20

After fruitless days of search for any clue to identify the hired killer (and they were certain he had been that), for any sign of the van he had used to transport Barbera’s body and then flee, the frustration of the investigators was evident. It was three and a half days since the murders, and they were no closer to finding what they were seeking than they had been at the start.

John Wales had an idea. He went to Gallagher. He was going over to the pier, he said, to the Kinney office. He was going to go through the whole operation, learn as much as he could, and he was going to go through the monthly parking applications. Since they were sure the killer had been after Barbera, he had to have known her habits. If she parked on the pier, maybe he did, too. And if he did, it was not unlikely that he had applied for a monthly space about the same time she did. It was worth checking.

The more he learned in conversation at Pier Ninety-two, the more Wales thought he was on the right track. Nobody, he was told, was allowed up on the parking pier unless he had a monthly permit, and the plate numbers of every car entering and leaving were noted to make sure there were no freeloaders. The only exceptions, the only times visitors were permitted on the pier, was when a ship was docking or departing. Of course, that Monday there had been a ship sailing. So it was possible the van had been used by one of the visitors. But if he had been tracking Barbera, it was unlikely. He was probably a regular.

Wales turned to the applications. “There were about three hundred of them,” he says, “but we were looking specifically for vans, so that narrowed it. We found that maybe twenty or thirty vans had taken spaces, monthly spaces, but none of them had done it after the time Barbera put in hers. In fact, between April first and April twelfth, there had been only five applications for monthly spaces, and only one of them had been a van. And that application kind of stood out. First of all, it was a van, and second of all, it had a cross-out on it. I mean, it had one plate number and that was crossed out and another one written in. So I took that application down to the kid at the gate and asked him what he knew about it. He said, yeah, I remember a guy with a silver van. He came through one day and he wrote down the wrong plate number and I made him write down the correct one.”

That was the start. Wales was getting very interested. He asked to look at the time sheets, when the van entered and left and when Barbera’s BMW entered and left. The tickets were incomplete, but they were complete enough to show a pattern, to show that the silver van could very well have timed its arrivals and departures to coincide with Barbera’s presence on the pier.

Wales was sure he had it now. But he wanted to make certain. He headed back for the office with the application, called down to the Department of Motor Vehicles to authenticate the plate. Back came the identification: it belonged to a van registered to a Donald Nash of West Forty-fifth Street. Wales called down to see if this Nash had an arrest record. He did, had been convicted and sent to prison once, had been convicted and fined several other times for a variety of offenses, and, perhaps as significant as anything, he was a fugitive; there was a bench warrant out for him for failure to surrender to begin serving a short sentence.

“I knew I had him,” Wales said. “So I looked around and I said to Chief Ponzini, ‘I got the killer right here.’ He thought it was a joke, since I was the kind of guy that tells little jokes every day, every single day, and he never believes me. I said, ‘No, I mean it. If I don’t have the killer, if this isn’t the killer, I’ll buy everybody lunch,’ and there were about forty people in the office right then. And I said, ‘If it is the killer, I want to get second-grade detective out of this.’ He says. ‘Okay, if you’ve got the right guy, you get second-grade.’ I never got second-grade.” And despite the promises, nobody else ever got anything, either.

Everything finally was falling into place. They had the plate number of the van and they had the name of the owner even if, right then, they had an address in New York for him and not his home in New Jersey. But it was a start, the first real start. The plate number was turned over to the FBI, and the agents ran it through their computer to see if anything turned up. “Bingo!” Wales says. “It comes back as being a block away from Barbera’s house. I mean, they had made an observation of the van as being there. They were doing an organized-crime surveillance, an entirely different case that had nothing to do with this, and they went around the block and copied down all the plate numbers, and one of them was his. And this time, they had the address in Jersey.”

It was late Friday night, though, before all the pieces had come together, and it was Saturday morning before the FBI moved, headed for Keansburg to begin surveillance on Donald Nash. They arrived as he was leaving.

With Nash on the move, the immediate question was whether to stop him and pick him up right then or let him go, tail him to see where he was heading and if he was going to meet somebody. The decision was to wait and tail, especially since there was uncertainty. The van registered to Nash and the van on the pier had been a silver one. The one Nash was driving was black. It could be a different one, then. The FBI wanted to get close enough at some point, without Nash being alerted and alarmed, to check the vehicle identification number (VIN) on the dashboard to see if it matched the silver van’s.

