Road to Nowhere
By Nicholas Italia
After a long day at the office (and trampling about outside), I enter my house, pass through my living room to my bedroom, take off my Suffolk County Police uniform, change into comfortable clothing, go back to the living room, and plop down on the couch, just as I do every day after work. My wife and niece greet me with smiles on their faces. I have only a few hours with my wife except on Saturdays, when we both have off from work. It is spring, and my wife and I are hosting Ginger, my niece, who wants to stay “as far away from her parents as possible” while on her spring break. While I love hosting her, her father being my older brother makes me uncomfortable. She has told me she likes being at boarding school, finishing her sophomore year for high school. She transferred to the local boarding school and moved into the dorms over her Christmas break, after being expelled from her previous high school for reasons I do not want to discuss or even think about.
I can read these two women’s minds; they want me to tell them everything about the case I’ve been working on. “Where’s Ted?” I ask. My wife, Rubie, hands our one-year-old over to me. I feel relieved. Relaxed. Ready for an interrogation; that is, these two women interrogating me.
“How are you, Uncle Cecil?” Ginger shows me her most recent paper for one of the classes she took, economics 101, a constructive criticism essay mentioning the pros and cons of the Federal Reserve System (which she got an ‘A’ on). She will be a junior in high school next year. She is fifteen-years old now. How time flies. She is currently attending a boarding high school for troubled girls; girls with behavior problems, drug addictions, learning disabilities, depression, you know what I am talking about. While my niece has not been clinically diagnosed with ADHD, her disruptive, erratic, and often impulsive behavior has been a concern of many people, including that of Rubie and me. On the other hand, she is much less prone to violent outbursts than she used to be. At least that is what I heard from what school administrators told my brother; Ginger’s father.
“Happy, I guess. For now, anyways, Ginger. This case is closed.”
“Another murder? So what was this latest one about? And why do bad things always happen to good people? I bet Aunt Rubie knows all about it,” Ginger remarks. I wonder if she was thinking about herself when she said good people.
“Of course, I know all about it,” Rubie starts. Then she turns to me. “By the way, Ginger did not get into any trouble today.” (My wife is a school nurse at the same boarding school for troubled girls that my niece attends; which is one reason my brother sent her there).
“So what’s the latest case about?” Ginger asks again, as I sip some tea. So I begin:
“It all started a few weeks ago when these road repairmen were repairing a section of a two- lane road that goes between here and Danesville. They discovered a bunch of bones on the side of the road that goes westward.”
“What part of the body?”
“Complete skeletons, actually, Ginger. Now, realize that, with this very finding by the construction workers, we stumbled upon clues that we figured just might solve a dead-end case that was opened about two years ago. All the action in the story I am about to tell you happened in the last few months.
“After going to the construction site and collecting the bones, we took them back to our forensic team. I also noticed, along with the bones, there were some shards of beer-bottle glass. Very few, but enough to notice. Our junior forensic, Mikayla Bespal, determined that the bones were around two years old. They had decayed a bit, but since the ground was rather dry, many were still intact and identifiable. But what caught my eye was that the male corpse had a ring on the middle finger of the left hand. It had a blue eagle on a black background, and it said ‘1990’ on it. We guessed it was a class ring. We took the ring as a clue. What my fellow officers and I did next was painstakingly look for schools or any other institution with a blue eagle as a mascot. We finally found one: ‘Amity Preparatory School’ in Amityville. What was also interesting was my team, me, Lieutenant Frost, and forensic Bespal noticed shards of beer-bottle glass beside the buried bodies. Bespal saw dents in the skulls of these two corpses suggesting they were hit over the head. We were ninety-nine percent sure it was beer bottle glass because most beer comes in green bottles.”
“They could have been Perrier bottles, or San Peligrino,” says Ginger.
