Murder in the Mansion
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As a young boy, I spent many happy hours playing at my friend Tommy’s house. He had three sisters who were all much older than we were—in fact they seemed like old ladies to me, and they would always tease us as soon as they caught us alone with them.
They told us terrible stories about men-eating snakes that lived under the bridge on Route 7 and that we should never cross it after dark or go anywhere near any water that was not marked by a white picket fence. When they weren’t telling us horror stories, they loved to make us chase each other around their yard until our legs ached from running.
We also liked to play games of tag when the moonlight shined brightly through the trees. One evening when we came home late from the woods, the lights in the kitchen were turned off and the door locked behind us. The only light inside the house was shining from beneath the bedroom door where my friend Tommy slept with his mother and sisters.
My mom told me to run upstairs and get some towels because there had been a terrible accident downstairs; so I ran up the stairs and got three thick bath towels out of Tommy’s bathroom closet.
We followed blood spatter down the hallway into the living room and then back outside. The front door opened silently and closed quickly. A single beam of moonlight cut across the lawn where a body lay crumpled over a pile of bloody towels. Our eyes could barely see the shape of our dead friend lying beside us.
The smell of death filled our nostrils as we stood over the body. It felt like the entire world fell silent as we looked down at him. There were several deep puncture wounds on his chest and one more on his left shoulder. Blood was everywhere; it dripped from the ceiling, pooled on the carpet, and splattered across the walls.
The murderer was nowhere to be seen but a trail of blood led away from the house, across the porch, and into the night. Tommy and I walked slowly in our bare feet across the damp grass toward the woods. When we reached the path we stopped for a moment and watched our dead friend walk down the path and disappear into the shadows.
When we returned to the scene of the crime, our friends who had been watching us from Tommy’s bedroom window were already packing up their things and leaving. The police arrived an hour later and took pictures, fingerprinted us, and put us all in jail. They didn’t let my mom come inside the house to say goodbye to her son or to find out what happened.
She waited anxiously at the top of the driveway until a detective came out and gave her his condolences. After he finished talking she asked if she might come inside and look around before the investigators came out. The detective nodded and said, “Yes ma’am.”
After my mom saw that the killer wasn’t going to escape justice, she drove herself and my best friend to my aunt’s house in New Hampshire and left me with Tommy’s family for the duration of the investigation. We stayed together for six weeks until the trial was over. Tommy’s father was tried first.
He was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. His appeal was denied, so the state of Connecticut executed him two years later.
A year after that, the police arrested and convicted Tommy’s mother for murdering Tommy. Her sentence was life without parole but she died in prison just a few months later.
The state claimed that she killed herself by stabbing herself repeatedly with a sharpened toothbrush but most people think that someone spiked her food or drink with arsenic while she was visiting relatives during Christmas vacation. The only good news was that the killer was finally exposed and brought to justice.
I can still remember how awful it felt to be standing over the dead body of a person we knew so well. It was such a sad experience because he had been part of our everyday lives since childhood. We had gone everywhere together, grown up with each other, and played every game imaginable with each other.
The next time you are at a party and a friend tells you an exciting story, try to remember how you felt sitting on your bed listening to them. Now imagine the same situation but instead of excitement and anticipation, there is a heaviness in the air. Suddenly the friend who had been telling the story looks down and starts crying.
Instead of laughing at another funny joke, everyone stops and stares at the floor.
That’s how it felt when we discovered Tommy’s corpse that night. As we knelt down to say farewell, he suddenly started to shake, making the towel on which he lay slip and slide across the slippery tile floor. Tommy began to moan and cry with his face pressed into the cold cement floor; this was followed by a loud gurgling sound, which sounded like bubbles being blown out of a bottle.
This must have startled us because my mind flashed back to a movie I’d seen about vampires. That’s when we both realized what was happening and scrambled over him in our panic. We pulled ourselves together and grabbed the phone to call 911. When we hung up and ran downstairs, we could hear Tommy’s cries getting louder and then softer.
This scared us even more because it made it seem like he was coming to life again. We hurried into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and turned on the light.
