What The Cat Saw - Part 2
The conclusion to a heinous crime and ghostly tale.
The following is second half of the story “What The Cat Saw.” Surnames have been left out for that sake of the survivors. There’s a slight bit of conjecture in regards to the murder, but for the most part, this story is true. If you’re easily disturbed by true crime stories, gruesome human dysfunction, or the possibility of ghosts, I would suggest you skip this half of the story. However, in doing so you’ll miss the opportunity to learn an important life lesson on how to avoid renting a haunted apartment.
Elaine W., a 48-year-old licensed podiatrist, did not have a reputation for being a "nice" person.
Neighbors described her as a gruff personality. This trait, when combined with her penchant for excessive drinking, made her a mean drunk. She tried to stay in control of this by regularly attending AA meetings, except her efforts to curb one abhorrent behavior did nothing to cure the fact that she was also a scheming con-artist.
Although she worked in the lucrative field of podiatry, she lacked the motivation to keep her office in Newark open for more than one day a week. Even though she enjoyed the profit made from feet, she found it more profitable to use her practice as a front for Medicare scams.
The access to patients' records made it simple for her to steal identities and run the fraud. Furthermore, thanks to the check forging machine at her apartment, she could also occasionally bolster her income by passing phony checks.
Given Elaine’s larcenous nature, it was the ultimate in irony that her brother, Edward W., was the antithesis to her criminality. He chose a career of law enforcement and rose through the ranks to being a lieutenant in the Jersey City police force.
However, don’t be mislead by his occupation and think this lends him any higher moral standard. Edward was as imperfect as his sister. He and his wife, Mary Ann, were both heavily mired in the snares of alcoholism. The tension in their relationship, and Mary Ann's struggle with booze, was serious enough for child services to remove their children.
Far too many times, after Mary Ann got inebriated she would climb behind the wheel of a car and drive with disastrous results. In a one of her many car wrecks, she ended up losing one of her eyes.
Edward retired from the force in 1997. One can assume that the free time retirement affords, combined with a liquor soaked relationship, proved too much for his health since Edward passed away in March 1998.
He left Mary Ann in financial distress. Because of the nature of Edward’s death, his insurance company was hesitant to pay his $40,000 death benefit. Mary Ann hired a lawyer to fight for the money.
As for Elaine, she saw her brother’s death, and especially his insurance money, as a golden opportunity in which she could manipulate, and take advantage of, Mary Ann’s grief.
Elaine started reaching out to the Mary Ann’s lawyer to "intervene" on behalf of her sister-in-law.
At some point, Elaine began to falsely claim death benefits that weren’t rightfully hers. Mary Ann, whom never liked, nor trusted, her sister-in-law, discovered this deceit in October 1998. Mary Ann decided she needed to confronted Elaine about this fraud.
Mary Ann showed up unannounced at Elaine’s building on Bright Street in Jersey City and, after she rang the buzzer, she entered the front door.
Unfortunately for Mary Ann, Elaine’s live-in boyfriend, Stanley E., was out of state for a few days. This meant he wasn’t there to de-escalate the tensions between the two women. Which might be why, from that day forward, Mary Ann W. was never heard from again.
A few days later, neighbors noticed Elaine carrying jugs of cleanser, bleach and towels into her apartment.
It was also around this time that Elaine suddenly stopped showing up to her podiatry office. The manager of the office said Elaine made no attempt to collect her mail, which included the various Medicare checks she illegally collected. The office manager tried calling her to collect the several months’ rent due on the office space, but Elaine never returned the calls.
Elaine also no longer showed up to her AA meetings.
Several neighbors noted that whenever they now saw her she was often intoxicated. On the return from his trip, her boyfriend Stanley also noted the relapse. He tried to get her to go back to the AA meetings but his words fell on deaf, drunk, ears.
Within the month, a strange putrid stench began to fill the brownstone apartment building on Bright Street. The sickening smell worsened and continued for months.
Stanley complained about the stink. Elaine tried to mask the smell. She once sprayed so much air freshener in the hallways that it set off smoke alarms.
Months passed, the smell worsened and residents of the building threatened to withhold rent if the landlord didn't do something about the unbearable odor. The Health Department was called to investigate the smell. They insisted that the landlord clean out the building’s sewer pipes. That was done, yet it failed to mitigate the problem as building residents said the fetidness persisted.
Without her podiatry office income, Elaine resorted to using her older scams of passing bad checks with various stolen identity cards. She also started collecting Edward’s pension checks that were meant for Mary Ann. Elaine assumed her identity by using Mary Ann’s driver’s license to cash the checks.
Eventually, the bank caught on to the fraud and reported it to police. Elaine was arrested for the crime. When she was brought before the judge she pleaded that her alcoholism was to blame for her misdeeds.