“Ah, except Bespal and Callist, from forensics, measured the approximate circumference of the bottles by looking at the slightest curvature of some of the shards. Most beer bottles have a diameter of 2.5 inches. I was able to see, by the curvature of a few of the shards then, that these people were struck by beer bottles, but I did not rule out other kinds of bottles. But these two homicide victims were very likely struck on the head by glass bottles. We dug more, and found evidence of a standard beer bottle neck, too. It was all in place, again, suggesting that these people were struck over the head with bottles. Humans have great imaginations; and anything can be a weapon.”
“Hmm. Ginger,” starts Rubie, “wouldn’t a person be able to use a beer bottle more easily than a sparkling water bottle?”
“Uhh, I guess so, Aunt Rubie. I mean they are smaller than the average sparkling water bottle. And those bottlenecks would have made perfect handles. Most carbonated water bottles do not have bottlenecks. Is that what you were hinting at?”
“Yes, Ginger,” Rubie says.
“So, what did you do next, Uncle?”
“Well, we had to go to Amity prep. I brought my lieutenants with me, as well as Bespal.” “Lieutenants Frost and Dumont?” Asks Rubie.
“Yes.”
“Which one’s the woman again?” Inquires Ginger.
“Dumont. Michelle Dumont.”
“Just asking, Uncle. I just want to... know that information...”
“May I continue?” I ask.
“Yes. Sorry,” Ginger says.
“I told the administrators that I had found a corpse with a class ring on it. I showed them the
ring, and asked them to show me a list of grads from 1990. The principal, Ms. Jennings, came back with one after a ten-minute wait. I came across the name ‘Earl Dawes.’ Earl Dawes had been on the missing persons list, as well as his wife, Fiona Dawes.
“So, I went back to the lab, where Bespal had just taken some DNA from both skeletons...” “Uncle Cecil, how do they extract deoxyribonucleic acid from bones?”
“When Bespal is ready to extract DNA, she cuts a small piece of bone or tooth and crushes it
into powder. In the bone powder are millions of bone cells and millions of cells from other organisms, such as bacteria and other parasites. A copy of the DNA is located inside every single cell...”
“Uncle Cecil, I already knew that DNA is in every cell in the body...”
“...Next, she needs to crack open the cell walls so that the DNA spills out. A special enzyme does this job. It is a lot like cracking open an egg into a bowl.”
“Cool!” my niece comments.
“Of course DNA is not the only thing inside a cell, Ginger. When the cell walls are cracked, other cell parts come out as well. To separate the DNA from the other parts of the cell, the next step is the cleaning step. Bespal must capture only the DNA but leave all of the other parts- the junk in other words- behind. When the DNA is clean, it is ready for analysis.”
“Wow!”
“So, what did the DNA test say?” Asks Rubie.
“Before I tell you that, Rubie I want to point out that there was evidence of blows to the head
of a certain kind; a strong enough blow to kill them, or at least knock them out for a period of time for the murderer to stick a knife in their throats and finish the job, or something else. There was no evidence of gun use at all. Bespal painstakingly looked for a bullet in or on the bones; none were found.
“As I just mentioned, my team dug up the names Earl and Fiona Dawes. Earl and Fiona Dawes were reported missing about two years ago; from a couple named ‘Carlisle.’ Edgar and Tammy were their first names. They claimed to be hosting the Dawes’ son, Bradley while his parents were at a school reunion of some kind. The reason the Carlisles were hosting Bradley was because their son, William Carlisle, is a good friend of Bradley. The Carlisles told us that Earl and Fiona were good people who became their friends through Bill and Bradley’s friendship, not the other way around. You know what I mean by that...”
“Of course!” replies Ginger.
“Yes, I know what you mean,” says Rubie.
“When I asked where Bradley was at the moment, Mr. Carlisle pointed to a thirteen year old
boy right behind them, who was with his maternal aunt, a woman named Claudia, as well as his paternal grandfather, a man named Alexander. I showed Alexander Dawes the ring, and he told me that it was his son’s class ring. We did DNA tests on Alexander Dawes and Claudia Ellis by extracting some living cells from saliva. Forensic Bespal extracted cells from Ellis, Bradley Dawes, and Earl Dawes by stroking the inside of their mouths with q-tips. Then, she extracted DNA from those cells, and matches were made with the DNA from Earl and Fiona Dawes.”
