The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 (7 page)

Cohan will also have the testimony of these witnesses to offer to a jury: A 41-year-old Ohio man who tested positive for HIV and hepatitis C after receiving BTS bone implants in surgery for degenerative disk disease. A 30-year-old Colorado woman who had to undergo a repeat ACL replacement after her first BTS tendon failed. A 74-year-old widow from Ohio who received BTS bone for a lower-back surgery and developed syphilis.

T
HOUGH HE HAS THE MODEL SHIP READY,
Dan Oprea hasn’t yet fulfilled his promise to his mother to deliver her ashes to the sea in a Viking funeral. “I intend to do this,” he says. “I’ve got the ship, I’ve got everything. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I have this feeling like…I’m throwing her in the trash. And I understand that’s not what’s happening, and I intend to do this eventually, but I’m just not ready yet.”

Oprea says he’s struggled to get past the news of what happened to his mother’s body. His wife says she often catches him staring into space, and knows where his mind is. In many ways, Dan says, he wishes he never found out about it. “It’s just like something out of a horror movie,” he says. “You just can’t understand how anybody could do this.”

And this poses the question, again, of what the greatest crime here may be. Irish journalist Mary Kenny, whose sister Ursula was among the unwitting donors, wrote that she doesn’t resent that her sister’s body was dissected, only that it was done without express permission. “What is a body after death anyway? Nothing but waxwork effigy,” she noted. “Her spirit remains strongly with me, hovering over so many moments in my life, and that is dearer to me than the fate of a mere anatomy.”

Certainly the accused in this case may be guilty of much, of
fraud, of larceny, of misleading loved ones, of taking advantage of their vulnerabilities, of falsifying records, of harvesting remains in grotesque, unsanitary settings, and of introducing potentially infectious parts into otherwise healthy bodies. Isn’t that last thing, without doubt, their most egregious offense? Yet it hasn’t resulted in a single criminal charge. Instead, it’s the charge of “abuser of corpses”—defined by the Commonwealth as “a person who treats a corpse in a way that he knows would outrage ordinary family sensibilities”—that has given the government the most traction. That may seem, in the scheme of things, almost quaint. Except that for Dan Oprea and millions of others, it goes to the very heart of how we still look at an uncertain line, between life and death.

D
AN
P. L
EE
writes about crime, science, and politics for
Philadelphia
magazine. Another of his stories—about two dueling forensic pathologists—appeared in
Best American Crime Reporting 2007.
He lives in Philadelphia’s Old City neighborhood.

Coda

After pleading guilty to the thousands of charges against him, Michael Mastromarino was sentenced to twenty-five to fifty-eight years in Philadelphia and eighteen to fifty-four years in New York; the sentences are to be served concurrently, and he won’t be eligible for parole for at least eighteen years. Appearing in a Philadelphia courtroom, Mastromarino looked gaunt, his hair recently shaved. He apologized to his victims, saying, “I have many years to think about the wrongs I have committed, in prison.”

Louis Garzone and his brother Gerald also pleaded guilty, on the day their criminal trial was to commence; each was sentenced to nine and a half to twenty years in state prison, of which they
are expected to serve at least eight. Their pleas were in large part the result of Mastromarino’s cooperation with Philadelphia authorities, as well as that of codefendant James McCafferty Jr. McCafferty, Jr. McCafferty, who claimed to have suffered from severe alcoholism, received a shorter sentence—three and a half to ten years in state prison—in exchange for agreeing to testify against the Garzone brothers and because he played a significantly smaller role in the criminal enterprise; he could be eligible for parole in as little as two years and eleven months.

The scene was emotional as the Garzones offered their pleas. About fifty people—some furious, others sobbing—packed the courtroom. Among them was Elizabeth Sparagno, who’d hired Louis Garzone to cremate her eighty-four-year-old mother Marie Lindgren’s body; Lindgren had been savagely murdered by two teenage neighbors to whom she’d once fed homemade cookies. Sparagno told the
Philadelphia Inquirer
she remained tortured by the double indignity. “It’s just not right,” she said. “Those boys already cut her head off, her pinky finger. And then later I find out that Garzone took her to the funeral home for those cutters who came down from New York.”

