AFTER INTERROGATING THE FAHYS, Devlin and Worrell claimed later, they considered the neighborhood. The Fahys had urged them to look at anyone who’d been living at 7244 Rutland, now boarded up by the city after being used as a drug flophouse. From neighbors they’d heard rumors that Sarge Green, one of the inhabitants, had killed Barbara Jean because John Fahy owed him money for drugs.1 And the detectives knew 7244 as a trouble house because in 1986, two years before Barbara Jean’s murder, Maureen Dunne, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a fellow detective, had been murdered in the basement. One of their colleagues in the small SIU office, Detective Edward Rocks, had overseen the taking of the crime scene photos in the Dunne murder and had worked as well on Barbara Jean’s murder in 1988.
If Devlin and Worrell looked at the Dunne murder file, they would have read about Walter Ogrod, the young man who lived with the Greens at 7244, who’d been a key witness in that case. Later, this would become an important point in the case against Ogrod, but Devlin and Worrell swore they never did.
Devlin and Worrell did hear about Ogrod from some of his neighbors, who called him “Crazy Walter” and described him as strange, “off”; he talked funny, kept to himself, was “retarded” or something.2
Though the detectives would later deny that they considered Ogrod a suspect, he did fit several of their criteria for a suspect: he was weird, his house was nearby and was a trouble house, and Barbara Jean would’ve felt comfortable there because of her friendship with the Green children. Later, Devlin and Worrell would admit only that when they realized Ogrod had only ever been spoken to once about Barbara Jean, the quick interview at his door the day after the murder, they decided they should speak to him again.
Walter Ogrod was born February 3, 1965, at St. Vincent’s orphanage in Philadelphia. His father was sixteen, his mother fourteen; she left the facility a month later. Walter was adopted at three months old by Walter and Olga Ogrod. Walter Sr. (they had different middle names, but I’ll use “Jr.” and “Sr.” for clarity) was forty-two, a World War II veteran who’d participated in the liberation of a concentration camp and worked as a draftsman, designing chemical plants and refineries. Olga was thirty-six, a secretary in a furniture shop and a dressmaker and artist. They’d met at a dance at the Ukrainian club on Franklin Avenue in the early 1950s and after getting married bought the tiny row house at 7244 Rutland Street. Art and design were Olga’s passions; twice she designed the first-prize-winning bonnet for the annual Atlantic City Easter Parade, and at one point a local department store was interested in some of her dress designs. But Walter Sr. didn’t want his wife going into business, belittled her frequently, and, she told her brother, beat her. Olga’s family felt her creativity threatened him. She was also schizophrenic and was hospitalized in 1954 after cutting her wrists.
The Ogrods had tried for years to have a baby before deciding to adopt, and for a time Walter Jr.’s arrival seemed to improve the marriage. He was the star of the family, a cheerful baby who loved to hug.3 Two years later the couple adopted another infant, Gregory. But as the boys grew, the marriage disintegrated. According to what Olga told her family, if Walter Sr. saw another woman he found attractive, he would point out some way Olga should try to be more like her. Olga had plastic surgery on her nose to try to please him. He hated that she was an artist and mocked her in front of the children. One day when the boys were about five and three, she was teaching them to paint and he went into a rage, yelling that he didn’t want them learning that art garbage and stomping his foot through the table on which they were working. When the boys misbehaved, she said, he beat them, sometimes with a slat from a wood floor.
Olga’s stories to her family became even more ominous. She described Walter Sr. as hyperreligious, lighting white candles all over the house, getting on his knees and praying for hours, telling Olga she would burn in hell if she left him. The end finally came in 1970 when, she said, in a rage, he pulled a gun. Olga took the kids and moved, and found work taking shopper surveys at a nearby mall. Walter Sr. agreed to pay thirty-five dollars a week in child support but did so only sporadically. Olga couldn’t afford a babysitter, so on days she couldn’t be home to meet her boys after school they had to wait on the front porch—rain, cold, or snow, they were forbidden to leave the stoop. Olga got much of their food from a local church, and the family went to bed hungry many nights. One year she pawned her wedding ring to buy coats for the boys. She argued bitterly with Walter Sr. about who owned the house on Rutland Street, claiming she’d contributed most of the down payment. This became one of the fixations of her life, and as her mental state worsened, she filed multiple lawsuits.
Walter Jr. and Greg dressed in worn-out clothes, didn’t have bikes, and were outcasts in their new neighborhood, not invited to join the neighborhood kids in their games.4 It didn’t help that Walter Jr.’s black hair always seemed greasy, he had a speech impediment, and he seemed mentally slow and clumsy. And he behaved strangely—lying on the ground and spinning around in circles or making guttural noises. He didn’t like to be touched and would pull away when his brother tried to hug him. If he fixated on something, he couldn’t let it go. If the ice cream truck came and Olga had no money, Greg, two years younger, would understand but Walter Jr. would scream “I want ice cream!” over and over, crying.
