The investigative team agreed that Fairley was the type of person who might act out with sexual violence. It certainly appeared that he’d done inappropriate things at his mother’s store when she was not there, and that he indulged in pornography. Although nothing in his background suggested murder, he’d definitely crossed a line in other ways, and he showed little respect to women. Perhaps he blamed them for his lonely life.
Upper Merion Township building
At the Upper Merion police station, Fairley seemed relaxed and cooperative. He was shown to a black vinyl chair in Saville’s office. Peffall noticed that he wore a thick layer of what looked like acne medication. “I saw Clearasil on his forehead and face,” he said, “so I got a wet paper towel and told him to wipe it off.”
Fairley obediently cleaned off his face, leaving a smudgy mess on the towel. It was, in fact, women’s make-up, but Peffall was not looking at this. He was staring at Fairley’s face. “The hair stood up on the back of my neck,” he said. “I could see clear scratch marks.” He recalled that Jimmy Manderach had said his wife would fight to protect herself and their child.
“How did you get those scratches?” Peffall asked.
Fairley had a ready answer. “I was moshing last night.”
“Moshing? What’s that?”
Fairley explained that it was a type of aggressive dancing performed while listening to punk or heavy metal music. The dancers slammed against one another. Peffall was incredulous, but Fairley assured him that while people can get hurt, it was a lot of fun. Peffall asked him to describe everything he’d done the day before.
Mosh pit
Fairley said that he’d managed the store all afternoon until closing at 5:00. He’d then cleaned up, taken out the trash, and changed his clothes to join a friend named Christopher. They had made plans a week earlier to go to a club in Philadelphia, and that’s where they went.
“What club?”
“The Asylum,” Fairley responded. “I applied for a membership.”
He and Christopher had stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts for a cup of coffee, Fairley continued, arriving at the club after 8:00 PM. They’d stayed just half an hour, because they didn’t like the band. They had decided to go to Christopher’s house to play video games, but his father was watching football, so they made an alternate plan. Christopher’s brother joined them to go over to the Denny’s restaurant at the King of Prussia Mall. Around 11:30 PM, Fairley said, they left. He dropped off the brothers and drove home.
Nothing he said seemed deceptive, but experienced detectives know that people can often hide criminal acts with a simple deflective tactic: Tell a story with lots of detail. Fairley looked at them, waiting. Peffall thought his explanation for the scratches was bogus, but they had to check it out. They asked for Christopher’s contact information, but continued to ask what Fairley might know about Lisa and Devon Manderach.
“It was a unique interview,” Peffall said. “We went at him and went at him, over several hours. We had the baby and we needed the mom.”
Time was wasting, Peffall knew. If Devon’s body had been so thoughtlessly tossed down a slope, Lisa’s body could be lying somewhere exposed. As many as twenty hours had passed, which meant that animals could already have disturbed it. Although DNA still got a shaky reception in court, over the past few years, the science had gained credibility. If Lisa had scratched her attacker, they might recover his skin from under her nails, but they would need to find her quickly. If Fairley had raped her, this evidence could deteriorate as well. But Fairley did not budge from his story.
Peffall applied more pressure. “We told him, ‘You gotta do the right thing.’”
Gradually, they observed a change. The more they appealed to his conscience, the less confident he seemed. “At one point,” Peffall recalled, “he looked down and started to get tears in his eyes. That was a good moment for us. I had a picture of Devon in a high chair, eating a piece of her birthday cake with a candle on it. When his tears started, I knew he was vulnerable, so I pulled out that picture.”
“Because we had Devon,” said Saville, “we suspected by then that something had gone seriously wrong with Lisa also. We’d tell him, ‘We’ve gotta get Devon back to her mother. Something bad has happened and they need to be together.’ His lower lip would tremble and he would tear up.”
To the detectives’ disappointment, he pulled himself together. The tears stopped. He looked from Saville to Peffall and said, “I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”
Fairley wanted a lawyer, and his mother, who had been shut out of the interview, was already in the process of hiring one. They had to stop. Now it would be a waiting game. Peffall could feel the tension. They’d been so close to getting the information they needed. Fairley was their guy, he was certain.
Castor was disappointed, too. He already knew there’d been nothing of consequence on Devon that tied Fairley to her murder, so they didn’t yet have probable cause to search the store, or Fairley’s car or home. They were in limbo.