To Hatred Turned (9 page)

In stilted medical jargon, Gilliland recorded the physical facts of Rozanne’s primary injury: “There is a history of a gunshot wound of the back of the head, slightly to the right of the midline at the torcula [
sic
]…There is additional history the inshoot was surgically resected as was the underlying skull…No powder or tattooing are mentioned in the description and none are visualized at autopsy.”

Gilliland described the path the bullet had taken: “After perforating the skin and subcutaneous tissue, the bullet perforated the skull and brain, lacerated the dura over the left anterior fossa and ricocheted to lodge beneath the dura of the left frontal lobe.” In layman’s language: big trouble. This wound, Gilliland concluded, had been lethal.

The second gunshot wound was of lesser import. “Internal examination [of that wound] reveals diffuse right subscapular [
sic
] hemorrhage,” she dictated.

While contributing to her death, Gilliland concluded, that wound was not as serious as the one in the back of the victim’s skull.

But there was something else that played a major role in the woman’s murder: the strangulation attempt. In the pathologist’s opinion, that also caused “an additional lethal injury.” If Rozanne had not been so effectively shot in the back of the head, Gilliland noted, the strangulation could have killed her.

Gilliland’s report, while it had the appearance of an unchallengeable scientific document that left little room for interpretation or dispute, would be highly contested years later and the pathologist’s conclusions would be roundly criticized. Making the document and its conclusions particularly vulnerable was a single sentence Gilliland added, seemingly as an afterthought. In a section of the report labeled “toxicology” was a single sentence that read: “No antemortem blood available.”

The report, and especially that sentence, would come back to haunt the pathologist. In spades.

At about the same time Gilliland was performing the autopsy, McGowan was gathering the facts as he knew them. They were pitifully few. The main clues were the bullets and shell casings, which told crime-lab experts that the weapon was a .25 caliber pistol and that the ammunition used in the shooting was of recent manufacture.

Even as the detective waited to interview Gailiunas, Larry, and Joy, his instincts told him that their alibis were going to check out perfectly. But just to make sure they were not playing games with him, he planned to ask each of the three to volunteer for a polygraph, commonly known as a lie-detector test.

At that stage of the investigation, McGowan had a distinct advantage: He knew more about the principals than they knew about him. Gailiunas and the Aylors were ignorant of the fact that McGowan had a reputation as a tenacious and determined investigator, a Texas version of a Canadian Mountie who never gave up until his quarry was in jail. To use a local analogy, the detective was like one of the snapping turtles that inhabit Texas creeks and rivers: Once he wrapped his jaws around a case, it would take considerably more than a clap of thunder to make him let go. He also had a special way with suspects, a sort of salesman’s touch that made people instinctively like him and want to share their secrets with him. Whenever the situation called for a good-cop/bad-cop ploy, McGowan invariably filled the good-cop role.

Coming across as a friend in need, McGowan frequently was able to get suspects to open up and tell him things they would never confide to any other officer. And if his charm failed to work with a suspect, he could fall back on a sharp intellect that was hidden by his deceptively easygoing demeanor. Many a crook and overanxious defense attorney made the erroneous assumption that the detective’s mind was as slow as his speech. Still, McGowan’s experience was limited. Richardson had rarely experienced a crime involving a cold-blooded killer striking for no apparent motive.

But, being a methodical man, McGowan had a simple modus operandi. Whenever he investigated a violent crime, especially a homicide, he looked for three things: motive, method, and opportunity. Leaning back in his chair and plunking his boots on the desktop, McGowan considered what he had to work with.

He could put “motive” on the back burner, he felt, because all three of the principals involved in the case had a reason for shooting Rozanne; certainly Gailiunas and Joy had more motive than Larry. While no one knew what the investigation might turn up about the lovers’ relationship, it was not a concern to the detective. Motive was definitely there, but he intuited that in this case “method” and “opportunity” were going to be more important to solving it.

“Opportunity” was going to be easy enough to check. Once Larry, Joy, and Gailiunas explained to them where they had been during the crucial hours, it would be easy enough to verify. The last person except the killer believed to have seen Rozanne before the shooting was the instructor at the ice-skating rink, who reported that Little Peter left with his mother at about two-thirty. The call to the fire department’s emergency switchboard was logged in at 6:33, so that left a four-hour gap when nothing was known of her activities. Whatever she had been doing that afternoon, she apparently did it at home because Little Peter did not say they had gone anywhere once they returned to Loganwood Drive.

“Method,” McGowan knew, was far and away going to be the most difficult issue to pin down, the one that was going to consume most of the investigator’s efforts. The Richardson Police Department tended to take violent crime very seriously indeed and when an incident of the type that involved Rozanne occurred, it was department policy to throw every available person on the job until either the case was solved or every possible lead had been checked. In this situation, McGowan had seven investigators under his command and he felt he was going to need them all.

The first task, he told them at a hastily called conference, was to try to determine where the rope came from. The other was to try to trace the ammunition back to a specific pistol, which was not unlike trying to find a male Texan who did not own a pair of boots.

One by one, the three main characters in the drama filed into McGowan’s office and gave him their alibis.

Gailiunas told the detective he had been at a clinic and then in his office on the afternoon of October 4, and he gave McGowan the name of another physician who could verify it.

Larry said he was in his apartment or with his sister Karen.

Joy, a quiet, seemingly shy blonde with an admirable ability to put others at ease, said she had been with her parents at a cottage they owned on a nearby lake.

McGowan was not surprised when their stories checked out. Nor was he astonished when each of the three agreed to take a polygraph and when the results revealed that they were not being deceptive in response to the questions asked of them.