Tommy stared back at us from its mirrored interior, making no effort to get up and continue his killing spree. He just looked at us, smiling as if he had just heard one of the funniest jokes ever told. Then Tommy’s mouth dropped open and something dark flew past our faces and hit the floor just inches in front of our feet.
Tommy’s eyes went wide and a look of terror crossed his face before he slumped forward onto his belly. He rolled onto his side and crawled along the floor toward us, trying to make his way through the blood that was dripping down the wall.
We screamed and ran away, leaving Tommy lying there helplessly, dying alone in his own pool of blood.
***
The following week, Tommy’s family buried him with full military honors in a cemetery near our homes. His parents and siblings stood in the graveside service and promised that they would keep his spirit alive forever. In the days leading up to the funeral, his sister told anyone who cared to listen that Tommy’s murderer would pay for what she called her brother’s “senseless death.”
Two months later, we returned to my aunt’s house. There was an envelope taped to our front door, addressed to us by name. My mom read it out loud. It was a letter from the police thanking us for bringing Tommy’s murderer to justice. They also thanked us for keeping the secret.
In the end, my best friend and I got to go home to our families. Tommy’s family never visited him in jail or the cemetery; after all, they couldn’t do anything except pray that God would forgive his killer and spare them the embarrassment of having to see her on television.
My best friend and I were inseparable for two years after that horrible night. We did everything together: school, movies, sports events, birthday parties… We even dated each other’s friends, which caused some problems at first but eventually, we worked things out. Unfortunately, it didn’t last very long. We ended up drifting apart because he was dating a girl we met when we visited Tommy in prison.
It took a decade for me to recover completely from the trauma and pain. It was almost ten years before I had nightmares about Tommy anymore. And it took another five years before the memories stopped flooding into my dreams at night. But even now, when I hear certain songs or catch sight of a certain object, it all comes flooding back.
I can close my eyes and remember the smell of that basement and the sound of Tommy screaming as we left him. I can hear the crunching of his bones beneath our feet as we fled down the stairs. Most of all, I will never forget the sickening look on his face when he realized that he would never see us again.
⁂
“You’re not going to believe this,” said the man sitting next to me in the cab of the tractor-trailer truck as we drove north on Interstate 95. The air conditioner inside was barely working so we both had drawn the curtain to our window in hopes that it might help us stay cool enough during our trip up to Boston.
But it was still sweltering hot, causing the cab of the truck to be stifling. I tried to sit with my back against the wall of the trailer to keep as far away from the driver as possible, but the heat was too intense.
I glanced across at my neighbor in the rearview mirror, trying to determine if he was kidding.
“Are you serious?” I asked, unable to hide my shock.
He nodded his head and smiled broadly at me. “Dead serious. We’ve been driving for three days straight, and we are only halfway there. It’s amazing. The guy is crazy.”
We were on our way to pick up cargo from a company called C&S Logistics in New York and deliver it to a facility at Logan Airport near Boston. Our delivery was scheduled for early the following morning, giving us two whole days to drive from Virginia to Massachusetts without stopping.
This wasn’t unusual—we made trips like these every few weeks—but what was strange was the size of our load. It weighed in at over twenty tons, more than double the weight we normally carried. That was because we were picking up a shipment of live animals that came to us through a private company in Texas.
Apparently, they had received an order from a large zoo in Massachusetts for exotic birds.
And apparently, the zoo had been expecting something much larger.
As my partner and I were hauling in our precious cargo, the driver received a message on his CB radio telling him that we were too small a company to handle such a large shipment. We could have turned around and gone back to Virginia, but we’d decided to press on with the delivery and make it work. He said that if they really wanted the birds to arrive by tomorrow morning, they should have used one of the bigger trucks.
“That’s just wrong,” said the man behind me as he shook his head in disbelief. “You guys shouldn’t have been forced to haul that kind of cargo.”
“No kidding,” I muttered back at him. “They should have known better.”
“What do you mean they should have known better?” asked my new companion.
I explained the situation to him as he sat next to me, staring at me with wide-eyed astonishment. For a while, neither of us spoke. We listened to the radio instead, trying to find out what had happened. We learned that a major airline had lost a crate containing two endangered African elephants.
