In a matter of weeks, Stan Chizuk, Bob Napier, the Greece town attorney, and Douglas Meeson—the owner of the funeral home that would provide Laraby’s funerary services—came to an agreement. Laraby agreed to waive his right to remain silent and offer a complete and truthful admission—one that contained details that could be checked—in exchange for a funeral and burial off prison grounds.

  On May 30, 2012, Stan, Mike, Napier, and Laraby sat around a table at Wende, and Mike hit record on his tape recorder once again.

  Much later, when I am in possession of that recording, I am tormented by it. I am afraid to hit play.

  I consider Melanie, my other stepsister, who once posted on Facebook: “My sister’s life is like the world inside a snow-globe: beautiful, shiny, and still.…”

  From everything I know now about Stephanie, her life was nothing like an idyllic snow globe. Maybe Melanie needed to retreat into a safer set of circumstances.

  When I emailed Melanie back in 2015, after Sandra said she’d let me listen to the recording with Melanie’s blessing, I was nervous about Melanie’s response. I told her I intended to travel to Rochester to start researching Stephanie’s story.

  Melanie had replied: “While it warms my heart that you want to keep her memory alive, there are details in that confession that I do not know myself, and do not want to know. It would be emotionally devastating to me and to my family to have that material publicized.”

  I’d written back and said I’d try to think of another approach.

  “If this happened to you,” I told my sister Vanessa as I drove up to Rochester, “I would want to know every single detail of everything you went through.”

  “Me, too,” Vanessa said.

  Then Sandra pressed the CD into my hand, even when I told her what Melanie said. “You need to hear it,” she said, and there was instantly no other approach.

  Everyone I talk to about Stephanie wants to know what happened to her. There are her childhood friends who ask shyly if I know what happened. There’s her student Heidi, who says, “I always felt like I knew what happened; will you tell me if I’m right?”

  I spent my whole adolescence with an understanding that my teacher’s daughter had vanished, just dematerialized. That remained true for only a short time when she was my stepsister, erased by the phone call from my mother when I was in my last semester at Rutgers, living with three female friends, often wandering the streets of New Brunswick alone in the dark after cast parties, drunk on Jack and Gingers.

  “They’ve found Stephanie …”

  I remember my stepfather, quiet at my college graduation as he watched me step offstage and into my life as an adult, one month after his daughter’s bones were discovered.

  I think about the console table in the dining room covered in greeting cards, my dead stepsister’s photo in the middle. The funeral that December, after almost eight months of the coroner holding onto Stephanie’s skeleton, where I sat in the back row and listened to Melanie play the violin, watched Tom and his sisters huddle together, and then drove back to New Brunswick to wait tables at Marita’s Cantina as if nothing had happened.

  “This is a story that needs to be told,” Sandra says.

  “Her case deserved justice, and it needs to be told,” Stan says.

  Melanie’s claim is strong, her connection to Stephanie infinitely deeper, bonded by blood. But Stephanie has been a haunting presence in my life for almost thirty years, has shaped so much of the way I view the world. I have lived in the shadow of this tragedy, too. I have experienced my own trauma—a different kind of trauma, of course—and nearly exhausted my own psychic bandwidth to come this far. Isn’t this, in a way, my story, too?

  I know this is true: Stephanie belongs to no one. Would she want her story told? She told her friends about her father’s beatings, about the times she thrashed against the walls to get Geoff’s attention, about the abortion she didn’t want to have.

  She told the truth when the truth wasn’t easy or glamorous. She told the truth even when it humiliated her. She told the truth, even when it was hideous. She was a truth-seeker, and so, to honor her, I will be one too.

  I will tell the truth though Melanie would wish it otherwise, knowing she will find it selfish, perhaps vainglorious. I wish there were some way to honor both her wishes and what I see as my duty, but there isn’t. Stephanie’s story calls out to be told. The only way to keep Stephanie’s memory—her full, complex, vibrant memory—alive is to tell her whole story, and her death is a part of it.

