If Looks Could Kill (2 page)
Read If Looks Could Kill Online
Authors: M. William Phelps
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #non fiction, #True Crime
Is history possible? Is anyone serious? Who do we take seriously? Only the lethal believer, the person who kills and dies for faith.
—Don DeLillo,
Mao II
ART
O
NE
It was a typical afternoon in Northeastern Ohio. The type of day when blackbirds, grazing together by the thousands in fields off to the side of the road, are spooked by the slightest sound—a beep of a horn, a shout, a kid speeding by on his skateboard, an impatient motorcyclist whining his engine at a stoplight—and, in an instant, flutter away like a school of minnows, darting from one grassy knoll to the next.
On this day, June 16, 2001, a busy spring Saturday, Carolyn Ann Hyson was sitting inside the employee kiosk of the Akron, Ohio, BJ’s Wholesale Club fuel station, going through the motions of her day. At a few minutes past noon, that otherwise ordinary day took a remarkable turn. Carolyn looked up from what she was doing and saw a motorcycle—“black with lime green trim”—speed past the front of her booth and stop sharply with a little chirp of its tire by the pump closest to her workstation.
At first, none of this seemed to be unusual. Carolyn had seen scores of customers throughout the morning. Some punk on a motorcycle acting unruly was a daily event.
The door to Carolyn’s booth was slightly ajar. It was pleasantly cool outside, about 71 degrees. Clouds had moved in and made the day a bit overcast, yet, at the same time, a cheery manner hung in the air. On balance, what did the weather matter? It was the weekend. Summer was upon Akron. Unlike Carolyn, who worked full-time during the week as a teacher’s aide, most had the day off. As she could see, many had decided to go shopping. BJ’s parking lot behind her was brimming with vehicles, same as the Chapel Hill Mall to her right. For most, it was just another weekend afternoon of errands and domestic chores, shopping with friends and enjoying time off. “It was nice,” Carolyn remarked later. “It was not too hot, not too cold. I was sitting there…just sitting in the booth with the door open.”
But then, in an instant, everything changed.
While Carolyn went about her work, preparing for her next customer, the motorcycle captured her attention. “Because,” she said, “it was making some loud noise.”
The driver, dressed from head to toe in black, wearing a full-face shield, was rocking the throttle back and forth, making the engine whine loudly. The black-clad driver had pulled up almost parallel to a dark-colored SUV, which was sitting at the same pump on the opposite side of the fuel island, about twenty feet from Carolyn’s booth. The SUV had just pulled in. The guy hadn’t even gotten out of his vehicle yet.
After Carolyn shook her head in disgust at the rude motorcyclist, she heard a loud crack—and it startled her. For Carolyn, who “grew up around guns,” and knew the difference between a backfiring car and the steel hammer of a handgun slapping the seat of a bullet, that loud crack meant only one thing.
Several people stood at the other pumps, oblivious to what was going on. Some were fumbling around, squeegeeing their windows clean, while others pumped fuel, staring blankly at the digits as they clicked away their money. All of them, undoubtedly, thinking about the gorgeous day it was turning out to be.
As Carolyn stopped working, that earsplitting explosion—a quick pop—shocked her to attention. It was rapid. A snap, like a firecracker, or the sound of a brittle piece of wood cracking in half.
Realizing it could possibly be a gunshot, Carolyn jumped out of her seat and followed the noise.
At the same time Carolyn heard the loud pop and saw the person on the motorcycle,
Mark Christianson
(pseudonyms are italicized at first use) was wandering around the “tirebox” area of BJ’s, a few hundred yards in back of the fuel station area. A few minutes before, Mark had seen someone on a motorcycle inside the parking lot. “He was riding his bike back and forth,” Mark said later. Mark had used the pronoun “he” more as an expression than a literal term, because he had no idea, really, which gender the person on the bike was.
Not thinking anything of it, Mark went back to his business, but was soon startled by the same loud noise Carolyn had heard. “I thought it was the kids up the hill to my left setting off M-80s.”
So when Mark heard the loud crack, he took off up the steep embankment, hoping to bag the kids and give them a good tongue-lashing. But when he made it around the corner of the building, near the foot of the hill, he noticed there wasn’t anyone around.
