THE DAY AFTER BARBARA JEAN’S MURDER, the sun rose and the heat of the Philadelphia summer brewed; the temperature would reach one hundred degrees. John and Sharon had one thing they had to do: go to the medical examiner’s office to formally identify Barbara Jean’s body. When they got there, they were shown a picture of her on a closed-circuit TV screen. Sharon noticed her little mouth was open and wanted to hold her again but was told that was a bad idea. She didn’t insist—she wanted Barbara Jean to feel like Barbara Jean in her arms but knew that after we’re gone our bodies don’t feel the same.1
That day, both major newspapers in Philadelphia had front-page headlines about the murder: DEAD CHILD FOUND NAKED IN CARTON in the Philadelphia Inquirer and CHILD’S SLAYING HAS NE [NORTHEAST PHILADELPHIA] IN PANIC in the Daily News.
As the medical examiner performed the autopsy on Barbara Jean that morning, four homicide and four burglary detectives canvassed Rutland Street. At 7244 Rutland, Linda Green answered the door with Walter Ogrod, her housemate. With Linda standing there, Walter told the detective he’d been home the day before and had gone out on some errands at about 2:45 PM, returning at about 3:30. Pretty soon after he got back, John Fahy knocked on the door and asked if anyone had seen his little girl. He and Linda had told him no, and John went off looking.2 Walter was twenty-three but looked younger, chunky at six feet two, 220, with jet-black hair over his collar and a speech impediment; he didn’t match the descriptions of the man carrying the box.
Kathleen Ritterson, the pregnant mother of two of Barbara Jean’s friends who, with her daughters, had helped John search the neighborhood, had slept little on the night of July 12, worrying about her own kids’ safety and how to tell them their playmate Barbara Jean was gone. When she took her girls outside for a swim in a kiddie pool the next day, reporters were jogging up and down the street, asking to talk to people. Later, a detective knocked on her door and she told him what she’d seen and heard. He said he was sure if they stood on the corner and threw a stone they’d hit the killer’s house.
The neighborhood was changed from a place where families sat on their stoops in the evenings to a place of “total panic”;3 everyone was scared: the murderer could live on the block and be thinking he got away with one and could get away with another.4 A nearby day care center canceled outdoor play because people were stopping to stare at the kids through the green chain-link fence; the owner also didn’t want children watching police stop traffic to distribute the sketch of the suspect, or garbage collectors going through trash cans for clues, or reporters and cameramen circling, looking for stories.5
Newspaper stories about the murder included important details: Barbara Jean was found in a fetal position, killed by blows to the head; there was no evidence of sexual assault, and her body had apparently been washed after she was killed. Both major papers included descriptions of the man carrying the box and photos of the police sketch of the suspect alongside photos of Barbara Jean.
By the afternoon of July 13, flyers of the sketch were being distributed all over Northeast Philadelphia and shown on local TV news. At rush hour, a dozen police officers joined the eight detectives canvassing the neighborhood with pictures of Barbara Jean and of the sketch. A detective told the Inquirer it was the kind of case every cop would work for free.6
Rumors spread: it was a serial killer; John Fahy got too angry and hit her too hard; Sarge Green killed her to get back at John because John owed him drug money; a black van had pulled up to the car dealership on the corner and someone inside asked if he could dump a box there, but an employee told him no and he drove off. Someone else saw someone drag a box from a black van on St. Vincent Street, near where the body was found.7
By the evening of July 14, police had passed out nearly a thousand flyers of the sketch and received more than two hundred tips. A woman called to say that on the twelfth she was parked on St. Vincent Street behind a male in a station wagon; he was about five feet eight, medium build, wearing a white T-shirt and blue jeans and struggling with a TV box, he looked nervous, and she thought he was stealing the TV—and then she hung up. Several people called about a man named Vinnie who owned a Monte Carlo. A woman called with the license number of a black van, driven by a man who matched the sketch, that she’d seen on July 11 and again after the murder. Another caller had seen a black van with tinted back windows and a white and red license plate (maybe Virginia?) in the area of St. Vincent Street at about five or five thirty on the afternoon of the murder.
