True Crime Files: My Most Memorable Cases

51 Pages·2011·1.27 MB·English

by  Casey

True Crime Files: My Most Memorable Cases
By Kathryn Casey

All Rights Reserved Copyright: Kathryn Casey August 1, 2011

Dear Readers: I’ve spent more than two decades covering sensational
murder cases - first for magazines and then for books - so it’s perhaps not
surprising that some linger in my mind. There are those stories that I can’t
forget. For some reason, they touched me, and I never stopped thinking about the
crimes, the investigations and the people involved.

True Crime Files is an anthology comprised of three such unforgettable
cases. In at least one way, they’re similar. All focus on women: a
businesswoman left for dead by a serial killer; a teenage girl and her murdered
mother; a woman who is certain that her ex-husband has killed their daughter. In
each instance, I’ve included the original piece and then updated it at the end. In
addition, case one has been substantially expanded to include an account of the
trial and its shocking aftermath. In many ways, these cases are milestones in my
career as a crime writer. I hope they capture your imaginations as they have
mine.

Now let’s begin:
Case One: Fighting Back: Denise Sam-Cali Refused to Die

In the mid-Nineties, a magazine editor asked me to fly to Allentown, PA, to
interview Denise Sam-Cali. My assignment was to report on her near fatal
attack by Harvey Miguel Robinson, thought to be the youngest serial killer in
U.S. history. In August 1992, at the age of 17, Robinson began a murderous
rampage, claiming life after life. It was a miracle that Sam-Cali survived, but
what impressed me the most was the incredible bravery she showed afterward, a
strength that helped bring Robinson to justice. That should have been the end of
it, but as the years passed the judicial system repeatedly failed Sam-Cali, forcing
her to continually relive the horror.
Come along with me to Allentown. It’s the spring of 1994, and Denise has
just opened her front door and invited us in.

Photo: Denise Sam-Cali in 2011

“THIS IS ONE HERE," Denise Sam-Cali says, indicating a bullet hole the
width of a finger sliced through the center of a white kitchen cabinet. Pulling
back a navy-blue rug in front of the range, she runs her foot over the linoleum
until she finds another cavity, protruding downward. "This is where the cop fired
back," she says. Then her voice falters, and anger flashes in her hazel eyes. "It
sounded like Vietnam."
The scene Denise describes occurred during a ghastly sequence of events:
In June 1993, Denise, a statuesque businesswoman with a cap of chin-length
reddish-brown hair, was raped and brutally beaten at her Allentown,
Pennsylvania, home by a serial killer thought to be the youngest in U.S. history.
Miraculously, she lived - yet the terror didn't end there. Instead, her would-be
murderer stalked her, eluding police with terrifying skill, obsessively intent on
finishing the job. Only when Denise and her husband, John, became the hunters
instead of the hunted was her assailant finally caught.
Sitting at a dinette chair as the sun streaks through the windows, Denise,
39, exudes a capable, in-charge confidence. But she insists she doesn't see
herself as heroic. She did what she had to do; her pursuer gave her no other
choice. "I couldn't forget his eyes," she says with a shudder. "There was no
person there, just dead blankness.... I knew it was him or me."

Photo: Joan Mary Burghardt

A NINETY-MINUTE DRIVE WEST of New York City, Allentown in the
early Nineties wasn't a city used to violence, but a quiet bedroom community. In
fact, the crime rate was historically so low that Parade magazine had recently
dubbed the erstwhile steel town one of the safest places in America. But the
summer of 1993 was an anxious season in the serene, tree-shaded neighborhood
where Denise Sam-Cali grew up and where she still lived, down the block from
her parents and sister. The unease had begun a year earlier, in August 1992,
when Joan Mary Burghardt, a 29-year-old single woman who worked as an aide
at a nursing home, was found raped and bludgeoned to death in her living room.
No arrest was made.
Photo: Charlotte Schmoyer

