Because You Loved Me (5 page)

Jeanne Dominico and Chris McGowan had never set a wedding date. Jeanne never wore an engagement ring. They decided they wanted to wait until Nicole and Drew were graduated from high school, Chris said, “and well-established in the direction of their lives.” To Jeanne and Chris, the kids came first. It was important to Jeanne: that the kids set goals for themselves, dream and focus on realizing their full potential. Forming a legal bond with Chris could wait. Drew and Nicole were what mattered most to Jeanne, and abiding by her wishes was one more way for Chris to show his love and support. He had waited decades for the love of his life. What was another four or five years for a wife?

“We were in no hurry at all.”

The night Chris proposed to Jeanne wasn’t the Bogie and Bacall moment either had perhaps anticipated. It was more of a casual gesture than anything else, and that’s the way Jeanne and Chris’s relationship progressed. Nothing was ever complicated. The way they saw it, they were two people who had found true love
later
rather than sooner. Nothing else mattered. They were in love.

A few months into their relationship, Chris and Jeanne discussed marriage. “I’ll wait to ask, though, Jeannie,” Chris said one night, “until I have the ring.”

Jeanne agreed.

“We had discussed the size and shape of the ring that she wanted,” remembered Chris.

“Wait until we can set a date,” insisted Jeanne, “before buying it.”

Jeanne was not someone who drew attention to herself; she was much more concerned with the happiness and security of others than what her own life could provide. The strength she amassed from helping people, many said, gave Jeanne a tremendous amount of comfort. Still, as time passed, Jeanne accepted the simple gestures of love Chris made. At first, she didn’t know how to react to someone showing her so much affection. Getting flowers delivered to her at work, for example. Chris had sent roses during that week in August to celebrate their approaching anniversary. Jeanne had “tears in her eyes” when she walked over to Chris’s desk to thank him.

“They’re beautiful, Chris. Thank you, honey.” Humility: it wasn’t something Jeanne worked at; it was part of who she was.

Chris smiled. Not because he felt so good about what he had done, but because Jeanne deserved it—someone had loved her in a way she had never experienced.

Perhaps it was that wholesome spirit Jeanne and Chris so openly displayed toward each other that Nicole had sought in Billy Sullivan as she quickly became infatuated by his seemingly kind and gentle manner. Nicole didn’t realize it then, but she was following in her mother’s footsteps.

“I was fascinated by the idea that someone would love me,” Nicole said later. “I didn’t want to lose Billy.”

Nashua police officer Kurt Gautier was approximately one mile away from Jeanne’s house, sitting in his cruiser on Amherst Street, when he responded to a report of a “sudden death.”

Flicking on his lights, Gautier rushed toward Dumaine Avenue.

When he arrived three minutes later, Chris McGowan was waiting at the door. Chris appeared desperate and perplexed. Gautier had been a cop for twenty-one years. He’d been involved on all levels of police work throughout his career: a K-9 handler, criminal investigation division officer, drug enforcement officer and straight patrol. He was experienced and respected. A big, hulking man, with a customary buzz cut, Gautier didn’t know what to expect as he entered Jeanne’s house. Dispatch reported a man had called in an account of a woman on the floor of her home who was not responding. There was a pool of blood around her.

After some time, several more officers arrived, accompanied by EMTs and firefighters.

Because of his training and experience, Gautier knew as soon as he looked at Jeanne that she was dead. Chris was still wondering if she was alive. He wasn’t thinking straight, but Gautier had seen dead bodies. He had no doubt.

“It was a bloody mess,” Gautier said later in court. “There was blood all over the floor, all over the cabinetry. It was everywhere. I saw massive amounts…splattered on the walls. The blood was still wet. It hadn’t dried….” (This told Gautier as he began surveying the scene that the crime had perhaps just taken place.)

Maybe Chris was responsible?

Police officer Jeff Connors arrived next. He escorted Chris away from the house. Gautier had questioned Chris after first entering the house, but it was “hard,” Gautier recalled, “to get any information out of him. He was stuttering. He was a mess.”

With Chris standing outside next to Connors, Gautier invited the paramedics inside to take a closer look at Jeanne while he stood nearby. No one was completely certain whether an intruder—if, indeed, Jeanne had been killed by a stranger—was still inside the house.

Were there more victims? Where were Billy and Nicole? What about Drew?

It didn’t take paramedics long to make the call. “She’s gone, Officer.”

“OK, please step back outside,” Gautier advised. Then he walked toward the back door. “Connors?”

“Yeah?”

“Come here.”

Connors and Gautier searched the house completely to make sure no one else was inside, “alive or dead.”

For all Chris knew, Billy, Drew and Nicole were upstairs, like Jeanne, lying in a pool of blood.

