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Caught in the Act Page 5
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He didn’t waste any time, getting out of his cab much earlier than he had in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. He donned his hunting attire, the exact same set of black clothes he had worn the night before. There were traces of blood on them that had barely dried from the murder he had committed the night before. He hadn’t even bothered to shower, despite the stifling and oppressive heat of the past few days. As he set out into the surrounding woods on foot, he could only have been looking to add another trophy to his collection.
Less than a quarter mile south, the figure in black stepped out of the woods at the edge of Woodcrest Condominiums. The three-story, sand-colored brick buildings were bound by I-495 on the north and on the south by Route 110, Littleton Road, which runs parallel to the highway. The trucker began skulking around in the shadows, looking for the right opportunity to enter one of the darkened units. For him, this meant an unlocked door so he could enter quietly. If he could determine that a woman was inside, she had to be alone, preferably sleeping. No situations like that presented themselves. It was only about 11:00 p.m., a lot earlier than usual for him to be out hunting, and there were lights on everywhere. This spelled trouble, but he was determined to try a couple more doors before moving on. Something made him pause outside building 6. For whatever reason, the ground-floor door of apartment 311 stood out among all the others, and he made his move. When he tried the door, however, he found that it was locked. He had also been spotted by the female resident as he approached her unit. She had been watching television in bed beside her sleeping husband when she heard someone trying to get inside through the basement door. She got up and went over to the second-floor bedroom balcony, which overlooked the backyard. Directly below her, she spotted a lurking figure wearing all black in the shadowy darkness. The woman immediately woke her husband and told him what she had seen, then called the police.
Chelmsford is just under twenty-three square miles and retains a fifty-member police department, about thirty of whom are patrol officers. Some nights there might be as few as four units on patrol, but this night, less than an hour before the shift change, there were six. Two of them, Officers Francis Teehan in Car 1 and Shawn Swift in Car 4, responded separately to this suspicious-person call and both arrived at approximately the same time, 11:09 p.m. The woman described the suspect as “stocky” and wearing black clothes, including a dark knit hat. She said she’d been unable to get a look at the suspect’s face before he disappeared into the woods in the direction of the truck stop behind the condos.
The officers searched the surroundings, but the suspect was long gone.
By 2:00 a.m., the trucker had moved on from Woodcrest Condominiums to the Chelmsford Mobile Home Park, a little farther south on Littleton Road. Based on the time of night that he had been most active in the past, it would seem that he felt much safer at this particular hour. Maybe he even felt invincible. Is that what gave him the brazen confidence that enabled him to enter someone’s house in search of a vulnerable woman to control with fear and violence ? What appeared certain was that the risks he was prepared to undertake now were not ones that he would have considered earlier. The trailer park was quite large, and the homes were all tightly clustered together, which would have been far too intimidating for him to consider earlier in the night. Now, with his confidence high, he approached the first unit on the left, just inside the entrance of the park. He immediately noticed the glow of a computer screen in one of the windows, and moved quickly out of the shadows.
The residence belonged to Gladys Shea, who lived there with her daughter, Kathy Crowley, and her granddaughter, Michele. Looking inside the window, the trucker observed fourteen-year-old Michele sitting in front of a desktop computer in the small living room. As he moved in for a closer look, the young girl noticed that someone was outside. At first, she believed it was her mother, whom she knew was still up and perhaps had gone out to have a smoke. However, a moment later Michele saw her mother enter the room from the kitchen.
“Mom, were you just outside the house on the porch?”
“No,” Kathy Crowley said with a rising sense of alarm.
“Well, I just saw somebody outside the window I thought was you.”
Concerned, Kathy stepped outside onto the porch. She looked all around but didn’t see anyone, so she went back inside. “There’s nothing there now.”
“It was probably nothing,” Michele said, turning her attention back to the computer.
“It’s time to turn the thing off and get to bed, anyway.”
“Oh, Mom!”
“Forget ‘Oh, Mom!’ Off it goes. You have until I come out of the bathroom.”
As the bathroom door closed, Michele sighed and then suddenly spotted something out of the corner of her eye. In the window, right beside her, was a face, though it was covered by what she thought was some type of bag that had been pulled over the head. She screamed, and her mother instantly emerged from the bathroom.
“What?”
Michele jumped up out of her chair. “Someone was in the window again.”
Kathy didn’t see anything when she looked, but thinking it was a Peeping Tom who she could easily frighten off for good, she rushed back outside without hesitation. A couple of trailers down, she saw something in the darkness. It was a rather large figure, walking farther away.
“Hey, what are you doing?” she yelled at the retreating silhouette.
Suddenly, he stopped and turned to face her, and she knew instantly that she was in trouble. He had a large belt strapped to his waist, and at first she thought he might be a cop or a security guard. But he was dressed entirely in black—like a Ninja, she thought. Kathy did not know what weapons he was carrying, but she was sure that he was not a police officer.
