Content warning: the events described in this Legacy article contain graphic violence/death as well as sexual violence. … The beautiful young violinist had been sexually assaulted and then hurled to her death. A glamorous Russian defector was only one of thousands of suspects. This is how two cops solved the crime.
Murder at the Met
Helen Hagnes Mintiks’s naked and bound body was not found for 11 hours after she left the orchestra pit at the Metropolitan Opera. The Berlin Ballet was performing that night — Wednesday, July 23, 1980 — with guest stars Valery Panov, his wife, Galina Panova, and Rudolf Nureyev — all Russian defectors who have become celebrities. The second ballet on the evening’s bill, the pas de deux from Don Quixote, danced by Panov and Panova, ended at 9:29. Helen put her violin under her chair. The orchestra was not needed for the next act, Five Tangoes, which was to be performed to taped music.
Helen had planned to duck out during her break to get a quick drink with another violinist, Elena Barere; but in the women’s locker room she told Elena she wasn’t feeling well. And she had to talk to Panov. She went up one flight to stage level, looking for Panov’s dressing room.
About a quarter of an hour after she left the pit — at 9:45 — Helen was seen walking away from the area where the stars’ dressing rooms were, down a corridor that passed behind the stage. She was accompanied by a man who seemed to be discussing something with her. They turned a corner and saw a ballerina, dressed in practice leotards, waiting for an elevator.
Helen stopped next to the ballerina and chattered away. She didn’t know her way around that part of the building, she said. Was the ballerina performing that night? Was Panov busy? Would it be a good time to talk to him?
The man stood slightly behind Helen, saying nothing, but somehow part of the conversation. The elevator came. The three of them entered it. The ballerina pushed the button for C-level, the third basement.
“Now, which floor do I have to go to?” Helen said.
The man said either “second” or “third floor.’’ He may even have pressed the button. Helen looked at him.
When the elevator door closed, Helen began chattering to the ballerina again. She didn’t want to bother Panov. She knew how busy he must be. Did he speak English?
The elevator stopped at C-level. The ballerina got off and went to a rehearsal hall. Helen moved to the back of the elevator. The door closed. She was alone with the man.
The elevator rose. The man said something rude to Helen. She slapped him.
In the elevator, the man must have done something that scared Helen enough to make her do what he said. On the second floor, he took her off the elevator and led her from one side of the building to the other, down a dark corridor. The right-hand wall was lined with racks of costumes, which were shrouded with pale dustcovers. The floor was silent except for the distant hum of the huge air-conditioner fans on the roof. At the end of the corridor, they turned right, passed another elevator, and went through a door into a stairwell.
The stairs were wide, twice the width of stairs in a house. The man walked Helen down five flights — from the second floor to the first floor to A-level, where the stairs narrowed and the walls seemed as though they were closing in, down to B-level and finally C-level. They stopped on the small landing at the bottom, a space about eight feet by five feet, the size of a cell. It was dark, dirty. “Fat Louie Sucks” was scrawled on one wall. Against another wall leaned a folding chair. There was a shut door and around its knob, some rope.
Helen screamed. She tried to slug the man. He grabbed her hands, and when he couldn’t silence her, he pulled out a hammer from his belt. He threatened to hit her. She stopped screaming. He told her to strip. She did. She was tan except where she’d been covered by a two-piece bathing suit. Her legs were shaved up to her thighs. She was in the last days of her period. Terrified, she took out her tampon.
‘He slit her skirt and slip. As he was cutting off her jersey, she must have felt the knife at her neck. When he cut off her bra, she must have felt it between her breasts.’
The man told her to lie down. She did. The floor was cold and gritty. Looking up, Helen must have seen a pipe passing up through the ceiling to the level above, the ceiling itself — with smudges on it like scuff marks from shoes — a dizzying perspective. The man, probably still dressed, his fly unzipped or at most his pants pulled down to his knees, lay on top of her. He tried to enter her, but couldn’t. So he rubbed against her, between her legs, until he came. He stood, told her to dress. She gathered up the clothes strewn around the floor — blue panties, pink bra, black slip, black jersey, and black skirt — and put them on.
After a rape or attempted rape, the rapist usually runs. But what if he doesn’t run? Panic. When you’re forced to admit the incredible is happening, panic can make you laugh as easily as cry — or it can shock you silent. The mind skitters around, looking for an out, a loophole. This can’t be happening. Not to me. You try to make bargains: rudeness but not pain, pain but not rape, rape or attempted rape but that’s all. It wasn’t even a rape. He didn’t enter. I won’t complain. I’ll be grateful if this is all it is.
The man told Helen to walk upstairs. She did. He followed. They retraced their steps: C-level to B-level to A-level to the first floor. Through the door and down a hall was the stage. Beyond the stage was the audience, hundreds of people who could help her if only she could reach them.
Second floor. Third floor. The stairs were endless, like stairs in a dream.
On the third-floor landing, on the other side of a door, a radio was broadcasting a baseball game. How wonderful the ordinary drone of the announcer must have sounded — life going on as usual, the dull routine of a typical summer evening — and how terrible it must have been to be shut off from it. Helen ran to the door and pulled. It was locked. She must have kept pulling and pulling, hoping that it would open. Pleading, praying that it would open.
The man grabbed her. They struggled. A flower and some bobby pins fell from her hair, a pen spilled from her pocket-book. The man shoved Helen and said, “Keep walking upstairs.”. With every flight, the roar of the air-conditioner fans grew louder. On the sixth floor, the man made Helen go through a door, past an air shaft that plunged down floor after floor, where the sound of the fans was like an approaching subway train, then through another door and onto the fan roof, where the noise was deafening.
The roof smelled wet, moldy. The surface was gravelly. They walked down a short hall, past a crate stuffed with rags, past a metal ladder that was set into the wall and seemed to go nowhere — one more escape cut off — around a corner onto the main part of the fan roof, which looked like a penitentiary yard, an enclosure formed on one side by the wall of the building and on the other three sides by a two-story rampart with a metal walk running across the top. Along the base of each rampart is a rectangular pit; in each pit, set below the level of the roof, are the air-conditioner fans: two small ones on each side and four larger ones along the back. The fans look like great concrete cakes. Inside are propellers with blades the size of a man.
