Finding Amy (17 page)

I can see the outline of a grave clearly now. Arrows, as in bows and arrows, stick up to mark points of contact and evidence. I've never seen that before.

Tommy stomps his feet. Scott stares at the earth, pensive, waiting, biting his left thumbnail. My pager goes off and when I return the call, someone wants to know if I'm coming to a Christmas party. Is it really almost Christmas? If so, then finding Amy is a good gift.

In the command post, symphony music drifts through the cozy interior as the backup camera shows the crime scene in all its eeriness. No sound, just ghoulish movements and slow digging as the music floats in the air and the warmth seems so welcoming. It's sad and strange and surreal. Is it Amy yet?

Tommy comes in. In the greenish glow of the backup screen we watch strange movements and a large item being removed from the grave. I pop out of the room, heading for the site. At the grave, Dr. Greenwald is kneeling, covered in dirt, her glasses steamed, holding one end of a large piece of board. Danny is on the other end. It's a two-by-four-foot board with metal straps. Danny is bent over, his watch cap smeared with dirt, as they hold the board for still pictures and video.

With the board removed, the dirt smells different. I know that smell. I see the outline of something. Are you there, Amy? The generators hum, producing a circle of light that looks like it ought to be warm, but it's bitterly cold. I stay and watch. Tom, Matt, Scott, Danny, and I almost joined by the arms, like brothers, our breath rising like smoke in the night. We're voices in the darkness.

Hey, there's that cat again. Maggots, I hear the ME say as I shove the kitty and tell it to go home. It scuttles across the path and over the edge of the grave. The searchers' voices are elevated now. We move toward the grave, where the outline of a human head is now clear.

Brush, broom, and trowel move around the skull and upper body, exposing the body outline. There she is. We are unearthing Amy and brushing back the sadness. The how and the why are for other days. I blink back tears, letting no one see. Maybe all of us who worked so closely on this are harboring secret tears.

Amy, is that really you? The image that comes to mind is one of her posters. Amy in a red dress, pearls, long, bouncy hair, earrings, and a subtle smile.

For a moment, I feel a flash of anger. I want to kill Gorman with my own hands. I look around, see the seriousness in Matt's stare as he looks into the earth, see Tommy's forensic mind working, Danny's sadness and exhaustion, Scott's strength. Tommy and I speak for a moment about the next steps the doctors are taking.

Let us whisper in the quiet horror of this.

Finally, the body is fully exposed, shrouded in brown dirt, her bagged hands pointing stiffly up as though she's reaching toward us.

A large white plastic body bag is unzipped and spread out near the grave. I think of Amy's bright and brave spirit. In a macabre silence, people position themselves around the grave. Dr. Greenwald instructs on how she'll be lifted out. Danny is in there, his eyes red from fatigue, with Scott right beside him.

The “mummy” form is lifted slowly out and onto the bag, looking like something not even Stephen King could conjure up as it rests in the shiny white plastic. The zipper closes with a whine, the body is carried out to the tote road and loaded into a livery vehicle. Doors slam shut with a final, hard noise, and the vehicle slowly moves away up the trail, bouncing red taillights gradually fading away into the darkness.

I stare after it long after it's gone, then stamp my feet and turn to see the guys, slumped as they stand. We still have to conduct a final search of the grave and immediate area for evidence, then carefully brush down all the equipment.

People shuffle around recovering equipment. Finally everything is loaded up. We shake hands, give a few halfhearted slaps, but there's no energy or feeling anymore. Stearns has the evidence tech van going. Dan, Tom, and I all hop inside. Blast the damned heat, Chris! We're all crammed into the vehicle, up front.

Matt, Scott, and the state police are in their command post, beeping as they back up, like leaving a camping trip. The autopsy will be tomorrow morning. We've been here at the grave since before three this afternoon, started our day at 5:00 a.m. Now it's after midnight.

Our van lurches forward, lights illuminating the dark road. We peer through the windshield like children.

Hey, is that snow? It's snowing! We look at each other for a moment. “God, are we lucky,” Tom says. “Another day, we'd have a different story. Look at that. It's snowing.” Big flakes quietly drifting down to cover this disturbed and eerie night.

Outside, in the “normal” world, it was a Saturday night in the Christmas season. People were crowding into the malls to do their holiday shopping. Going to parties, to dinners, to concerts and carol sings. People were baking. Decorating. Wrapping presents. Writing Christmas cards. While under the eerie, searing brightness of a bank of artificial lights, detectives toiled in a woodland clearing, unearthing the dirt-encrusted form of a lovely young woman who had had the misfortune to cross paths with a predator.