The neighborhood kids thought Olga was strange, too. They’d see her, tiny and frail, dressed all in black, walking quickly from her apartment to the bus stop, never stopping to talk. They thought she was a ghost. John Fahy was one of the neighborhood children who remembered her drawing while riding the bus, how strange that seemed.5
Walter Jr. and Greg went to Catholic school for a few years and then to public school when their father stopped paying the tuition. Walter lived in a world of perpetual self-defense, consistently picked on at school, where he got in fights to defend himself, and physically and emotionally abused by his mother at home. She’d hit him, throw him into walls, tell him that he was nuts like his father and that she should have him put away. She took him to doctor after doctor; she’d yank him out of school, telling him he couldn’t learn, then put him in another school, then take him out again for long stretches.6
Sometimes Olga took the boys to an artists’ colony where she went to sell her drawings. As they got older her artwork became increasingly bizarre—she painted tortured faces and affixed human hair, eyelashes, and fingernails to her canvases. She increasingly focused her delusions and paranoia on Walter Jr., saying he was trying to kill her. Sometimes she’d lead him to a table, point to a lamp, and convince him it didn’t exist.
One friend of Walter’s, William Daka, was a few years older and saw Walter getting picked on every day, called names, teased, and beaten up. William thought Walter was too easy a target, too slow and odd and unable to fit in, so he began to intervene. Otherwise, he thought, Walter would’ve been beaten up every day.7
At home Walter acted out, kicking and screaming, knocking holes in walls, smashing in a door. Sometimes when Olga couldn’t control him, Greg would watch her take an eyedropper and put a few drops of something in Walter Jr.’s orange juice. Walter Jr. would calm down. Greg stopped drinking orange juice. Other times Olga would call her brother John, who, frustrated at being woken up in the middle of the night again, would arrive to a familiar scene: Walter Jr., a big kid for his age, kicking and screaming, his speech impediment giving the screaming a harrowing quality. John would wrestle him to the ground and sit on him until he calmed down, sometimes spanking him with an old fraternity paddle. Once he hit Walter Jr. with a belt and the buckle caught Walter Jr.’s eye.8
Walter Jr.’s behavioral problems weren’t as bad at his father’s house; he got along well with his father, who dressed his boys in nice clothes, though he made them change back into their old clothes before returning to their mother’s. And Walter was still picked on by neighborhood kids. He fought sometimes, but fighting wasn’t his first choice; he wanted to be liked and accepted and would do anything most kids said, believe anything they told him.9
Olga was deteriorating mentally, filing more lawsuits against her ex-husband and against anyone she thought wronged her, fighting back against a world she was sure was out to get her. In September 1975, she checked ten-year-old Walter Jr. into a psychiatric hospital, telling the staff he assaulted her. She claimed he kicked and bit her, but doctors observed that he had no aggressive interactions with anyone other than her, and noted Olga’s psychiatric history. Walter Jr. stayed for a month, being treated with psychotherapy and medication, and was released with a diagnosis of hyperactivity, minimal brain damage (which seems to translate roughly to “something not quite right”), and adjustment reaction of childhood.10
On April 12, 1976, after another call from Olga, Uncle John wrestled Walter Jr. into a car and took him to the emergency room at Nazareth Hospital. Olga, screaming and waving her arms, told the staff her son was violent and abusive, had threatened to kill her, and she wanted him locked up in a state home forever. The doctor on duty observed that Walter Jr. seemed fine and suspected instead that Olga was mentally ill and had been abusing her son. He didn’t want to send Walter Jr. home with her but couldn’t get in touch with Walter Sr., so he checked the boy into the hospital.11
All Walter Jr. knew was he was supposed to see his grandmother that night, then they were driving up to the emergency room and his mother was saying he needed to be admitted.12 He ended up spending a month at Nazareth Hospital under the care of a psychiatrist, Dr. Peter Ganime. Ganime called Walter Jr.’s school and was told that the staff there had never seen any of the violent behaviors Olga described, but that they had seen bruises on him and suspected he was being abused. Ganime tried to meet with Olga, but her behavior was erratic; she missed a scheduled appointment, then called twice demanding to see him immediately, and when he couldn’t, refused to accept another appointment time, then eventually accepted it, then didn’t show up again. Ganime came to believe that Olga was paranoid schizophrenic and suffered from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a condition that causes mentally ill parents to project their illnesses onto their children.13 Essentially, Olga was seeing her own paranoid schizophrenic horrors in her son.
Dr. Ganime was able to meet with Walter Sr., who struck him as gentle and kind, showing no signs of the violent nature Olga described. Walter Sr. told him about Olga’s 1954 suicide attempt, her endless lawsuits, her paranoia, his concern that she was driving Walter Jr. into mental hospitals.14 After the meeting Ganime was able to have a phone conversation with Olga, but when he recommended Walter live with his father she refused adamantly, saying she preferred to have him in a mental institution for the rest of his life.15
The doctors at Nazareth described Walter Jr. as showing no signs of psychosis—he was not mentally ill. They described him as being of limited intellectual capacity and diagnosed him with anxiety neurosis and what we now call attention deficit disorder. When it was time to leave Nazareth, Walter Jr. had to go in front of a judge to choose which parent to live with; he picked his father. When Olga visited the hospital and heard about this, she tried to attack Walter and had to be escorted from the building. Greg stayed with his mother, so the brothers did not spend a lot of time together after that.