“Wait, the workmen were trying to fix the road and found the skeletons, right? Asks Rubie. “Yes. Sorry if I wasn’t clear.”
“It was clear to me!” Snaps Ginger.
I continue:
“We got in touch with Alexander Dawes, Claudia Ellis, and the Carlisles. They were relieved that their bodies were found after two years of running around in circles. I asked both Alexander Dawes and Claudia Ellis how Mr. and Mrs. Dawes intended to get to the party. They both told me the only way they could have gone was by car. I took that down immediately, and asked if they could give me any photos of this car, which they did. The car was a blue Mini-Cooper with the license plate number being ‘SUF-108.’”
“Bespal did not find any bullets or traces of bullets in or near the skeletons, but she did notice signs of a fight. She found blunted dents in Earl and Fiona’s skulls that hinted they were clubbed with something like a baseball bat. She also found traces of round, broken bottle-glass...”
“We know, Uncle Cecil. You already told us that.”
“So, I asked Bespal if there was significant damage to other bones. She showed me the rest of the bones; they did not appear to be damaged. She looked at the teeth of the skulls, noticed some were missing, again suggesting that there was a fight. Of course, it could also be that the Dawes did not care about dental hygiene.”
“That’s not funny,” Rubie remarks. Rubie is something of a health nut, which should not be surprising given her profession.
“Aunt Rubie, one can never assume anything about anybody, especially Uncle Cecil...” “Much of their clothing remained,” I continue.
“Gross, Uncle Cecil. What did it look like? Worm-eaten? Moldy?”
“Both, Ginger. Anyways, by then we thought about motives for killing the Dawes. We
asked ourselves whether the culprit knew Dawes or not. We asked if their homicide was planned or if it was a random mugging. We asked if Earl was the target, or Fiona. We asked ourselves about money. After all, no wallets were found.”
“Even if it was not about money, I do not think anyone would just leave the wallet, Uncle Cecil.”
“Yeah, dear,” Rubie says, taking Ginger’s point.
“Another question was why there...”
“Why not there, Cecil? Who would think of looking for dead bodies off a two-lane country
road that cuts through dry, empty grassland, as you initially described the scene of the crime to me after the corpses were discovered?”
“Yes, it definitely bewildered us, Rubie. So, the case was reopened. Authorities drilled Alexander Dawes and Claudia Ellis some more. We found out that Earl was a bartender and Fiona was a teacher. Bradley told me, just like Mr. Dawes and Ms. Ellis said, that his parents went to a reunion. However, he could not remember for which parent. He did remember, of course, that before his aunt took him in her care, he was sleeping over at the Carlisle’s house. The friend’s name is Carlisle, William Carlisle. That was his name, though everyone calls him ‘Bill.’ And it was only then when I remembered the names Edgar and Tammy Carlisle, and how it was them who initially alerted us about Earl and Fiona Dawes in the first place. Remember, the murder happened two years ago.
“Bradley, of course, was upset when he heard the bad news of his parent’s death, even though he sort of ‘knew’ by then. He did not cry. He just held his head in his hands. I gently asked him a few questions. He was eleven years old when I first interviewed him. That was two years ago. That was the last time he saw his parents.
“At first, I could not conclude whether Bradley Dawes was telling the truth or feeding me words Claudia had prepared for him... or something else. Still, I never accuse people of lying until I am 100% sure. Accusing someone of lying can sometimes backfire; it can make a person actually lie when they have already told you the truth.
“So, I asked Claudia if she could recite to me what Bradley initially knew. Claudia told me that Bradley told her about not hearing back from his parents for days. Bradley told me that they went to the reunion by car. Again, that was important. After all, no trace of a vehicle was found near their shallow graves.
