Chasing the Boogeyman Page 5

  I remembered thinking at the time: Maybe sisters aren’t so bad after all. Then AC/DC came over the loudspeakers and, just like that, the thought was gone and I was back to stopping Jimmy from sticking his gum in an unsuspecting girl’s hair.

  2

  During the five years I was away at college, Natasha Gallagher certainly grew up. At five foot four and barely one hundred pounds, she evolved into a natural and gifted gymnast. She adored the sport and was disciplined in her craft, practicing five times a week at Harford Gymnastics in the William Paca Business Center. Floor routine and balance beam were her specialties. She also loved cheerleading and was the only freshman in her class to make the varsity squad at Edgewood High. If you asked Natasha’s family and friends to tell you something memorable about her, they would paint a picture of a beautiful and perpetually happy teenager. She was addicted to cinnamon chewing gum and colorful hair barrettes, and was madly in love with life. She loved to laugh and make others do the same. A terrible singer, she never let that stop her from being the loudest in the group. She was goofy and hyper and not the least bit self-conscious, rare for a girl her age. She liked to doodle and daydream. She loved flowers and helping her mother in the garden. And for such a talented athlete, she was endearingly clumsy off the gymnastic mat. Natasha was the kind of girl who picked up trash when she found it on the ground and told strangers to have a wonderful day. She often cried while watching movies and gave the best hugs.

  So said her obituary.

  3

  I was helping my roommates haul furniture out of the unnatural disaster zone that was our three-bedroom apartment, located on the outskirts of the University of Maryland campus, when I first heard the news that Natasha Gallagher had been killed.

  I’d lost a coin toss earlier in the morning and was on my way to pick up Chinese food for all of us when a quickie news story came on the car radio. I almost slammed on the brakes in the middle of Greenbelt Road when I heard the reporter mention “young girl from the suburb of Edgewood” and the victim’s last name. Praying I was mistaken, I called home as soon as I got back to the apartment and spoke with my father. He didn’t know much more than I did, just enough to confirm that it had indeed been our neighbor Natasha. The conversation was brief and somber.

  It was all over the evening news and on the front page of several local newspapers the next morning. Later that afternoon, I called a couple of old friends and got the rest of the story.

  This is what I learned:

  Two nights earlier—Thursday, June 2, 1988—Natasha Gallagher, age fifteen, spent the evening with her mother and father watching television in their basement family room until 9:00 p.m. Once the program ended, she’d said goodnight and gone upstairs to get ready for bed. It was summer vacation and nine o’clock was early for her, but Natasha had been swimming at a friend’s house most of the afternoon. She was sunburned and exhausted.

  At approximately 9:10, she yelled a second goodnight from the top of the stairwell, and Mr. and Mrs. Gallagher heard her walk down the hall and close her bedroom door. About an hour later, they turned off the television, went upstairs and double-checked the front door was locked, and went to sleep. It was just the three of them in the house. Josh, who’d dropped out of college during his sophomore year after a shoulder injury from wrestling, now lived in a rented town house in nearby Joppatowne, where he worked full-time at Andersen’s Hardware.

  The next morning, after seeing her husband off to work and loading the dishwasher, Catherine Gallagher glanced at the kitchen clock and was surprised to see that it was almost nine. Natasha was taking care of the neighbors’ dogs while they were away on vacation, and it wasn’t like her to oversleep. The kitchen radio’s kind of loud this morning. Maybe she’s up and in the shower already, and I just didn’t hear her, Mrs. Gallagher thought as she walked down the hallway, going out of her way to give her daughter the benefit of the doubt.

  Finding the bathroom empty, an irritated Mrs. Gallagher knocked on Natasha’s bedroom door, twice, and when there was no response, she opened it and went inside. Her daughter’s bed was empty. The clean shorts and T-shirt she’d laid out the night before were still draped over the chair in front of her desk. Her favorite yellow flip-flops sat on the floor at the base of her bed.