The civil trial against all the defendants is still pending.

FROM
Rolling Stone

O
N AN OVERCAST WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON
last December, a skinny white teenager shuffled into the Westroads Mall in Omaha, Nebraska, with an assault rifle hidden under his black hoodie. A cheery holiday atmosphere filled the aisles. Christmas trees twinkled, holiday music played softly. Nobody paid attention to the slouching teen as he got on the elevator in the Von Maur department store and rode it to Level 3.

He came out with his gun raised: an effeminate-looking, almost pretty boy with alabaster skin and cherry-red lips, holding the rifle like a pro—stock to cheek, elbow high. Harry Potter with an AK-47. He crossed the hall to the
GIRLS
7–16 section, where, among the rows of dresses and frilly tops, he came across two women and shot and killed them both.

The high-decibel blasts ricocheted through the store and sent the remaining shoppers into a panicky, screaming dash for cover, and as they ran, crying out in confusion, the teen squeezed off two more rounds hitting the arm of a man lunging into a side door—then aiming at a man fleeing down an escalator, killing
him before he reached the last step. The boy leaned over a balcony overlooking a central atrium, squinted down 40 feet to Level 1, where a janitor was scrambling to find a safe zone, and shot and killed him. Swiveling back to Level 3, he saw a woman ducking into an employee locker room, and he shot and killed her.

In the midst of the carnage, the boy changed magazines, loading in 30 fresh bullets. He walked over to the customer-service counter, behind which four workers were huddled. One of them, Dianne Trent, 53, had hastily called 911 and was describing a “young boy with glasses” coming toward her when the teen shot her at point-blank range, killing her instantly. He then shot the remaining three people behind the counter, wounding a man and two women. They collapsed in a squirming, bloody tangle. Then he turned around and shot and killed a 65-year-old man hiding behind a chair with his wife.

Barely five minutes had passed since the boy started shooting. Seven were now slain, four more badly wounded, bleeding into the thick-pile carpet. Behind the customer-service counter, one of the boy’s victims was crying out, “I need oxygen, I need oxygen.” She bled to death before help arrived. Police and ambulance sirens could now be heard approaching from the distance.

The teen shot a stuffed teddy bear. Then he turned the gun on himself: one shot, under the chin.

At that same moment, in a suburban sheriff’s office miles away from the pandemonium at the mall, a 41-year-old woman named Molly Rodriguez was consulting a deputy about her son, whom she feared might be planning to kill himself. She had discovered a rifle missing from her ex-husband’s house that morning, she told the deputy. She wasn’t sure of the rifle’s make, other than that it was black, and ugly.

As the deputy compiled his report, news came in over the radio about the shooting at the mall. “Ma’am,” the deputy asked, “might that be your son?” Rodriguez said she doubted it. Ten minutes later, the shooter was positively identified as Robert A.
Hawkins, born May 17th, 1988, to Ronald Hawkins and Molly Rodriguez.

Her child.

I
T WAS A BIG STORY.
For about a week. Immediately after the shooting, the media descended on the woodsy suburb of Omaha known as Bellevue (population 50,000), where Hawkins had been living, and began some hit-and-run reporting. But that soon sputtered out. After it was discovered that the shooter had a history of mental illness, the national media left town, and then when it came out that he’d recently been fired from a job at McDonald’s, even the local guys dropped the story and went back to reporting on the weather. That was pretty much the extent of the digging, as if losing the opportunity to flip burgers was what drove the teen to murder.

Less than a decade ago, in the aftermath of the Columbine High School shootings, teen murder was such a horrifying novelty that it occupied the entire national conversation for months. But these days, teenage shooters come and go on TV with such regularity that their sprees hardly seem surprising anymore; on the contrary, it feels almost naive to be shocked. In the end, the Robert Hawkins mall massacre—the bloodiest episode in Nebraska since the Charles Starkweather murders of 1958, and one of the deadliest rampages in American history—amounted to just a few days’ worth of news and infotainment. Within two weeks of the shooting, Von Maur was speed-cleaned and reopened, just in time for the Christmas rush. In the atrium where Hawkins had sprayed bullets and slain eight, there was no lasting marker of what he had done: no plaque for the dead on the freshly polished marble columns, no memorial fountain where the victims had fallen. The aisles were soon humming with contented customers who didn’t seem to mind, or even know, that they were shopping in a former killing field. Only the presence of a new security
guard, roaming the racks with a revolver on his belt, suggested that anything untoward had happened here at all.