She was temporarily frozen in terror, but as soon as the figure started to make a decisive move in her direction she ran back into the trailer, slamming the door and locking it behind her. At the same time, she screamed to her daughter, “Close the window! And lock it!” She picked up the phone to call the police, and when she looked back around at the kitchen window she saw the black-masked figure peering in at them. Frantically trying to dial out, she realized that her daughter was still logged on to the Internet using the telephone line, so she was unable to get through.
As soon as she turned and noticed that the face in the window had disappeared, she heard the door handle being jiggled and then a moment later a loud banging. The prowler outside was pounding on the door.
Thinking quickly, Kathy grabbed her cell phone and her daughter, then retreated to the bedroom at the farthest end of the trailer, where her mother, Gladys, was sleeping. She used an ironing board as a wedge under the door handle, bracing it against the floor to reinforce the meager lock.
It was 2:17 a.m. when Kathy reached a 911 operator.
“Please hurry,” she begged. “There’s someone outside my house looking in all the windows.”
“Okay, what’s the address?”
As she was talking to the emergency dispatcher, the prowler’s violent pounding on the external door was recorded, and the whole trailer was shaking.
“Oh, he’s trying to break in! Oh my God! Somebody’s trying to break in . . . Get somebody here . . . quick! He’s trying to break in right now!”
“Okay, what part of the house is he at?”
“He’s at the front door!”
“He’s at the front door?”
“He might be in the house! I can hear something now! He’s breaking in! Hurry up!”
“Do you know who it is?” the dispatcher calmly asked.
“He’s at the front door. Just get the police here, quick!”
There was a sudden explosion of light, prompting all three women to react in heightened panic, believing the prowler had entered the trailer.
“He’s in the house now! Please!”
The attacker was still outside, however; he had smashed the outside porch light beside the door. Even as help was summoned and just seconds aw
ay, the women remained huddled together, completely defenseless and absolutely terrified.
Officer Robert Murphy of the Chelmsford Police Department had been assigned to Car 1 that night, and he was the first respondent to the scene. Officer Bruce Darwin in Car 4 and Sergeant Frank Goode in Car 9 quickly followed. Hearing the officer’s firm knocking on the front door, the female residents thought the prowler had returned. When Kathy confirmed that it was the police, she immediately let them inside.
She explained what had happened, describing the prowler as a heavyset white male wearing tight black clothes that resembled a wet suit. She also described the subject as wearing a belt that “looked like what the police wear” with “things hanging off it.”
The officers did not notice any damage to the exterior screen door, but the plastic fixture around the exterior light was busted and the glass bulb had been shattered. Kathy informed them that she believed the man had broken the light on purpose to prevent them from seeing him, and as a result she had not gotten a good enough look to be able to identify him. She also reported that a pack of cigarettes was missing from the outside porch.
Following a thorough search of the area around their lot and elsewhere around the mobile home park, no trace of the prowler was found. The women were so shaken by what happened, however, that they packed some belongings and stayed the rest of the night at a friend’s home. They were convinced that the prowler would return, and there was no way they were going to stay there after what they had just been through. The officers remained in the area for more than an hour afterward, patrolling the grounds of the mobile home park, looking for anything suspicious.
After leaving Gladys Shea’s trailer, the trucker had made his way back through the woods, moving north until he reached Hunt Road, which he followed west. At 3:00 a.m., there were no cars on the road, which would have only enhanced any fantasies he may have been entertaining that he was something of a spirit, moving unseen and unstoppable through the darkness. The road crossed over I-495, less than a half mile south of the truck stop where his rig was parked.
After a short distance, Hunt Road merged into Pine Hill Road, which split off in two directions. To the left was a nursery, and on the other side of the street, at the corner of the intersection that formed a wide-angled Y, was a beautifully restored rambling farmhouse. The trucker took an indirect route toward the large estate, walking among the shadows along the far side of the road before cutting across in the backyard, his steps slow and deliberate.
The property was gated, but he quickly gained access to a large patio area by unlatching the adjoining door. He sidled past an in-ground pool and approached a rear entry exterior door. He tried it. It was unlocked. He stepped into the farmhouse.
As he stepped cautiously through the dark interior, he moved through a narrow hallway into the back end of the kitchen. He immediately spotted an iPod cradled in a stereo dock on a countertop. He reached for it, but in grasping it, he accidentally touched the play button, and loud music began to blare from the device. This home invasion ended at that moment, as the trucker instantly released the iPod and fled, making no attempt to turn it off and leaving the farmhouse the same way he came in.
There were two women asleep in their bedrooms upstairs at the time, a mother and a daughter. Both were awakened by the disturbance, but the daughter got up out of bed and went down to the kitchen to turn her iPod off. It was 3:30 a.m., and she was still groggy as she headed back upstairs through the silent house, thinking that the device had gone off on its own. She then went back to bed and didn’t think anything more of it that night.
