The Shadow of Death: The Hunt for the Connecticut River Valley Killer
397
The Shadow of Death: The Hunt for the Connecticut River Valley Killer
397eBookDigital Original (Digital Original)
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
In the mid-1980s, someone stabbed six women to death in the Connecticut River Valley on the border between New Hampshire and Vermont. The murderer remains at large and the total number of his victims is unknown. In this brilliant work of true crime reportage, New York Times–bestselling author Philip E. Ginsburg provides fascinating insights into the groundbreaking forensic methods used to track the killer and paints indelible portraits of the lives he cut so tragically short.
The Shadow of Death re-creates the fear that consumed the idyllic region when young women began to disappear with horrifying regularity. Neighbors used to leaving their doors unlocked suddenly wondered who among them was a sadistic serial killer. Friends and family of the victims were left to endure the bottomless pain of imagining their loved ones’ terrifying last moments. Desperate to stop the slayings, local police and FBI investigators used exotic new techniques to try to unmask the murderer. In some of the book’s most harrowing sections, Ginsburg documents the extraordinary efforts of psychologist John Philpin as he risks his own emotional stability to get inside the mind of a madman.
Law enforcement officials identified several suspects and came tantalizingly close to putting all the pieces of the puzzle together, but it was only after a pregnant woman survived a brutal attack that the killings appeared to stop. The question remains: Could they start again? The Shadow of Death is a “riveting” profile of one of America’s greatest unsolved mysteries (Kirkus Reviews).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504053051 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 07/31/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 397 |
| Sales rank: | 452,051 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Ginsburg started writing before he was a teenager as a reporter for a short-lived summer camp newspaper. After college and a term in the Peace Corps, he worked as a newspaper reporter, a college professor teaching comparative and Chinese politics, and executive director of the New Hampshire Humanities Council. On a sabbatical from the Council, he turned what was intended to be a magazine article harking back to his journalism days into a book, Poisoned Blood, which became a New York Times bestseller. His subsequent career as a freelance writer produced histories, brochures and other materials—mostly for nonprofit organizations—and a second true crime work, The Shadow of Death. Since retiring as a writer, Ginsburg has worked as a volunteer advisor/mediator at the New Hampshire Consumer Protection Bureau and a court guardian for children in abuse and neglect cases. He also served in the New Hampshire House of Representatives.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
May — June 1984
It had been raining steadily in the Valley for two days.
All of May had been wet, and by now it was getting hard to remember a day when it hadn't rained. Total rainfall for the month was approaching record levels.
Even in ordinary times it was impossible to go anywhere in the Valley without being aware of the presence of running water, friendly, cheerful, comforting. It flowed under a bridge beneath the road, it splashed and gurgled near a familiar path through the woods, it trickled across a meadow to fill a cow pond, it moved with slow majesty in the Connecticut River, which both separated and connected New Hampshire and Vermont. The big river formed the spine of the Valley, flowing always just below the consciousness of everyone who lived within a dozen miles of its banks on either side.
But now the water was out of control. All up and down the Valley roads were closed and students were sent home early. Town and village schools stayed closed on Tuesday in Cavendish and Chester and Londonderry on the Vermont side of the river, and roads were washed out in Weathersfield and Ludlow. In the little city of Springfield, twenty feet of sidewalk collapsed at the corner of Mount Vernon Street and Gulf Road.
On the New Hampshire side, the Sugar River, a favored trout stream that fed the Connecticut, was overflowing its banks throughout Newport. Downstream from Newport, the business district of Claremont was safe up on its hill, but on the flats below, where the Sugar River flowed through the Beauregard Village section just before joining the Connecticut, the fire department was keeping watch. Volunteers were helping to scoop out debris and clear culverts, to keep the water from backing up and washing over the roads.
Beauregard Village was the last place anybody saw Bernice Courtemanche.
Bernice's boyfriend, Teddy Berry, called her at work at the Sullivan County Nursing Home on Wednesday. They arranged that Bernice would come to meet him at his sister's place in Newport after she got off work at three o'clock.
