The Killer Book of Cold Cases (22 page)

In June 1976, I was embarking on a thrilling new project, my first novel. The subject, of course, was murder. I figured that if I wanted to learn about homicide, I should talk to the investigators in the homicide squad in Suffolk County, where my story was set.

In mid-June, having applied for and gotten permission to do just that, I was ushered into the office of Lt. Tom Richmond, the homicide squad commander. A private, powder-blue, two-story home had been converted into the squad’s temporary headquarters while the regular quarters were under construction.

Richmond was a warm, garrulous man with a funeral business on the side, and he answered my questions willingly and well. Indeed, I was thrilled when he told me things like, “The body speaks to you.” I could see such utterances enlivening and adding credibility to my novel.

After around forty-five minutes, I left the office and headed for my car. Little did I know that as I did, a detective with a high-powered, long-distance camera was taking multiple pictures of me. The reason, I was to find out, was that police everywhere know that killers like playing with fire and often contact police in some way after a murder. For example, Edmund Kemper, the notorious serial killer from the West Coast, would go to a bar called the Jury Room in Santa Cruz, California, where the cops who were investigating the murders he had committed hung out.

A week before I showed up at the Suffolk County homicide squad, the body of a 13-year-old girl named Katherine Woods had been found in Huntington. I was aware of that because the story was splashed all over the newspapers, but at the time I had no active interest in it for my book. As it happened, I immediately and routinely became a “person of interest” in Katherine’s case.

After my visit, one of the Suffolk County homicide detectives invited me to accompany him on his rounds the next day. Jimmy Pavese was a burly, cigar-inhaling guy who was as tough as cops come. I thought he was just being nice and trying to help me get the research I needed to write my book. Jimmy also supplemented my crash course in homicide by giving me
Manner of Death
, a book written by medical examiner Howard Adelman that showed all kinds of people who had left this life violently, and all in living color.

The next day was old hat for him but not for me. I got to view a young, deceased guy who had already been autopsied on a stainless-steel gurney in the morgue and, therefore, saw for the first time the characteristic Y-shaped incision on a victim’s chest. This guy had been murdered by the Mafia, and I was astonished to see only a tiny hole from a .22 bullet in his head. Unfortunately, I was still there when the dead man’s wife or girlfriend came in and started screaming hysterically.

Two things got to me that day. One was Jimmy’s cynicism. At the end of the day, when we had stopped for a few beers, he commented offhandedly that “people stink, Tommy.”

And the other was what real homicide is all about. It’s a horror, a far cry from the sanitized material presented on TV or in the movies.

A couple of days later, I got another pleasant surprise. Jimmy knocked unexpectedly on my door and asked if I wanted to go to the crime scene of the Kathy Woods case. I was out the door in a flash.

As we drove to the scene, I recalled what I knew about the case from the newspapers. Kathy Woods was from Italy and had been adopted by Thomas Woods and his wife, Marian, as were four other kids: Jill (Kathy’s biological sister), Steven, Thomas, and Merrie.

Kathy attended Burr Hill Elementary School. On June 2, a Wednesday, she had gone to a big playground after school with friends and then had left to go home. She never got there and was reported missing by the Woods family.

On the following Saturday morning, her body was found by a family of bikers in woods adjacent to Sweet Hollow Road in Huntington, about five or six miles from her posh home in the upscale community of Dix Hills.

Because they were looking for a thirteen-year-old girl, cops didn’t know at first that this was Kathy’s body. The person they found looked like a spectacularly curvaceous woman in her early twenties. Indeed, I found out later that a number of cops came from other precincts in the county just to view the body.

Sweet Hollow was a very narrow road that was relatively primitive for being in the middle of the bustling town of Huntington. The road was partly paved and partly packed dirt. It was flanked by heavy woods, and later, after traveling it many times, I learned that the road was in perpetual shadow because the tops of trees from both sides of the road interlaced and blocked the sun. Much later, it became a mecca for ghost hunters because at night it was very spooky.

Before we started rolling down it, Jimmy pointed out the window and said, “Look, there are metal medallions on the light poles in the woods. We’re looking for the LILCO (Long Island Lighting Company) pole numbered 62, which is near where she was found. Why don’t I look on my side and you look on yours?”

We did that, and as we did, Jimmy started to ask me questions about the murder, things like how I would’ve handled it if it were me. I found the questions quite complimentary.

“One thing I wouldn’t do is murder her in these woods,” I said. “There are only a few houses along the road, but certainly she would scream and be heard by someone. I think she was killed somewhere else and her body dumped here.”

For some reason, we couldn’t find LILCO Pole 62. After a half hour, Jimmy suggested we quit and go to one of his favorite places, the nearest bar.

As we sipped beers, Jimmy remained quiet until he suddenly said, “I hope you don’t think I was trying to refamiliarize you with the scene.”

It took me a moment to understand what he was getting at. He would have loved for me to give him a fact I shouldn’t know, such as the location of well-hidden LILCO Pole 62.

I was still a person of interest.

Once he was convinced I was not involved in Kathy’ murder, I got to be friends with Jimmy and he really let me inside the case, though, of course, not all the way inside. He told me Kathy’s throat had been cut and she had been stabbed in the back. There were bruises on her face but she died of asphyxiation. A gag the killer shoved down her throat had choked her to death.

And she had been hog-tied with cord made of yellow polypropylene. The cords were tight and interconnected to her neck, so if she moved, she would choke.