From the very beginning of his life, Rob Hawkins was a throwaway kid. In 1982, Molly Rodriguez was working the counter at the Swiss Colony in a mall in San Angelo, Texas: a buxom, petite 16-year-old in white pants and a tube top, looking for a husband to take her away from being the seventh kid in a working-class family of nine kids. In walks Ronald Hawkins, young buck, rising star in the Air Force’s electronic-warfare division, and they hit it off: marriage in a matter of months, and then a child, Cynthia. But things changed after the birth, and they changed for the worse. The infant bawling in the house turned them both off, Molly recalls, and without the bedroom to bond them, the tenderness left their relationship. Soon Ronald acted like Molly wasn’t so hot anymore, calling her a “pussy life-support system.” She got back at him by having affairs with soldiers at the base in Suffolk, England, where Ronald was transferred.

After that, the sex was more sadistic than loving. It seemed to Molly like Ronald enjoyed when she came home with other men’s semen still inside her—at night, while she slept, he would sometimes ejaculate on her face. She got pregnant again in 1987, hoping the second kid would solve the problems of the first, but by then all they really felt for each other was hostility. Robbie was born the next spring, a normal, healthy baby, but during his fragile first months—the period when the infant nervous system soaks up every stimulus—he got wired to violence as his parents’ marriage devolved into a cage fight. “Mom and Dad were on the floor slugging it out,” Molly recalls. Before long, Rob’s childhood became even more traumatic; several doctors would later conclude that at some point during these first years, Rob was molested. Once, when Molly was changing Rob’s diapers, his older sister, Cynthia, then six, leaned forward and put her mouth on his privates. Molly pulled her off. She stared at her husband, but he said nothing. On another occasion, Rob was left alone with a rela
tive who, Rob would later say, “tickled” him in a way that made him feel odd.

Infants are imitative: They learn by copying what they see. And by the time he was four years old, Rob had grown into an attack machine. He was a menace on the playground, punching other kids or kicking them in the groin whenever he got upset. When teachers disciplined him, he bit their hands. And he held grudges; he once came up to a teacher he disliked and slammed her head in a door. He did this when he was a preschooler, only three and a half feet tall and 34 pounds.

In 1992, after Ronald was posted to an Air Force base in Omaha, he brought his four-year-old son to the Methodist Richard Young Hospital and asked the psychiatrists what to do with the violent boy. The doctors asked Robbie why he kept hurting other kids. He lowered his eyes to the floor.

“Because I’m stupid and bad,” he mumbled.

Committed to the hospital for observation, Rob behaved erratically. One minute he was playing peacefully with Matchbox cars; the next he was desperately throwing his arms around a nurse, as if asking for protection. He was diagnosed with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder—the condition usually found in battle-weary veterans—caused by his hellish family life. After a month of heavy medication, the doctors sent him home with a warning that his recovery depended on continued therapy, and more important, on having a stable, nurturing family environment.

But stability was not his fate. Robbie returned instead to a chaotic custody battle between his parents, who were now divorced and waging a
Jerry Springer
-style campaign against each other that culminated in Molly being dragged away in handcuffs and threatening Ronald’s new wife, Candace. Molly herself had quickly remarried—hooking up with an Air Force friend of Ronald’s named Mark Dotson—and she was anxious to start a new family that didn’t have the drama and the burdens of her first big relationship. So after Candace had repeatedly called the police on
Molly with charges of child endangerment, Molly gave up and surrendered her visitation rights to Rob, hoping to cut ties with the past and start fresh.

She called her son into her room to explain the situation. By then Rob had been on regular doses of Thioridazine, the antipsychotic drug, and Ritalin, to treat attention-deficit disorder. Molly hugged him and said that she was going away. “He didn’t really understand it,” she recalls. “He was so young.”

