The first bulletin came on the seven o’clock morning news while I was doing sit-ups in front of the TV.
It said there’d been a shocking murder in Central Park. The body of a young woman had been found in a wooded area near the Park Grille Restaurant on the west side of the park. The victim had not yet been identified. Authorities said she had been killed sometime the night before, but no one knew anything else about her, why she was in the park or the exact cause of death.
I had a decision to make. Should I stop doing sit-ups and call the city desk right away? Or wait until they called me? I knew that if I stopped my sit-ups, I’d feel guilty all morning. Besides, the office knew where to find me.
Sure enough, some fifteen minutes later, my phone was ringing when I came out of the shower. It was Danny Knowlton, the assistant city desk editor at the New York Tribune, the newspaper where I work as a crime reporter.
“Listen, Jessie, there’s just been a killing—” Knowlton began.
“I’m way ahead of you. I saw the news bulletin on TV.”
“Well, we’ve got more details now. This sounds like it’s going to be a big story.”
The victim had been identified as Margaret Kincaid, who worked as a campaign aide on the re-election committee of U.S. Senator Frank Lansdale. Margaret Kincaid was twenty-nine years old and lived downtown in the SoHo area of Manhattan. She’d only been in New York City for a few months – she was originally from Santa Barbara, California.
“If you get a cab right away, you can be at the crime scene in ten minutes,” Knowlton said.
“What’s the big hurry?” I asked, working a comb through my wet hair.
“The big hurry is I’d like to beat the other papers in town on this story.”
“Margaret Kincaid’s not going anywhere. I mean, she’s not going to jump up and walk away or anything.”
“But all the other reporters will get there first—”
“That’s not what I do, Danny.”
“What exactly is it you do again?”
Knowlton knew the answer to that, of course. I didn’t use the police as the primary source for my crime stories. I preferred to write about crime from the perspective of the victim. Why did it happen to them? Who were they? What were the consequences and the repercussions of the crime? That was my specialty. I’d made a living doing that.
I glanced over at a picture of myself hanging on the wall of my apartment – a framed cover of New York Magazine. The headline said:
STOP THE PRESSES – CENTRAL PARK VICTIM JESSIE TUCKER IS FAMOUS!
There was a picture of me standing next to a New York Tribune delivery truck, looking very much like a modern-day version of Lois Lane.
“Haven’t you heard?” I laughed to Danny Knowlton. “I’m a legend.”
I got dressed then. I put on a pair of Calvin Klein blue jeans, a pink silk Christian Dior blouse, flat Italian sandals and a funky cowgirl-style belt with a big buckle that I’d bought on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village a few weeks before. I put some sunscreen on my face and pulled my wavy, dark hair into a simple ponytail. Then I checked myself out in a mirror. Not too bad for thirty-six, I told myself. Yep, all the sit-ups had really paid off.
Of course, I really had no choice in the matter. Those were the doctors’ orders. Even all these years later the daily exercises had to be done, no matter what. But the looking good part that came with it – well, that was a nice bonus too.
I still walked with a slight limp from the injuries I suffered that night.
Every once in a while, I even had to use a cane – but never out in public where people could see me. And then there were the minor aches and pains that the doctors said would never completely go away. But, all in all, I was in pretty good shape. The scars on my body were very faint now.
But what about the scars you can’t see? The ones inside you?
The doctors can’t do anything about them.
I thought about Margaret Kincaid lying dead there in Central Park. A woman in the wrong place at the wrong time on a hot summer night. And now she was dead.
Nope, it was no surprise that the Tribune had assigned me the story.
I was the ideal reporter for it.
I was perfect.
The Margaret Kincaid murder was a slam-dunk, open-and-shut case, according to the cops.
She had left her job at the New York City campaign office of Senator Frank Lansdale at 5:31 p.m. on the night she died. She made two stops. The first one was at a print shop on Madison Avenue where she picked up a package. The second was to the Park Grille, a trendy new restaurant on the west side of Central Park, near 86th Street, where she was meeting Jonathan Lansdale for dinner. Jonathan Lansdale was the senator’s son and also his campaign manager.