  42

  The seventy-minute recording is muffled and garbled, with a scratchy overlay, harder to decipher than the Egg McMuffin tape. On top of that, the decline in Laraby’s speech is audible; it is labored, barely understandable at times. It takes me four hours to listen to it because of how often I backtrack, pressing my earbud farther into my ear, trying different combinations—listening only with one bud, switching ears, raising and lowering the volume, adjusting treble and bass. Even then, there are sentences that decrescendo to a point I can’t make them out. His answers are shorter than before, and that incongruent laughter is less frequent, less hearty. Where his confession to raping Annette seems like a diversion for him, this one is decidedly more of a chore. There’s no pizza or roast beef sub to relish, no backslapping quality between the men, no one-liners or ribbing.

  Stan asks if he understands the implications of waiving his Miranda rights. Laraby says, “Yeah.”

  “Bob?” Stan says, and Napier adds, “On behalf of Mr. Laraby and in consideration of the negotiations with the town of Greece which I’ve reviewed with Laraby, I would consent to a waiver of his right to counsel so he is free to speak to members of the Greece Police Department.”

  Laraby and Napier sign a form, and Stan begins.

  He tells Laraby they’re there to speak about any interactions Laraby had with Stephanie with regards to her death.

  “Uh, yeah, I could do that,” Laraby says, “The thing I told you last year—I candy-coated it.” Here, he pauses for a long breath. “… So the family wouldn’t really know what the deal was. I just told you what you wanted to hear.”

  “Are you gonna tell us the full truth today? You’re not gonna leave out any details in spite of how difficult it may be for somebody to learn, in the family, what the true details are?”

  Laraby agrees and begins to tell the story.

  The evening of July 31, 1991, Laraby says, “I was drinking my blues away, haha,” and snorting cocaine. He can’t remember if he was with Glen or not, but he “never needed a drug buddy.”

  “How much cocaine?” Mike asks.

  “A lot!” Laraby answers with the most verve he can muster. He laughs a high-pitched giggle.

  No one laughs with him this time.

  Drunk and high, he walked to Newcastle Apartments, leaving Terry and the boys home, intending to go to the home of a woman named Karen for “a sexual encounter.” When he rang the bell, Karen’s boyfriend answered the door, and Laraby ran off.

  He’d turned in a set of master keys when he was fired on July 26—five days earlier—but he’d made another set. “I could use [them] anytime I wanted.”

  He headed to Stephanie’s apartment because he was “pretty sure there was no guy there.” He knew the apartments surrounding hers—an old woman by herself in one, the other vacant.

  “Why her?” Stan asks.

  “I used to talk to her, and she was agreeable to conversation. I knew she was alone, the only thing she had was birds.” Laraby pauses to remember. “A couple of birds,” he says.

  Laraby let himself into Stephanie’s apartment. A string of bells—like Christmas bells—chimed as he opened the door. He walked through the dark and into her bedroom, where Stephanie was sleeping on her stomach, wearing only underwear. He climbed into the bed with her, and she awoke and immediately started struggling. “I told her I was much bigger and stronger, so she might as well give it up. And she did.”

  Laraby handcuffed Stephanie’s wrists and ankles. He then picked her up and brought her to the sofa.

  “Had you put anything over your face at that point?” Mike asks.

  “No, but I did put something over her face,” Laraby answers. “Some kind of throw thing from her couch.”

  At first, Laraby said, Stephanie wouldn’t speak and just “stood there submissively.”

  He gave her a choice—please him orally or anally. “She chose oral,” Laraby says. “She was so disgusted by it that I made her do it a second time. She said she’d never done it before. I teased her. I said, ‘This is the first time you ever did that?’ ”

  Then Stephanie asked him to leave. “She never screamed,” Laraby says.

