The CBS Murders (17 page)

Oestericher passed the word on to Nash. Nash accepted the terms. Oestericher reported to Margolies and said the money would have to be paid immediately. Margolies agreed. It was not hard for him to gather that much cash, in $100 bills. He and Madeleine Margolies counted it to make sure it was all there. Then they packaged it. The neatly wrapped bundle was turned over to one of their sons, who bore it to a Federal Express office. When it was ready, Nash sent a messenger to Federal Express to retrieve it and deliver it to him in Keansburg. (Some weeks later, a very worried Madeleine Margolies paid a call on Henry Oestericher. Can the FBI get fingerprints off money? she asked. Why? Oestericher countered. Because, she explained, she had helped count and package the money that had been sent to Nash, and if they could get her fingerprints, she was in a great deal of trouble. Oestericher considered that and then said he did not think bills retained fingerprints.)

Now Nash began to prepare for his flight. He and his nephew Thomas Dane went out shopping. They went to an auto supply store near home, bought black auto paint and a number of sporting decals. It was on to Newark Airport from there. Nash retrieved the silver van. But on his way out, he decided to play a little game and so gain additional protection. Instead of handing in the parking ticket as he departed, he tucked it up under the sun visor on the windshield, told the attendant he had misplaced it, had a little argument about how much he owed and the time he had entered (he claimed it had been early the day before, which, if believed, would have put the van in the parking lot before the murders on the pier), finally settled up for what the attendant demanded, and said he was going to file a claim for the lost ticket and the charges. Then, followed by Dane, he drove back to Keansburg. Over the next several hours, inside his garage, they spray-painted the van black and affixed the decals of eagles, bear, and fish around the sides. When the paint was dry, Nash drove back to Newark Airport, parked the now-black van in the long-term lot, and then returned to Keansburg in Dane's car.

He would have liked to have begun his trip immediately. He could not. The money from Margolies had not yet arrived and he had to wait for it, wait for the word that it was at Federal Express, send his messenger, and know that he really possessed it. That took a few days. By Friday, April 16, the money had been collected. The first thing Nash did was use some of it, some of the $5,000 for the CBS disaster and the balance from the Barbera-Chin contract, to pay off a second mortgage on his home. The rest, something over $2,500 in $100 bills, he kept, stuffing them into his wallet, to see him through the hard days to come.

On Saturday, April 17, he was ready to move. At about midmorning, Dane arrived and picked him up. They went on another shopping excursion, this time to a string of sporting-goods stores between Keansburg and Newark. He spread some of his new money around, buying sleeping bags, fishing poles, a portable stove, a portable lantern, blankets, a portable AMFM cassette recorder-radio, a small portable television set, hunting clothes, boxes of food that would not spoil, and a lot more. It was as though he were planning to establish himself as huntsman of the year.

By late in the afternoon, he had bought all he thought he would need for a long stay in the woods, or at least on the road. Dane drove him back to Newark Airport and let him out at the entrance to the long-term parking lot. A few minutes later, the black van, Nash driving, emerged from the lot. He had changed license plates once more; this time the van bore New Jersey plates.

A few miles from the airport, Nash pulled to the side of the road. Dane's car, which had been following, pulled up behind. For the next fifteen or twenty minutes, the two men moved all the camping and hunting equipment, all the newly purchased supplies and more, including the .22-caliber rifle Nash had purchased earlier in Rockland County, from Dane's car to the van. When they were done, Dane returned to his car and drove off. Nash got into the van, turned it onto the New Jersey Turnpike, and headed south.

What he did not know was that ever since he and Dane had left his home in Keansburg, they had been followed by FBI agents. Less than fifteen minutes before that morning departure, the FBI had arrived outside the house to begin surveillance, had hardly placed themselves before Nash was on the way out. Had they arrived fifteen minutes later, he would have been gone and, in all likelihood, might never have been found.