They had been dating for a few months – pretty much the entire time she’d been working for his father. Jonathan Lansdale told police afterward that Margaret had seemed upset by something during dinner, but she wouldn’t say what it was. Finally, while they were having coffee and dessert, he asked her again what was bothering her. Instead of telling him, she began to cry and ran toward the women’s room. She never came back.
A parking lot attendant on duty outside remembered seeing a distressed woman come out the front door of the restaurant at about that time. She had her cell phone out and was talking to someone, he said. Then she began striding quickly across the parking lot toward the park itself.
The attendant called out after her to see if she wanted him to call a cab. But she waved him off. She disappeared into the trees, apparently headed toward an exit from the park. She never made it.
Lansdale, her dinner companion, waited at the table for a long time hoping she’d come back. When she didn’t, he called her apartment in Soho to see if she was there. She wasn’t, but he kept calling her phone every five minutes or so for much of the night – increasingly desperate to find out what had happened to her.
At 3:30 a.m., Lansdale – confused, worried and unsure of what to do next – called the police. Of course, she was long dead by then. But his reporting of her as a missing person was one of the reasons the police were able to identify her so quickly.
A passerby spotted the body a little after 5:00 a.m., when the sun was just starting to come up. The police at the scene reported that Margaret Kincaid had been bludgeoned to death with a rock. The bloody rock was found on the ground a few feet away from the body.
Her death was not instantaneous, according to the medical examiner’s office. Their theory was that the first blow had struck her on the left temple, just above the eye – and stunned her enough to prevent her from fighting back. But she was probably still conscious. There were several other blows from the rock, and much of her face was crushed in. She took a few minutes to die, the ME’s report said.
Her skirt was pushed up and had been ripped, but there was no further evidence of sexual assault. It wasn’t clear why – maybe her attacker heard someone coming and needed to get away in a hurry.
But he took her purse, a pearl ring, a pair of earrings – and her cell phone was missing too. Investigators also found three cigarette butts at the crime scene, which they figured the killer had smoked while he waited there for a likely victim.
Sometime the next day, police – acting on a tip – raided the hotel room of a man named Joseph Enrico, who was staying at a cheap flophouse called The Stanton on Amsterdam Avenue. They said his fingerprints matched fingerprints found on the bloody rock. They also found Margaret Kincaid’s purse, earrings and ring in his room. When they attempted to handcuff him, he pulled a gun from his pocket and opened fire. The police shot back, killing him instantly. Enrico had a rap sheet dating back twenty years for burglary, forgery and auto theft.
I put all this in my story for the Tribune. There was a picture of Margaret Kincaid that ran with it. We’d gotten the picture from the Lansdale campaign office, and it showed her standing next to her desk there. She was blonde, beautiful and looked full of life. That haunting last image made her violent and senseless murder seem even more tragic.
The death of Margaret Kincaid was like too many New York City crime stories – just an innocent person in the wrong place at the wrong time.
If Margaret Kincaid hadn’t left her boyfriend and run out of that restaurant, she’d be alive today.
Or if she’d turned around in the parking lot and waited for a taxicab.
Or if the path of a career criminal like Joseph Enrico hadn’t crossed hers at exactly that moment…
We all make a hundred decisions like that every day without ever suffering any real consequences from any of them.
And then one day there are consequences. But by then it’s too late.
A lot of my stories are very complicated. They take days from the time of the crime until the arrest and eventually the trial. Or, they go unsolved without anyone ever knowing all the answers.
But this one wasn’t like that.
Margaret Kincaid was murdered, the obvious perpetrator shot to death during the arrest and the case cleared off the books – all in less than twenty-four hours.
It was easy.
Maybe too easy.
I had some problems with it.
First, what was Margaret Kincaid so upset about in the hours before her death? The woman had jumped up in the middle of a restaurant, burst into tears and ran outside alone into the woods. Didn’t that mean something? Of course, it could just be a coincidence. But I wondered how extensively the police had questioned Jonathan Lansdale. Lansdale was the last person with her, which normally would have made him a prime suspect. But he was immediately cleared. Of course, he was the son of a U.S. senator. And there was no evidence linking him to the crime. Besides, he was still sitting inside the restaurant waiting for her to come back when she disappeared from sight.