Bernice decided to go home to get some things before heading over to Newport, so she asked Bonnie Spicer, who was getting off work at the same time, for a ride into Claremont. From the nursing home, in the little town of Unity, it was less than ten minutes' drive north to the house in Beauregard Village, where they had been living with Teddy's parents. She'd get a snack and change, then hitchhike the ten miles east to Newport. She hitched rides a lot these days and it was a good way to get around, but she was due to get her driver's license soon and she was looking forward to it. She wouldn't have to depend on strangers so much.
Bonnie dropped her off at the corner of Main Street, where it came down the hill from the center of Claremont, and Citizen Street, which led off to the left across the Sugar River into Beauregard Village. It was still overcast, but the rain had let up, at least for a while.
Teddy's parents, Janet and Arthur Berry, lived in a small yellow house a few blocks into the village. They arrived home around three-thirty. Janet stayed outside in the truck with the motor running while Arthur ran inside to get something. Bernice was sitting at the kitchen table eating a peanut butter sandwich. She told Arthur she was planning to go to Newport to meet Teddy at his sister's. He offered her a ride. She said, no, she'd get a ride easily enough.
Teddy wasn't worried at first. They hadn't been definite about what time she'd get to Newport, and he knew Bernice might have had trouble getting a ride. It wasn't until darkness fell that he started wondering what was holding her up. He called home first but she wasn't there.
Maybe she had gone to her parents' house. When he phoned he learned that her parents had rushed off to Boston with Bernice's younger brother. He had gotten a fish hook caught near his eye and they wanted him to get specialized attention at the Boston Eye and Ear Infirmary. That was close to two hours' drive, so they would be late getting back. Could Bernice have gone with them? No, she hadn't been around.
Around six-thirty Teddy and his sister's husband, Robert, went out to see if they could find her. They drove the ten miles from Newport to Claremont, searching the roadside and anywhere she might have gotten sidetracked. In Claremont they checked all the likely places. No luck. Finally they decided to sleep on it. Bernice was an independent type. They told themselves it was just possible to imagine her staying away overnight, and maybe something had kept her from calling so far. It wasn't like Bernice to just take off and not come back the next day; she'd turn up, they said to each other. But their hopeful imaginings didn't carry much conviction.
In the morning there was still no sign of her, and no word. At twelve-fifteen Teddy called the Claremont police. Bernice Courtemanche went into the official records as a missing person.
The rain and cloudy skies had intruded on the activities of the long Memorial Day weekend, but it wasn't as if Mike Prozzo ever got very far away from his work, no matter what he was doing. He hadn't expected it to turn out that way. He had hated the idea of being transferred to the detective division when the chief first told him about it. It had felt like a punishment. That had been two and half years ago, and at the time he couldn't imagine anything that suited him more than being a uniformed cop, walking the streets, keeping an eye on things.
Prozzo had grown up in Claremont and it felt as if he knew everybody in town. As a child he had just assumed he would go into the family business. His father had come back from World War II and started a dry-cleaning store, naming it Veterans Cleaners in honor of his recent experience and his fellow soldiers.
It was a real family business. Michael's grandfather, uncle, and mother had all worked there with his father at one time or another, and his older brother and sister had helped out while they were in school. But by the time Michael was finishing high school at St. Mary's Catholic in Claremont, it was clear that his older sister and brother had other career plans; she was on her way to becoming a hairdresser, he was going to business college, majoring in accounting. Michael, who was helping out in the store himself now, was his father's last hope to take over the business.
The problem was, they couldn't work together. The old man knew how he wanted things to be done, and that was that. And as Michael got older, he started to feel he knew how things ought to be done, too, and it wasn't always the same way his father wanted.
"We're both thick-headed Guineas," Prozzo said years later, his smile taking the sting out of the coarse ethnic slur he had heard more than once as a young man. Being Italian really had nothing to do with it; the story of a father and son clashing at close quarters was as old as time, and there was no room for compromise.
