Because You Loved Me (7 page)

Patricia “Pat” Sullivan was at her Willimantic, Connecticut, home when she received a call from Billy, her son, at about 7:30
P.M
. He was “calm,” Patricia said later, as he explained that he and Nicole had been driving around town most of the night. They were “shopping,” added Billy. Two young lovers spending their final night together.

“OK,” said Patricia.

“We’re at the mall.”

“How are you?”

“Good. I’m picking up some souvenirs for [my sisters].”

“Don’t go spending all of your money,” warned Patricia. She had always taught Billy the value of saving his money. There was no need to go out and buy the kids a gift. They could do without.

“I won’t, Mom.”

Then Patricia asked, “Are you taking your medication?”

Billy was on a variety of antidepressants. He took the pills at night. It was important he took his medication, for Patricia knew things fell apart rather quickly for Billy when he failed to medicate himself regularly.

“Yes, Mom.”

As the murder scene back at Jeanne’s unfolded, Nicole and Billy drove around town. Unless they had been stalking the scene from afar, neither could have known cops were scurrying around, collecting evidence, interviewing neighbors and friends, trying desperately to figure out what had happened. Nicole had no idea that her brother, Drew, a wayward boy at odds with his mother, was now aware that she was dead—or that Drew was out there on the front lawn, like everyone else, answering questions, weeping, trying to comprehend it all.

While they were out, Billy stopped at a nearby shopping mall. Nicole bought him a new pair of socks and a T-shirt. For some reason, Billy felt the need to wear them that night and changed clothes just down the street from Jeanne’s in the parking lot of a local movie theater.

Nicole had called home a few times, but, of course, no one answered, so she left several messages, saying she and Billy were “running late” and would be home as soon as they could. After all, it was their last night together. They had to make the best of the time they had left. By Thursday morning, life would be, Nicole later wrote in her diary, a “hellhole” she saw no way of digging out of. Nicole wrote that she’d likely sit in her room, hug her favorite pillow, listen to music that reminded her of Billy and try to figure out a way to be with him again. Any depression she had suffered throughout the past six months was going to escalate. She was sure of it. And Billy, well, he was going to be back at McDonald’s flipping burgers, making sandwiches he cared little about, wondering how he was going to convince Jeanne to allow the relationship to continue.

“Let’s take off to Connecticut,” Nicole suggested at one point that night as Billy drove.

“No,” Billy said for a second time, “the cops will be at my door two days later.”

“Vermont. Let’s go to Vermont, or Niagara Falls, like we talked about.”

“Come on, Nicole.”

After leaving the movie theater parking lot and stopping a few additional places around town, Billy drove to
Amanda Kane’
s house. Amanda was Jeanne’s best friend. She lived about three miles east of Jeanne’s, over near the intersection of Greeley Park and Route 3, the main interstate leading into downtown Nashua. Amanda’s house was small, but the perfect suburban haven she desired. Jeanne, Billy, Nicole, Drew and Chris had helped Amanda move into the house the previous Friday, August 1. Some of her things were still unpacked. In boxes. Sitting all over the place. Amanda was planning on having Jeanne and Chris back over that Saturday to help finish unpacking.

Amanda had known Jeanne for close to fifteen years: they had worked together at one time and met through the companionship of spending eight hours next to each other, five days a week. Amanda was quite different than most of Jeanne’s friends.

“Very reclusive,” said a former friend. “[Amanda] rarely goes anywhere aside from work, five days a week. She is an unbelievable chain-smoker that sits at home with her two cats…. She records her soap operas and watches them religiously. Jeanne would go to Amanda’s house on Saturdays and do all her housework (vacuuming, dusting and other minor chores)…. Jeanne provided her with some well-needed companionship. Jeanne accepted [Amanda] for who she was…. She is not a badperson, just for the fact that she is very antisocial.”

Jeanne, without a doubt, loved Amanda dearly.

Especially short at four feet ten inches, and a bit heavy, forty-five-year-old Amanda wore her Puerto Rican heritage well. She was born and raised in New York City; her parents were in Puerto Rico, her grandparents in Spain.

“I’m pretty Latin, all the way down to my fingertips,” she later said jokingly.

With jet black hair and olive skin, Amanda was attractive, but also strong-minded and not afraid to speak her opinions when she felt the situation warranted it; whereas Jeanne was more laid-back, socially correct and not quite as outspoken.

They had made a great pair, feeding off their differences.

Like Jeanne, Amanda, a single woman, worked hard to make ends meet. She was employed by a health care company in Andover, Massachusetts, about a forty-minute drive on a good day from her home. Because the commute during peak morning and afternoon rush hour could get congested and heavy along Route 3 and Interstate 495, Amanda set it up with her boss so that she could get into the office by 6:30 or 7:00
A.M
.

“That way,” she said, “I can miss most of the morning traffic and I get to leave work by three-thirty or four
P.M
. and miss most of the afternoon traffic.”

