Good Cop
At the same time officials were holding their press conference in Chester, four plainclothes troopers from Major Crime—three men and one woman, all of them sergeants—were heading to Dover to follow up on their strongest lead. There they met up with a Dover Police Department detective with the plan of visiting Kat McDonough and Seth Mazzaglia at their apartment and talking with them some more.
Detective Jeff Ladieu called Kat’s cell and asked if he could come over to ask more questions about Lizzi Marriott’s disappearance. Kat told Ladieu neither she nor Seth was home because they were both at work in Newington. She said she would be meeting up with her boyfriend when he went on his break, and would be willing to meet with the detectives at Best Buy, where he worked. It was clear to the investigators that Kat didn’t want to talk to them unless Seth was with her.
The five officers took a pair of unmarked cruisers from Dover to the Newington Best Buy. Ladieu went into the store by himself and asked a worker where he could find Seth Mazzaglia. He was directed to the video game section of the store.
Ladieu introduced himself to Seth as a state police detective and asked if he could borrow some of Seth’s time to get more details about Lizzi Marriott’s whereabouts on the evening she was last heard from. Ladieu then asked Seth if he’d be willing to accompany him to the Newington police station to answer questions.
“How long do you think it will take?” Seth asked.
“I don’t know,” Ladieu said.
Ladieu noted that Seth remained calm and friendly, asking his store supervisor if he could leave early from work. Kat, whose job at Michaels was across the street, arrived at Best Buy as Ladieu and Seth were preparing to leave. They all walked out the front door together.
The investigators phoned ahead to the Newington Police Department and obtained clearance to use two of the department’s interview rooms for as long as they needed them.
Kat got into the car with Ladieu and Sergeant Sara Hennessey, the two officers who it had been decided beforehand would question Kat, while Seth got into the other car with Sergeants Joe Ebert and Brian Strong, who had been assigned to conduct his interrogation.
Seth said he recognized the third man in the car, Dover Detective Scott Pettingill.
“We met before,” he said to Pettingill, “I remember you from when I applied for a job at the Dover Police Department.”
—
Seth sat at a large table in a second-floor conference room at the Newington PD. When the two-car caravan arrived at the department at around four P.M., he’d been escorted to the room along with NHSP Sergeants Ebert and Strong and Detective Pettingill. He had no opportunity to speak with Kat, as she’d been led to a separate room on the first floor of the department along with the other two state cops, Ladieu and Hennessey.
Seth’s back was to the room’s door, and as he looked across the table at the three investigators, he realized he’d been in this room before under very different circumstances. The conference room had served as a classroom for some of the Citizens Police Academy classes he’d attended a year earlier.
Ebert spoke first, asking Seth if he had any objection to his recording their conversation. Seth said he was fine with it, and Ebert activated two small recorders he’d placed on the table between the investigators and Seth. Ebert asked Seth to repeat for the recording that he assented to the interview being taped. Seth confirmed that he did.
Ebert then asked Seth whether he understood that, although he’d been driven to the department in a state police car, he was there voluntarily and that the door to the room was closed only for privacy. Seth said he understood the situation, and the officers then began asking him questions about October 9, the night Lizzi Marriott disappeared.
One of Joseph Ebert’s areas of expertise was in crisis negotiations. He had to read people quickly and figure out which buttons would work best when pressed. Seth wanted to be a police officer, and there was an awkward earnestness to him. Ebert would use that. He wasn’t going to treat him as if he were stupid or pound his fist on the table. Seth was acting like he wanted to help, so Ebert would let him help. He’d take the “good cop” approach.
For about an hour, Seth told the three men the same basic outline—that he’d arrived home from work around nine P.M., gone out for a jog, and returned at ten P.M.
Kat, he said, wasn’t home at either point, and when she finally arrived at the apartment at midnight, she told him she’d been walking at a local cemetery because she thought Lizzi Marriott might be there.
Sergeant Ebert asked Seth if he’d received any phone calls that evening, and Seth said he had. Ebert then asked Seth if he minded if Sergeant Strong looked at his phone while they continued to talk.
“Yeah, sure,” Seth said, pulling out his phone and punching the password on the keys, then handing the phone to Strong.
Ebert asked Seth if he believed something had happened to Lizzi Marriott.
“I don’t know,” Seth said. “I really don’t.”