On the fifteenth the Daily News offered a $4,000 reward.
For most people on the block, including the Fahys, one thing seemed sure: if a stranger had come into the neighborhood and killed Barbara Jean, he had something to do with the bikers at 7244 Rutland. There’d been a murder there two years earlier, and now the biker parties, the fights and drugs . . .
As detectives and reporters swirled through the Fahys’ neighborhood in the days after the murder, Sharon and John stayed in a fog with the help of a friendly nurse, who gave them Ativan.8
The police might have cleared John as a suspect, but he knew what people were saying. Sometime after the murder he went home to pick up clothes and decided to get a haircut. In the barbershop near his house, news about the murder came on TV and the barber said, “Oh, they’re gonna get the stepfather for that. You know he did it.”
John started crying and went outside. The barber came out to apologize; John had been there many times and had even brought Barbara Jean in, the barber just hadn’t remembered.
And in his own mind, it was simple—he’d been watching her; he’d let her down. And she was dead.
More than five hundred people came to Barbara Jean’s viewing on Friday, July 15, at St. Martin of Tours, the church where the Fahys had been married and Barbara Jean had been baptized. Barbara Jean was laid out in white, lying in a small white coffin surrounded by flowers, including a heart made of pink carnations.
“There is a cloud of confusion, a cloud of darkness,” the priest said in his homily.9
John and Sharon sat in a daze beside the altar, greeting the line of people, which stretched to the rear of the church. God didn’t mean much to them just then—if he existed he would’ve protected Barbara Jean, maybe made John go outside to look for her a few minutes earlier. If he existed they didn’t want anything to do with him.
As of July 20, police had received more than four hundred tips: A deliveryman reported that in the middle of all the police activity at the Fahys’ house on the night of the murder he’d delivered a pizza to a man a few doors away who looked just like the sketch. A three-page letter, with supporting astrology charts, suggested the murder may have been committed for satanic reasons. Another letter described a man in a black van eyeing the writer’s daughter, who was three but looked five, at around 1:30 PM on July 12. A woman who turned out to have a long history of mental illness claimed to have seen Barbara Jean in a department store that afternoon with a man who matched the sketch; a few minutes later, she said, she walked by a black van on the street and heard the sounds of someone being beaten inside. A man who lived just down the street looked exactly like the sketch; a security guard at Temple University looked like the sketch, had a dark blue or black van, and dyed his hair shortly after the murder. A bus driver had snapped at a caller’s five-year-old daughter and made an obscene gesture.
The police put ten or twelve officers in the field every day, following up every tip, no matter how far-fetched,10 hoping to ease fears and talk to as many people as possible who’d seen something the day of the murder. Media pressure to solve the case was building: the man with the box had been right there on a busy street in the middle of rush hour without trying to disguise himself, had been seen by many people, and had just disappeared.
A Daily News article that ran under the headline YOU WONDER IF IT’S HIM: FEAR HAUNTS NEIGHBORHOOD IN WAKE OF KILLING described Rutland Street as a ghost town with empty kiddie pools and abandoned front stoops. A second article spread the fear citywide: Barbara Jean was one of five children killed in Philadelphia between July 11 and July 19, and a police officer was quoted as saying he’d never seen so much violence against children in eighteen years on the force.
For the police, it was a high-profile case of the worst kind, the kind that scared parents in their homes and, therefore, politicians in their offices: voters who feel unsafe may think their leaders soft, and soft leaders do not win reelection.