The following June, 15-year-old Charlotte Schmoyer circulated through
the neighborhood delivering newspapers. At 5:50 on the morning of the ninth, a
woman walked outside in her bathrobe expecting to retrieve her newspaper and
found that it hadn’t arrived. When the woman scanned the street, she noticed the
ninth-grader’s cart filled with newspapers just down the block. Time passed, and
the woman watched, but Charlotte didn’t return. The cart appeared abandoned.
After a call to 911, police arrived. The situation became even more
ominous when one officer noticed a trail of blood. Following it, they discovered
one of Charlotte’s shoes. Three hours later the search centered on a wooded area
near a reservoir, based on the supposition that a kidnapper would want seclusion.
It was there among the trees that an officer pointed at a white object in the
distance. It turned out to be an exposed section of pale skin. Most of Charlotte’s
brutally savaged body lay hidden under a pile of logs and brush. When the
autopsy was completed, the medical examiner determined that the teenager had
been raped and stabbed 22 times. Her throat had been slashed.
Despite the ferocity of the attack, there was evidence that Charlotte hadn’t
succumbed easily. The condition of the body, especially defensive wounds on
her hands, suggested that the teenager had fought back, as did drops of blood
found on the scene that didn’t match Charlotte’s - blood the police believed
came from her killer.
Allentown was already reeling over Burghardt’s murder; now local
newspapers and TV reports filled with the grisly details of Charlotte Schmoyer’s
death. Denise remembers: "Every morning I checked the papers to see if they
had caught anyone. They never did." Still, Denise and John, a handsome gray-
haired 46-year old, had more immediate concerns, like the limousine and bus
service they owned and operated from offices within walking distance of their
home.
Then on June 18, just nine days after Schmoyer's murder, the Calis
returned from a sailing trip and discovered their ranch-style home had been
burglarized. John's gun collection had been stolen, and a bottle of Canadian Club
whiskey had been left out on a kitchen counter, but nothing else was disturbed.
In the building heat of that summer, the specter of violence drew
increasingly closer. Two days later as John walked to the office, a pack of squad
cars screeched to a halt in front of a nearby house. The following morning, the
headlines announced yet another attack - this time, the victim was a five-year-
old girl. As her parents slept, someone had entered the home and thrown the
child headfirst into a basket of laundry before raping and beating her. Left for
dead, she survived. To Denise, it was unbelievable.
"I'd grown up in this neighborhood," she remembers. "We never had things
like this. Still, I wasn't really worried."

THE DAYS PASSED. ONE WEEK LATER, on June 28, John
accompanied a client to Atlantic City. Not expecting her husband to return until
morning, Denise stopped for dinner at her aunt's house, and by midnight was
home in bed, alone. The entire city was suffering in the grip of a stifling heat
wave, so she left a few windows open to cool the house. It would be her last
peaceful night's sleep for a long time.
Before dawn, Denise awoke to the sound of paper rustling in the living
room. "John, is that you?" she called out. When no one answered, dread rushed
through her. Wearing only her bra, she grabbed a comforter and ran from the
bedroom, into a hallway. Terrified, she hurried past a bedroom they’d converted
into a closet, toward the living room, intent on fleeing the house. But as she
neared the end of the hallway, she heard footsteps. Her heart racing, Denise
glanced back toward the closet, and what she saw sent a shudder through her.
There stood a meticulously groomed young man in tight-fitting jeans, staring at
her. For a fleeting moment, she thought: He's not what I would have expected.
But when their eyes met, she noticed his cold, blank stare.
Oh, my God, I'm dead, she thought. I'm raped, and then I'm dead.
Before she could react, the intruder ran toward her and raised his arms,
wielding one of her own kitchen knives, the handle wrapped in a napkin. Purely
on instinct, Denise, still holding the comforter, swung her arms up, breaking his
grip on the weapon. The knife fell and he paused, a look of surprise on his face.
Pouncing on the opportunity, Denise raced toward the front door, and for a
moment she thought she’d escape. She was in the living room when he grabbed
her by the hair, fiercely snapping her head back. He was strong, but Denise
struggled against him, and again she broke free, this time running through the
front door and outside into the hot night air. She ran as fast as she could across
her front lawn toward a neighbor's house. But she couldn’t run fast enough.
Suddenly, with what seemed like incredible strength, he seized her from behind
and slammed her to the ground beneath a miniature peach tree.
Powerfully built, he pinned her beneath him, but she didn’t give up. Using
her only weapon, Denise bit her attacker, clamping down hard on his upper right
arm. To her astonishment, when she looked in his eyes she saw exhilaration not
pain. Her heart pounding and her terror escalating, she flayed at him with her
arms as he tightened one hand around her throat and gripped the other over her
mouth. Later she’d remember his fist barreling toward her and the first four
blows to her head, the hazy swell of unconsciousness, and the image of her
assailant unfastening his leather belt.
For what must have been only minutes but seemed like an eternity, Denise
drifted in and out of consciousness; when she finally came to, he loomed over
her as her entire body jerked, racked by involuntary convulsions. Wanting her
attacker to believe she was dead, Denise fought to lie as still as possible. She
could feel him watching her when suddenly, Denise heard a neighbor from
across the street walk outside and shout. Instantly, her attacker turned and fled
into the Calis’ house. Seconds later, Denise saw him escape through the rear
patio door.
Dazed, her head pounding and suffering excruciating pain, Denise slowly
pulled herself onto unsteady feet and stumbled into the house. Her 911 call
clocked in at 4:52 a.m.
"Please help me," she whispered.
John returned to the house the following morning and found police still
processing what had become a crime scene. One detective broke the horrible
news. At the hospital, John couldn't believe that the battered woman in the
emergency room was really his wife. The attacker had pummeled her face and
upper body, and her neck and chest were a patchwork of bruises, her upper lip
slashed in two. By then Denise's face and head had swollen and both of her eyes
were ringed in black, the whites red with broken blood vessels. Suspecting what
might have happened, Denise’s brother, George, had asked the doctors to do a
rape kit.
Later that morning, John held her hand as a doctor delivered the agonizing
news: semen had been recovered and the tests had confirmed George’s fears.
Denise’s would-be killer had also raped her. The only good news was that they
now had the genetic imprint of the attacker; yet without a suspect to tie it to, it
was worthless. While her injuries were incredibly painful, doctors found nothing
serious enough to warrant admitting Denise, and that same day she was taken by
ambulance to a plastic surgeon. After her lip was repaired, she was transported
to her mother's house, where her family gathered around her, angry and shaken.
A police artist arrived and worked with Denise to draw a portrait of the
young man who’d attacked her. Yet somehow, that evidence didn’t make it to
those who most needed it; the drawing, for some reason, wasn’t distributed to
the officers working the streets. They also weren’t told about the bite mark she’d
inflicted on the rapist’s arm. Later Denise would hear that a man fitting the
description had been stopped but allowed to continue on when it was discovered
that he lived in the neighborhood. No one compared his face to the drawing or
asked him to roll up his sleeve so they could look at his arm.
Five days later, Denise returned to her own home. By then John had
arranged to have a security system installed that would sound when the doors
were opened, and had bought central air conditioning so they could keep the
windows shut.
Why didn’t she simply pack up and leave? She wasn’t going to let the
monster win. "There were those who thought I should move," Denise says. "But
this was my home."