At the same time, Prozzo had harbored good feelings about cops and their work ever since he was a child. There were always beat cops around his father's store, and when he was eight years old a veteran Claremont officer named Arnie Foosse had given him a police whistle. Michael and a friend sat on a stoop on Washington Street and blew the whistle at cars that looked like they were going too fast.
In high school he discovered that other people accepted him as a leader. He was chosen cocaptain of the soccer team and elected an officer of the student council. And when he went into the National Guard soon after graduating from high school, he was singled out for promotion to PFC, then to corporal, and later to sergeant.
Prozzo wasn't given to self-analysis, but in later years it occurred to him that these experiences contributed to his feeling that he could never get along in the dry-cleaning business. When he finished Guard training in South Carolina he went back to the store, but it didn't feel right any longer.
"At that point," he recalled, "in my father's business he was the leader and I was the follower, and I would rather have been the leader. I always liked leading people, and I don't like following."
It was easier to make the decision than it was to tell his father about it. For all the conflict, they were still close, and Michael didn't want to disappoint his father. He was still living at home, and he eased into the police department at first, with part-time work as a "special." He helped out on traffic duty or worked special events when he wasn't needed in the dry-cleaning store. Then a full-time position opened up in the department. Prozzo applied and was accepted. The critical moment had arrived.
"I can remember like it was yesterday," Prozzo said, "going home and telling my father that I wasn't going to work for him any longer." His laugh betrayed the tension of the moment even when it was close to two decades in the past. The elder Prozzo had been taking his midday break from the store, sitting in his armchair in the corner of the living room at home. The television was on but it was hard to tell if he was watching or dozing.
"I need to talk with you for a minute," Michael said to his father, and then he told him he was going to work full-time in the police department and wouldn't be helping out in the store anymore. The reaction was curiously muted, and Michael was relieved, but he could tell from his father's manner how disappointed he was.
Now it was more than two decades later, the elder Prozzos had just sold the dry-cleaning store and moved to Florida, and their son had risen steadily in the Claremont Police Department. In 1981, when he was a lieutenant in charge of the uniformed division, he had applied to become chief, but the job went to someone else. When the new chief transferred him to head the detectives a few months later, Prozzo was convinced that insecurity was responsible for the move, that his visibility in the community as head of the uniformed officers on the street posed a threat to his boss, a newcomer to Claremont.
That wasn't the only reason for his disappointment with the shift. Prozzo had no interest whatever in being a detective. The duties of an officer on patrol fit him like his sharply tailored uniform shirt. Ducking in and out of stores and restaurants and bars, anywhere people gathered, stopping to chat on the street, keeping up with what was going on in town, anticipating problems and preventing them from developing, resolving disputes, collaring troublemakers, none of that seemed like work.
Prozzo knew these people. He was a glutton for professional self-improvement — he had once figured out that in less than eighteen years on the force he had spent a total of almost two years in courses of various kinds — and he was especially proud of having been selected in 1978 to go to the FBI Academy, where cops from all over the country learn about the latest law-enforcement issues and techniques. But he also knew that police work in a small place like Claremont depended on knowing the community and its people much more than on technology and methods. That was the part of the job that he loved. For a gregarious person like Prozzo, a man who moved among the people of Claremont like a fish in a pond, being a street cop was as easy and natural as breathing.
Even so, within a year or so after he had been taken away from the uniformed division Prozzo could hardly remember why he had objected to the idea so strenuously, and his disappointment had turned into gratitude to the chief who had made the move. Perhaps the chief had understood something that wasn't visible to Prozzo himself. Prozzo loved the work.
In the two and a half years since the transfer he had instituted a series of changes to make the detective division function more efficiently, but the part Prozzo enjoyed most was the change he felt in himself. He had learned how to see the broad picture, how to manage a case, how to talk with suspects, how to work within the legal restrictions to gather evidence for a prosecution.
Most of all, it was the interview, the confrontation with the suspect, that he loved. It was a psychological game, and it required a feel for people, a gut-level understanding of character and personality. The transfer to detective work offered a whole new set of challenges, and Mike Prozzo found that his ability to meet them was a rich new source of professional achievement and satisfaction.