Second, who did she talk to on her cell phone outside the restaurant? Was she calling for a taxi to take her somewhere? Probably not, because the parking lot attendant offered to get her one, but she waved him away. Whoever was on the other end of that phone – assuming she actually reached someone – was the last person to talk to Margaret Kincaid. So who was that, and why hadn’t he or she come forward with their story yet?
Third, why didn’t she accept the offer of a taxi? It certainly was better than walking all the way out of the park to wherever she was headed. What if she had been trying to get away from Jonathan Lansdale? He could have come out of the restaurant at any moment and caught up with her. But, if she’d just gotten in a cab, she’d have been long gone.
Fourth, Joseph Enrico seemed to be an odd person to have committed this murder. It didn’t seem to be his style. None of his previous crimes – burglary, forgery or auto theft – included random street attacks like this. That wasn’t his MO. So why did Enrico stand there in the woods with a rock in his hand waiting for someone like Margaret Kincaid to walk past? Also, it turned out Enrico didn’t smoke. So where did the three cigarette butts at the crime scene come from? The cops decided they’d probably been left there earlier by someone who had nothing to do with the murder.
Of course, none of this meant anything if you accepted the obvious conclusion the way the police did: that Joseph Enrico killed Margaret Kincaid in a simple case of robbery, attempted sexual assault and murder just because she happened to be there on that particular night.
Because then all the rest of it – the crying scene in the restaurant, the cell phone call, the refused taxicab – was clearly irrelevant to the way she had died.
That’s how cops solve most of their cases. They focus on a likely suspect – the person they believe did it. Then they accumulate evidence that could back up this version of how it happened. The police don’t particularly care about any evidence they happen to run across which takes them in a different direction. That only complicates things. Not that there is really anything wrong with this approach. Most of the time it works.
On the other hand, if you started out with the hypothesis that maybe Joseph Enrico didn’t commit the murder, then all these other questions become very important to the case again.
The crying. The taxicab. The phone call. The lack of any apparent motive for a career criminal like Joseph Enrico to kill Margaret Kincaid. And what about the shootout at the end that killed Enrico? Why did he pull a gun when they came to arrest him? He must have known that he was signing his own death warrant. Enrico had been to jail plenty of times. He knew the score. He’d never done anything like that before.
None of this bothered the cops.
Or the District Attorney’s office.
Or any of the people covering the story for the other newspapers and TV stations and news websites in town.
But it bothered me.
I sat now in the city room of the Tribune, nursing a chipped mug of black coffee and reading an old news story about myself that I’d called up online.
A chill ran down my spine, and I shuddered. I was supposed to be working on the Margaret Kincaid murder story, but the discovery of Margaret Kincaid’s body in the park had sure brought back a lot of the old memories.
Terrifying memories. The nightmarish ones that I kept telling myself I’d finally put behind me after twelve long years. Except I knew, deep down inside, that I really hadn’t done that at all. All it took was an event like this – an attack on another woman in the park just like happened to me – to bring back the rising nausea all over again.
And when I’d googled for articles on Central Park crimes to find out how many others there had been over the years, I came across this piece about myself:
MIRACLE ON 77th STREET
By Ellen Robbins
Tribune Reporter
Jessie Tucker lies in a bed in Rm. 321 of Lenox Hill Hospital on East 77th Street, just a short distance away from Central Park where she was found beaten and near death months ago. She has suffered two broken legs, a broken hip, a cracked fibula, massive internal injuries, severe damage to her head which left her in a coma for weeks and cuts and lacerations that will take months of plastic and reconstructive surgery to repair. She can only be out of bed for 10 to 15 minutes at a time. Even then, she is confined to a wheelchair. Doctors say it will be a long time before she can learn to walk again – and they’re not offering any guarantees she’ll ever have a normal life going forward.
But Jessie Tucker knows she’s lucky.
She is still alive.
“I’m just taking it one day at a time,” she told the Tribune yesterday in an exclusive interview – the first she has given since she was brutally beaten and left for dead. “But I’m going to be OK. Tell everyone that. I’m going to make it all the way back.”
It was four months ago that an early morning dog walker found Jessie’s bruised and battered body lying behind some trees about 100 yards into the park, near 79th Street and Fifth. She was unconscious and had gone into shock. She was near death.