W
HEN
M
OLLY’S ABANDONMENT
finally sunk in, Rob turned his formidable anger against his stepmother, Candace, the only maternal figure left in his life, transferring onto her all the rage he must have felt toward his biological mother. It probably didn’t help matters that while Rob was always getting in trouble for smoking and fighting, Candace’s own son, Zachary, four years Rob’s junior, seemed to skate smoothly along. Nor did her response to his tantrums help. Rob’s father preferred to handle his outbursts by pinning him on the floor, sometimes for as long as an hour, until he would calm down. But when it was her turn to control him, Candace, an Air Force vet, used the back of her hand.

Growing up on a steady diet of psychiatric medication and corporal punishment, Rob became more violent and withdrawn. When he was 13, his ongoing battle with Candace went nuclear. She searched his backpack for cigarettes, and Rob flipped out on her. In response, she slapped him across the face so hard that her ring cut his forehead. He balled up his fist and said quietly, “I’m going to kill you.”

Candace believed he was capable of making good on the threat: For his 14th birthday, Rob got another hospital admission and another fistful of pills. This time he sat in the doctor’s office and stared blankly, refusing to acknowledge the gravity of the situation. The doctor insisted he apologize to Candace. But Rob was
in no mood to make amends with his family. “I hope they get into a car accident,” he told the doctor. By now, he no longer regretted his outbursts. The four-year-old kid who thought of himself as stupid and bad for hitting people was now a teenager deep in the throes of mental illness. If the doctors returned him to his stepmother, he said, he “knew where the knives were located, and she would leave the house in a body bag.” On Mother’s Day, when patients were told to draw cards for their loved ones, Robbie drew a picture of a noose for his stepmother.

Not long after, his father drove to juvenile court and asked the judge to take over: His health insurance had run out, he told the court, and he couldn’t afford to pay Rob’s medical bills. Molly, Rob’s biological mother, wasn’t at the hearing—she wasn’t even informed of the court date, although she lived 12 miles away—but in any case she was out of the picture by then, off raising her new family. After a hearing that lasted just eight minutes by the stenographer’s clock, Judge Robert O’Neal rapped his gavel and the state department of Health and Human Services became Rob’s legal guardian.

T
WO YEARS LATER,
the angry young man waiting in his therapist’s office for his father and stepmother to show up for a counseling session looked more like a refugee from a Dickens tale than a kid from Omaha. At 16, Rob was now a veteran of institutions, having spent the last 24 months of his childhood in group homes because he resisted the reconciliation with Candace that would have allowed him to rejoin his family. He looked the part of a miserable ward of the state: painfully thin from years of undereating, nails chewed to gnarled stubs. He wore his hair long, in a thick curtain that hid much of his face and obscured his eyes. He had been molested by another resident, and was prone to suicidal despair. None of it matters, he would tell his therapists: “We’re basically just numbers.”

In some ways, he was even more traumatized than when he’d entered the system. He had done nine months at the Piney Ridge Center, a residential treatment center in Missouri (where he got into physical fights with other residents), before being transferred at the judge’s behest to Cooper Village, a home for boys in Nebraska (where he lived under strict isolation, rarely allowed to leave the campus or make phone calls). Over the years he kept trying to buck the rules and talk to his biological mother, with whom he held out hope of a reunion, but he was never allowed to call her.

By now, his psychological profile included the darker, more exotic ailment that would lie behind his future crimes: anti-social personality disorder, a condition that makes it difficult, if not impossible, for sufferers to feel empathy for strangers. It is the underlying pathology of most serial killers. Rob drew swastikas and professed to believe in Satan. When the staff threatened to send him to another institution if he didn’t reconcile with his family, this brooding young man who had spent his teen years being raised by orderlies gave them a dark warning. “If you send me there,” he said, “I’ll burn that motherfucking place down and all of the people in it.”

But now, sitting in the therapist’s office, Rob was about to surprise the doctors and social workers who had seen little evidence of change in him. After two years of round-the-clock therapy—at least two sessions a day, plus novel approaches like equine therapy, where he worked with horses—Rob was finally ready to apologize to Candace for threatening her. His therapists considered this the breakthrough they’d been working toward, and his caseworker noted in his file that he was mentally well enough to return home.