II
“I called the Carlisles- Edgar and Tamar Carlisle. Bradley was nice enough to give me a photo of him and Bill hanging out by a tennis court, so I could recognize Bill when I saw him. When I got to the address Bradley gave us, I saw nothing suspicious, just a plain old house...”
“So they lived near each other?”
“Yes they did, Rubie.”
“Why were you expecting something suspicious?” Asks Ginger as she drinks some Coca-
Cola and prevents herself from burping. “Excuse me,” she mutters.
“We detectives are trained to never take anything for granted or assume anything...”
“You just assumed it would look suspicious,” Ginger points out.
“What I mean is,” I say, feeling a slight hint of impatience “is that you should never believe
something that looks empty is empty, and anything that looks occupied is occupied. Always be skeptical.
“So, back to my story: I asked the Carlisles if Bradley had been staying over. Their answer
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was affirmative. Tamar Carlisle told me Earl and Fiona had dropped Bradley off. I asked if Mr. Dawes told them where they were going. ‘To Amityville,’ they said. Tamar mentioned that they were going to there by car. I asked if they remembered why they were going to Amityville. Mr. Carlisle mentioned ‘a reunion of some sort.’ Mrs. Carlisle echoed her husband. Clearly, they corroborated the Dawes’ account.
“Next, I asked the Dawes when they started to worry because Mr. and Mrs. Dawes were not calling, and if they tried to contact them. What the Carlisles told me was that Bradley was only supposed to be over for one full day. Since it was two years ago, though, Mr. and Mrs. Carlisle had forgotten which weeknights Bradley had slept over.
“After receiving that information, we went to the Dawes’ place itself to take a look and see if there were any clues...”
“Cecil,” Rubie starts as she sips some peppermint tea, “their residence has been vacant for two years now?”
“The Dawes’ place is in Bradley’s name now. Bradley now lives with his Aunt Claudia. Of course, Claudia is acting as a ‘regent’ and rents it out to college students. Bradley Carlisle can sell it when he is eighteen years old.”
“So, did you talk to any of those students? Are Claudia Ellis and her nephew renting the place out right now? It is summer...”
“And I’ll be a junior!” Says Ginger.
“Are you excited?” I ask her.
“Oh, yeah!”
“So, are there any students right now?” Rubie asks again with an impatient sigh. “No, of course not, Rubie.”
“Were there any clues at the Dawes’ place?” Asks Rubie.
“No. What I did get later that day was an email from Alex Dawes. It was a photo of Earl in a baseball uniform. The uniform had a black shirt with a big blue eagle, and said ‘Amity Prep.’”
III
“Now, only a couple of months ago, three months after the case was reopened and everyone
was focused on the Dawes case...”
“By ‘everyone,’ you mean ‘you,’” Rubie corrects me.
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“Even after the case was reopened, I was going nowhere with it for maybe three months of dead ends, when a woman maybe a head taller than Ginger here, entered the station, on February seventeenth,, talked to chief Rowen for a while, and rushed out, looking worried. Rowen told me that the woman and her family own a used car dealership, and she was concerned that somebody had tried to sell her brother a stolen vehicle because she saw the customer before, and reasoned with herself that no one could sell her a car and then come back with another one to sell so soon. She recognized the license plates, too. The woman’s name was Leah Kittson. Kittson’s family owns a used car dealership, and has branches in several locations here in Suffolk County. Kittson’s base is in Amityville. However, her younger brother has an extension of their business in Lynbrook. Kittson claims that she was visiting her brother’s base when she saw him talking to a customer whom she recently bought a car from. She reasoned that no one would sell two completely different cars in such a short period of time- ‘about a year’ as she put it. This man sold a car to Leah, and then was trying to sell another used car to her brother, Luke. Ms. Kittson found it odd that this same person would come back a year later, probably hoping that he would not be recognized. However, of course he would not because he never went back to Leah’s base. He was obviously not stupid. What did happen, however, was that Leah Kittson happened to be in the right place at the right time. Apparently, Ms. Kittson saw this customer, and then this customer saw Ms. Kittson, and after that, he ran out of the office, hopped back in the car and sped off. Kittson thought that this man might have recognized her and knew he would be questioned intensively by her. Why was this man selling another used car so soon?”