The man tied her hands behind her back and bound her feet together. He told her he was going to leave her on the roof. He promised to call someone and tell where she was.
He left the main part of the fan roof, went down the short hall toward the door, and stopped.
“What if she gets free?” he wondered — just as she did get free. He heard some rattling, rushed back onto the fan roof, and saw Helen run to a pipe that divided the roof, sit on it, swing her legs around and over it, and head toward another door — escape.
The man chased her, vaulted the pipe, caught her, and carried her back to the wall where she had been sitting. He tied her up again, using some rags he’d found in the crate, and took off her shoes so she’d have trouble running: the gravelly surface would hurt her feet. He carried her to the biggest fan pit, and lifted her over the edge, then down into the recessed area, where he leaned her against one of the fans. The noise — and worse, the vibration — must have been terrifying, the massive blades whipping around right next to her.
Helen was still talking to him — shouting; it must have been like screaming into the open mouth of hell — trying to be nice, to soothe, pacify. She rattled on as though her voice were the thread connecting her to life. The more she talked, the more she would become for him a particular person, someone who liked to fish and hike and ski and play basketball and cook, who grew up speaking Swedish at home, learned English at school, picked up French, German, Italian, and Spanish, had a sister named Delcie — anything that would make her more than a body, more than an aid to masturbation, to be used and discarded, more than a scapegoat on which he could revenge every slap he’d ever received from a haughty woman, every rejection, every petty humiliation he’d suffered — if he were, as he seemed to be, a member of the Met backstage crew — at the hands of musicians and dancers who, since he stood outside the magic circle of art, had contempt for him or, worse, ignored him, annihilated him with their snubs.
He gagged her.
He may have also blindfolded her.
He was afraid she would run away again. Figuring that if she were naked, she would be too embarrassed to go for help, he cut off her clothes.
He slit her skirt and slip up the side. As he was cutting off her jersey, she must have felt the knife at her neck. When he cut off her bra, she must have felt it between her breasts. When he cut off her panties, she must have felt it on her thighs, on her hips.
Around the sides of each pit is a space about 2 feet wide that opens onto a shaft 29 feet deep — a three-story drop. He threw the clothes and pocketbook down the shaft.
With Helen beside him, bound, gagged, blindfolded, he sat and wondered what he should do. Minutes passed. He climbed out of the fan pit, started to walk away, and over the roar of the fans heard her bouncing up and down. To make such a noise she must have been slamming herself around in an effort to get free. Why wouldn’t she stay still? Why wouldn’t she let him leave? He may have felt that she was forcing him to do what he did not want to do, making him be bad, like a child who feels that the world is conspiring to wrong him.
He climbed back into the fan pit and kicked Helen down the shaft.
At 3 AM. on Thursday, July 24, 1980, Detective Jerry Giorgio got a phone call from the 20th Precinct. There was a missing person at the Met. A violinist. The 20th was not asking for help. This was just a “scratch”— a notification for the Manhattan-area nightwatch. The nightwatch investigates major felonies from midnight to 9 AM. It is made up of eight detectives drawn from all over the borough: local precincts as well as the Task Force.
The Task Force is an elite division that is brought in on the most sensitive cases. Between it and the precincts is an interdepartmental rivalry. Detectives from the precinct call the Task Force detectives “the stars” — not a compliment.
That night, Jerry was the representative from the Task Force. He was troubled by the call. The 20th Precinct had mentioned something about an abandoned violin. Jerry had a friend who played the violin. He knew how unlikely it was that any musician would leave behind an instrument.
Fifteen minutes after the first call, the 20th Precinct telephoned again. Jerry, Patrick Egan, the sergeant in charge that night, and Patrick Heaney, a detective with the 28th Precinct in central Harlem, drove over to the Met. It was a warm night, about seventy degrees. The buildings at Lincoln Center, their marble facades pale in the street lights, looked like mausoleums. At the stage entrance hall were half a dozen Met employees, security guards, and administrators, as well as a handful of uniformed cops from the 20th Precinct. They all told Jerry, Egan, and Heaney what they knew about the missing person: Helen Hagnes Mintiks.
Donald Maccourt, a bassoon player and the man in charge of the orchestra’s day-to-day summer operations, had noticed that Helen was missing and alerted Antonia Sunderland, the assistant house manager, who was on duty that night. Sunderland organized a search of the most obvious areas backstage. But Helen wasn’t found.
Maccourt telephoned Helen’s apartment on West Seventy-fifth Street and left a message on the answering machine for Helen or her husband, Janis — who, it turned out, had called at the same moment, got a busy signal, and assumed his wife had returned home. Janis, as was his habit, had been waiting for Helen on a side street in their old van. When she didn’t arrive, he called, then drove the few blocks back to their apartment. Three of Helen’s coworkers then arrived looking for her. By 1 A.M. on what was now Thursday, Janis realized something was wrong.
The 20th Precinct in the meantime had checked out neighborhood restaurants, bars, and the nearest hospital. Three cops made a second search backstage at the Met. Detective Jerry Giorgio now suggested that they do a thorough canvass, a room-by-room sweep of the entire building Impossible, said the security guards. Even they didn’t know their way around the whole place. The Met was a maze. Corridors on corridors. Flights of stairs vanishing up into the six top floors and down into three basements.
But Jerry wanted to make a start, so the guards led him, Egan, and Heaney to the stage. The curtains were closed. The cables for opening it ran diagonally across the cloth like sutures. Above them, the huge vault of the files, where scenery backdrops were hung, disappeared in shadows. On either side of the stage were wagons, as large as the stage itself, that could roll back and forth. Scattered around in the darkness were glowing blue exit signs. There was a smell of stored wood. Black curtains hung everywhere like funeral crepe.
Jerry walked upstage to the freight elevator, which carried scenery into, the bowels of the building. With Egan and Heaney he descended the stairs to A-level, passing double-bass cases, crates of costumes, and canvas bags — all large enough to hide a body.