Son of a gun. What was that noise?
When Mark got back to the tirebox, he heard Carolyn, who had assessed the situation at the pumps and ran back into her kiosk, “panicking over the PA system.” Then Mark looked toward the fuel pumps and noticed two BJ’s managers running toward Carolyn and the pumps.
Something had happened. Somebody was hurt.
So Mark took off toward them.
Coming out of the booth a moment later, Carolyn saw the motorcyclist standing near the driver’s side door of the SUV. So she stopped by a pillar and stared. Standing, stunned, Carolyn saw “a fully clothed…[person]. Let’s put it that way because I could not tell you what he was. I see a person standing there….”
The person she saw, Carolyn explained, had his or her hands stretched out, pointed at the SUV, much like a cop holding a weapon on someone and saying
“Freeze!”
But at that moment, the motorcyclist turned to look at Carolyn. The rider, underneath his or her face shield, looked directly at Carolyn for a brief moment, perhaps sizing her up. Then hopped back on the bike and sped off toward Home Avenue, just to the west of the fuel pumps, and down a short inlet road. Carolyn later described the look the motorcyclist gave her as a “chill that went through” her. The person had a steely gaze about him or her. One of those rigid, “forget what you just saw” looks. It seemed threatening to Carolyn. She was terrified.
Within a few seconds—or so it seemed—the person on the motorcycle drove past a small grassy area near the fuel station entrance, stopped momentarily to avoid hitting a car, floored the gas throttle and, leaving a patch of rubber behind, sped off through a red light, took a sharp left near Success Avenue, jumped over the railroad tracks and disappeared out of sight.
The entire sequence of circumstances took about ninety seconds.
Carolyn had already approached the man in the SUV. A big man, she remembered. Tall. Handsome. White hair. “I went over to him,” she remembered later in court, “and he was sitting there…and his head was rolling back and forth, back and forth. I could see the life going out of him because he was turning completely white.”
Then Mark approached. He saw a “white male with his head down,” slumped over, inside the same black SUV. “I thought he passed out…that there was a fire or something. But when I got in front of the truck, I noticed both windows were busted.”
Carolyn was shaking so bad after seeing the color flush out of the man’s face that, when she returned to her kiosk, she had trouble dialing 911.
Located about three miles north of BJ’s Wholesale Club, Akron City Hospital, on East Market Street, employs dozens of doctors and nurses who stop at BJ’s to gas up and grab a few gas-and-snack items—chips, soda pop, gum, candy, whatever—on their way to work. Many even live in the Chapel Hill Mall area and, on weekends, frequent the different shops. After Mark took another look at the guy in the SUV and realized he was hurt pretty bad, he heard one of his bosses call out over the PA system for any doctors and/or nurses in the immediate area. No sooner had the plea gone out when “five women,” Mark recalled, “[ran] over, who were nurses and doctors, and proceed to pull the gentleman out of the truck.”
One of them, who claimed to be a doctor, asked Carolyn if she had any alcohol around. Quick-thinking Carolyn grabbed the eyewash solution, which she knew was loaded with alcohol, and poured it over the doctor’s hands.
Standing there, watching everything going on, with a crowd of people now swelling around, Mark knew immediately—after the nurses and doctors dragged the man out of his SUV onto the ground and began working on him—that the guy was in serious trouble.
“There was blood all over his shirt,” Mark recalled.
Beyond that, there was even more blood draining down the back of his head and a starfish-shaped hole about the size of a dime on the opposite side of his cheek.
Ed Moriarty grew up in Akron. He was just a kid when, after leaving high school in 1964 and subsequently spending three years in the military, 1½ of which included a tour with the Third Marine Amphibious Force in Vietnam, he found himself back in the thicket of Akron wondering what to do with his life. In his absence, many of Moriarty’s friends had gone on to college to become educators. Moriarty had gone to Catholic schools most of his life. He even understood a bit of Latin. He surely had the skills, definitely the patience, and no doubt the will, to become a teacher himself. It was a noble profession.
So what was stopping him?
