Because You Loved Me. M. William Phelps
of spending eight hours next to each other, five days a week. Amanda was quite different than most of Jeanne’s friends.
“Very reclusive,” said a former friend. “[Amanda] rarely goes anywhere aside from work, five days a week. She is an unbelievable chain-smoker that sits at home with her two cats…. She records her soap operas and watches them religiously. Jeanne would go to Amanda’s house on Saturdays and do all her housework (vacuuming, dusting and other minor chores)…. Jeanne provided her with some well-needed companionship. Jeanne accepted [Amanda] for who she was…. She is not a badperson, just for the fact that she is very antisocial.”
Jeanne, without a doubt, loved Amanda dearly.
Especially short at four feet ten inches, and a bit heavy, forty-five-year-old Amanda wore her Puerto Rican heritage well. She was born and raised in New York City; her parents were in Puerto Rico, her grandparents in Spain.
“I’m pretty Latin, all the way down to my fingertips,” she later said jokingly.
With jet black hair and olive skin, Amanda was attractive, but also strong-minded and not afraid to speak her opinions when she felt the situation warranted it; whereas Jeanne was more laid-back, socially correct and not quite as outspoken.
They had made a great pair, feeding off their differences.
Like Jeanne, Amanda, a single woman, worked hard to make ends meet. She was employed by a health care company in Andover, Massachusetts, about a forty-minute drive on a good day from her home. Because the commute during peak morning and afternoon rush hour could get congested and heavy along Route 3 and Interstate 495, Amanda set it up with her boss so that she could get into the office by 6:30 or 7:00 A.M.
“That way,” she said, “I can miss most of the morning traffic and I get to leave work by three-thirty or four P.M. and miss most of the afternoon traffic.”
Leaving her house at 6:30 A.M., however, had its downside: Amanda had to get up by 4:00 A.M. to shower and fix her hair and makeup, which meant she had to be in bed on most nights by 8:00 P.M. At about 10:05 P.M., Billy and Nicole knocked on Amanda’s door. Amanda wasn’t quite asleep, but she had the lights out and, lying down, had begun to drift off. When she heard the buzzer, she said aloud, “Shit, who is that?” knowing full well, she remembered later, it was Nicole.
“What is it?” Amanda asked as she sluggishly opened the door, upset Nicole and Billy were ringing her at that time of the night. Nicole knows better, she thought.
“It’s Nicole, Amanda.”
“It’s late, honey, you know I go to bed early. What the hell are you doing here?”
Having known Nicole since she was two years old, Amanda held a special bond with her. Like many of Jeanne’s friends, Amanda believed Nicole was smarter than most girls her own age. (“She had a bright future ahead of her—and still does,” recalled Amanda.)
“We wanted to come over so Billy could say good-bye,” said Nicole. “He’s leaving tomorrow morning.”
Nicole seemed sincere. She looked tired, but Amanda expected it: Billy was leaving, and Nicole had made no secret of the fact that her “world” was going to collapse with his departure.
Still, the last thing Amanda wanted to do was sit and entertain two teenagers.
Part of her felt bad about coming out and telling Nicole to take Billy and leave. Nicole had telephoned Amanda three times earlier that night, but Amanda screened each call and never answered. In one message, Nicole said she wanted to stop by. “I thought it was nice, you know,” recalled Amanda. “It was unnecessary, but it was a nice gesture. I figured if I didn’t answer the phone, they would just go home and leave me alone.”
Nonetheless, here they were, standing in her doorway.
“Come on in,” said Amanda grudgingly. Billy seemed hyped-up and “jittery,” she recalled. Nicole was somewhat relaxed, calm, but also “very sad.” Both looked “tired and exhausted,” remembered Amanda. “I attributed it all to separation anxiety. Billy was going back to Connecticut the next day. That’s why I thought they looked so nervous.”
“If I look a little jittery or jumpy,” Billy said as they stepped into Amanda’s dining room, “it’s because I had a Coke earlier.”
“Whatever…,” Amanda said. She was uninterested.
Nicole sat quietly next to Billy. Although Nicole and Billy hadn’t spent that much time together face-to-face since they met online in May 2002, many who witnessed them together said Billy was the dominant force in the relationship. It was an unspoken rule, for example, that Nicole submit to Billy’s wishes. More than one close friend of the family later said that whenever Billy used the bathroom in Nicole’s presence, she would “wait like a puppy dog” by the restroom door and was expected not to talk to anyone until Billy emerged. Just a few days ago, on Sunday, August 3, Billy and Nicole stopped at a local fast-food restaurant and Nicole bumped into a male friend. After saying hello, Nicole and the boy hugged. Billy was “so upset,” said Nicole’s only girlfriend, Cassidy Dion, “he stormed out of the restaurant” in anger. “He got really upset and walked out.” Furthermore, Chris was quick to point out he thought it rather bizarre that on those nights Billy stayed at the house he slept on the couch, and Nicole, even though she was told not to, slept on the floor next to him, as if Billy didn’t want her out of his sight.
While inside Amanda’s, Billy bounced his foot a mile a minute, like a kid waiting outside the principal’s office, and, at times, got up and walked around the room.
He just couldn’t keep still.
Finally, after some small talk, “Listen, you guys are going to have to leave now,” Amanda said. “I need to get some sleep so I can get up for work.” She didn’t want to kick them out. She felt that being Jeanne’s best friend, it was nice of Nicole to bring Billy by. But at the same time, it was getting late. Amanda needed to get some sleep.
“Nicole,” Amanda said when Nicole didn’t respond, “it’s after ten o’clock. Your mother let Billy stay here for a week. She must be worried about you.”
“I know,” said Nicole.
Amanda picked up the telephone and dialed Jeanne’s.
No one answered.
Then she tried calling Chris.
Addressing Nicole after hanging up the line, she said, “They are probably out looking for you right now. It’s pretty selfish of you to do this to her. Why don’t you just go home.”
“Yeah, I guess we’re really tired,” said Billy. “I guess I’ll just go to Jeanne’s and crash on the couch.”
CHAPTER 17
For Chris McGowan, the nightmare had just begun. It was like a telephone call in the middle of the night—it was never good news.
“Look at all this blood?” Chris told himself as he stood underneath the fluorescent glow of the lights inside the small room that detectives had put him in at the NPD. Both of his arms, from his triceps down to his fingertips, were covered. His knees, because he was wearing shorts, had patches of blood where he had knelt down beside Jeanne.
My goodness, thought Chris while sitting in the room by himself, holding up his arms, looking at it all for the first time. What happened?
Two detectives sat Chris down at a small table on the second floor, gave him a glass of water and told him to “relax,” someone would be back to ask him a few questions in due time.
What seemed to Chris like “an hour” actually took fifteen minutes. As he sat, contemplating life without Jeanne, thinking about what could have happened, he still didn’t feel as though he was being treated as a suspect.
“I had nothing to hide,” he said later. “It didn’t even cross my mind.”
Equally disturbing was the idea of never seeing