Death's Shadow (12 page)

Eternal Pain

— I —

She took her first breath on a Saturday in June and her last on a cold Wednesday in March. This is the story on the gravestone. Just 26 years passed in between — her life all prologue. An old man shuffled up the row in the cemetery, sun shining off his silver hair, moving well considering the hip and knee replacements. He remarked on how many graves had joined his daughter’s over the years. His name is on the stone, too, the date of death left vacant.

A woman visited a while back, left flowers and a letter. She knew the victim not at all in life, but in death feels a connection that mystifies and haunts her. She researches the case, sits in the house where the homicide happened, and thinks of her.

A man and his two sons come to the cemetery to visit the graves where family members lie, but each time the man wanders off on his own. He does not tell his boys why it is he pauses wordlessly in Section 15, Row 25; does not reveal that he’s thinking of the woman with the silky blonde hair.

The old detective does not visit. He lives up north on two acres, by cool water and tall pines. He speaks in a gravelly baritone, his face softened by a grey beard, hands still rugged and hard, the eyes deep green. He says he closed the drawer on the past when he retired. Still, on occasion, it floats into his mind’s eye, the scene in that basement a long time ago. No, he does not dwell on the past. But he also does not forget that when all was said and done, he still had a case left out there.

March 29, 1978

2:30 a.m.

Hamilton, Ontario

The man held the hostage at knife-point. It was his own son. He demanded a flight out of Canada for both of them. The Hamilton detective, who was tall, with dark hair and green eyes, dressed in a jacket and tie, stood on the other side of the apartment door, speaking calmly in the deep baritone, stalling.

“It’s going to take a little longer,” said Don Crath. “We just need a little more time. Got to finish arrangements for the flights.”

To lessen the man’s tension, stall for time, Crath tried to make a connection with the man. “Do you have a picture of your son? You show me a picture of your son and I’ll show you a picture of my two boys.”

The man slid a photo under the door.

“Nice looking boy. You don’t want to harm your boy, do you, Bill? I know you don’t want to hurt anybody. I sure don’t want to get any of my policemen hurt. Just hang on.”

He kept the man with the knife talking for more than two hours. Then he and officers Bill McCulloch and Vern Cummins burst through the door, rescued the boy, made the arrest. The story would make headlines in the
Spectator
the next day; reporter Darryl Gibson had been listening to the whole thing.

Crath drove back to the weathered old detectives’ office on King William Street, where he worked in the Criminal Investigations Division. The place was old school; cops there sat in beat-up wooden chairs and smoked, the interrogation room had flecks of blood on the wall. Known for wearing natty suits, Crath usually stood out. However, he felt rather beat-up himself that morning. He loosened his tie, rubbed his tired eyes, and typed his report as morning broke.

Crath was 41 and had started as a cop in his early twenties. That had been soon after his wife Darlene gave birth, to twin boys. He figured that policing was a solid family job, better than getting stuck on the road in sales. Turned out he liked being a cop and was good at it. Solid police work, he knew, was about trusting your gut. Keep it simple, use common sense. It usually worked.

Don Crath was an old-school cop known for wearing natty suits while on the police force.
Hamilton Spectator.

One year after the hostage case, Don Crath was blindsided. He lost his wife, the two boys their mother. Darlene died.

Mauro Iacoboni entered a bar with his cousin near Barton and Strathearn. It was November 1981. Mauro was 27, from an Italian family, his first name pronounced
Mah-ro
, with a rolling
r
. Guys at the factory where he worked didn’t roll their
r
’s all that well, though. He got called Moe.

He saw her for the first time in the bar and was instantly attracted. She was petite, with long blonde hair — very pretty, he thought. And just his luck, she was with a woman he knew. He left his cousin, walked over, said hi, chatted with both of them, his eyes mostly on the blonde. She said her name was Trisha Roach. Moments later Mauro turned to leave.

“Where are you going?” Trisha asked. The blunt tone caught him off guard.

“I … I have to work in the morning.”

Trisha continued talking with him. By the end of the night they had exchanged phone numbers and he had learned more about her.

Trisha was 26 and lived alone in a house on Montclair Avenue, just east of Gage Park. Until recently she had shared it with her husband, Terry Paraszczuk (
Paraz-chuck
). Trisha had dated Terry at Bishop Ryan high school. where they were in the same grade. She had been crazy about him. He was handsome, a charmer, the life of the party. He was more outgoing than Trisha, who usually came across as more reserved.

Trisha’s parents were Ray and Floria Roach, who had both grown up in the city’s north end. Ray’s father cut ice off the bay in winter and sold it year-round. Ray carried on the family business, running a delivery service called Roach Ice. Terry’s parents, Michael and Maria, had Ukrainian roots; Michael worked at a hardware store, Maria in a hospital.