  Later, I have dinner with Stan and his wife, Michelle, who’s unfazed by our talk. I ask if he thinks it’s true that Stephanie didn’t scream. He doesn’t. He believes Stephanie would have fought violently, but that no one heard her. I’m not sure. I know it’s instinct to freeze sometimes in dangerous situations, to “play dead” until the threat is gone. Maybe silence was Stephanie’s survival tactic.

  Stephanie had told Laraby she had a music student scheduled in the morning, and she didn’t want him to be there when her student showed up.

  “I didn’t know what I was gonna do, but after some thought, I decided that the thing to do was eliminate the witness.” The detachment both of the language—eliminate the witness—and the way Laraby says the words leaves me with a cold feeling inside.

  He claims he never told her he was going to kill her. “She never saw it coming,” he says. He approached her from behind while she was standing, put his arm around her neck, and applied pressure for several minutes. She threw up, he says, so at that point, he let her slide to the floor. “I pressed my ear against her chest to see if there were any sounds, and there were bodily sounds but no heartbeat, so I knew she was gone.” Laraby strains to say this, the last word—“gone”—almost a whisper.

  Mike makes sure to clarify that the killing was a conscious choice with the purpose of avoiding later identification as “the person who had contact with her.”

  “Yeah,” Laraby says. “Because I knew her, I didn’t really wanna go through with that, but … you know …”

  No one speaks.

  After a moment, Stan resumes. “We talked to you before about sexual assaults that have occurred … What made this one different where you decided you had to kill Stephanie?”

  “Well, I was pretty sure that she could see my arms, which are tattooed heavily, and I knew that I was looking at probably a serious twenty-five-year sentence if it ever came up. It was just, you know, a question of survival. I wanted to take care of it and move on.”

  He continues. “I took the bedding—I think it was a floral print—off the bed, I lay her on the floor.”

  He pauses, takes several breaths. The conversation has lasted almost an hour already, and he’s tiring. There’s a dry clicking sound, a sort of inhaled glottal stop, like the sound of the letter K, when he breathes. Each phrase is slower as he enumerates, one by one, his actions. “I took off the handcuffs, put them in my pocket, I took off her clothes, the only clothes she wore—her underwear, and then I rolled her up in the bedding and picked her up. And uh, she was no trouble to pick up because at the time, I was bench-pressing three hundred pounds, and I had a little hundred-pound nothing to pick up, so I lay her across my shoulder, opened the door, went downstairs and out to her car, and put her in the trunk.”

  Mike asks where her car was parked; Laraby says there’s only one place to park a car. As I listen, I remember parking outside Stephanie’s apartment, likely in the same spot. I remember that as I’d stared at the nondescript building, a little brown sparrow alit on the tree branch closest to me. It chirped twice and flew off.

  Stan asks what Laraby did with Stephanie’s underwear. Laraby’s voice becomes lighter. “I took them. I had an underwear fetish—haha. They’re gone now, but I guess there’s no harm in telling you that I had a footlocker full, I mean full, of underwear that I had taken when I was a superintendent at three different complexes. Eventually, I got a delusion about having evidence and destroyed it.”

  Laraby explains how he trashed his collection in a dumpster by a store called Chad’s. Looking for something to corroborate, Mike asks if absolutely all the souvenirs are gone.

  “Oh, yeah,” Laraby says dejectedly, like a kid who’s dropped his ice cream cone. “Oh, it broke my heart.”

  “Did you take anything else from Stephanie’s apartment?”

  “Her purse, wallet, and checkbook.” He describes the purse as brown with a strap—a precise description of the Esprit purse Stephanie brought to Charlotte Pier with Maxine and her kids. He says that’s where he found her car keys, along with “the usual girly stuff, lipstick, compact, stuff like that,” the keys to what he remembered as a red economy car, “maybe a Toyota or a Datsun.”

  He says even though her trunk was filled with “papers and books and crap,” he had no problem fitting her body there because “she was so little.”

  The messiness of Stephanie’s trunk is a detail publicly unknown. This is exactly what they need to nail the case shut for good. Real details. Details only Stephanie’s actual killer would know. I ask Stan later what he thought in this moment, if he felt a little victory. “Yes,” he says quickly. “Mike and I made eye contact. We knew we had him.”

