Chapter 7
Memorial Day, 1976
Dorothy banded the phone to her husband, cupping the receiver. "Take down the information from this woman," Dorothy whispered. "We're going to her house right now. She lives on Staten Island, wherever in God's territory that is. I'm getting strong feelings from this woman."
Ellen Jacobson, usually a lively woman, was practically inaudible on the phone. Calling Dorothy Allison had not been her idea, nor did she have any idea what a psychic could do to find her missing fourteen-year-old daughter, Susan.
But Ellen's sister, June, had heard about the Nutley psychic from a friend and had pressed her to call; in addition, a reporter from the Staten Island Advance had called, giving Ellen Dorothy's phone number through a mother Dorothy had worked with the previous year. The message included the information that "Dorothy was at home" that Memorial Day afternoon.
Reported missing on May 15, Susan Jacobson would be the longest, most arduous case on which Dorothy had worked; a case in which not only her own stamina, but also the grim perseverance of the young parents, Bill and Ellen Jacobson, would be pushed to an inhuman threshold.
Ellen Jacobson and her younger sister, June, were born on Staten Island of Scottish parents; both women had fair complexions and short, light brown hair. Ellen, thirty-seven, worked hard as the mother of seven children, whose ages spanned from one year to sixteen. No one ever felt unwelcome in Bill and Ellen's house, no matter how busy or chaotic the movements of their large family might be, because the parents worked closely and lovingly to keep their home open to strangers and friends.
When Bob and Dorothy got to the three-story Jacobson house, located on a corner in Staten Island, Dorothy felt an immediate kinship for the tall, energetic but nervous woman who greeted them. Dorothy could see the tear-stained eyes behind the tinted wire-framed glasses. After two weeks of constant vigilance and searching for her daughter, desperation was ingrained in Ellen's smile.
Dorothy gave the woman a hug - a gesture of deeply felt sympathy, for Dorothy, in her own mind, already knew that Ellen Jacobson's daughter had been murdered.
"Where's the coffee?" Dorothy asked as soon as the upstairs door closed behind them and they stood in the bright, small kitchen and dining area. Ellen Jacobson anxiously poured coffee all around.
"I'm sorry my husband isn't here," she said. "The reporter from the newspaper said I should call you right away, so I didn't have time to wait for Bill. He's out with friends looking for Susan. He doesn't usually give up till just before the sun goes down. There must be twenty people out there looking today."
Dorothy sat at the table and pulled out a note pad and pen. She began writing.
"I see 'MAR.' What is it? Do you know?" Dorothy asked Ellen.
"Can't imagine. Is it part of someone's name?" Ellen wondered.
"No, I don't think it's part of anything. I just see three letters, 'MAR,' and nothing else."
Dorothy wrote down the number '2562' and showed it to Ellen.
"Mean anything?" Dorothy probed.
"It's Susan's birthday," Ellen said, sounding slightly incredulous.
Dorothy wrote down "405-408," and again presented it to Ellen. The mother stopped for a moment to think finally said that if the numbers were related to the birth day, then 4:05 would have been the correct time of Susan' birth.
"Good," Dorothy said. "I'm getting a lot of strong feel ings, which I will describe to you first, and then, see if you can place them," Dorothy instructed her. "When I'm done I'll ask you things about the case and the investigation."
Ellen grimaced at the word "investigation," but before she could say anything, Dorothy went on with her vision
"I have a very good picture of an area related to Susan," Dorothy told Ellen. "I see twin bridges in the distance, but one of the bridges isn't for cars. The area is like a swamp There's an abandoned car near the place where I see 'MAR.' I also see two sets of dual church steeples and two huge smokestacks. The 'MAR' will help us pinpoint where to begin. That's what we've got to find first."
Ellen's mind reeled with the facts. She was too frightened to fully comprehend anything Dorothy was saying. She knew that there were plenty of bridges and church steeples around the island, but her husband would be better equipped to help the psychic. He had already taken three weeks off from his work at Citibank in Manhattan to search for his second oldest daughter.
"Where're the police?" Dorothy asked suddenly.
Ellen shuddered at the question. Gus Doyle, June's boyfriend, had run an investigation of his own. Doyle, a tall, boisterous Irishman, worked as an insurance investigator and was fully schooled in the language of investigative procedures.
In addition to family and friends, help in the search for Susan had been provided by members of a citizens-band radio club, cabdrivers, and bus drivers. But in two weeks there had still been little investigation done by the police as far as Bill and Ellen were concerned.
When Ellen had phoned the Staten Island police at 9:00 P.M. on Saturday, May 15, the answering policeman had been unsympathetic to her plight.
"A fourteen-year-old girl who is only missing three hours after dinner isn't missing at all," the man said. "She's out screwing around with friends."
"We've talked to all her friends," Ellen persisted. "Nobody has seen her since early this afternoon. I know she hasn't run away."
"That's what they all say," the officer exclaimed. "Okay, lady, relax. I'll have someone by your place in an hour to take down the facts." He hung up abruptly.
Someone did come. An officer appeared more than an hour later, asked very few questions, none of which had to do with Susan's physical description, and left. The next day Ellen was told by a detective on the phone that if Susan had not shown up by Monday, the case would be turned over to the Missing Persons Bureau, whose offices were in Manhattan.
For the next week, the Jacobsons heard nothing from the Missing Persons Bureau, and only briefly from the local police. On the seventh day they were informed by phone that they had to obtain a PINS (Persons in Need of Supervision) warrant, which Bill Jacobson did, spending an entire day in court to obtain it. But the PINS warrant merely emphasized, the fact that the officials felt Susan had run away.
On the twelfth day after Susan's disappearance, Patricia, the oldest of the seven children, was sitting on the shady corner in front of her house when suddenly, a man in a business suit grabbed her arm and announced that he had "found" her.
"Found who?" Patricia screamed as she wrenched her arm free.
"Susan Jacobson," the man announced.
"You're crazy, mister. We may look alike, but I'm not Susan," the angry teen-ager snarled.
The man who had approached Patricia was a detective from the Missing Persons Bureau. After mistaking Patricia for Susan, he proceeded upstairs to introduce himself to the parents. The man sat with Bill and Ellen around their dining table for fifteen minutes, during which time he told them "everything possible would be done" to find Susan, but that "nine times out of ten these cases are runaways." He also asked some questions. He had heard Susan had a boyfriend: was he around?
Dempsey Hawkins was always around, usually on the corner in front of the Jacobsons' house with the other neighborhood kids. Ellen told the investigator that he might find him there now.
The man requested a copy of Susan's dental chart, for possible future identification. Ellen gave him a flier of which Bill had made two thousand copies to be distributed all over Staten Island. That flier, with Susan's photograph on it, and the dental chart were the only things the parents saw go into their daughter's file.
The investigator did locate Dempsey on the street. A strapping, wiry-haired mulatto, Dempsey Hawkins glared at the fortyish man mistrustfully, as he glared at all the world. Born out of wedlock, Dempsey lived with his British mother and his sister in the Port Richmond neighborhood. Dempsey's life had been difficult, at best. He had grown up neither black nor white and had learned that taking the offense was a stronger position, ultimately, than defense. Confronting people, he presented a solid, sometimes stony facade. At sixteen Dempsey was already a thinking man, scrutinizing the world from behind his glasses.
The detective introduced himself and asked the boy if he believed Susan had any reason to run away.
"No, sir," Dempsey responded.
Dempsey stood in the evening shadows and coolly told the man he had no idea what had happened to Susan. On the Saturday morning of her disappearance he had seen her taking care of the two youngest Jacobson children. The detective commended the boy for helping out in the search and advised that he alone had disability to play both sides of the street in order to obtain information.
"Know what I mean?" the investigator said, handing Dempsey his card.
"Both sides of the street," Dempsey repeated, smiling to himself.
That completed the only official interrogation of Dempsey. According to the family, in the next twenty-two months the Missing Persons Bureau called on the Jacob-sons' only once: to retrieve Susan's dental chart.
