The Case of the Drowning Men (8 page)

Before that,
McNeill’s
conduct as he
had
made his way south
on
Second Avenue
from
the
92nd Street
pub
was
apparently
so worrying that a number of passersby took not
ic
e of it,
keenly
watching as
he
staggered and sometimes fell down before getting up and stumbling onward
again
.
These
eye
w
itnesses also described a vehicle
which appeared to have been shadowing McNeill
’s movements
from the minute he left the Dapper Dog
.
Suspicious of
its driver’s
intent,
one of them
,
having
first see
n
it double-parked
at
the bar where McNeill was originally standing, even
had
the wherewithal to
obtain
a partial
license
plate number
.
O
ther o
nlookers
also
reported
the
ir belief that
the occupants were
tailing
the young man
,
saying the vehicle would come to
a
complete
stop
and
then
resum
e
again
each time
McNeill
would
falter
.
W
hen
,
in this
highly
disoriented
condition
,
he
finally
turned
left
onto 90th Street,
everyone
who could see
the vehicle
at that juncture
stated
it
also
took a
left.

And neither was ever seen again.

Though
the N
ew
Y
ork
P
olice
D
epartment
and
legions
of
citizen
volunteers searched for
Patrick McNeill
in the
days and
weeks
following
his mysterious disappearance
,
handing out and
hanging
up
more than
10,000 posters
from New York City to Yonkers and in the process making it one of the most famous missing persons cases in the city’s history,
the young man’s
fate was not
to be
learn
ed
for months.
In the interim, tensions would
steadily
rise between McNeill’s loved ones and the NYPD during the fruitless search, and it wasn’t long
before
the men in blue
, who claimed they were being pressured
by McNeill Senior’
s
strong republican ties in neighboring West
c
hester county,
began
leaking
their own
opinions
about the case
, about
the victim’s
character
,
and his
possible
whereabouts
. M
ost of
the
se
quite negative.

“Patrick made some mistakes,” one detective cryptically alluded. “And it appears he needed some time and space to sort things out.”

“The kid screwed up,” a second NYPD cop emphatically stated. “He’s probably hiding out in Queens.”

“This kid is 21, he’s a partier and he doesn’t want to be in college,” y
et a
nother
city
detective
informed
reporters
, confiding in them with
palpable
disdain that he also
“
knew
”
Patrick
McNeill had impregnated a couple
of
young women
. “He’s running around and involved in all this stuff so he doesn’t have to be in school
,
”
the officer knowledgeably asserted.

One
detective
from NYPD’s
m
issing
p
ersons bureau
even
pointed to the fact that McNeill’s ear and tongue were pierced and that the young man had a Celtic cross tattooed on his forearm as proof he was
deliberately try
i
ng not to be found. “The public wonders why the cops are cynical,”
t
he
de
te
ctive
wearily
opined. “It’s because of cases like this.”

The Dapper Dog,
finding
itself in the crossfire and the
subject
of
extreme
public and legal scrutiny over their role in serving McNeill
on
that night
,
as well as
to their dubious record in general, also joined
in
maligning
the
victim
. “He’s shooting heroin on the Westside,” they
derisively
chimed. “But because he’s 21
now
the cops can’t bring him in.”

McNeill’s
discouraged
family and friends
, placed on the
defensive in this way
,
vehemently
disputed the
se
unflattering
assessments.

“It’s so out of character for my son,” McNeill’s father insisted. “I know it was foul play.”

“If he had problems he’d confide in us. And nothing was bothering him that I know of,” a
friend
who had known McNeill since childhood confidently
assured
the press
.

Even one of his Fordham roommates stated for the record,
“I’ve never seen Pat in a bad mood
.
He’s the last guy who’d run away from a problem
.
”

Things dragged on in this
unseemly
and unproductive
manner well into March
of 1997
, where
the futile
search
-and-rescue
efforts were further exasperated by a
series
of false sighting in other
boroughs of New York. For instance, a real estate agent
from Queens
reported
that someone closely matching the missing man’s description stumbled into his office one day looking “disheveled and upset.” But this
tip
, and others like it,
though investigated,
only amounted to
a
wild goose chase for the already annoyed police officers of the Bronx precinct
,
who moaned
that their time was being wasted on
useless
reports that
led
them nowhere
in search of somebody clearly in hiding.

Finally, on
April
7th
1997
, Patrick McNeill’s
badly decomposed body
, clad only in
his
blue-jeans and socks,
was
spotted
face up
in the East River
near
a
Brooklyn
pier
, some twelve miles away from his last known location.

Because of the
suddenly questionable
circumstances
surrounding McNeill’s death and the condition of his corpse
,
the case
was
then
tentatively upgraded
as a potential abduction and murder
pending further investigation
by the police
. As
such,
it was transferred from the missing persons
department and
re
assigned to the NYPD’s much
-
decorated homicide detective, Kevin Gannon.

Examining
the
remains
and recovery photos,
De
te
ctive Gannon
had
suspected
from
the
body’s
lack of skin
“
slippage
”
that
McNeill
hadn’t been in the water for the entire
two months
he’d
been missing
. Maybe, in fact,
he’d
only
been floating
around
in
the river
a
few days before
being
discovered
.
Lividity wasn’t adding up, either
.
The
telltale discoloration
s
exhibiting on the front of the corpse
clearly
show
ing
McNeil
had to have
died
lying
face down
for all his blood to settle in
those parts
,
whereas
his body
had
been discovered
and recovered
lying face up
.

K
nowing
from experience
, too,
that
people who
accidentally
drown
aren’t
usually
found
floating on their backs
,
or with
rope burns
around
their necks
and other mark
ing
s
,
t
he
detective
was
very
e
ager to
formally
name the
yet unidentified
owners and occupants
of the vehicle
seen
following
the victim
as “persons of interest”
in the case
.

T
hey were not just ogling spectators,
Gannon
felt
certain, and
Patrick McNeill had not
simply
lost his footing
and
fallen
over the dock
in some
alcoholic
stupor. Patrick McNeill hadn’t flung off half his clo
th
e
s
in
the
brutal month
of
February to take a
night
swim either
,
n
or restrained himself
somewhere
with ropes or wires,
torched
his upper torso
and head
,
dumped
his
rotting body
miles upstream
when nobody was around
.

The McNeill’s had been unlucky to lose their son, but in
Kevin Gannon the
y
had
at least
found a friend in law enforcement
, someone
just
as determined as they were to
find
justice.

C
ompletely i
n line with the family’s way of thinking,
the
homicide
detective also
regarded the intoxicated angle with
a great deal
of skepticism.
If
a
man
McNeill’s
size, a former high-school football captain,
had
appeared that
wasted
on only
two or three
cocktails
, Gannon believed
he
must’ve
been drugged to make it look that way, slipped a mick
e
y
,
as they
call it
in the business.
Probably
a
date-rape
narcotic
like
Ro
h
y
pnol
or GBH
,
he
speculated,
colorless
substances
at that time and
virtually tasteless
so
they
c
ouldn’t
easily
be detected
when
added to
a drink
.
The effects of either Rohypnol or GBH
―
impaired speech and
muscle
coordination, blackouts
,
amnesia
―
could be quadrupled
, even lethal,
if
mixed with enough alcohol, and both drugs
were known to be
f
ast-acting and
almost
untraceable
,
even in an autopsy.