Then a break: on July 21 police connected the serial number on the TV box to a family living at 7208 Rutland Street, about half a block south from the Fahys, near the corner of Rutland and St. Vincent on the Greens’ side of the street. The house belonged to Joseph Ward, who lived there with his wife, elderly mother, and younger son. The box was for a thirteen-inch Hitachi color TV that Joseph’s older son had bought four years earlier, and though he’d moved out a few months earlier he’d kept the box stored in his parents’ basement.11
Joseph and his wife had been in Atlantic City the afternoon of the murder and his mother in Florida, leaving his younger son, Wesley, a college student, alone in the house. It seemed suspicious that Wesley had decided to put a long-stored box out for trash collection the very afternoon of the murder, after the trash had already been picked up.
Reporters, TV cameramen, and dozens of neighbors stood outside 7208 Rutland Street on July 21 as police “tore it apart.”12 Some in the crowd were relieved the killer had finally been caught; others were skeptical. Ward’s neighbors couldn’t believe he would do something like that and said he didn’t look anything like the sketch.
Detectives took Wesley Ward down to the Roundhouse to interview and photograph him. Ward told police he had been at class on the day of the murder, a claim they couldn’t confirm because the professor hadn’t kept good attendance records. They took samples of what looked like blood from the basement where the box had been stored but lacked hard evidence linking Ward to the crime and let him go at 7:00 PM.13
Another possible break came on August 1 when David Schectman identified Raymond Sheehan, a suspect in the recent rape and murder of a ten-year-old girl not far from Rutland Street, as the man who’d carried the box.14 Police took Sheehan’s fingerprints to test against the fingerprint found on the TV box, but there was no match.
The most promising suspect seemed to be Ross Felice, a twenty-three-year-old who lived a couple blocks from where the box was left. He’d come to the attention of Jonathan Jones, a homicide detective who lived in the neighborhood, on the night of the murder by going up and down Rutland Street until 10:00 PM, asking too many questions about what detectives knew, like he wanted to be seen. Even after the police left, he kept going.15 Then, the next day, police started getting phone calls telling them Felice looked exactly like the sketch.
Two of the witnesses from St. Vincent Street, Chris Kochan and Lorraine Schectman, would eventually pick Felice as the man who’d carried the box, but in August, David Schectman identified Felice’s brother, Michael.16 Police searched the apartment the Felice brothers shared with their mother and took samples that looked like blood from a rug, a shower curtain, and a few other places. They interviewed Ross Felice twice and even followed him for six months; the detectives working the case wanted him charged, but the prosecutors said they didn’t have enough evidence.
Nothing taken from either Felice’s apartment or the Ward home was linked to the crime; trash bags from Wesley Ward’s house and from the Felice apartment were not similar to the bag found wrapped around Barbara Jean. The fingerprint on the TV box did not match Ward or either Felice brother, and a palm print taken from the box had no identification value.17
Sharon spent a lot of time in Barbara Jean’s room, which she and John left just as it was, a Cabbage Patch doll tucked into bed. Sharon could smell her daughter there.18 They left Barbara Jean’s playroom untouched, too, the toy kitchen and the computerized picture on the door of Barbara Jean over the words “I Love My Daddy!” Even if it was hard to see her things, Sharon wanted to remember her daughter playing there.19
It was good to be back with Barbara Jean’s things, but being home was also horrible; they felt isolated in the neighborhood, and nobody talked to them. Maybe no one knew what to say or maybe they thought John did it, but Kathleen Ritterson was the only one who knocked on the door sometimes to see how they were doing. Not that they wanted to talk to their neighbors. They didn’t trust anybody.
The sketch of the killer was up everywhere, more than three thousand in the windows of Laundromats, convenience stores, hair salons, and other businesses around Northeast Philadelphia. John helped distribute the flyer, but he and Sharon hated seeing the face.20 And the horror wasn’t just seeing the sketch, it was seeing men who looked like it. They knew they were living in sight of the murderer, so everybody was a suspect. Everybody. Someone fidgeting on the bus would cause Sharon to wonder why and think, Oh God, he looks like the sketch and follow him home. Once she asked John to come, to see if he thought so, too. John went to bars, got drunk, and picked fights with people who reminded him of the sketch. Detectives kept telling him Ross Felice was the killer,21 so John put out the word he was looking for Felice; once he even saw Felice, who ran away.
