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Blood Crimes
The Pennsylvania Skinhead Murders
By Fred Rosen OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1996 Fred Rosen
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2263-7
CHAPTER 1
Since 1978, Valerie Freeman had lived with her brother and sister-in-law. There was a bottle of twelve-year-old Scotch that Dennis kept hidden, to be opened on the day she got married.
It wasn't bound to be any time soon.
Valerie had no prospective suitors. Still, you never knew. Whatever Jehovah wanted for her would be his will. Thy will be done.
It had been Jehovah's will that David and Bryan would rebel against their parents and pick on Valerie Freeman by urinating in her shampoo and leaving chicken bones in her bed. Dennis had seen what was happening and knew that Jehovah had chosen him, yet he felt powerless to stop the cruel way his sons were treating his sister.
That was the usual thing with Dennis these days. He just didn't know what to do.
"Maybe if you move out, things might be better," Dennis had suggested.
Not wishing to overstay her welcome and seeing that things had gotten out of hand, Valerie left. Still, she saw the family a lot. Her favorite nephew, Erik, was suffering the most. His brothers didn't treat him well. They felt that the younger boy, always kissing up to his parents, was spoiled, while they were held in nothing but the utmost contempt.
David and Bryan picked on Erik, teased him, and chastised him for his religious beliefs. Erik was a devout Jehovah's Witness. In him rested the one great hope, that the line of Jehovah's Witnesses in the Freeman family would be redeemed. But clearly, Valerie realized, Erik had felt himself in some sort of jeopardy, and though he didn't say from whom, it was clear that he feared his older, more powerful brothers.
They could be brutes when angered, and with the cruel use of their strength and size, they could inflict tremendous pain.
All this Valerie knew when, at 5 P.M., her hand reached out for the front doorknob. She tried it. It had no give to it. That was unusual. Her sister-in-law, Brenda, always left it unlocked when she was home, and she was home most of the time. Valerie had a key, but before she used it, she decided to step around to the side and try the garage door.
It was also locked. She looked over at Dennis's truck. It looked like it hadn't been moved.
Unusual. Dennis, a school janitor, never missed a day of work.
Growing alarmed, Valerie went around the side of the house and tried the sliding glass door. Unlocked, it gave easily.
Inside, the house was cold enough to see her breath pluming in the frigid air. It was dark, very dark, and eerily silent. With a growing sense of dread, she climbed the stairs and ran ran down the hallway to Erik's bedroom. She paused for a moment before the closed door and then pushed it open.
A few minutes later, there was a frantic knock at the Ehrgott house next door. Samuel Ehrgott answered it.
"May I use your phone?" Valerie asked.
"What's wrong, Valerie?"
"Erik is dead," she said, in a shaky voice.
Sam's mother came to the door.
"Ma, Valerie says Erik is dead."
Sam told her what had happened. His mom immediately dialed "911" to report a homicide.
A few moments later, the radio crackled to life in the blue and white.
"Thirty-five. Thirty-five."
Officer Michael Pochran picked up the mike and pressed a button.
"Thirty-five?" he responded.
"Proceed to Ehrgott residence on Gale Avenue. See a woman there about a homicide. Body of a young boy has been found."
When he got to the residence, Pochran saw that people had already gathered outside the Ehrgott home. They motioned him across the way. The officer followed their direction and parked his cruiser.
"Who's the owner?" Pochran asked the crowd.
"It's Freeman," said a small, mousy woman, who stepped forward. She wore tortoise-shell eyeglasses that distorted the shape of her eyes.
"Brenda and Dennis Freeman. My brother and sister-in-law."
"And you're?"
"Valerie Freeman. I found Erik."
She started to cry.
"How'd you get in?"
"Through the back door," she answered between sobs. "It was open. But I have a key, too."
She gave him the key to the front door.
Officer Pochran walked slowly up the snow-covered driveway. He noticed that today's paper was still on the porch. In the driveway were two vehicles: a car and, parked behind that, a van. The rear window of the van bore the tracks of a windshield wiper, though the van looked like it hadn't been moved.
As Valerie had said, the front door was locked. He went to the back, where he found the sliding glass doors open, exactly as Valerie had left them. He returned back to the front and waited for backup.
When Officer Michael Reddings arrived, they used Valerie's key to gain entrance through the front door. Their flashlights cut through the interior darkness. Halfway up the stairs, the flashlight beams picked out blood on the stairway carpet. At the top of the landing, they looked down and flashed their beams again,.
Below was the living room, and beyond that the kitchen, where they could see a silver, aluminum baseball bat, laying against a blue cabinet. The blood covering the barrel of the bat contrasted starkly with the cabinet's blue.
Still on the landing, they heard a dog barking and followed the sound to a closed bedroom door. Behind it, the dog, of course, sensed their presence and continued barking violently to get out. They didn't open it. Instead, they entered the master bedroom across the hall.