They looked in the locker rooms, the artists’ dressing rooms. Their flashlights swept across papier-mache mountains, painted forests, towering columns, minarets, a Romeo and Juliet balcony, a ship’s mast with rigging that looked like the work of a giant spider, some gladiator shields, a stagecoach, a World War I army truck. There were so many out-of-the-way places in which Helen could have gotten trapped or been hidden. Jerry figured that to adequately inspect such a vast and confusing area, they would need 100 men, each escorted by someone on the Met staff who knew the way.
At 5 AM, Jerry, Egan, and Heaney went to talk to Elena Barere, the last person to see Helen alive that they knew about. Her apartment was near Helen’s — and the Met — on West Seventieth Street. She was so upset she hadn’t been able to sleep. She told them what she knew of Helen and Panov — not much — and about how Helen had said she wasn’t feeling well. Maybe Helen had gotten sick, Jerry thought; maybe she had lain down to sleep or had passed out somewhere.
The early morning was already muggy. It would be a hot, humid day in the mid-80s. After checking back at the Met — no news — Jerry, Egan, and Heaney went to the Mintiks’ apartment.
Helen had received a letter from her mother, who had recently broken her hip. Her parents still lived on the farm in British Columbia. Although in pain, her mother was hobbling around on a walker doing chores — which upset Helen.
“Could she have just taken off to go home?” Jerry asked. “Gotten on a bus or plane without telling you?”
Janis shook his head. No. Their relationship was close. She wouldn’t have left without letting him know.
“Could she have gone off to a hotel by herself to think?” Jerry asked.
Janis said no — for the same reason. “I’m sorry to have to ask you this,” Jerry said, “but could she have a boyfriend?”
Janis again shook his head. No.
As the detectives left the apartment, Jerry said, “You watch, we’ll find out she’s on her way to Canada to see her folks.”
Heaney turned thumbs-down.
“Nope,” he said. “She’s dead somewhere.”
They got back to the Met at 7 A.M. and were told that the female-musicians’ dressing room was locked. When the door was at last opened, they found the room just as it should have been. But in Helen’s locker, No. 4, they found something that was not as it should have been. Helen’s street clothes were still there. She had never changed out of her orchestra blacks after leaving the pit.
While waiting for police reinforcements who would help in a full-scale search, Jerry watched Met employees drift in through the stage door. Mostly rough-and-tumble guys, Jerry thought. Not the kind of men who’d be happy to see cops hanging around. That could be a problem. They were asked to report anything unusual they might see — and to keep Helen’s disappearance to themselves.
A little after eight o’clock, a maintenance man, Lawrence Lennon, came up to Jerry. He was pale and looked scared. He’d been on the roof to turn on a fan, his usual morning job, and had seen a pair of woman’s shoes.
“Oh, shit,” Jerry said. Helen, feeling depressed about her mother, must have taken a header: jumped. “Okay,” Jerry told Lennon. “Show us where.”
Lennon led Jerry, Egan, Heaney, and two Emergency Service officers to the sixth-floor fan roof. Jerry glanced at the parapet, which was virtually impossible to climb, and thought, “She didn’t jump.”
The cops spread out. Jerry hadn’t gone far when he heard one of the Emergency Service officers say, “Oh, my God!”
Jerry ran to where he stood by one of the fans. He looked down through the narrow opening into the shaft and saw at the bottom, 29 feet below, Helen’s body: naked, hands apparently tied behind her back, legs draped over the sluiceway on which she lay.
Jerry had seen thousands of corpses and worked on 300 to 400 homicides — so many he’d lost count — but this was one of the most gruesome, pitiful sights he’d ever come across. The whole lower part of her face and her neck were bloody. He thought her throat had been slit.
Suddenly a fan roared on. Jerry jumped. Mist sprayed them.
“This is going to be a bad one,” Jerry said.
Not only was the murder horrible but it had happened at the Met. The victim, as he had learned already, had been on her way to talk to a ballet superstar who also happened to be a Russian defector. Publicity — and it would be national — could make the case a carnival. Pressure on the department would be intense. And they would need the cooperation of the backstage crew, one of the most tightly knit, father-son unions in the city.
Jerry left the Emergency Service cops to safeguard the roof and went with Egan and Heaney to the third floor, where Helen had landed. On the way down in the elevator, Jerry thought, “My God, the husband’s at home waiting for a call from us.” He was certain Janis was not involved, and he was sick at the idea of his having to be told.
On the third floor, they went through the electrical shop to the bottom of the shaft. Exposed pipes were raised on blocks about a foot off a damp floor. Lying below the bend in one pipe were Helen’s bra and slip. Behind another pipe, next to a brick wall, was Helen’s pocketbook, the contents scattered about the floor.
Jerry stood right under the sluiceway on which Helen lay. From that angle, her torso was hidden. All he could see were her legs, which looked strange. They were bent not at the knees but halfway up the thighs, where there is no joint. The bones had snapped.
Jerry climbed up to the sluiceway for a closer look. The spray from the fans rained on him.
“Jesus,” he said.
Her throat wasn’t cut. A rag was stuffed in her mouth. She had hemorrhaged, and blood had soaked the gag and spilled over her jaw and neck. A tuft of hair, and possibly scalp, ripped off in the fall, was caught along the edge of a trapdoor in the sluiceway.
“Call the 20th,” Jerry said. “Tell everybody who’s working to get their tails up here.”
When Detective Mike Struk got to the Met, the place was swarming with employees trying to find out what had happened by eavesdropping on the cops. On the third floor, he went into the electrical shop, where the cops who had arrived already had set up temporary headquarters. Spotlights two feet high stood in a group, like R2-D2’s family reunion.
Heaney came over to Mike and with a grin asked, “Are you the lucky one?”
“I think I’m in the jackpot,” Mike said.
It was normal for a detective from the local precinct to take over from whoever on nightwatch had been handling the case.
“Who’s dead?” Mike asked. “Is she the palace blowjob? A nun? What?”
“She checks out okay,” Heaney said. “A decent gal. Happy marriage. Nothing shady in her background.”
“Anybody touched the body?” Mike asked Egan.
“Far as I know,” Egan said, “you got a cherry scene.”
Trailed by cops who would be helping on the case, Mike rattled off what had to be done.