One little girl’s mother who was putting together a memorial plaque for Barbara Jean at a local community center asked Sharon for some pictures, so she and her sister Barb took some over. The woman’s husband was drunk and took them to his basement to show them where he’d ripped up some carpet and done some work on the storage area beneath the stairs. Why was he redoing the carpet in his basement just then, and why was he insisting they see it? Sharon wondered. She brought it up with John, and together they remembered a day that spring when that little girl had been at their house playing with Barbara Jean and when John went upstairs to ask if they wanted mac and cheese and hot dogs for supper, the little girl had backed up against a wall like she was scared. Maybe her father had sexually abused her, they thought. Everything out of the ordinary seemed sinister; everyone around them was a suspect.
The Fahys still thought the murderer had something to do with 7244 Rutland. There was no way Barbara Jean would have walked off with a stranger without a fight, but she might have followed someone from that house if she knew him from playing with Charliebird.22 With so many people coming and going from that house, Barbara Jean could’ve known someone they didn’t.
In mid-August new flyers offering a $10,000 reward raised by a local businessman went up around the neighborhood. By then police had gotten more than a thousand tips. Detective Frank Miller, on the case from the first night, skipped his summer vacation and worked on his days off.
“We have significant pieces of the puzzle,” the head of the Philadelphia Police Department’s homicide division told a reporter. “The trail of that box is very important.”23 He also addressed the woman who’d called police on July 14 and described the man struggling with a TV box in a car on St. Vincent Street—since the line had gone dead at that point, the police needed the woman to call back. She never did.24
Sharon went back to work at the end of August. Her employers at the brokerage firm paid her for the time she missed. John got a letter from a man at an employment agency who’d read about Barbara Jean and wanted to help him get a job. Soon he was working at a metal shop.
At 5:45 AM one day, just after John left for his new job, the phone rang. Sharon answered it.
“I know who killed your daughter,” a deep, male voice said.
“Hello?” Sharon said.
“I know who killed your daughter. Can we get together and talk about it?” the voice asked.
Sharon thought she was going to have a heart attack.25 She hung up and took the phone off the hook until 6:30 AM, when John was supposed to call. She talked to her mother briefly, and then a few minutes later the phone rang.
“I want—” the voice started.
Sharon slammed the phone down.
The Fahys had a trace put on their line, and the next evening the man called again, asking Sharon obscene questions. A few days later a call came at 6:10 AM, even more obscene. Two more came that morning; Sharon wasn’t terrified anymore, she was furious. One morning fourteen calls came between three forty and eight thirty.26
Police tracked the calls to a part-time cab driver with two prior convictions for making obscene phone calls.27 John went to his house, thinking he would take care of the man himself, but when he got there it was obvious the guy was just a big, dumb loser who didn’t know anything about the case. John went home.28 Police arrested the man, who indeed knew nothing about the murder. He’d gotten the Fahys’ number out of the phone book.29
John’s new job didn’t work out. He was grateful for the opportunity but felt like everyone knew how he’d gotten there and was looking at him all the time.
On September 8, two local organizations held a child safety forum at a local church. Barbara Jean was the second child murder victim in a year and a half in the neighborhood; the first was Heather Coffin, the ten-year-old who’d been raped and strangled in her bedroom in February 1987. Raymond Sheehan, a suspect in that case, was one of the men David Schectman had identified as the man carrying the TV box.
Twenty-five people showed up to the safety meeting, along with five police officers and an assistant district attorney.
“We have Barbara Jean picked up off the street in broad daylight,” an audience member said. “We have Heather Coffin killed in her own home at night. The horror is, these kids are dead. Does anybody have anything encouraging to tell us? What do we do?”