Finally, late in the evening, the excavation had fully exposed the body, and the surrounding earth had all been removed and screened. Around 11:00 p.m., the body presumed to be Amy St. Laurent was carefully removed from her grave and placed in a body bag for transport to the medical examiner's office. Before Amy was taken away, Detective Young asked the medical examiner to clean the dirt from her ankle. He was looking for the dolphin tattoo so he could give Dennis St. Laurent, still waiting out on the road, the real confirmation he'd been waiting for.

As the ME's van drove away and the evidence techs were snapping their last pictures, it began to snow.

It had been a long, grueling, miserable day and it had been as exciting as any the detectives had ever had in their careers. Danny Young said that, for him, finding the body was like getting to set down a hundred-pound weight. Tommy Joyce said, “The feeling you get when you succeed … it's why we do the job.”

Tired, they stared at the snow, and looked at their watches, and found confirmation for their belief that for that whole day they had received the gift of divine intervention. Someone had sent the wardens, held off the snow, given them the faith and patience and willingness to come out this day and search. If they hadn't found Amy that day, they might not have had another chance to search until spring. And by then, snowpack, wind and rain, and freezing and thawing might have settled the disturbed earth, scattered the pine needles, and erased the shovel marks. Like many buried victims, Amy St. Laurent might never have been found.

O
n Sunday, the state of Maine awoke to snow on the ground and news headlines proclaiming that a body found in Scarborough was likely that of the missing South Berwick woman, Amy St. Laurent. A relieved public assumed that the job was done, now that Amy had been found, and looked for a quick arrest.

For the detectives, it was different. The case detectives awoke on Sunday feeling a hundred pounds lighter. They had worked hard to find the missing young woman they had come to think of as “Our Amy,” but there was no time to relax and rest on their laurels. Now that they had a body and a grave site that should yield some information about the crime, and would soon have a cause of death, a new phase of their work had just begun.

Men who had barely slept were up and off at dawn to attend the autopsy. And the pace didn't let up. It wouldn't be until the following Sunday that Danny Young and Scott Harakles would get to spend some time with their families, after one of the most extraordinary weeks of their careers.

Sunday morning, December 9. I peek out my window and see the snow on the ground, everything clean and white. Not enough to clean the muddy image of Amy … not enough snow for that. Stumbling around to make coffee, I am thrilled that we found her. I know Dan and Stearns, Scott and Matt are already going to or are at the autopsy. They must be burnt toast, I think, as the smell of my own toast rises in the kitchen.

I still can't believe we found her. Days like that, you have to believe in divine intervention. And the way we found her … that bastard at least tried to rape her. Maybe we'll know. Maybe we won't. The CSI-watching public has no idea how random forensic evidence can be. I'll bet he strangled her.

“We will get you!” I shout aloud, startling myself with the sound of my own raspy voice, as the image of Amy in the grave floats before me. I cannot clear my head. Joe! That's not her, Joe. The smell of dirt and decay mixed with cold and pine lingers in my nostrils.

I shake my head. Why does this image bother me so? I've seen hundreds of dead.

That's not Amy, I think. Amy is the picture on the flyers. The pretty girl in pearls. I see her as an angel with a pink rose. Clean, floating smiling to heaven, not coated in dirt like a mummy.

I keep spitting and blowing my nose, trying to clear out the death smell.
¹
I think back to horrific scenes, the blood smell, the scent of physical matter destroyed. I would come home and throw my clothes off, discarded like a bad skin, and in the morning, putting them in the wash, I would hardly remember the scene, but Amy stays … so strong, so distinct right down to individual pieces of dirt. The tenacity of this image will not leave.

Later, my pager goes off, and it starts again. It's Tom. I ask how he and Dan are holding up.

“Joe, they're done with the post and on their way back.”

“Yes, Tom, yes. How?”

“Are you ready?” He gives me a beat. “Gunshot to the head.”

Gunshot! Gunshot! It hangs a moment. God. That bastard. The downside of being taught to imagine it. I think of her fear. A lovely girl who thinks she can handle herself facing a guy with a gun. We've been imagining it all along. Now we'll have the details. Start all the arguments again. Was it Campbell's gun?