Standing outside, running his hands through his hair, Chris thought:
Oh Christ…what’s happening?

“Oh my God! Oh my God!” Chris said aloud, pacing the lawn. Then he dropped to his knees and, moments after, got up and walked around.

Donna Shepard,
Jeanne’s next-door neighbor, was looking out her porch window a few minutes later when she noticed two people standing by the side of Jeanne’s house. She couldn’t quite make out who they were through the brush blocking her view, but she was convinced it was Chris and Jeanne.

“I thought for some reason,” Donna said later, “Chris and Jeanne were out there talking.”

It was the perfect opportunity, thought Donna, to go talk to Jeanne regarding something she had found out about Nicole the previous day. Donna, a twenty-nine-year-old mother of three children—a boy, aged three, a girl, five, and a boy, nine—had lived with her husband next door to Jeanne for the past two years. They were good friends. Nicole had recently started babysitting Donna’s kids. Through that, Donna and Nicole had become close. At times, Nicole confided in Donna about “teenage” problems she felt she couldn’t discuss with Jeanne. On that Wednesday, the previous day, Nicole showed up to babysit, but seemed worried about something.

“What is it?” asked Donna. She was genuinely concerned.

“Can you go to the store and get me a pregnancy test?” asked Nicole. She was terrified. “I think I might be pregnant.”

“Nicole…what do you mean?” Donna knew Nicole had been seeing Billy. She had even met him a few times. She thought he was a presentable boy, well mannered, but extremely quiet and reserved. She knew Nicole loved Billy and had been having sex with him; Nicole had even told Donna Billy was her first. But like everyone else, Donna saw the relationship as the beginning of a long list of romances Nicole was going to have throughout her teenage years. Let that first love run its course and she’ll be fine, Donna assumed.

“Don’t tell my mother, please, Donna,” pleaded Nicole.

“OK,” said Donna, for the sake of the conversation. Yet she decided when the first opportunity presented itself, she was going to let Jeanne know what was going on. Ultimately, Donna went down to the store and picked up a pregnancy test and brought it back to the house while Nicole waited. With Donna there, Nicole went into the bathroom and took the test.

Now Donna, looking out her window, believing Chris and Jeanne were out there talking, was prepared to tell Jeanne the results of that test.

Donna stepped out of her house and walked across the lawn. When she reached the little trail beyond the brush and trees, she noticed several police cruisers and ambulances lined up and down the street. Cops were beginning to block off the area with yellow crime-scene tape.

“What the hell is going on?” Donna said out loud to no one in particular.

Then she saw Chris.

“Hey, Chris.”

Chris didn’t react. As she approached, Donna noticed it wasn’t Jeanne standing beside Chris, but a police officer.

“Chris,” Donna said, “what’s going on here?”

“I thought it was going to turn out to be something silly,” recalled Donna. “No big deal. Maybe Drew and his friends had gotten into some trouble. Drew was hanging around with the wrong crowd and he and Jeanne were at odds during much of that summer.”

Donna got closer to Chris. He was walking in circles again, trying to understand what he had just found.

“Chris, what the heck is happening?” she asked again.

At first, Chris had a hard time speaking. Then, according to Donna, he blurted out: “She has to be dead…. There’s blood everywhere. I don’t know how she can still be alive.”

“What are you talking about?”

Chris didn’t answer. Instead, he dropped to his knees and cried. Then he stood and walked around as an officer followed him wherever he went. For a few minutes, recalled Donna, that’s all Chris did: drop to his knees, cry and get up to walk in circles. At one point, Donna heard Chris shout, “Why…why would someone do this to Jeannie? Why did this happen?”

“I just shut down,” remembered Donna. “It’s disbelief. You cannot comprehend what someone is telling you. Nothing was registering.”

Donna’s kids were alone at home. She was worried about them and needed to get back to the house. One of the officers told her they had to talk to Chris alone. She would have to leave.

“Someone will be over to speak with you soon,” the officer told Donna.

As she walked back to her house, more cruisers arrived. Soon the entire street was blocked off.

When Donna got into her house, she huddled her children around her and hugged them. Then she stood by her window, lit a cigarette and thought about who she should call first.

“I wondered then where Drew and, especially, Nicole were. Jeanne’s death was going to devastate those two kids.”

It was near 7:30
P.M
. when twenty-five-year-old Carla Hall approached the corner of Dumaine Avenue and Amherst Street. As she turned left at the light beyond Dumaine and made a U-turn heading back down Amherst the opposite way, Carla noticed the commotion going on near her home. She had lived across the street from Jeanne for a little over a year. Now there was yellow police tape blocking the entrance to her and Jeanne’s street, police cruisers, ambulances and fire trucks parked in front of the house.