Leaving her house at 6:30
A.M
., however, had its downside: Amanda had to get up by 4:00
A.M
. to shower and fix her hair and makeup, which meant she had to be in bed on most nights by 8:00
P.M
. At about 10:05
P.M
., Billy and Nicole knocked on Amanda’s door. Amanda wasn’t quite asleep, but she had the lights out and, lying down, had begun to drift off. When she heard the buzzer, she said aloud, “Shit, who is that?” knowing full well, she remembered later, it was Nicole.

“What is it?” Amanda asked as she sluggishly opened the door, upset Nicole and Billy were ringing her at that time of the night.
Nicole knows better,
she thought.

“It’s Nicole, Amanda.”

“It’s late, honey, you know I go to bed early. What the hell are you doing here?”

Having known Nicole since she was two years old, Amanda held a special bond with her. Like many of Jeanne’s friends, Amanda believed Nicole was smarter than most girls her own age. (“She had a bright future ahead of her—and still does,” recalled Amanda.)

“We wanted to come over so Billy could say good-bye,” said Nicole. “He’s leaving tomorrow morning.”

Nicole seemed sincere. She looked tired, but Amanda expected it: Billy was leaving, and Nicole had made no secret of the fact that her “world” was going to collapse with his departure.

Still, the last thing Amanda wanted to do was sit and entertain two teenagers.

Part of her felt bad about coming out and telling Nicole to take Billy and leave. Nicole had telephoned Amanda three times earlier that night, but Amanda screened each call and never answered. In one message, Nicole said she wanted to stop by. “I thought it was nice, you know,” recalled Amanda. “It was unnecessary, but it was a nice gesture. I figured if I didn’t answer the phone, they would just go home and leave me alone.”

Nonetheless, here they were, standing in her doorway.

“Come on in,” said Amanda grudgingly. Billy seemed hyped-up and “jittery,” she recalled. Nicole was somewhat relaxed, calm, but also “very sad.” Both looked “tired and exhausted,” remembered Amanda. “I attributed it all to separation anxiety. Billy was going back to Connecticut the next day. That’s why I thought they looked so nervous.”

“If I look a little jittery or jumpy,” Billy said as they stepped into Amanda’s dining room, “it’s because I had a Coke earlier.”

“Whatever…,” Amanda said. She was uninterested.

Nicole sat quietly next to Billy. Although Nicole and Billy hadn’t spent that much time together face-to-face since they met online in May 2002, many who witnessed them together said Billy was the dominant force in the relationship. It was an unspoken rule, for example, that Nicole submit to Billy’s wishes. More than one close friend of the family later said that whenever Billy used the bathroom in Nicole’s presence, she would “wait like a puppy dog” by the restroom door and was expected not to talk to anyone until Billy emerged. Just a few days ago, on Sunday, August 3, Billy and Nicole stopped at a local fast-food restaurant and Nicole bumped into a male friend. After saying hello, Nicole and the boy hugged. Billy was “so upset,” said Nicole’s only girlfriend, Cassidy Dion, “he stormed out of the restaurant” in anger. “He got really upset and walked out.” Furthermore, Chris was quick to point out he thought it rather bizarre that on those nights Billy stayed at the house he slept on the couch, and Nicole, even though she was told not to, slept on the floor next to him, as if Billy didn’t want her out of his sight.

While inside Amanda’s, Billy bounced his foot a mile a minute, like a kid waiting outside the principal’s office, and, at times, got up and walked around the room.

He just couldn’t keep still.

Finally, after some small talk, “Listen, you guys are going to have to leave now,” Amanda said. “I need to get some sleep so I can get up for work.” She didn’t want to kick them out. She felt that being Jeanne’s best friend, it was nice of Nicole to bring Billy by. But at the same time, it was getting late. Amanda needed to get some sleep.

“Nicole,” Amanda said when Nicole didn’t respond, “it’s after ten o’clock. Your mother let Billy stay here for a week. She must be worried about you.”

“I know,” said Nicole.

Amanda picked up the telephone and dialed Jeanne’s.

No one answered.

Then she tried calling Chris.

Addressing Nicole after hanging up the line, she said, “They are probably out looking for you right now. It’s pretty selfish of you to do this to her. Why don’t you just
go
home.”

“Yeah, I guess we’re really tired,” said Billy. “I guess I’ll just go to Jeanne’s and crash on the couch.”

For Chris McGowan, the nightmare had just begun. It was like a telephone call in the middle of the night—it was never good news.

“Look at all this blood?” Chris told himself as he stood underneath the fluorescent glow of the lights inside the small room that detectives had put him in at the NPD. Both of his arms, from his triceps down to his fingertips, were covered. His knees, because he was wearing shorts, had patches of blood where he had knelt down beside Jeanne.

My goodness,
thought Chris while sitting in the room by himself, holding up his arms, looking at it all for the first time.
What happened?

Two detectives sat Chris down at a small table on the second floor, gave him a glass of water and told him to “relax,” someone would be back to ask him a few questions in due time.