Dorothy rose out of her seat like an angry phoenix coming to life.
"Come on, we've got work to do. We're going to the police department," she commanded.
The three got into Bob Allison's car. Driving to the station, down Jewett Avenue through Richmond Terrace, Ellen told Bob to make a right at a fork in the road.
"No," Dorothy said. "If we go the other way, to the left, we'll be heading in the correct direction. I get a very strong scent of oil. Very strong, as if I were in a barrel of oil."
Ellen thought nothing of the oil scent, as the entire area was surrounded by oil-producing companies and container companies. The police station was in the opposite direction, toward the Statue of Liberty, so Dorothy made a mental note of the direction and the trio proceeded to the station.
Carrying a red satchel, Dorothy followed Ellen and Bob into the Police Department where the nervous mother introduced herself to the patrolman on duty as the mother of Susan Jacobson, a missing child. No one knew what she was talking about. Then Dorothy asked to see one of the detectives.
The patrolman explained that if the case was being handled by missing persons, they could not interfere with the investigation. At that time the shift changed, and Dorothy caught two unsuspecting detectives walking in for duty.
She cornered them and briefly introduced herself, pulling out two large scrapbooks of affidavits and articles from cases she had resolved. Reluctantly they escorted her into an office where, behind closed doors, away from Ellen's ears, she told the two men that the case belonged in homicide, not missing persons. She told them that Susan Jacobson was not missing, she was dead, and that she had been murdered by someone who had known her for some time.
Seeing the policemen were skeptical, Dorothy began telling the officers details about other cases they were working on. She specifically talked about a man who was missing and who would be found in three days by the beach, or on something called "Beach," in an area known as Old Town. She predicted that the body would be found in the trunk of a large abandoned black car, like a Lincoln, with license plates that did not belong to the car. The car, she added, would not readily appear to have been abandoned.
The men agreed to go out with Dorothy, but their skepticism was a barrier to real cooperation. They drove around Staten Island for thirty minutes.
"We need facts, not psychics," the police told the Jacobsons, a response that would haunt the parents.
That evening Bill Jacobson listened to everything Dorothy said. Her descriptions seemed to fit various places he had visited in the past weeks.
Dorothy left the Jacobsons" house that evening sharing their sadness and frustration. She wondered whether, if the Jacobsons had been wealthy or if Susan had been the daughter of a policeman, they would have received different treatment.
Three days after Dorothy's first visit, the newspapers reported that a man's body had been found in an abandoned black Lincoln on Beach Street in the neighborhood known as New Dorp, a section of the island once known as Old Town. The dead man was "believed to be a New Jersey fisherman involved in organized crime narcotic trafficking."
The following week, on June 8, an article appeared on the front page of the Staten Island Advance announcing that the New Jersey psychic was working on the Jacobson case and that she had accurately predicted the discovery of the fisherman's body the week before. This illicited no response from the police.
Believing the police would do nothing with Dorothy's description of the pertinent area, Bill Jacobson continued to investigate on his own. Along with Gus Doyle and Bill's close friend, Dale Williams, Bill spent three days on the southern part of the island looking for the "MAR" Dorothy had described. On an island full of marine-related businesses, "MAR" would be three very common letters. But Dorothy's confidence and sympathy had lifted the spirits of the desperate parents. Bill Jacobson felt he would find everything Dorothy saw. By the time Dorothy returned the following weekend, the men had come up with a couple of possibilities.
Bill Jacobson invited the Staten Island reporter Janice Kabel to join them on the search with Dorothy. Although an invitation had been extended to the Missing Persons Bureau as well, no one from the Bureau showed up. So, the search party consisted of the parents, Dorothy, Dale Williams, and the reporter.
First the group went to a little wooded area near North Street, a street Dorothy had seen as important, and also near the water. As they walked down a dirt road in the summer heat, they looked through the trees and spotted an old trailer. The name on the van, which was partially blocked by the trees, began with "MAR." As they approached the van, however, the "MAR" became part of MARGOLIN Brothers. Dorothy walked around the area for a while, checking the van and the surrounding shrubbery, and finally said she picked up no feelings from it. Perhaps, she said, they would return to the spot at another time. She wanted to see the other location first.
In Mariner's Harbor they walked along a road, skirting rubbish piles, and into a dense area of vegetation where flies and mosquitoes buzzed around them mercilessly. In the distance tall cranes moved slowly in the air, looking like prehistoric creatures. They lifted their loads as if the tons of metal were weightless.
The area, known during World War I as Downey's Shipyard, had been used as docks for merchant ships. Huge concrete slabs, partially covered with plants and graffiti, and deep, dark caverns, which once had served as storage and water retainers, also gave the area the atmosphere of a spot once inhabited by an ancient civilization.
On a large concrete corner jutting out of the earth some fifteen feet, Bill pointed out red painted letters, probably the handiwork of kids leaving their mark. The letters spelled "MAR."
"This is it!" Dorothy's excitement was evident. Not thirty feet away from the slab was an abandoned junked car. "I know we're in the right place. I feel it all over me."
Looking south over a long concrete dividing wall, the group could see the Bayonne Bridge and a train bridge spanning the bay. Across the water in New Jersey, two sets of dual steeples pointed heavenward.
But everywhere the earth was full of deep trenches and dark, forbidding holes, many containing dank water where insects were breeding in the summer heat. Dorothy shook her head, realizing the work involved in searching the underground network.
"You've got to get the police down here with bloodhounds and rowboats," Dorothy told them. "You must have their cooperation to get this investigation off the ground. I'm not a cop. I can point out where a person might be, but I can't go any further. That wouldn't stand up well in a courtroom," she advised Bill. "Your daughter is connected with this area and it's up to the police to find her."
The small, anxious man was overwhelmingly frustrated. Everytime he had turned to the police, he had encountered a blank wall. Only Dorothy's work had lifted his spirits. Only Dorothy continued to drive to Staten Island and spend time looking for their daughter. Dorothy would listen to their plight at any time, offering whatever solace and support she could.
But Ellen and Bill gave the information to the police, anyway. They were told, again, that the police "needed facts, not psychics." Moreover the police said they simply did not have the manpower to do the searching needed to cover the area Dorothy had pinpointed.
That evening, after the newspaper reporter had gone, Dorothy sat on Susan's bed with Ellen, feeling Susan's jewelry and thumbing through some photographs of the Jacobson children from a report Susan had done for school on her family life.
Dorothy looked at the photo of the attractive girl. Susan wore her long, light brown hair parted down the middle, framing her warm smile. She wore blue-tinted, wire-framed glasses, like her mother's, over her blue eyes.
Ellen sighed from exhaustion and sadness. Sitting quietly in Susan's room, she reflected on her daughter.
"She is so stubborn, sometimes," Ellen told Dorothy. "At nine months she was walking because she couldn't figure out how to crawl. She's smart, too. Almost straight A's in school."
The two mothers smiled.
"Stubbornness is in her planets," Dorothy said. "Ellen, I feel Susan had a bad time this last year. Is that right?"
Not exactly sure what Dorothy meant, Ellen asked her why she felt that way.
"Susan spent a lot of time with her boyfriend, didn't she?" Dorothy asked.
"I guess so." Ellen shrugged, not sure she wanted to pursue the sensitive subject. "We didn't really know how much time they were spending together," she said hesitantly. She wondered what Dorothy could be seeing. After all, Dorothy had not met Dempsey, yet.
"I feel they were doing a lot more than holding hands together," Dorothy continued, not sure how to pursue her feelings without offending the mother. But Ellen knew what the psychic was seeing.
"You're right, Dorothy, they were doing more than holding hands. Susan got pregnant and had to have an abortion last January." Tears streamed from the mother's eyes as she remembered the day the previous December, when she had found Susan in the bathroom, nauseated. Having had seven children, Ellen's subconscious suspicion was that her daughter was suffering from morning sickness. Unfortunately she had been correct.
What followed were several months of delicate textbook parenting. Without losing their equilibrium, Bill and Ellen helped their daughter through a difficult time with the support and understanding they knew she needed. She had made a mistake, but they didn't want her life ruined by it.