“We’ll need more manpower,” he said. “Jerry Giorgio took care of that,” he was told.
“The borough office has to be notified.’’ “Giorgio called.”
“What about the chief?”
“Giorgio let him know.”
“The medical examiner?”
“Giorgio phoned.”
“Crime Scene Unit? Press Office?” Giorgio. Giorgio. Giorgio.
At last, Mike asked, “What the fuck’s a Giorgio?”
Mike went to his boss, Arthur O’Connor, a lieutenant at the 20th Precinct, to find out if he was catching the case, or if it was being given to the Task Force — to this guy Giorgio.
O’Connor assured Mike it was his case. The Task Force was assisting.
“Who from the Task Force?” Mike wanted to know. He didn’t want to work with Giorgio. He didn’t like the guy’s style. It was Mike’s case, and Giorgio hadn’t even had the courtesy to come over and introduce himself.
One of the other Task Force detectives was assigned to help, Mike was told. Benny Leotta.
Leotta was a nice guy. Mike figured he could work with him.
By now the press had heard about the murder. They were demanding information. People were throwing facts at Mike, offering him details about Helen’s movements the night before, as well as possible suspects: the guy downstairs with the broken tooth, weirdos who hang around the opera. Mike got an instant headache. Then Leotta came over to Mike and said he wasn’t working the case after all.
“Who is?” Mike asked.
“Jerry Giorgio,” Leotta said.
Mike was pissed. He went to Heaney and told him, “Look, when your friend Giorgio gets caught up with his bullshit, have him come over and tell me what he’s doing.”
Heavies were arriving. The Manhattan chief of detectives, Richard Nicastro. The chief medical examiner, Elliot Gross, who rarely did fieldwork.
Mike and Gross hunkered down side by, side and examined the body. The victim was tied, but this didn’t seem to be the typical sex crime. Except for her nakedness, it had none of the usual sex-crime signs: no bite marks on the nipples, nothing shoved inside her.
Two hairs — “fiber,” the medical examiner called them — were found: one in the gag, the other stuck to her chest with what appeared to be sweat or blood. After an hour and a half, Mike would admit that the medical examiner had given the job first-class treatment, which was one of the advantages of pulling down a big case. When Mike climbed down from the sluice-way, he was told that the Crime Scene Unit’s photographs, which often take two or three weeks to be processed, would be in his hands by the end of the day.
“Helen ran to the door and pulled. It was locked. She must have kept pulling and pulling, hoping that it would open. Pleading, praying that it would open.”
On the way up to the roof, Mike learned that in the stairwell outside the electrical shop they’d found a pen, bobby pins, a cigarette butt, and a flower. When Helen was last seen, she’d been wearing a flower in her hair. Evidence of a struggle.
The roof was swarming with cops. “How many Met employees were here last night?” Mike asked.
“About 200,” he was told.
“Great,” he thought. Two hundred possible interviews just to start with.
“How many people worked here since January 1?” he asked.
“Two thousand six hundred.”
Fingerprint experts were dusting the roof. Mike doubted that they would find anything. When they did, it was usually only a fragment that appeared after hours of painstaking work. But one of the cops slapped a duster against a low, horizontal pipe and up popped a perfect print, and not just fingerprints but a whole palm! Too good to be true. Mike assumed a sloppy cop had contaminated the scene. He ordered everybody off the roof except the few cops doing specific jobs.
The first strategy session was held in the electrical-shop office. The room was hot, they were all in shirt-sleeves. Chief Nicastro told them he was going to pull men from all over the borough. As the chief talked, Mike and Jerry eyed each other with distrust. Mike didn’t like Jerry and had pegged him as one of the Task Force stars. Jerry didn’t like Mike and had pegged him as a hothead, someone without finesse. But for the duration of the case, they were married to each other.
At the elevator, Jerry came up to Mike and said, “Let’s get together for a minute.”
Mike, trying to needle Jerry, said, “Gee, after working all night you must be tired.”
“Fresh as a daisy,” Jerry said, his grin widening.
Mike asked, “You a third-grader?”
“No,” Jerry said. “Detective second grade.”
“You must be high up on the list for first grade,” Mike said. “This case won’t hurt you.”
“Let’s cut the crap,” Jerry said. “What’s your plan?”
“I’m going to talk to the husband,” Mike said.
“I talked to him already,” Jerry said.
“Are you forgetting what the man said?” Mike said. “It’s Mike Struk’s case.”
They were silent in the elevator on the way down to the atrium. This was the section of Met headquarters that had been offered to the police department for its investigation. Compared with the hell of backstage, this was heaven. All red-plush, gold and silver. The teak doors were so tall they seemed designed for superhuman creatures.
Outside the door to one room, Mike and Jerry stopped. Mike peeked in to check out Janis Mintiks, who sat at a table with a bottle of Jack Daniels, for company. Mike glanced at Janis’s beard and asked Jerry, “What is he? A beatnik?”
“He’s okay,” Jerry said.
Look, fucko, Mike thought, I know I’m probably wasting my time talking to him, but you know I got to do it. If I don’t do it, I’ll look like a country asshole. So don’t give me that shit. I’m going to eliminate him, or make him a suspect real quick.
When Mike entered the room, Janis swung his head up. The expression in his eyes and the wildness of his beard made him look like one of the disciples mourning Christ. Mike ran through his questions. Janis said he’d spent the evening working on their new loft with a friend. Mike could see Jerry was right. It was unlikely that Janis was involved in his wife’s death.
“Go home,” Mike told Janis. “Get some sleep.”
After Janis left, Mike said, “Let’s get some ground rules around here. You scratch this way. I’ll scratch that way. At the end of the day, we’ll get together. Just let me know what you’re doing. I don’t want no surprises. Like, ‘Hey, Mike, I just closed the case.’”
Start with the obvious. Start with the husband. If he’s not involved, look for a lover. If there’s no lover, find someone who was where he shouldn’t have been.
