Читать книгу Death Dealer - Kate Clark Flora - Страница 14
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Shortly before noon on the day scheduled for his interview, David called Detective Sergeant Paul Fiander to say that he was in Saint John, where he’d gotten a list of Maria’s old friends and was planning to contact them to see if anyone had heard from her. He reported that he would be returning to Miramichi either late that night or on the following day. Later, he called the Miramichi dispatch and told them that if Detective Cummings was looking for him, he had gone to his mother’s in Saint John. He left a contact phone number.
Later that morning, David called Maria’s friend, Darlene, and told her he was in Saint John. Then he tried to convince her that she was wrong about the dates on which she had told police she had last seen Maria, and that she had last seen Maria at the apartment on January 12. Darlene reminded him that she was away visiting her mother on that date and also of their conversation on the 16th, when she’d stopped by and he’d told her Maria wasn’t home because she’d gone to a christening. David disagreed, saying that Maria had gone to Amanda Malley’s baby shower that day.
Concerned by the odd nature of the phone call, Darlene phoned Detective Cummings and repeated the conversation to him.
David also called the ex-husband of his upstairs neighbors and asked him to feed the Tanasichuk’s dog while he was away. While David was in Saint John, he was contacted by a reporter from Global News, Dave Crase. Crase had seen the police press release about Maria Tanasichuk being missing and had recognized the names both from David Tanasichuk’s past brushes with the law and from the events surrounding B.J.’s death. Crase contacted Tanasichuk and asked for an interview. At first, David refused the interview, but when Crase pressured him, suggesting that refusal would demonstrate his lack of concern about Maria’s whereabouts and welfare, David agreed.
He gave the television interview to Global News from his mother’s house in Saint John. It appeared on the six o’clock news on the evening of January 28. In the segment, David told the interviewer that things between himself and Maria were fine when she left. He described the day she left and said that he believed Maria had taken the bus to Saint John and he presumed that she had taken a cab to the bus station. David said that his concern for his wife began after he hadn’t heard from her for four or five days, and he told the reporter that the police suspected some of Maria’s friends were lying for her and helping her to hide. Then he made a plea to the general public for information about his wife’s whereabouts.
With David out of town and unable to be interviewed, the detectives continued to speak with the Tanasichuks’ friends and neighbors. They learned that what others were saying was inconsistent in many respects with what they’d been hearing from David.
Police officers have a motto (from former US President Ronald Reagan) that they operate by: “Trust, then verify.” In any investigation, given the uncertainties, inconsistencies, faulty memories and the way that full information can often take repeated interviews to obtain, detectives like to have multiple sources to establish any facts on which they’re going to rely. This meant that while David Tanasichuk was Maria’s husband and therefore presumed to be the person closest to her and most likely to have the information they needed to help locate her, they wanted to check what he was telling them against what they could learn from her friends, relatives and the Tanasichuks’ neighbors.
In this case, they were also forced to turn to other sources in seeking information useful in locating Maria, because despite the concern he had voiced about his missing wife, David had thus far been unwilling or unable to provide much of substance that the police could use in trying to locate her. They had no idea what she was wearing when last seen or what she’d taken with her. They didn’t have a name and address for the friend she’d gone to visit. They needed an explanation as to why, if she had packed luggage to be gone for a week, she’d left behind something as important as her prescription medicines. Even something as basic as the day she’d left town was uncertain.
The investigators suspected that David’s vagueness might be due to his admitted issues with drug use. A person under the influence of drugs can have a fuzzy memory and be unable to recall dates and times. But a person who expresses deep concern about a disappearance, yet seems unwilling to assist in investigating that disappearance, also raises suspicion. He had spoken about providing names and phone numbers but hadn’t provided them. He had agreed to an interview but instead left town. He had said during his television appearance that he believed her friends were hiding her, yet the friends police had spoken with had not heard from her. The significant dates he was giving the police differed from those of other witnesses. And now, if Maria’s friend Darlene was telling the truth, he was trying to persuade people the police might interview that their own recall of significant dates was faulty.
