Never Let Them See You Cry (32 page)

I never felt so helpless.

No progress was made in the murder of Mrs. Z.

The dead couple is still unidentified. I now suspect they came here from another country.

The little boy was finally identified two years ago—by a stroke of luck.

Maurice was five years old and from Minneapolis. He was waiting for his mother in the car when she was arrested for using a stolen credit card. A woman with his mother got away and drove off with him. Her name was Arlie Phaneus, and she was a prostitute.

When Arlie left for Miami with a man named Nate Mendenhall and several other prostitutes, the mother was still in jail, so they took the boy along. Arlie was jealous because the mother was Nate's former girlfriend. She even objected to stopping for the little boy to use a rest room during the long drive. They came to Miami to buy drugs and decided to stay.

When the mother was released from jail, she reported her son missing and told Minneapolis police who took him. They issued arrest warrants for false imprisonment of a child. Nate Mendenhall was arrested in Miami in a stolen car on September 2, 1981. The warrants were discovered and Minneapolis police notified, but somebody slipped up. Whoever took the call mistakenly reported that the child was no longer missing. The error was fatal to Maurice.

Nobody asked where the boy was, Nate said later. If they had, he would have told them. But no one asked. While Nate was in jail, Arlie killed the child.

A customer let hookers stay in his apartment He even gave Arlie a key. She took the body there while he was out, bought supplies and constructed the child's tomb herself. She stayed for two weeks. When her host saw body fluids seeping from under the cement, she said she had spilled something. When he noticed the bad smell, he thought it was his clothes. He worked in a gas station.

In 1986, the boy's mother discovered the mistake by Minneapolis authorities and the canceled warrants were reissued. Rearrested in 1987, Nate denied knowing the whereabouts of the child. He was sentenced to three years.

Police in Miami arrested Arlie and asked where the boy was. “In a closet in North Miami,” she said.

She blamed Nate, saying he had hit the child, who was dead next morning. Nate stole a car to dispose of the body, she said, but was arrested behind the wheel before he could do so.

Nice try, but no cigar. The truth had been walled up in the closet with the corpse. Police had found a computer-dated store receipt for the building supplies and items used to wrap the body. The date proved that Nate was already in jail when the child died. Arlie pleaded guilty in March 1990 and was sentenced to fifty years in prison.

No way Butchko's diligent detective work could have identified the little boy any sooner. There had been more than one slip-up. The national clearinghouse for missing children had never received his name from Minneapolis. And his little gap-toothed grin meant nothing. When Maurice left Minneapolis, his baby teeth were straight and perfect. Though his adult teeth were growing in crooked, his own mother would not have recognized them.

Danny, ten, and Brandon, seven, take piano lessons, and Tia is learning to play the guitar. She has a lovely bell-clear soprano, just like her mother. Amanda, at two and a half, is astonishingly bright.

Tia still misses her mother. She always will. “Things come up in everyday life, and you want to turn to your own mother,” she said last time we talked, “like the questions I want to ask her when the kids get the chicken pox or mumps. I'm twenty-nine years old now, and I will never be too old to need my mother. I need her as much now as when I was fourteen.

“I don't think I could go on if I told myself it will never be solved. So in my heart I believe that someday there's going to be some justice, that Mom's not going to be one of the people whose murder is never solved.”

Amen.

For Mrs. Z, and for all of the others.

Her name was Amy, and she was a young woman in search of her past. She lacked nothing in her life, yet she felt an irresistible compulsion to reach out to the woman who had given her up for adoption at birth. Her persistent search for her biological mother would unearth murder, tragic secrets and, in the end, joy.

Her story posed two questions: Can a mother-daughter bond exist when the two are strangers? And can it remain alive even after death?

Amy's childhood was a happy one: She grew up in East Meadow, Long Island, in a comfortable Jewish home with loving parents. By age five she knew she was adopted. Her parents explained that she was chosen because she was the best, the most beautiful and the most delightful of all children. Made sense to her. But a shadow fell slowly across her life, nonetheless. Between the ages of five and fifteen, Amy occasionally asked questions about her real mother. Her parents, usually honest and open, were uncharacteristically evasive, their stories often conflicting.

Her mother was dead, she was told, struck down by a car. Another time: Her mother was killed in a car that crashed. A third time: Her mother perished in a plane that fell from the sky.

Why were they lying to her? What really happened to her mother? Who was she? Amy daydreamed and fantasized. “I used to think my mother was Marilyn Monroe.”

By age sixteen she had become a teenage rebel, a chronic runaway. Her good, hard-working and concerned parents took Amy to a family therapist. To their surprise, the therapist sided with Amy. Had she not been present at the session, she is certain she never would have learned the truth. If Amy wants to discuss her roots, the therapist said, her parents should be forthright.

“Even if it's gruesome?” the adoptive mother asked.

Yes, the therapist said.

That is how Amy learned that her mother had been murdered in Miami.

The parents knew few details. The adoption was arranged before Amy's birth. At the hospital, in Miami Beach, the lawyer handling the details said that the infant's mother was eager to meet the new parents. They declined. They just wanted to take the baby and go. A year later the same lawyer notified them that the woman was dead—murdered.