Central Park has long been known as one of the city’s most notorious spots for crime. There was the Central Park jogger in the 80s, when a young woman was attacked while running in the park. The preppie murder of a pretty young Upper East Side woman that became a tabloid sensation. And so many other murders, assaults and rapes that have occurred there over the years.
But crime has gone down dramatically in the city in the last decade – and what happened to Jessie Tucker is a shocking reminder to New Yorkers of those bad old days.
For several days after the attack, Jessie lay in a coma – and doctors said there was no more anyone could do for her except pray for a miracle.
And we all did.
The miracle, when it happened, came slowly. One day she opened her eyes. Then she moved a finger. After that, her whole hand. And, finally, she began saying her first words.
“I never wanted to become a poster girl for sympathy and pity,” she says now from her hospital room on East 77th Street, where she looks out at a bustling Manhattan street and dreams of one day being out there walking around like all the other people again.
“But I guess everything happens for a reason. I know my life will never be exactly the same as it was before. I also know though that I’ll be a stronger person because I was able to survive all this.
“And I’ll never forget the outpouring of kindness from so many people I don’t even know.”
She looked around at all the cards and flowers and gifts that adorned the room.
“They say New Yorkers are hard-hearted and cynical. But it isn’t true. I still can’t believe the way everyone in this city has opened up their hearts to me.”
One of her goals is to testify against the man arrested for the attack against her. His trial is set for early spring, and Jessie vows she’ll walk into that courtroom to tell her story.
Everyone who knows Jessie believes she can do it.
“She’s a fighter,” said Dr. Janet Spitz, who has been by her side every step of the way in her battle to recover from her devastating injuries. “I’ve never seen a patient so determined to get well. She’s come so far. I know she’ll walk again. Hell, I think someday she will be the same woman she always was.”
“She won’t be alone,” promised Gary Bettig, a lawyer whom Jessie had been dating for several months before the attack. They recently got engaged and plan to be married in the spring. “I’ll be there for her. She’s going to need a lot of love and support. That’s what I’m going to give her.”
And her bosses at Wiley, Farrior and Mueller say her job as an advertising account executive will be waiting for her there whenever she’s ready to come back.
“We were proud of Jessie before this terrible thing happened,” said Robert Wiley, senior partner of the firm. “But now we’re just bursting with pride and joy that she’s come so far. She’s a very special person. There will always be a place for her at Wiley, Farrior and Mueller.”
There were two pictures with the article. One was a profile of me sitting in a wheelchair and looking out the hospital window. It was taken from the side, and the angle of the shot hid the bruises and injuries I still had when the interview was done. The other was a file picture the Tribune had gotten from Wiley, Farrior and Mueller. I looked at that picture now. The woman in the picture was young, self-confident, unafraid of anything.
But, like I said, that was a long time ago.
Now, well… I wasn’t sure I even knew that person anymore.
When I got home later, I was still thinking about that article.
I poured myself a glass of wine, relaxed on the couch in my living room and tried to lose myself in a movie I was watching on Netflix.
But I couldn’t get those memories from out of my mind.
A lot has changed since the article was written.
Robert Wiley, the senior partner at the advertising firm I worked for then, got himself indicted several years later for embezzlement and misappropriation of company funds. He left the firm in disgrace.
Gary Bettig is gone too. Not long after his touching words of love and devotion in the article about us, Bettig stopped coming to see me in the hospital. He said it was just too depressing, and he wanted to date other women. “I want to have sex with my girlfriend, I can’t be with a cripple,” is what he told me the last time I saw him. I heard he eventually got married to someone else, had a couple of kids and was practicing tax law somewhere in the city.
And then there was the tragedy of Dr. Spitz. Kind, gentle, compassionate Dr. Janet Spitz. A truly wonderful woman. I never would have survived without her. One day she left Lenox Hill Hospital and walked to a fast food restaurant a block away to grab a sandwich for lunch. A man with a gun tried to hold up the place while she was there. No one knows exactly what happened, but shots were fired – and Janet Spitz was hit in the heart. She was gone by the time the ambulance got there and the killer was never caught. I used to dream that I would be the one to avenge Dr. Spitz’s murder, but I never got anywhere with that. In the end, there were never any real answers for what happened. Just another senseless death in a city too often filled with senseless crime.
