True, D’Addario’s relationship with the captain had never been close, but the events of 1988 left both men with few illusions. To D’Addario, it seemed that the captain was looking for unequivocal loyalty in his subordinates while offering little of the same. He hinted at an unwillingness to protect Donald Worden during the Larry Young mess, and he was unwilling to protect D’Addario when every fresh murder was coming in open. In the lieutenant’s mind, the pattern had become all too familiar.
D’Addario survived it: Eight years as a homicide commander makes any man a connoisseur of survival. Along the way, he managed to get good and sometimes superb police work from his men. But D’Addario was a proud man, and the cost of remaining in homicide was finally too high. One night in 1989, when D’Addario was called downtown in the early morning hours for a police shooting, he heard about an opening for a lieutenant in vice enforcement, and the longer he thought about the idea, the better he liked it. Vice would give him nine-to-five hours, his own car, his own command. He went to the colonel that same week and the transfer was immediately approved. A month later, the homicide unit had a new shift lieutenant-a decent guy, too, fair and sympathetic to the men. But he had a tough act to follow. As one detective put it succinctly, “He ain’t no Dee.”
At this writing, D’Addario is the commander of the BPD’s vice enforcement section. One of his best detectives there is Fred Ceruti, who still harbors some resentment about the events of 1988, but promises that he will be returning to homicide. “Hey,” he says, smiling. “I’m still young.”
Technically, Harry Edgerton remains a homicide detective, although the last two years might suggest otherwise.
Ed Burns, the only detective Edgerton was ever willing to call a partner, briefly returned to the homicide unit in early 1989 after completing his two-year FBI probe of the Warren Boardley drug organization in the Lexington Terrace projects. As chief protagonists in a bloody 1986 turf war in the projects, Boardley and his lieutenants were believed responsible for seven unsolved homicides and fourteen shootings. The federal probe eventually sent the key players to prison for terms ranging from double life to eighteen years without the possibility of parole. Edgerton, who had been removed from the probe because of a budget dispute between federal and local agencies, marked the November 1988 arrest of Boardley and his men by joining Burns and other agents in the raiding parties.
Almost immediately after the Boardley case was closed, Burns and Edgerton were both detailed to the Drug Enforcement Administration for a probe of yet another violent narcotics trafficker. Linwood “Rudy” Williams had already beaten two murder charges, a machine-gun possession charge and two drug charges in state courts, when the DEA began its investigation in mid-1989; he was also suspected in four Baltimore-area homicides in 1989 and 1990 alone. In March 1991, Williams and six codefendants were convicted in U.S. District Court as part of a federal drug conspiracy indictment. The primary investigator in the yearlong probe was Ed Burns; Edgerton was one of two chief prosecution witnesses.
The success of the Williams investigation, which involved wiretaps, room mikes, assets probes and the extensive use of a federal grand jury, was such that even Harry Edgerton’s critics in the homicide unit had to sit up and take notice. The general opinion was that with Rudy Williams in federal detention, city homicide detectives were being spared three or four case files a year. But within the Baltimore department, a debate over the value of protracted investigation continues; both Edgerton and Burns have been told that after the Williams trial, they are to return to the homicide unit and the regular rotation.
Edgerton did get some satisfaction from the Andrea Perry case. His suspect in the rape-murder, Eugene Dale, became the only one of two hundred homicide defendants in 1988 to be tried under the death penalty statute in Baltimore. (Prosecutors made the decision to pursue capital punishment when the results of DNA testing on Dale’s blood confirmed that the semen found inside the twelve-year-old’s body was his own.) Although the effort to pursue the death penalty failed, Dale was convicted of first-degree murder and second-degree rape, and he has been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
If and when Edgerton does return to the homicide unit, his assignment is uncertain; the squad he left in 1989-Roger Nolan’s-no longer exists.
The squad began to dissolve in early 1989, beginning with the loss of Edgerton to the Williams probe. Soon afterward, Donald Kincaid departed in a four-squad trade that brought two of Stanton’s men to Nolan’s crew. Kincaid then went to work for Jay Landsman, and for a time, at least, he was content-and Landsman was pleased enough to have acquired an experienced detective. But within months Kincaid had a fresh argument going-this time with the new lieutenant, who tried to hold some of the unit’s veterans, Kincaid included, to a shorter leash. Kincaid’s anger finally won out, and in the summer of 1990 he took his pension and retired after twenty-four years with the department.
His war with Edgerton, and then with the lieutenant, points to one of the real truths about life in any police department. For a detective or street police, the only real satisfaction is the work itself; when a cop spends more and more time getting aggravated with the details, he’s finished. The attitude of co-workers, the indifference of superiors, the poor quality of the equipment-all of it pales if you still love the job; all of it matters if you don’t.
The murder of Latonya Kim Wallace-the Angel of Reservoir Hill, as she became known in Baltimore-remains unsolved. The case folders have been returned to a file drawer; detectives in Landsman’s squad are no longer actively investigating the death, though they continue to pursue any fresh information that comes in.
For Tom Pellegrini, the case left a legacy of frustration and doubt that took another year to overcome. Well into 1989, he continued to work around the edges of the file at the expense of other cases. In the end, he found little solace in the fact that the investigation had been pursued with greater diligence and perseverance than any other in recent memory; the greater the effort, in fact, the greater his frustration.
Months after his last interrogation of the Fish Man, Pellegrini came back to the file once more, scanning the existing evidence, compiling information, then typing an elaborate memorandum to the state’s attorney’s office. In it he argued that a circumstantial case existed against the old store owner-a case strong enough to put before a grand jury. But it didn’t surprise Pellegrini when Tim Doory declined to prosecute the case. The little girl’s murder was far too prominent, far too newsworthy, to risk a court trial on a thin web of evidence, or to bluff by charging a suspect in the hope of provoking a confession. And several detectives who had also worked on the case still didn’t believe the old man was the killer. If he was truly guilty, they reasoned, three long interrogations would have, at the very least, punched some larger holes in his story.
Pellegrini learned to live with the ambiguity. Two years after walking into that rear yard on Newington Avenue, he could finally say that he had put the worst part of the Latonya Wallace case behind him-and it didn’t hurt. He began 1990 with eight straight clearances.
Early this year, he undertook a small but telling task. Slowly, methodically, he began organizing the contents of the Latonya Wallace files, making them more accessible and understandable to any detective who may later have use for them. It was a quiet but necessary acknowledgment that Tom Pellegrini might be years gone before the truth is known, if indeed it is ever known.