If Seth was surprised by the directness of the question, he didn’t show it. But what he said next got everyone’s attention.
“I’m concerned that something might have, though, and that Kat is covering it up.”
When Ebert asked what kind of cover-up he was concerned about, Seth’s answer was even stranger. He suggested that Kat and Lizzi might have encountered an “aggressive prowler” while out walking in the cemetery.
Something bothered Ebert about Seth, and it went beyond the bizarre response he’d given to the question about Lizzi. It was something in the way he addressed the three officers, at once open and helpful but also glib and more than a little shady.
Seth’s affect was off. He had a swagger that didn’t match up with reality. He was a twenty-nine-year-old man working a part-time job at Best Buy. He’d tried to make small talk with cops by bringing up his failed police academy application. His girlfriend looked like a little kid and acted like Seth was the boss, yet Seth was talking about her as if she were someone who kept secrets from him.
Following what he would later say was a pure hunch, Ebert asked Seth to talk more about his girlfriend, Kat, in particular their sexual relationship. Without hesitation or embarrassment, Seth told the officers that he and Kat enjoyed rough sex, even going into detail describing the leather belts he liked to use to restrain her. He launched into a casual lecture on BDSM, explaining that he and Kat frequently took part in bondage, domination, and other kinky sex acts.
Ebert asked whether Seth and Kat had ever involved a third person in their bedroom activities. Seth responded that they had done so on several occasions.
“Did you have an interest in involving Lizzi Marriott in intercourse with Kat?”
Seth shrugged. “Down the road, maybe.”
—
Seth’s cell phone was now on the conference table in front of Sergeant Ebert. Ebert asked Seth if he understood the mechanics of how cell phones search for signals, how they “bounce off towers” when seeking to connect to the network. Seth replied that he didn’t know much, but he’d heard it was possible to track a person’s location using their cell phone.
Ebert then swung the conversation back to Lizzi, asking what Seth thought might have happened to her.
“I don’t know,” Seth said, “I could theorize and speculate all day, but I wasn’t there.”
“Seth,” Ebert asked thoughtfully, “if something did happen to Lizzi, what do you think should happen to the person who committed that crime?”
“It would depend on what they did,” Seth replied. “You know, the more extreme the crime, the more extreme the punishment.”
“How about if it wasn’t extreme at all?” Ebert asked. “How about if it was accidental?”
Ebert then told Seth that Lizzi’s cell phone records put her in the vicinity of the Sawyer Mill apartments on the night she disappeared. Given what they’d just discussed about Seth and Kat’s personal life, he said, he was worried that perhaps Lizzi had been harmed at some kind of “party gone wrong” at the apartment.
“Let me ask you this, Seth—understanding the type of sexual gratification that both you and Kat enjoy, do you think it’s possible that’s what happened that night?”
“My memory is good,” Seth replied. “It’s not a hundred percent. But how something like that could happen without me knowing or seeing or without someone saying, ‘Hey, guess what happened in your apartment while you were running,’ you know? Like, I . . . That’s the kind of thing I might need a little air to think about.”
“Yeah,” was all Ebert said.
“That’s—I—because if something like that happened in my apartment, I . . . that’s . . .”
“Accidental, though,” Ebert interjected, “I want you to consider that.”
“And I mean what . . . okay,” Seth stammered. “If it were an accident, what would happen to the person?”
The detective told Seth a story about a previous investigation he’d worked in which a man lied about having contact with a missing woman, when in actuality, that woman had died during sex with the man and another woman. Because the man lied at the outset, Ebert said, he faced serious consequences. No one believed him when he tried to explain later that the woman’s death had been an accident.
Ebert’s story was a fabrication, but he’d quickly formed a theory and hoped Seth would rise to the bait.
Seth nibbled, asking what happened to the people in the story.
“There were consequences for them,” Ebert said, “for lying to us and not being truthful with us, in the front, but there weren’t consequences for them in terms of what had taken place.”
He paused to let that sink in.
“And it depends very much on how something takes place.”
Ebert reminded Seth of the importance of being able to tell the Marriotts what had happened to their daughter, and he admitted that if something had happened to Lizzi, he would have to hold someone accountable for it. Seth said he did have suspicions, but was afraid of what might happen if he talked about it.
“Seth, here’s the thing,” Ebert said. “Before we go even one second further, I want you to . . .”