“Keep your child secure,” an officer from the Philadelphia sex crimes unit told the audience. “Keep your child supervised. Keep your house supervised. And keep your fingers crossed.”30
In other words: We have no idea what to tell you.
In October the Inquirer ran a story featuring Barbara Jean and Heather Coffin. It included pictures of both little girls, the TV box on St. Vincent Street, and the sketch of the man seen carrying the box.31
November came. Sharon just couldn’t understand why it was so hard to find the killer. It was driving her crazy; days went by and nothing was different.32
One of the detectives on the case flew to Los Angeles to tape a segment of Unsolved Mysteries, a new TV program designed to generate fresh information about difficult cases. The segment on Barbara Jean aired on November 16, with photos of her supplied by John and Sharon.
“Every parent’s worst nightmare is the loss of a child to a violent stranger,” the host, Robert Stack, said while introducing the segment, which included details of the day of the murder, a shot of the police sketch, and information about the $10,000 reward.
Hundreds of tips came in. None led to anything.
The evening after the Unsolved Mysteries segment aired, John was watching TV in his living room when he heard cursing and punching outside. Sharon, upstairs, didn’t care what happened to anybody on that block and called to John to leave it alone. But John opened the door and saw Sarge Green beating somebody across lawns and down Rutland Street; the guy looked like a teenager, and Sarge, this big biker, was pounding him. They fell to the ground and Sarge kept pounding him.
John thought the size difference was too much. He called 911 and went out to break up the fight. By then it was over and Sarge went back in his house.
The other guy came toward John and asked, “Can I come in?”
It was Walter Ogrod, but John didn’t know him other than that he was one of the people who lived with the Greens. John pointed to a brick wall a couple of houses away, told him to sit there, that the police were on the way, and went inside.
When the police came Sarge was arrested and charged with aggravated assault. The police report noted that Sarge “did punch [Ogrod] numerous times about the head, throw him down a staircase, then knock him to the ground, kicking him about the head and body.” Ogrod was taken to the hospital “for possible fractured orbital socket, concussion, facial lacerations, and human bite.”33
The next time John saw Sarge, he asked what the fight was about.
“You don’t wanna know,” Sarge told him. “It’s none of your business.”34
So the fall went. Everyone on Rutland Street felt suspicious and isolated, John and Sharon most of all.
During the last week of November, two detectives were assigned to watch Ross Felice.35 On the afternoon of January 13, 1989, they brought David Schectman to a school gym where Felice liked to play basketball. When Felice saw Schectman and the detective, he put a hand up to hide his face and walked quickly away. Schectman said Felice was the man he’d seen carrying the box,36 but it was his third ID after Felice’s brother and Raymond Sheehan.
In June detectives tried again. Felice was due in court for jury duty, so they brought Lorraine Schectman in her wheelchair to the hallway outside the courtroom and asked her to tell them if “anything interesting” happened. When Felice came out and saw the detectives and Lorraine, he put his head down, turned away from them, and went back in. He came out again, went back in again; through a window a detective saw him pacing. He came out again and got in line for the water fountain, trying to shield himself behind a larger man.
“The guy that keeps looking at me, I think that’s him,” Lorraine said. She leaned over the arm of her wheelchair to study Felice for a minute and told the detective, “That’s him.”37
Both identifications by the Schectmans have a big problem: Felice knew he was being followed and knew he was a suspect, so if he acted strangely when the Schectmans saw him it might well have been because he knew what was happening. Mrs. Schectman may have even picked Felice because he kept looking at her.
Detectives wanted to arrest Felice, but they didn’t have enough.
