nicole, though not by name or sight, talking to uniformed officers by Billy’s car.

“Give me one minute,” Linehan said to DiGeronimo. From where he stood, Linehan noticed the license plate on Billy’s car.

Connecticut?

Then he recalled how Chris had told him that Nicole’s boyfriend was from Connecticut.

As Linehan walked over, Billy spoke to an officer on the opposite side of the car and explained that he lived out of state.

“I’m her boyfriend.”

“What’s going on?” Linehan asked as he approached.

“That’s my girlfriend,” Billy stated.

Billy was pacing, Linehan said later, “back and forth between his vehicle and [a cruiser nearby].” He was so squirrelly that Linehan, at one point, said, “Try to relax, man, best you can.”

“I take medication for high anxiety,” Billy offered. “Sorry, but I can’t stand still.”

“You’re going to have to come down to the police station and give us a statement,” one of the officers told Billy.

Billy said he’d have no trouble doing that.

About ten feet away, another cop explained the same thing to Nicole.

From there, Nicole and Billy were separated and moved to the “edge of the crime scene.”

Detective Sergeant Richard Sprankle then conferred with one of the officers and explained what to do next. “Separate them and transport them in different vehicles.”

“Yes, sir.”

It was important to get separate stories.

After Billy and Nicole gave each other a quick peck on the lips, they were separated and watched. It was standard NPD practice to transport witnesses to the station house in police vehicles. It didn’t mean you were being viewed or targeted as a suspect, said one law enforcement official, but NPD’s policy dictated that witnesses shouldn’t be allowed the opportunity to change their mind and drive away while en route to the NPD. Still, if a witness is adamant about driving to the station house alone, there is no law preventing the NPD from allowing it.

“I need to lock up my car and turn off the lights,” Billy said to the officer escorting him around the scene.

“Sure.”

When they returned, the officer stood with Billy by the cruiser and chatted a bit.

“His mood would change,” the officer noted later, “from being jovial to being agitated. He was extremely talkative and constantly pacing back and forth.”

“I’m going to be sick,” Billy said. He walked toward the back of the car and, dry-heaving, began hacking.

Noticing what was going on, Detective Linehan, going back and forth between the crime scene and where Billy and Nicole stood, walked over and spoke with the officer. When Billy saw them talking privately, he became excited again and asked, “What’s going on? What’s happening?”

“Relax,” said Linehan. “Come on. Relax as best you can.”

“Sorry,” said Billy, “It’s my anxiety—” He said he needed to take his meds.

“Let’s get you out of here then. Would you mind coming downtown and giving us a statement?”

“Can’t I go with Nicole?”

“Sorry, Mr. Sullivan, we can’t do that.”

“OK, then.”

“Do you need your medication?”

“I take it at night.”

“OK.”

Later, Billy said it was at that moment when he began to break down. He thought,
I’m screwed. Something’s wrong—otherwise they would let me get in the car with Nicole.

This move by Linehan to get Billy and Nicole downtown, later scrutinized, was not unusual. Many people in the neighborhood were being brought in to give statements. Husbands and wives were not allowed to ride together. Standard procedure. There was a brutal murder scene inside a home on Dumaine Avenue. Heck, Jeanne Dominico’s body was still on the floor of her kitchen (where it would stay for about the next twenty-four hours). What people said and the differences in their stories were vital parts of the investigation. Good investigators knew the slightest discrepancy in statements, although not pointing specifically to guilt, could ultimately solve a case.

Linehan got into the backseat of the cruiser with Billy. Another officer drove. It was about 10:30
P.M
.

“We’re heading out,” Linehan told Sprankle.

As they drove, Linehan asked Billy, “So how long have you and Nicole been together?”

Billy seemed uncomfortable, antsy. “Fifteen months.”

“How’d you guys meet?”

Casual conversation. Linehan wasn’t fishing; he just wanted basic facts. Billy was under no obligation to answer.