“I feel like maybe I should be asking for a lawyer,” Seth suddenly blurted. “I don’t want to be accused of something I didn’t do . . .”
“Oh, hey, look—” Ebert tried to interrupt.
“. . . that happened in my apartment,” Seth said. “I mean that’s literally what’s going on in my head right now.”
“Let me say this to you,” Ebert was looking directly at Seth. “If you told me, ‘Hey, I want an attorney,’ I would never tell you not to get one. If you told me, ‘I want to leave,’ I told you that you’re here voluntarily.”
Seth told Ebert that he wanted to be cooperative, but he was scared he was being accused of something. The cop reassured Seth he wasn’t targeting him, he just wanted to know the truth about what happened that night.
Seth waited a few moments, seeming to weigh Ebert’s words. His head was bowed. His leg bounced nervously on the floor.
Finally, he spoke.
“She’s gone.”
—
“She’s gone, she’s gone,” Ebert repeated. “Now I’m not pointing anything at you. I’m just saying if she was here and there was some type of—something of play that ended with an accidental death . . .”
“Yeah,” Seth muttered.
“. . . if you had a suspicion of that, hey, now is the time to be honest with me and tell me that. And if you are telling me, ‘I’m not going to tell you without an attorney,’ I’m never going to—I’m not going to beat it out of you.”
“Yeah,” Seth repeated.
Seth then said it was possible that some of his friends might have been inside his apartment at Sawyer Mill without his knowledge, explaining he hadn’t mentioned it previously because he was trying to protect them. He said he had exchanged text messages with those friends, but said he was not at the apartment when something may have happened to Lizzi. Seth then said he was concerned Kat might have been involved.
“If what I do know leads to Kat being locked away for a lifetime?” Seth said. “It would shatter me.”
Seth told Ebert that there were things he knew but that he was scared of getting his friends in trouble, in particular, two friends who had come over to his apartment later that night. As he talked, Seth’s earlier swagger seemed to melt, and he became increasingly agitated.
“I’m sorry,” he said to Ebert. “I’m getting worked up. And I could probably use some air, but I really . . . I really . . . I really want to help.”
Ebert said, “I know you do.”
Detective Pettingill excused himself from the conference room and made sure he was out of earshot before pulling out his cell phone to call his own department headquarters in Dover. He told the shift supervisor to send a squad car over to Sawyer Mill to secure the entrance to Seth’s apartment. The unit, he said, was a potential crime scene.
—
“Is there any way I can speak off the record, like, no record just for a few minutes? Is that possible?” Seth had been answering Sergeant Ebert’s questions for two hours.
Ebert convinced Seth to leave the recorders running, and then Seth told him something new. He claimed that he sometimes suffered blackouts, which made him worry that he might have information that he couldn’t access. He then changed another detail of his story, telling Ebert that the night Lizzi went missing, he’d come home from work and put on his running clothes, but then blacked out. He said it wasn’t just him and Kat in the apartment that night; another couple did come over, but much later.
“I think something did—something bad happened that night,” Seth said, but he continued to claim that, since he’d blacked out, he couldn’t get at the memory.
For another twenty minutes, Seth repeated his assertion that something bad might have happened at his apartment, but he couldn’t remember anything else. He also told the officers his parents would be worried about his absence and perhaps he should leave.
Ebert posed a scenario to Seth. If Kat and this other couple were able to tell the police what had happened, he suggested, wouldn’t it be in Seth’s interest to do so now himself, rather than let others speak for him?
“And here’s the other thing that should be of concern,” Ebert added. “As I sit here, you’re talking to a couple of guys from the state police and the Dover Police Department. When I left the debriefing this morning, there were a hundred law enforcement officers from across the country. The FBI is here . . . there is no stone that will be left unturned.”
Seth posed a scenario of his own: If something had happened as the result of a “horrible BDSM-related accident,” he asked, “what are the consequences? What happens to the people in it?”
Ebert told Seth that if he were able to help the police find Lizzi, he would have to answer for what took place, but that his cooperation would be taken into consideration.
“I don’t want to walk out on the interview like I—I—but—I do—I do need air.” Seth’s agitation was ticking up a notch. “It’s like there’s this voice just screaming inside of me.”
Ebert didn’t want to lose him.
