Glancing around, he whispered, “Tell you what, though. I’ll let you leave with both today if you’ll just sign this form with any old name and address here. This will make sure that if there are any UC agents roaming around, they’ll see me handing you a proper form. Make it look like you’ve completed the form and you can take the gun home with you today.”
Dick left the arena nervously with the rolled-up package under his arm. He even said goodbye to one of the state troopers at the front door, who then half-saluted him in a friendly return gesture.
Twenty minutes later, that same seller was arrested by a roving undercover FBI agent for similar infractions he had witnessed with other customers. It was just dumb luck for Straub that the agent missed his transaction by less than a half-hour, or he would have had a lot of explaining to do behind bars.
Dick Straub found a local shooting range and frequently went there after work. He practiced shooting for several weeks until he became a sharpshooter with the .45. He did not bring the silencer because he knew that police officers also came to practice.
A major part of Dick’s plan was to take two shots at all four of golf partners, not necessarily intending to kill them, but to confuse the police. They would be uncertain if the target was one of the golfers, or all four of them, or whether more shootings would take place at others not involved with golf. The police would not know how to resolve the shootings, why they occurred, or who the shooter was.
Dick began shooting at each of the foursome on different days over the next few months. He continued to develop his plans to the smallest detail, holding them firmly in his mind. He wanted nothing left to identify him in what was about to happen.
He went to different Home Depots to purchase the individual items he felt he needed. These included a pair of rubber painter’s gloves, a ten-foot by ten-foot canvas painter’s tarp, some heavy cordage, and a gallon of bleach. He didn’t want any single Home Depot to have a record of purchasing all four items at the same store, paying cash for them rather than using his company credit card.
Two weeks later, Straub followed Rabbi Bloom home from the synagogue for the fourth time. This time however, he didn’t just continue to drive by, but parked his worn-green pickup truck three blocks away from the house at a Circle-K convenience store. He knew it would be relatively empty after the normal breakfast crowd of coffee, donuts and chips customers. Still wanting to assure himself of not being noticed, he parked in the rear of the store. He waited behind the store until it got to be approximately 10:45 a.m. and, leaving the truck there, Straub walked the three blocks to the Rabbi’s house.
Carrying the gear he’d purchased, he approached the Rabbi’s home that morning with the gun and attached silencer hidden under his sweat suit. Once at the Rabbi’s house, he stashed the gear in some shrubs beside the house. Straub rang the Rabbi’s doorbell, pulled out the gun with the silencer attached, and waited for the door to open. When Rabbi Bloom opened the front door, for a second he thought he was staring at a full-length mirror image of himself. As he stood there dumbfounded, Straub shot him squarely in the forehead, throwing the Rabbi back against a front closet door and enabling Straub to climb over the body and close the front door without being seen.
He then placed the tarp on the floor near the front door, lifted the Rabbi and placed him on top of the tarp and wrapped his body with it, tying it snugly with the rope. The floors were made of hard granite, so there were no scratch marks left as he drug the tarp to the extra-large horizontal freezer he had found in the three-car garage, after a short search of the premises. There were only two cars parked in the garage, with the freezer near the door in what would have been the third spot. This gave him an idea that seemed much better than his original idea of dumping it in the desert. Straub placed the body into the freezer, not expecting it to ever be found. After moving into the home and living there as the Rabbi, his plan was to never open it again.
Over the following days, Straub went through the house many times to familiarize himself with it. He opened Neil’s closets looking for clothes to wear and dressed himself in one of the Rabbi’s suits. Standing before a mirror he instantly became, to all appearances, Rabbi Neil Bloom himself, which pleased him immensely. He also went through the Rabbi’s papers and bank statements, and was thrilled to learn how rich he was about to be, once he learned to replicate the Rabbi’s signature. Now that he had the keys to the Rabbi’s fancy cars, he called his old boss, telling him he was taking a new job in Las Vegas and where he had left the old green pickup.
Poor no more, he thought with profound satisfaction. “All I have to do now is give convincing performances at the synagogue.” Remarkably, he was able to bring them off almost flawlessly, and nobody seemed to notice the difference, not even the Rabbi’s mistress Carol.
Straub’s expectation that the corpse would never be found, however, was a huge mistake. One night six weeks later, the neighborhood was struck by a severe thunder and lightning storm, causing the power to go out for three days. The body began to stink the terrible odor of death due to the freezer thawing out. This caused Straub to get nervous the
