Catch the sparrow, p.9
Catch the Sparrow, page 9
But some people, even ones who knew him well, stand firm in their belief—to this day—that Geoff was involved. One of those people—a person too scared to give a name—says to me, “I still think it was Geoff and nothing will change that.”
Then, in December 2018, out of nowhere, Geoff emails me. Having lost his job with the Naples Orchestra and Chorus in Florida a few years earlier over “personality conflicts,” according to an article in the Naples Daily News, he’s decided to move back to New York and is living in Canandaigua, just north of Rochester. He feels different about sharing his stories with me, he says, after reading some of my essays and finding me “inquisitive and unbiased, interested in the fabric, texture, and meaning of relationship.”
He tells me about the night Stephanie “threatened him with a shotgun and ran barefoot back to her house” and then began “screaming about killing herself” on the phone. He tells me about the abortion; in Geoff’s version, “after much conversation, she agreed to an abortion,” even though he “knew it was not what she wanted.” But, Geoff writes, in his opinion, Stephanie was “too crazy” to be a mother.
There is also a great deal of guilt expressed in his email: “I deeply regret that my own issues played into reinforcing her bad childhood. I know I was blinded by my sexist attitudes at the time. I do carry the awful reality of the part I played in Stephanie’s life and her choice to leave [Martha’s Vineyard] thereby exposing herself to abduction and death.”
He now says he finds other stories about Stephanie “borderline delusional,” a statement I found myself nodding to as I read, and that what he wants more than anything, just like I do, is “a true and balanced portrait of Stephanie and her family along with the forces and events leading to her tragic end.”
I hate what he did to Stephanie, using his older age and imposing physicality (I never forget his domestic violence citations, the restraining orders) to coerce her into an abortion, and I hate his veiled legal threats and his guns. Still, three years after I first ask for his cooperation, twenty-seven years after her disappearance, Geoff writes, “In my mind the refrain of ‘if only …’ echoes and demands accountability. That is vastly different from guilt and regret but it comes with its own punishments. Even though I can look at the past and see myself as moved by forces in myself I did not understand, I accept my accountability in this tragedy.”
It seems like maybe Geoff has acknowledged the role his own traumas played in the way he treated Stephanie. I read his email with a cynicism nursed by my own history with men, by what I know about Geoff so far, wondering what he wants. At the same time, I want to believe there is authentic remorse in him for whatever he did. And if the remorse is real, perhaps so is his evolution.
20
When the school year started in September 1991, I was a sophomore, and it would be five more years before my parents divorced and we moved next door to Jerry. But I noticed him in the corner of the band room or the back of the auditorium, checking in on various ensembles. I took account of his stature, his face, as I tried to pay attention to Mr. Whitlock’s or Mr. Tedeschi’s conducting. Everybody at school knew what had happened, and my friends and I talked about his courage and strength in pushing forward and holding onto hope.
Jerry Kupchynsky was a stoic man. It was a stoicism accumulated from a lifetime of hardship: the abuse he’d endured at the hands of his own stepfather, the strident disapproval of a mother who harped on him until the day she died, the years he spent in a displaced persons camp in Bavaria, his experiences when he’d been conscripted by the Nazis, his nearly dying of pneumonia, his first wife’s leaving him, his second wife’s multiple sclerosis … It was the only way he knew how to be.
But after Stephanie’s disappearance, he changed. As the terrible lack of knowledge about what had happened to her extended, his resolve began to crack at the edges, although few could tell from the outside.
After two months, when it began to seem like Stephanie would not soon resurface, and some people began to call it a “lost cause,” waves of correspondence began rolling in from all reaches of the country. These letters are now all in a fat manila envelope in the bag of files my mother gave me. I sit on the floor of my apartment when I get back to Brooklyn from Vermont that summer of 2015, and I spread the cards and letters across the carpet in front of me.