20

After fruitless days of search for any clue to identify the hired killer (and they were certain he had been that), for any sign of the van he had used to transport Barbera's body and then flee, the frustration of the investigators was evident. It was three and a half days since the murders, and they were no closer to finding what they were seeking than they had been at the start.

John Wales had an idea. He went to Gallagher. He was going over to the pier, he said, to the Kinney office. He was going to go through the whole operation, learn as much as he could, and he was going to go through the monthly parking applications. Since they were sure the killer had been after Barbera, he had to have known her habits. If she parked on the pier, maybe he did, too. And if he did, it was not unlikely that he had applied for a monthly space about the same time she did. It was worth checking.

The more he learned in conversation at Pier Ninety-two, the more Wales thought he was on the right track. Nobody, he was told, was allowed up on the parking pier unless he had a monthly permit, and the plate numbers of every car entering and leaving were noted to make sure there were no freeloaders. The only exceptions, the only times visitors were permitted on the pier, was when a ship was docking or departing. Of course, that Monday there had been a ship sailing. So it was possible the van had been used by one of the visitors. But if he had been tracking Barbera, it was unlikely. He was probably a regular.

Wales turned to the applications. “There were about three hundred of them,” he says, “but we were looking specifically for vans, so that narrowed it. We found that maybe twenty or thirty vans had taken spaces, monthly spaces, but none of them had done it after the time Barbera put in hers. In fact, between April first and April twelfth, there had been only five applications for monthly spaces, and only one of them had been a van. And that application kind of stood out. First of all, it was a van, and second of all, it had a cross-out on it. I mean, it had one plate number and that was crossed out and another one written in. So I took that application down to the kid at the gate and asked him what he knew about it. He said, yeah, I remember a guy with a silver van. He came through one day and he wrote down the wrong plate number and I made him write down the correct one.”

That was the start. Wales was getting very interested. He asked to look at the time sheets, when the van entered and left and when Barbera's BMW entered and left. The tickets were incomplete, but they were complete enough to show a pattern, to show that the silver van could very well have timed its arrivals and departures to coincide with Barbera's presence on the pier.

Wales was sure he had it now. But he wanted to make certain. He headed back for the office with the application, called down to the Department of Motor Vehicles to authenticate the plate. Back came the identification: it belonged to a van registered to a Donald Nash of West Forty-fifth Street. Wales called down to see if this Nash had an arrest record. He did, had been convicted and sent to prison once, had been convicted and fined several other times for a variety of offenses, and, perhaps as significant as anything, he was a fugitive; there was a bench warrant out for him for failure to surrender to begin serving a short sentence.

“I knew I had him,” Wales said. “So I looked around and I said to Chief Ponzini, ‘I got the killer right here.' He thought it was a joke, since I was the kind of guy that tells little jokes every day, every single day, and he never believes me. I said, ‘No, I mean it. If I don't have the killer, if this isn't the killer, I'll buy everybody lunch,' and there were about forty people in the office right then. And I said, ‘If it is the killer, I want to get second-grade detective out of this.' He says. ‘Okay, if you've got the right guy, you get second-grade.' I never got second-grade.” And despite the promises, nobody else ever got anything, either.

Everything finally was falling into place. They had the plate number of the van and they had the name of the owner even if, right then, they had an address in New York for him and not his home in New Jersey. But it was a start, the first real start. The plate number was turned over to the FBI, and the agents ran it through their computer to see if anything turned up. “Bingo!” Wales says. “It comes back as being a block away from Barbera's house. I mean, they had made an observation of the van as being there. They were doing an organized-crime surveillance, an entirely different case that had nothing to do with this, and they went around the block and copied down all the plate numbers, and one of them was his. And this time, they had the address in Jersey.”

It was late Friday night, though, before all the pieces had come together, and it was Saturday morning before the FBI moved, headed for Keansburg to begin surveillance on Donald Nash. They arrived as he was leaving.