  Mrs. Gallagher, no longer irritated but now confused, started to turn away when she noticed something odd about the window. For the past week, an early summer hot spell had settled over Edgewood, with temperatures hovering in the high eighties. Natasha had begged her father to turn on the central air-conditioning, but to no one’s surprise, he’d refused. “Not until the first week of July, you know that’s the rule,” he’d lectured her. “What do you think, we’re made of money?” Natasha had pouted, but only for a short time and without any real enthusiasm.

  Mrs. Gallagher slowly approached the window. It was slid almost all the way open, the sheer curtains rustling in the muggy morning breeze—but that’s not what caught her eye. The screen was missing.

  She walked closer and immediately noticed a dark smear, no larger than a dime, on the windowsill. Unable to stop herself, she reached out and touched it, and her fingertip came away stained a dullish red. She lifted her hand closer to her face. It looked an awful lot like blood, she told the police later, but I couldn’t be sure.

  The first butterflies of panic stirring inside her, Mrs. Gallagher leaned over the windowsill, careful not to get any of the red stuff on her blouse, and peered outside. A short distance below, on the lawn, lay the screen to the window. It was twisted almost in half.

  Mrs. Gallagher, heart hammering in her chest, forcing herself not to run, returned to the kitchen and phoned her husband at the office.

  It was 9:07 a.m.

  4

  The first two police officers arrived at the Gallagher residence on Hawthorne Drive at 9:20 a.m. They found Catherine Gallagher pacing back and forth in the driveway. Her face was streaked with tears and her hands were clasped tightly together in front of her, but she managed to fill them in with clear-voiced efficiency. The Maryland State Police troopers, in their report, later described her as “frightened and agitated, but in complete control. Her chain of events was clear and consistent.”

  One of the troopers escorted Mrs. Gallagher back inside the house and, after requesting that she wait in the living room, conducted a brief examination of Natasha’s bedroom. The second officer went to the side yard and, careful not to disturb anything, inspected the open bedroom window and the damaged screen on the ground.

  As the trooper returned to the front of the house, a pair of Harford County Sheriff’s cruisers pulled to the curb. Before heading inside to join his partner in questioning Mrs. Gallagher, the trooper quickly brought the arriving officers up to speed and asked them to begin searching the surrounding area. By this point, a small crowd of neighbors had gathered outside on the sidewalk.

  By 9:29 a.m., Russell Gallagher arrived at the residence, parking his Cadillac in the driveway and rushing inside. Neighbors reported hearing angry shouting from inside the house, and it was later learned that Mr. Gallagher needed to be restrained in order to prevent him from disturbing the crime scene in his daughter’s bedroom.

  At 9:41 a.m., Joshua Gallagher, whom his mother had also phoned, arrived at the house. He’d made the normally fifteen-minute drive from Joppatowne in just under ten minutes. Josh spoke briefly with several of the waiting neighbors on the sidewalk, and then he went inside.

  5

  At 10:07 a.m., less than forty-five minutes after the first officers arrived at Hawthorne Drive, Natasha Gallagher’s body was discovered in the woods behind her house by a member of the Harford County Sheriff’s Department. Still dressed in the matching light-blue shorts and tank top she’d worn to bed the night before, Natasha was propped up against a tree with her ankles crossed and her hands resting in her lap. She’d suffered severe bruising and swelling around her neck, a fractured cheekbone, a pair of black eyes, and the thumb and ring finger on
her right hand had been broken. The coroner determined that the majority of her injuries most likely occurred during a prolonged struggle. What hadn’t occurred during the struggle was this: at some point, her left ear had been sliced off by a sharp blade of unknown design. No signs of either a weapon or the severed ear were located at the crime scene. Preliminary reports listed cause of death as strangulation. Approximate time of death had yet to be determined.

  6

  The rumors started almost immediately.

  Neighbors called neighbors and gossiped over backyard fences and cups of coffee or tea. Strangers and friends alike chatted at the bar or in the frozen food aisle at Santoni’s grocery store or while waiting in line at the post office. Kids overheard their parents talking about it and repeated what they’d heard on ball fields and playgrounds.

  By the time I’d gotten home three days later, I’d already heard a half-dozen different theories regarding what had happened to Natasha Gallagher.

