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Overview
On a chilly, gray autumn afternoon in 1984, a patrolman was dispatched to an inner-city tenement in Auburn, Maine to investigate the report of a possible fire. What he found inside the building's smoke-filled, second-story apartment was not a fire but something far more horrifying -- the charred body of a 4-year-old girl, Angela Palmer, who had been stuffed into the oven of a kitchen stove and cooked to death. The discovery traumatized the community and shocked the country. The ensuing murder prosecution of the youngster's mother, Cynthia Palmer, and her boyfriend, John Lane, cast a searching light into the shadows of a secret world in which children and women suffer violence and sexual predation at the hands of those who are supposed to love and protect them.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781452035628 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | AuthorHouse |
| Publication date: | 10/04/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Sales rank: | 732,771 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Lucifer's Child
By Elliott L. Epstein
AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2010 Elliott L. EpsteinAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4520-3561-1
Chapter One
LUCIFER IS DEAD
By late Saturday afternoon, Auburn policeman John Reid had been on duty for almost 10 hours. It was a damp, gray autumn day. The trees were past the peak of foliage color, a chill was in the air and the long Maine winter beckoned. Reid was looking forward to getting off work, anticipating the pleasure of playing with his 5-year-old son, then going out with his wife for the evening. He was patrolling in a cruiser, the intermittent crackle of radio transmissions interrupting the monotony of his rounds, when a dispatch call at about 4 o'clock instructed him to proceed to 317 Main Street to check a report of smoke.
Minutes later, Reid reached his destination, an old apartment building. Fire trucks were arriving, and his backup, Tom Kelly, was already standing outside the building. He had radioed ahead to Kelly to wait for him. Reid emerged from the cruiser and strode to the front door. Short and compact, his hair and mustache neatly trimmed, he walked with military bearing.
"Let's go up and get it over with," he told Kelly as they climbed the four concrete steps to the threshold and entered the front hallway, several firemen following in their wake. They headed for the second floor, where two or three residents were standing on the landing. One of them, a middle-aged woman, complained loudly, "The guy inside is crazy. Look at all the smoke. It smells like burnt hair!"
Reid turned to face the apartment door to his left. He could see smoke seeping from beneath the door. The woman continued talking to him, "They're crazy, they're crazy. I don't know what the hell's going on in there. They're burning the whole God-darn house!" "Have you knocked on the door?" Reid asked. "Yes," she replied. "We've been knocking for hours. They won't answer."
Reid turned the knob, but it was locked. He knocked several times, but no one answered. Then he kicked the door twice, but it held. Finally a paunchy firefighter gave the door a hard kick and broke it open, splintering the jamb.
While the firemen went for their equipment, Reid entered the apartment. The interior was blanketed with white smoke. Crouching beneath the heaviest layer of smoke, Reid began to circle, searching for occupants.
The front door led to a kitchen, the hub of the apartment. The room was in shambles. A rectangular dining table lay upended. Towels, pots, toys and trash were strewn about. An electric stove stood against the left-hand wall, its oven door wedged shut by a chair. Thick smoke was pouring from the oven compartment.
To the right of the entry was a small bathroom. Reid looked in and shouted, "Is anyone in here?" There was no answer. He walked across the kitchen and pushed open a door to a bedroom, also empty. As he backed out of the bedroom, he noticed a living room to his left. It was not as smoky as the kitchen.
Reid could make out three people in the living room, a man, a woman and a child, all holding hands. They were standing before a bay window, staring towards the street, their backs to him. "Get out of here!" he told them. The adults were unresponsive, as though they had not heard him. The child, a girl of 5 or 6, turned and looked up at Reid but did not move. Her right hand was held firmly in the grasp of the woman, apparently her mother.
"Get out of here!" Reid said again, this time with more urgency, but the three stood frozen in place like mannequins in a department store window. Reid was becoming increasingly alarmed. He could not determine the extent of the fire, and he needed to evacuate everyone.
Reid approached the trio, stumbling momentarily on a large suitcase in the middle of the floor. In his free hand, the man was clutching a Bible to his chest, his fingers inserted in the book as if to mark a particular page. No expression registered on his face or the woman's. They simply continued staring blankly out the window.
Reid reached down to pick up the child, but her mother held her fast. "For Christ's sake," he shouted. "Will you let her go? Let me take her out of here. You can stay, if you want!"