Family friends sent a check for $385. Jerry wasn’t one to accept charity, but he acquiesced and wrote back, “I consider myself to be pretty tough—surviving two wars, multiple sclerosis, immigration (Jerry’s journey!), and now a loss of beloved daughter. However, when I read your card with the check, I got totally ‘unglued’ and cried like a baby (Please keep it a secret!) I am a very lucky man to be blessed with such wonderful people as all of you.”
Stephanie’s student Heidi wrote: “Every time the hairs on my bow flow across the strings on my violin, I can hear her voice. ‘Put a little more umph in it, Heidi!’ she says. Then she shows me. She isn’t here to show me anymore. It hurts.”
Melanie’s high school friend Joanne Lipman wrote, offering to help get media attention. Stephanie, Melanie, Joanne, and Miriam Simon had played in a string quartet in their teen years. (One of their favorite pieces was Haydn’s String Quartet no. 53 in D Major, “The Lark.”) Joanne, who went on to become editor in chief at USA Today and a chief officer at Gannett, was a journalist with good connections. “I’ve been thinking non-stop about you and your family since I heard the news,” she wrote. “If you think more widespread coverage would do any good, I know lots of people in newspapers and TV.”
Jerry took her up on her offer, and in December 1991 a piece ran in the regional section of the New York Times entitled “One More Blow to the Heart for Survivor of Nazi Terror.” The article told Stephanie’s story, including limited details about her emotional teenage years and the “desolate” winters on Martha’s Vineyard, which Jerry again blamed for her depression. “I think about Steph every two minutes,” Jerry said. “She dominates my life.”
That holiday season saw a flurry of newspaper articles and prayerful holiday greetings. As my eyes pass over the array of cards and letters on my living room floor, my mother’s own handwriting leaps out at me, recognizable before I consciously identify it. “As the mother of three daughters,” my mother wrote, “my heart goes out to you and your family upon the disappearance of your daughter Stephanie. Our prayers are that she may be safe and that the new year will see you reunited.”
Stephanie’s college boyfriend R. J. Vealey and his mother were quoted in an article in the Charleston Gazette. R. J. said he and Stephanie had spoken about her problems on Martha’s Vineyard. “We’ve all been at points where you wonder if it’s really worth it,” he said. “Hopefully, she decided to check out for a while.”
His mother, Rosie, added, “I don’t think I could hurt any more if it was one of my own. We’re all hoping she has amnesia or something and she’ll be found. That would be the greatest Christmas present of all.”
Tom’s mother wrote to Jerry, too. Soon after Stephanie’s disappearance, she had a dream. Stephanie, whom she’d never met, appeared to her. “You don’t need to worry about this,” Stephanie said. “Tom has nothing to do with this.” Tom’s parents had the same feeling Dee and Molly did: that Stephanie and Tom were a perfect match. Her dream of Stephanie proved it. “I have wanted to write you for some time, but I have not had the words to express our family’s complete sadness. It is incredible that people can go from such joy and happiness to utter despair in so short a time,” she wrote.
For Tom’s family, part of that despair had to do with their utter lack of trust in the police. Over twenty-five years later, they are still indignant—not just about how Tom was treated, but about a more systematic failure on the part of the police, which led to Stephanie’s remains going undiscovered for nearly seven years.
From day one, Molly and Dee felt brushed aside. They felt less and less urgency on the part of the police every time they called, even in those first few days. They insisted that Stephanie would never leave her birds. “It’s like a mother leaving a baby at home,” Molly told the police.
Dee organized her own unofficial search party, and rode her horses through the town’s fields and backwoods, hoping the higher vantage point would help. They brought stacks of posters emblazoned with Stephanie’s face everywhere they went.
One officer mocked Dee when she begged the sheriff’s office to check the fields near Newcastle a week or two after Stephanie went missing. “What, do you think she’s lying half dead in a field somewhere?” he said.
The worst part was how the cops treated Tom.
Even with the ceaseless support of his family, Tom was wearing down, his sisters could see. The love of his life was missing, probably dead. And the only worldly thing he had to remind him of her was Chubie, who, that fall, had begun laying eggs for the first time in her life.