In cars, constantly alternating places so that Nash would suspect nothing, in helicopters and planes, the federal agents kept pace with the van as it moved steadily south. By nightfall, Nash had reached Lancaster, Pa. He pulled off the Pennsylvania Turnpike and stopped at a Holiday Inn. There he spent the night.

In darkness later that night, the FBI moved in on the van. The VIN was unreadable, masked by paint. A scraping of black paint was taken from the van, to be tested to see if it was, as suspected, fresh.

The decision was made to let him continue, and to keep constant watch, to make sure he was never out of sight of his pursuers, to wait for the opportunity to make sure of the VIN before taking him. They now had additional evidence linking Nash to the silver van, if they needed it. That morning, a six-year-old neighbor of Nash had been playing in Waackack Creek, which ran directly behind Nash’s home. Floating in the creek, she found some papers. She brought them to her mother, who turned them over to authorities. Those papers included an insurance identification card and insurance policy issued on March 2 to Donald Nash covering a silver van, containing the VIN and the license-plate numbers. Those plate numbers matched the ones the FBI had jotted down that March night in Ridgewood and the numbers Nash had written in on his Kinney parking application. Still, everyone thought it important to let him continue on his way, until the VIN could be made and, perhaps, until he met up with somebody, a somebody who conceivably could be his employer.

Nash drove on through the next day, Sunday, reaching Milton, West Virginia, at dusk. He pulled off the road and into a campground. That night, he slept in the van. The agents could not approach.

Back in New York, the cops and the FBI were getting a little nervous. The tracking had gone on for two days, was about to go into a third. So far, they had been lucky. They had not lost Nash. But what if they did? What if he turned off the road, undetected? What if somehow he managed to slip by? The decision was made to precipitate a little action. A request was made to the Kentucky State Police to set up roadblocks and check the papers and VINs of every car that went through. That way, they could make certain of the identification number of the black van. Supposedly, that was all that was wanted. Then Nash would be permitted to continue to wherever he was going, to his rendezvous, if there was one.

About noon, on Interstate 64 about twenty miles from Lexington, Nash reached the roadblock. He handed over his papers to the state trooper, who examined them, made note of the numbers and other information, handed them back, and waved Nash on. Nash drove away.

As Nash drove on, the trooper radioed the information about the van back to headquarters. There it was put on the computer for a check. Months before, during the aborted attempt by Robert Dane to ditch the van and collect the insurance, he had reported it stolen. When it was recovered, the alarm for a stolen vehicle was supposedly canceled. But because of the missing license plates, the alarm actually remained in force, and now the word came back to the Kentucky troopers that the black van that had just passed through was, according to the VIN, a stolen vehicle. The troopers set out on a chase, and, less than a half hour later, twenty-five miles down the road, they found it. It was parked by the side of the road. Nash was sitting on a campstool, eating fried chicken for lunch, chicken he was cooking on his new camp stove. He was put under arrest. He offered no resistance, surrendered meekly, and was taken to the barracks in Frankfort.

“I said to Captain Burke,” John Wales remembers, “when they told us about the roadblocks that they’re going to stop the car and something’s going to be wrong and they’re going to pop him. I’ll bet you, I said. He says, no they won’t. Well, they did.”

Indeed, they did. But Dick Gallagher adds, “I’ll tell you this, it was no accident. They knew exactly what they were doing. They were holding the bag. The FBI was tailing this guy, not the New York City Police Department. And if that son-of-a-bitch ever got away from them, which could have happened, who’s going to look like the biggest idiots in the world? Not us. They got nervous and they cut it off. But, what the hell, how long were you going to go on with this stupid thing? I don’t blame them. If it had been us, we’d probably have taken him before he got out of Jersey.”

So now they had Nash and they had the van, and both were safely ensconced in Kentucky, for the moment at least. But there was the realization that unless they did something fast, they could lose both. It would not take long for the news to travel south that the van was not, after all, a stolen vehicle, that it legally belonged to Nash. When that happened, he would get into it and drive on his way. They moved on two fronts to stop that.