What in the world?

Then she saw the lights. Blue and red and white flashes. It was dusk. Although Carla could see down the street, it was dark enough that the police and ambulance lights illuminated the entire block in pulsating strobes. She could also see clearly that the fuss going on was centered around Jeanne Dominico’s and Donna Shepard’s houses. Carla’s yard was taped off, too. Police officers were waving cars away, not allowing anyone down Dumaine.

But I live here,
Carla thought as she looked for a place to park on the side of the street.
What the heck?

Carla was sure someone had been hit by a car. With Amherst being such a busy major thoroughfare, cars whizzing by faster than they should, she was concerned one of the neighborhood kids had been struck and killed.

Nicole? Drew?

Living so close to Jeanne throughout the past year had been, Carla recalled, a life-changing experience. Single, “but living with someone then,” Carla didn’t always have Lady Luck on her side when it came to life and love. She was predisposed, in a sense, to find herself in a continuous struggle, like most, to makes ends meet and run through life unaffected by tragedy and personal loss. But Jeanne had changed Carla’s outlook on it all. She made Carla a better person by simply bringing a positive attitude into her world. Basic things, Carla said, made the difference. Jeanne taught her that no matter what was going on in her life, she could get up every day and take on the world with a new, more positive approach. In doing that, promised Jeanne, her life would get better.

“Even Jeanne’s smile was contagious,” remembered Carla. “Her voice was comforting and friendly. Very warm. Just the way she always had an optimistic outlook on life in general, especially since I knew her life wasn’t handed to her on a silver platter—although talking to her, listening to the way she felt about others and how she helped people, you’d
think
it was.”

After parking near the corner of Amherst Street and Dumaine, Carla stepped out and walked toward several Nashua police officers standing in back of the police tape.

“What’s going on?” Carla wanted to know.

“Ma’am,” said one of the officers, “you cannot come down this street.”

“I live right there, though,” Carla said, pointing to her house.

The officer shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. Sorry.”

Stepping back from the scene, Carla called Donna Shepard from her cell phone to see if she knew what was going on.

“Donna, what is this? I’m out here on Amherst. They won’t let me into my house.”

Donna was docile. After talking to Chris, now having a bit of time to accept what had happened, the tragedy of Jeanne’s death had settled on her. Carla could tell she had been crying.

“It’s Jeanne,” Donna said. “Jeanne’s dead. She was murdered.”

“What?” Carla didn’t know how to react. Jeanne was the last person she’d expect to have been found murdered.

“Call me back,” Donna said.

“I will. I have to get into my house.”

Carla walked back to the officer she had spoken to earlier and said, “Hey, I know my neighbor was murdered in there. Can I
please
get to my house?”

“How do you know that, ma’am?”

“I just got off the phone with my neighbor.”

After a discussion between the officer and several of his colleagues, he allowed Carla to enter her house.

As she drove the few hundred feet into her driveway, Carla couldn’t help but think of Nicole: how devastated she was going to be when she found out about her mother. Then it hit her:
Where are the kids?

Not only Nicole, but Drew.

In her driveway, Carla got out of her car and confronted an officer standing near Jeanne’s yard.

“You
have
to find Jeanne’s daughter, Nicole,” she suggested. “You need to make sure she’s OK. Someone has to find her before she finds out what happened.”

As she unlocked her door, memories—some simple, others more complicated—consumed Carla as she retreated into her house, terrified by what she had just learned. She didn’t know, nor did anyone else, who had murdered Jeanne. Was it an intruder? For the most part, Carla lived alone. A young, single woman. How would she protect herself? And yet, out of all people, Jeanne was dead.

Why Jeanne?

Carla threw her keys on the kitchen counter and stood in front of her living-room bay window just “staring,” she remembered, across the street at Jeanne’s house as people continued coming and going. More police officers arrived. People were scurrying around. Her friend, neighbor, the one woman who would give you her last nickel and put her needs before anyone else, was gone.

From the first day Carla met Jeanne, she knew she had found someone special. Jeanne was outside in her yard raking leaves when Carla arrived with her real estate agent to look at the house across the street.

“Jeanne was just so welcoming and friendly, even that first moment we saw each other.”

Their friendship started not long after Carla moved in. She’d be outside, or walking to her car on her way to go somewhere, and Jeanne would pop her head out the door and scream, “Hi, honey,” waving and smiling.

“It was the tone of her voice: it made me get excited about life. She made me laugh when she screamed, ‘Hi, honey.’ It was one of her trademarks.”