Helen’s stand partner in the orchestra, Clay Reude, had seen a balding white man wearing a uniform with a red-and-white patch lurking around the Met about midnight. The uniform made sense to Mike. By now, he figured the murder had to have been an inside job. The murderer had to know the layout of the Met well enough to get Helen to the roof. And the employees of the Met, who were most likely to know the layout, were also the ones most likely to wear uniforms, or something resembling a uniform, like coveralls. Security guards, engineers, porters … Mike asked for lists of all of them. He wanted to know who hadn’t shown up for work that morning, or who showed up with a fresh black eye or scratch marks on the face, possible defense wounds.
One porter, Jarett Kipp,* also had been seen lurking. This, according to Panov, who himself was a suspect. There were all sorts of rumors involving Panov, from an assignation with Helen, who after all had been on her way to see him when she’d disappeared, to CIA-KGB involvement. But Helen apparently was going to see Panov only to help Janis get work as a set designer. Panov was rapidly eliminated as a suspect. So too was the lingering porter he had seen. Jarett Kipp had a swollen foot, so swollen, in fact, that half of his shoe had had to be cut off before it would fit. He could barely walk, let alone have struggled with a healthy, strong woman like Helen.
Mike learned that Joe Brady, one of fifty cops who had been canvassing the Met, had found a witness: a dancer who had been in an elevator the night before with Helen and an unknown man. The witness — Laura Cutler — spoke in such a low voice that Mike kept asking her to repeat things.
“Show us which elevator,” he said.
Laura led Mike and Heaney through corridors on the stage level. A matinee was in progress. Dancers and stagehands rushed back and forth. It was like being in a submarine on battle alert.
At the elevator — No. 12, near the women’s dressing room — Mike, Heaney, and Laura acted out what had happened, with Laura playing herself and Mike and Heaney playing Helen and the unknown man. Jerry, not wanting to miss out on the report of a key witness, joined them. Mike was annoyed. Jerry immediately assumed the role of director of their little playlet.
They went over and over what happened. From the way Helen and the man were acting, Laura had formed the impression they were together.
Why?
Just from their talking together. From the way he answered Helen’s question about which floor Panov’s dressing room was on. He had said “two” or “three” very quickly and confidently — although Laura now admitted that if she’d given it some thought, it should have seemed odd, since all the stars’ dressing rooms were on the stage level.
Laura said she had been surprised because the elevator had not gone up — as the directional arrow had been pointing — but down — to C-level, where she’d gotten off.
“Let’s go to C-level,” Jerry said.
Down and up they went, occasionally surprising performers who were waiting to use the elevator and, when the door opened, did not expect to see three cops and a dancer milling purposefully around as though they were choreographing a ballet for cramped space.
“What about this guy?” Mike asked. Laura hadn’t gotten a good look at him.
He was white. Maybe five feet ten inches. Dark hair, not very long, not terribly short. Sort of flyaway, she would later describe it. She thought the man was a little overweight. Not freshly shaven. Maybe he had a New York accent. And he was dressed in work clothes. Laura assumed he was on the Met crew.
After Laura left, Mike said, “We got to find that guy.”
The opera buff in the ratty swallowtail coat who haunted the Met. The stranger who was once on the grand staircase, gazing at the chandelier and getting an erection that was obvious even through his baggy pants. Someone’s brother-in-law. Someone’s mother-in-law. By that night, the madness had started: the anonymous callers, the freaks, the cranks, each with a theory, each with a suspect. Each had to be logged into the record book — the bible of the case — checked out, filed away.
While Jerry was doing fieldwork, Mike was stuck with paperwork in the atrium, playing ringmaster to the circus. Employees were stopping by with tips. Cops were feeding him bits of information, most of it random facts that wouldn’t match up with anything in the investigation.
When Vinnie Jenkins came in, Mike was in a bad mood. Mike liked Jenkins, who was a detective with the Task Force. He thought he was capable, a real pro. But Jenkins had been Jerry’s partner for seven years, and some of Mike’s anger at Jerry spilled over on him.
“Mike,” Jenkins said. “On C-deck. We were down there searching the back of the building. And we found some napkins and this tampon.”
“What about it, Vinnie?” Mike said.
“Well,” Vinnie said. “It looks like it’s got a little blood on it.”
Big deal, Mike thought. Blood on a tampon. What’s unusual about that.
“Where is this again?” Mike asked.
“In the back of the building and way down in the subbasement,” Vinnie said. “C-deck.”
There are three subbasements. C-level is the lowest. The murder happened nine flights up and on the opposite side of the building. To Mike, the tampon could have been on Mars. And Mike had no memory of the medical examiner mentioning that Helen was having her period. The tampon seemed like one more random fact. One out of hundreds.
“Thanks, Vinnie,” Mike said. “Anything else? You want coffee or something?”
“What do you want to do with the tampon?” Jenkins asked.
“What do you want to do with it?” Mike said.
When Vinnie said nothing, Mike said, “Hey, Vinnie. Why don’t you take the fucking thing home and suck on it.”
The next day, in a strategy session, Mike was reporting on what he had learned.
“Nothing real hot,” he said. As an after-thought, he mentioned Jenkins’s telling him about a tampon being found on C-level.
“What?” Jerry said.
After being Jenkins’s partner for so many years, Jerry trusted Jenkins’s instincts. If he mentioned something, it was worth checking.
“Well,” Jerry asked, “where’s the tampon?”
“Probably where he found it,” Mike said.
Jerry and Captain Frank Ward, of the 5th Detective Zone, descended into the bowels of the building. The bright colors gave way to gray. The music from the show got softer and softer until they could no longer hear it. They passed dressing rooms, rehearsal halls, storage rooms — until they came into the landing at the bottom of the stairs on C-level. There were graffiti — “Fat Louie Sucks” — on the walls, and on the floor, the tampon.
This is it, Jerry thought. A classic setting for a rape. But if Helen had been taken there, it meant that the crime scene was spread over the whole building. Laura Cutler saw Helen riding the elevator, apparently headed for the second or third floor, at about 9:45. According to the autopsy report, Helen was probably killed between 11 and 11 :30, which meant that sometime between 9:45 and 11:30 the murderer had to get Helen from the second or third floor to C-level to the roof through a maze of corridors in a busy building without being seen. Improbable.
But Jerry figured the tampon was Helen’s. He was annoyed at Mike for having ignored it.