In his brilliant book about homicide detectives in Baltimore, Maryland, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, David Simon observes the following from the police officers whom he has interviewed:
It is a God-given truth: Everyone lies. And this most basic of axioms has three corollaries:
A. Murderers lie because they have to.
B. Witnesses and other participants lie because they think they have to.
C. Everyone else lies for the sheer joy of it, and to uphold a general principle that under no circumstances do you provide accurate information to a cop.6
In truth, there are plenty of honest witnesses. But even with well-meaning witnesses, obtaining information and then determining if it is “truth” is a complicated business.
Good people tell the truth—or try to—or tell the truth as they remember it. Witnesses may tell as much of the truth as they think will reflect favorably on them and maybe leave out the parts that reflect poorly on them. Perhaps they were under the influence of drugs or alcohol and have poor memories of what happened. Sometimes, as with the case of a man with a reputation for violence like David Tanasichuk, they’re afraid to tell the truth because of who the parties are and their fear of retaliation.
In some cases, witnesses may know something but they’re actually unaware of the significance of what they know. Sometimes their memories are vague or unreliable and it takes multiple interviews to jog the information back into consciousness and coherence. Sometimes it can take more than one interview to build the trust necessary to get witnesses to talk freely and share what they know. Detectives are often forced to walk a fine line between re-interviewing in order to conduct a competent investigation and over-interviewing and risking the charge of harassing the witness.
All of these factors combine to complicate the investigator’s task. In this case, the murky nature of the information available, combined with the deep concern and fear for her safety expressed by Maria’s friends and relatives, made the detectives certain that Maria’s disappearance warranted further investigation.
On January 28, after hearing David’s former sister-in-law’s ominous words at the courthouse about “something bad” happening to Maria and following his conversations with Maria’s sister and best friend, Detective Cummings spoke with Amanda Malley, whose grandmother was the Tanasichuks’ next door neighbor. It was her baby shower that David had told Darlene Gertley, in their telephone conversation, that Maria was attending on the 16th, as a reason why she wasn’t at home when Darlene called.
Amanda said she considered herself a close friend of Maria’s, seeing Maria a few times a week and speaking with her on the phone even more often. She told the detective that her baby shower had been held in November and Maria had been there. She had had her baby on January 7. On the 12th, she had spoken with Maria around midday and they’d made plans for Amanda to bring the baby for a visit the following day. Maria had congratulated Amanda on the baby and made no mention of any plans to go to Saint John. On the 13th, the baby was sick, so the visit did not take place.
Asked about the state of the relationship between Maria and David, Amanda told the detective that the last time she had seen Maria was on January 4 at the B.J. Breau Basketball Fundraiser, an annual event held in memory of Maria’s son, B.J., to raise money for scholarships. For the first time, David, who enjoyed social events and loved being the life of the party, did not attend. Maria, who did attend, seemed sad and subdued and said that the couple was not getting along well because David was back on drugs again. Maria told her friend that she’d given David an ultimatum—either he got clean or she was going to leave him.
As an aside in their interview, referring to Maria’s passionate attachment to her jewelry collection, Amanda Malley told Cummings that if any of Maria’s jewelry was still in the house, he should consider it a serious problem, because Maria would never go away for any period of time and leave her jewelry behind with David.
After he left the interview, following a hunch born of his long experience with drug users descending into addiction, Cummings visited a pawn shop on King George Highway. The proprietor confirmed that on and around January 16 and 17, David Tanasichuk had been into the shop and, over the course of those visits, he had sold some jewelry outright and pawned a number of pieces of women’s gold jewelry, including several rings and a chain with a pendant reading “#1 Wife.”
It’s a common thing and something Cummings had seen far too much of in his career—the devastation that drug use can cause a family. As the addiction takes hold and use becomes more frequent, the allure of drugs can become so powerful it outweighs duty to spouses and children, dragging users down until they’ve destroyed everything around them. First it’s a bit of the grocery money, then money to pay the bills and the rent, all accompanied by tears and promises to stop, along with endless lies and deception. There is no liar like a drug user.
And it doesn’t stop there. Far too often, a woman will come home to find the house missing a piece of furniture or that the television has been sold to buy drugs. As the need for the next fix comes to control the addict’s life, he or she will sell the car, the washing machine, the children’s beds, their clothes, occasionally even the children themselves—anything to satisfy that craving. And now Cummings was hearing that David was selling or pawning Maria’s treasured jewelry the day after Darlene Gertley said she had last seen Maria at home in her apartment.
