The Murder Room (27 page)

James Churchill, chief investigator for the Ocean County prosecutor’s office, said Assur was taking medicine for depression, and had killed herself near the spot where her sister had fallen to her death in a horse-riding accident seven years earlier. Fleisher and Gordon thought the police inquiry was “a joke.”

So they piled into a car with Joe O’Kane and Frank Bender, a team of four Philadelphia VSMs, and drove seventy-five miles east to the wooded area near Toms River, New Jersey, to see for themselves. Maybe an ex-Customs drug agent, FBI agent, black-belt polygraph examiner, and psychic artist could spot something the cops missed.

“It was unbelievable,” Bender said. Although the body had been removed and the scene cleaned up, they found fragments of Zoia’s clothes, even a piece of fingernail. Fleisher was more surprised by the mile they had to hike into the woods to find the place. And the style and location of the suicide weapon—a heavy, German-made Heckler & Koch P7, an eight-shot automatic found in a bag twenty-seven feet from the body.

“I get it,” he said sarcastically. “This petite young woman who is weak and sickly fights her way almost a mile through thick brush carrying a gun she’s incapable of firing. It takes twelve and a half pounds of pressure to fire the P7, and she’s not going to be able to turn it around herself and find the force to pull the trigger at that angle.” To test his theory, Fleisher asked Jan Bender, who was about the same size as Zoia, to try to shoot herself in the chest with the same gun, empty, at an indoor shooting range. Wearing a bulletproof vest, she awkwardly pointed the P7 automatic with both hands back at her chest, and pulled the trigger with all her strength for several minutes. She couldn’t do it. When she finally succeeded, the gun was pointing over her shoulder.

Standing on the soft Pine Barrens sand, Fleisher continued his theory. “So now we’re supposed to believe Zoia shoots herself once in the chest, has the strength to shoot herself twice more, once in the heart, then puts the gun in a bag and moves it nearly thirty feet away?”

The big man smiled. “Yeah, this was a suicide, and Gordon is Elvis Presley.”

On the way back to Philadelphia, Fleisher drove them to a New Jersey psychic who claimed to have insights about the case. Standing in her kitchen, the psychic closed her eyes and whispered that the spirit of Zoia Assur was present, yet afraid to talk. Fleisher said tenderly, “It’s OK, Zoia, you can trust us.” He reached out into the air to gently touch her, making a gesture as if he was stroking her reassuringly on the arm or head.

They got no new information from the spirit world that evening.

As the car crossed the dark Jersey flatlands in the moonlight, Bender felt he’d never had more fun with the Vidcoq Society, all of them working together. O’Kane howled in laughter. “Bill, you will never live down the night you petted a ghost.” O’Kane couldn’t believe it. He kept saying it over and over. “He petted a ghost!”

O’Kane’s booming laughter was joined by the artist’s, the polygrapher’s, and that of red-faced Fleisher himself. “Maybe Bill scared her away.”

 

As Fleisher and Gordon prepared to run the test, Bender strolled into the outer office with Laura Shaughnessy, his girlfriend and Andronico’s old high school buddy. Laura was distraught. She had screamed at Bender in the car: “I should never have brought you in on this!” The relentless Bender and his Vidocq friends were trying to expose her good friend Kenny as a murderer, and Kenny couldn’t have done it, she said. Bender was grinning now. Seeing that Fleisher and Gordon had matters well in hand, he left, saying, “Laura and I are going to go grab some lunch.”

Fleisher laughed. “Leave it to Frank. We’re trying to solve a murder and he runs off for a tryst.”

Fleisher and Gordon turned to the interrogation of the man they suspected in the murder Bender’s affair had brought to their door. Fleisher studied Dr. Andronico with hard eyes.
When he looks in a mirror,
Fleisher thought,
he finds his fiancée’s killer
.

Wired to the machine, Andronico was supremely confident. He said he’d flown up to Philadelphia to take the test and rule himself out as a suspect—then maybe the Vidocq Society would help him find his fiancée’s killer.

“He’s agreeing to take the polygraph because he thinks he’s smart enough to fool you and fool the machine,” Walter told Fleisher before the test. Walter had completed his profile of Andronico after studying the crime scene. The shooting and disposal of Assur like rubbish confirmed his analysis of a power-driven killer of psychopathic arrogance.