"This is the twentieth century," Ellen said to Dorothy. "It's no use hiding from these realities."
Susan's relationship with Dempsey had been slightly off-balance from the onset. They had met in grammar school and had played on the street in front of the Jacobsons' house on Anderson Avenue for more than a year without becoming close friends. Dempsey's confident and defensive air prevented anyone from seeing inside, from touching his vulnerabilities.
One day the previous August, while playing ball on the street, Susan struck a direct emotional hit. Dempsey had been playing catcher, and the slender thirteen-year-old girl accidentally let go of the bat, which flew by Dempsey, striking his eye. He was rushed to the hospital where a doctor stitched up the bleeding eye in the emergency room. No visual damage had been done, but for weeks Dempsey strutted about with a patch over his eye.
Susan had been hysterical with grief. Her guilt and unhappiness gave way, eventually, to romance. As they entered school that September, they were one of the talked about "new romances." Dempsey, a freshman at Port Richmond High, and Susan, an eighth grader at Prall IS, West Brighton.
The emotional balance in their relationship never seemed to achieve an evenness. All along, Dempsey seemed to hold something over Susan. Trusting was difficult for Dempsey in a world that separated people by! color. He didn't want to tread where he might be unwelcome, so one day he approached Susan's mother, Ellen.
"Do you object to me, Mrs. Jacobson?" the adolescent asked directly.
"Object to you?" Ellen repeated. "You mean am I prejudiced because you're not white and my daughter is? No," she stated flatly. "That doesn't really bother me. What does bother me," the concerned mother continued, "is the idea of a thirteen-year-old being seriously involved in a relationship. I don't mind you hanging around together on the street corners and playing, but I would prefer you didn't get too serious."
Dempsey became a fixture at the Jacobson house, coming and going as he pleased and sharing in Susan's family life. Ellen and Bill watched them play together that autumn within the familiar group on the street in front of their home. They sent them off to the movies with the other Jacobson children, riding either the bus or their bicycles, depending on the weather. Everyone seemed relaxed about the friendship.
Then, in November, came the parents' first inkling that something was awry. Susan brought home a report card with absences for which Ellen could not account. Her daughter insisted that she had helped Dempsey and his family move on one day, and that on the second absence, she had waited around with Dempsey for the electrician and phone man to arrive.
After the abortion in late January Susan's parents insisted that the relationship terminate immediately. They were willing, however, to let Susan handle that situation in her own manner. For all her parents knew, Susan and Dempsey saw one another only occasionally, within their social group.
"I don't like what I hear," Dorothy said. "This boy gives me a lot of feelings. I think I need to see him. I wondered why I saw someone who wasn't black or white and sometimes both. Now I know. Has he been around lately?" Dorothy asked.
"All the time," Ellen said. "The evening Susan was missing I saw Dempsey on the corner. I asked him if he'd seen Susan and he said not since that morning. He had seen her in front of our house, taking care of my two youngest."
"He never talked to her that day?" Dorothy asked.
"That's right. From the second day on, he's been helping us search. He took two of my other kids around different areas looking for Susan. He's even reported ideas to us about where Susan might be." Despite her words, Ellen's voice revealed the suspicions she harbored toward Dempsey.
She remembered that after the abortion, in late February, the phone had begun ringing at odd hours, mostly after midnight. The anonymous caller would make threats against the Jacobsons' house. Ellen had recognized the voice as Dempsey's, but when she challenged him on the street, he had dispassionately denied being the caller.
Even after changing their number to an unlisted one, the calls persisted. This time Dempsey would get a friend to ask for Susan, and then would take the phone once Susan had answered.
Not long after that, in late February, Bill had been walking down the back steps one cold evening to put out the garbage. Susan had just left for a girl friend's house two blocks away, to go skating. Bill looked up the street and saw Dempsey walking with his cousin, Punky, toward the house where Susan was heading.
Bill ran back and retrieved his jacket, got into his car, and drove down Palmer Avenue. The two boys were walking no more than thirty feet behind his daughter. Bill drove up to Susan and told her to continue walking to her friend's, that he was going to talk with Dempsey.
Dempsey started throwing rocks at the car.
"Listen, Dempsey," Bill called out. "You want to know why we don't want you around anymore? You want to know why we don't want you with Susan? Get in the car and we'll talk about it like adults. I'll tell you what it's all about."
Dempsey started calling Bill names, but the man kept his composure, wanting to reason with the boy rather than quarrel. After a few minutes Dempsey got into the car and they drove for a bit until Bill parked the car on Jewett Avenue. He turned to the boy, who stared out the front window in silence.
Bill explained to the teenager that the reason Dempsey was unwelcome was because his daughter had been pregnant and had gone through an abortion. Dempsey's face showed no reaction; he said nothing more than "you're kidding."
Bill went on to say that he and Ellen didn't want either of the kids' lives destroyed by their ignorance, and that they felt it best to break off the relationship so that Susan and Dempsey could start fresh with other people.
"As far as I know, there are only four of us now who know about this," Bill said. "I suggest we go to your house now and tell your mother."
"I don't want to tell her now," Dempsey said. "I'll tell her later in my own way."
Bill relented and dropped the youth off in front of his mother's apartment.
Bill's sense of fairness was no deterrent to Dempsey's bitterness and anger. Now that the father had told him about Susan's abortion, the boy began spreading news of the incident, using the fact as a way to degrade Susan. The two continued to see one another, Susan often bearing the brunt of Dempsey's humiliating threats. Her stubbornness and pride, however, kept her from saying anything to her family.
In desperation the concerned parents tried again in April to reason with the two youngsters, having Dempsey to their home for dinner and discussing the subject openly, just as the textbooks prescribed. The evening seemed to go well, leaving Bill and Ellen hopeful that the situation was finally resolved.
On Saturday, May 15, the Jacobsons' house was full of goings-on; Ellen's parents had arrived from the Catskills. Bill and his father-in-law were remodeling the downstairs bathroom. Bill had taken out a loan to begin a major remodeling job on the four-decade-old house in which he had grown up. Born in 1939 of Swedish and German parents, Bill had raised his own children in the two-story house which had seen Jacobsons grow and die through the decades.
That bright Saturday morning, Ellen announced that dinner would be served at 5:30 and that she didn't want anyone to be late. With seven children and guests, experience told her it would be impossible to chase after anyone. Most of the time her children were usually on hand, anyway, playing in front of their house.
It wasn't till dinnertime that Susan was missed. Usually she would have been helping to set the table around 5:00. When that time came and she hadn't arrived, the family called out her name around the block a couple of times and, getting no response, sat down to eat.
Around 6:30 Ellen walked out front and called Susan again. She noticed Dempsey standing on the corner, so she headed in his direction.
"Hi, Dempsey," Ellen said. "Have you seen Susan around?"
"Haven't seen her since this morning, Mrs. Jacobson," he said politely, then got on his bicycle and rode away.
Soon after, the family split up and started looking for Susan. Telephones, bicycles, and cars were used for two hours as they tried to track her down.
One eleven-year-old reported having seen her in the early afternoon walking past the child's house. Susan had waved at the girl and said she was heading for Ralph's Ice Cream Parlor to see if she had a chance at getting a summer job. Someone else reported seeing her walking in the vicinity of Dempsey's apartment, but Dempsey had reported he hadn't been home. No one else remembered seeing her that afternoon.
Dorothy shook her head. She did not like the story Ellen told. The more she handled Susan's possessions, the more she felt Susan had been deeply troubled and frightened, and no one had known it. The pictures coming to Dorothy were not for discussion with the girl's parents. Ellen and Bill had been through enough, Dorothy felt.
In the days that followed their daughter's disappearance, Bill and Ellen watched the newspapers closely for reports of unidentified bodies found anywhere in the United States. As soon as they found something, such as a report of a discovered corpse or even part of a body, Ellen would send a dental chart and flier to the police department in the area. If only part of a body had been found, she would send a copy of an X-ray taken of Susan's spine months before she had disappeared, when it was discovered her spine had a slight curvature. But so far none of these efforts had uncovered news of Susan.