  Laraby says that after Stephanie’s body was stashed, he went upstairs to vacuum and wipe everything down with a dish towel from her kitchen, “but I was in there a million times before, documented, so I wasn’t real concerned about having my prints found.”

  Mike and Stan ask if there was any sign that anyone heard or saw anything.

  “Nobody seen me coming, nobody seen me going,” Laraby says.

  He’s struggling to speak. “You okay?” Mike asks.

  “Having a little difficulty,” Laraby says quietly.

  Mike pushes on. “You never returned to that apartment again?”

  “Never.”

  “Can you take us from there?”

  “I got in her car, and I drove out of the complex out to, I think it’s called New Road, which leads to Ridge Road, and I turned onto Ridge Road and proceeded out to Orleans County,” Laraby says.

  “What was the point of driving out to Orleans County?” Mike asks.

  He explains that he’d made that decision based on the terrible reputation of the county’s district attorney. “The DA—he was a real screwup. He screwed up everything he touched, so I figured if it ever came to that, it would fall to him, and he’d probably screw up again.” Laraby laughs for a few seconds at his own joke.

  The exact location was never in the news, and sure enough, when I look on Google Maps, I see that Telegraph Road is the first left turn after the road running directly north-south that’s called County Line Road.

  Laraby talks about how he passed two police cruisers on the road, then a sheriff’s cruiser, which shone a spotlight on his car. He panicked but held it together, and as night turned to morning, he knew he had to finish up. “It was a perilous situation; I was running out of time. The light was creeping on the horizon. So I pulled into a farmer’s field and I got out, took her body out of the trunk, and carried her back to where you guys found her—or somebody found her, kids, I guess. There was a little stream. It wasn’t very deep. I walked through it and came out on the other side of it into the bushes and debris and wildflowers. I took the bedding off, left her alone on her back, nude, and I took the bedding and went back to the vehicle.”

  “What was the point of taking the bedding with you?” Mike asks.

  “I was hoping for decomposition, animals, bugs, you know the usual stuff that consumes,” Laraby says.

  Mike asks if he was worried about leaving anything behind, even a muddy footprint. Laraby says no, and he wouldn’t have trekked mud to the car, either, since walking through the tall grass would have cleaned his shoes.

  “If I recall correctly,” Laraby says, “the forecast called for rain. I wasn’t really concerned. I figured the rain would wash everything away when time passed.”

  Then he drove to a county park, where he took her checkbook out of her purse and threw the purse into a ravine. “I threw her wallet and checkbook out on the street thinking that someone would find it … and they’d try to cash the checks and remove the credit cards and therefore implicate themselves and that would give them somebody else to look at,” he says.

  “Which is kinda what happened,” says Mike.

  “Uh-huh,” says Laraby. I can almost hear his smile.

  Laraby then drove Stephanie’s car to the airport and parked it in the long-term lot, where he “made a mistake” leaving the seat pushed back. This was one of the first things Tom Redmond noticed, another detail that wasn’t publicly known. I imagine Stan and Mike’s eyebrows rising slightly as they try to hide another thrill of vindication.

  Next, Laraby walked to the Holiday Inn near the airport, hid the wrapped-up bedding outside, and went in to call a taxi. While he waited for the taxi, he chucked the car keys into the canal. He retrieved the bedding, got in the taxi, which he said was probably a Crown Vic from Town Taxi, and had the driver drop him at the Greece Ramada. He walked home from there, still carrying the bedding. He reached his house on Fielding Road at about 6:30 A.M., put the bedding in the trunk of his car, and went inside.

  “Was there anyone to greet you?” asks Mike. “Was a six-thirty arrival for you kinda unique?”

  “No, it happened other times, and of course, my wife was not a happy camper,” Laraby says, chuckling.

  “Did you get in an argument about it?” asks Mike.

 

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