There was no way to ignore what he was hearing. Every interview, every report, every story that friends and neighbors were telling him increased the urgency of Cummings’s need to sit down with his friend David and get the straight story.
David’s initial statements and interviews with family, friends and neighbors had raised so many questions. What had been the true state of their marriage in recent weeks and months? What day had Maria actually left? What had she been wearing? What had she taken in her suitcase—clothes for a few days, a few weeks? Had she in fact taken her jewelry? David had mentioned prescriptions, so what had her state of mind and health been? Might she have told him she was going to Saint John and gone to stay with friends somewhere else? If she wasn’t in touch with him, who might she have been in touch with? Could he provide the names and addresses of people she might have gone to stay with? Had he recalled Cathy’s last name?
On January 29, at around 2:00 P.M., three full days after he’d first reported his wife missing, David Tanasichuk came to the police department and sat down with Cummings to give a statement. He had a miserable cold and requested a paper cup as a place to spit phlegm. Before embarking on his questions, to show Maria’s husband that they were taking the situation seriously, Cummings showed David the reports in the provincial papers of Maria’s disappearance, noting that usually the papers don’t react to missing persons so quickly.
“It’s out of character for her, we told them. Run this story,” Cummings said. Then he asked David to start wherever he thought relevant and describe the circumstances leading up to Maria’s disappearance.
David then described in detail how Maria would come with him to his counseling sessions with addiction services and how Maria was reluctant to give him any time to himself, so the counselor had proposed that one of them should get away from the other. He explained that initially he had wanted to stay at his brother Joe’s house, but Maria disliked Joe’s girlfriend and insisted that there would be “too many girls around.” He had also suggested going to his mother’s in Saint John, but again Maria believed that there would be a problem with too many women. Maria countered that she would travel to Saint John instead and stay with her friend Cathy.
David said he had phoned home on the 11th from the pay phone in the lobby of a grocery store to ask if he should get more dog food. She told him that they didn’t need it, they still had half a bag and added that she would be leaving the following day on the bus. Initially, he thought that her threat to leave was just a ploy to make him come home, so he went back to their apartment. When he realized she was serious, they discussed her plan to leave. He told the detective that Maria thought it would be better for him to be at home where people were around who could look after him.
David said that the following morning, January 12, he brought Maria coffee in bed and they discussed her plans—how she was glad to be seeing her old friends and maybe she’d go drinking with them. She already had some stuff packed and she said she was leaving on the bus at 2:00. They promised to always be good to each other. Soon he left to go to his friend’s house to work on his three-wheeler. When he got back around five, Maria was gone. She hadn’t left any note, but she’d said she would be gone about a week and that she’d be in touch with his mother, who lived in Saint John, so he should call his mother if he wanted to contact her.
Cummings asked whether he had heard from her since, or spoken with anyone who had seen her. David said that the closest he’d come to any sighting or word about Maria was that Darlene Gertley claimed to have seen her on the 15th at their house. Since in his version of events Maria had already gone, he thought that this meant Darlene must have been taking too many prescription pills and only imagined it. And no, he told the detective, there were no bank cards or credit cards she might have used that could help track her because he had screwed up their credit.
When Cummings asked for more information about who the person was that Maria had gone to visit, David repeated that her name was Cathy and added that earlier in the month, Maria had had a call from an old friend named Cathy who lived in Saint John. When he’d gone down to Saint John to look for Maria, he’d spoken with a friend who had told him it was probably a woman named Cathy Penny.
Getting down to identifying details, Cummings asked what Maria was wearing on the day she left. David said she was still in her pajamas when he left, so he didn’t know. He did describe her yellow and black winter jacket in detail and agreed that while he knew nothing about women’s pants, he thought she was likely to be wearing jeans and hiking boots. He told Cummings Maria would have had over eight hundred dollars with her, money she had taken (David actually said that Maria had stolen the money) from their safe, funds they had been saving for their headstones.