What seemed to Chris like “an hour” actually took fifteen minutes. As he sat, contemplating life without Jeanne, thinking about what could have happened, he still didn’t feel as though he was being treated as a suspect.

“I had nothing to hide,” he said later. “It didn’t even cross my mind.”

Equally disturbing was the idea of never seeing Jeanne again.
She’s dead.
In the breadth of an instant, just like that—Chris snapped his fingers while recalling the memory—he and Jeanne were talking about the rest of their lives together, going out to dinner, taking walks, raising Jeanne’s two kids, saying good-bye at work, discussing soda and pizza and chips, the kids—and now she was gone. How quickly life can be interrupted by tragedy.

When one of the detectives came back into the room, Chris was asked, “When was the last time you saw Ms. Dominico?”

He took a swallow from the cup of water in front of him.

“Geez…it was at work. We work together at the same company.”

“She say anything to you about meeting anyone tonight?” The detective wrote something down on a notepad he had in his hand.

Chris ran one of his hands through his hair, took a long breath.

“No. Not that I know of. We had plans to meet up at the house. I was staying there this week. She was supposed to pick up a pizza, go home…and meet up with the—”

“How?” the detective interrupted.

“—the kids. Where are the kids? I need to find the kids.” Chris became nervous, suddenly worried. “I need to tell them before they find out some other way.” It had been on his mind the past few hours: how was he going to explain to Drew and Nicole what had happened to their mother?

“No, don’t worry about the kids. We’re working on locating them.”

“I gotta tell them.” Then, speaking more to himself than the detective, “Where are they gonna go? What are they gonna do now?”

Chris shook his head and began crying.

The Criminal Investigation Division (CID) of the NPD consisted of thirteen members on the day they began investigating Jeanne Dominico’s death. It was one of five divisions within the NPD’s Detective Bureau. Comprised of one lieutenant, two sergeants and ten detectives, the CID’s primary function, according to official policy, is to “further the investigation into all felony level crimes committed by adult offenders that occur within the City of Nashua.”

Among a city housing some ninety thousand residents, a larger population, incidentally, than a majority of the nation’s cities, the NPD’s headquarters at Zero Panther Drive, near downtown, a modernized redbrick building, is up to date with all the latest investigative techniques, procedures and practices. Capable of investigating “all levels of crime,” the NPD stands in a relatively small class of police departments statewide that can boast of such diligent street-level crime-fighting strategies and crime scene investigation tactics. Homicide, kidnapping, violent assaults, sexual assaults, burglaries, thefts and corruption of all types generally encompass most of what the NPD prides itself on. Quite interestingly, the NPD Uniform Field Operations Bureau is considered its “most prominent,” simply because it is “called into action” and acts, mainly, as an initial response team the moment a major crime is reported.

“The officer at the scene will conduct a preliminary investigation into the incident,” says official procedure, “documenting the facts as he learns them,” before forwarding a report to the attention of the Detective Bureau. “On occasion, based upon the seriousness of the offense, detectives may be called to the scene of the crime immediately after members of the Uniform Bureau have arrived and assessed the situation.”

The NPD homicide investigating team is a tight-knit group of cops, whose primary focus is to be ready and willing to conduct any type of investigation required in order to solve a crime as quickly as possible. The safety of the residents of Nashua is the NPD’s number one concern, obviously. This is one of the reasons why the response at Jeanne Dominico’s house once Chris McGowan called 911 on the night of August 6, 2003, was so thorough and quick: in theory, like many of the police departments throughout the state of New Hampshire, members of the NPD were waiting for the call, ready to take action the moment a violent crime had taken place.

What detectives from the NPD’s CID unit knew as the night moved forward and the investigation progressed was that violence was not an intense enough word to explain what had happened inside Jeanne’s kitchen. In fact, Jeanne hadn’t fallen from her countertop and split her head open, as most everyone now knew, nor had she gotten into a scuffle with a burglar, as many may have believed early on. Detectives knew immediately upon entering Jeanne’s home that she had been beaten savagely with some sort of blunt, solid object, and stabbed repeatedly with, authorities knew, two different knives. Some early estimates, as crime scene investigators worked the scene—taking videotape and photographs, collecting fingerprints, shoe prints and other evidence, and reported back to detectives—was that Jeanne had been stabbed approximately forty, or maybe even fifty, times. She had wounds to her face, neck, head, throat, along with what looked to be defensive wounds on her hands. Moreover, investigators uncovered a broken knife handle inside Jeanne’s kitchen sink; its blade on the floor nearby.

This was no random act—Jeanne’s murderer was angry. Detectives knew right away there was a personal connection.

From those early moments, it appeared detectives had some key pieces of evidence to go on, yet no viable suspect. Then, at 9:13
P.M
., while searching Jeanne’s backyard, one of the investigating officers found something.

“Over here.”

Detective Denis Linehan and his boss, Detective Sergeant Richard Sprankle, had been at the scene for a little over an hour. When they heard the officer call out, both walked over to see what he had found.