Andronico had said he didn’t believe Zoia killed herself, either. He suspected Zoia’s brother-in-law, the state police sergeant who was having an affair with her. The P7 handgun found at the scene, which fired the bullets that killed Zoia, was the sergeant’s service gun. But the police had ruled out the state trooper as a suspect, and the Vidocq Society believed he was innocent.

Walter scoffed at the doctor’s story. “He had plenty of motives to kill Zoia. He’s enraged to find out she’s sleeping with a married man, and doubly enraged that it’s her brother-in-law, under her sister’s roof. The doctor is power-driven. You don’t get rid of him. That’s an intolerable insult. He gets rid of you.”

The state police had also ruled out Andronico as a suspect. He was innocent in the eyes of the law. “So what’s he doing here?” Walter asked. “Why fly fifteen hundred miles to pay for a polygraph to prove his innocence to a bunch of private cold-case detectives who may show that he’s guilty? He thinks he is smarter than everyone, that’s why, and it gives him a thrill to beat us. He relives the excitement and sense of control of the murder itself. He’s playing that dangerous ‘catch me if you can’ game.”

Andronico had even agreed to allow his polygraph to be filmed by the Vidocq Society for possible future use and shown on
48 Hours
with Dan Rather. The
48 Hours
crew was scheduled to film the upcoming Vidocq Society meeting, where the society would investigate whether Assur’s death was suicide or murder and whether the doctor killed her.

Walter believed the doctor killed his fiancée, planted the gun to get rid of both betrayers, gulled the police, staged a murder, frame-up, and cover-up, and now would try to fool the Vidocq Society and CBS News in one nationally televised Machiavellian stroke.

 

Minutes into the test, Andronico’s cool evaporated. His readings shot for the moon: flushed, rapid breathing, shifty eyes, jittery arms and legs. His big, eggplant-shaped face was sweating like it sat in a steam pot.

Fleisher and Gordon had seldom seen a man so clearly deceptive.

Dr. Andronico had a great memory for how he spent each hour of each day. “But asked to describe his whereabouts on the day his fiancée is missing,” Gordon said, “he suddenly becomes very upset and no longer remembers clearly.”

“When did you last speak with Zoia?”

The night before she died, Saturday night, August 10, Dr. Andronico said, he spoke with his fiancée on the telephone. “He told her he was coming up that Monday morning,” Andronico’s father, Carmen, told the
Atlantic City Press
. Now Dr. Andronico insisted he never made the trip to New Jersey.

Andronico stuck to his alibi. He was at his father’s beach house in Florida more than a thousand miles from New Jersey on the Sunday Zoia disappeared. It was impossible for him to have committed the murder. His father corroborated his son’s story.

But Fleisher wasn’t convinced. Before the polygraph, he had checked airplane schedules between Florida and Philadelphia and the driving distance to the Jersey shore. He concluded there was plenty of time for Dr. Andronico to do the killing and return to Florida in one day. “That doesn’t mean he did it,” he said. “But it was possible.” Fleisher pushed Dr. Andronico hard on the point, and the charts showed the doctor was being deceptive about his alibi. “Why would a man who was innocent lie about his alibi?” Fleisher asked.

Fleisher and Gordon conducted the polygraph examination three times that afternoon; each time, the doctor failed spectacularly. His answers about the murder and his alibi were overwhelmingly deceptive. The Vidocqeans also tested Dr. Andronico’s father, who also registered as deceptive about his son’s alibi.

“It was classic deception,” Fleisher said. “I wish all charts were this easy to read.”

Andronico was so flustered at one point he said, “I have to get my story straight.”

But he did not confess to the crime.

In the topsy-turvy world of the psychopath, he must have been thrilled, Walter thought.

He was winning.

 

On May 17, 1992,
48 Hours
with Dan Rather aired its episode on the Vidocq Society in Philadelphia, “Murder on the Menu.”

CBS correspondent Richard Schlesinger described the shooting death of twenty-seven-year-old Zoia Assur, a doctor’s fiancée, and asked: “Was it suicide? Or was it murder?”

“The setting is colonial, but the subject is crime,” he said. “Today, the eighty-two members will try to solve one before dessert.”

As the VSMs nibbled on the entrée, members reached a consensus that Zoia’s death was “definitely murder,” but several members said there was no suspect yet, nor a motive. Walter, Bender, and Fleisher made their case for Andronico as the prime suspect, including the doctor’s jittery, deceptive polygraph. Andronico had declined an invitation to the luncheon.