The woman turned towards the man, her expression still flat. "It's all right," he assured her. "Lucifer is dead. Lucifer is gone. Angie will be o.k. now." Hearing these words, the woman released the girl's hand, and Reid lifted her into his arms. Then the man began reading from the Bible as if preaching a sermon.
"Now you get the hell out of the building, too!" Reid commanded. "Get out of the fucking building!" The pair turned and walked somnambulantly through the apartment door.
Kelly was waiting at the landing. Reid briefed him. "Something's going on. I don't know what, but don't let them out of here." Kelly shepherded the pair down the staircase, while Reid, the child still cradled in his arms, brought up the rear.
When Reid got outdoors, he was accosted by a young woman who had been inside the building when he first arrived. "Where's the baby?" she shouted hysterically. Reid was puzzled. He was carrying the only child he had found. "I've got the baby in my hands," he said. "No!" she insisted. "There's another little baby in the apartment."
Reid called to nearest firefighters, "Look for a baby. Look for a crib." Then he handed the girl to a paramedic and rushed back to the apartment. Three firemen stood in the kitchen, one holding an extinguisher. The stove had been unplugged and moved away from the wall, its door opened. Reid's eyes were immediately drawn to the oven compartment. Crouched inside was a small burned body, its leg protruding from the blackened space.
Chapter Two
JESUS LOVES YOU
The six-family tenement at 317 Main Street was a homely building, three stories high and comprised of two bow-front wings knit together by a central stairwell. Mustard-colored with brown trim, its bay windows looked out onto shabby surroundings - a neighboring tenement on one flank, a bakery thrift shop on the other, a concrete retaining wall across the road. There was constant traffic noise from Main Street, a busy thoroughfare connecting the commercial downtown with the suburbs to the south.
Situated in the central Maine city of Auburn, the apartment house, like the community itself, was down on its luck. Auburn had been a prosperous shoemaking center on the west bank of the Androscoggin River for more than a century. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, immigrant mill workers and shopkeepers streamed into the area around 317 Main Street, known as "New Auburn."
Now the nation's free trade policies and the shoe industry's offshore migration were eviscerating Auburn's factories. A number of sprawling mills, the site of enterprises which once employed thousands, had been demolished, while others lay empty or were converted to warehouses or elderly housing. The multi-storied tenements, which once teemed with laborers and their families, had become dilapidated.
It was hardly surprising, then, that the apartment house at 317 Main Street was less than a luxury accommodation. It was home for the working poor and the unemployed poor. Social turbulence was as much a part of the landscape as ambient noise. Police cruisers were frequently dispatched to the neighborhood to respond to complaints about domestic squabbles and loud stereos. However, the sounds and smells emanating that day, Saturday October 27, 1984, from John Lane's and Cynthia Palmer's apartment were more obnoxious than the tenement's residents could tolerate.
For the past month, Lane and Palmer, together with Palmer's young daughters, Sarrah and Angela, had been living in the unit located in the left wing of the building's second story. They had kept largely to themselves and caused no trouble. They had not been seen outside their apartment for the past two days, and their laundry had been hanging on the back porch since mid-week as if abandoned. Yet the couple must have been home. Since Friday afternoon, their neighbors had been annoyed by loud music, strange voices and pounding noises from their apartment. On Saturday afternoon, irritation turned to alarm as a burning odor from the unit wafted through the building.
* * *
Patricia White, a tall young woman with long blond hair and a gentle face, lived, with her two-year-old son and her boyfriend, Robert LaGrange, in the apartment directly below Lane and Palmer. On Friday afternoon, she heard religious music blaring from the floor above, so loud it drowned out her television. It was the same recording, played over and over, repeating the words, "Jesus Loves You." White remained stoic through most of the evening but finally lost her patience and, at 2 in the morning, sent her boyfriend upstairs to complain.
LaGrange, a short, tough-looking shoe worker, with a dark, full mustache and a tattooed right arm, stamped up the staircase like a sailor wading into a barroom brawl. He knocked angrily at the door. "Turn down that music!" he barked. The door did not open, but a man's voice answered from within, "Go away." When LaGrange continued knocking, the voice warned, "The wrath of God will strike you dead!"
"Come out, and I'll show you the wrath of God!" LeGrange said menacingly. Then he heard the voice again. The man was giving orders to someone inside. "Tell him to go away or the wrath of God will strike him dead." A woman dutifully repeated the warning. White, who was standing at the foot of the stairs, calmed her boyfriend and summoned him back to bed. "Leave well enough alone," she said. "We'll talk to the landlord about it tomorrow."
