Ten Little New Yorkers (11 page)

M
cGovern had a little more but not much. His sources at the cop shop said they definitely had the killer in custody. The guy had signed a written confession and the cops were convinced they had their boy, although McGovern didn't as yet know his name. But in the Village, once the news hit, there would be a long, collective sigh of relief. This, of course, was understandable, if somewhat premature. It is a rather widespread misconception that innocent people do not confess to crimes they didn't commit. This notion is flat wrong. False confession is rooted in the very nature of man. For instance, more than two hundred people confessed to the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. The cops had more than thirty signed, written confessions in the famous case of the Black Dahlia murder in Los Angeles in the late forties. In that case, the murder and dismemberment of actress Elizabeth Short, the real killer is still unknown. Then there is the well-documented time the cowardly kraut Himmler thought that he'd lost his favorite pipe. He eventually found it on the seat of his truck where he'd left it, but in the interval, six concentration camp inmates had signed written confessions that they'd stolen it. When I meet Himmler in hell I'm going to take his fucking pipe and shove it up his ass. At any rate, because of interrogation techniques, the desire to see that fucking smile of acceptance on that fucking face of that fucking cop, the ambition of having our fifteen minutes of shame, or the fact that many of us just don't give a damn whether we live or die anymore just as long as we get a good table in a restaurant, an ungodly large number of false confessions have come into being. DNA tests are proving every day that this is true.

I am not a Catholic priest; I don't believe in confessions. Like Sherlock Holmes, all I believe in is the irrefutable, undeniable, unforgivable evidence. I walked over to the huge, gleaming espresso machine, drew another cup of hot, bitter espresso, and accompanied it back to the desk. I was kind of in a hot, bitter mood myself. I thought of my own firsthand encounter with Max Soffar, who's been in solitary confinement for twenty-three years on death row in Texas. It is mute commentary to what a confession can do when tossed into the well-oiled workings of a broken system. It is a reminder that the lowest form of society is not the criminal class. The lowest form of society are those who guard the criminal class. What follows are a few actual pages from the Kinkster's casebook.

 

I'd never interviewed anyone on death row until one January when I picked up a telephone and looked through a clear plastic divider at the haunting reflection of my own humanity in the eyes of Max Soffar. Max doesn't have a lot of time and neither do I, so I'll try to keep this brief and to the point. “I'm not a murderer,” he told me. “I want people to know that I'm not a murderer. That means more to me than anything. It means more to me than freedom.”

Somewhere along the line, Max Soffar's life fell between the cracks. A sixth-grade dropout whose IQ tests pegged him as borderline mentally retarded, he grew up in Houston, where he was a petty burglar, an idiot-savant car thief, and a low-level, if highly imaginative, police snitch. He spent four years as a child, he says, “in the nut-house in Austin,” where he remembers the guards putting on human cockfights: They would lock two eleven-year-olds in the same cell, egg them on, and bet on which one of them would be able to walk out. Max ran away, and it's been pretty much downhill from there.

For the past twenty-three years, since confessing to a cold-blooded triple murder at a Houston bowling alley, Max has been at his final station on the way: the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas. But he long ago recanted that confession, and many people, including an ever-growing number of Houston-area law enforcement officers, think he didn't commit the crime. They say he merely told the cops what they wanted to hear after three days of interrogation without a lawyer present. At the very least, they say, Max's case is an example of everything that's wrong with the system. In the words of my friend, Steve Rambam, who is Max's pro bono private investigator, “I'm not anti–death penalty; I'm just anti-the-wrong
-guy-getting-executed.” Another observer troubled by Max's case is Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judge Harold R. DeMoss, Jr., who wrote in 2002, after hearing Max's last appeal, “I have lain awake nights agonizing over the enigmas, contradictions, and ambiguities” in the record.

Chief among these Kafkaesque elements is the fact that Max's state-appointed attorney was the late Joe Cannon, who was infamous for sometimes sleeping through his clients' capital murder trials. Cannon managed to stay awake for Max's, but he did not bother to interview the one surviving witness who might have cleared him. There are, incidentally, ten men on death row who were clients of Cannon's.

Then there's the evidence—or the total lack of it. Jim Schropp, a Washington, D.C., lawyer who's been handling Max's case for over ten years, also on a pro bono basis, says it seemed cut-and-dried when he initially reviewed the file. “But the more we looked into it,” he told me, “the facts and the confession didn't match up.” Schropp discovered that there was no physical evidence linking Max to the crime. No eyewitnesses who placed him at the scene or saw him do it. No fingerprints. No ballistics. Two police lineups in which Max was not identified by the witness. Polygraph tests he passed, which have now gone missing. If the facts had been before them, Schropp says, no jurors would have believed that the prosecution's case had eliminated all reasonable doubt. “When you peel away the layers of the onion,” he says, “you find the rotten core.”