Then he described Maria’s tattoos. On her right breast there was an open locket that read “In Memory of B.J.” and the date of her son’s death, with his high school graduation picture. She had a pink bunny on her right shoulder, a trillium flower on her left ankle and the name “Billy Joe” on her left forearm.
Asked if he knew for sure that Maria had taken the bus, David said he’d considered calling the bus station, but decided that wouldn’t prove anything because he’d taken the bus many times and knew you could buy a ticket on the bus. She probably didn’t pre-purchase a ticket because she was a homebody who never left the house except for grocery shopping, bill paying or cleaning B.J.’s grave.
David described Maria’s jewelry, saying that she wore a lot of it, often fifteen or twenty rings at a time, which Cummings agreed he remembered seeing in the past, and David told the investigator that he hadn’t seen any of her jewelry around the house so he presumed she had taken all of her jewelry with her, including some rings that had belonged to B.J. that she wore for sentimental reasons. He described some of Maria’s favorite pieces in detail.
Afterward, they discussed the idea of Cummings coming by the apartment and looking at pictures of Maria, to get a better idea of what jewelry she had and often wore. Later they did this, and David used some photographs of Maria wearing her jewelry to help remember what she usually wore, including her 90% Devil pendant.
What she had left behind, though, was her prescription medication, David said, along with the red devil teddy bear that she called “Baby B” for her son B.J. and her “sooky” blanket that she wrapped around herself for comfort when she curled up on the couch. David told Cummings that Maria kissed the bear every night, made him kiss the bear and would not go to sleep unless it was on her pillow.
Because state of mind is such an important factor in evaluating any disappearance, they next discussed David and Maria’s relationship at the time she left. Although the interview up to that point had been generally cordial, things got tense when the detective tried to explore the state of the relationship between husband and wife.
Cummings reminded David that he had told Constable Seeley that things hadn’t been good between them because of Maria’s refusal to give him space. David agreed, saying that things actually hadn’t been good between them for years, but that it had gotten much worse after Maria was diagnosed with Hepatitis C back in late August or September. While the couple hadn’t had physical fights, they had argued often about David’s drug use. David resented her interference, which was persistent and stifling, even though he understood that she did it out of genuine concern for his health. Maria would tell him to go look in the mirror, because he was killing himself. But he couldn’t see it, even after his son came to visit and his altered appearance made the boy cry.
David admitted sometimes injecting hydromorphone, readily acknowledging buying pills on the street as well. He had last used drugs, he told Cummings, about a week prior to the interview.
He had started getting worried after Maria had been gone for a week without him hearing from her, and around the 17th or 18th he began calling people, though he couldn’t provide the names of the people he’d called, referring Cummings to the list he’d given to Constable Seeley and the people he’d contacted in Saint John. David said that he had a list of the people he’d contacted at home, pages and pages of them, which they agreed Cummings would come to the apartment to pick up.
David had brought to the interview two prescription bottles for pills prescribed to Maria. Both were dated January 6. The first was an antidepressant. The bottle had initially contained sixty pills and the label instructed Maria to take one half tablet daily for the first seven days. When Cummings later counted the pills, there were fifty-five and one half. The second prescription was for an anti-anxiety medication. That bottle was empty. The recent prescriptions led to a discussion of Maria’s state of mind, and David said that she was tattered. Since her Hepatitis diagnosis, she’d been convinced that her life was over. Maria, he said, cared more about what happened to him than about anything else in the world.
When Cummings started going back through his notes of their conversation and writing out the details for a formal statement, David objected and became angry, stating that none of the stuff about their relationship or his drug use was going to help them find Maria.
In response to the question, “What do you think happened to Maria?” David admitted to being of two minds. A part of him thought she was staying with a friend, maybe had hooked up with someone, maybe was back on drugs herself. Another part worried that something might have happened to her. What he wanted, he said, was for someone to come and tell him she was all right.
When Cummings attempted to explore the possibility that something had happened to Maria, asking, “What if she’s not all right?” David replied angrily and threatened to walk out. Then he began to cry.
After David’s statement was reviewed, agreed on and signed, Detective Cummings then made the distraught man a promise. He said, “I want to find Maria as much as you do, okay? And I will find Maria, all right? I will.”