With Nash on the move, the immediate question was whether to stop him and pick him up right then or let him go, tail him to see where he was heading and if he was going to meet somebody. The decision was to wait and tail, especially since there was uncertainty. The van registered to Nash and the van on the pier had been a silver one. The one Nash was driving was black. It could be a different one, then. The FBI wanted to get close enough at some point, without Nash being alerted and alarmed, to check the vehicle identification number (VIN) on the dashboard to see if it matched the silver van's.

In cars, constantly alternating places so that Nash would suspect nothing, in helicopters and planes, the federal agents kept pace with the van as it moved steadily south. By nightfall, Nash had reached Lancaster, Pa. He pulled off the Pennsylvania Turnpike and stopped at a Holiday Inn. There he spent the night.

In darkness later that night, the FBI moved in on the van. The VIN was unreadable, masked by paint. A scraping of black paint was taken from the van, to be tested to see if it was, as suspected, fresh.

The decision was made to let him continue, and to keep constant watch, to make sure he was never out of sight of his pursuers, to wait for the opportunity to make sure of the VIN before taking him. They now had additional evidence linking Nash to the silver van, if they needed it. That morning, a six-year-old neighbor of Nash had been playing in Waackack Creek, which ran directly behind Nash's home. Floating in the creek, she found some papers. She brought them to her mother, who turned them over to authorities. Those papers included an insurance identification card and insurance policy issued on March 2 to Donald Nash covering a silver van, containing the VIN and the license-plate numbers. Those plate numbers matched the ones the FBI had jotted down that March night in Ridgewood and the numbers Nash had written in on his Kinney parking application. Still, everyone thought it important to let him continue on his way, until the VIN could be made and, perhaps, until he met up with somebody, a somebody who conceivably could be his employer.

Nash drove on through the next day, Sunday, reaching Milton, West Virginia, at dusk. He pulled off the road and into a campground. That night, he slept in the van. The agents could not approach.

Back in New York, the cops and the FBI were getting a little nervous. The tracking had gone on for two days, was about to go into a third. So far, they had been lucky. They had not lost Nash. But what if they did? What if he turned off the road, undetected? What if somehow he managed to slip by? The decision was made to precipitate a little action. A request was made to the Kentucky State Police to set up roadblocks and check the papers and VINs of every car that went through. That way, they could make certain of the identification number of the black van. Supposedly, that was all that was wanted. Then Nash would be permitted to continue to wherever he was going, to his rendezvous, if there was one.

About noon, on Interstate 64 about twenty miles from Lexington, Nash reached the roadblock. He handed over his papers to the state trooper, who examined them, made note of the numbers and other information, handed them back, and waved Nash on. Nash drove away.

As Nash drove on, the trooper radioed the information about the van back to headquarters. There it was put on the computer for a check. Months before, during the aborted attempt by Robert Dane to ditch the van and collect the insurance, he had reported it stolen. When it was recovered, the alarm for a stolen vehicle was supposedly canceled. But because of the missing license plates, the alarm actually remained in force, and now the word came back to the Kentucky troopers that the black van that had just passed through was, according to the VIN, a stolen vehicle. The troopers set out on a chase, and, less than a half hour later, twenty-five miles down the road, they found it. It was parked by the side of the road. Nash was sitting on a campstool, eating fried chicken for lunch, chicken he was cooking on his new camp stove. He was put under arrest. He offered no resistance, surrendered meekly, and was taken to the barracks in Frankfurt.

“I said to Captain Burke,” John Wales remembers, “when they told us about the roadblocks that they're going to stop the car and something's going to be wrong and they're going to pop him. I'll bet you, I said. He says, no they won't. Well, they did.”

Indeed, they did. But Dick Gallagher adds, “I'll tell you this, it was no accident. They knew exactly what they were doing. They were holding the bag. The FBI was tailing this guy, not the New York City Police Department. And if that son-of-a-bitch ever got away from them, which could have happened, who's going to look like the biggest idiots in the world? Not us. They got nervous and they cut it off. But, what the hell, how long were you going to go on with this stupid thing? I don't blame them. If it had been us, we'd probably have taken him before he got out of Jersey.”