Trisha married Terry on August 26, 1978, at Blessed Sacrament Roman Catholic Church on a perfect summer day. She was 23. Trisha’s sister, Cathy, her only sibling, was maid of honour. The sisters were close, born just 11 months apart; both were nurses. Now that his daughter was a Paraszczuk, Ray Roach carried a slip of paper in his wallet with the new name on it so he wouldn’t forget the spelling.

The crime scene in Trisha’s house was a disaster from the fire and the water used to douse it.
Hamilton Spectator.

Trisha and Terry bought the old red brick two-and-a-half storey house at 944 Montclair. Terry had recently started a job as a customs officer, while Trisha had worked for three years as a nurse in the neurology department at Hamilton General Hospital. She put up $10,000 of her savings toward the down payment. Terry’s father, Michael, who lived just around the corner, did some work on the unfinished basement.

The couple’s dating life had been stormy on occasion; marriage did not smooth the waters. Trisha, who was a small woman, less than 100 pounds, came across as quiet, but she stood up for herself. In 1981 they separated. Trisha returned to using her maiden name, Roach, but legally still carried Terry’s. The house was put up for sale. Michael Paraszczuk told Trisha that he wanted to be repaid for his expenses fixing up some of the basement, which upset her. Ray Roach said Michael further served Trisha a lawsuit to recoup the money.

Toward the end of 1981, Trisha started dating Mauro Iacoboni. He played drums in a band with three of his cousins, and on their first date he picked her up in his van with the kit in the back. To Mauro, who lived with his parents, Trisha seemed mature, independent. She kept the house on Montclair immaculate. Although she was a smoker, the house usually smelled of cookies rather than cigarette smoke because she was always baking. She also knitted. She made a blanket for her mother, Floria, for Christmas in Floria’s favourite powder blue. She sewed on her back porch in the sun.

Being with Trisha was just so easy, Mauro felt. She was sweet and pretty, and it just worked. He loved her long hair; on the job at the hospital she had to wear it up, but with him it was always down. They used to just relax in her house; ordered in Chinese food a lot, her favourite. Mauro got to know her parents, too. He’ d kick back with Ray and watch hockey games at Trisha’s house. He felt his relationship with Trisha deepen.

On New Year’s Eve, 1981, his band played an all-night show at Queen’s Banquet Centre on Barton Street, and she went to see him play. She fitted right in with Mauro’s friends. At midnight the band paused, Trisha joined Mauro on stage and kissed him as the year turned to 1982.

Things were looking up for Trisha. She continued working at the hospital, where her co-workers and bosses loved her. She regularly attended St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic Church, and now met privately with her priest, Father Ron Cote. He asked if she had considered having her marriage to Terry annulled. She was interested and took home some reading on the topic, showed it to a friend. Trisha said she wanted to start over, get married again, and start a family. She decided that she needed to sell the house, so she started to look for an apartment. She had a dog, a large unruly Dalmatian named Jakes; she knew she wouldn’t be able to keep him in an apartment, so she gave him away, returned him to the breeder. The house sold and she met with Terry on Thursday, February 25, to sign papers approving the sale.

A week later, Wednesday, March 3, Trisha looked at apartments with Floria and Cathy. She also had plans to meet her friend Sandra for coffee, but Sandra was under the weather and had to cancel. Floria planned to come to Trisha’s house that night to join her for dinner. But Floria felt ill, stayed in bed instead.

Mauro worked the evening shift at American Can on the stamping production line. At his 7:30 p.m. break, he phoned Trisha. They chatted for almost a half-hour. She told him she had moved some boxes to the basement, getting ready for the move.

“I’ll see you later,” Mauro said, signing off.

“Okay, bye, pumpkin,” she replied, and they hung up.

Pumpkin. Mauro smiled. It was a pet name he had heard Trisha call her nephew. She had never called him that. It felt good.

Late that night stars were out and it was very cold. Detective Don Crath drove around the lower city in an unmarked cruiser. Working CID meant taking on a bit of everything. Crath, his hair greying from 46 years of living and 20 on the force, was paired with Dave Matteson when the call came in after midnight. Firefighters had put out a house fire at 944 Montclair Avenue. A body was inside. At the scene, Crath, in suit and overcoat, spoke to a deputy fire chief.

“We have a dead body in the basement,” the firefighter said.

