Rich Garvey remains Rich Garvey, a detective for whom one year is much the same as the last. His 1989 campaign was as successful as his 1988 effort, and his clearance rate in 1990 was top-of-the-line.
But a look back at the 1988 case files reveals that the Perfect Year was an illusion in more ways than one. For example, the summer murder of the bartender in Fairfield, the robbery case that began when one patron remembered the license tag of the getaway car, ended disastrously. Despite the testimony of two codefendants, who confessed and accepted pleas of twenty and thirty years, the remaining two defendants were acquitted by a jury after two mistrials. The accused shooter, Westley Branch, was acquitted even though his fingerprint had been recovered from a Colt 45 can near the register. Garvey wasn’t in the courtroom the day the jury verdict was read, which was just as well: The acquitted defendants marked the occasion with cheers and high-fives.
It was Garvey’s first loss to a trial verdict, and other frustrations followed. Another murder case that he had worked with Bob Bowman in December 1988 suddenly collapsed in court when a member of the victim’s own family took the stand to exonerate the killer; Garvey later learned that the family had been in contact with the defendant before the trial and some money had changed hands. Likewise, the death of Cornelius Langley, the victim of the daylight drug shooting on Woodland Avenue in August, was also unavenged. That case was dropped after Michael Langley, the state’s chief witness and brother of the victim, was himself killed in an unrelated 1989 drug murder.
But there were victories, too. The conviction of Robert Frazier for the murder of Lena Lucas resulted in a life-without-parole sentence; so did the prosecution of Jerry Jackson, the east-sider who murdered Henry Plumer, then left the body in his basement. Perhaps the most gratifying outcome came in the case of Carlton Robinson, the young construction worker gunned down as he left the house to go to work on an icy November morning, killed because his friend and co-worker, Warren Waddell, had been called a dickhead at work the day before. The centerpiece of that prosecution was Robinson’s dying words to the first officers at the scene, his final declaration in which he named Waddell as the shooter. And yet it was unclear whether Robinson believed that he was dying or whether the officers or paramedics had told him so-throwing the legal validity of the declaration into doubt.
Garvey had asked for a quality prosecutor in that case and he got one. Bill McCollum, an experienced attorney with the career criminals unit of the state’s attorney’s office, reinterviewed the paramedics who handled the call and learned that Carlton Robinson, on the way to the hospital, had openly acknowledged that he was dying. Months later, the paramedics remembered the November 9 shooting call because of the date-they, too, noted that it occurred on the day that the state’s vaunted handgun law took effect.
In the end, a jury in Judge Bothe’s court found Warren Waddell guilty of first-degree murder, a verdict that resulted in a life-without-parole term predicated on the fact that Waddell had only recently been paroled on a charge of homicide. At this writing, however, the verdict has been overturned by a Maryland appeals court because of prejudicial comments made by Judge Bothe in the presence of the jury; a new trial date has yet to be scheduled.
Still, the case against Waddell remains a viable prosecution, a victory snatched from the jaws of defeat by good legal work, and Garvey, for one, allowed himself some measure of satisfaction at the end of the first trial.
As a sheriff ’s deputy led Warren Waddell down the marble stairs to the basement lockup, the defendant stared sullenly at the detective for a second too long. Garvey responded by leaning over the railing and calling to the convicted man in a stage whisper: “See you later, dickhead.”
McCollum, who was talking to another attorney a few feet away, suddenly made the connection. “You didn’t just say what I thought you said?”
“Fuck yes,” said Garvey. “Somebody had to.”
Alone among the three squads of D’Addario’s 1988 command, Terry McLarney’s crew is still intact.
Eddie Brown moves steadily from case to case, seemingly impervious to the passage of time. Rick James, who worked hard and long on the March murder of cab driver Karen Renee Smith, has now moved far enough from Worden’s shadow to be called a veteran. In fact, James’s 1988 campaign was nearly as successful as Rich Garvey’s: Alvin Richardson, who raped and murdered that two-year-old boy in November, was convicted in a jury trial and sentenced to life in prison, and Dennis Wahls, who led police to the stolen jewelry and implicated himself in the cab driver’s murder, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and accepted a life sentence. Clinton Butler, the man whom Wahls named as the man who actually beat Karen Smith to death, was tried twice in Baltimore courtrooms. Despite Wahls’s testimony and other corroborating evidence, the first jury was hung, the second found Butler innocent.
Donald Waltemeyer’s career case went to trial in 1989, as prosecutors brought Geraldine Parrish into Judge Bothe’s court for the murder of Albert Robinson, the alcoholic from Plainfield, New Jersey, found dead by the railbed in Clifton Park in 1986. Geraldine knew Albert Robinson from her storefront church in Plainfield, and years earlier she had convinced him to sign a life insurance policy that named her as the beneficiary. Of the four murders with which she was charged, the slaying of Robinson proved to have the most corroborative evidence. A trio of prosecutors told jurors an incredible, at times almost comical, tale in which Geraldine and a handful of other conspirators drove to New Jersey and lured Robinson into a car with promises of alcohol. Hours later, they shot him and left him for dead in a copse near Atlantic City. Robinson survived with only superficial wounds, but he was so drunk that he remembered nothing of the incident. A few months later, the gang returned to New Jersey, lured the drunk into the car once again, and this time drove him to Baltimore, where a teenage friend of one of Geraldine’s nieces finished the job on the B &O railbed, leaving Rick James with a stone whodunit.
Geraldine disappointed no one at the trial. At one point, she threw a conniption in the jury’s presence, flailing in her chair and spitting foam from the corners of her mouth. A bored Elsbeth Bothe ordered her to behave, ending the demonstration. Later, on the witness stand, Geraldine claimed she was duped by men who made her turn over the insurance policies and identify the prospective victims for them.
She wasn’t convincing, and in this instance a jury had little problem agreeing on a verdict. Geraldine Parrish was sentenced to life in prison, after which she pleaded guilty to the remaining three murders and received concurrent life sentences. No one was more relieved to see the case end than Donald Waltemeyer, who returned to the rotation full time immediately after the trial.
Waltemeyer’s partner, Dave Brown, no longer lives in a state of perpetual torment. For the last two years, Donald Worden has granted the younger detective a certain grudging acceptance, if not respect. It is true, however, that in the summer of 1989 the Big Man began charging Brown twenty-five cents apiece for his phone messages.
As for Terry McLarney himself, he continues to cling to the brotherhood. In 1989, he ignored a persistent cough until he could barely stand, then spent months recuperating from a bacterial infection around his heart. He was not expected to return to homicide, which is to say he was back in four months, looking leaner and healthier than he had in years.
At twenty-eight years of service and counting, Donald Worden is still a Baltimore police officer, still the center of McLarney’s squad. And he is now a married man. The wedding was in the summer of 1989 and most of the shift was there. Toast followed toast, and the entire wedding party concluded the festivities at Kavanaugh’s, with Diane gracing a barstool in her wedding dress and the Big Man holding court in a well-tailored tuxedo.