Okay, so what about the confession? Rambam says that when Max was arrested on August 5, 1980, for speeding on a stolen motorcycle, it was the third or fourth time he'd been caught for various offenses, and he thought he could deal his way out again, as he'd done before. The bowling alley murders had been highly publicized, and Max had seen the police sketch of the perpetrator, which he thought resembled a friend and sometime running buddy. Max and the friend were on the outs—they'd agreed to rob their parents' houses, the friend reneged—so to get revenge and to help his own case in the process, Max volunteered that he knew something about the murders. Unfortunately, in his attempt to implicate his friend, he placed himself at the scene, and before long he became a target of the investigation himself. “The cops spoon-fed Max information, and he gave them what they wanted,” Rambam says. “He was a confession machine. If he thought it would have helped him with the police, he would have confessed to kidnapping the Lindbergh baby.” (That Lindbergh baby really gets around.)

The trouble is, Max's confession—actually, he made three different confessions—contained conflicting information. First, he claimed to be outside the bowling alley when the murders took place and that he only heard the shots. Then he said he was inside and saw it all go down. Then he said his friend shot two people and threw him the gun, whereupon he shot the other two; it was like a scene in an old western. The written record of Max's confession states that there were two gunmen, himself and his friend; the only surviving victim, the witness Joe Cannon didn't bother to interview, says there was only one. Max also told the cops that he and his friend had killed some people and buried them in a field. The cops used methane probes and search dogs and found nothing. He claimed that they had robbed several convenience stores, which turned out never to have been robbed. Best of all, when the cops told him that the bowling alley had been burglarized the night before the murders, Max confessed to that crime as well. What he didn't know was that the burglars had already been arrested. “We won't be needing that confession,” the homicide detective reportedly told him. After signing the murder confession, Max asked the officers, “Can I go home now?”

You may be wondering: What about the friend? He was arrested solely on the basis of Max's confession but was released because there was no evidence (the same “evidence” was later considered good enough to put Max on death row). Nonetheless, at Max's trial, the prosecutor told the jury that the police knew that the friend was involved and that they planned to hunt him down once Max was dealt with. But it never happened, and for the past twenty-three years, the friend—who is the son of a Houston cop—has been living free as a bird, currently in Mississippi, with the long arm of the Texas law never once reaching out to touch him. Why? Good question. “It wasn't hard to run him down and pay him a visit,” Rambam says. “I found his name in the phone book.”

Why would someone confess to a crime he didn't commit? A cry for help? A drug-addled death wish? Perhaps it has to do with what the poet Kenneth Patchen once wrote: “There are so many little dyings, it doesn't matter which of them is death.”

As my interview with Max was ending, he placed his hand against the glass. I did likewise. He said he would like me to be there with him at the execution if it happens. I hesitated. “You've come this far,” he said. “Why go halfway?”

I promised him I would be there. It's a promise I would dearly love not to have to keep.

Y
ou gotta be kiddin', Sherlock,” said a disappointed Ratso, when I called him. “All that work we did and now the cops have cracked the case?”

“Watson, Watson, Watson,” I said. “There is a world of difference between ‘cracking a case,' as you say, and someone merely making a confession. Remember, more than two hundred people confessed to kidnapping the Lindbergh baby, even though it was, of course, after our time. But if all those confessions were accurate and true, that's a big crowd of people at the Lindberghs' window.”

“Who cares?” said Ratso. “Lindbergh was a Nazi.”

“Ah, Watson, you do go right to the heart of things. The train of thought needs hardly to stop at your station, my dear friend.”

“Thank you, Sherlock. Why all this shit about the Lindbergh baby anyway?”

“Because I
am
the Lindbergh baby. But right now I'm busy being Sherlock and I have good reason to believe that this current confession is a false one.”

“You're kidding? How could you possibly know that? Do you know something about the man who confessed?”

“Not even his name, Watson. Not even the great McGovern, sometimes referred to as ‘The Shadow,' knows the name of the confessor yet.”

“Then how can you be so sure the confession is false?”

“Watson, you know my methods. I'm passionately anal retentive. And I particularly make a point of not divulging my methods to Jews or to the Irish. As Brendan Behan once remarked, ‘The Jews and the Irish do not share a culture; they share a psychosis.' So I will not be sharing this information at this time with either you or McGovern. It is privileged and it must remain privileged until everything else is impossible.”

“You're impossible.”

“Watson, if I told you the reasoning behind why I strongly suspect the confession to be false, you would laugh and say it's so simple anybody could have figured that out. But anybody couldn't have figured it out, Watson! Only the great Sherlock could have tumbled to the truth so early in the investigation. And Sherlock's lonely secrets are secrets he must keep.”

“Jump up my ass.”

“Ah, my dear Watson, your earthy humor is ever a leavening agent, even at mankind's darkest hour!”

“Yeah, well, I'm not wasting all that legwork, Sherlock. If you won't tell me, I'll check with my own sauces. I have sauces, too, you know. Then I'll compare notes with McGovern. Then I'll come by your place later this afternoon and maybe you'll be a little more forthcoming with your dear friend Watson.”