But undoubtedly the worst detail was that cops speculated—since time of death is so difficult to prove—that the killer had kept her alive for at least three days, sexually and physically assaulting her the entire time. She definitely was not murdered on Sweet Hollow. They called it a crime scene, but it was just the place where the body had been dumped. Kathy had been tortured and killed somewhere else. She had been a little girl, and I found the details of her abduction and death almost unbearable to think about.

Gradually I became more and more emotionally involved in the case—having two daughters about Kathy’s age added to my involvement—and I thought of ways I might help Jimmy on the investigation.

I had a freelance gig as the editor-in-chief of
Caper
and
Escapade
, two unremarkable girlie magazines, and I knew a bondage expert who I thought might be able to help us. Jack Jackson ran a photo studio in Manhattan and would occasionally shoot photos of nude models for use in
Caper
and
Escapade
. But Jackson was also head of the Eulenspiegel Society, a bondage and domination club.

Jack liked me, I knew, and of course he made money off me for the photos he took. One day, after clearing it with Jimmy Pavese, I told Jack about the murder of Kathy Woods and how he might be able to help by giving us his feedback on how Kathy was tied.

He agreed to do it, and on a weekday morning a few days later, I was riding in a police car with two detectives. Pete was driving, and sitting next to me in the back was Richie Reck, who I would become friendly with.

As we drove, Richie handed me a sheaf of eight-by-ten color photos that I had never seen. They all showed how Kathy had been tied up when they found her.

I leafed through the photos, and they were appalling. She was lying on her belly on a stainless-steel gurney in the morgue with her black hair mussed and her dark, dead eyes open, fixed, and dilated. I could instantly see from the way she was tied that if she moved at all, she would choke herself.

We met with Jackson at about ten thirty and went into a local bar and ordered beers.

Richie Reck handed Jackson the photos, and he leafed through them one by one. His brow wrinkled and his face became very serious. He was disturbed.

He went through all the photos and then said something I will never forget.

“We [the Eulenspiegel Society] play games,” he said. “This is the work of a psycho.”

We finished our beers, but before we left, the cops tried something that was not part of the original plan for Jackson, and it really pissed me off. They wanted access to his file listing all of the Eulenspiegel members. I told them that was not part of the deal, and Jackson categorically refused to do it.

In the car on the way home, Richie Reck said to me, “Tom, if we thought he had anything to do with the death, we would have arrested him on the spot.”

I had been naïve. Cops are cops, and the only thing that matters to them is collaring the perp.

Over the next couple of months, my wife, Catherine, who had also become emotionally involved in the case, and I tried to investigate it ourselves. We drove by Kathy’s house, and followed the two routes that cops theorized the murderer might have traveled to her home—either hitchhiking on Caledonia Road which would only take a couple of minutes, or using a shortcut through the woods off Arbor Road. We drove endlessly up and down Sweet Hollow Road and many other places.

We were by no means Holmes and Watson, but some things were easy to deduce. For example, the killer had to be a local because only a local would be likely to know the existence of a road that was such a perfect place to dump a body at night. Anyone could stop a car at the wide part of Sweet Hollow Road and then walk quickly into the woods and dump the body. The killed would have had ample time to hide if he or she saw the lights of a vehicle—which would be at least a half a mile away—approaching.

Eventually, the case went cold, and things went terrible for the Woods family. Thomas Woods was diabetic and he started to abuse his body, taking up smoking and drinking. He died at the age of sixty-one. Kathy’s sister, Jill, ran away from home and, for three years after the murder, was in a number of different foster homes. The other kids, who were older, left as well. Kathy’s mother, Marian, invested her insurance money in a religious articles shop in Florida but eventually went bankrupt.

The oldest sister, Merrie, summed up what happened to her family very well: “He just killed us all.”

The case stayed cold for sixteen years, when suddenly it came back. It all started late one Friday night, August 2, 1991, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, once famous for its steel. A small, dark-haired woman who must remain anonymous—let’s call her Dorothy—left her parents’ home in Northampton, where she lived, and drove her white Chevy Nova to the Ramada Inn on MacArthur Road in Whitehall to pick up her best friend, Kelly, who worked there. Then they drove to Mickey’s, a small neighborhood bar favored by young people for its cheap beer and loose dress code.

They had a few drinks, listened to songs on the jukebox, and stayed until the bar closed at 2 a.m. Then they drove to Perkins Restaurant, a pancake house. Dorothy called her parents from there and told them that she would be home after she and Kelly left the restaurant.

The young woman drove Kelly back to the Ramada Inn so she could pick up her car, and then they planned to follow each other home.

As she waited for Kelly to drive up in her car, Dorothy lit a cigarette and listened to the radio. Then, the passenger door was wrenched open abruptly, and a wild-eyed, black-haired man got into the car. In his hand he held a wicked-looking, two-inch folding knife. “Do you know what this is?” he asked. Dorothy nodded, terrified.

He pushed and pulled her into the backseat, out of sight, and warned her to stay as she was. Then he got behind the wheel and drove the terrified young woman for ten minutes to a large old house on a street with a constant flow of traffic. He went around to the back of the house where there was another door.

After parking in a small gravel parking lot, he grabbed Dorothy and pulled her roughly from the backseat. With one arm wrapped around her neck, he pulled her along the back path into the house. Once inside, he continued to pull her upstairs past a photograph of himself and a little girl, who was likely his daughter, hanging on the wall.

Through her terror, Dorothy was puzzled.

“I couldn’t imagine him having a little girl and doing this,” she said later.