Finding Amy (18 page)

While Danny Young and Scott Harakles were interviewing Dot and Jamie Baillargeon, Tommy Joyce and Matt Stewart, along with five or six other Portland and MSP detectives and evidence techs, were executing a warrant Young had obtained to search Gorman's mother's house. Among the things police were looking for were the spade shovel he had borrowed from his stepfather; a firearm, firearm packaging, or ammunition; Amy's missing clothing or her driver's license; bloodstained clothing or clothing with soil or vegetation that might connect it to the grave site; a computer or other writing that might contain the letter Gorman told Brent Plummer he had left when he went to Alabama; and items that might contain Gorman's DNA.

It was an extremely dynamic scene as personnel arrived and began their search of a dwelling that, while not large, was cluttered and rambling, with small rooms and cubbyholes everywhere. When they first arrived, they found only Gorman's teenage sister, Britney, at home. Soon after that, the phone rang and it was Gorman. After speaking with him briefly, Britney handed Sergeant Stewart the phone, saying, “My brother wants to speak with you.”

Stewart said hello and asked if the caller was Gorman. Gorman angrily stated that it was, and questioned their right to be there when his mother wasn't home. Stewart told him they had a warrant to search and that his sister was okay. Gorman ordered them to leave. Stewart responded that they would leave when they were finished and asked Gorman if he'd like to talk about things. Gorman snarled, “Fuck you, come get me, bitch,” and slammed down the phone.

Soon after that, Tammy Westbrook arrived with her two younger children. From her behavior, Sergeant Joyce and Sergeant Stewart both had a gut-level reaction that she knew something. They also recognized that this might be their only chance to do an untainted interview with her, as she had refused to leave the house to be interviewed and they believed it likely that as the case against her son progressed, she might retain a lawyer and refuse to speak with them.

The two detectives sat down with her in the kitchen. Slowly, they eased into a superficially casual conversation about family, the challenges of raising children, and the holidays while the search proceeded around them, detectives coming and going in the room and her kids clambering in and out of her lap and clamoring for attention. She would alternate speaking to the detectives with little chats to her kids in a singsongy voice. Once Joyce and Stewart started talking to her, they became certain that what she knew was significant and that she was determined to protect her son.

As they attempted, through their questions, to bring her down the road to truth-telling and convince her to unload her heavy secret, her internal battle between telling what she knew about a horrible crime and her desire to shield her son was apparent. She seemed to teeter on the verge of control while her demeanor screamed anguish, conflict, and deception. As they talked, emphasizing her responsibility to do the right thing and not cover up for her son, she would visibly soften as the part of her that wanted to tell the truth would be dominant. Several times, they felt they had reached her and she was right on the verge of blurting out what she knew. Then her desperate desire to protect her son would surface. She would pull back. The sad, confused, and panicked looked in her eyes would harden into a flinty, determined stare, and her face and body would stiffen with resistance.

Eventually she terminated the interview, using her kids as an excuse, but she didn't shut the door on future conversations, telling the detectives maybe they could do this later. Although they abandoned their efforts to elicit the truth from Westbrook, the search of her house continued for most of the day and into the night.

Joyce and Stewart would stop by several more times—spontaneous visits rather than interviews by appointment, because people have a harder time telling the police they won't talk face to face than over the phone—hoping to catch her at a time when they could persuade her to tell the truth.

On Tuesday, December 11, detectives returned to the medical examiner's office to discuss her findings and get confirmation that dental records had positively identified the body as that of Amy St. Laurent. Dr. Greenwald confirmed from further examination of the skull by herself and Dr. Sorg that the cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head and that the death was, unquestionably, a homicide.
⁷
State and Portland police recognized that it was critically important that the cause of death, and the circumstances surrounding it, be kept secret.

Mary Young, during her conversation with Tammy Westbrook in which Westbrook revealed her son's confession, had urged Westbrook to report the conversation to the police. Westbrook had refused, saying, “I can't. He's my baby.” So Mary Young made another phone call to Danny Young. She was Tammy's friend, and she sympathized with Tammy Westbrook's agony and her dilemma, but Mary Young was also the mother of a teenage daughter. What Gorman had done to someone else's daughter wasn't something she could just let ride.