When Jerry returned to the atrium conference room with the tampon, claiming it was a crucial bit of evidence, Mike was furious at him for what seemed to be grandstanding. He was sure that Jerry was going to let him do all the paperwork and then grab all the glory for himself.
A former employee, who was under psychiatric care because he’d learned that his best friend was the real father of his child, was at the Met the night of the murder. So was a supervisor who had once ripped a woman’s blouse backstage. And a member of the crew who once had ground out a cigarette against a woman’s breast. Mike had rarely seen in one case such a collection of likely suspects.
An engineer, Matthew Potts, said that an electrician, Tommy Anton, had a room on C-level that he kept locked. Anton said he kept the room locked because he brought his girlfriend there. And, Anton added, he’d seen Potts on C-level the night of the murder. Potts admitted that he’d been on C-level about 9 PM. and said he’d heard a moan.
The two hairs found at the crime scene, one in the gag and the other stuck to Helen’s breast, had tiny knots in them. “Who would knot their hair like that?” Mike wondered. And how could they do it? Tweezers and a magnifying glass? The paper towels found stuffed around the pipes between B- and C-levels were stained with semen from three different men at three different times. On the third floor, not far from where Helen’s body landed, was a room the crew called the “Motel,” where more semen stains were found. What were the stagehands doing? Spraying their hoses every which way? A tampon tube was found on the grid in the files above the stage. It was beginning to look as though there was more sex backstage at the Met than at Plato’s Retreat.
It turned out the tampon container was not connected to the murder. The semen stains in the Motel had nothing to do with the case. The semen-stained paper towels were also red herrings. And the knotted hairs remained a mystery.
Mike was so frustrated that when a professional psychic named Gray Wolf, whom Mike had seen on television, sent him a tape with information about Helen, Mike, a skeptic, took the tape to the chief. The chief listened politely and then said, “Throw the thing in the garbage.”
On August 1, Mike and Jerry learned that the C-level tampon was Helen’s. It had been tested for blood type. After the daily strategy session, Jerry left to pick up his daughter from ballet class. Fifteen minutes later, a reporter called up the Met to ask if it was true they’d identified the C-level tampon as Helen’s.
Only two people outside the conference room at the Met knew the tampon had been identified, the chief told Jerry the next morning — Jerry, and the lab technician.
“Then we know who’s the leak,” Jerry said. “’The lab technician.”
The conference room was swept for bugs. And the following Friday, August 8, the chief called Mike to a secret meeting. The meeting was limited to about half a dozen people. Jerry was not there.
Using an extraordinary new method, the police lifted prints of fingertips from Helen’s skirt. From the hem — just where they’d be if someone had grabbed the skirt to cut or rip it. The tips were not Helen’s. They must belong to the killer. Now they had to get prints from everyone at the Met and find the ones that matched the prints on the skirt.
The didn’t want to let the killer know what they had, so instead of saying the prints came from her skirt, they concocted a story: The tips — they would say — came from a boatswain’s whistle they’d found. Since the killer would know he’d never touched a boatswain’s whistle, he wouldn’t refuse to let the cops take his prints.
One more thing, Mike was told. This plan had to remain secret. No one except the people in the room could know the truth.
“What about Jerry?” Mike asked. Not even Jerry could know.
Mike thought, “They must figure Jerry’s the leak.”
Good cops don’t hold out on each other. No matter how much you might hate your partner, someday your life may depend on him. You don’t hold out. Mike felt terrible.
That evening, Mike worked himself to exhaustion in the gym in the basement of the 20th Precinct station house. Then he ran around the Central Park reservoir until he was ready to drop. By the time he got back to the bunk room at the precinct headquarters, he’d decided to tell Jerry the truth about the tip-prints.
“Listen, I got to talk to you,” Mike said to Jerry the next morning.
Afraid of bugs in the atrium offices, Mike drew Jerry into a storage room.
“I know we’re not kissing cousins,” Mike said, “but there’s something I got to say. I don’t want to carry it around no more. But you got to promise you won’t tell nobody I told you. Not the chief, nobody. If you do, I’m dead.”
Jerry promised.
Mike told him that the boatswain-whistle story was a ruse. The tips really came from Helen’s skirt. He’d been ordered not to tell Jerry.
Jerry puffed out his cheeks the way he does when he’s upset.
“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” he said. “I’ll be a son of a bitch.”
For the rest of the day, during meetings about fingerprinting the Met employees, Mike and Jerry kept exchanging glances. Together, they interviewed some members of the crew to see if they had triconodosis, a condition that causes hairs to knot as they grow — the condition that knotted the two hairs found with Helen’s corpse. This, too, turned out to be a blind alley, but they didn’t know that then. And in working together, Jerry engaged suspects in talk while Mike stood behind and peered down into the guy’s hair, looking for the patchy bald spots caused by the disease.
The next day, Thursday, August 14, the crew came down to the atrium in twos and threes — so the show would not be interrupted — to fill out questionnaires about their movements around the time Helen was killed, to be photographed, and to have their fingertips printed. Just for the record, their palm prints were also taken — to prove that the perfect palm print on the roof pipe was not connected to the investigation, but was a souvenir of some careless cop.
That evening, one of the officers doing the printing told Mike and Jerry that a couple of Met employees had refused to have their prints taken. For various reasons, neither seemed a likely suspect. But a third employee, a stagehand who did let them take his prints, had been very nervous. He’d been hyperventilating.
Mike was curious about the nervous stagehand, whose name he took note of: Craig Crimmins.
The next day, they were told the tips were not Craig’s.
Mike and Jerry shrugged. So they didn’t get lucky.
But the palm print from the pipe on the roof, the print that was so perfect everyone assumed it had to be worthless — that print was Craig’s.
Craig Crimmins was twenty-one years old. A stage carpenter. His father, Edward Crimmins, and his stepfather, Martin Higgins, both worked backstage at the Met. He was a husky, slope-shouldered man with a baby face. He seemed like a picture in a kid’s mix-and-match book, in which you can put the head of one figure on top of the body of another.