Walter Jr. moved in with his father, who enrolled him in the Ashbourne School for learning disabled and troubled children. He got along well with staff, though they noted he was immature—if another student yelled, for example, Walter Jr. yelled, too.
As a teenager Walter Jr. was extremely self-conscious about his acne, his speech impediment, and his weight, refusing to ever wear shorts even on the hottest days because he thought his legs looked gross. He couldn’t process other peoples’ words very quickly, and when he tried to respond, his speech sounded funny. He couldn’t get other students’ jokes and they teased him for it, and for being fat and clumsy.16 He had trouble understanding and expressing his own emotions and with perceiving others’ emotional cues. He knew people thought he was a freak.17 He would throw the other students’ contempt back at them, responding to their taunts by telling them he was the smartest kid in class. (This trait is common enough in people with autism spectrum disorder to have become known as “Asperger’s arrogance.”)18 The school staff told him to let them handle it when he was bullied, but he’d grown up defending himself, so that’s what he did. He could throw other kids around or sit on them; he was once suspended for a day for pushing a kid who called him fat. In another fight he fractured his wrist and in two others got concussions.
Still, at Ashbourne Walter Jr. was industrious and made good academic progress; by age fifteen he was working at an eighth-grade level.
In the late 1970s, Walter Sr.’s diabetes and kidney problems worsened, and by the early ’80s he was going blind. Walter Jr. got a learner’s permit early so he could drive his father on errands and to dialysis appointments; he helped with his father’s stomach drainage bag, drew his insulin for him, helped with injections, wrote checks and signed legal documents for him, and, as Walter Sr. worsened, explained everything to him. Walter Sr. retired in 1982 and lived on Social Security disability benefits.19
Walter Sr. worried what would become of his son after he died. At Walter Jr.’s appointments with Dr. Ganime, Walter Sr. would pull the doctor aside and tell him he was terrified that soon he wouldn’t be able to care for his son and the boy would have to go live with Olga, who wouldn’t be able to handle him, so he’d end up back in an orphanage. Walter Sr. said he’d been in an orphanage when he was a child and couldn’t stand the thought of his son ending up in one. He knew he wouldn’t live long and suffered from despondency, insomnia, anorexia, intense anxiety, and depression. Walter Jr., equally worried about his father, was anxious and depressed to the point of “desperation.”20
In 1982, when Walter Jr. turned seventeen, a possible solution presented itself: the army. Walter Sr., the World War II veteran, hoped the army would teach Walter Jr. how to take care of himself. Dr. Ganime wrote a letter of support, and Walter Jr. enlisted and was sent to Fort Dix in New Jersey for basic training, scheduled to become a truck driver. On just his second day he was admitted to the base hospital with a bad reaction to an immunization. By the end of the second week, other recruits were treating him as their “errand boy” and he’d been in two fights with a recruit who bullied him.21 He was sent back to the hospital, where he told the doctors that other recruits were scapegoating him and wanted to hurt him, that he couldn’t concentrate and felt confused. He said he was “lonesome, wondering, don’t know what to know.”22
He spent six weeks in the hospital. The nurses were struck by his immaturity, noting that he butted into other peoples’ conversations, mocked other patients, and liked to stick his face right next to someone who was trying to read the paper. The doctors diagnosed him with “Mixed Personality Disorder manifested by extreme dependency, immaturity . . . [an] intrinsic belief that he is different from other people, poor history of socialization, poor ability to handle stress.” His “impairment for further military duty” was “marked” and for “social and industrial adaptability” was “definite.”23
Walter Jr. was granted a medical discharge and went back to his father and grandmother. He did the one thing he could always do: work hard. He joined a lawn service company a friend from the Ashbourne School, Richie Hackett, had started, and by 1984 they had 120 landscaping and snow removal clients. They had leaf blowers, fifty-inch mowers, and a couple trucks they used as snowplows in the winter.24 Walter Jr. was the workhorse—most people thought Richie took advantage, letting him do the hard work.
In 1984 Walter Jr. got his certificate of completion from the Ashbourne School, graduating only two years late. He was proud he’d gotten the high score on an aptitude test two years in a row and had lost out on being class valedictorian by only one point. He worked long hours with the landscaping company that summer and took care of his father, who, as Walter described it to me later, looked like an AIDS patient. It hurt seeing his father like that, going blind, going in and out of the hospital for months at a time.
Walter Sr. died at fifty-eight in October 1984.
Walter Jr.’s anchor was gone; he was lost.
“I went for months—I kind of wasn’t there,” he remembered.25
Walter Jr. would have two periods of relative stability in his life. The first one had just ended, and it would be a long, difficult path to the next.