As the months passed and Carla became more of a neighbor and a friend than the new girl in town, she and Jeanne spent time together ruminating on life in general. Jeanne confided in Carla about problems she was having with her ex-husband, work-related issues, or, on occasion, problems Nicole was having at school with some of the kids bothering her. It really dampened Jeanne’s spirit, Carla said, as it would perhaps any parent, to think Nicole was being verbally abused and bullied by some of the kids at school. Nicole was quiet, Carla recalled, and never gave the impression that she was a wiseass or provoked any type of criticism by other students. To the contrary, Carla, and even Jeanne, agreed Nicole kept to herself and didn’t bother anyone.

“In my opinion,” said Carla, “Nicole seemed to be a loner…and kids at school were giving her a hard time, anyway.”

Another friend of Jeanne’s explained an incident at school that had sent Nicole into a deep depression, and irritated Jeanne to the point where she thought about pressing charges against the kid. A girl in school who, reportedly, “had it out” for Nicole walked up behind her one day and pulled her pants down in front of a group of kids. In between class, many of the kids hung out in the courtyard and talked. Nicole was standing in the middle of a large group by herself. She was wearing loose-fitting sweatpants. The girl, part of a group of kids Nicole didn’t get along with, came up from behind and surprised her.

What would have been, under most circumstances, a cruel prank that happened one moment, and was forgotten about the next, turned into a minor scandal.

“Nicole, for some reason,” said an acquaintance, “didn’t like to wear panties.”

Thus, when the girl pulled her pants down, there Nicole stood bare-ass in front of everyone. Kids laughed at her and pointed as she pulled up her pants and ran from the courtyard.

Jeanne hit the roof when she found out. Nicole was so traumatized and embarrassed that she didn’t show up for school for three days afterward. Jeanne ultimately drove to the school and raised a ruckus about the incident, as any concerned mother might.

“I want something done about this,” Jeanne told the principal in her careful, concerned manner. She wasn’t loud or obnoxious. Jeanne simply spoke her peace: “How dare someone do that to my daughter.”

The girl was suspended. Part of her punishment included writing Jeanne a letter, apologizing for what she had done.

Constantly unsure of herself, always worried she was too fat and ugly, Nicole developed an even deeper complex after that day. Shortly after the incident, Nicole got a job at a local fast-food restaurant. One day, she called one of Jeanne’s neighbors from work; she had an odd request: “Can you go up into my room and grab me a pair of panties? I need you to bring them to me here at work.”

Nicole had split her pants while working and wasn’t wearing underwear and had to walk around with her privates exposed.

No one could understand why Nicole was being picked on at school. She wasn’t an outcast, a Goth-type dresser, and didn’t wear clothes that drew attention to her. She was quite conservative as far as the type of dress she chose.

“Jeans and a T-shirt,” said Carla Hall. “That’s pretty normal to me.”

Because Carla worked so much, she never had much time to interact with Nicole or Jeanne, like some of the other neighbors. She saw Jeanne occasionally, perhaps when sunning herself outside and Jeanne was tending to the garden she kept up for Nicole. At times, they met on the edge of Jeanne’s property, or in her garden, and discussed everyday issues. Yet there were two specific times, recalled Carla, when Jeanne went out of her way “just to make me feel good.” And that was the fundamental nature of who Jeanne was: “The first person to do something for somebody else.”

Carla worked as a nail technician at a nearby salon. She remembered one day when Jeanne showed up to get her fingernails done.

“How great to see you, Jeanne,” said Carla. She was pleasantly surprised Jeanne had just popped in.

“Carla, how are you?” Naturally, Jeanne was beaming.

And for the next half hour Jeanne sat as Carla filed and polished and painted her nails. As part of the service Carla offered, she concluded the session with a hand massage. Yet no sooner had she finished, did Jeanne grab her by the hands.

“Let me do that to
you
now,” suggested Jeanne. “You sit here and do this to everybody all day long and I bet you never get it done.”

Carla was taken aback.

“You’re right, Jeanne,” she said in a half-joking manner. “You know, you’re right.”

“That’s just typical Jeanne,” Carla insisted later. “She gave me a little hand massage because she wanted to do something for
me
.”

It was as if Jeanne couldn’t accept a moment of pleasure, a luxury for herself, without giving back.

A few weeks into July 2003, Carla and Jeanne found themselves both cleaning their houses on the same day, a leisurely Saturday afternoon. Jeanne, out of nowhere, called Carla.

“I’m making piña coladas, honey. You want one?”

“Honey” was a common name Jeanne used to greet her closest friends and neighbors—just one more way for her to make people feel comfortable.

“Sure, Jeanne.”

“I’ll send it right over.”

A few minutes later, Nicole knocked on Carla’s door. She had a smile on her face and a fresh piña colada in her hand.

“It was just so funny, so random. Now that I look back on it all, Jeanne just loved putting a smile on everyone’s face. It’s a good memory. I’ll never forget it.”