“Listen, Joe, we got a lot to do. I'm going back to 109 with Dan in a few. We gotta keep this tight when you tell the chief and command …”

I hang up and walk in circles in my living room. A gunshot. That explains the fluid we saw last night. God, poor Amy. Poor Amy. I gaze into the backyard, out to clean snow. A large crow looms in a pine, watching. I see you, deathbird. I see you.

Before they left the grave site, the medical examiner had scheduled an autopsy for 9:00 a.m. the next morning. Detectives and evidence technicians rose at dawn, gathered their equipment, and trooped up to Augusta, about an hour north, for the sad task of collecting evidence from the body and learning what the autopsy would reveal. For the last seven weeks, they'd been imagining the last day of Amy St. Laurent's life. Now they would get the information that would let them imagine her death.

The body on the stainless steel autopsy table, still thickly coated with dirt, looked more like a mummy than a person. After seven weeks in the ground, a visual identification wasn't possible. As the body was slowly cleaned, the investigators would get confirmation of what they'd observed the night before. Amy's sweatshirt, shirt, and bra were pushed up above her breasts. Her jeans, shoes, and one sock were missing. Her underpants were rolled down around her ankles.

With the same concern that had been used for preserving evidence at the exhumation, the clothing and remaining dirt were removed from the body with great care to ensure that any clinging hairs or fibers wouldn't be lost. Body hair, head hair, and fingernails were collected. Then the body was washed so that the skin could be examined.

Although formal identification would have to wait for DNA results or a comparison to Amy St. Laurent's dental records, there was sufficient information on the body or with it to make the detectives certain that this was Amy. Four details in particular matched information provided by Amy's mother. These were the surgical scars on Amy's hips, the tattoo of jumping dolphins around her ankle, her earrings, and her ring.

Once the autopsy was under way, detectives began to get more detailed information about the circumstances of Amy's death. They would learn that, prior to her death, Amy had been severely beaten about the head and face. Her skull would show evidence of several blows to the head. One of the bones in her face was broken. Her lip was cut and swollen and one of her teeth was freshly chipped.

Behind her left ear there was a large hole in her skull, which the medical examiner, Dr. Greenwald, pending the results of further examination, believed to be the result of a gunshot wound. A hole on the right side of the skull was probably the exit wound. Although the medical examiner had more work to do before she could officially state as a cause of death that Amy St. Laurent had been shot, detectives left the autopsy room knowing that their victim had been savagely beaten, quite possibly sexually assaulted, and shot in the head.
²

Later in the day, detectives and evidence technicians would return to the burial site to finish digging out and sifting the soil that had been underneath the body and to take more photographs. Young and Harakles would return several more times to search the area, as well as conducting searches in other areas well known to Gorman, looking for Amy's clothes, Gorman's clothes, Amy's shoes, and the murder weapon. Since they hadn't found blood or a bullet, they surmised that the crime scene might still be somewhere else.

MSP detectives canvassed the homes in the area, searching for witnesses. Detectives also searched for hunters or fishermen who might have been in the area in October.

Danny Young returned from the autopsy to find an interesting telephone message. A woman named Mary Young (no relation to Danny) had called from Florida with information regarding the St. Laurent case. Told that he was the primary detective on the case, she had left a message asking him to call her back.

When Detective Young returned the call, he learned that Mary Young was a friend and former neighbor of Gorman's mother, Tammy Westbrook, when Westbrook lived in Delray Beach, Florida, and that Tammy's teenage daughter and hers were close friends.
³
Mary Young told him she had recently received a phone call from Tammy Westbrook, her first such call in many months. In that call, a distressed Westbrook described getting a phone call from her son, Russ, in which he'd said he had known all along that Amy St. Laurent was dead.

Gorman told his mother that it had not been he, but his roommates Kush and Jason, who had left with Amy, while he had never left the apartment except to go across the street for coffee. Sharma and Cook had been gone for several hours, and when they returned, they told Gorman they had killed her. They then asked him where was a good place to hide a body. After they threatened his ex-girlfriend, Jamie, and his family, Gorman directed them to the wooded area near a pond behind his mother's house, where they dumped the body and later went back to bury it.

It was ironic, after all their efforts to provide him with an alibi, that Gorman should try to explain the presence of Amy's body near his mother's house by blaming Cook and Sharma for the murder. The detectives, hearing Mary Young's information, understood exactly what Gorman was doing. Now that Amy's body had been found, he felt pressured to explain to his family and friends why it had been found where it was.