A man lay sprawled across his bed. His head and face had been struck and smashed repeatedly. So hard had he been hit that his skull had been shattered and his brain had swelled out through the cranium. His throat had throat had been cut.
"Must be Dennis Freeman," Pochran said.
"Look." Reddings pointed up.
Dennis Freeman's blood had spattered across the ceiling.
"Let's check for the kid."
Down the hall, they entered Erik Freeman's bedroom. His small, fragile body lay in a lifeless heap on his bed. His face had been beaten into such a bloody pulp, they had no way of knowing that Erik had been a handsome boy.
Their grim footsteps made hollow echoes. They headed down to the basement, searching for Brenda Freeman as they went and fearing what they would find. On the floor in a narrow hallway they found a metal pipe covered with blood.
In the back hallway they found Brenda. She was lying on her side, her nightgown pulled up, exposing a large, fleshy body. There was a bloody knife on the floor next to her.
Brenda Freeman had been stabbed in the back. A pool of dark blood had coagulated underneath her bloated body. Behind her, on the wall, someone had scrawled two swastikas. Is this some kind of hate crime, Pochran wondered. Could the victims be Jewish?
By that time, the rescue squad of the Eastern Salisbury Township Fire Department had responded. Finding that the victims were dead and there was nothing they could do, they milled around the crime scene, careful not to touch anything, lest they contaminate evidence.
"Looks like Bryan Freeman killed his parents and little brother," said Frank Johnson, one member of the rescue squad, addressing another, Harry Liste.
At 10:30 P.M., Trooper Joseph Vazquez arrived at the Freeman home. With his baby face and dark complexion and hair, he looked more like a movie star than what he was, a seasoned homicide investigator with twelve years of experience.
Wearing surgical gloves to prevent contaminating the crime scene, Vazquez took a look around the house, noting the angles at which the victims were lying in death; type of wound (stabbing, slicing, et al.); and the blunt-force trauma to the heads of Erik and Dennis.
Most of all he noted the ferocity of the assaults. It was overkill.
A small army of technicians that accompanies any violent death in a American city worked silently through the house. They dusted for prints, examined and photographed the bodies and crime scene, and eventually, when the detectives gave the OK, moved the bodies to the morgue for autopsy.
Detectives fanned out across Lehigh County to question those who knew the Freeman family. They called in after interviews with Brenda's sisters, Sandy Lettich and Linda Solivan. Both women said that there was bad blood between David and Bryan Freeman and their parents and little brother. At the crime scene, Valerie Freeman confirmed this.
"David and Bryan had become skinheads," she revealed.
The police also learned that the family had kept a shotgun in the house. It was missing. Since Bryan and David and one of the family cars were also missing, along with their cousin Benny, and with the antagonism the boys had openly displayed toward their parents, it was a logical theory to conclude that the brothers had killed their parents, their cousin had participated, and they were all on the run.
"Let's get the warrants to arrest them," Bob Steinberg said.
Tall, slim, and well-dressed, Steinberg was the district attorney of Lehigh County. He also happened to be honest. A hands-on district attorney, he not only prosecuted many of the cases his office handled, he also participated in active investigations.
In one previous case involving a rapist/serial killer, Steinberg had actually discovered the body of a young girl the serial killer had murdered. He was no stranger to helping track down suspected criminals.
Late that night, Steinberg had his warrants and directed the police to contact the National Crime Information Center (NCIC). Fugitives are listed with the NCIC, and local police departments are expected to tap into their files on a regular basis to see who is wanted. Pennsylvania State Trooper Joe Vazquez became the case's lead investigator.
Soon, the NCIC computers had a complete description of the Freeman brothers and Ben Birdwell, a description of the car they were driving, and the license plate number.
But Lehigh County is just like anyplace else in the United States: You can't keep a secret very long. The press soon discovered that the Freeman family had been murdered, and that the suspects were their sons and their cousin.
The case was splashed across the front pages of the Reading Eagle and the Allentown Morning Call.
"SKINHEADS KILL PARENTS" the headlines read.
Besides the local stations, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and Fox all bannered the story of the murders and the boys' escape.
Sally Dobbins, a fifteen-year-old student at Salisbury High School, was in her home watching TV when the report of the Freeman murders came on.
"David and Brenda Freeman and their son Erik have been found brutally murdered in their Allentown, Pennsylvania, home. Missing are their other two sons, David and Bryan, and the family car. Police suspect that the missing boys, who are skinheads, are responsible for the crime. An all-points bulletin has been issued for their arrest."
"Oh, my God, they did it!" Sally said aloud.
She couldn't believe it: They'd actually gone ahead with what they had threatened, and now they were on the run, probably heading for Florida. At least, that's where they'd said they wanted to run to.
Florida.
