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By
DAN ACKMAN In
the beginning there was nothing: no gun, no body, no crime.
Not even a suspicion. Alfred
Hunt Howell, an 83-year old philanthropist, retired from a career
at Citibank, died on the evening of April 23, 1996.
His butler, Keith Alexander, found the body the next
morning belly down in a pool of blood in the bedroom of his
mansion overlooking the Hudson in the Riverdale section of the
Bronx. There was a
gash over his eye. The
butler called the police. Tyrone
Ramsey, a detective from the 50th Precinct, was assigned to
investigate. Ramsey
arrived, checked the house, and found no sign of foul play.
He then called the medical examiner, and described what he
saw: old man, pool of blood, his wallet on the bed.
The medical examiner determined there was no need to send
an investigator, and instead called Howell's doctor, John Postley,
whose office is on Madison Avenue in Manhattan.
Postley told the medical examiner that Howell had a heart
condition and was being treated with Coumadin, a blood-thinning
medication. Without
ever venturing to the Bronx to see the body, Dr. Postley signed
the death certificate listing the cause of death as "natural
causes." The
time of death was approximately
6:00 p.m. (Both
Ramsey and Postley refused to comment for this article.) Once
Dr. Postley signed off on the paperwork, the medical examiner
released the body to the custody of the Howell family, who called
funeral director Vincent Palladino to pick it up.
Palladino and his associate arrived at the scene where, the
police were taking photographs.
He placed the corpse in a body bag, loaded it in a hearse
and accompanied it to the Williams Funeral Home in the Kingsbridge
section. At
the funeral home, Palladino placed the body in a plain pine box
for transport, per the family's wishes, to the Ferncliff
Crematorium in Hartsdale, New York.
There, Fernando Santos incinerated the body while it
remained inside the box, the procedure required by law.
He sent the ashes to the Homewood Cemetary in Pittsburgh,
where they were placed in an urn and buried. That
might have been the end of it, except Nickolaj Amann was convinced
the police were looking for him.
Dr.
Howell died in a pool of blood.
A couple hundred dollars in cash had been removed from his
wallet. Still, no
one-- not the police, not the medical examiner, not Mr. Howell's
family, not his nephew who spent the night at the mansion-- knew
that he'd been murdered. No
one except Nick Amann. For
weeks, the skinny 23-year-old with the pointy goatee scoured the
newspapers, not just the Times, the News and the Post, but the
local Riverdale papers also.
He couldn't figure out why the crime hadn't made the
papers. After all,
this wasn't some drug dealer in Hunts Point.
The old man lived in a big house in Wave Hill, the ritziest
part of Riverdale). He
had money. Could it
be that the police convinced the media to squelch stories about
the old man's death in order to avoid tipping their hand about the
investigation? The
police were in pursuit, he was convinced, but were playing mind
games. In fact, Amann
had, without knowing it, committed the perfect crime.
Still, he waited for the day the ax would fall. *
* * * Alfred
Hunt Howell was a remarkable man.
A native of Wyoming, Ohio, he graduated from Princeton,
moved to Riverdale in the late 1940s, and started a career at
Citibank, eventually becoming a vice-president for pension fund
investments. He
retired in 1972 and began what amounted to a second career as a
scholar and philanthropist. He
enrolled at Columbia University, learned Arabic, and studied
history and Middle Eastern studies.
At age 80, he earned his doctorate in medieval history.
In between the time he earned his masters and his
doctorate, he published a book on philosophy and theology, Who
Made You? Theology, Science and Human Responsibility (Praeger
1989). In
his spare time, he collected rare books and was active in the
Grolier Club, the library and gathering place for book-lovers on
the East Side of Manhattan, and served for a time as its
president. He was a
trustee of the Frick Collection and a longtime benefactor of the
Young Men's Christian Association, where he served as trustee,
board chairman and president at the local, state and national
levels. Four
months after Dr. Howell died, Amann, then 23, was arrested while
driving in a stolen car in the Washington Heights section of
Manhattan. Per police
department policy, a veteran detective named Gennaro Giorgio of
the 34th Precinct debriefed him and asked him about other crimes,
other criminals he may have known about.
A
car thief and an occasional house burglar, Amann had one burglary
conviction on his record. To
Giorgio, he talked about a robbery he'd "heard about"
and a burglary that he'd already been arrested for.
But then he admitted to something new.
Amann told Giorgio that he knew about a robbery at a big
house in Riverdale in which "an old man was hurt."
Amann
told Giorgio that he didn't actually participate in the robbery,
that he was across the street.
But he knew the crooks involved, Michael Colon and Michael
Russo. He said he
heard four or five shots from inside the house before the burglars
walked out, Colon with blood on his pants.
Colon and Russo, like Amann, lived up in Riverdale. Giorgio
placed a call to the 50th precinct, which covers Riverdale, and
told them Amann's story about the burglary and the old man.
Detectives there checked crime reports and a book called
the unusual incidents report.