The judge ordered her to attend a drug and alcohol treatment center as part of her bail agreement while awaiting her sentencing. The judge went easy on her after seeing that she had an otherwise clean record, which was no doubt thanks to the influence of her police officer brother over any previous arrest. Elaine was committed to a drug and alcohol treatment center in Laural Run Boro, Pa.
Weirdly, throughout all of her arrest and court appearance, not one person inquired about the main victim of this fraud.
No one bothered to try and locate Mary Ann.
While this went on, back in Jersey City at Bright St. the stench became unbearable as the warm spring month approached. Residents spent as little time as possible in the building. The foulness was gut-wrenching and vomit inducing.
With Elaine gone, and possibly facing a few years in jail, Stanley E. realized he had to find another roommate to help pay for the rent. When he finally found a new roommate, he had to make room for the move in, so he was forced to remove Elaine’s belongings. However before doing so, he contacted Elaine out of courtesy to her and let her know he had no choice but to get rid of her belongings—especially all the stuff she had in the basement.
He went to the basement storage area to clean out her belongings. It was there that he saw the large picnic cooler. It was a large 120 Quart cooler that he and Elaine would bring to Liberty State Park picnics.
It was really useful for large gatherings, except now it was covered in what looked like soap and detergent flakes. The sprinkling was so heavy that the wall next to the cooler was decayed and damaged by the chemicals.
As Stanley got closer to the cooler, its odor became unbearable. He realized this was the source of the building’s awful stench. He grabbed one the handles of the cooler and dragged it across the storage room floor and to the exit door of the basement storage. Once outside, he then dragged it to the vacant lot next to the building and left it there as he readied the apartment for his new roommate.
When the roommate arrived, Stanley asked if he could help him move the cooler to an weed-ridden abandoned lot across the street. He thought the father away that stink was, the better.
He and the roommate, a former EMT, moved the cooler across the street. The new roommate commented on the smell coming from it. To the EMT, it was the familiar smell of death. When they set the cooler down, the EMT opened the cooler’s lid.
The pungency of rotten flesh wafted out from the cooler. Inside of it was a garment bag covered in detergent and cleaning liquids. The bag held something bulky. Both of the men were afraid to look further, but the EMT had to know and unzipped the bag. Immediately they both saw the handcuffed arm and hand of a corpse.
At the same time that this was happening, Elaine knew that soon police would seek her out for more than just passing bad checks. She fled from the Pennsylvania rehab center.
In Jersey City, Police were called to investigate the cooler. The coroner inspected the body and its dental recorders. The coroner saw the corpse was missing an eye. This corpse matched the description of one of one of the stolen identity cards that were in Elaine’s possession when she was arrested.
Mary Ann W. Had been found.
Elaine didn’t get far in her escape. She was caught by Pennsylvania state police and jailed in the Luzerne County Correctional Facility where she sat waiting to be extradited back to New Jersey, where New Jersey investigators were growing their case against her.
Elaine’s various crimes all began to coalesce. Police became aware of the wider crimes of her medicare fraud, her check fraud, her multiple identity thefts, and of course, her implication in the murder of her sister-in-law, Mary Ann W.
Elaine sat in her cell and considered her fate. She asked a guard if she could have a pen and some paper.
Sometime later when the guard returned to check on Elaine, he found her hanging from a bed sheet she had strung up to the vent cover in the upper corner of the cell.
On the cot in her cell lay a 12 page suicide note.
Elaine’s note was an apology for everything she had done wrong in her life. However, in the face of the acknowledgement of her financial crimes, Elaine denied killing her sister-in-law, yet knew no one would believe her. She said this left her with no other option but suicide.
With Elaine’s death, the police closed the murder case despite the many inconsistencies raised in her note.
It’s unknown what really transpired when Mary Ann showed up at Elaine’s apartment since only what exists is from Elaine's written version of that day’s events.
Elaine wrote that Mary Ann showed up to her door in out-of-control anger. Elaine tried to reason with her, but Mary Ann was intractable.
As Mary Ann screamed at her, Elaine tried to tell her she was late for an AA meeting, and asked if she could meet Mary Ann later on to talk things over. Mary Ann only persisted in her anger and yelling.
Elaine described that she managed to subdue Mary Ann, grabbed a pair of handcuffs, which she supposedly inherited in her brother’s death, and cuffed Mary Ann to a chair. To keep her quiet and her neighbors unaware, Elaine shoved a gag into Mary Ann’s mouth. Elaine insisted that while she was attending her AA meeting, she left Mary Ann handcuffed to a chair on the first floor of the apartment.
When she returned home after her meeting, she claimed to have found Mary Ann dead at the bottom of her stairs in the lower level of her apartment.