The house still smoldered as the detectives moved down through the heat and charred stench to the unfinished basement. The floor was covered in water. Crath saw a woman’s body, fully clothed, soaked. Her face was a bit dirty from the smoke, but she had suffered no damage from the fire. He saw a thin chord, like twine: a ligature. She likely had strangled. The ligature had also somehow ridden up from her neck to her face. Suicide? Possible, except Crath had been trained to treat every sudden death as a homicide. He grimaced. If it was a crime scene, it was a lousy one, he thought: evidence destroyed by either fire, smoke, water, or firefighters trampling through the place. He didn’t blame the fire guys; they had to soak it. Montclair was a street of old homes. They could not risk fire spreading.

A couple of senior police officers arrived. Had to be suicide, one of them offered. Crath knew most hangings are suicides, but women usually don’t use that method. Most use pills. The scene was odd. The fire had started in the basement, spread up to the first and second floors. Some boxes and debris in the basement had caught fire. Crath figured an accelerant of some kind had been used. If she had committed suicide, how would she have set the fire?

Then there was the hanging. If she had hanged herself, it was an odd way to do it. She had not tried to do it from a rafter, kick a bucket. No, the ligature had broken, and one severed end was still tied to a wooden post on a wall — a joist, or fire stop, part of an unfinished wall where insulation and drywall had not been added. The joist was only about three feet off the floor. Crath knew some inmates in prison used a “low hang,” tied on to bars for leverage, to kill themselves. But a woman in her own basement?

He also noted that the woman’s arms lay straight at her side. He knew that after a hanging the hands are often near the neck. It was as though her arms had been placed in position. Suicide? Don Crath’s gut said otherwise.

Ray Roach was led down to the morgue in Hamilton General Hospital by Crath. In the future, Hamilton would have a renovated morgue that would offer family members a tiny window through which to view a body for identification. But that was not the case with the old morgue. Ray watched an attendant wheel a gurney out in front of him. A body lay on top, covered by a sheet from head to toe.

Ray had been at home on the east Mountain with Floria when they got the call in the middle of the night that their daughter’s house was on fire. Floria had called Trisha at 9:30 p.m., but no one answered. She called again later, kept trying, but eventually the signal was just busy. After receiving the news, Ray and Floria drove down to Montclair. Cathy, Trisha’s sister, arrived as well. The scene was cluttered with fire and police vehicles; her sister’s car was in the driveway.

Ray walked up to a uniformed police officer.

“Was there anyone in the house?” Ray asked.

“Yes. One person.”

Cathy, a nurse, saw a car on the road that had a sign in the window. The coroner’s car. Her body shook. There was a pounding inside her head; she felt sick.

An old family photo of Ray, Floria, and their daughters Trisha and Cathy at Christmastime.
Hamilton Spectator.

A neighbour of Trisha beckoned Cathy to come to his door. What did he want to tell her? She started to go, then her husband called for her. She joined her parents in a police cruiser. They answered questions, were taken to the police station. They entered a room and met Crath for the first time. He asked them about suicide. Absolutely not, they said. Trisha would never do it. Her life was turning around. Not a chance. He asked if there was anyone they believed would hurt Trisha. There was someone and they urged Crath to interview him.

There was no mystery to the identity of the victim in the house on Montclair, but by protocol she had to be identified by family. In the morgue the attendant drew down the sheet from the head of the body on the gurney. The attendant was supposed to reveal enough for identification, just past the eyes, nose. Instead the sheet dropped lower. And now Ray Roach saw it: the mark on his daughter’s neck, a clean dark red welt. It was burned forever in his mind’s eye at that moment.

“They must have strangled her,” Ray said quietly in the room. “Used a telephone cord.”

“No,” Crath said softly in the deep voice. “That wasn’t it.”

Before dawn Mauro Iacoboni heard a voice, awakening him from a deep sleep. It was his dad. Mauro had come home from work after midnight, watched TV, and gone to bed.

His parents knew he was dating someone, but he had not told them a name or details. He knew that his dad, Azio, an old-school Italian and a Dofasco man, would not appreciate his son dating a recently separated woman.

“Mauro, you need to come to the door,” his father said.

Mauro padded out of his room and into the front hallway on the same floor of the bungalow. Two men in suits in the doorway.

“Do you know Patricia Roach?” one of them asked.

“Yes,” Mauro said.

“She died tonight. Would you come with us to answer some questions?”

He talked to the detectives in the unmarked cruiser and then down at the station.

“Do you know what she was doing last night?”

“Packing,” Mauro said. “She said she had moved boxes to the basement. Her house sold, she’s moving.”

Mauro felt numb the entire time, and always would when recalling that night. Trisha was gone. He thought they were on the road to serious commitment, maybe even marriage. Now Trisha was dead, and he knew police were trying to determine if he had any role in her death.