As Moriarty settled in back home after returning from Vietnam, the thought of teaching was far from his mind. The first thing he did was get a job with the East Ohio Gas Company. Then he went to a local university to pursue a degree in education—but the prospect soon vanished. Not because he didn’t want to sit in class for four more years, or go through the rigmarole of the school system, but all those friends of his who had gone into teaching were leaving the field. The pay was horrible, Moriarty heard. Students were taking control of the classrooms. Teachers had little say anymore in what went on with the curriculum, or the treatment they could dish out to unruly kids.
Hearing all of that, Moriarty wanted no part of it. Life then wasn’t easy. Returning to society from Vietnam, he recalled, was confusing, and plagued by more questions than answers. “It wasn’t like it is now,” he said, “where even if you don’t support the war in Iraq, everybody is at least showing their support for the troops. When I returned from Vietnam, that wasn’t the country’s situation. It was more of a, well, it didn’t matter which aspect you played in the Vietnam War,
you
were
part
of the problem.”
This unwelcoming sentiment was unsettling to Moriarty. It troubled him. He had given three years of his life to the military. He had seen friends and fellow soldiers wounded and killed. He could have almost died himself. Now people were saying he was wrong for standing behind his country.
After a few years, Moriarty decided he needed to find a career path. He wasn’t getting any younger. He wanted to get married someday and start a family, but still hadn’t settled on any one particular vocation.
Then one day, Moriarty said, it happened. “I saw an ad in the newspaper for the Akron Police Department, applied and became a patrol officer.”
At the time Ed Moriarty had stumbled onto what would become his life’s passion, Northeastern Ohio was in a state of social chaos. It was May 4, 1970. Tensions between student demonstrators at Kent State University and the Ohio National Guard, who had been called in to control the escalating situation, were getting out of hand. People were screaming. Throwing things. Yelling insults at government and school officials. Taunting National Guardsmen. What inspired the quagmire, some later suggested, was an American invasion of Cambodia President Richard Nixon had launched a few weeks earlier. Nixon had made the announcement during a televised presedential address five days later. Since then, a group of Kent State students had become outraged. In the end, four students ended up getting shot by National Guardsmen and the day went down as a turning point in American social history.
As Moriarty’s career with the Akron Police Department (APD) took off, “I gotta tell ya,” he said, chuckling humbly, “I was always in the right place at the right time. It seemed from that very first year, my law enforcement career went from one desirable assignment to another.”
It took on a fast track, in other words.
“After two years in patrol, I was transferred to the traffic bureau as an accident investigator. It was at this [point] when I received the schooling and training that gave me the foundation for all aspects of police investigation.”
He was then assigned to the solo motorcycle unit, where he was given the responsibility of escorting celebrities, politicians and any other dignitaries that came into Akron.
“That was a real good situation to be in.”
Moriarty’s next move was undercover, in vice and narcotics, where he stayed for about ten years.
“I liked it because most police work is responsive—whereas, in vice, you initiate the work. Undercover work means that you seek it out.”
A point Moriarty wanted to make clear was that throughout his career, police work was never about individual police officers.
“Police work is the combination of a lot of people working
really
hard toward one goal.”
By 1991, he was promoted to sector sergeant, which put him back in uniform. Things were rolling for Moriarty. He had found his place in the community and loved going to work, even though he was given the dreaded midnight-to-eight shift. “Every shift is set up in four sectors,” he explained, “and there are usually four cars in a sector, which can give you anywhere between seven to eight law enforcement officers you’re responsible for during your shift. Like any police department, we were often shorthanded, so I had, sometimes, two sectors, fourteen officers, to look out for.”
All cops have that “one case” they can recall without even thinking about it. It’s generally an investigation where all involved shake their heads for years afterward, talking about it over beers at the local pub. For Moriarty, that case took place one day when he and a team of detectives had answered a domestic violence call. When they arrived at the home and walked in, they found the suspect had cut his wife’s head off, placed it in a bucket and left it on the premises for everyone to see.
“Incredible, really,” Moriarty said, looking back. “We just couldn’t believe this guy had actually cut his wife’s head off and put it in a bucket. You never know what to expect on any give day of police work.”