Chapter 7
THE WRONG ROAD
Shea had been dropped off at home at about a quarter to twelve. The first thing she did was come into our bedroom to let us know she was home. Kevin was out cold by then. Usually one of us would wait up until the kids were all in, and as the Red Sox game had only recently ended, I was still wide awake. Besides, the overhead fan had done little to diminish the room’s oppressive heat, which was not at all conducive to sleep. Shea told me she was going to sleep next door in the guest bedroom, and I couldn’t blame her. She said good night, and as she was turning to leave she started to close the door behind her.
“Shea, could you leave that open a little? Thanks, baby. Have a good night.”
Shea wasn’t quite ready for bed, however, so she went into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of water from the refrigerator. As she walked into the family room and turned on the television, she realized that her brother was not home. Assuming that he would be coming in shortly—he was older, so he had a later curfew—she innocently unlocked the back door for him in case he forgot his key, as he was prone to do. She did not know that Ryan was spending the night at Ricky’s house. Sitting in front of the TV, she flipped through the stations for a while but quickly began to tire. She fought sleep, dozing on the sectional until about 2:00 a.m., when she got up and dragged herself to bed in the guest bedroom. Even with two twin beds in there, the room is quite small, and with the AC unit running full blast, it got very cold in there very quickly. Shea had the blankets piled all the way up to her chin to shield herself from the chilly air as she slept.
Despite having to flee the farmhouse, his fantasy unfulfilled, the trucker felt more charged up than ever. He continued north up Pine Hill, moving through the backyards of the residences on the northern side of the road. When he reached a neighboring property, located diagonally to our home, the neighbor’s dogs went wild, barking like crazy, incensed by the trucker’s movement and most certainly the pungent smell he emitted from his activities over the past twenty-four hours. One of the neighbors was awakened and stumbled out of bed, but he saw nothing in the dark expanse outside his back door. He figured that a passing coyote had riled up the dogs, which in turn had scared the wild animal off.
It was around this time that I woke up. Maybe it was the barking of the dogs, I can’t say for certain. And it was still sweltering. My skin was damp with sweat and my mouth was dry. I was thirsty, so I got out of bed and went to the kitchen to get a glass of water. I had a few sips and then took the glass back with me to the bedroom in case I got thirsty again later on. I went right back to bed, but it wasn’t easy to fall back to sleep. I must have wakened Kevin, because I heard him tossing and turning. I eventually dropped off, but it was far from a deep sleep.
Outside, the masked trucker reached Misty Meadows, a narrow dirt road that provided access from Pine Hill for the three homes at the end of the way. Now he was headed directly toward our house.
It was around 3:40 a.m. when he walked up the driveway along the left side of the house. He passed the doghouse, where our dog, Bosco, was on a leash tethered to a line that ran between two trees. The setup increased his freedom of movement to about twenty feet in either direction. He was a friendly, loving dog, but he had always been very territorial. Whenever someone he didn’t know came on or near the property, he barked incessantly. But if he barked at all that night, with no air conditioner running and the windows open, we would have heard him. However, for whatever reason, Bosco did not seem to stir as the reeking, dark figure entered the backyard through the side gate and up onto the small back porch to the door, which had been unlocked earlier by Shea.
The trucker entered our house and found himself at the back of the family room facing the kitchen. Shea’s purse was on the counter closest to the back door, and mine was on the counter in the kitchen by the phone. He grabbed them both and took them back outside, where he rifled through them, using the concentrated beam of his tiny flashlight to view the contents. He pulled out my driver’s license and the cash I had inside. In Shea’s bag, he came across a small can of pepper spray, which he tossed into the woods outside the fenced-in backyard. He then checked her wallet and found her high school identification card, which had a small color photo of Shea on it. It was all he needed to see.
Finally! he must have thought. Something was going right.
This, after all, was
what he had set out to find.
He took the small amount of cash from her purse and left everything on the porch table. He was anticipating taking the items with him when he left the house later, confident that he was going to emerge successful. Stepping back inside, he slowly made his way through the dark kitchen, turning left and moving down the narrow hallway. He crept past our partially open bedroom door to his left, ignoring me and Kevin and the wad of cash in plain view on our bureau. Instead, he single-mindedly approached the closed door directly in front of him.
When the masked trucker opened the guest room door and saw Shea asleep, he quickly entered the room and closed the door behind him. The drone of the air conditioner softened any sound he made, and the chill air blowing behind Shea toward the intruder diminished the intensity of his odor. He approached the bed more deliberately, almost a shadow in the cool darkness. The time displayed on Shea’s cell phone glowing in the darkness was 3:51. Unsheathing a knife, he clutched it in his gloved right hand and leaned forward over our daughter, who was sleeping soundly on her back, her head turned slightly to the right. He watched her for a moment as she slept, listening to the sound of her shallow breathing. He pulled the covers down to her knees, then reached over and placed his gloved left hand firmly over her nose and mouth.
Shea instantly awakened, but was disoriented at first. Feeling something over her mouth, her first thought was that it was her brother joking around with her, but even in the darkness she could tell that the hulking body leaning over her was not Ryan’s. She felt something cold and sharp pressed against her neck, and as her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she could see that the man was wearing a dark mask.