At age twenty-three, Amy began to actively seek the facts about what happened to her mother. She felt a growing sense of urgency: The people who knew might die before she found them. She zeroed in on the case by locating a decades-old newspaper article in archives at the Miami-Dade Public Library. For a while, Amy worked as a skip tracer for a Long Island law firm. Smart and resourceful, she was good at it, very good. She got fired for spending too much time seeking information about her mother.

She wrote to Dr. Joseph Davis, the Dade County medical examiner. He gave her the name of Miami Homicide Sergeant Mike Gonzalez, who had been lead detective on the now twenty-three-year-old murder. He and Mike, the doctor wrote, were the only people left who would recall her mother's case. “All the others involved in the investigation have long since left office I suggest you contact Detective Gonzalez, whose memory is well recognized by his peers.”

Mike remembered the case as if it had happened yesterday. Surprised when Amy called and introduced herself, he tried to dissuade her from probing into the past, but she would not be discouraged. He told her what had happened to her mother and sent the information she wanted, along with a note:

Amy,

I have been very reluctant to send you this stuff.

I really don't believe you should relive this ancient tragedy.

Remember that your parents are the ones who raised you and loved you all these years.

It seems to me that it will be very difficult for you to relate to the life and times of Johanna Block.

I hope these reports do not upset you too much. I hope I'm not making a mistake.

Good luck to you—look to the future, not the past.

Sincerely,

Sgt. Mike Gonzalez

The sad and shocking story of her mother's life and death stunned the urbane and polished young woman.

Johanna Block came to America as a German war bride and became a casualty of life in Miami. Happiness eluded her. A judge ordered her hospitalized for mental problems in 1953. By the time she gave birth to Amy, she was an alcoholic barmaid, three times married and divorced.

In the spring of 1961, Johanna Block was thirty-three and about to strike out for a new start in life. She planned to move to Kansas City with friends. She talked about joining Alcoholics Anonymous.

She never got the chance.

On the last night of her life. May 25, 1961, Johanna Block left the Club 41, where she was employed, and walked to her nearby apartment. She had been drinking, and two friends walked her home. They were a woman named Mary Bratt, the daughter of a Miami police captain, and her fiancé, Vernon Edwards, a burly six-foot six-inch house painter. The couple would marry the following month.

Johanna Block failed to answer when friends knocked on her door the following day. A fellow worker stopped by to wake her at one
P.M
. The door was unlocked, and she stepped inside. Johanna Block lay naked on the floor, strangled with a belt and stabbed. A pair of scissors from her sewing basket protruded from her chest.

A pretty and vivacious woman, Johanna Block always had lots of boyfriends. One ex-husband was an accountant, another was an ex-convict named Walter George Zarzycki, who had owned a jukebox business. Miami police said they had twenty suspects but arrested no one. The slaying joined the ranks of other unsolved mysteries.

Miami's most famous unsolved murder had occurred two years earlier, in 1959. Ethel Little was a gentle fifty-three-year-old churchgoing spinster and legal secretary to a former Miami mayor. Her savage murder became known as the city's most sadistic slaying.

She was found naked, tied spread-eagled to her bed, strangled with a light cord, horribly tortured, raped with a flashlight and sexually mutilated by a killer who sliced off her right breast and hurled it at a mirror in the bedroom of the small cottage where she lived alone.

The only clue left by the killer was a bloody palm print on a windowsill. Police had never found the man who left it.

No detective ever linked the two unsolved murders.

Suddenly, thirteen years later, both were solved by a phone call.

In Decatur, Georgia, in July 1972, the former Mary Bratt picked up a telephone and called the police. Her husband, Vernon Edwards, had been drinking. He was guilt-stricken and depressed. He wanted to confess to two murders in Miami. One of the victims was Ethel Little; the other, Johanna Block.

The windowsill print matched the palm of the hulking 285-pound Edwards. The solution to the famous Ethel Little murder made headlines. Almost as an afterthought, it was mentioned that Edwards had also confessed to the 1961 death of barmaid Johanna Block.

On the night of the murder, after Mary Bratt and Vernon Edwards strolled home with Johanna Block and left her at her apartment, the engaged couple quarreled. Rebuffed and angry, Edwards said he went out and drank some more, then began to think of Johanna Block, drunk, alone and vulnerable. They had never dated. He had never been inside her apartment, but now he went there, with sex in mind. She resisted and started to scream, so he choked her, first with his hands, then with his belt. He thought she was dead, but he had to be sure she would never tell his fiancée. He took the scissors from her sewing kit on the dresser and stabbed her, leaving them in her chest. He searched her room, took what little money she had and left. Hours later, before dawn, he realized that a cigarette lighter with his name engraved on it had fallen from his pocket during the struggle. He returned to the scene of the crime and found it near her body.

A month later he married Mary.

Edwards was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Ethel Little. He was never even prosecuted for killing Johanna Block. In her case the only evidence against him was his confession, while police had his bloody palm print in the more famous murder. No matter, they reasoned, he would spend life in prison anyway.