The last Saturday that June Dorothy invited Bill and Ellen to Nutley. She wanted Detective Lubertazzi to meet them and discuss possible ways they might go about the investigation.
The group spent a pleasant afternoon eating and drinking beer, talking about cases Dorothy had worked on with Lupo. Dorothy wanted to make the day relaxing for the Jacobsons, as both parents were showing signs of emotional stress.
It wasn't until dinnertime that Dorothy began asking questions about Dempsey. She wondered about his recent behavior toward them.
Bill informed her that Dempsey had been around constantly, having gone out on several searches with him, often for a whole afternoon. On different occasions Dempsey had taken Susan's sister Patricia searching in places he said he was suspicious of. The father admitted to having moments of suspicion, himself, when he looked at Dempsey because of the incidents of the past year. But he still believed Dempsey was not capable of doing anything really harmful to Susan.
Ellen agreed, although she admitted he had shown little or no remorse at Susan's disappearance.
"He just doesn't show much emotion at all," Ellen said as if defending him. She added that the boy had never once inquired into the Jacobson's own state of mind since their daughter's disappearance.
"I wonder," Dorothy said, "if he'd be willing to come here for a little talk. I'd like to talk with him," she told Bill.
"Sure. Why not? I'll call and see if anyone has seen him around. You do mean tonight, don't you?"
"Of course. I have another steak defrosted. Tell him I'll feed him," Dorothy said. "Kids like to eat. Some eat raw meat like lions, though," she said with an ominous smile at Lupo.
Bill called his home and Patricia reported that she had just seen Dempsey on the corner. When the boy got to the phone, Bill explained the situation and asked if Dempsey could come out to Nutley for a talk with Dorothy.
Dempsey agreed, and Bill persuaded a cousin to drive the teen-ager to a midpoint in New Jersey, where Bill met them, around 8:00 P.M.
By the time Dempsey arrived with Bill, Dorothy had cleared away the dishes from their dinner, and only one place was set in the corner for the late arrival. Dorothy had one steak on the grill for him, while the others sat around the table drinking coffee.
Dorothy had grave misgivings about Dempsey, and meeting him added fuel to her already heated feelings. She knew the Jacobsons were reluctant to point an accusing finger at the boy. She hoped to open them up to the fact that anyone, and everyone, should be suspected.
She looked into the boy's eyes and could sense his inner being. Here was a sixteen-year-old at the table with a cop, a psychic, and the parents of his former and missing girl friend. He was miles away from his own turf, yet he was in full control. Dempsey's self-supports were strong, she felt.
While feeding him, Dorothy showed Dempsey articles about cases she had worked on with the police and the FBI. She showed him photographs of some of the missing children she had found.
"Do you believe in psychics?" Dorothy asked him.
"Guess so," he shrugged.
By now Dorothy did not trust Dempsey at all. Her instincts told her that he was capable of much more than Susan's parents would let themselves imagine.
"Dempsey, when did you see Susan that Saturday?" Dorothy asked as soon as the boy had finished eating.
"That morning. She was taking care of the two little kids," he told her.
"So that was the only time you saw her that day. Correct?"
"That's what I said."
"How many times did you go home that day?" Dorothy asked him.
"I didn't go back till after I saw the Jacobsons and she asked if I'd seen Susan," he said, indicating Ellen.
"So you never went home till that evening?"
"Right."
"How come I see you in two different shirts that day? I see you in a red and black striped shut. Like a sweater shirt."
"You mean my hockey shirt? Yeah, I was wearing that shirt that day."
"You weren't wearing that shirt in the afternoon," Dorothy stated.
Dempsey thought for a moment, never averting his eyes.
"I guess I did go home early that afternoon. That shirt was too hot. I forgot about that," he said without batting an eye.
"About what tune? Just after lunch?" Dorothy guessed.
"Yeah, I guess around that tune," Dempsey agreed, this time hesitantly.
Bill and Ellen were surprised by the news. For four weeks Dempsey had said he had not been home that afternoon. Now it turned out he had been home about the time Susan had been seen heading in the general direction of his house - about 1:30 that afternoon.
"Big deal. So I forgot a little thing," he said, sensing the tension in the air.
"It is a big deal," Dorothy said to him.
"I can't believe you lied like that," Ellen said quietly, her voice quivering.
"Dempsey, what was your relationship with Susan like?" Dorothy resumed her questioning.
Dempsey shrugged.
"I don't know what that means," Dorothy pursued.
"Not too terrific," he finally said.
"What do you mean, not too terrific? I thought you two were in love," Dorothy said.
"What love?" he said. "We just screwed a lot."
"You son of a bitch!" Bill slammed his fist on the table. "One minute you love her, the next you make her a piece of meat. You're a sick bastard, Dempsey."
As if not hearing the father's words, Dempsey went on.
"We screwed because she thought she was a lezzie," he said flatly. "She thought I was good looking and could help ..." Before he could finish, Ellen rose and left the room, followed shortly by Bill, who glared into Dempsey's face. Words stuck in the father's throat as he struggled with anger and hurt. Lupo looked at Dorothy, knowing full well where she was heading. He got up and turned to the door.
"I'll make sure they're okay," he said, leaving the room.
As soon as the two were alone, Dorothy leaned over the table, pinning the boy into the corner. She kept her full weight on the table, leaning forward, grabbing his shirt collar.
"What is this crap you're telling me, Dempsey? I don't go for any of it. You have no decency as a human being, saying those things in front of people who've been much too kind to you." Dorothy twisted his shirt in anger.
Dempsey's eyes were wide, his breathing fast and nervous.
"I would never have been nice to you, like they've been. Never. Especially if you'd done the things you did to that girl and she was my daughter. I'd have your throat in a minute," she challenged him.
"I don't know what you're talking about, lady," Dempsey began. "I only slapped her face."
"You know exactly what I'm talking about. You took that girl to Mariner's Harbor and did her in. You did, didn't you?"
Dempsey was speechless. Their eyes held each other as Dorothy released her grip but still leaned against the table. Dempsey averted his gaze.
"You're lucky I'm not a cop," Dorothy told him. "You don't have to say a thing, of course. But I know you killed her. My knowing won't do any good, I'm afraid. The police will have to find out for themselves."
Dorothy thought of the investigation so far and felt furiously frustrated.
"I didn't kill her. I didn't do it," Dempsey insisted, his voice holding back the rage and fear he was feeling.
"I got all I wanted tonight." Dorothy moved away from the table and sighed. "Now, can I give you another piece of cake?" She smiled wryly at Dempsey and left the room.
Dorothy was exhausted. It was after 1:00 A.M. Ellen had been resting on the couch for the duration of Dorothy's interrogation, while Lupo and Bill went over facts and possibilities on the case.
Dorothy opened the kitchen door, entering the den like a doctor coming out of the delivery room into a waiting room full of expectant families. She slapped her hands together in a "job-well-done" fashion and announced that she was tired and ready to kick everyone out for the night.
Bill went into the kitchen and told Dempsey they were ready to return to Staten Island. At this point Bill was still unsure of Dempsey. The Jacobsons were not aware of the depth of Dorothy's strong feelings about the youth. But Dempsey had lied, and the parents could not help but feel more suspicious.
Dorothy abided by her cardinal rule of never telling a missing child's parents that she knew the child was dead. Therefore she could not reveal all her feelings about Dempsey to the Jacobsons. Dorothy knew, too, that for the Jacobsons to accuse Dempsey would get them nowhere, so she suggested to Bill and Ellen that Dempsey be given a polygraph. Polygraphs were not very reliable, but she hoped the fear of taking the polygraph would push him to talk.
Gus Doyle, who was still helping the Jacobsons, agreed that the polygraph would be a good idea, and he volunteered to make the arrangements for the examination in Manhattan. Written permission was obtained from Dempsey's mother, who had had no contact at all with the Jacobsons before or since Susan's disappearance. Bill Jacobson paid the $200 for the examination. By now most of his home-improvement loan had been eaten away by the costs of the investigation.