There was the bench warrant out on Nash as a fugitive from justice for failing to surrender on April 13 and begin serving his twenty days for the conviction for cloning a taxicab medallion. Into court went a Manhattan assistant district attorney to obtain approval for a request to Kentucky for Nash’s extradition back to New York on that fugitive warrant. Normally, such a request would be taken under advisement; the court would consider the merits. When the charge was minor, as inconsequential as this one, it might normally have resulted only in laughter and sarcasm, not official approval. But this was different. The assistant district attorney made his motion. It was granted on the spot. Down to Kentucky went the request for extradition. And down to Kentucky went Detectives John Wales and Bobby Patterson to bring Nash back, if the Kentucky court agreed to honor the extradition request.

Down to Kentucky, too, went Detective Richie Chartrand and a Manhattan assistant district attorney, and with them went FBI Agent Bob Paquette and a federal lawyer. They wanted a look through the van and what might be in it. “We get down there,” Chartrand says, “and we make an application for a search warrant. The judge is a very precise and accurate man. He not only wants to know why we want to search the van, he wants to know where the van is, and it’s in a Kentucky State Police garage, and he wants to know how many yards and how many feet from the roadway it is, at what intersection that is. We provide him with that very precise information and he grants us a search warrant. And now we do a search of the vehicle. We do many searches. We spend eleven and a half hours searching the van. We have a team of pathologists from the Kentucky State Police. We have forensic experts. We have a seven-man and one-woman search team. And every time we go into the van, we come back out with more. We do everything according to the book, what was retrieved, who retrieved it, who took possession of what, and we photographed everything before it was removed from the van.”

The list of items that was discovered and removed from the van runs to pages and numbers more than 150. It included some very interesting and incriminating things. Though Nash had tried to do a thorough job of cleaning the interior at the same time he was painting the van, there was much he had missed. And so Chartrand, Paquette, and their search teams and experts came up with a set of New York license plates, the same plates that had been on the van when it was registered to park on Pier Ninety-two and that had been spotted by the FBI near Barbera’s apartment. They found wooden matches. They found eleven rounds of live .22-caliber ammunition in the back and another live round in the pocket of a light-colored wind-breaker. They found splashes of blood on the floor in the rear, on the doors and door handles, on the ceiling; and elsewhere in the van. Nash had tried to scrub them away when he cleaned the van, but enough traces remained for good samples to be collected from every spot where the blood was discerned. In the well underneath the driver’s seat, they discovered a spent .22-caliber shell casing. Impressions were taken of the van’s tires, and scrapes of paint from the outside. They found a parking ticket from the Newark Airport long-term parking lot under the visor.

“Everything,” Chartrand says, “was put into the custody of Paquette and myself, with the exception of the shell casing. I took possession of that.” And Gallagher says, “He painted the van, changed the plates, drove all that distance, and the asshole’s asshole is approximately ten inches from the missing fourth shell casing all the while. After shooting Barbera, the shell casing apparently ejected into the van. No wonder we went crazy looking for that fourth shell casing.” It was only right. The rules of the game were that the murders belonged to the New York cops, and the FBI was helping out only because its major witness in a fraud case had been among the murdered. The casing, of course, might be directly related to the murders.

Chartrand and Paquette made the next plane north, heading back for New York. Chartrand took the shell casing to the police lab for examination; Paquette took the blood samples and other evidence to FBI labs for analyses. What came back was damning. The shell casing found in the well of the van identically matched the shell casing found in Jenny Soo Chin’s car and the three shell casings found next to the bodies of the three CBS victims. All five had been fired in the same .22-caliber pistol. The impressions of the tire tracks were a match with the tire tracks found on the pier. Some of the blood samples matched Margaret Barbera’s blood; while there were no blood samples available from Jenny Soo Chin, other samples found in the van were consistent with the blood of an Oriental woman.

“You’ve got one hell of a case against the van,” an assistant district attorney told Chartrand when he laid it all out for him. “But that’s it. What about Nash?”

Nash was in jail in Kentucky, waiting for a hearing to decide whether the state would honor New York’s request for extradition. Wales and Patterson arrived to take him into custody and return him, should the court agree. Nash appeared at the hearing with a local attorney, Larry Cleveland of Frankfort. The judge read the request, looked at Nash. Did Nash agree to waive extradition and permit himself to be escorted back to New York? Cleveland responded that Nash did, indeed, waive extradition. The judge looked at Cleveland, looked at Nash, and asked where Nash had found his lawyer, since he was a stranger in the city. Nash said he had looked through the telephone book’s listing of lawyers and chosen Cleveland. Was there any particular reason? the judge asked. Because, Nash replied, he had once had a good time in Cleveland and so the name might be a good omen. The judge looked at him. He had read the papers, knew the reports, knew that some of the papers were calling the man before him Donald Bowers. So the judge said, “Tell me, did you choose the name Nash because your parents once had a good time in the back seat of a Nash?”