“C’mon, uncle Cecil. Why are you asking us that? Did you have to ask yourself a question with such an obvious answer? We know exactly why he jumped back in the car without a word. Right aunt Rubie?” Rubie nods and smiles.
“Yes, Ginger,” I tell her. “Sometimes, one gets the answer before the question is asked. So I had to figure out what kind of question this event would have answered. I figured that this man took the same license plates that were on the vehicle he originally sold, which were possibly his own legitimate license plates issued by the department of motor vehicles a long time back, stole a car, replaced the car’s license plates with his own, sold the stolen car, took the license plates back, stole another car and put his license plates on that car, thus trying the same trick again.”
“Did this man say anything to Luke Kittson before fleeing? Like ‘I gotta go to my cousin’s birthday’ or something? Did he give an excuse to go before running off like that?”
“Not that I heard,” I tell Rubie. “Why do you ask?”
8
“I’m just curious.”
Suddenly, Ginger cuts in. “Uncle Cecil, you mentioned the possible suspect ‘changing the license plates to his own.’ That makes no sense. Why would he steal a car if he had one?”
“Just because someone owns some license plates does not mean he owns a car, Ginger. Some people collect old license plates as a hobby, in fact.”
“Oh, yeah.” Ginger turns a little red.
“Are you embarrassed about...?”
“I’m fifth in my class! I should know everything!”
“And second in class when it comes to staying after class for comments on your behavior,
Ginger. Don’t deny it!” Snaps Rubie. “Aunt Rubie...”
“Ginger, even Einstein did not know everything. Now let me continue. Kittson told me she sold the ‘stolen’ vehicle to a man named Darron Eichenwald. She gave me his address. I found out he was a broker. I doubted his being a broker would have anything to do with the case, though. I went to visit Mr. Eichenwald with Lieutenant Frost and Mikayla Bespal, from forensics. I told him Mr. Eichenwald that he might have bought a stolen vehicle from Kittson. Eichenwald told me that Kittson ‘did not look like a criminal.’ He asked me how I knew that he had bought a stolen car. Of course, I did not know then, but Bespal soon found hair to extract DNA samples from. She and I noticed the gas and brake pedals had hints that someone who drove the car had taps on the toes of his shoes. There were no taps on them; his shoes were rather new.
“Bespal took the hair samples back to the laboratory...”
“So then, you solved the case, right? DNA always leads to the bad guy...”
“It’s more complicated than that, Ginger. There is always the case that it could be
Eichenwald’s one of the Dawes’ or the thief’s DNA. Some of the DNA Bespal cracked open was from Eichenwald. Other hair was the Dawes’ hair, and then, there was hair that did not match either.”
“So how did you...”
“Be patient, Ginger,” Rubie says. “I want to hear every detail. Don’t you?” Ginger mutters something under her breath.
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IV
“I thought about Kittson’s story; how she could have sold the supposedly stolen vehicle to
Eichenwald. And then the same person who initially sold the ‘stolen’ car now in Eichenwald’s hands comes back with another car to sell...”
“He didn’t ‘come back;’ you just told us he went to someone who happened to be Leah Kittson’s brother in Lynbrook,” Ginger says.
“Apparently, this person was obviously not smart enough for Ms. Kittson. We asked this Kittson woman if she could remember the person’s name- the person who brought the mini-cooper to her, since she had dealt with him before. She insisted she could not. Also, Kittson pointed out that she did not recognize him by his face, but by his voice. I took down that information.
“Kittson told us she was going over records of sales at her brothers’ branch, eyes on the desk. Then, supposedly, he walked in and started to talk to her brother. But as soon as she glanced at him, this man, the potential customer ran away, as she described the scene to me.
