The Last Place You'd Look (19 page)

It was a little before 6:00 p.m. as West crept through the wood. There were still a good two or more hours of sunlight left before the shadows would lengthen, and he wanted to finish searching that particular area before moving on to the next spot. There was a lot of land to cover before night fell, and the department was stretched thin.

The deputy was more than two hundred feet into the forest when he spied a jolt of red visible through the trees. As he moved closer, West found a small clearing. In the center of that clearing stood Scott’s candy-apple red Beretta. And on the ground between the car’s open door and the vehicle itself, curled up as if sleeping in a bed of leaves, was Scott, his head wrapped in a makeshift hood. He had been shot once at point-blank range on the left side of his head. Later, investigators would determine his hair contained traces of duct tape adhesive.

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In addition to their grief and horror, Helen and her family were panicked at the news of Scott’s murder. They knew his killing meant Phyllis’s chances of being found alive had ebbed away.

As each day passed and the investigation into the robbery of Woodson Music and Pawn and the kidnapping and murder of Scott Gasperson progressed, Helen also began to sense a shift in the way the community regarded her and her family. Although her lifelong friends and those who knew Phyllis well continued to stand by and comfort her, terrible rumors began to creep into the subtext of the Aragonas’ lives. Phyllis, people whispered, had been in on the robbery and helped kill Scott. Even now, these voices said, she was on the run.

“My friends would call me up to say teachers had told the class my sister did it,” Jennifer says. Helen received telephone calls that were even nastier than Jennifer’s.

“I’d get calls at work, a voice saying, ‘Help me, Mom, help me,’” Helen says.

Jennifer was also on the receiving end of cruel, personal intrusions. “People would call and tell me that I was a tramp,” she says. For a fifteen-year-old girl mourning her big sister, the telephone calls were both crushing and astonishing. She didn’t understand how a world that was orderly and normal could turn sour and unsure so fast.

Speculation about the circumstances of Phyllis’s disappearance continued to spawn gossip and rumor: Phyllis was after Scott’s money. He had a big life insurance policy and she was the beneficiary. She was on the run, hiding out, pretending to be a victim, but she’d come back soon to claim the cash.

The officers investigating the case also conjectured on the petite redhead’s possible involvement. The discovery of Scott’s body with no sign of Phyllis placed everyone close to the missing woman, including Helen and Jennifer, under suspicion.

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Onslow Sheriff’s Deputy Mack Whitney, now retired, has decades of experience as a cop. In addition to his law enforcement duties, Whitney serves as an ordained minister, a combination some might find odd, but not uncommon in southern law enforcement. Whitney’s mellow personality and soft, persuasive voice make him easy to talk to, even when the subject is murder.

Five days after Scott and Phyllis were discovered missing, Tuesday, July 17, a man named Miguel Angel Guzman contacted Whitney. Guzman told the officer that about three months before Scott and Phyllis disappeared, he was approached by two acquaintances, a Cuban refugee named Gary Fernandez and his son, Orlando. Gary and Orlando asked Guzman to participate in a robbery. Their target: Woodson Music and Pawn. Guzman declined. He also failed to mention it to anyone.

Guzman said Gary and Orlando Fernandez once again contacted him on July 1, still talking about the pawnshop robbery. After Woodson’s was robbed, on Thursday, July 12 and again on July 13, they told Guzman in two separate conversations they were going away.

Based on Guzman’s information, deputies searched a storage unit and mobile home rented by the fugitives. By then, they’d left Onslow County far behind. Gary Fernandez, his girlfriend, Maria Monserrate, and Gary’s son, Orlando Fernandez, were in Miami.

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The way most successful detectives investigate any case is a bit counterintuitive: they do not try to unearth enough evidence to prove someone is guilty of a crime but instead attempt to exculpate each suspect. When they cannot build a case for innocence, they usually have their answer.

Phyllis’s disappearance left them with a hurdle that would prove difficult to overcome. Since they had no inkling of her whereabouts, investigators treated her not as a victim, but as a party to the crime. Helen later said she knew they were doing their jobs, but it was still painful.

Why wasn’t Phyllis cleared once deputies knew about Gary Fernandez? Because until she was found and an arrest made, everyone associated with the case remained a suspect, even Phyllis.