When White awoke three hours later, the music was still playing loudly. It continued until late morning, when the volume was suddenly turned down. At 2:30 Saturday afternoon, a new disturbance took its place. White's light fixture rattled. It sounded like someone banging or jumping on the kitchen floor upstairs. Curious, she stepped out onto her rear porch and started climbing the stairs to the next landing. She thought about peeking through the window of the apartment. Midway up the steps, however, she changed her mind and turned back. She did not want to appear nosy.
* * *
Mary Deraps, another young mother, also wondered what was happening on the second floor. Deraps, her husband and their two-year-old daughter lived above Lane and Palmer. She awoke at 5 a.m. Saturday with music from downstairs ringing in her ears. A sound sleeper, she learned from her husband that it had been going all night. Deraps could not make out the lyrics. She could only hear the word "Jesus."
John Lane had played religious music earlier that week but was considerate enough to ask if it bothered her. At the time it did not. Now it did. When the music continued late into the morning, she pounded on the floor. Then she called the landlord. She assumed Lane and Palmer got the message, because the sound became softer.
At 11:30 in the morning, Deraps descended to the first-floor mailbox. As she passed the door of Lane's and Palmer's apartment, she heard a little girl's plaintive voice within crying, "Daddy, let me out!" Deraps thought little of it, assuming the girl had been sent to her bedroom as a punishment. That afternoon, when she heard the noise of someone jumping below, she started down her back-porch stairs to investigate. Not wishing to intrude, however, she stopped before reaching the second story. "It's probably nothing," she assured herself.
Deraps was carving a Halloween pumpkin in her kitchen later in the day, when a sickening odor enveloped the room. She walked to the living room to check whether the smell was from a lit cigarette she had left there. She did not find a burning cigarette but did see her apartment filling with smoke. Alarmed, she left the 9-year-old child she was babysitting to look after her own daughter and hurried downstairs to find out what was happening.
* * *
Julie St. Amand, who lived across the hall from Patricia White, had known John Lane and Cynthia Palmer for only a few weeks but was better acquainted with them than anyone else in the building. She helped take care of Palmer's girls after Palmer was hurt in a car accident 11 days earlier, and had invited John, Cynthia and the children to her apartment for a visit the previous Thursday evening.
St. Amand, who was only 18 and whose diminutive stature made her look even younger, was fond of John and Cynthia. That feeling was not shared by her roommate, James Bussiere. After Lane proclaimed that Cynthia, her daughters and even Julie herself had "multiple personalities," Bussiere decided he did not like Lane's attitude. He told St. Amand to "lay off going up there."
Although St. Amand and Bussiere were nominally the landlord's managers, they did not manage the building or collect the rents. Their role was to keep the noise down and report any disturbance to the landlord. When he came home from work early Friday evening, Bussiere heard loud gospel music from Palmer's and Lane's apartment. He sang in a choir and tried to catch the words, but the volume was distorting the sound. "Why waste good music by playing it so loud?" he thought.
Bussiere was also the building's handyman. At 6:30 on Saturday morning, he was carrying storm windows to the third floor for installation. As he passed the second-floor apartment, he heard the sound of water running in a bathtub and snatches of conversation. A child asked, "Can I get out now?" The voice sounded like Angela Palmer's. He heard another girl say, "She hasn't done anything. Let her go." Then Lane's voice, "She's a naughty girl. She needs to be cleansed. She needs to pay for what she has done." Bussiere recalled that Angela wet her pants when she, her mother and Lane had visited Julie on Thursday. It must have happened again, he thought. Early in the afternoon, he went by the apartment a second time and heard Lane reading aloud from the Bible.
About 10:30 a.m., St. Amand knocked on Lane's and Palmer's door, planning to tell them they had been making too much noise. Lane answered but would not open the door. "Go away," he said. "You're trying to hurt Sarrah with the orange ball!" St. Amand complied but was puzzled by the accusation. She had played with Sarrah on Thursday, rolling a spongy, orange ball to her, though she certainly had done nothing to harm the child.
About 1 Saturday afternoon, St. Amand passed Lane's and Palmer's apartment again. She assumed one of the girls had been sent to her room for misbehaving, because she heard a cry, "Daddy, let me out! Let me out!"
