WHEN A CHILD IS MURDERED, detectives check the parents first, and on the night Barbara Jean was killed, John—at five feet seven, about 160 pounds, short brown hair parted in the middle, a mustache, and a Philadelphia accent—generally matched a description of the man who’d been seen carrying the box that police were then developing from witnesses on St. Vincent Street. And John had a cut on his hand from punching the door.
The detectives put Sharon in a cruiser, allowing her sister and brother-in-law to ride with her. John rode in a separate car with two detectives, one sitting in back with him. In the homicide offices at the Police Administration Building downtown, called “the Roundhouse” because it’s shaped like a pair of handcuffs,1 the Fahys were put in separate interview rooms. Sharon said she had to get home in case Barbara Jean came back. A detective said not to worry, there was an officer at the house if that happened. The detective asked what she’d done that day, about her relationship with John, if there was any way he might’ve hurt Barbara Jean.
“No,” she said. “There’s no way. If I thought for a minute he could’ve done it, you wouldn’t have to worry, I’d kill him myself.”
Was there anyone who didn’t like her or John, anyone they were fighting with? She mentioned the Greens and that John and Chuck had a falling-out a couple of weeks before.
Down the hall, Detective Miller read John his rights and asked if he wanted a lawyer. John said he hadn’t done anything, so he didn’t need one. Miller had him detail his day, then do it again. Then Miller accused him of the murder.
“You’re out of your fucking mind,” John told him.
Miller questioned him about his life and marriage. He wasn’t always proud to answer but told the truth about his drinking, his fights with Sharon, how sometimes the situation could get out of hand, that things got thrown or there was some pushing.
Miller asked if he’d ever hit his wife and he admitted he’d smacked her.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” John said. “My daughter is dead. I want you to get the guy who did it. I don’t wanna be a problem for this, I don’t want you to waste a lot of time with me, I know I did nothing wrong. I want you to find out who killed her.”
Miller brought in pictures of Barbara Jean, dead; John identified her. Miller told him again he did it. John took a lie detector test, and Miller told him the results were inconclusive; they shouldn’t have given it to him just then because he was too upset. But detectives can and do lie about lie detector results during interrogations, so John may well have passed it.
The detectives pressured John for hours, but he never wavered.
Up on Rutland Street, Margaret Kruce, the neighbor who’d seen Barbara Jean at around 3:00 PM walking with a man she took to be the little girl’s father, was shown a photo of John and said it wasn’t him. Also, none of the St. Vincent Street witnesses had seen any tattoos on the man with the box, and John had seven on his arms.2
Miller and Kelly released John and Sharon close to midnight. John’s mother came to the Roundhouse to get them and took them back to her house. They went upstairs and lay in bed, not saying much other than that they couldn’t believe Barbara Jean was gone. Impossible. They just lay there in the dark.
John felt he was outside himself watching this whole other thing go on. Crazy, just fucking crazy.
For detectives, good information and leads were coming in. Barbara Jean had to have been killed between 3:00 PM—when she was last seen alive—and, say, 5:00 PM, since the man with the box had first been seen at 5:12. (The medical examiner would put the time of death between 3:30 and 4:30 PM.) There were rumors about someone in a black van trying to dump a TV box at Kutner Buick, a car dealership on the corner near where Barbara Jean had been left, but the narrow time frame for the crime suggested she’d been killed in the neighborhood. There wasn’t time to take her away, kill her, and bring the body back. And why do that anyway?
The most promising leads came from four witnesses who had seen the man carrying the box on St. Vincent Street. These four all described a Caucasian man in his late twenties or early thirties, between five feet six and five feet eight, 160 to 180 pounds, with short dark blond or light brown hair, wearing shorts and a T-shirt. They disagreed about what color his T-shirt was, what kind of shorts he wore, and whether or not he had a light mustache.
The first of these witnesses, Michael Massi, a sixty-year-old car salesman, had been reclining in his chair in a cubicle in Kutner Buick on the corner of St. Vincent Street and Castor Avenue, taking a break in his twelve-hour workday. At a few minutes past 5:00 PM he’d been facing north, looking out a floor-to-ceiling window when a man walked past, going north on Castor Avenue, carrying a box for a thirteen-inch color TV with a garbage bag sticking out of the top. The man crossed St. Vincent Street and paused in front of the church on the corner, putting the box down to rest; he stood with his back to Massi for about twenty seconds, looking around, panting, then hunched over and dragged the box backward five or six steps down St. Vincent Street. He was five feet six or five feet eight, Massi thought, medium build, hair on the darker side and cut close to his head. Massi didn’t get a good look at his face but saw enough to know he was no kid, probably thirty-ish.3
At 5:12 PM, off-duty fireman David Schectman, leaning against the tailgate of his 1980 Chevy station wagon in front of his house on St. Vincent Street, checked his watch, then looked back at his newspaper. His wife, Lorraine, who had multiple sclerosis, was sitting in the passenger’s seat, ready to leave for her 5:30 PM doctor’s appointment as soon as their kids got home from summer camp.