When a loved one vanishes, even if the evidence points to a dark ending, it’s often difficult for the family to accept what may seem inevitable to others. The Aragonas continued to hold onto their faith that Phyllis would be returned to them alive and whole, even when most expected the worst. Mothers often find hope in the bleakest of scenarios. Helen Aragona was no exception.

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As the search for Phyllis continued, investigators tracked Gary Fernandez and his accomplices. With Phyllis still missing weeks after the robbery, Helen traveled to New York to visit one of her other daughters. Detectives followed her on the premise she could be meeting Phyllis. Helen feels conflicted at the premise she might have been in league with her daughter or that Phyllis was suspected of involvement in Scott’s slaying.

But Helen and Phyllis were not alone in the spotlight. Detectives couldn’t rule out anyone who might benefit from Scott’s death, even his father, Robert.

“They thought Robert might have killed Scott for the money,” Helen says, her voice derisive at the implication this father would sacrifice his child for cash. Although their relationship was strained at first because Phyllis remained missing after Scott’s body was found, Robert Gasperson has become a good friend over the years.

As long as Phyllis remained missing, her absence became almost like a living thing—the elephant in Helen Aragona’s life. Though she arose each day with the hope that Phyllis would be found, even she admitted as the days passed, it seemed less and less likely. But never once did she buy into the theory Phyllis was involved in the robbery or Scott’s murder.

“She loved him. She loved him more than anything,” Helen says. “She would never, ever do anything to hurt that man. He was the center of her world.”

Meanwhile, Helen continued to endure rude comments and finger-pointing. People yelled at her on the street from passing cars. She hated going out. The abuse also affected Jennifer.

A counselor at Jennifer’s school called the stricken student into her office and advised her to “get over it.” An honors student, Jennifer’s grades slipped, and she grew morose. She could think of nothing but her sister. Soon things grew so nasty that Helen sent Jennifer to Texas to live with another sibling. There, the fragile teen was spared the cruelty and idle speculation of classmates and strangers, but her life would remain altered and broken beyond repair. To this day, she still weeps for Phyllis and Scott, and her trust in others has all but evaporated.

“I don’t feel safe anymore,” Jennifer says, trembling.

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Months passed and the investigation continued. The Aragonas observed their first Thanksgiving without Phyllis. The Christmas holidays ahead promised little peace. The struggle to return to business as usual and put their lives back together remained difficult. Without knowing where Phyllis was and what happened to her, they felt as though they lived in some sort of hellish alternate universe.

Winter stripped the trees of their leaves and turned the grass brown and lifeless. Helen Aragona went through the minutiae of living, but there was no longer any joy in her life. Still, she was convinced, as she had been since the beginning, that her daughter was innocent of the things people said about her. The ugly speculation and scrutiny continued to wound, but she tried not to think about it and focused instead on the continued search for Phyllis.

By this time, the agencies involved in the case, including the FBI, read like a book of acronyms. Authorities were now convinced Gary and Orlando Fernandez and Maria Monserrate killed Scott Gasperson and robbed the pawnshop. They tracked the threesome from Miami to the Dominican Republic, where they had traveled by boat.

A couple of weeks before Christmas, they had them: Gary, his son, and Maria, the girlfriend. Arrested in the Dominican Republic, the three were brought back to stand trial for Scott’s murder. Phyllis was still missing.

The story behind the crime was so bizarre and so heinous that the case would be reenacted on John Walsh’s television program,
America’s Most Wanted
. When Gary, Maria, and Orlando were apprehended in the Dominican Republic, one law enforcement agency involved contacted the television program to announce the arrests, even though Helen Aragona had not yet been notified. Helen found out when the news media called for comment.

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Helen’s quest to clear her daughter’s name would continue until April 1991, as the sun warmed the cold hard earth.

On Sunday, April 7, almost nine months from the day that Phyllis Aragona was abducted, her skeletal remains were discovered in a wooded area in nearby Pender County. Like Scott, Phyllis had been shot once in the head. Over time, her bones were scattered, and authorities were forced to use dental records to identify her. Bits of hair and duct tape also were found at the scene.