It was the first week in July that Dempsey went to Manhattan for the polygraph. When he was asked by the polygraph examiner if he had murdered Susan, he stated his innocence. The machine registered that he was telling the truth. Nevertheless he revealed facts to the interrogator that he had not disclosed to the Jacobsons.
As soon as the test was completed, Dempsey called Gus Doyle. He admitted that he had seen Susan the Saturday she disappeared. In fact, he said, she had been at his apartment after lunch, where they had had an argument.
"She left crying," Dempsey told Gus. "I never saw her again." And the teen-ager hung up.
Gus knew that Dempsey had not been seen on the street that Saturday till 4:00 P.M. Between 1:30 and 4:00 he had no reliable alibi and claimed to have been alone.
When Bill and Ellen heard from Gus that Dempsey had passed the polygraph, but not without divulging some interesting new facts, they could only think that Dorothy's intuition about the boy had been right. After six weeks Dempsey admitted not only to having gone home to change shirts but also to having been with Susan in his own apartment.
Bill saw Dempsey on the street the next day and invited Mm upstairs for a talk. Bill had drawn a map of the area, detailing it with the places Susan was reported to have passed or possibly visited that Saturday afternoon. In light of Dempsey's recent admission, the map forced suspicion on him.
"You kept telling us you hadn't seen Susan that day."
Bill looked hard at the teen-ager. "Then you told Dorothy you did go home, but just to change your shirt. That was around lunchtime. That's about the time Susan was last seen."
Bill was anxious, sitting there with Dempsey. He felt angrier than he had been in a long time. Dempsey was talk and more athletic than Bill, but the father wanted the truth, and he would use physical force if necessary.
"If you look at this map, it's hard not to place the blame on you," Bill said.
Dempsey looked directly into Bill's eyes, as if challenging him.
"Well then, you'll have to prove it," Dempsey said sarcastically.
Bill lunged forward and grabbed Dempsey's shirt. Flying back in fear, Dempsey landed against the kitchen counter. He took hold of the kitchen chair and threw it at Bill, shattering glasses in its path. Dempsey dived for the door and ran down the narrow steps. Out front he picked up a large rock and hurled it at the Jacobsons' front door, smashing it, then ran up the street and was gone.
If ever guilt was evident, Bill felt, it was in Dempsey's behavior. How much more certain could he be that Dempsey was responsible for his daughter's disappearance?
Bill went to Dempsey's mother's house that evening, looking for the boy. Dempsey had not been home since their encounter. The well-dressed, attractive mother sat and listened to Bill's story and his obvious concern with her son. After he had been there more than an hour, the phone rang. It was Dempsey.
Bill listened as Mrs. Hawkins pleaded with her son to come home and discuss the matter. Dempsey argued that his mother did not love him, that no one really cared him, and that his problems were her fault.
"What do you mean, I don't love you?" Bill heard the anxious mother say as she paced back and forth in the small, dark hallway.
"You're not talking sense. Commit suicide? Dempsey, come home and talk to me. You'll be safe here, I promise you. No one is going to do anything to you."
The tall, dark-haired woman put the phone down and shook her head. She turned to Bill and sighed, looking confused and without real direction. Bill soon departed, leaving the mother to await the arrival of her son.
The next day Dempsey was hanging out on the corner as usual. This time, however, he paid no attention to the Jacobson house. Nor did the Jacobsons attempt communication. Bill and Ellen were too angry and hurt to talk with Dempsey again.
But the boy's presence was always felt. He and some friends took to showing up on the corner with radios blaring at night, often as late as 2:00 A.M. The angry parents decided to ignore, as much as possible, his juvenile behavior.
Dorothy and Lupo felt something had to be done about getting Dempsey interrogated again by the police. The polygraph had proven both positive and negative; though he had passed it, it had brought out new evidence that could only bring him closer to being incriminated.
Lupo called the Missing Persons Bureau and informed them that he and Dorothy both felt Dempsey was guilty. The detective he spoke with said that he had already interrogated the boy and felt he was not only innocent, but a help in getting information about the girl's whereabouts. That a psychic felt Susan had not run away proved nothing to the officials involved.
By August Bill was usually searching alone after work, although he was sometimes aided by friends or Dorothy. Dempsey's face was seen less and less as he involved himself with other neighborhood friends and stayed away from the Jacobson house. Dorothy's feelings never wavered, nor did her vision of where Susan's body would be found.
It wasn't until November that Dorothy underwent hypnosis with Dr. Ribner. Bill had asked that someone from the Missing Persons Bureau be present, and had been told the Bureau would cooperate. The group waited for someone from the Bureau to arrive, and then, after forty-five minutes, went on without him. Bill had brought along his own cassette recorder.
Dr. Ribner asked Bill to wait outside during the first session. He explained that a family member's emotions could prevent Dorothy from seeing clearly. Bill consented.
Gus Doyle and Dr. Ribner proceeded to interrogate the psychic. In that first of two sessions, Dorothy told the that she saw Susan, and that the girl had been strangled death. The murderer was black, she said, and everyone in the family knew him. Once again she described the area she had originally seen around Mariner's Harbor. "Susan is in water, but she didn't drown," Dorothy said. "I smell oil Very strong oil odor, as if I could suffocate from it."
She also told them she saw another body that was not Susan Jacobson's, but that would be found in the Richmond Town area within the next two days. The body was that of a woman who had been dead several days.
When Gus played the tape that night for Bill and Ellen it was the first verbal confirmation they had from Dorothy that their daughter was dead. In the six months they had worked with her, not once had she openly stated to them that Susan had been murdered. They found themselves crying, even though they had felt all along that Susan could not be alive.
The next day a woman's corpse was found in Richmond Town in the manner Dorothy had foreseen. Bill and Ellen were excited, hoping to provide substantiation to the police of Dorothy's abilities.
The couple was even more determined to prove her abilities publicly after Dorothy's second session with Ribner, during which she described in detail a scene in which another body would be found on Staten Island within days. This time she mentioned a cemetery and something she saw on a hill.
"Isn't it funny," she said, "that I see a lighthouse on land? Can that be? It's not close to the water."
She went on to describe a nearby golf course and an area known as Toad Hill. She said the woman's body, which had already been buried once and dug up again, would be found near the lighthouse.
"It's not Susan, though," Dorothy cautioned.
"Dorothy, try and get back to Susan," Dr. Ribner guided her. "See what's around Susan."
Dorothy was quiet for a moment while she focused again. This time, however, she did not get the scene in Mariner's Harbor.
"I see horses. Several horses running along a trail. I'm getting something like silver, too. I'm not sure it's the metal I feel or just the word. Or a word close to it. Now, somewhere near those horses I see a gravestone. One of those large, family-type stones. Wait, I'm getting a name on it." She hesitated for a moment while Bill Jacobson, sitting next to the tape recorder, watched her work through inexplicable mental channels.
"The name I see on the gravestone is John and Mary Moore," Dorothy reported. She also gave the dates inscribed on the stone, and described a long plank of wood over which people would cross.
Bill was excited by the details. This time he and Ellen wanted to prove to the police that Dorothy was on target. For the next several days they searched through cemeteries for the names John and Mary Moore. Since it was a common name, plenty of Moores were found, but none with the right first names. Every Staten Island cemetery was searched, but they came up with nothing.
At the same time they searched for the "lighthouse" Dorothy had seen. The Jacobsons wanted to find the body of the woman Dorothy had seen and lead the police to it. But they were beaten to the finish by two little boys who discovered the woman's body behind a round, turn-of-the-century home that resembled a turreted old English home. In Dorothy's eyes the tall, round structure resembled a lighthouse.
The months seemed to pass in a cloud of sadness for the Jacobson family. Whiter had set in, and the searching came to a standstill. The only important development was that Dempsey had left school that January. Fellow students reported to the Jacobsons that their daughter's former boyfriend had left Staten Island. Rumor had it he was somewhere in the Midwest.