Tom wrote to Jerry, beginning by saying how much he missed Stephanie and how happy she’d been, and updating Jerry on the cockatiel:
Chubie seems to be happy and I am glad her egg-laying has stopped. Her latest act is landing on a book’s edge I am reading while lying on my sofa. While perched there, she tries to eat the pages so I have to shoo her away or play with her. I am very glad to have her.
About a week after his first letter, Tom sent another, this envelope containing also a clipping from the Rochester Times-Union. Sergeant Donald Farrell, the man who accused Tom of murdering Stephanie, had been arrested and charged with third-degree grand larceny, a felony. Tom wrote, “We suspected the quality of the investigators from the beginning and this is pretty strong proof. Maybe it will help in getting the FBI involved.”
Tom also sent Jerry a Christmas gift. He’d taken Chubie’s three eggs to a Ukrainian folk artist, who decorated them in intricate patterns of gold and black and rich deep red in the traditional Ukrainian pysanka Easter egg style.
My mother still has the eggs—each only about an inch long—in a tiny liqueur glass on a shelf in her china cabinet. I never knew until last year that they had come from Stephanie’s bird. I have always liked rotating them to follow the details of their designs, holding them with the lightest touch of my fingertips.
In 1992 Jerry increased his reward to $10,000. The Star-Ledger newspaper published an article when Stephanie had been missing for just shy of a year. Sergeant Murray told the reporter they hadn’t ruled out foul play and were working on the case “every week.” “It’s like a wound that won’t heal,” Jerry was quoted as saying. “You sort of get used to it, but it doesn’t hurt any less.”
Jerry kept paying the private investigator, whose work produced nothing. Jerry and Melanie kept reaching out to the media. Hope fluttered in their hearts at every lead.
In October 1992, several women’s bodies were found near the Ontario State Parkway, not far from where Stephanie’s checkbook had lain in the dirt. Stephanie’s coworkers Kim and Carl Fink wrote to Jerry to say the police suspected the work of a serial killer. “Stephanie’s dental records were checked, and ruled out. Stephanie continues to be, very much, on the minds of the police,” they wrote.
The women were identified; all had links to drugs or sex work, so it wasn’t likely these crimes were connected to Stephanie, anyway. These were the women John White was later suspected of murdering.
Hope was dashed again and again.
Sergeant Connors, the lead detective on Stephanie’s case, wanted nothing more than to find her. But soon enough, a new horror caught Connors’s attention.
21
Annette Alferov went to bed the night of April 9, 1992, at around 10:00 P.M., her six-year-old daughter Yvonne sleeping in the next room. Annette awoke from a deep sleep, aware of a misty light shining through the space between her bedroom curtains, to the sound of an intruder in her living room, and wandered out to face a stocky man, about six feet tall and pudgy in the middle, wearing a dark-colored baseball cap and a white hockey mask that completely covered his face.
She had started to ask what he was doing there when he shoved a crowbar across her throat, pushing her into her bedroom and onto her bed. He told her to shut up—he’d only come to take things, he said, and then he handcuffed her.
“What time is it?” the man asked.
“I need my glasses,” Annette told him.
He got them for her. It was 2:30 A.M.
“Please don’t hurt me,” Annette said calmly.
“I won’t,” he said. “Are you married?”
She lied and said yes, and her husband, a truck driver, would be home around 4:00 A.M. She tried to keep the conversation going, to stall whatever he might have planned. He told her he’d been in the country a few months. He repeated he’d come to steal from her, and it would be fine since she had insurance. “I don’t have insurance,” she told him.
“What are you, a dumb ditzy bitch?” he said.
“I may be dumb, but I’m not a bitch,” she answered.
He asked how many children she had; she lied and said two. “You’re a liar,” he told her, correcting her. “You have one. What’s her name?”
“It’s Susan,” she lied again.
“I’ve been watching you,” he told her.
She could smell the liquor on his breath as he stripped her bed and covered her head with her own pillowcase. He found pantyhose in her dresser and used it to tie her ankles and hands to the bedposts.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked.