In addition to answering the detective’s questions, Larry repeated to McGowan his belief that Rozanne’s murder was a contract job.

McGowan waved his hand in dismissal. “You’ve been watching too many movies,” McGowan told him.

As a result of the lack of progress, the detective was left just about where he figured he would be: up a blind alley until, and if, solid detection could break the case open.

For three months, his investigators fanned out through Richardson and the surrounding communities, as well as into Dallas itself, talking to anyone they felt might have the slightest connection to the incident. Over the weeks, they questioned more than a thousand people. And when they were through, they had no more idea of who had killed Rozanne than they did on the night of the attack.

For McGowan, it was a depressing turn of events. He had never been faced with such a perplexing situation; despite the thousands of man hours and an incalculable amount of money spent investigating the murder of Rozanne Gailiunas, neither he nor the investigators under him had come up with a single solid lead.

After the turn of the year, when all possibilities had been exhausted and every potential lead run down, the investigative task force was dissolved. That left only McGowan, who was forced to rely on luck.

Since the night of the shooting, McGowan felt part of the answer to who had attacked Rozanne was to be found in her house, despite his own inability or that of his investigators to find it. Early on, he developed the habit of returning to the house to see if he could find the vital clue he was sure that he and everyone else had overlooked. Even after the task force was terminated and he went on to investigate other crimes, McGowan continued to visit Rozanne’s house, pacing silently through the empty rooms, waiting, it sometimes seemed, for an almost-supernatural sign that might lead him to her murderer. Even after the house was rented to a new tenant, McGowan made arrangements with the latest occupants to visit the house when they were not home. The detective was not sure what he was looking for, but McGowan was certain he would find it, given enough time and sufficient determination.

9

Almost as soon as the autopsy on Rozanne was complete, Larry began making surreptitious plans to return her body to Massachusetts. Knowing that Peter Gailiunas would object and possibly try to get a court order to stop him, Larry made travel arrangements under an assumed name. Before he left Dallas, however, there was someone he had to talk to: Joy.

Driving to the house on Arbor Trail, Larry parked his truck in the driveway and knocked on the door.

“You know about Rozanne, don’t you?” he asked when she answered.

“Oh, Larry,” she replied sadly. “I’m so sorry. I know how much you loved her and how much it really hurt you.”

Reminding her that their divorce was supposed to become final in just a few days, on October 10, Larry asked her to do nothing to try to prevent it from going through. “I’m just tired of the fighting,” he said.

Tears brimmed in her eyes. “Do what you have to do with Rozanne,” Joy told him. “Go and be with her family and when you get back, we can settle our business. I’m tired of the fighting, too.”

But a week later when he called Joy from Boston and asked her if the divorce was final, she told him that she had postponed it.

“Why the hell did you do that?” Larry asked angrily. “I thought I told you I didn’t want you to try to stop it.”

“Because, Larry,” Joy said, “it seemed like the right thing to do. The Richardson police are going to try to hang this murder on you and you need all the help you can get. My family is behind you and I want you home.” Besides, she added, Chris, then just entering his teens, needed a father.

Larry was not happy with the situation, but he was too tired to argue. On the way out of Dallas he had stopped at his apartment and he had been all but overcome by the memories of Rozanne that still lingered: the remains of a pizza they had shared; some of her clothes that were hanging in the closet; strands of her hair on a pillow, the lingering scent of her favorite perfume, Chloe. “Okay,” he told Joy reluctantly. “I’ll come back.”

But the readjustment was not easy. One evening soon after he returned, he and Joy were sitting in the den when the telephone rang. Joy answered it, listening in silence for several seconds.

“No,” she said finally, “I can’t. My husband and I are back together.”

Again she listened, then replied, “Yep, that’s the way I want it.”

When she hung up, Larry asked her who that had been.

“You don’t know him,” Joy replied, adding, “it doesn’t matter anyway. It was a friend of a friend who asked me out because he thought I was single.”

“I’m not sure I like that,” Larry said.

“Forget about it,” Joy told him. “He won’t call anymore.”

Despite Larry’s original diffidence to an attempt at reconciliation, it looked at first as though the effort might be successful.

Friends who ran into Joy and Larry at parties or in their old haunts said they acted like newlyweds, holding hands, hugging and smooching. Larry seemed to be giving Joy the attention and consideration that had been absent in their relationship a couple of years earlier, while Joy gave indications that she was ready to forgive and forget. Their business continued to prosper and the money rolled in. For Christmas, Larry bought Joy a $40,000 Porsche, a black 911 model, which several months later she traded in for a bright red 928, a more expensive and luxurious version.

But things were not as serene as they appeared on the surface. Although he had moved back in with his wife and son and had abandoned his divorce plans, Larry still carried a torch for Rozanne. He continued sending flowers to her grave and spoke of her often, even to Joy. This bothered Joy more than she let on. In public, she worked to create the image that they were again one happy family, but when she became pregnant soon after their reconciliation she decided to undergo an abortion rather than have the child.

On June 25, 1985, eighteen months after Larry moved back in with Joy,
she
filed for divorce.

Not long before, her younger sister, Elizabeth, twenty-five, announced her plans to marry a technical designer named Michael Goacher. According to a Dallas magazine, Larry’s reaction to his sister-in-law’s plans was bizarre. When he learned of the impending marriage, the magazine said, Larry threw a tantrum and threatened to beat Goacher. Even when he calmed down, he was unrelenting: He prohibited Joy and Chris from attending the wedding. Larry denies this. Although he admits that he did not attend the wedding, he said he did not tell Joy or Chris they could not go.