Barbara O’Hara looked at the snowy vista outside her apartment on November 25 and decided it was not a good morning to ride her bike. She called for a taxi and Salvatore Malagnino picked her up.
The sun had not yet quenched all vestiges of darkness when Barbara arrived at 7:15. As soon as they turned onto the street, she knew something was wrong. Every light in the house was on—even the one in the living room that was never used. An ugly premonition clenched her stomach muscles tight as she slid her key into the lock.
Her eyes grazed over the kitchen. The oatmeal was not sitting by the stove. The plates were not on the children’s table. She heard no sound of Liz stirring upstairs. An unpleasant, unrecognized odor hung heavy in the air.
Then she saw the body crumpled in a pool of blood at the foot of the stairs. Her heart thudded like an over-worked piston in her chest. Her mind screamed out in denial and blinded her to what was before her eyes.
“Liz! Liz! Are you okay?” she shouted as she stepped over the body and lunged up the stairs.
Liz was not in the bathroom. Barbara opened the bedroom door. The room was empty. She checked on the two girls. Both were still asleep. That was unusual for Margaret, who was an early riser. Barbara went back to Liz’s room. The phone was beside the bed, where Liz placed it every night. She grabbed the receiver. She would call Michael for help. He would know what to do. No dial tone. She stabbed the disconnect button. She pushed it again with more force. And again. Still, no dial tone. She dropped the receiver and, looking out the window, discovered that her cab driver was still sitting in front of the house. She raced back down the stairs.
Three steps from the landing, reality formed a tight fist that slammed into her head. The boots—yellow boots—Liz’s snow boots. It was Liz at the foot of the stairs. It was Liz in the pool of blood. Was she wearing a red sweater? Or was there just that much blood? Her eyes registered the blood up and down the stairway. Too much blood.
She forced herself to go down the steps to Liz’s body. Liz lay on her right side with her legs pulled slightly toward her chest. Barbara ran outside and asked the driver to call an ambulance and the police.
She hurried back into the house and took Liz in her arms. She felt warmth. Hope was still alive. Her fingers traced the open wounds on the back of Liz’s head. Gently, she laid Liz down as she had found her. She fled the house to find more help.
She banged on the Petersons’ door with the intensity of a jackhammer. Patty, half-dressed, flung the door open to a panting and wild-eyed Barbara.
“Something horrible has happened. Hurry,” Barbara blurted.
Mike appeared at the top of the stairs in a pair of boxers and a tee shirt. Nothing Barbara said made any sense to Patty. She and Michael slapped on their clothes and followed a babbling Barbara over to Liz’s house.
Once inside, Barbara raced upstairs to the bathroom—she thought she was going to be sick. Michael came to the door and, in denial, Barbara told him, “I touched her. She’s warm.”
“She’s not warm, Barbara,” Mike told her, placing his hands on her arms. “She’s not warm—she’s dead. The warmth you felt was from the floor heating.”
The fear that the little girls would see their mother dead and covered with blood propelled Barbara into action. Wrapping a blanket around Margaret, she lifted her up and carried her down the fire escape stairs in the back of the house. She ran around the garden with her precious bundle and left her up the street at the Petersons’ house with Todd and Clayton. She then returned for Martha.
She took the littlest one from the house by the same route, laid the sleeping baby down next to her drowsy sister and slipped back to Liz’s house. When she reached the door, she could not bear the thought of stepping inside. Instead, she headed across the alley and six doors up to the home of DOD teacher Amybeth Berner.
She banged a desperate tattoo on the door. “Come quickly. Something’s happened to Liz,” Barbara pleaded.
Amybeth and her husband, Bruce, grabbed their coats and followed Barbara across the alleyway. Amybeth came through the front door and her eyes focused on the yellow boots. The rest of the body was covered, but she knew it was Liz.
Amybeth turned to Patty Peterson. “What happened?”
Patty said not a word. She just stared into space—a look of disbelief dragged on her face.
Amybeth turned back to the stairs. She absorbed the scene before her. Blood on the walls—a lot of blood. Blood on the floor—too much blood. Her eyes sought out Michael Peterson. She did not say a word, but he saw the question etched on her face.
He told her that Liz had a brain aneurysm and had fallen down the stairs. Something did not seem right to Amybeth, but in her shock she could not shape that vague feeling into a concrete conclusion.
Amybeth hurried back to her home. In the kitchen, she grabbed the green Christmas cookie tin that held her phone numbers. She rooted around until she found the slip for Tom and Cheryl Appel–Schumacher.
Her knees shook and her hands trembled as she dialed the number. Tom, who was home alone, answered her call.
“Tom, you need to sit down,” she ordered. “You and Cheryl need to come right away. Liz had an accident.”
After delivering the news, Amybeth went back to Liz’s house. She approached Liz’s body with the sensation that she was drowning in her own helplessness. She focused in on a bloody footprint on the third step. “Whose footprint is that?”
“That’s my footprint. That’s when I went to get Martha Baby and Gigi,” Barbara admitted, referring to the little girls by their baby names.
“This is a crime scene,” Amybeth insisted. “Someone needs to investigate this. Don’t walk up the stairs.”
“Yes,” Barbara said. “There is an awful lot of blood here.”
“Yes,” Bruce echoed. “Something is wrong. Something is wrong.”
At Amybeth’s suggestion, Bruce went outside and checked the perimeter of the house for any signs of forced entry. Amybeth went down three steps to the lower level and checked the sliding glass garden door from the inside. It was locked. She went around to the washroom in the back of the kitchen. That door was locked, too.
She scanned the house, looking to see if anything was missing or disturbed. They found no evidence of a break-in—no clues pointing to a robbery.