As for me, I never went back to the Madison Avenue advertising job. The experience I’d endured really had changed me. Suddenly I didn’t want to spend my life working on slogans and ad campaigns anymore. I wanted to do something more meaningful. I became friends with Ellen Robbins – the newspaper reporter who’d done the interview with me – and it was Ellen who suggested that I try writing for the Tribune about other victims of violent crime.
Now I was the crime specialist for the Tribune.
Around the time of my attack, I had been written up in People, USA Today and a lot of other major publications – and even now I have a crime blog with hundreds of thousands of followers, although I write less and less on it these days. Someone had even put out a quickie book about me that made the New York Times bestseller list, followed by a made-for-TV movie called: Miracle in Central Park: The Jessie Tucker Story.
Yep, I’d made it a long way back. Just like Dr. Spitz had predicted in that newspaper article twelve years ago.
She was wrong about one thing though.
When she said that one day I would again be the same woman I always was… I knew I’d never be the same again.
The newsroom of a big city newspaper – especially when you’re working on a good story – is the most exciting place in the world.
Reporters pounding away on their keyboards. Editors screaming. Telephones ringing. People racing around the room frantically as their deadline approaches.
At the Tribune, the newsroom is a football field-sized space in a building on Sixth Avenue near Rockefeller Center, with huge, plate-glass windows overlooking Radio City Music Hall on one side and Times Square on the other.
The old newsrooms from movies with typewriters and wire machines spewing out copy are long gone now. The Tribune newsroom looks more like an insurance office – carpeted floors, modular furniture and computer terminals where reporters write their stories and store all their copy. There are also a half-dozen big flat-screen TVs on the walls alongside the desks so reporters and editors know what is going on everywhere in the news. And, of course, everyone is constantly checking their phones for texts and updates.
Even after all these years, the excitement of walking into a newsroom is still there for me.
I felt it now as I went to talk to Danny Knowlton, the assistant city editor. “I’ve been thinking… I want to keep covering the Margaret Kincaid story,” I said to Danny.
“I thought the story was over.”
“Not for me it isn’t.”
Danny smiled. I think he had expected this.
“I noticed what you wrote about it for us wasn’t exactly objective, Jessie.” Danny pushed his glasses up his nose and raised his eyebrows.
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
In the article I’d submitted the day before I’d included all my questions and reservations about the results of the investigation into Margaret Kincaid’s death.
“The police are calling it a closed case.”
“So? Let’s reopen it. Or at least look a little deeper into the facts of what happened to Margaret Kincaid.”
“How do you do plan to do that?”
“Just some basic investigative reporting, Danny. Talk to people in Senator Lansdale’s office about her. Talk to the senator’s son who was dating her. Talk to other people who knew her. Retrace all of her steps on the night she died. Even if we don’t find out anything new, it’s a great angle for the Tribune. ‘Former Central Park Crime Victim reports on new Central Park Murder Victim’. Everyone will be talking about me and the story. Which means they’ll be talking about the Tribune.” I leaned up against his desk, fingers drumming on the wood as I spoke.
I could tell Danny liked the idea. And why not? It was the perfect story for an ambitious young newspaper editor to milk for as long as possible. And no question about it, Danny Knowlton was definitely an ambitious young newspaper editor. Me, I had slightly mixed feelings about it, despite it being my own suggestion. I had no desire to be back in the limelight… but, if that’s what I had to do to stay on this story, I was willing to make the sacrifice.
The city editor of the paper, Danny’s boss, was a man named Norman Isaacs. Everyone figured Danny would take over Isaacs’ job soon. It was just a matter of when.
Isaacs was close to sixty-five years old, and retirement was just around the corner. He didn’t ever want to rock the boat and do anything to jeopardize that retirement. No problems, no hassles, no messes – even if it meant no good stories either. “I want to work a clean shift today,” he often announced in the morning as he sat down at the city desk. Everyone nodded and agreed with the sentiment, but behind his back they made fun of him. No-Guts Norman, they called him. He wasn’t really a bad guy. Somewhere along the line he’d just lost the fire in his belly.
The truth of the matter was that Isaacs – even before his retirement began to loom as a real possibility – had always been a cautious, play-by-the-rules kind of editor. He had reprimanded my friend Ellen more than a decade ago for putting on a hospital worker’s clothes to sneak up to my room and get . . .
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