The rumors were correct. Dempsey had gone to live with his father, a farmer, in a little rural town in Illinois, called Joppa, population 500. As far as the Jacobsons knew, Dempsey had never even met his father; now he was living with him.
With Dempsey out of reach and the police investigation at a standstill, there seemed no hope of ever finding Susan.
Dorothy, wherever she traveled, kept Susan's picture with her. While in Baltimore in March, 1977, Dorothy checked the police department to see if Susan was listed on the national missing-persons printout. She discovered that her name had never appeared on the national list, only on the New York State file which was located in Albany.
On Tuesday, March 14, 1978, Dorothy sat in her den with three detectives from the Missing Persons Bureau of the Bergen County Police Department. On March 1, Detective Rufino had called Dorothy concerning a missing youth the police were having trouble locating. Rufino felt the nineteen-year-old boy had run into problems but was stumped as far as clues were concerned. Rufino brought two fellow detectives with him, Charlie Serwin and Tony Tortora.
While they were discussing the case, Rufino was called away by his department on an emergency. As the men had traveled in two cars, Tortora and Serwin wondered if Dorothy might be willing to help them on three other cases whose files they had brought with them. The three separate cases all involved teen-agers, and none had been resolved by conventional means. Virtually no clues existed. Two cases dated back a year, one was only sixty days old.
Dorothy agreed to see if one of the cases might strike a chord in her which would help them. She sat on her couch, legs crossed, cigarette in hand, trying to focus on a vision she had of someone who might be one of the teen-agers involved. She had a feeling that the boy she had in mind was known to the detectives, although possibly his was not one of the cases on hand. She was having trouble getting details, though.
As Dorothy and the men discussed the missing teenagers, a drama began to open in her vision.
Three boys were moving about together in a vast, empty area, as if scrambling for something. Swamplike, the area was bordered by a highway on one side. She could also see a car. Then she saw another boy, but he was on the ground and still. Finally she saw a knife.
"I'm getting something with a stabbing," she interrupted them. "But I don't think it's one of the kids you're looking for today."
"We're not here for a stabbing," Tortora said. "We're not homicide. As far as we're concerned, these kids are just missing. We have no real grounds for suspecting foul play."
"You don't call 'missing' foul play?" Dorothy asked. "If my kid was missing, the first thing I'd smell would be foul play."
"These kids may have split on their own," Serwin offered. "We were hoping you'd be able to help us with that."
"I don't care," Dorothy said. "I see what I see, and I think one of you knows about this stabbing."
The men looked at one another, perplexed and wondering how to gain control of the situation. Dorothy went on with her vision.
She told them she saw three boys around the age of nineteen or twenty, in a large field, and that she had the feeling the field was located behind an airport, or some place to do with airplanes.
Next she described a wall. She said the area was known as the "wall," and that kids came to that area to gather and drink at night. She felt the "wall" was part of an old building that had been destroyed by fire and was near water.
Dorothy got up and pulled a clean piece of paper out of a drawer in the bookcase. She began to draw what she was seeing. Tortora watched the rustic map evolve of a place Dorothy had never visited. After a few minutes the two detectives decided the map resembled the area around the Passaic Avenue bridge across the Saddle River in Lodi.
"It isn't near the airport," she said, handing the map to Tortora. "There's an empty lot adjacent to it that'll soon have a building built on it. Something official, like a courthouse." She stopped for a moment, focusing on the area around the "wall." "There's a building nearby that has the word 'water' written on it. Water is part of the name of the building, I think."
Tortora and Serwin sat in amazement. They had no idea what to do with the facts; only Tortora was beginning to recognize landmarks.
"Did this guy drown?" Tortora asked.
"No, I'd know that for sure. This boy was stabbed to death and buried in dirt. I know one of you is aware of this case," she told them.
"Can you describe the kid at all?"
"I get a boy in bis late teens. Good looking, with glasses. Very strong. A fighter in strength, but not necessarily in temperament. I see him very active in sports."
Tortora thought about Dorothy's description for a few minutes before saying anything. He did have a case, he told her, dating back to late September, concerning a seventeen-year-old Lodi boy who had never been found. As soon as he began telling Dorothy about the boy, she felt they were on the same track.
"The kid's mother has been trying to get in touch with you for six months now," he informed her. "She called and wrote the Nutley Police Department, and they told her they would forward her name to you when you weren't busy on other cases. That was last October."
Dorothy flinched, thinking of the hundreds of letters and phone calls Lupo and Phyllis had to field. The thought of the desperate mothers turning to her for help depressed her.
"Call her now," Dorothy said. "Tell her to come over."
Nancy Locascio was thrilled to hear that Dorothy Allison would work on her son's disappearance. The call from the Bergen detective lifted her out of her despondency. The short, dark-haired woman had been to the threshold of insanity in her desperate six-month search for her son, Ronnie, the third of her four children.
Ronnie Stica had been missing since early evening, September 22, 1977. The good-looking, sandy-haired youth had no reason to run away, as the police had suggested.
A junior, Rennie had dropped out of high school the previous year with his mother's approval, having opted for a period of work and earning money. The youth was a great collector, having amassed a sizable coin collection and "newspaper firsts" collection.
Ronnie was an athlete, a body builder, and a star pitcher; his room full of trophies and plaques attested to bis abilities as a player. Though not a great student, he realized that school was not everything, that education could be attained through other means.
Nancy's four children, Susan, Joey, Ronnie, and thirteen-year-old Bobby, had been close to one another in a way Nancy had never been able to experience in her own youth. Nancy spent her very early years in Brooklyn's Italian and Jewish neighborhoods with her parents, her twin brother, and her sister. Both parents died within a year of . one another in 1942, leaving the children alone and without means.
Nancy had been adopted by an Italian family in Lodi, New Jersey, a quiet, northern New Jersey town that is still predominantly Italian. She had been separated from her siblings, who were taken in by relatives.
Nancy met her first husband, Leon Stica, in high school and married him after graduation when he became a policeman in the Bergen County Police Department.
Life had been difficult for her; her emotional foundation was not always able to support her in times of stress. Although she wrestled with marital problems and eventually a divorce, her children remained close and loving - until Ronnie was discovered missing that warm fall evening.
Ronnie had been expecting potential buyers to come around and inspect his car late that evening; he hoped to sell it before be and his sister, Susan, entered night school that October to get their diplomas. Afraid to damage the car, he chose not to drive it at all.
When Nancy got home from her job at a nearby department store where she was a clerk, Susan, who lived with her husband, Johnny, downstairs in the white wooden house, asked Nancy if she might borrow her mother's car to run some errands. Ronnie made the same pitch almost simultaneously, wanting to meet some friends at De Vries Park, a housing development, for an hour. Susan agreed to drop Ronnie off and go about her business.
"It would be terrible," Nancy lamented in jest, "if my children ever had to walk anyplace. God forbid you should have to walk two blocks." She recalled the time Ronnie had taken a cab home without the funds for the fare, leaving Nancy to pay.
Susan and Ronnie drove to De Vries Park, chatting and joking with one another. Ronnie said he was to meet some "buddies" for a while and then he'd grab a lift home, call his brother Joey for a ride if Susan was still out with the car.
Tall and well built, Ronnie struggled out of the small yellow Firebird, finding relief in stretching his legs again. Susan watched him walk toward a fellow she recognized as a recent acquaintance of his, a local boy named Dave Menicola. The athletic-looking boy nodded at Ronnie, and Susan drove off, having seen her brother alive for the last time.
At home Nancy was tired. The department store ha been undergoing renovation, forcing the staff to work twice as hard, leaving her exhausted. She crawled into bed early that night.
The next morning Nancy noticed Ronnie wan't around, and she assumed he had stayed the night at his girl friend Carol's house. Nancy liked Carol and was glad her son had found himself a positive relationship.