But now, as Prozzo returned to work after a long Memorial Day weekend, his enthusiasm was about to run head-on into a case that would gradually expand to touch every corner of the community in which he was so deeply immersed, and his professional confidence was soon to be tested in a way that went far beyond anything he had ever experienced.
Leafing through the preliminary reports turned in by detectives and officers in his absence, Prozzo saw little at first in the case of Bernice Courtemanche to produce the chill of concern that usually signalled something special. A seventeen-year-old girl with no apparent reason to take off was missing. Officers had checked with her boyfriend, Teddy Berry, his parents and sister, Bernice's parents, a couple of her teachers, a supervisor at the nursing home. There wasn't anything in these preliminary interviews to distinguish Bernice Courtemanche from a lot of other runaways.
"She's not the first juvenile that we've had missing," Prozzo thought to himself. Even in a quiet place like Claremont, that happened all the time.
The truth was, it had been happening more and more in the last few years. In the previous twelve months, 237 adults and 95 children had been reported missing in Claremont. In a single year, the number of people who disappeared for long enough to provoke a report to the police department equalled one of every forty-four people in Claremont.
Among almost a hundred children reported missing in the twelve months before Bernice Courtemanche disappeared, a three-year-old had wandered less than a block to her grandmother's house, then found her way home twenty minutes later. A sixteen-year-old girl turned up at the home of friends after a day and a half; it was the fourth time she had run away. A retarded eight-year-old wandered away when his brother, who was assigned to watch him, got distracted; he was found after ten minutes in the bushes near his house. A two-year-old was snatched by his mother from a department store; the parents were fighting for custody of the child. And little clusters of youngsters, ten to fifteen years old, were constantly disappearing for a few hours from Orion House, a local home for troubled children. These cases, where the children were located within a short time, usually hours, at most a couple of days, were typical.
But there were exceptions, tragic exceptions. The year before, just a dozen miles away, across the river in Vermont, an eleven-year-old girl had been kidnapped on an April Saturday. Her body was found the following day; she had been murdered. Long after the case had been solved her parents were left with the thought that somehow the horror might have been prevented. They initiated a lawsuit against the local police department, claiming it had not reacted quickly or comprehensively enough to the report of the kidnapping.
And it was the possibility of this kind of exception, the thought that a child might have come to harm, that sharpened the attention of anyone who heard a report that a young person was missing.
In March of 1984 the mayor of Claremont, partly in response to the Vermont case, had appointed a committee to upgrade the city's procedures for handling missing-persons cases. The committee was to focus especially on cases involving children. One member was the chief of police, Adam Bauer. Chief Bauer named a young detective, Bill Wilmot, to serve with him on the committee. Two months after that, Wilmot was working with Mike Prozzo on the disappearance of Bernice Courtemanche.
At first look it wasn't clear to Prozzo how the case should be treated. At seventeen, Bernice Courtemanche seemed to be on the borderline between adult and child. She was working at the nursing home, no longer dependent on her parents, living with a boyfriend away from home; but she was still living as a dependent with adults, Teddy's parents, she was still going to school, and she still had a few months left as a minor.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Shadow of Death"
by .
Copyright © 1993 Philip E. Ginsburg.
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.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- Dedication
- Author’s Note
- Prologue
- Book I: Isolated Incidents
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Book II: Innocence at Risk
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Book III: Connections
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapter 14
- Book IV: Eleven Days
- April 1986
- Chapter 15
- Chapter 16
- Chapter 17
- Book V: Counterattack
- Chapter 18
- Chapter 19
- Chapter 20
- Chapter 21
- Chapter 22
- Chapter 23
- Chapter 24
- Book VI: Twenty Heartbeats
- Chapter 25
- Chapter 26
- Chapter 27
- Chapter 28
- Chapter 29
- Chapter 30
- Chapter 31
- Book VII: Survivors
- Chapter 32
- Chapter 33
- Chapter 34
- Chapter 35
- Chapter 36
- Epilogue
- Image Gallery
- Acknowledgments
- Index
- About the Author
Related Subjects
Customer Reviews
Explore More Items