On his questionnaire, he claimed that on the night of Helen’s murder he hadn’t missed any of his cues — which, according to his boss and some fellow stagehands, was not true. Not only was he missing for the whole second half of the show, a search party had looked for him — unsuccessfully.
The detectives sent for Craig.
“This might be the ball game,” Jerry told Mike before Craig came in.
“Should we hit him with everything?” Mike asked. “He’s got to know why he’s here. Maybe he’ll crumble?”
“Me,” Jerry said. “I like to go slow. Easy. Methodical. Just go on. Rap. Rap. Rap.”
“You don’t think he’ll cave?” Mike asked.
“No,” Jerry said. “I don’t think so.”
“All right,” Mike said. “You got a few years on me. Let’s try it your way.”
At 4:30 P.M., Craig came into the conference room in the atrium. He seemed, Mike thought, very cool.
“Feel free to smoke,” Jerry said. “This is Mike Struk. If you want to call him Mike, it’s fine. If you want to call me Jerry, it’s fine. Can we call you Craig?”
They started with Craig’s background. They asked him about his movements the night of the murder, showed him the questionnaire in which he claimed he’d missed no cues. He said the questionnaire was right.
“Gee, Craig,” Jerry said. “Something isn’t jelling here. Something’s not right. We’ve talked to hundreds of people. You know how many guys we’ve had in and out of here, and there seems to be something wrong. You say you were here for all these portions of the show, and yet somebody missed you.”
Craig said he’d been drinking. He couldn’t remember everything too clearly.
“We’ve been very careful in asking you about all your movements that night,” Jerry said. “What you did and didn’t remember, and you were positive you were here for the whole show. Now that I tell you we know you weren’t here, you say you’re unclear.”
Craig said he hadn’t wanted to tell them he’d missed his cues, because he didn’t want to get in trouble with his boss. He’d been drunk; he’d fallen asleep on the left rear wagon.
“There’s something else wrong here,” Jerry said. “That night, your friends, coworkers, and boss looked for you. And do you know where they looked? They looked on the rear wagon. And they looked not only on the left side but also on the right side.”
Craig was silent.
“The first statement you gave us, about not missing any cues, we went over that several times,” Jerry said. “Each time, you said that it was absolutely correct. Then we told you we knew you’d missed your cue, and you said you were on the rear wagon. And that was absolutely correct. Then we told you they searched for you and didn’t find you.”
Craig was silent for a little while longer. Finally, he asked if he could talk to Jerry alone.
When Mike left the room, Jerry asked, “Well, what is it, Craig?”
There was something about that night he hadn’t told, Craig said.
“Go ahead,” Jerry said.
Craig said he was the guy on the elevator with Helen.
Charles Heffernan, the assistant district attorney assigned to the case, was at Meadowlands Arena, in New Jersey, watching a Giants game when he was paged and asked to come to the Met. By the time he arrived, Jerry had locked Craig into his new story: He’d met Helen as they were going to the elevator. She asked him directions to Panov’s dressing room. He told her it was on the second floor. She got off at the second floor. He went to A-level, took a six-pack of beer from his locker, drank it, and fell asleep on the couch in the electricians’ lounge.
Craig had agreed to videotape his statement. While reading Craig the Miranda warnings, Heffernan repeatedly emphasized Craig’s right to get a lawyer.
He’s over-Mirandizing him, Mike thought. He’ll take the hint, get a lawyer, and we’II lose our chance to get a statement.
But Craig didn’t ask for a lawyer. Once the videotaping was done, Mike and Jerry told Heffernan they were sure that if they now told Craig he was under arrest he’d confess. But Heffernan wanted a stronger case. Mike and Jerry couldn’t believe it.
They argued for almost six hours. Heffernan would not relent. He wanted Mike and Jerry to prove Craig was not where he said he’d been — the locker room and the electricians’ lounge.
At 7 A.M. on Sunday, Craig left the Met. For the next two weeks, Mike and Jerry punched holes in Craig’s new story. One of the stage carpenters said Craig couldn’t have been drinking in the locker room around’ the time of the killing because he’d been down there alone, snorting coke.
A stagehand, Mike Murray, said Craig couldn’t have been asleep on the couch in, the electricians’ lounge that night, because he’d been sleeping on that couch at the time.
By Thursday, August 28, Mike and Jerry had destroyed Craig’s alibi. But because they wanted one more chance to get a confession, they didn’t want to arrest Craig or in any other way prompt him to get a lawyer. On Monday, when he returned from vacation, they’d have another talk with him. Until then, there was nothing to do. It was Labor Day weekend. They decided to take a few days off.
Mike met his family at Beach Haven at the New Jersey shore on Thursday night. On Friday morning Mike had one foot in a boat and one foot onshore — he was shoving off to go crabbing with his kids — when his wife called from the house that he had a phone call. It was Frank Ward, the 5th Detective Zone Commander. There was a problem. The Daily News had called the district attorney’s office to say that they knew Craig Crimmins was the suspect and they were going to break the story that night at seven o’clock. Once the paper hit the stands, Mike and Jerry would lose their chance to get Craig’s confession. They had to find Craig, convince him to come down to the station to talk without arresting him, and hope he’d spill — before seven o’clock.
“Shit,” Mike thought. “I’m not going to be there when this guy gets collared.”
He had visions of arriving at the precinct headquarters to find Jerry in his television suit posing for the cameras.
“The son of a bitch is doing it to me again,” Mike thought.
He jumped in his car and headed up the New Jersey Turnpike for New York City.
Jerry had heard about the call from the newspaper at about 1 or 2 PM.
“Where’s Mike?” Jerry asked.
“On his way,” he was told.
Jerry and his assistant, Leo Rosenthal, drove to the Bronx — to where Craig lived with his father and sister. They waited. At 6:50, ten minutes before the news was due to break, Craig strolled out of the apartment house.
Craig spotted Jerry, crossed over to him and said, “Hi” He asked if anything was wrong.
“Nothing wrong,” Jerry said. “But if you recall the last conversation we had, there were certain areas you said were unclear — that you couldn’t remember. You said if you had some time to think about it, you might be able to clear these matters up. Would you mind very much coming back to the office, and we’ll go over it?”
Craig asked if it would take all night again.
