Retired Philadelphia police captain Frank Friel sat in the ballroom of the San Antonio Hilton, chain-smoking and haunted by his thoughts. In his suit pocket was his keynote speech; in his hands was the national convention’s Book of the Dead. At his table were the conventioneers, their faces distorted with grief or anger or flooded with tears, like rain washing over stone. It was Thursday evening, August 11, 1991, and the fourth annual convention of the National Organization of Parents of Murdered Children (POMC) was a gathering unlike any Friel had ever seen.
As he stood to speak to the hall filled with mothers and fathers, uncles and grandparents, of murdered children and young adults, Friel prayed for guidance. The enormity of the suffering in the room weighed on him; he was struggling to keep down a bottomless grief, to stare into his own soul.
In thirty years on the Philadelphia police force, Friel had thought he knew all there was to know about murder. He’d investigated thousands of them as a cop and homicide captain. He’d been codirector of the Philadelphia Police–FBI Organized Crime Task Force that virtually destroyed the Philadelphia Mafia in the 1980s. He’d fearlessly stood up to the murderous don, Nicodemo Scarfo, who identified Friel as his “chief nemesis.” He’d personally investigated the bombing assassination of Philadelphia godfather Philip “Chicken Man” Testa on the Ides of March 1981, when Testa was blown through his front door as he put the key in the lock at 2117 Porter Street in South Philadelphia. In the nation’s fourth-largest city, Friel was the best of the best. The former city police commissioner and mayor Frank Rizzo once said, “No detective in the history of the Philadelphia Police Department was better than Frank Friel.”
Retired from the Philly PD for two years, he’d taken a job as the public safety director of Bensalem, Bucks County, and worked as a consultant to the FBI and Major League Baseball on organized crime. He toured the country assessing the professional standards of police departments for the National Commission on Accreditation. He taught criminology at Temple, St. Joseph’s, and LaSalle universities. But the POMC was something new. The group had 100,000 members, with chapters in most states, and provided a full range of services to suffering families. The convention seemed surreal to him. In seminars and hallways, at meals and over drinks, they learned from experts and one another how to endure a murder in the family: inattentive, inept, or corrupt cops and prosecutors; an exploitive press; the court system with its noble constitutional safeguards for the rights of their sons’ or daughters’ killers and none for them or their son or daughter; friends, neighbors, and church folk who shunned them; the sidelong glances that said,
Friel thought he knew the awful secret of murder in America. The awful secret was that since 1960, when he joined the police department at age eighteen, more than 500,000 Americans had been murdered—approximately ten times the combat deaths in Vietnam, nearly as many American deaths as the Civil War and World War II combined. The combat in Americans’ private lives was the nation’s penultimate war, and the troops were sadly undermanned.
Big city police were overwhelmed by a flood of new murder cases each week. With no time to do the job properly, they focused on easy cases and let difficult ones slide. The typical PD was a tragically inefficient bureaucracy that half the time chained the detective to a desk, pushing needless paper, Friel said. “Disgraceful turf battles for individual glory” consumed cops at all levels and prevented city, state, and federal agents from working together. The result was that “the streets are less safe for our citizens than they should be, and crimes—often very serious crimes—that could be solved are not.” The result was that as many as 30 percent of murders nationwide went unsolved. Put another way, more than 100,000 Americans in a generation had gotten away with murder.
Friel knew all that. Then he saw “The Murder Wall” in the main lobby of the hotel. It was a simple display, with homemade posters and photographs, telling the stories of 120 murder victims. His eyes scanned the faces of the dead: not drug dealers or gang members, or the front-page victims of the Los Angeles Night Stalker or Chicago’s Killer Clown. A twenty-three-year-old Chicago medical student. A thirty-four-year-old Michigan lawyer. Two young Minnesota girls who went shopping for school and never came home. America’s slaughtered boys and girls next door.
Friel saw parents quietly approach the wall, heads bowed. They left notes and flowers as if at a war memorial. They seemed broken, invisible men and women whom he’d heard say in the hallways and seminars, “Don’t let the killer take another victim.” It hit Friel then that nobody had put into numbers the larger tragedy of American murder, the uncounted hundreds of thousands of people struggling to find a healing they knew would never come, a rough closure. How they hated that word, “closure,” he noted. They knew it was not possible.
JUST ONE PERSON IS MISSING, James Charles Kaloger’s parents wrote at the wall. BUT OUR WHOLE WORLD SEEMS SO EMPTY!
Friel scarcely remembered his keynote address that night. Returning to Philadelphia, he knew he had seen through a fissure in the surface of American crime to an underground, a place of routine tragedy and suffering that was unimaginable and therefore unimagined.
“This is a tragic situation in our country,” Friel said to Fleisher and the others at a luncheon. “How can we see this level of suffering and do nothing? There are lots of people who need our help.” The mission of the Vidocq Society was finally clear.
• CHAPTER 27 •
THE END OF THE AFFAIR
Covered with dust from an all-nighter in the studio, Bender sighed deeply and picked up the telephone. Jan was still asleep, and Joan was cleaning up from helping him finish a head. He had greeted the dawn with exhilaration; at moments like these, he felt half his age, which was fifty-two. Then the sexual energy and hectoring presence of twentysomething Laura Shaughnessy buzzed through the line.
Laura was furious that he hadn’t yet left his wife; Bender was trying to tell her without coming right out and saying that it was over between them. She was demanding he leave Jan and Joan and settle down. She was trying to make him monogamous. Bender was starting to call her “Sarge.”
They still dated. He’d still have sex with her. “You don’t want to cut it off completely,” he reasoned. But he was saying things like, “I’m not sure this is working out.” He was letting her down slowly. By autumn 1991, he felt strongly reconnected to Jan and Joan, and Laura was trying his patience.
“Laura was a lovely person. We had great times together. It was a fun affair. But I felt like I was losing my space, my freedom. I just couldn’t deal with that.” After a period of self-examination, he had concluded, “I wasn’t about to leave Jan over her, and I wasn’t about to leave Joan over her. They’re the two women in my life who mean an awful lot to me. It’s times like that when you’re tested that you realize how much you really care for certain people.”
Now he thought ruefully, “The greater the pleasure, the higher the price.” His bill for the two-year affair was coming due.
Laura sounded like she’d been crying.
“Kenny is devastated,” she said. “He went on and on about this girl Zoia, this Russian girl, and now she’s disappeared. It’s his fiancee, he really loves her. I feel terrible for him. He’s a big teddy bear, and he’s falling apart.”
“Whoa!” Bender said. “Slow down and tell me what happened.”
Laura said she’d just gotten a distressing phone call from one of her best friends since high school in New Jersey, a Florida ophthalmologist named Kenny Andronico. Kenny had said his fiancee, Zoia Assur, who was living with her sister in New Jersey before moving down to be with him, had disappeared.
Zoia hadn’t been seen in two weeks. The cops were telling Kenny not to worry, people went missing and showed back up. But they’d been going steady for five years, and Kenny had given her a necklace and they had plans to marry. He knew something was wrong. He was scared that something bad had happened to her. He went to pieces on the phone.
“Frank, Zoia is missing and Kenny wants your help to find her—through your contacts at the Vidocq Society,