Schlesinger was shocked. “Why would a guy who killed his fiancée walk into a room with eighty-two experts in crime and say investigate this crime when it’s already been ruled a suicide by local police? Why would anybody do that?”

Fleisher shrugged. “This is typical behavior of a psychopathic killer—to inject themselves into an investigation, to maintain some kind of control.”

During dessert, Dan Rather said in a voice-over, “Did this man murder his own fiancée? We’ll confront him with the conclusion of some master detectives, and give him a chance to respond.”

The
48 Hours
team flew to Florida, and Schlesinger confronted Andronico in a room of his doctor’s office with the camera rolling. Standing against a wall in a blue suit and yellow tie, Andronico said no one knew or loved Zoia “as much as I did,” and he was suffering the greatest loss.

Schlesinger said that the Vidocq Society investigators believed he was a psychopathic killer; what did he say to that? Andronico calmly stuck to his alibi and said, “I have nothing to worry about.”

“Did you kill her?” Schlesinger said.

Calmly, “No, I did not. No, I did not.”

In February, Fleisher had sent a ninety-page letter to the Ocean County prosecutor summarizing the findings of the Vidocq Society investigation and urging him to reexamine Assur’s death.

“We believe that there are enough inconsistencies regarding her death to cause a reasonable person to pause before declaring it a suicide, and that the case, therefore, should be revisited,” Fleisher wrote in the
Vidocq Society Journal
.

The prosecutor never answered back.

By January 1993, almost a year after Fleisher’s letter, nobody from the police or prosecutor or medical examiner’s offices had shown any interest in looking at the Vidocq polygraph charts, reviewing the conflicting statements of alibi witnesses, watching the videotapes of Andronico and his father, or “for that matter, even listening to what we have to say,” Fleisher said. The New Jersey case was closed: Assur had committed suicide. Andronico had never been considered a suspect. Therefore, Fleisher said, “The Vidocq Society is placing this case in a closed status.”

He added, “There is much truth to the old saw ‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.’ ”

I
n old Philadelphia, where horse-drawn hansoms rattled over cobblestones, stood an old brick tavern open for business on and off for two centuries, with the sign of the loaves and roasts creaking in the wind. The eighteenth-century edifice once commanded the New World harbor as “the most genteel tavern in North America,” John Adams said. Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and Adams dined and drank their way through the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution there. Now it was an elegant neo-colonial restaurant and tourist watering hole that seemed lost in time. The mass of visitors walked by heading to Independence Hall as if the tavern at Second and Walnut was not visible.

During the great celebrations of independence two centuries ago, full-length portraits of Lafayette and General Washington were painted in the tavern windows, backlit by candlelight. On Thursday morning, April 30, 1992, the windows were marbled by more disturbing images. The corpse of a lovely young woman, blond and petite, filled the projection screen at the north end of the hall. Deborah Lynn Wilson, twenty years old, was lying on her back at the bottom of a stairwell on the campus of Drexel University in Philadelphia. The senior mathematics major, a former model, had been severely beaten and strangled to death.

Seven years later, no one had been arrested for the murder, and Vidocq Society Members had assembled from London, Paris, New York, and Virginia to examine their ninth murder case, the Death of Deborah Wilson.

Philadelphia police sergeant Robert Snyder, a homicide detective in his forties with sandy hair and intense blue eyes, took the podium. The highly respected detective had worked the case for much of seven years; Snyder worked headline cases. But this one stumped him. “You always feel bad about the cases you don’t solve,” he told the society. “Especially the ones involving the young, the innocent, and the aged. This is one of the innocents.”

Walter, putting down his coffee, snapped to attention and looked up. He saw at once why no arrests had been made after seven years, and why police detectives and a private eye hired by the family were still confused. The murder scene contained no signs of the common motivations cops were trained to observe—no obvious clues implicating money or sex. No signs of robbery. Deborah’s body was covered by the down-quilted gray overcoat she had donned that chilly morning of November 30, 1984, the week after Thanksgiving. Her winter gloves were still stuffed in the pockets of the overcoat. Her wristwatch was still on her wrist. Nor was there a recognizable sexual assault. Deborah Wilson died still fully clothed, in jeans and a blue, long-sleeve pullover blouse, except for her feet, which were bare. Only her white Reebok sneakers and socks were missing.