They’d been shipped on board as cargo, and they hadn’t shown up in Boston until late yesterday afternoon. By that point, everyone else in line knew about it, and they were scrambling to find alternate transportation. Now the airport was swamped with planes trying to land and take off with their loads in time.
But since our cargo was coming in on a direct flight, we were still scheduled for landing in Boston at eleven o’clock tonight. If everything went well, we would make it with plenty of time to spare. My partner and I had already planned to get a hotel room somewhere near the airport so we wouldn’t waste any hours sleeping in the cab of the truck when we arrived.
The radio crackled again, letting us know that another plane carrying a large group of endangered animals had crashed, killing eight people. The crash site was located some distance south of our own, so we didn’t think that our route would be affected too badly.
After we dropped our cargo at the zoo, we would be returning to Virginia where we hoped to pick up another load of livestock from a farm in North Carolina that was due to be delivered at a feed mill in Pennsylvania. It took less than an hour to reach our first stop in New Jersey, and it was almost noon by the time we parked outside a warehouse full of shipping containers.
We got out of the cab, stretched our legs, and walked to the loading dock to meet our contact. We waited for fifteen minutes before he arrived, looking harried.
He introduced himself as Paul, and he was supposed to be supervising the transfer of our cargo into one of the shipping containers. Instead, he had apparently taken a nap after receiving news of the disaster at the airport.
The man’s exhaustion was obvious and disheartening, especially considering the fact that our entire trip was predicated upon being able to rely on Paul for assistance. He looked as if he hadn’t slept for days, his hair is greasy and unwashed, his clothes dirty and wrinkled. He apologized profusely for being a no-show.
Our new partner seemed unimpressed by this explanation but said nothing as we climbed back in the cab and drove to the nearby port to drop our empty trailer off so it could be transferred to another truck for transport. The port area was busy, with a constant flow of incoming cargo arriving and outgoing shipments leaving.
Trucks from all over the country were lining up along the roadways to wait their turn. After we had unloaded our cargo, my partner took us directly north towards Philadelphia on Route 95. He had planned to go through Delaware to save fuel but quickly changed his mind when a large crowd of protesters began gathering on the road ahead of us.
They marched down the middle of the highway with signs reading ‘Save the Earth,’ ‘Protect Wildlife,’ and ‘Animals Deserve Better.’ Some held placards depicting images of lions and tigers and leopards; others had pictures of apes and monkeys and chimpanzees; and there were even a few pictures of dolphins and whales. All of them looked as though they’d been drawn by children.
When my partner saw what was happening, he put the truck in reverse, turning onto the grassy median separating the northbound and southbound lanes. As the demonstrators cheered, our truck inched its way back across the center line.
When we reached the side road, we turned right and accelerated as fast as the truck’s engine would allow. Once we crossed the state border, we pulled off to the side of the interstate, stopped, and waited for several minutes until most of the protesters had moved away from our path.
“Let’s take a break here,” my partner announced as soon as we were out of sight. He turned on the air conditioner and lit a cigarette.
We took turns resting, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, or taking naps. Our plan called for us to get to our destination in Pennsylvania within six hours, so we kept the speed limit under seventy miles per hour and stayed alert. We stopped three times to stretch our legs and eat whatever food we could carry with us. My partner had brought an extra cooler packed with sandwiches and drinks.
A little before five o’clock, we reached our final destination: the feed mill outside of Wilkes-Barre. My partner parked the truck behind a large metal structure that resembled a huge silo. The feed company had sent someone out with a forklift to help us unload our cargo. Within minutes, we finished loading the containers into the storage yard.
Wilkes-Barre seemed like a normal midwestern city at first glance. A strip of stores lined a four-lane road adjacent to the railroad tracks that ran along the northern edge of town. There were gas stations and convenience stores, banks and restaurants, small hotels, and car lots where cars and trucks were displayed for sale.
But as I drove along, past the rows of buildings and parking lots, I noticed something strange. Many of the businesses in Wilkes-Barre were closed. The windows were shuttered, and the doors were locked. Some of the storefronts had even been boarded up. I couldn’t understand what was going on.
The End