The news brought mixed emotions to the Aragonas. When she heard, Helen experienced intense pain, but also a grim sort of relief—not because Phyllis was dead, but because Helen could stop hoping.

“That year in limbo, that was the worst time of all,” Helen says.

Now her phone could ring unanswered and Helen could do something no mother ever wants to do: lay her child to rest.

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It took almost three years to find all the people responsible for the deaths of Phyllis and Scott and bring them back to Onslow County to stand trial for the murders. Helen went head-to-head with the investigators during the entire process. She demanded to know their progress, to stay in the loop.

In addition to the Fernandezes and Maria Monserrate, Eli Ocasio, Maria’s teenaged son, also was charged with murder. After a long, intense search that saw the case stretching into the spring of 1993, authorities located and arrested Eli in New York City.

After the trials, after the sentencing, after the young lovers’ names were chiseled on their headstones, the full story emerged about how Scott and Phyllis were kidnapped to facilitate the pawnshop robbery. And Gary, who masterminded the crime, turned out to be more than a Cuban refugee; he was also a government informant enrolled in the federal witness protection program.

During the trials, testimony revealed the crime was one of swiftness, brutality, and an underworld far removed from the lives of ordinary, decent people like Scott and Phyllis. Gary was involved in drug dealing and theft, and his past had caught up to him. He needed money fast. Gary cased Woodson Music and Pawn and made plans to take the couple hostage, then force them to open the safe so it could be looted.

Scott and Phyllis were captured at their home and then held at the trailer. Two of their abductors left the trailer early on the morning of July 12 and drove to the pawnshop Scott managed. After opening the door and going inside, they departed and waited to see if their actions would trip a silent alarm and trigger a police response. No alarm sounded; no officer came by.

They drove back to the trailer and retrieved Scott. They brought Scott to the pawnshop in his own car—the car witnesses would pass as it sped toward Smith Road, where Scott’s execution-style murder took place. Maria also drove back to the pawnshop, but in Phyllis’s Blazer. Phyllis was held in Maria’s mobile home, where she was beaten and raped.

At one point during their capture, Scott broke free and tried to run but was chased down and forced back inside the residence. The morning of the robbery—July 12—was the last time Scott and Phyllis saw one another.

A few hours after murdering Scott, the killers took a terrified Phyllis and drove her to a location even more remote than the one where they left Scott. As they walked her deep into the woods, she clung with fraying hope to her captors’ promise that they would leave her there so she could be rescued. She knew that they took Scott away but not that he was murdered. That hope died with Phyllis when she was shot in the back of the head and abandoned to the elements. The bullet, from a .380 caliber handgun, exited near her eye.

Gary was the first one tried and convicted of robbing, kidnapping, and murdering Scott Gasperson and Phyllis Aragona. Arthur Bollinger, an inmate imprisoned with Gary Fernandez, testified at Gary’s trial that Gary told him he shot and killed Phyllis, and his son, Orlando, killed Scott. Gary also admitted to Bollinger that he beat and raped Phyllis.

The jury convicted Gary but hung during the sentencing phase, which meant he did not receive the death penalty. Instead, Gary Fernandez was given a mandatory life sentence for each of the first-degree murder convictions, plus 130 consecutive years for the other charges.

The four defendants are each serving life sentences. It is doubtful any of them will ever be paroled.

Today

In the corner of one room of Helen Aragona’s pastel-hued home sits a huge blue stuffed rabbit. It is the size of Helen’s four-year-old granddaughter. The rabbit has seen better days. Its stuffing is lumpy, its fur bedraggled and the ears look as if they’ve been used to drag the bunny around.

Helen’s kitchen, all sky blue and white, has a little country feel to it. It’s a look that went out of fashion more than a decade ago, but Helen doesn’t care. Most of what hangs on the walls of her antiseptically clean home has been taken from the little house on Ben Williams Road that Phyllis shared with Scott.

Jennifer, grown and married now with children of her own, resembles her oldest sister so much that Helen’s voice breaks when she remarks on their similarity. Both mother and daughter remember with absolute clarity the moment they heard about Scott’s death. His killing disassembled what remained of their faith that Phyllis would come back home to them alive.