Dead Men Walking (True Crime) by Bill Wallace Read Free Book Online

struck again. Rosemary Keegan drove Carl Denaro home from a party at a bar in Queens. Parked near his house at around 1.30 a.m., they sat in her Volkswagen Beetle and talked. Suddenly, the side window of the car seemed to explode and bullets were whizzing past them. Keegan pressed her foot down on the accelerator and sped from the scene back to the bar. Denaro had been hit in the head but survived following an operation to have a piece of his skull replaced by a metal plate. They saw nothing of their attacker.
    Once again, it was a motiveless incident but police did not connect it with the first shooting, initially, because the two incidents had occurred in different boroughs of the city and were investigated by different police agencies.
    Towards the end of the evening of 26 November, sixteen-year-old Donna DeMasi and eighteen-year-old Joanne Lomino were chatting outside Lomino’s house after walking home from a movie when a man suddenly approached and began to ask in a high-pitched voice, ‘Can you tell me how to get…?’ He left the phrase incomplete, however, instead pulling out a revolver. He shot each of them once and then while they were on the ground fired several more bullets seemingly at random, hitting a nearby building before running away. A neighbour came rushing out and saw a blonde man run past with a gun in his hand.
    The girls survived, but Joanne Lomino was rendered paraplegic by the bullet which had hit her spine.
    On 30 January, engaged couple Christine Freund and John Diel were in Diel’s Pontiac Firebird, which was parked in Queens, when their car was shot at. Christine, hit twice, died two hours later in hospital while her companion was unharmed.
    A task force named Operation Omega was assembled to deal with the thousands of leads that were coming in from the panicked populace of New York. Two detectives, Sergeant Joe Coffey and Captain Joe Borelli investigated the background of the victims, but found nothing to link them apart from the fact that they were mostly attractive young women.
    On 8 March, Virginia Voskocherian was shot in the face and killed instantly by a man who approached her as she walked home from college. As he ran away, the shooter passed a man who was just coming round the corner of the street. ‘Hi, mister!’ he shouted as he ran past. The killer on this occasion was described by some as a teenager of about sixteen to eighteen years of age, although others gave a description that applied more to the man who was finally arrested. The bullet that killed Virginia Voskocherian was fired from the same gun as the one that had killed Donna Lauria the previous July, confirming that it was still the same perpetrator. They issued a description of the suspect – a white male, twenty-five to thirty-six years old, six feet tall, of medium build and with dark hair.
    The next victims were a couple of young lovers shot as they kissed near the Hutchinson River Parkway at three o’clock on the morning of 17 April. A car pulled up alongside theirs and someone opened fire from inside. Eighteen-year-old Valentina Suriani died at the scene and her twenty-year-old boyfriend, Alexander Esau, died later in hospital.
    Now the letters started. At the latest murder scene a letter was found, addressed to Captain Borelli. Complete with misspellings, it