YET HAVING DENISE IN THE SAME HOUSE where she’d been so
brutally attacked frightened not only John but her entire family. They talked
often, trying to figure out who could have committed such a vicious crime. They
wanted whoever it was taken off the streets before he hurt someone else. The
police were working on the case, yet none of Denise’s family felt good about the
progress. When her brother asked for information, the detective in charge
refused to talk, saying he couldn’t disclose the details of an ongoing
investigation.
Irritated with the lack of progress, Denise's family decided days later that
they had no alternative but to take her protection into their own hands. In the
wee hours of the night, Denise’s brother and cousins began patrolling the Calis’
neighborhood, watching for strangers. An uncle, a Korean War vet, had to be
talked out of laying in wait for the man under a tarp in the yard. Meanwhile
inside the house, John spent hour after hour trying to think of someone - anyone
- who could have a vendetta against him, someone sick enough to have savagely
attacked his wife. Despite the security system, John slept on the couch at night, a
newly purchased gun close at hand. "I wanted to kill him," he says. "I wanted
that SOB to come back."
Yet that was his wife’s worst nightmare. While her physical wounds were
healing and the bruises fading, emotionally and psychologically Denise was
suffering. Whenever she had to be alone in the house, her chest tightened and her
heart pounded as she fought panic attacks. At such times, she couldn’t erase the
man’s face from her mind. She wondered if he could be just outside, hidden
behind a bush or in the shadows, waiting for the opportunity to strike again. "I
couldn't even take a shower or go to the mall," she remembers.
As the days passed, while her family remained vigilant, Denise’s mind
cleared and she began to think about what had happened. Neither she nor John
had made a connection at first, but before long Denise began reconsidering the
violence that had plagued her neighborhood since the previous year, including
the two murders and the rape and beating of the small girl. Slowly she began to
wonder if her assault could be related to the others.
If at first it seemed preposterous, the more she thought about it, the more
logical it all appeared. Needing to understand more about what had happened in
the other cases, Denise and John called the parents of the five-year-old victim in
early July. When they agreed to talk, the Calis went to the girl’s home.
Questioning the parents, John and Denise began noting similarities between both
attacks, including the time of night and the calm manner of the intruder. "By the
time we left their house, I was thoroughly convinced it was the same guy," John
remembers. From that realization, it was a smaller leap to conclude that both
rapes could be connected to the unsolved murders of Burghardt and Schmoyer.
Yet that realization brought not closure but more fear. When Denise
realized that the man who’d attacked her could be a serial killer, the dread that
enveloped her was nearly suffocating. Although she’d never doubted that he
meant to kill her, knowing that two other women were dead made it all the more
real.
Despite that, Denise was alive. Police reassured her that such violent