However, if one takes time to reevaluate Elaine’s story, as well as certain aspect of the apartment’s layout, it’s obvious that she’s lying, or at least trying to re-imagine events in an attempt at assuage a guilty conscience.
First of all, let’s take a look at the apartment. It was a duplex railroad style layout. On the first floor there was a bedroom in the front then a hallway connecting to a closet, a staircase, the bathroom and finally a back bedroom. Midway in the hallway a metal banister protected the open space of the spiral stair case which led downward to a basement level kitchen, living room, and second small toilet. At this basement level there was a patio door which opened to a patio and backyard of the apartment building. Also on this patio level, there was a door to the basement storage area.
According to Elaine’s note, we are led to believe that Mary Ann, who was only handcuffed with a single pair of handcuffs to a chair, somehow decided to hop around from one of the bedrooms and down the hallway, where she clumsily managed to toppled down the spiral stair case?
Having lived in this apartment, and based on what was reported from the coroner, I highly doubt that was the case. The autopsy reported that Mary Ann was strangled and bludgeoned to death.
A more plausible explanation might be that Mary Ann charged through the apartment door, and in her rage, immediately attacked Elaine. Elaine at some defensive point in the tussle, tried strangling Mary Ann and also used something to bludgeon her into unconsciousness. Not having the strength to prop 100Lb. Mary Ann up on a chair, Elaine left Mary Ann on the floor where she fell. Elaine then gagged and handcuffed her, thinking that Mary Ann would have time to cool down while Elaine attended her AA meeting.
Mary Ann certainly did cool down in the interim…to just about room temperature, which is what fresh corpses tend to do.
Or perhaps the fight took place in the hallway, and during the fight and Elaine’s attempt at strangulation, Mary Ann pushed away from her, only to fall backwards down the staircase where she landed with a fatal thud.
Seeing what happened Elaine then constructed her flimsy, panicked alibi and posthumously placed the handcuffs on Mary Ann’s wrists before leaving for her AA meeting.
After returning home, Elaine snuck over to the first floor door that led down to the basement storage. She quietly walked down the stairs and over to her designated storage space. From there, she retrieved a garment bag and the large picnic cooler she had used for summer gatherings at the nearby Liberty State Park.
Instead of noisily hauling these things back up the stairs, and possibly being seen by neighbors, she instead unlocked the storage room basement door that led out to the patio, where she was able to drag the cooler a few feet over to the patio door of her apartment. Once back inside the apartment, she stuffed the body into the garment bag. With some difficulty, due to the bulkiness of the bag, Elaine folded Mary Ann’s bagged corpse into the cooler.
Elaine was probably glad that rigor mortis hadn’t yet set into her “oh-so-ex-sister-in-law.” After a few proper shoves and sickening crunches, the flexible stiff fit down tight enough to properly close the lid of the cooler.
Elaine perhaps thought that by putting the cooler back into its proper spot in the basement storage, that none would know Mary Ann had ever visited.
I guess she didn’t count on the cadaver stinking up the place.
Whether by accident or design, that day's events had led to the same chilling conclusion: Elaine and Mary Ann shared ill-fated destinies brought on by rage, addiction, and deceit.
Afterword
Have you ever been curious about the people who lived in a home or apartment before you took up residence, or what might have happened within those very walls?
It’s said by some, that homes and apartments can retain the emotional energies, good or bad, that are given off by the humans who occupy the spaces.
I never gave either of these items too much thought before my girlfriend (now wife) and I moved into that Bright Street apartment; a building whose very dark history we were so oblivious to before signing the lease.
But after you move into such a place, where you notice your cat is suddenly holding long conversations with invisible pals and you begin to imagine specters watching your sleep, existential and supernatural topics tend to bubble up into your mind during all future living space inspections.
Since then, I’ve considered it good due diligence to ask bizarre questions to ALL real estate agents.
“My future home isn’t located near any toxic superfund sites, right?”
“…Or isn’t sitting on any old Indian burial grounds?”
“…or any haunted pet cemeteries?”
“…or was the site of horrific murders…suicides…or weird cult ceremonies?”
“What about badly prepared Thanksgiving meals that caused family rifts? None of that, right?”
It pays to be thorough.
Unfortunately, I spend so much time asking about nonsense that I usually forget to ask about things like mold, termites, or water pipe leaks.
I hope this you found this story interesting and a useful cautionary tale.
May all your living spaces be ghost and horror free.
I’ll be back to the cartoon comic hilarity in my next post.
Cheers,
Ed
YAK! Truly a true crime haunted house story. Perhaps a visit from Amy Bruni and Adam Berry would help put Mary Ann to rest. Or maybe not. Looks like her story got out and that should be that. Hope all your future domiciles are psychically clean.