They said they had no record of the robbery or of shots
being fired. They
certainly hadn't heard anything about an old man being shot.
Amann was booked for possession of stolen property and
released on bail. Nick
Amann was born in Denmark and came to New York with his mother
Cecelia Iscowich when he was three years old.
He grew up in Riverdale on Greystone Avenue, but is still a
Danish national. Much
later, when Frank Viggiano, the Deputy Chief Investigator for the
Bronx District Attorney checked the records, he found that Amann
was one of only two Danish nationals registered in the New York
State criminal justice system.
The other was Annette Sorensen, the Danish mother arrested
in 1997 for leaving her baby in a stroller outside a restaurant in
the East Village. Not
for that reason alone, Viggiano, whose jet-black hair gives him
the look of Roy Scheider in "Jaws," calls Amann's case,
involving a mansion, a butler, a brooding Dane, and the Bronx, the
"strangest I have seen" in his 25 years as a cop, 15
years as a Bronx homicide detective, followed by eight years with
the District Attorney's office. Viggiano
would learn that Amann was a car buff with a particular knack for
stealing the objects of his passion.
He would boost a car and then find another of the exact
same make, model, color and year.
He would then steal the license plates off the second car
and switch them with the ones on the car he was now driving.
That way if a cop did run his plates, the car would not
have been reported stolen. He
would also contact a friend who worked at an insurance company and
find out the name and address of the owner of the plates he was
now displaying. If he
got pulled over, he could say he forgot the registration, but that
he had borrowed the car from his "friend," the owner of
the plates. He tended
to drive the car around for a while, just because he loved cars.
Then he would park it in a prominent place and call the
police and report it abandoned just to make sure the vehicle came
to no harm. Amann
remembered tiny details about every car he ever stole. As
a house burglar, his method was to steal a dark-colored sedan of
the kind used by car services.
Dressed in a jacket and tie, he would drive to a house he
felt like robbing and knock on the front door.
If someone answered, he'd ask if this was the house where
someone called for a car. If
no one was home, he'd look for a way to break in. But
Nick Amann was not a killer and there was no particular reason to
believe he had anything to do with a murder, let alone a murder
that was never counted as murder.
He had pleaded guilty to forging checks, to burglary, to
criminal possession of stolen property, and to petty larceny.
For his crimes, he had been placed on probation.
Three-and-a-half
months later, on Nov. 15, 1996, detectives Michael Pineau and his
supervisor Douglas Buschel of the Harrison, New York, police
department were on their way to interrogate a suspect who had been
arrested in Queens when they got a call about a burglar alarm that
had just gone off. On
the way they saw a black Lincoln with a broken window parked on
the side of the road. The
driver, dressed like a chauffeur, was outside the car leaning into
the back seat. The
detectives passed the car at first, but then decided to go back
and investigate. Pineau
approached the driver from behind and said, "Stop, I'm a
policeman and I have a gun."
Amann answered, "So do I."
Pineau took the gun from Amann's belt and saw it to be an
air gun that shoots pellets rather than real bullets.
As they cuffed him, the detectives realized that Amann had
been dividing and organizing the loot from the burglary, mostly
jewelry. It seemed
Amann was dividing the real stuff from the costume jewelry he had
stolen. When
Buschel and Pineau got Amann back to the station, they like the
detectives in the 34th questioned him about other crimes, other
criminals. This time
Amann had been caught red-handed, not just with the goods, but in
a situation that proved he did the robbery.
So he had every reason to cooperate.
Amann told the detectives about some burglaries in
Westchester, as well as one in the Bronx, mentioning again a big
house in the Bronx where an old man got hurt.
The detectives thought Amann might be the key to several
recent house thefts, one in Harrison and others in nearby towns. They
put Amann in a car and said "show us."
Amann
directed the detectives to several homes in Westchester County
that had been robbed. He
had a good memory of where the houses were and the best way to
drive to them. He
also knew what had been robbed and where it might have been
fenced. His
information seemed so reliable, that the detectives decided to
cross the county line and have Amann show them the big house in
Riverdale. Amann
didn't know the address, but he did find the house, which turned
out to be 4602 Palisade Avenue.
At the house, he repeated what he had told Giorgio but
added some telling detail. He
said that he was outside while Colon and Russo went inside.
Colon stayed on the first floor, he said, while Russo went
upstairs. He said he
heard four or five shots, after which Colon ran upstairs.
When they came down, Colon had blood on his pants and said
to Russo, "You did not have to do that to the old man."
According to Amann, he was driving a stolen Acura that day,
while Colon and Russo had arrived in a NYNEX truck, also stolen
from a NYNEX yard on Jerome Avenue.