Amy wrote to Edwards in prison, hoping to learn more about her mother from the man who had killed her. He never answered. His wife divorced him while he was behind bars. He remarried while still a prisoner.

Life, as defined by our criminal justice system, is short.

Vernon Edwards walked out of prison a free man and drove off with his beaming new bride on July 24, 1990.

I was on leave of absence from the newspaper. Someone else wrote the story about Vernon Edwards's release. The article focused on the Ethel Little case, never mentioning Johanna Block, or her murder.

But she is not forgotten by everyone.

Sergeant Gonzalez sent Amy snapshots from his case file. In one of them, Johanna Block smiles across the years from an old-fashioned kitchen. The other was shot in a five-and-dime photo booth. Amy also found a morgue photo of her mother, a profile. “I had never seen a dead person before,” Amy said, “especially my mother. It was horrible. I think my life stopped for a while,” she told me later. “I was having trouble sleeping, having nightmares.”

Now she was even more determined to unlock the long-buried secrets of her mother's life and death. The musty files she had probed for information about her own birth had yielded something else, something that infused her search with new meaning. Before she was born, her mother had given birth to three other children, all boys, born in 1949, 1952 and 1954.

“I want to find them,” Amy told me. “We all share a mutual terribleness: our mother's life.”

There was one more reason. Amy, now a twenty-five-year-old Long Island housewife, was more than eight months pregnant with her first child. I wrote a news story three days before Christmas, saying, “Amy's Christmas wish is for three strangers. They probably do not know she exists. They are her brothers.”

She thought they should know that they would soon be uncles. Hospital records had indicated that Amy's father, name unknown, worked as a jail guard and was married to someone else at the time of her birth. Amy had tried with no luck to find Walter Zarzycki, probably the father of the boys.

The
Herald
story reached readers who remembered the family but no one who knew exactly what had become of Johanna Block's sons. Records reflected that when Walter Zarzycki was informed that his former wife, the mother of his children, had been murdered, he said he had no interest Johanna Block's funeral was paid for by friends.

She apparently had a lot of them.

I asked a
Miami Herald
librarian to punch the name Zarzycki into her computer system. It spit out a small story that had appeared in the newspaper's Gulf Coast edition. One Raymond Zarzycki, age twenty-nine, was nearly killed in an explosion the prior spring. Riding an all-terrain vehicle along a country trail, he ran over and detonated a buried seismic testing charge placed by a Houston oil-exploration company. The blast hurled him thirty to fifty feet into the air. He suffered leg fractures and powder burns.

He apparently lived in a trailer at the western edge of the Everglades and had no telephone. I sent a telegram:

IF YOU ARE THE SON OF WALTER ZARZYCKI AND JOHANNA BLOCK, YOUR SISTER AMY, BORN IN
1960
AND PUT UP FOR ADOPTION, IS TRYING TO FIND YOU AND YOUR BROTHERS. SHE IS A CHARMING, DELIGHTFUL WOMAN WHO IS EAGER TO MEET YOU. PLEASE CALL ME COLLECT.

He was, and he did.

“I've had the shakes ever since I got it,” he told me. Raymond Zarzycki had worked in agricultural water control until the accident. The explosion had shattered his left leg. He was still recovering, using crutches and a leg brace. His hands trembled as we reached Amy by telephone. So did his voice. The date was January 1. On New Year's Day, a strange woman more than thirteen hundred miles away made Raymond Zarzycki cry.

Amy, in her Long Island living room, laughed a lot, out of sheer joy. Over long-distance telephone, she described her “little nose and pouty lips and a dimple on my chin.”

Raymond Zarzycki, barefoot and unshaven, in East Naples, on the fringe of the great Everglades swamp, had them too. The big brother she had never met was the New Year's wish she had feared would never come true.

“I found you!” she cried into a bad telephone connection to Florida.

“I've found you too,” Ray said.

“I can't believe I actually succeeded.”

“My hands have been shaking since I heard.”

Amy, quick and bubbly, talks like New York, where she grew up. Ray talks southern country, quiet and slow. He grew up attending school with Miccosoukee Indian children out the Tamiami Trail near Frog City.

What they share is roots and the sadness of their mother's life. Raymond and his brother Joseph are the sons of Walter Zarzycki. The third boy must have been by another marriage.

Raymond Zarzycki had no memory of his mother. His father had married again and bought a bar out on the Trail, in the Glades. He later bought a tavern in Naples. He had died several years earlier of natural causes.

He never talked to his sons about the past, Ray said, “never told us we had any kinfolks.”

But he and his brother overheard their father and grandmother whispering several times as they grew up. Ray became convinced he had a baby sister somewhere. “I caught a couple of hints. My grandma dropped a few here and there, but I didn't know where to look.” When he did search, unaware of the adoption, it was for a sister with the same last name as his.

He had not seen the story eleven days earlier in the
Herald
. But a former classmate had and had sent Amy a picture of Ray's first-grade class and two snapshots of Ray and Joseph scuffling in the grass. The little boy in the school photo bears an astonishing likeness to Amy's pictures at that age.

She had been afraid he would not want to meet her. “I didn't know how you would feel, how you would react,” she told Ray.