Because You Loved Me. M. William Phelps
the next, turned into a minor scandal.
“Nicole, for some reason,” said an acquaintance, “didn’t like to wear panties.”
Thus, when the girl pulled her pants down, there Nicole stood bare-ass in front of everyone. Kids laughed at her and pointed as she pulled up her pants and ran from the courtyard.
Jeanne hit the roof when she found out. Nicole was so traumatized and embarrassed that she didn’t show up for school for three days afterward. Jeanne ultimately drove to the school and raised a ruckus about the incident, as any concerned mother might.
“I want something done about this,” Jeanne told the principal in her careful, concerned manner. She wasn’t loud or obnoxious. Jeanne simply spoke her peace: “How dare someone do that to my daughter.”
The girl was suspended. Part of her punishment included writing Jeanne a letter, apologizing for what she had done.
Constantly unsure of herself, always worried she was too fat and ugly, Nicole developed an even deeper complex after that day. Shortly after the incident, Nicole got a job at a local fast-food restaurant. One day, she called one of Jeanne’s neighbors from work; she had an odd request: “Can you go up into my room and grab me a pair of panties? I need you to bring them to me here at work.”
Nicole had split her pants while working and wasn’t wearing underwear and had to walk around with her privates exposed.
No one could understand why Nicole was being picked on at school. She wasn’t an outcast, a Goth-type dresser, and didn’t wear clothes that drew attention to her. She was quite conservative as far as the type of dress she chose.
“Jeans and a T-shirt,” said Carla Hall. “That’s pretty normal to me.”
Because Carla worked so much, she never had much time to interact with Nicole or Jeanne, like some of the other neighbors. She saw Jeanne occasionally, perhaps when sunning herself outside and Jeanne was tending to the garden she kept up for Nicole. At times, they met on the edge of Jeanne’s property, or in her garden, and discussed everyday issues. Yet there were two specific times, recalled Carla, when Jeanne went out of her way “just to make me feel good.” And that was the fundamental nature of who Jeanne was: “The first person to do something for somebody else.”
Carla worked as a nail technician at a nearby salon. She remembered one day when Jeanne showed up to get her fingernails done.
“How great to see you, Jeanne,” said Carla. She was pleasantly surprised Jeanne had just popped in.
“Carla, how are you?” Naturally, Jeanne was beaming.
And for the next half hour Jeanne sat as Carla filed and polished and painted her nails. As part of the service Carla offered, she concluded the session with a hand massage. Yet no sooner had she finished, did Jeanne grab her by the hands.
“Let me do that to you now,” suggested Jeanne. “You sit here and do this to everybody all day long and I bet you never get it done.”
Carla was taken aback.
“You’re right, Jeanne,” she said in a half-joking manner. “You know, you’re right.”
“That’s just typical Jeanne,” Carla insisted later. “She gave me a little hand massage because she wanted to do something for me.”
It was as if Jeanne couldn’t accept a moment of pleasure, a luxury for herself, without giving back.
A few weeks into July 2003, Carla and Jeanne found themselves both cleaning their houses on the same day, a leisurely Saturday afternoon. Jeanne, out of nowhere, called Carla.
“I’m making piña coladas, honey. You want one?”
“Honey” was a common name Jeanne used to greet her closest friends and neighbors—just one more way for her to make people feel comfortable.
“Sure, Jeanne.”
“I’ll send it right over.”
A few minutes later, Nicole knocked on Carla’s door. She had a smile on her face and a fresh piña colada in her hand.
“It was just so funny, so random. Now that I look back on it all, Jeanne just loved putting a smile on everyone’s face. It’s a good memory. I’ll never forget it.”
CHAPTER 13
While Chris McGowan stood outside of Jeanne’s home, a detective wandered over and asked him a few pointed questions. When Chris had called 911, he had initiated an investigation. Information that could be important to finding Jeanne’s killer needed to be documented immediately. Chris might know something central to the case without realizing it. Also, as far as detectives knew, Chris McGowan was their prime suspect.
Beyond the initial “who are you?” and “what’s your date of birth?” Chris wasn’t pressured to answer any tough questions relating to the murder scene. Detectives could tell he was not in his best frame of mind.
“Everything was moving so fast,” recalled Chris. “I was stumbling through my words. I had no idea what was going on.”
There was going to come a time, detectives promised, when Chris sat down and, in a sense, defended himself. He wasn’t going to walk away without explaining a few things, which, early on, didn’t seem to add up.
Standing in front of the window in her living room, Carla Hall was mortified at the thought that her friend and neighbor, a woman who ostensibly had no enemies, lay dead on her kitchen floor, her killer at large. For a moment, Carla stared out the window and shook her head. Yellow crime-scene tape. Police officers. The scene looked like some sort of CSI TV drama. Spotlights illuminating the property, casting an eerie football stadium gaze on everyone.
Incredible. What is happening?
Neighbors gathered in the street and talked as police came and went. Dumaine Avenue was clogged with crime scene investigation box trucks and evidence vans. Uniformed officers banged on doors, asked questions, took statements. Jeanne’s ex-husband became the most popular topic of conversation among many standing out front. It was no secret Anthony Kasinskas had been in trouble with the law.
He and Jeanne, more than one person later noted, were at odds constantly. Jeanne was terrified of him.
There was no doubt Jeanne had developed high anxiety where Anthony was concerned. She called neighbors during the day when the kids were home and asked them to go look in on the children. Her biggest fear, several neighbors reported, was that Anthony showed up unannounced.
“Do you see anything going on over there?” Jeanne asked. “Is everything OK?”
“She would call me,” recalled one neighbor, “two or three times a day sometimes and ask me to check in on the kids. She would make a point to say she was scared Anthony was going to ‘do something.’ She called less frequently when Chris started staying overnight, but she was still frightened of Anthony.”
“Terrified is more like it,” said another friend. “She always thought that he would kill her. She believed it.”
When Anthony and Jeanne divorced, Jeanne made it clear that she wanted to drop his name and went to court to change her last name back to Dominico. She gave the kids the option to do the same, never pressuring them, and both chose to keep their dad’s name.
Still, would Anthony go as far as to murder his ex-wife? It didn’t seem logical. In the eyes of detectives, Anthony was an obvious suspect—and prosecutors later said that indeed Anthony had a bull’s-eye on his back immediately.
There was one instance where Anthony had fired a shotgun—a warning shot—in the air as someone walked toward his car while he was hunting. The guy turned out to be a cop. Anthony was arrested.
But had Jeanne been murdered by a firearm? By this point, detectives weren’t willing to offer those sorts of details. Save for a few detectives and crime scene investigators inside the house, no one knew how