“A mutual friend,” said Billy. It was a lie; they had met in a chat room on the Internet.

For the next few minutes, they discussed where Billy was from and the town of Willimantic itself. Billy seemed quite captivated by the town’s recent popularity.

“The town was featured on a TV program; you know that?” asked Billy.

“Actually,” Linehan said, “I saw it.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Bad publicity for the town, though, huh?”

The program had depicted the town of Willimantic as a haven for drug use, especially heroin.

Billy said, “Me and some of my classmates have tried to boost the town’s reputation.”

“Well, you do what you can, you know.”

“Yeah,” Billy said.

At 10:34
P.M
., Detective Sergeant Richard Sprankle walked into the kitchen of Jeanne’s house with Assistant Deputy ME Wayne DiGeronimo. A veteran detective who had worked all aspects of homicide throughout his career with the NPD, Sprankle was unnerved by the scene. Nashua was a community under his watch. This wasn’t the sort of crime the town saw all that much of. More recently, Sprankle was involved on an investigation level into the explosion of gang violence on the streets of downtown Nashua, a part of the job he took a particular interest in because so many children’s lives were at stake. Lately, the NPD was documenting an increase in the number of gang markings from the Latin Kings and Folk Nation, two of America’s more well-known street gangs—that just happened to be “bitter enemies.” Throughout downtown, in certain locations, “walls and other structures” were covered with both gangs’ indelible graffiti-laden scribes, which told investigators trouble was undoubtedly on the horizon.

Could Jeanne’s death be gang-related? It was possible.

Like Sprankle, Dr. DiGeronimo’s integrity for serving the needs of the community drove him. In the coming months, DiGeronimo would be one of several insiders to instigate a major investigation into corruption within his own office as two of his distinguished colleagues became the target of a major state police inquiry. A former chief forensic investigator with the ME’s office and an assistant deputy medical examiner were going to be the focus of what was reportedly widespread “forgery, fraudulent handling of recordable writings and tampering with public records.” In short, the pair allegedly conspired to “falsify cremation documents” and control the “certification of New Hampshire cremations” for a profit in the neighborhood of, some reports had it, twenty thousand dollars.

Sprankle’s wide base of gang violence knowledge must have implored him to consider a gang-style robbery gone bad as he and DiGeronimo moved about the scene at Jeanne’s, studying her body, blood spatter evidence all about the kitchen and the immediate area around the house. Most of the gangs in Nashua used baseball bats to strike their victims motionless before robbing them. For a seasoned detective and experienced medical examiner, it was easy to tell by just a quick glance at Jeanne’s body that she had been beaten brutally with an object similar to a bat.

As they entered the kitchen where Jeanne’s body lay, both Sprankle and DiGeronimo noticed the way the blood—from one end of the room to the other—was spattered. The pattern indicated some sort of struggle between Jeanne and her killer (or killers). There, though, among the blood spatter patterns across the floor and cabinets were several footprints, Jeanne’s among them. On the refrigerator was what looked to be a large bloody palm print.

Heading toward the living room, Sprankle saw the remains of the coffee table, which had been broken in half, and then looked over toward the back door: the glass, quite significantly, had been pushed out, apparently from the inside. Jeanne’s killer had obviously walked into the house without a problem; yet, for some reason, perhaps pushed his or her way out, or struggled with Jeanne, knocking the glass out during what looked to be a fight for life and death.

As officers had reported earlier, inside the kitchen sink was the handle of a knife. In the backyard were two more knives, which a cop roaming through the scene had found and pointed out to Linehan before he left.

Kneeling down, looking over Jeanne’s body, DiGeronimo’s preliminary thesis was that there were dozens of stab wounds to her neck and throat, even on her head.

It appeared, however, that nothing was missing from the house. Burglary being quickly ruled out, Sprankle and his fellow investigators roaming about the scene were left to wonder if Jeanne knew her attacker.