“Kittson also suggested that this person could have done something with his hair- dyed it, shaved his moustache, grew a beard, et cetera. I had to get her to slow down; she was talking a mile a minute. Ms. Kittson not only recognized the driver by sound and sight, but the license plate as well. But just because she recognized a possible car thief did not mean he would be easy to find...”
“Did you get the license plate number, Uncle Cecil?”
“SUF-116.”
“But, Cecil, what if she, I mean, what if Ms. Kittson always knew, but was scared to cause
trouble so she let him get away? You know, Genovese effect?” Asks Rubie.
“Or was she responsible... wait, what’s the ‘Genovese effect’?” Asks Ginger.
“The ‘Genovese Effect’ is a term describing a situation when someone does not report a
crime because she thinks other witnesses will, and is afraid to report it because she will have to take the witness stand.”
“That’s sad,” Ginger remarks. “Everyone knows I am always the first to tell on people.”
“In what situation?” I ask, rather interested in.
“I still tell on my little siblings all the time when they do something wrong. I do not wait for
someone else to. I am always a first responder!”
“Err that’s a little different, Ginger,” I say as I turn to Rubie. “To answer your question,
Rubie, we did drill Ms. Kittson on being scared to call us. But she did call us later, and she did not
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assume somebody else would, so, no, not a true Genovese effect. But, yes, she obviously wanted to avoid ‘trouble’ at the time, as you phased it.”
Ginger then tells me to get to the point where I track the culprit down and ‘skip the boring parts.’ “How would you have tracked him down, Ginger?”
“Ummm... I give up. Go on.”
V
“Let me get back to the bones. I thought about the bones again. They were discovered by
the road.”
“How do you know there was no fight right there at that point in the road?” Asks Ginger. “Well, Ginger, that seemed highly unlikely. Though Frost, Dumont and I did keep it in the
back of our minds. By chance their corpses were brought over to the middle of nowhere, a place no one would look and only found because there was some roadwork going on. I decided to visit Ms. Ellis again with a few new questions for her. During this interrogation, I learned that the car was her sister’s car, not Earl’s. Fiona Dawes owned the car before she married Mr. Dawes, and Mr. Dawes sold his car soon after they tied the knot. That was years ago, of course. Claudia Ellis told me she ‘thought’ they were going to Amityville. She did not know what happened to her sister’s car and did not care for that information; solving the mystery of her sister’s death was more important, naturally.”
Ginger cuts in again: “Did you ever think the Dawes’ deaths had to do with stealing the car? Why else would they be dead? You just told us about Claudia not giving a damn about it, but it might have been important, no?”
“Good analysis, Ginger, but it was not the time to jump to conclusions.”
“How about wills?” Asks Ginger.
“Another fair question,” I tell Ginger. “While we did think about wills briefly, there was no
reason for Claudia to kill her sister and brother-in-law to collect inheritance. If a will were involved, it would definitely have been Bradley who would have killed them, and that was highly unlikely...”
“...Because Bradley was with his friend, Bill, at the time, and...it would have been impossible for Bradley to kill his mom and dad! Weren’t they found with excessive wounds to their skulls?”
“An eleven-year-old boy would not be strong or tall enough to beat up both of his parents like that...” Rubie starts, then looks at our eighteen month old, Ted. “...Well, maybe he will be,” Rubie remarks. Ginger laughs for a full minute and asks my wife why she became a nurse instead of a stand-up comic.
“Stage fright,” Rubie replies.
Rubie mentioning the word ‘stage’ immediately makes Ginger brag about fooling people on stage with her magic tricks, putting people in boxes and making them ‘disappear.’ Then she quiets down, apologizes, and asks again if there was anything in the will for Claudia at all.
“No, everything went to Bradley. And Bradley is now old enough to manage his own bank account.”
“What if Claudia wanted Bradley’s Money? I mean, the money put in Bradley’s name?” Insists Ginger.
“We’ll get back to that,” I promise her.