  The most prevalent belief was that Edgewood’s mysterious Phantom Fondler had finally escalated from voyeuristic creeping and touching to cold-blooded murder and mutilation. There was even widespread speculation that he might do it again, and sooner rather than later. Local police were quick to refute these claims and requested that the public remain vigilant yet calm. Desperate to say something, they even provided surprising new details regarding the Fondler investigation for the first time in nearly six months.

  “At this time, we do not believe there is any connection,” said Major Buck Flemings of the Harford County Sheriff’s Department. “For a variety of reasons, which we’re currently unable to make public, we believe these crimes have been committed by two very different individuals. In fact, during the course of our lengthy investigation, we recently thought we knew who the Fondler was. We had a suspect who was incarcerated on an unrelated charge, and the incidents ceased. We believed at that time he was probably the man we were looking for.

  “This individual was released for a short time and then incarcerated once more,” Flemings said. “The incidents started up again while he was free, seeming to confirm our suspicions, but then they continued even though the guy we were looking at was once again back in custody. Now… we don’t know what to think.”

  In another surprise admission, Flemings went on to report that the latest fondling incident occurred a mere two weeks earlier but was never publicized at the request of the sheriff’s department. “It was the same pattern as before. The woman woke up to find a man standing over her in her bedroom. He was touching her hair and face. She cried out, and the man took off.

  “So now we’re back to square one. We don’t know if it’s been the same guy all along, or if it’s some kind of copycat running around. We do know that nothing much has changed. What he did two weeks ago is the same thing he did in 1986 and 1987. It’s the exact same M.O., and bears no evidential resemblance to the case involving Natasha Gallagher. But you can rest assured, every one of my officers is working around the clock to solve this horrific crime.”

  Another theory floating around town that proved particularly unsettling involved Natasha Gallagher’s father. According to several close neighbors, Russell Gallagher exhibited excessively strange behavior in the days that followed the discovery of Natasha’s body. Normally stoic and steadfast—some would even say abrasively masculine—Mr. Gallagher was barely able to drag himself out of bed over the course of the next forty-eight hours. “It was like he was in a trance or something,” one neighbor claimed. “He cried the entire time I was there and just kept mumbling, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ His eyes were so swollen he could barely keep them open.”

  Initially, Mrs. Gallagher was all but abandoned to deal with the parade of police officers, detectives, neighbors, and media that swarmed in and out of her house all day long, but Josh quickly stepped up and established boundaries, and her younger sister from Orlando, Florida, flew in later that week to help. According to Rose Elliott, who’d lived next door to the Gallaghers for as long as anyone could remember, Mrs. Gallagher even considered checking her husband into the hospital. That’s how desperate she’d become.

  For most people, Mr. Gallagher’s behavior could be explained away by the obvious fact that the man’s only daughter had been violently murdered just days earlier. He was clearly distraught and suffering from unimaginable pain. In addition, it was widely understood that Mr. Gallagher placed the bulk of the blame for Natasha’s death on his own shoulders. After all, he was the one who hadn’t allowed her to turn on the air-conditioning in the house. He was the reason her window had been left open that fateful night.

  “There’s not a single rational thought,” said Frank Logan, one of Russell Gallagher’s coworkers at the insurance agency, “that points to Russ having anything to do with his daughter’s murder. To claim otherwise is utterly ridiculous and irresponsible.”

  But certain other people were quick to point out that even in the days leading up to Natasha’s murder, Mr. Gallagher had been acting rather strange. “It was the oddest thing,” one local said. “He picked an argument with me just last week. Out of the blue, he accused me of letting my dogs do their business in his yard. I’ve lived down the street from the Gallaghers for fifteen years and I’ve never once let one of my dogs take a crap on their lawn. He was really upset about it, too. I have no idea what got into him.”

  Another Hawthorne Drive resident offered up similar concerns. “He’s usually pretty quiet and keeps to himself. I mean, he’s friendly enough, waves hello, wishes you a ‘good day,’ that sort of thing. But lately he’s seemed nervous and distracted. And talking a whole lot more than usual, almost like he was covering up for something.”