It wasn't until Nancy returned home from work that evening that she got word that something was awry. The phone rang and it was Carol, looking for Ronnie. "Didn't he stay with you last night?" she asked. "No. I haven't seen him at all," the girl friend said. "I was wondering why he hadn't called."
Nancy had a sickening feeling in the pit of her stomach. She immediately began calling relatives and friends, trying to place Ronnie.
No one had seen him. As a mother's instant fears pervaded her consciousness, Nancy, dizzy and nauseous, had to sit down. Ronnie was a strong boy, she told herself, so it was unlikely that he had gotten into any serious trouble. Unless he had hurt someone and was too frightened to tell her.
After several hours of calling and searching, the weakened mother got into her car and drove to the Lodi Police Department. With tears streaming down her face, she told a policeman that her seventeen-year-old son had been out all night and had not been heard from since the previous day.
The policeman said that teen-agers had a habit of getting into trouble and forgetting about their parents.
"I wouldn't worry too much," he told her. "Sons have a way of finding their way home."
"Ronnie always calls," Nancy insisted. "Even when he's going to be a half hour late, he calls."
The policeman took down her name but asked very few questions. Nancy was frustrated and angry, feeling the police weren't going to do anything. The volatile woman stormed out of the station, as she would do again, several times, in the following months.
Nancy had tried to reach Dave Menicola whom she had never met but had heard about from Ronnie and Susan. The woman who answered the Menicola phone told Nancy in broken English that she was Dave's grandmother, and that Dave was not around. He was in the hospital.
"Why is he in the hospital?" Nancy gasped, frightened to hear this response.
"I don't know, they don't tell me anything. They think I'm stupid," the pitiful-sounding woman said.
"Which hospital is he in?" Nancy asked.
"I don't know," came the woman's reply. "They think I'm too stupid to be told these things."
Exasperated, Nancy slammed the phone down and reached for the directory in search of hospital numbers. It took awhile before she tracked down Dave Menicola at Hackensack Hospital.
All the while, Nancy's mind raced with frightening possibilities. Could Ronnie have injured this boy, sending Mm to the hospital? Not Ronnie ... It just didn't seem possible.
She finally had the twenty-year-old Menicola on the phone.
He told Nancy he had been to a party the night before and had accidentally cut himself on a broken bottle.
"Where was Ronnie?" she asked.
"I don't know. He didn't go to the party. He headed over to the wall, last I saw him."
"To the wall? How did he get there?" Nancy pursued, dragging on a cigarette.
"Walking. I guess he walked," Menicola said.
"Walked? Ronnie walked to the wall?" came the incredulous reply. "Ronnie would never walk anywhere," Nancy told the boy, "much less to the wall. He'd take a taxi first."
Nancy didn't like the sound of the boy's voice. Too steady, she thought. Too cool. He had his story comfortably in his head. Something told her he was not telling the truth.
Nancy went to the police station and told them what she had discovered. She explained that Menicola was the last person known to have been with Ronnie, and now he claimed not to know where Ronnie had been the previous night. She entreated them to check with Hackensack Hospital and make certain that Menicola's story was on the level. The police said that there was no law against lying, and if the kid was in the hospital, they couldn't just check up on a patient without substantial reason.
The next day Nancy found out where the supposed party had been held, and that night she called the people whose house it had been held in. She explained who she was and wondered if they knew David Menicola had hurt his arm.
The woman who answered said there had been no party at their house that they knew of, and if one of their son's friends had cut his arm and been taken to a hospital during an incident in their home, they would certainly have known about it.
Nancy, driven to distraction by the police's insistence that Ronnie had run away and would return shortly like the thousands of other kids reported missing, went back to the detective who had been assigned to the case and told him about the party and the lies.
The man carefully took down everything Nancy reported, and said the police would investigate in the usual manner.
"Everything will get checked," he assured her.
In the meantime Nancy's life had reached a tragic low. She struggled to work, she cared little about herself, she found herself snapping at people uncontrollably. Susan, Joey, and Bobby were with her as much as possible, trying everything possible to find Ronnie. Instead of familiar banter and joking, silence permeated their family life, and stayed like an uncomfortable guest.
Nancy had a recurring dream for the first several weeks after Ronnie's disappearance. Three teen-aged boys, all without faces, stood around a body which lay quietly on the ground. That body was Ronnie's, Nancy knew, and they were burying him.
Nancy called relatives out of state, just in case Ronnie might be traveling across country. Two cousins were law-enforcement officers and they checked their own departments for information. They informed Nancy that Ronnie's name was not yet listed on the national missing-persons list.
She went to the Lodi police and broke into the captain's office.
"I won't leave here until I find out what is happening with my son," she demanded. "I won't leave till I'm sure you're doing something."
The captain tried to calm her down.
"Did you ever put out a missing-person alarm on Ronnie?" she inquired.
The captain replied affirmatively.
"I want to see a copy of the bulletin," she demanded.
Nancy sat and waited in the small smoke-filled office for twenty minutes until the captain returned.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Locascio, we can't find the copy of the report. It must have been misplaced in the files."
"I know why you can't find it." Nancy rose and challenged the slow-moving official. "It's because you never did it. You bastards never put it through," she screamed.
Despite the official's assurances, Nancy continued to believe her son's name had not been put on the national list.
Nancy went to Chief Andy Veto's office next and demanded that he telephone Dave Menicola while she stood in his office. He agreed to call and talk with the boy if Nancy would sit quietly. He didn't want her to speak with him.
Voto called Menicola and after thirty minutes of exasperating discussion with Dave and his frightened mother, he got them to agree to a brief interrogation in his office.
Roughly handsome and of medium height, Menicola seemed more nervous of his anxious mother and the mood emanating from Nancy than he was of the officer's questions. He told the chief that he had cut his arm on a piece of glass. It wasn't exactly a formal party he'd gone to, he explained; he was just messing around with some buddies. One of them took him to Hackensack Hospital where the attending doctor said he'd have to spend the night due to the extent of the cut. While he talked, his mother sat on the edge of her seat, chain-smoking, as if ready to leap to her son's defense.
Voto finished his questioning and accepted the story, thanking the pair for their cooperation.
All along Nancy had wanted more help than she felt the police would provide. Next she wrote the Internal Revenue district offices in several states, explaining in her letter that her son was missing and that she realized, due to the Privacy Act, they could not tell her directly if Ronnie was in their area. Nevertheless she sent along a letter that could be forwarded to him, if he could be located. The letter read:
December 24, 1977
My Darling Ronnie,
It's been 3 months now since we have seen or heard from you. We don't know if you are dead or alive. I'm afraid something awful has happened to you. If you are alive and you do get this letter, please, Ronnie, get in touch with us. We are desperate to find you. My hand is shaking so badly I can hardly write. We have had two detectives looking for you for some time now. We are putting your picture on TV and posting a $1,000.00 reward for your whereabouts. Please, please, Ronnie, if you are reading this, contact us in some way. We love you so much and we want to know where you are. I can't make myself believe you just ran away and left all your possessions behind. Tomorrow is Christmas and next week is your birthday, but it won't be the same without you. Ronnie, I love you so much. My life is so empty. Please take the pain away from my heart. I love you.
Mommy, Daddy, Joey, Susan, Bobby, Johnny, Suzanne, Baby Joey, John and baby Sue, Uncle Tom and everyone in town is praying to know you're well.
Copies of the letter were sent across the country. Nancy paid to have Ronnie's picture put into newspapers and had to handle the appeals as paid advertising.
At the same time Nancy had gone to tea-leaf readers, psychics, palm and tarot card readers. She attended psychic fairs where practitioners would give her bits of information at $5-$10 a hit.
Each time Nancy would hear a different description of her son's location and situation, she would go home and cry. One psychic told her Ronnie was in the Nevada desert, having been taken there by a motorcycle gang and was wrapped in a yellow-flowered blanket. Another said he was in a commune in Ohio. Yet another said he was in a nearby cemetery, in a crypt with a broken lock.
Nancy and her kids searched the Lodi cemeteries for a crypt with a broken lock. Crypts with gates ajar were found, but most were open due to the extreme cold and heavy snows. Nothing was found after two days of cold searching.