“Oh no,” Jerry said. If he balks, Jerry thought, I’m going to have to put him under arrest, and we’ll lose our confession.
Craig agreed to go.
By the time they got to the 20th Precinct, the press had already descended. As they pulled up in front of the station house, another Task Force detective, Peter Mangicavallo, warned Jerry in Italian, “Take him to our house” — the Task Force office at the 13th Precinct.
“Good cops don’t hold out on each other. No matter how much you might hate your partner, someday your life may depend on him. You don’t hold out.”
They arrived there at about 8:10. When they walked in, Jerry surreptitiously motioned to someone near the television to turn the set off. He didn’t want Craig to hear over the news that he’d become their prime suspect.
Mike gave Craig his Miranda rights. Then he and Jerry once more took Craig through his story about getting the beer from the locker, drinking it, and falling asleep on the electricians’ lounge couch. Was he sure he did that? Yes, he was sure. Was he sure about the time? Yes, he was sure.
Now, they listed all the inconsistencies and changes in his story.
First, he said he missed no cues. That wasn’t true.
Then, he said he’d fallen asleep on the left rear wagon. That wasn’t true.
Then, he admitted he was the man on the elevator with Helen.
Then, he said he got off at A-level, got beer from the locker, and had fallen asleep on the couch in the electricians’ lounge.
“Craig,” Jerry said, “That’s not true, either.”
Craig asked if he could talk to Jerry alone.
After Mike left the room, Jerry could see him through the frosted glass on the top of the door crouched down to listen through the louvers at the bottom.
“What is it, Craig?” Jerry asked.
“You know,” Craig said.
“What?” Jerry asked.
“That I killed the lady,” Craig said. Craig said he didn’t know where to begin. He wanted Jerry to ask him questions — which Jerry, being careful not to lead or feed, did.
“Did you see Helen Hagnes Mintiks Wednesday night, July 23, 1980? And where?” Jerry started.
“I seen her at the back elevator, No. 12,” Craig said. “I said something to her on the elevator, and she hit me.”
“How did she hit you?”
“She smacked me on the right side of my face, on the ear.”
“When you got to the second floor, did you get off with her?”
“She kept looking for the studios. We checked all the studios, everything was out. When she smacked me on the elevator, she said something snotty and loud. I said to her, go this way and she did. I meant go to the stairs.”
“Was she afraid of you at this time?” “Yes, she was, and she went with me.” “Where did you go on the stairs, and what happened?”
“We went to either C- or B-deck, and I sort of talked her into fooling around. I said it won’t hurt, and she started to get worse. She started freaking out on me. She tried to hit me. I grabbed her hands. That’s when I took out the hammer. I just held it and told her to walk up the stairs.”
“Before you went up the stairs, what, if anything, happened?”
“When she saw the hammer, she started taking off her clothes. She took them all off, and I saw her take out the rag, but she didn’t say anything about it.”
“Did you tell her to do anything?”
“I told her to lay down, and I tried to put it in. It wouldn’t go in. I tried for about five minutes, and I couldn’t get it in. I told her to get dressed and told her to walk up the stairs. On the way upstairs, I don’t know which shop it was, she ran and tried to go into a door. I knew the door was locked. And she tried to open the door. I grabbed her and gave her a shove and said, ‘Keep walking upstairs.’”
“What happened then?”
“We got to the roof, and I didn’t know which of the doors went out. I wasn’t sure then. I held her hand and opened the door. It led out to the roof. We went out and sat right by the pipe.”
“What happened then?”
“She was trying to make conversation, asking if I worked here and if I was afraid I couldn’t get out of this. I said I didn’t work — I didn’t work here. I tied her right there because I was going to leave her there. I didn’t have anything to do with her sexually after the first time on C-deck.”
“Did you ever reach a climax that night?”
“I came on C-deck. I was just rubbing against her and came on her. I wasn’t in her.”
“Did you have it between her legs?” “I guess so.”
“Now, after you tied her on the roof, what happened?”
“I tied… I tied her with rope. I told her I would leave her. I would call somebody and tell them she was there.”
“Then what happened?”
“I left her there, walked back toward the door, and like was standing there thinking, if she gets out of it. As I was thinking, I heard some rattling, and I saw her with her feet undone, and she ran to the pipe, sat on it, and went over. I ran after her, jumped over the pipe, caught her, and took her back to the same spot.”
“Then what?”
“I think there was a bucket there with a whole shitful of rags in it. I tied her feet.”
“Do you remember if she still had her shoes?”
“I remember I took them off and tossed them away, so that if she ran it would hurt her feet. I put the rags over the rope so that it wouldn’t come loose again. At that point, I picked her up and carried her in my arms, carried her to the ledge, sat her down, then pulled her down and leaned her against the fan. She wasn’t gagged. She was talking to me, trying to be nice. I decided to gag her and laid her flat on her stomach. I know I gagged her, and I think I put one around her eyes.”
“How did her clothes get off?”
“I had my knife in the case on my belt. I took it out and cut them off. I figured if she got loose she wouldn’t run, because she would be embarrassed.”
“What did you do with the clothes?” “I just threw them down on the side of the fan.”
“What else did you do?”
“At this point I was just sitting there thinking.”
“What were you thinking?”
“What should I do. I sat there for a few minutes.”
“What did you decide to do?”
“I decided to leave. As I was walking away, I heard her pouncing up and down and that’s when it happened. I went back and kicked her off.”
Jerry saw Mike leap up in joy. They got the confession.
After it was over, Craig asked if he was under arrest.
“Yeah,” Jerry said. “Yeah, Craig.” They videotaped the confession, which was used in the trial. On June 4, 1981, the jury returned a verdict: on the first count, intentional murder, not guilty; on the second count, felony murder, which is not premeditated, guilty.
Craig Crimmins was sentenced a prison term of 20 to life.
*Editor’s note: The names of several people questioned by the police have been changed in this article.
Reaction to the initial publication of this article in 1984 reached a swell to a point that Mr. Black elaborated on the story at great length in a captivating book. We have never done a lot of true crime stories at Penthouse, possibly because the impact they leave can feel like you probably do now.