Since his departure for Alabama, Gorman's mother had been phoning him repeatedly, giving him details of the news reports and telling him how the police were coming around all the time asking questions about him.

The pressure on Gorman was cranked up on the Monday after Amy's body was found when David Hench, a reporter for the
Portland Press Herald
, reiterated even more strongly than in his previous article that police investigators believed they had been given inaccurate information by the last person known to be with St. Laurent, and that he did not drop her off in the Old Port as he'd claimed. On Tuesday, Gorman's name was publicly linked to the investigation when the same newspaper reported that a document filed in the Cumberland County Superior Court identified Jeffrey “Russ” Gorman as a suspect in the case.
⁴
Gorman's mother called his grandparents to warn them that his name was in the paper.

As the police had expected, down in Alabama, Gorman was starting to unravel. One of his first acts on arriving in Troy was to get himself a little .25 handgun. Shortly before Amy's body was found, he acquired a second one, telling people he needed them for protection or, alternatively, that he had them in case the police came after him.

He and Sean Littlefield had been staying with his paternal grandmother, Littlefield mostly moping around with little to do while Gorman wore Littlefield's clothes and drove around in Littlefield's car, looking for women to add to his list of conquests. At one point, Gorman might have taken off for Florida with plans to sell some drugs, leaving Littlefield behind in Troy.

When Russ Gorman's uncle, Danny Gorman, was due to be released from prison, his grandmother told Russ he had to leave because he had a record and she couldn't have someone with a criminal record staying at the house if her son Danny was going to stay there.
⁵
She said that Littlefield was welcome to stay. Russ Gorman and Littlefield went to stay with Erika Walker, a friend of the family.

Early in the investigation, Gorman had reported to friends that the police were interested in him but that they had no evidence against him. He had also stated that Amy St. Laurent's body would never be found. Following a phone call from his mother, telling him that a body
had
been found, he went to the local college, Troy State University, and used the Internet to check the stories in Maine papers. Later that day, on December 9, at approximately 2:30 in the afternoon, he called his mother on her cell phone as she was on her way to the Maine Mall.

In response to her prompting that the stories he'd been telling her didn't add up, and that he should tell her the truth, Gorman said, “Mom, I did it. I killed that girl.” He described walking with Amy by the lake, becoming enraged at something she'd said, and pulling out a gun and shooting her in the head.
⁶
He told his mother that when he was beating and killing Amy, he was seeing her (Tammy's) face, and that she should be glad she wasn't the one he'd killed.

Following the conversation on December 9, Gorman called his mother and asked her to send him money, which she promptly did.

Tammy Westbrook, having asked for the truth and gotten some version of it, did not report this conversation to the police. She did, however, call her friend Mary Young again and repeated the conversation to her. She also called an Episcopal priest in Florida, Father Fred Basil, and told him about her son's confession.

Although no official cause of death had been announced—the medical examiner would not release the information that Amy St. Laurent died from a gunshot wound to the head until March 22, 2002—information linking Gorman and guns continued to come in. Later on Monday, December 10, interviewing Jamie Baillargeon, Gorman's former girlfriend, Young and Harakles learned that Gorman had dropped what she believed was a plastic grip from a gun in her car three days before he left for Alabama. She gave the suspicious part to Young. It turned out not to be part of a gun; however, she also told Young that Gorman had told her he had a gun down in Alabama and that he'd had guns in the past.

In the same interview, the detectives learned that Gorman had told her the same story he'd told his mother—that he didn't take Amy back to the Pavilion, Kush and Jason did, and that they were gone three hours and returned with blood on their hands to say they'd killed her. She told them Gorman had said that Jason and Kush threatened harm to her (Jamie) and to his family if Gorman didn't tell them about a good place to hide the body, and he suggested they put it out by his “fishing hole.”

She told them she was really troubled by the idea of a threat to her but also felt that it didn't quite ring true. Gorman was not the type of person to be intimidated by a threat. In that same conversation, Gorman had admitted to her that he had known all along that Amy was dead and where the body was.

In response to Jamie's shocked expression of how cruel this was to Amy's family—and didn't it bother him?—Gorman had responded that at first he felt bad but now he didn't really care anymore.

The following day, Detective Young heard from Jamie's mother, Dot, that Gorman had been seen at a party with a 9 mm Glock around the time Amy St. Laurent disappeared. And information from Jamie's current boyfriend was that he had heard that Gorman was looking for someone who wanted to buy a gun.