In searching through Bryan's room, police came upon a picture of a teenage boy. On the back, someone had drawn a swastika. The picture of the boy was immediately identified by rescue squad members as Harry Liste. Liste was a squad member and was one of those who had responded to the emergency at the Freeman home. He was still on the scene.
Vazquez immediately had Officer Pochran and Trooper David Seip drive the teenager down to the Eastern Salisbury Firehouse for an interview. The time was 10:45 P.M. While Liste was being whisked in for questioning, across town in two homes, the grieving was beginning.
Linda Solivan and Sandy Lettich had just finished talking to detectives. They had loved their sister Brenda dearly and were shattered by the news of her violent death. The deaths of Dennis and their nephew Erik made it all that much more difficult to bear. Yet, they were devout Jehovah's Witnesses.
This was an attack directly from Satan. Only Satan could wreak such havoc on the Freeman household; only Satan could kill them so violently. But Satan could not, would not win, because they were killed as Jesus was. To die for being a Witness is the ultimate joy. As such, their death was not so much a tragedy as an honor. Brenda, David, and Erik were martyred Jehovah's Witnesses in the same way that the Christians were martyred in the Coliseum and the Jews at Masada.
Trooper Seip, though, was not concerned with affairs on the spiritual plane; his job was to get to the bottom of a triple homicide and get the perpetrators arrested. He began questioning Harry Liste.
"Where do you go to school?" Seip began.
"At Salisbury High School with Bryan. And David."
"How'd your picture wind up in their house?"
"Well, I'm a friend of Bryan's. We're regular friends, me and Bryan," he added.
"How long have you known Bryan?" Seip asked.
"About two years, though we hardly ever do anything outside of school. We pal around at school."
"Sort of like school friends," Seip, repeated.
"Yeah. We have some of the same classes, and we both go to Vo-Tech in the afternoon. Bryan's taking automotive classes."
"How well do you know his brother David?"
"Not well at all. I met David through Bryan."
"Did you ever hear either make any threats toward their parents?"
Liste nodded.
"Bryan said a couple of times that he wanted to kill his parents."
"When did he make these threats?"
"Bryan's been saying that he wanted to kilt his parents for the past two years. Bryan said that he had beat up his father in the past."
"Did he ever indicate why he hated his parents?"
"No, he never said," Liste replied. "He also said he hated his little brother, and he would beat him up as well."
"How long were they skinheads?"
"About three years."
If Liste was right, it meant that Bryan had been a skinhead since he was fourteen-years-old and his brother since he was twelve."
"Did Bryan have any of those tattoos the skinheads usually have?"
"He had several."
"Describe them."
"Well, he had the word 'berserker' tattooed across his forehead. Then there was a swastika made of bones on his neck, and a man, half black and half white, on his right arm. That means something in skinhead lore, but I don't know what."
"When was the last time you talked to Bryan?"
"On Friday. At school. It was in the morning sometime. I said I'd see him between classes and at lunch."
"Do you know how Bryan was doing in school?"
"He was in trouble, at least on Friday, because he wrote some obscene stuff on a state test he'd been taking. That had gotten him suspended for five days. Bryan told me that he didn't care if he got into trouble."
"Had he said anything to you about his plans for the weekend?"
Liste shook his head.
"What kind of mood was Bryan in on Friday?"
"Bryan seemed pissed off. I saw him trying to scrounge lunch money off somebody. The principal saw him and grabbed Bryan. Bryan pushed him away. That was the last time I saw him."
"Do you have any idea where Bryan might have gone to?"
"Well, about two weeks ago, Bryan said he was trying to get some money to go to Florida. He wanted to go there because of the mostly white population."
Seip didn't tell Liste that Bryan had been misinformed. Florida has a significant Hispanic and African American population.
"Bryan always talked about an uncle he liked a lot."
The uncle lived in Florida, but Liste didn't know his name.
"Did you see David on Friday?"
"Yeah. In the hall. He seemed OK."
"Now, Mr. Liste, about that picture we found in the house. It was of you, and on the back there was a swastika."
Liste explained that he had drawn the swastika on the back.
"Are you a skinhead?"
"No way," Liste said. "I just wrote that stuff to be Bryan's friend."
"So what did you guys do when you palled around? Out of school, that is."
"It was about two months ago at the Whitehall Mall. It was me, Bryan, David, Beth, that's another friend of Bryan's, and Ben, his cousin. There were about twenty skinheads altogether."
The Freeman Brothers tried to pick a fight with some kid.
"They got bounced out of the mall," Liste continued.
"So where do you think they've gone to?"
"Like I said, they had this uncle they liked, and they also said they liked their grandfather. Me, I think they took off, and they'll keep going."
"Do you know if they have any weapons?"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Blood Crimes by Fred Rosen. Copyright © 1996 Fred Rosen. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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