With that, the judge ordered Nash turned over to Wales and Patterson. He summoned the two detectives to his office to wait while he signed the papers. In the office with them was Larry Cleveland, putting in a claim for a few hundred dollars as his fee for representing Nash, a claim against $2,500 in $100 bills found in Nash’s wallet when he was picked up. The judge took Cleveland’s request under advisement. Until he, or somebody else, knew whether the money Nash had actually belonged to him, he wasn’t about to start disbursing it among the claimants. He signed the papers so that Wales and Patterson could take custody of their prisoner. Wales, the eternal jokester, suddenly interjected, “Your Honor, I want to ask you something. About deathbed statements, declarations, that kind of thing.”

The judge said, “What?”

Wales said, “Suppose we’re riding in the plane. I know you admonished us not to talk to the defendant here, and our district attorney in New York told us the same thing. But suppose we’re in the plane and the pilot comes over the loudspeaker and says, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve developed engine trouble, both engines are going out any second and the plane is going to crash.’ And all of a sudden, the plane does a turnover and starts heading down. As it’s going down, Nash turns around to me and says, ‘Listen, I want to make a clean breast of things before we go out. I really killed all those people.’ And at that point, the plane levels out and flies straight. Would that be considered, would that be eligible to take into court? Did I violate his Miranda rights? And what if my brother happens to be the pilot on this plane? It’s an amazing coincidence, but what if it was so?”

The judge stared at Wales. “You’re kidding,” he said. “You’re brother’s really a pilot on this plane?”

Laughing, Wales remembers the scene. “He thinks,” Wales says, “I’m going to do that. He thinks I can make the plane go into a tailspin. It’s a commercial plane, a hundred people on that plane. Then he knew I was kidding. But it was a thing there for a minute.”

The two New York detectives took Nash out to the airport and boarded the plane with him. On the plane, too, was an army of New York reporters, flown down to witness the events in Frankfort. On the first leg of the trip, from Frankfort to Roanoke, Va., Wales and Patterson kept Nash separated from the reporters. It wasn’t hard. Nash had nothing to say to anyone. “Our entire conversation was, ‘You want a drink?’ ‘You want a sandwich?’ ‘You want to go to the bathroom?’ That was it. He just sat there staring out of the window, staring into space,” Wales says.

In Roanoke, there was a layover for an hour or so. Back in New York, word had just reached Chartrand from the police lab that the shell casing found in the van was a match with those found on the pier and in Chin’s car. Wales heard the news when he called the office from the airport in Virginia. But, he was told, this was strictly secret. The news was going to be held tightly, not let out to anyone.

Back on the plane, Wales and Patterson, knowing what Nash did not know, had a feeling of some elation. And they thought they knew something the reporters didn’t know, either, which made them feel even better. “The reporters on the plane,” Wales said, “they see us and they come back where we’re sitting. They want to talk to Nash. So I said, ‘Listen, the guy’s a prisoner. We’re instructed by the court and we’re not going to talk to him. You can’t really ask him anything pointed, and I doubt if he’s going to answer you, and we don’t want you to annoy the guy. But if he wants to talk to you, that’s okay with us. We have no objections at all.’ So now, one of the reporters says to him, ‘How do you feel now that the bullets match? The bullet found in your van matches the bullets found on the pier?’ I don’t know how they knew about it. They must have got it from somebody down in ballistics. When this guy says this, Nash, there was a visible change in him. His eyes are misty. You could see how upset he was. Now, like he realized. He thought it was all bullshit, that we got him on the misdemeanor thing. Now he realizes that we’re doing some more things, things that he doesn’t know about, especially with the bullets. It was like he was all of a sudden all screwed up. Let me tell you, we were annoyed with the fucking newsies for doing that. It put us in a bad position. Now we’ve got a guy we might have a problem with. We don’t want him to try to escape or go crazy or go wild. But he never said anything. But you could see an actual visible change in his mood. He looks like he seemed almost ready to cry.”

They landed in New York. Nash was hustled to the Brooklyn House of Detention. Theoretically, he was there only to serve his twenty days.