“All women deserve this,” he answered, stuffing something black and lacy into her mouth. She spit it out; he sealed her mouth closed with gray duct tape. He asked her if she wanted some “reefer or Jack Daniel’s” and he left the room. He returned with a container, found a straw in her kitchen, put it near her mouth, and told her to drink. She recognized the taste of Jack Daniel’s.
For the next few hours the man raped her orally, vaginally, and anally. He said the most vulgar things imaginable about her body, made her say she loved what he was making her do, and methodically beat her buttocks with something that “hurt like hell,” possibly a Rubbermaid cake mixer from her own kitchen. “All women like this,” he told her.
“No, they don’t,” she said.
“They deserve to get beat,” he said.
Sometime later in the haze of her assault, Annette asked what time it was. He told her it was 5:00 A.M. When he was finished, he lay down next to her. “Now I don’t know what we’re going to do. You’ve seen my face,” he said.
Annette wrote in her statement later that morning that she thought he would kill her. When he mentioned her seeing his face, she said, “He sounded like doom.”
She assured him she hadn’t seen him. “I promised I wouldn’t look, and I didn’t,” she said. “I want to live. I want to raise my little girl,” she pleaded, thinking of Yvonne, sleeping on the other side of her bedroom wall.
“I know what we are going to do,” he said. He forced her into the shower, telling her to stay in there and wash herself completely, inside and out. She stayed until the hot water turned freezing cold. The man took the stockings and some of Annette’s bedding and put them on a wash cycle in the laundry room. He warned her, in a bizarre moment, “If you don’t want me to come back, put a deadbolt on your door and a pole in your window.”
He told her not to tell anyone because she’d never catch him, and even if she did, it would be her word against his. He told her to stay in the shower for another ten minutes, and he left. She waited, then grabbed her keys, purse, and daughter, ran to her upstairs neighbor’s apartment, and called the police. It was the morning of her thirty-third birthday.
Annette lived directly across the parking lot from Stephanie’s apartment. The windows of their bedrooms faced one another. Annette remembered that the week before her assault, she’d come home to find her closet door open, which she found so strange she’d called her mother to ask if she’d been in the apartment.
Now she wondered if the same man had already cased her home before he broke in and raped her. Annette couldn’t recall hearing the front door open when her attacker left to get the Jack Daniel’s he made her drink. She felt a strange intuition that the man had stashed the alcohol in the utility room before that night.
Six-year-old Yvonne mostly slept through her mother’s assault. All she could tell the police was, “I heard Mommy talking to some man, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying.”
That weekend Connors and Armstrong were back in Poughkeepsie to interview Stephanie’s cousin Ivan. They wanted him excluded as a suspect. He signed his statement hours before Annette woke up to find a rapist in her bedroom. When they returned to Greece, the horror of Annette’s assault eclipsed everything else in their workload.
Annette drew a crude sketch for the cops of the assailant’s mask. She was an intelligent victim who had a good handle on what had been done to her.
The detectives started canvassing the complex, asking the women who lived there what they knew. Four days after Annette’s assault, a neighbor named Sheryl told Connors and Armstrong that two former Newcastle Apartments employees had once told her they wanted to “screw” Annette Alferov. Randall Glen and his brother-in-law Ed Laraby had come by Sheryl’s apartment several times in a “drunken stupor” and made sexual overtures to her. Laraby bragged about beating his wife, and said that he knew where every single woman in the complex lived and what she did for a living.
Four months earlier, in January 1992, another resident had called to report an unlawful entry. She also mentioned that Laraby, a former maintenance worker at the apartment complex, had been making her uncomfortable by saying sexually suggestive things to her. She wondered if Laraby might have been the man who’d entered her apartment and left before she could see his face. Laraby had been in her apartment on at least two other occasions for “bogus maintenance calls,” entering through the laundry room, not the front door of the building, asking her “what kind of sexual activity she liked” and to “take a ride in the truck” with him. She got rid of him both times by saying her boyfriend would be home soon.