“Look at me, brother,” he said, looking Seth in the eye. “You and I can take a walk outside, catch some air. We’ll get a glass of water.”
As they walked toward the door, Seth asked Ebert if Kat was okay. The detective assured him they were treating her in the same manner in which they were treating Seth.
—
NHSP Sergeants Jeff Ladieu and Sara Hennessey had been questioning Kat McDonough in a room on the ground floor of the Newington PD. They’d figured Kat might open up to another woman, so Hennessey had asked most of the questions. Kat didn’t say much of substance and largely stuck to her original story.
While it was true that she’d had plans to meet Lizzi at the Sawyer Mill apartment, Kat told the officers, Lizzi never showed up.
Kat claimed that she’d looked for Lizzi outside the building for a while, and then headed on foot to a nearby cemetery. Her cell phone had died while she was in the graveyard, she said, which was why she didn’t know that Lizzi had texted her from the back door of the apartment building.
Kat said she spent several hours taking photos in an attempt to capture ghosts before returning to Sawyer Mill at midnight. Seth was home when she got there, Kat said, and they went to sleep like any other night.
Ladieu and Hennessey asked Kat to sign forms giving consent to a search of her cell phone and her apartment. Hennessey scrolled through the phone, past some texts from Darla, and pulled up a text in the Sent folder, dated October 9.
“Did you send this text to Lizzi the night she went missing?”
The message read, “Hey dahling i expected you a 10? i passed out and lost track of time. you still coming?”
Kat said she did send the text, and that she now remembered wondering why Lizzi never showed up.
“But the text was sent at 11:04 P.M.,” Hennessey pointed out. “You said your phone died when you were in the cemetery and you didn’t recharge it until you got home.”
Kat stared blankly at Hennessey, then said she must have gotten the time wrong.
Ladieu excused himself and walked upstairs to the room where Seth was being questioned. In the hallway, he traded notes with Sergeant Strong about what each team was learning. Strong gave Ladieu the names of the other couple Seth claimed had come over to the apartment. They were working the angle in the other room that something sexual might have happened among them all, and he suggested the detectives ask Kat about it too.
Ladieu returned to the downstairs conference room around the same time Ebert took Seth outside for a breath of fresh air. He passed the couple’s names to Hennessey, who then asked Kat if these friends had anything to do with what happened to Lizzi.
Kat began to shake visibly and the color drained from her face. When she spoke, it sounded as if her tongue had swelled, slurring her speech.
“I don’t want to answer any more questions without talking to a lawyer,” she said.
And just like that, Kat’s interrogation was over.
—
Seth and Ebert stood in the cold, leaning against the building like smokers taking a break. Newington’s police department occupies a modern building, set back from the road in a grove of trees. Seth gestured to an open area on the grass.
“That’s where I saw the K-9 demonstration for the Citizens Police Academy,” he said.
Ebert knew Seth was still trying to make some sort of connection to the investigator. His “good cop” technique was still working.
They walked back into the building and Ebert asked Seth to keep his voice down as they passed the area where Kat was being interviewed. When they returned to the upstairs conference room, Ebert picked up the thread of the question Seth had asked him earlier. He told Seth that the extent to which he would be held criminally responsible for what happened to Lizzi would be based on whatever information he provided.
“The only person who asked me that question . . .” Ebert began.
“Is someone who’s done something,” Seth finished.
“Exactly,” Ebert said.
“I know.”
Ebert asked Seth if he’d meant to hurt Lizzi Marriott on the night she disappeared.
“Well, no more than in the BDSM kind of stuff,” he started, then added quickly, “If that’s what happened . . . the intention . . . I certainly would not have meant to kill her.”
Pushing a pen and paper in front of Seth, Ebert told him that, if he wanted to, he could draw a map to where Lizzi was located. Seth asked whether he would be taken to jail immediately if he told the investigators where she was, and Ebert told him not to make that assumption.
“Step one is ‘Where she at? Where she at?’ Let’s get over the hill together,” Ebert said. “Let’s get over that, then let’s work on ‘What happens to me?’ We’ll get to that.”
“Would I get to see my parents and Kat before going to jail?” Seth asked, suddenly sounding like a little boy.
“When you tell me where she’s at and what happened, I will ensure that you get to see your parents tonight.”
Seth picked up the pen and began drawing.