Dr. Andronico’s powerful face, wide in the jaw, wore a slick yellow sheen under the hot lights. He refused to make eye contact; his pupils darted along the rims of his eyes, as if looking to escape his head. But there was no escape. The big man was strapped into the subject’s chair with arm and finger cuffs. Rubber pneumograph tubes bound his chest and abdomen. He couldn’t see an exit. He couldn’t see much around the dominant, five-hundred- pound shadow formed by two very large men, renowned polygraph examiners Fleisher and Gordon. They leaned close with their cool voices and big, manicured hands.
Gordon tossed Andronico a softball question, a standard warm-up.
“How do you think you’ll do on the lie-detection test?”
“This thing, I think I can beat it,” Andronico said.
Gordon smiled to himself.
The helicopters, dogs, and search squads had combed every inch of the Pine Barrens since August.
Four months later, the corpse was discovered in a place they’d already looked.
In December 1991, a hunter found Zoia Assur in a shallow grave in the piney woods, one of the largest remaining tracts of East Coast wilderness. Animals and the moist coastal sand had quickly reduced her to little more than a skeleton. Enough remained for the Ocean County medical examiner to determine the cause of death: Zoia had been shot three times in the chest. One of the bullets pierced her heart.
James Churchill, chief investigator for the Ocean County prosecutor’s office, said Assur was taking medicine for depression, and had killed herself near the spot where her sister had fallen to her death in a horse-riding accident seven years earlier. Fleisher and Gordon thought the police inquiry was “a joke.”
So they piled into a car with Joe O’Kane and Frank Bender, a team of four Philadelphia VSMs, and drove seventy-five miles east to the wooded area near Toms River, New Jersey, to see for themselves. Maybe an ex- Customs drug agent, FBI agent, black-belt polygraph examiner, and psychic artist could spot something the cops missed.
“It was unbelievable,” Bender said. Although the body had been removed and the scene cleaned up, they found fragments of Zoia’s clothes, even a piece of fingernail. Fleisher was more surprised by the mile they had to hike into the woods to find the place. And the style and location of the suicide weapon—a heavy, German-made Heckler & Koch P7, an eight-shot automatic found in a bag twenty-seven feet from the body.
“I get it,” he said sarcastically. “This petite young woman who is weak and sickly fights her way almost a mile through thick brush carrying a gun she’s incapable of firing. It takes twelve and a half pounds of pressure to fire the P7, and she’s not going to be able to turn it around herself and find the force to pull the trigger at that angle.” To test his theory, Fleisher asked Jan Bender, who was about the same size as Zoia, to try to shoot herself in the chest with the same gun, empty, at an indoor shooting range. Wearing a bulletproof vest, she awkwardly pointed the P7 automatic with both hands back at her chest, and pulled the trigger with all her strength for several minutes. She couldn’t do it. When she finally succeeded, the gun was pointing over her shoulder.
Standing on the soft Pine Barrens sand, Fleisher continued his theory. “So now we’re supposed to believe Zoia shoots herself once in the chest, has the strength to shoot herself twice more, once in the heart, then puts the gun in a bag and moves it nearly thirty feet away?”
The big man smiled. “Yeah, this was a suicide, and Gordon is Elvis Presley.”
On the way back to Philadelphia, Fleisher drove them to a New Jersey psychic who claimed to have insights about the case. Standing in her kitchen, the psychic closed her eyes and whispered that the spirit of Zoia Assur was present, yet afraid to talk. Fleisher said tenderly, “It’s OK, Zoia, you can trust us.” He reached out into the air to gently touch her, making a gesture as if he was stroking her reassuringly on the arm or head.
They got no new information from the spirit world that evening.
As the car crossed the dark Jersey flatlands in the moonlight, Bender felt he’d never had more fun with the Vidcoq Society, all of them working together. O’Kane howled in laughter. “Bill, you will never live down the night you petted a ghost.” O’Kane couldn’t believe it. He kept saying it over and over. “He petted a ghost!”
O’Kane’s booming laughter was joined by the artist’s, the polygrapher’s, and that of red-faced Fleisher himself. “Maybe Bill scared her away.”
As Fleisher and Gordon prepared to run the test, Bender strolled into the outer office with Laura Shaughnessy, his girlfriend and Andronico’s old high school buddy. Laura was distraught. She had screamed at Bender in the car: “I should never have brought you in on this!” The relentless Bender and his Vidocq friends were trying to expose her good friend Kenny as a murderer, and Kenny couldn’t have done it, she said. Bender was grinning now. Seeing that Fleisher and Gordon had matters well in hand, he left, saying, “Laura and I are going to go grab some lunch.”
Fleisher laughed. “Leave it to Frank. We’re trying to solve a murder and he runs off for a tryst.”
Fleisher and Gordon turned to the interrogation of the man they suspected in the murder Bender’s affair had brought to their door. Fleisher studied Dr. Andronico with hard eyes.
Wired to the machine, Andronico was supremely confident. He said he’d flown up to Philadelphia to take the test and rule himself out as a suspect—then maybe the Vidocq Society would help him find his fiancee’s killer.
“He’s agreeing to take the polygraph because he thinks he’s smart enough to fool you and fool the machine,” Walter told Fleisher before the test. Walter had completed his profile of Andronico after studying the crime scene. The shooting and disposal of Assur like rubbish confirmed his analysis of a power-driven killer of psychopathic arrogance.
Andronico had said he didn’t believe Zoia killed herself, either. He suspected Zoia’s brother-in-law, the state police sergeant who was having an affair with her. The P7 handgun found at the scene, which fired the bullets that killed Zoia, was the sergeant’s service gun. But the police had ruled out the state trooper as a suspect, and the Vidocq Society believed he was innocent.
Walter scoffed at the doctor’s story. “He had plenty of motives to kill Zoia. He’s enraged to find out she’s sleeping with a married man, and doubly enraged that it’s her brother-in-law, under her sister’s roof. The doctor is power-driven. You don’t get rid of him. That’s an intolerable insult. He gets rid of you.”
The state police had also ruled out Andronico as a suspect. He was innocent in the eyes of the law. “So what’s he doing here?” Walter asked. “Why fly fifteen hundred miles to pay for a polygraph to prove his innocence to a bunch of private cold-case detectives who may show that he’s guilty? He thinks he is smarter than everyone, that’s why, and it gives him a thrill to beat us. He relives the excitement and sense of control of the murder itself. He’s playing that dangerous ‘catch me if you can’ game.”
Andronico had even agreed to allow his polygraph to be filmed by the Vidocq Society for possible future use and shown on
Walter believed the doctor killed his fiancee, planted the gun to get rid of both betrayers, gulled the police, staged a murder, frame-up, and cover-up, and now would try to fool the Vidocq Society and CBS News in one nationally televised Machiavellian stroke.
Minutes into the test, Andronico’s cool evaporated. His readings shot for the moon: flushed, rapid breathing, shifty eyes, jittery arms and legs. His big, eggplant-shaped face was sweating like it sat in a steam pot.
Fleisher and Gordon had seldom seen a man so clearly deceptive.
Dr. Andronico had a great memory for how he spent each hour of each day. “But asked to describe his whereabouts on the day his fiancee is missing,” Gordon said, “he suddenly becomes very upset and no longer remembers clearly.”
“When did you last speak with Zoia?”
The night before she died, Saturday night, August 10, Dr. Andronico said, he spoke with his fiancee on the telephone. “He told her he was coming up that Monday morning,” Andronico’s father, Carmen, told the
Andronico stuck to his alibi. He was at his father’s beach house in Florida more than a thousand miles from