  For other townspeople, suspicion immediately focused on Lenny Baxter. Lenny was a decorated Vietnam veteran who spent his days picking up litter along Edgewood Road and doing yard work if he could find someone to hire him. Lenny never begged for money and didn’t accept handouts. He’d once lived with his mother on Perry Avenue, not far from the high school, but after her death in the late seventies, he’d been unable to keep up with the mortgage payments and had lost the house. Most of the year—spring, summer, and fall—he lived in a tent in the woods behind the post office. There were rumors he’d booby-trapped the area around his campsite, but I didn’t believe them. No one I talked to knew where he went during the winter months.

  The thing about Lenny was this: although at first glance he certainly appeared to be strong enough to strangle a young girl, he also walked with a pronounced limp, thanks to an old hip injury, and could barely look people in the eye when he spoke, much less hold a real conversation. He also smelled pretty bad and was in the process of losing most of his teeth. The idea of Lenny Baxter luring Natasha Gallagher out of her house and into the woods seemed a bit far-fetched. The idea of him doing it without leaving behind a slew of evidence seemed downright impossible; a theory based solely on convenience and nothing more. There wasn’t a sliver of doubt in my mind that if Lenny Baxter had committed the crime, he’d already be locked up.

  Other less popular rumors also surfaced. One story involved a hidden diary discovered in a shoebox in Natasha’s bedroom detailing a series of secret rendezvous with an older boy. Yet another described an ongoing argument with a jealous girlfriend suddenly turned violent. None of these local tales possessed a hint of evidence backing them up, but still there remained whispers, as expected.

  That first week back in Edgewood, I spoke with pretty much anyone and everyone willing to talk to me about Natasha Gallagher’s murder—old friends and acquaintances, the teller at my bank and the counter lady at the post office, longtime neighbors and complete strangers. I also found myself eavesdropping on other people’s conversations. I wasn’t proud of this fact, but I couldn’t wrap my head around the reality that a girl I knew—however peripherally—had been killed just up the street from where I’d grown up. It felt like a movie. It felt like a nightmare.

  7

  The fu
neral service was delayed until the following Friday. I assumed this was because the family had to wait for Natasha’s body to be released by the coroner’s office, which was pretty damn gruesome to consider. My mother was right—I couldn’t imagine something like this happening to us.

  I’d only been to a handful of funerals in my life—a couple of uncles and a good friend’s mother who’d passed away from cancer during our last year of high school—but I’d still managed to create a strict set of expectations for such events. The first was that there was very little talking, and what there was of it was done in hushed tones and a crude form of sign language. My second preconceived notion was that the weather would inevitably match the mood of the attendees—dark and stormy and depressing. A cold rain was practically a given.

  The morning of Natasha Gallagher’s funeral service dawned sunny and mild. Scattered wisps of thin white clouds scudded across a brilliant blue sky, the kind that begged for picnics at the beach and flying kites and boat rides on the river. It felt wrong, almost obscene.

  The service took place at Prince of Peace on Willoughby Beach Road, the same church where I’d first laid eyes on Natasha. Father Francis gave the mass—unbearably solemn and well attended—and did his best to try to make sense of what had happened. I think he also went out of his way to make the ceremony as brief as possible; there was enough pain and suffering in that room to fill a dozen such services.

  My parents and I sat toward the front of the church with the Gentiles from next door, my mother and Norma exchanging balled-up tissues throughout the sermon. Mr. and Mrs. Gallagher and Josh sat a few rows ahead of us, along with a bunch of people I didn’t recognize, but assumed were relatives. Despite the stories I’d heard around town, Mr. Gallagher appeared rigid and composed. Perhaps he was all cried out by that time. Mrs. Gallagher sobbed throughout, head bowed and slender shoulders trembling. At one point, Josh slid his arm around his mother, and she rested her head on his shoulder. That was when I almost lost it. I wished Kara were there with me, but she was taking summer classes at Hopkins and couldn’t afford to miss her first lab.