Mary Young made her call at 9:30 in the morning on December 11. Detective Young got a page informing him of Mary Young's second call while he was in the meeting with the medical examiner. It was a big meeting, with Fern LaRochelle and Bill Stokes from the attorney general's office, Matt Stewart, Scott Harakles, Rick LeClair, Warren Ferland, MSP spokesman Steve McCausland, and Lieutenant Brian McDonough from the state police, Deputy Chief Tim Burton, Lieutenant Loughlin, Tommy Joyce, and evidence technician Chris Stearns from the Portland police department, and lab technicians from the state crime lab. When he could, Young left the meeting to return the call.

Young went back into the meeting clutching his notebook and shaking his head. “You won't believe the phone call I just had.” He dropped into his chair, pushed his glasses back up his nose, and galvanized the meeting with the information he'd just gotten from Mary Young.

In this call, she told him several things:

1. Tammy Westbrook was afraid her phones were tapped and preferred to use pay phones.
   
2. Her son had called her on her cell phone while she was on her way to the mall the day after the body was discovered and admitted that he did kill Amy St. Laurent by shooting her in the head.
   
3. He was seeing her face (Tammy's) while he was doing it.
   
4. Tammy had called the grandparents to let them know Russ's name was in the newspaper.
   
5. When Russ was a baby, Tammy was doing drugs and so this is her fault. Her fault that her son turned out the way he is.
   
6. Tammy said Russ had told her she was lucky she wasn't the one he'd killed.
   
7. Tammy said that “he didn't mean it, it was an accident.”
   

Mary Young also described Westbrook's anguish as a mother having such information.

Mary Young's call was like a shot of adrenaline to the tired detectives, putting the excitement and thrill of catching Amy's killer back into the air. It gave them the confirmation they'd been hoping for. It also gave them details they could use in their investigation, details only the killer would know. They had let Gorman run so he would talk, and now, finally, he was talking.

Suddenly, after seven weeks of drudgery, dead ends, and discouragement, they were on a crazy roller-coaster ride where information just came flying at them. Later that day, Mary Young called again to report that Gorman had called his ex-girlfriend Kathleen Ferguson, the mother of his young daughter, who lived across the street from Mary Young. Gorman had told Kathleen the following things: That the police wouldn't find DNA, because Amy wasn't raped. That there would be no gun residue and that his gun wasn't used. That after he killed her, he washed her body. Russ had made the call from a number belonging to friends of his relatives.

While the detectives in Maine were having another eureka day, having finally gotten a solid break in their investigation, down in Troy, Alabama, a stressed-out Gorman was becoming increasingly erratic. He made statements to various people that the reason he had two guns was that he was never going to be taken alive and he was never going to be taken back to Maine and put in jail.

An old friend from Florida who had known Gorman for years, Angela Pannell, was concerned about Gorman's state of mind after talking with his mother. She called him at his grandmother's home in Troy, trying to convince him to go back to Maine and deal with things. According to Pannell, Gorman told her that there was no way he would go back to Maine unless it was in a body bag. He'd kill himself first.

On that same Tuesday, while Danny Young was having his watershed conversation with Mary Young and describing it to his colleagues, Gorman had a dramatic encounter with a man in a Blimpie's parking lot. The man was coming out with a sandwich when he saw Gorman sitting in a car. As he passed the car, Gorman leaned out the window and ordered him not to stare. The man with the sandwich was Andy Bowen, the football conditioning coach at Troy State University. Not the type of man to be intimidated. He challenged Gorman, asking what Gorman was going to do about it.

In response, Gorman got out of the car and pointed a handgun at Bowen. A woman pulled Gorman back into the car, screaming at him not to shoot. After a few words were exchanged, Bowen walked back to his truck. Gorman drove away and Bowen contacted the police, describing Gorman and informing them that the man who had threatened him had driven off in a red Dodge Neon with Maine license plates.