Schectman glanced up at the intersection, half a block east, where his kids’ camp van would turn onto St. Vincent Street from Castor Avenue. A few people were waiting at the bus stop on the corner in front of the church, and as he looked, the man carrying a box for a thirteen-inch color TV came into view and put it down to rest for a few seconds. Schectman went back to his paper. When he looked up again, the man was coming toward him on St. Vincent, alternately carrying the box with both arms and dragging it by a garbage bag sticking out of the top. As the man approached, he put the box down to rest and looked up. He was maybe five feet six or five feet eight, with sandy blond or brownish hair.
“What do you have in the box?” Schectman asked him.
“Some old junk,” the man said.
“Trash pickup is Tuesday,” Schectman said.
“I thought it was Wednesday on this street,” the man said. He made no attempt to hide his face, and had a medium-pitched voice and Philadelphia accent. He picked up the box and started up the steps leading to Schectman’s backyard.
Schectman thought maybe he was from the church at the corner and was trying to go through the backyard to get back there.
“Hold on,” Schectman said. “It doesn’t go through.”
The man turned around and came across the lawn. When he reached the sidewalk, he put the box down, dragged it a few feet, and tried to push it into some bushes between Schectman’s house and the next house over.
“You can’t put that in there,” Schectman told him.
The man was agitated. He picked the box up and tried to go up the walkway two houses down but saw Schectman looking at him so continued west on St. Vincent, carrying and dragging the box, stopping several times.
As Schectman finished speaking to the man, Chris Kochan, fourteen, came east down the sidewalk on his bike to deliver Schectman’s Daily News. As Kochan approached, the man was bent over, dragging the box; he stepped aside so Kochan could squeeze past. Kochan gave Schectman his paper and settled his bill. They chatted for a minute or two, Schectman telling him about the man trying to put the box in his backyard. Kochan watched the man drag the box along the sidewalk until he left it on the curb next to a metal garbage can and walked away, not hurrying. Schectman and Kochan watched him cross the next street, Loretto Avenue, and continue west. It was 5:23 PM.
Kochan finished talking to Schectman and rode back the way he’d come. He passed the TV box but didn’t see the man who’d been carrying it.
The camp van with the Schectman children arrived, and they left for Lorraine’s appointment at 5:26 PM. David pointed out the box, now sitting in front of 1409 St. Vincent, to his wife. She asked if he wanted to see what was in it. He said no.
That night, Schectman told police he’d seen and talked to the man with the box for eleven minutes. Since the man had been only a day off in telling Schectman he thought Wednesday was trash pickup day on that street, detectives thought he had some knowledge of the neighborhood, probably lived or worked nearby. This made sense because they thought Barbara Jean must’ve been killed indoors, or someone would’ve seen the murder or heard her screaming.
More clues: Barbara Jean’s wet hair suggested the body had been washed, maybe to clean off evidence, and her being naked made sexual assault a possible motive. Also, technicians pulled one fingerprint from the box and one fingerprint from the garbage bag, and the TV box had a serial number they could use to trace it to its owner.
That night detectives also interviewed a fifth witness who’d seen the man with the box. This was Peter Vargas, who’d been installing an air conditioning unit in 7259 Rutland that day and was in the alley behind the house—the same alley that ran behind Barbara Jean’s house—that afternoon getting something from his truck when a man carrying a TV box approached, the muscles in his forearms straining from the effort. Vargas’s description of the man was similar to the other witnesses: five feet nine to six feet, 165 to 175 pounds, with brownish-blond hair parted in the middle, a medium complexion, and a slight mustache. His description of the man’s clothes was different; Vargas said he’d been wearing blue jeans, a plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up over a white T-shirt and a pack of Marlboros in the left breast pocket, and white sneakers. A cigarette dangled from the man’s lip, and he asked Vargas to light it. Vargas did, and the man continued on his way north up the alley.4 This story never fit with any law enforcement theory of the case, and Vargas never testified.
The one witness whose description of a possible suspect was slightly different was Margaret Kruce, who’d described the man she’d seen walking with Barbara Jean at 3:00 PM as five feet ten or so, not fat but with rolls over his belt, his hair dark brown and kinky, wearing a T-shirt and blue work pants or shorts. But after Margaret told police on the night of the murder that it wasn’t John, she was never interviewed by anyone from the DA’s office about what she saw; like Peter Vargas, her story never fit any prosecution theory of the crime.5
The day after the murder, a police artist met with the Schectmans to create a sketch of the man with the box. Michael Massi said the sketch was very accurate, especially the hair.6
Later, prosecutors would try to dismiss all the eyewitnesses as mistaken and even to keep the police sketch out of the trial. But at the time, the investigation was off to a good start.