As weeks passed, John and Sharon would hear on the news that Barbara Jean’s case was going cold. John didn’t wait to hear from detectives. He called them every day, and they told him there was a guy down the block (Felice) who matched the sketch. What about the Greens’ house? John would ask. No, don’t worry, we’re following this guy from down the street—he looks exactly like the sketch, the detectives would say.38
John got a job and went to AA meetings sometimes but couldn’t quit drinking. Grief split him from Sharon as his drinking and temper got worse. He felt failures building up on him: he knew he wasn’t helping his wife, knew he couldn’t, knew he was a loser who let his daughter get killed, couldn’t even keep a job, couldn’t do anything. Just a loser. He drank more, dousing the pain, then trying to kill it. Then he was drunk 24/7 and feeling like shit for being drunk and feeling his family looking at him like he was shit because he was drunk, and the pain was still there anyway. It just blended; everything got worse and worse.39
After a while Sharon didn’t even argue with him anymore when he came in at 4:00 AM. She’d just think, There he is, drunk again. She leaned on her friends and family and worked as much overtime as she could. She didn’t want to be around kids. A close friend at whose wedding Barbara Jean was supposed to have been the flower girl got pregnant, but it was hard for Sharon to be around her; she was glad for her friend but jealous about the baby.
In the fall of 1989, the Greens and everyone else who lived in 7244 Rutland moved out. The Fahys again begged police to search the house; once those people moved, valuable evidence could be lost. But the detectives didn’t want to hear it. John thought about searching the abandoned house himself for any of Barbara Jean’s clothes. But he figured if he did find anything, the police would say he had the evidence and pin the murder on him.
By March 1990, 7244 Rutland had become a haven for squatters, the windows broken out, living room walls covered with graffiti, beer bottles and trash scattered on the floor. The city sent a crew to clean the house out and seal it with sheet metal, plywood, and cinder blocks.
John saw the clean and seal crew and called detectives again.
“You gotta get over here,” he said. “They’re cleaning that house out. If somebody in that house did it, there’s evidence in that house and it’s gonna be gone.”
“John, it was [Felice],” a detective told him. “We’re gonna get the evidence.”
It’s nuts, John thought. They’re just boarding it up, don’t want to hear nothing, just feed us enough information to keep us quiet. They didn’t want to listen. Did not want to listen.
Detectives were convinced that people with potentially crucial information about the case weren’t helping them, so in 1990, Assistant District Attorney Joseph Casey led a grand jury inquiry into Ross Felice and Wesley Ward. The grand jury could force reluctant witnesses to testify and offered John and Sharon hope. The jury did convene, but no indictments resulted.40
It was hard for the Fahys to see Barbara Jean’s case mentioned on a list of unsolved crimes in a June 1990 Daily News article, along with the observation that as each year passed, the chances of solving the old cases got slimmer.41 But they weren’t letting the case go cold. John continued to call detectives frequently, asking for updates.
Sharon was determined that whoever killed Barbara Jean wouldn’t ruin her life any more than he already had; she thought she and John would get through it if she just worked and worked. She told John many times he couldn’t let the killer ruin his life, too, but she could see the murder was killing him.
For a couple of years John and Sharon felt they were living in the same house without really being together but tried to hold it together. In 1991 they moved out of Rutland Street and in with her sister, Barb, who’d separated from her husband. John lost his latest construction job just before Christmas and didn’t tell Sharon for a week. When she found out, she’d had enough. He’d been trying AA meetings off and on for eleven years and was only getting worse; he’d stop for a couple weeks only to drink again whenever he was around liquor. She loved him but couldn’t do it anymore and told him, “Go.”
John moved in with his mom, but she was almost eighty and couldn’t deal with him the way he was—out of work, drinking. Finally she told him, “You’re not doing this to me; you’re not staying with me.”
John didn’t know what he was supposed to do. Sharon didn’t want him anymore, his friends didn’t want him around, even his mom didn’t. Nowhere to go, not working, he was feeling suicidal, even homicidal. He wanted to take his anger out on somebody, anybody—someone needed to pay for what happened to Barbara Jean.42