Chapter Three
GABRIEL
Nick Scappaticci was a short, slender man. Though only 30, his face portrayed deep sadness and nervous wariness, the expression of one who had suffered a long, traumatic ordeal. Scappaticci had been a friend of John Lane for six months, and the two had spent many hours engrossed in deep, personal conversations. For a time, he had allowed Lane to share his apartment. Recently Lane introduced Scappaticci to Cynthia Palmer, and Scappaticci, along with his girl friend, Shirley Sargent, socialized with the couple on a few occasions.
Scappaticci and Sargent had been window shopping in Auburn on Saturday, when they decided to pay an unannounced visit to Lane and Palmer. They arrived mid-afternoon and noticed their friends' mailbox stuffed with envelopes. As they headed for the second floor, a neighbor warned them, "You're not going to get in. They haven't answered the door for the last two days."
When Scappaticci and Sargent reached the apartment, they could hear crying inside. Scappaticci knocked. The door remained closed, but he recognized Lane's voice answering, "Go away! You are not pure enough to come in! You are going to hell!" Scappaticci started back down the stairs, but changed his mind and returned to the door. He knew Lane was emotionally troubled and had attempted suicide in the past. Perhaps his friend needed help. He knocked again.
Lane was rambling in a loud voice, but Scappaticci could make out only one word: "Lucifer!" "John, It's Nick!" Scappaticci called through the door. "Lucifer is gone, he's gone now," Lane replied. "No one is going to hurt me." Scappaticci tried the door. It opened, and he took a step inside. The room was warm and filled with fine white smoke, which billowed through the open door into the hallway. Pans were stacked atop the stove, and there appeared to be a small smear of blood on the floor.
Lane stood near the threshold. Scappaticci tried to make eye contact and talk with him, hoping for a sign of recognition, but Lane stopped him, addressing him as "Gabriel," and began to rant about brimstone." Suddenly Lane rushed forward, angrily slamming the door on Scappaticci, who stepped back in time to avoid being struck.
Confused and uncertain about what to do, Scappaticci sat down on a step, as neighbors began appearing in the hallways. Mary Deraps called from the third-floor landing to Julie St. Amand on the first, "What's burning?" "I don't know," St. Amand answered. "Smoke's coming out of their apartment. They've got something burning in there, and they won't let us in." Deraps descended rapidly to the second floor and pounded on the apartment door. "You've got something burning in the oven!" she yelled. "Yes," Lane responded. "Lucifer!"
Word about the situation reached Bussiere, who had been outside changing the tires on his car. He returned to find himself in the middle of a debate about how to handle the crisis. Sargent was pleading for someone to call "DHS," the acronym for Maine's Department of Human Services. As far as Bussiere was concerned, Sargent had no business even being there. "Who gives a damn about DHS," he said irritably, contemplating the damage a fire could cause to all the work he had done on the apartment, "Call the cops!"
Sargent wanted to get help for Lane, but she could not ignore the smoke filling the building. After a brief discussion with Scappaticci and St. Amand, she placed a call to the Auburn police. The time was
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lucifer's Child by Elliott L. Epstein Copyright © 2010 by Elliott L. Epstein. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Chapter 1: LUCIFER IS DEAD....................1Chapter 2: JESUS LOVES YOU....................4
Chapter 3: GABRIEL....................9
Chapter 4: ANGIE WAS BAD....................11
Chapter 5: THE SLIMY GREEN MONSTER....................14
Chapter 6: SILENT WITNESSES....................26
Chapter 7: PURGATORY....................33
Chapter 8: CYNTHIA....................42
Chapter 9: BURN ON THE GALLOWS....................48
Chapter 10: N.G.R.I....................56
Chapter 11: JOHN....................72
Chapter 12: THEY'VE ALL GOT A DEAD BODY IN THEM....................78
Chapter 13: I BURNED MY BABY....................84
Chapter 14: LOOKING FOR LOVE IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES....................103
Chapter 15: HOCUS POCUS....................110
Chapter 16: MICHAEL....................115
Chapter 17: IT'S A DAMN SHAME....................127
Chapter 18: PRINCE CHARMING AND CINDERELLA....................142
Chapter 20: SKIING ON ONE SKI....................147
Chapter 19: SQUEEZE A BALLOON....................154
Chapter 20: JUDGMENT DAY....................169
AUTHOR'S NOTE....................177
PHOTOGRAPHS AND ILLUSTRATIONS....................65