Don Crath worked against time, and the grain. His bosses were calling it suicide. Trisha’s family insisted it was murder. He believed the Roaches. Thursday morning, not pausing to sleep, he went after it by the book. Interview those closest to the victim. In homicides in a house, the victim knows the killer in 80 percent of cases. There had been no sign of forced entry. She must have known him. Trisha’s death, and the fire, had happened sometime after 9:00 p.m., when she had answered the phone, and 11:30 p.m., when neighbours saw the house ablaze. Nothing had been stolen.

Right off the bat, Crath and Dave Matteson visited Trisha’s estranged husband. Terry Paraszczuk, who was still working as a customs officer, lived with his girlfriend in a two-storey apartment above a store on Queenston Road in Stoney Creek. The detectives knocked on the door. No answer. They knocked louder. Terry finally answered. It was very early in the morning; he had been asleep. There had been a fire at the house, the detectives told him. Trisha was dead. Terry looked surprised. The detectives took him to the station, continued to question him, and the girlfriend. He said he had been with his girlfriend all night; she said the same thing.

Word spread that morning among friends of Trisha and Terry. A close friend of Terry, a man named John Pajek, who had been best man at the wedding, was awakened by the phone ringing at about 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. It was Michael Paraszczuk, Terry’s father. Half asleep, John heard Terry’s father’s voice on the other end. The words did not make any sense to him.

“Tragedy,” Michael Paraszczuk said. “Trisha’s dead.”

It was sometime after 7:00 a.m. when Trisha’s friend Sandra received a call from Terry. She hadn’t seen or talked to Terry in years; she had been in touch with Trisha only. Now Terry told Sandra that Trisha was dead. In disbelief, she hung up and dialed Trisha’s number. The line was busy. She turned on the radio and heard about the fire on Montclair.
My God
, she thought,
it’s really happening
.

The
Hamilton Spectator
reported that morning that police were investigating the sudden death of 26-year-old Patricia Paraszczuk. The story quoted Terry: “It came as much of a shock to me as everyone else,” he said. “She was a beautiful person and she didn’t deserve to die that way.”

The post-mortem concluded the next day, Friday. The cause of death: strangulation by ligature hanging. The level of carbon monoxide in her body was 14 percent, consistent with that of a smoker; the ligature killed her, not smoke from the fire. There were no signs of sexual assault.

The body was delivered to Friscolanti Funeral Home on Barton Street. The
Spectator
reported a police official saying that Trisha had “been experiencing personal and family problems prior to her death.”

That day Crath met with Ray, Floria, and Cathy. He told them her death was still being ruled a suicide. They were angry.

“It was not a suicide!” Floria said, nearly shouting. “You have to look harder.”

At home that night, Crath continued brooding over the case, seeing the body in the basement. Nothing added up. He went to his workshop, hammered a few pieces of wood together to mirror the firestop joist construction where the torn ligature had been found. He knelt on the floor, trying to imagine how she could have strangled herself just three feet off the ground. It made no sense.

The next day he took his homemade re-enactment to Hamilton General Hospital and spoke to veteran forensic pathologist Rex Ferris. Ferris, who had a lofty reputation in the field, had had doubts about the suicide theory as well. He said they could learn more from further examination of the body.

With plans already set for the funeral visitation, police officers entered Friscolanti to take the body back, much to the horror of the funeral director, who had never seen such a thing. He refused, before permission to re-examine the body was granted by the coroner.

Crath had attended the first post-mortem, and on Sunday, March 7, four days after Trisha had died, he attended a second. Rex Ferris examined tissue behind the skin on her face. He detected bruising that could not be seen in the original autopsy. She had been struck prior to her death. It was not tramline bruising, which is caused by a cylindrical object, but it clearly had been an assault.

Crath could all but see it now. Trisha, just 98 pounds, punched in the face by her attacker, someone she knew, knocked unconscious or unable to defend herself; dragged to the basement, strangled, the scene made to look like a suicide. Killer sets house on fire to cover his tracks. Crath had seen it all, but this killer had been especially ruthless.

He had wondered if it was a spontaneous crime, an assault sparked by an argument. But the strangulation and arson concealment looked planned. The killer knew he could be connected to the crime by his association to the victim, or the location. So he had burned it up.

Many more questions than answers remained. Why would the killer tie the ligature to that joist? Why had the ligature torn and broke? Was it heat from the fire? The extra dead weight of her body when her clothes became soaking wet from the fire hoses? Why had the ligature been tight enough to kill, but still managed to slip up over her chin onto her face? Who had motive and opportunity to do it?

Trisha Roach on her wedding day.
Hamilton Spectator.

The family was at least pleased that the notion that Trisha had taken her own life had been put to rest. That was justice of a sort. But confirmation that it was a homicide also meant that there would be miles to go before Crath or the family could rest.

Back at the station, a senior colleague chided Crath. “You just had to turn it into a goddamn murder, didn’t you.”