Following the gun incident, Troy police searched for Gorman to arrest him on a criminal threatening charge. Gorman's dangerous behavior ended the Maine detectives' debate about putting the warrant to arrest him for violating his probation back into the system. They asked the Troy police to arrest him and hold him for return to Maine.

There's a bustle over by Danny Young's crowded desk. Voices are elevated and Matt's head is really red, his forehead furrowed in deep concern. He's pacing. I glide over and see Matt's face red in appeal and then he says, hastily, “This is not good, Lieutenant!”

Tommy and I lock eyes and he knows what I'm asking without uttering a word. Cavalierly, he says, “Yeah, hey, Gorman just stuck a gun in a guy's face down in Troy and the cops are looking for him.” He chuckles.

Matt's got steam coming out of his ears and Tommy's acting very relaxed. Partly, Tommy's just jerking Matt's chain, but partly it's because he is cool with this. He's been making hard decisions in hot moments for a long time. Matt is extremely methodical, responsible, and not so flexible. Day to day, these two intense control freaks manage to put their personality differences aside in the interest of solving the case, but at moments like this, their truce can get a little frayed.

Many voices put their two cents in. I know this is serious—Gorman is crashing—but if he hurts someone, the blame will be on us. People will have the luxury of second-guessing our strategy and they'll disparage us with a vengeance. There will be legal and potential career implications. Meanwhile, there is chaos and Tom is thriving in the midst of it while Matt is truly in pain.

Casually, Tom rises from his desk and strolls over to Danny. “Dan, I think it's time we put that warrant back in the system.” Dan, Matt, and the others look relieved. I'm relieved. As I head toward Chitwood's office to update him on the case, I call back, “Tom, keep me posted.”

Following the incident in the Blimpie's parking lot, Troy police got a tip that the red Neon was parked at a Troy address. Surveillance was set up at the residence, but Gorman evaded police all night and into the next day. On the twelfth, the vehicle left the staked-out residence and went to a second residence a mile away. When the vehicle left the second residence, police stopped it, but Gorman was not in the car. The occupants told police that Gorman was in the attic of the residence they had just left, and that he was armed.

As investigators in Portland followed the incident from nearly fourteen hundred miles away via frequent updates from Sergeant Calista Everage—a Troy, Alabama, detective—Troy police arrived at the residence to arrest Gorman on a fugitive warrant. Gorman held guns to his head and threatened to shoot himself.

As Gorman held the guns to his head, the Portland detectives debated whether Gorman would pull the trigger. With typical sick cop humor, they started a betting pool.

“Tom, stop for a minute. First, where the hell did you get a tie like that? They don't even sell that shit in Kmart, and the sixties are over. Is that your dad's stuff?” He's wearing a blue and white checked shirt and a brown striped tie. Tom's notorious for dressing like Sipowicz on
NYPD Blue.

He's moving jerkily and I know he has good info for me, so I play to hold it all off, knowing I'm about to get a present. It's chaos out in the bay behind him.

“Ooookay, Tom, what is it?”

“Gorman's in a standoff in Troy and has two guns to his head,” he says, smiling.

Bam! My fist goes onto the desk. “I hope that prick kills himself!”

“Hey, we're making bets in the bay if he's going to do it.”

“Tom, send the Grim Reaper south. I don't want Diane, Dennis, and the family going through the pain and foolishness of a trial.”

Tommy grins, liking the idea. “You think?”

As part of our constant black humor, the Grim Reaper had developed anthropomorphic attributes here in the office. It became the device to illustrate how we felt about certain crime scenes, to avoid lurid details. Sometimes we appealed to the Reaper to hold off his work while we caught up on other cases and crime scenes.

This time, I wanted to employ him. Send him down to see Gorman if it meant we could avoid a trial. A trial would be such a brutal extension of the family's pain and suffering. The system is slow, rigid, and confusing and a theatrical defense attorney can easily manipulate a jury into “reasonable doubt.” I dislike trials, as they are not always about truth and the jury never gets to see the entire picture.