“Fine, Watson, fine.”

As I believe I mentioned much earlier, Ratso had begun to be quite an irritant in my life. Because he had virtually no insight into the mind of the criminal, he would quite predictably go off on the wrong track at every opportunity. Like all of us, he was a creature of narrow habit. He was, unfortunately, also a creature of unpleasant habits. Maybe it's something in the nature of all relationships. What we once thought of as refreshing takes only a little time to become quite tedious. But it was far more than Ratso that was irritating me now. I firmly believed the cops had bought a false confession. If they considered the case closed, it would be most unfortunate. It would mean the real killer was still running loose on the street.

I met my friend Chinga Chavin at the Second Avenue Deli and chose not to burden him with details of the case. It was pleasant to be with someone besides Ratso for a change. I did not notice the small Band-Aids at Chinga's temples and around his thumbs. This was good. It meant he wasn't scratching and biting himself like a monkey on crack. Chinga's shrink had once referred to this behavior as “a grooming mechanism gone awry.” It's almost like what happens, I thought, within the mind of a killer. Almost. What actually happens, only the killer could tell us, and in the matter at hand, I doubted seriously if the killer would ever confess.

It was about five-thirty by the time I got back to Vandam Street. Ratso was sitting on the stoop of the building, looking like a large, phlegm-colored, poisonous mushroom.

“Where the hell do you get a phlegm-colored jumpsuit in New York?” I asked.

“Hadassah Thrift Shop,” he answered. “Do you want to know the name of the killer?”

“The killer or the poor bastard who confessed to a highly publicized crime he didn't commit?”

“The NYPD thinks they're one and the same, Sherlock.”

“Then the NYPD is wrong,” I said, as I unlocked the door of the building.

As in Heather Lay's building, the little freight elevator with one swinging exposed light bulb was not working. Unlike the one in Heather's building, this freight elevator hadn't worked in recent memory. Neither had I.

“A killer whose MO is to leave fiendishly dramatically staged death scenes,” I continued, as we legged it up the darkened stairwell, “is not going to trot down to his local cop shop and turn himself in. Far from it, Watson. Right now the killer, far from feeling remorseful, is very probably luxuriating in the news of this false confession—”

“Sherlock, you don't know it's false! I haven't even told you the guy's name. It's Barry Russell, by the way. No previous rap sheet.”

“An institutionalized mind wishing desperately to get back in prison, Watson, is only one reason for making a false confession. Climbing too many stairs could be one. No, no, no, Watson. The killer is still here, right here in the Village, and we must struggle forward with the investigation because we're getting closer to this evil-doer with every step that we take. Do you hear me, Watson?”

“No. I've got a Persian slipper in my ear.”

“You'll have a Persian slipper in your ass if you don't move along a little faster.”

The truth was, we really were getting closer to the killer. The mind behind five murders had already pretty much unmasked itself by this time. It was the kind of mind, I believed very strongly, that would never be satiated until the killer was caught.

We were not in the loft long enough for the espresso machine to finish humming “My Old Kentucky Home” when we had an unexpected knock upon the door. I looked at Ratso, he shrugged, and I looked at Sherlock, who didn't blink. Then I took a patient puff on my cigar and was about to walk over to the door when our visitors announced themselves.

“Police. Open up,” said a voice.

“Tex,” said another, more familiar voice. “It's Mort Cooperman.”

When the cops arrive five minutes after you do, it's never a very good sign. It means they've got their beady little eyes trained closely on your comings and goings, and maybe even on your staying homes. I knew the visit was coming, of course. I just didn't know if Cooperman wanted a cup of sugar or if he was trying to sell me something. I went over and opened the door.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” I said, as Cooperman and a plain-clothes dick I didn't know brushed past me into the room.

“No problem,” said Cooperman, playing it straight. “We were in the neighborhood. Just thought I'd come by and borrow a cigar, if I might.”

“I didn't know you smoked cigars,” I said.

“I don't,” said Cooperman.

His demeanor did not seem as gruff as usual. He was still his surly self, but he appeared to be a bit subdued. He introduced the other guy to me and Ratso, some kind of tech specialist named David Anderson. The other guy wandered about the loft as Cooperman wandered over to my desk. I maintained my position loitering between the desk and the door. It was cop etiquette. They could wander wherever the hell they wanted and I could loiter wherever the hell I wanted just as long as I didn't have to go with them when they left. Cooperman seemed on the verge of saying something when Ratso pulled his head out of the refrigerator long enough to pipe up himself.

“Hey, congratulations, officer,” he said. “I hear the perp of those five murders has confessed.”

“Forget it,” said Cooperman, shooting Ratso a look so hard it caused him to close the door to the refrigerator.

“Yeah,” Ratso continued obliviously, “but this Barry Russell guy. I thought you had him in custody.”

“We did,” said Cooperman. “But there's been another murder.”