In scanning the papers daily, Nancy would respond to any item that reported the finding of a body. One day she found an article that said a large box wrapped in Christmas foil had been found with a body inside, but the corpse had been cut into six-inch slices. What most alarmed Nancy was the fact that the box was found at the end of her ex-husband's street. After two days of calls and worries, Nancy was told the body was that of a woman who had been a prostitute.
Nancy had read about Dorothy Allison in the National Enquirer and tried to reach her in nearby Nutley. She had called Detective Lubertazzi at the Nutley Police Department and was told that Dorothy was overbooked and working on several cases at the time. Detective Tortora of the Bergen County police said he had met Dorothy and would try to bring the two women together.
When Tony Tortora called from Dorothy's house, Nancy had an intuitive feeling that important things were about to happen. She remembered seeing Dorothy's photograph in the papers and believed the woman to be sincere, unlike some of the other psychics she had dealt With. At the very least, they were paesans.
Nancy and Joey, her twenty-year-old son and an aspiring musician and lyricist, drove to Nutley. Dorothy greeted Nancy warmly, giving her instant encouragement and solace. Nancy was grateful to Dorothy for her strong support and came to rely on her from that moment on. Dorothy quickly became part of Nancy's family and life.
Nancy, Joey, and the two detectives sat around the kitchen table while Dorothy went to work on Ronnie Stica.
"Do you know anyone with a pilot's license? Or an airplane?" Dorothy asked.
"No," Nancy said.
"No one that flies a plane or spends time at airports for some reason?" Dorothy questioned.
"No one in my family has anything to do with planes," Nancy said.
"Ralph. I get the name Ralph. Anyone you know?"
Nancy and Joey tried to think of a "Ralph" they knew, but could not.
Nancy had brought a pair of Ronnie's glasses with her, so that Dorothy could hold something he had worn. After she held the pilot's glasses for a while, she put them down on the Formica table and began pursuing other images.
"Nancy, I see a yellow building. Ronnie had something to do with that building. Let me see what more I can tell you. It has the word 'water' on it."
Nancy remembered that the building where Susan had dropped Ronnie was several stories high and was a pale yellow color. She had no idea where the word "water" came from.
"I see a yellow car with a black roof," Dorothy continued. Nancy recognized that as her own Firebird, the car in which Susan and Ronnie had driven.
It was when Dorothy began to speak of the "wall" that Nancy felt she had at last found a true psychic. Everything Dorothy said fit the description of the infamous "wall" where the kids hung out, smoking and drinking. It was a large retaining wall alongside a part of the Passaic River, and Dorothy saw it as if she had been there.
Dorothy could see from Nancy's excitement that she was close to the reality of the situation. She wanted to get up and go to Lodi, but the detectives had other appointments. Nancy agreed to drive around with Dorothy that next Sunday, which was Palm Sunday.
As they were saying good-bye, Dorothy told Tortora privately to look for a piece of a blue car in the vacant area behind the airport.
"Something fell off the car," she told him. "That blue car is important. Ronnie was in that car that night."
She also told him to look for anything with the word "eclipse," either a street sign or an advertisement. She felt Ronnie's body was not too far from the "eclipse."
Seeing how emotionally overwrought Nancy was, Dorothy told her that she would not, could not work with anyone so volatile. Dorothy's emotions and her psychic power were too closely connected, she explained, and would be blurred by a mother's emotions. It was partly for that reason that Dorothy never told parents if she saw their child dead, or took them to the victim's grave. Dorothy also knew the law about tampering with a corpse, possibly contaminating it and ruining the evidence.
Meeting Dorothy and sensing her confidence and sympathy infused Nancy with new hope: hope in which she wanted desperately to believe. For six months she had listened to detectives and psychics theorize or shrug their shoulders, and for six months hardly a night had passed that she had not shed tears. The police had even suggested that her own son, Joey, was not beyond suspicion. But when the angry family insisted on his taking a polygraph, the police had refused to administer it.
That night Nancy felt stronger and more positive than she had felt in months. That night Nancy did not cry.
***
The following day Dorothy drove to the Lodi police station and met the two dectectives. They sat for a few minutes discussing aspects of the case that Dorothy had sensed during the night. Meeting Nancy had sent her into a whirlwind of feelings and visions. Dorothy's instant warmth and sympathy for the woman and her suffering made her want to resolve the case quickly. She knew she could.
Tortora had taken some time after work the previous day to search around Teterboro Airport. He admitted it was difficult trying to pick one spot in which to search in such a large area. But he had found one interesting item: the skirt from a blue car, which was a recent model.
Dorothy was pleased, sensing immediately that they were on the right track.
"Let's start driving around. I don't want to get in the car with Nancy on Sunday and take her to her son's body. She doesn't need that."
They drove for almost two hours, but they stayed within Lodi, rather than driving to the airport. Dorothy first asked to be taken to a street or place that would have some connection to the telephone company. She had no feelings about the actual telephone company building when they passed it, so Tortora suggested "Bell Avenue."
"That's it," Dorothy said. "Someone who lives on Bell Avenue gives me very strong feelings."
They drove down the tree-lined street of older homes. Dorothy indicated that one of the perpetrators, "one of the animals," lived on that street.
Tortora and Serwin did not tell Dorothy that Dave Menicola lived on the block she pinpointed; they simply too note of the fact and continued driving.
Next they drove to DeVries Park. They walked around the area where Ronnie had been left by his sister, and Dorothy felt Ms presence as she had seen it in her mind. She could picture his getting out of the yellow and black car and meeting his "buddy."
"I think these kids were up to something," she told the detectives. "They didn't just kill him. One of them thought they had good reason to do nun in. Poor Nancy, she should know."
***
It wasn't until Palm Sunday that Dorothy finally got to Teterboro Airport. Nancy and her son-in-law, Johnny, drove Dorothy around DeVries Park first. Dorothy was trying to follow the path the boys had taken the night of September 22.
Nancy and Dorothy walked around the yellow building. Walking through the small dirt playground alongside the building, where mothers and their children were playing, Dorothy noted that part of the original name of the building was still in evidence. What remained of "Water Works Building" was only the first word.
Next they drove to Teterboro. Dorothy remembered the two businessmen who had been heading for Teterboro four years before and whose plane had crashed in southern New Jersey. She was finally seeing their destination, a busy, small private airport.
In a vast, swampy area behind the airport Dorothy walked with her companions. As soon as she had spent some time walking around on the cool, sunny day, she felt certain that Ronnie was in the area. Tortora had told her where to find the blue skirt, but she didn't want Nancy to accidentally trip over her son's leg.
Nancy walked alone, her head down, her eyes fixed on anything that might have been a grave. She picked up a broken white vase. She thought it was a beautiful piece of ceramic, and an odd item to find in such a desolate area.
While she stood musing, Dorothy quietly told Johnny that they should leave the area. She told him that Ronnie's body was definitely there and that Nancy should be taken away. She said she would feign illness, so as not to arouse Nancy's suspicions.
"Are you sure it's Ronnie you're feeling?" the boy asked.
"Of course I'm sure," Dorothy said.
"Well, they did find a black boy's body here about a month ago. Maybe you're sensing him," Johnny offered.
"Not on your life," Dorothy exclaimed. She moved toward Nancy.
Nancy was confused and angry when Dorothy said she wanted to leave. After so much enthusiasm and confidence, Nancy had expected to spend the whole day out looking.
But Nancy could not dissuade the psychic. She was aware that she wasn't paying Dorothy anything, so Dorothy was free to do as she pleased. Nancy placed the vase on the ground and the two women walked slowly back to the car.
Before Dorothy drove to Nutley, she told Nancy that someone in a blue car would have important information for her. "Whatever he says is crucial," she told the sad mother.
Dorothy told the police by telephone that they should search the fields around Teterboro. If someone had been buried there in September, the changes of season would have washed away any indications. The police said they didn't have the manpower to search such a large area.