Pineau
and Buschel called the 50th Precinct and told them what Amann had
said. But the Bronx
detectives said again that they had no crime, no incident matching
Amann's story. The
Bronx wasn't really their business anyway, so they took Amann back
to Harrison and called the Westchester district attorney. In
Pineau's view, Amann was willing to talk about other crimes
because he knew he'd been caught red-handed on the Harrison job
and he wanted to be on the record as cooperative so he could get a
deal on sentencing. In
fact, he was able to arrange a plea bargain that incorporated all
his Westchester robberies for which he was sentenced to a
three-year term. In
the interim, Amann was being held in the Westchester County jail
where Pineau and Buschel would return periodically to discuss
various burglaries that Amann might have had a hand in or known
about. And each time,
Amann would ask the detectives if they had any news about the big
house in Riverdale or the old man. Over
the next several weeks, Amann fleshed out his story.
On Jan. 2, 1997, Amann gave a list of items that had been
robbed from 4602 Palisade Ave.
Colon and Russo had stolen crystal glasses in
a wooden case, four sterling silver candlestick holders,
cash from a wallet, some liquor, stamps from a collection, and a
tool for removing lug nuts that plugged into a car's cigarette
lighter. He added
that Russo shot the old man as he emerged from his bathroom and
that one of them had sold the candlesticks at T. Fox, a secondhand
store on Broadway in Riverdale that deals in gold and rare coins.
Amann said he tried to sell the stamps at a store in
Manhattan, but that, according to the clerk, two of the stamps
were not genuine so he ripped them up. On
January 17, 1997, Pineau
was picking up a prisoner at the jail when Amann approached him
and asked whether he had found out anything about Palisade Avenue.
He told the detective that he had something to tell him.
But he said he couldn't talk where he was and asked Pineau
to come back and see him later.
A
few days later, Pineau and Buschel both went to see Amann.
This time and for the first time, he put himself inside
4602 Palisade Ave. Amann
said he backed the Acura into the garage while Colon and Russo
parked the NYNEX truck in the driveway.
Amann said he stayed in the basement while his confederates
went upstairs to the kitchen and the second floor.
After the shots were fired, Colon came down with the shoe
box full of stamps, the bottles of liquor, and the candlestick
holders. Amann, for
his part, took the lug nut remover from the basement workroom.
Pineau didn't understand why Amann was so insistent, but he
was curious enough to return to Riverdale and to 4602 Palisade
Ave. to find out what, if anything, had happened there.
Pineau knocked on the front door and then looked in the
window. The house was
completely empty. He
then rang a neighbor's doorbell and asked if anything had happened
in the house where Howell lived.
A woman who answered the door told him that an old man had
died in that house. The
rumor was he had fallen down a flight of stairs.
The
next day Pineau got a call from a woman named Phyllis Criscoli.
Criscoli works at the Cleveland H. Dodge Foundation, a
charity based in the Bronx of which Howell had been a director.
She had been with Howell the day he died.
Criscoli put Pineau in touch with one of Howell's sons,
Alfred Hunt Howell, Jr., a banker in Washington D.C., who goes by
the name Hunt. Pineau
told Hunt about what Amann had been saying about the house being
robbed and shots being fired.
He offered him a list of items that Amann said were stolen.
Dr. Howell had been in the process of moving and the movers
had compiled a list of items to be moved.
Sure enough, some of the items Amann listed were gone, but
were assumed to have disappeared in transit. "I
hate to be the one to tell you this," Pineau told the son.
"But this is what this person [Amann] has been telling
me." He
expressed the view that Amann had definitely participated in a
robbery of the house. He
said also that Dr. Howell might have been murdered.
Twenty-five
years earlier, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau had
lived in Wave Hill and he still knew some of the people in the
area, including Dr. Howell. A
couple of his old neighbors called him he says, as did Howell's
son, who had known Morgenthau's children.
When Morgenthau got word of Pineau's investigation, he
called NYPD First Deputy Commissioner Patrick Kelleher and asked
him to look into the situation. Within days, Pineau got a call
from detectives in the 50th Precinct and Assistant District
Attorney Antonio Castro, Deputy Chief of Homicide, was assigned to
the case. Castro,
a 12-year veteran of the district attorney's office, knew three
things. The first was
that Amann, if his story was true, had already admitted enough to
be guilty of felony murder. He
knew that he could not rely on the story being true.
Finally he knew that time was on his side since Amann was
now serving a two-to-four year term at the Adirondack Correctional
Facility in Ray Brook, New York.
His first move was to assign Viggiano to the case.
Viggiano brought in John Tierney, who joined the office a
few months later after a long career as a detective with the NYPD
in the Bronx and a brief, unhappy stint working in corporate
security for a Wall Street brokerage. Viggiano
contacted the 50th Precinct and learned that there had been no
sign of forced entry and that there was nothing out of place.
He learned that Howell was an old man with a heart
condition. He learned
that although Howell was found in a pool of blood, his own doctor
believed he had had a heart attack or a stroke, fallen down and
hit his head on a bed post. The
amount of blood was caused, the doctor believed by the fact that
he was on Coumadin, which could lead to excessive bleeding from
even a minor injury and certainly from a head wound.
On the other hand, Amann was saying that Howell had been
shot, perhaps as many as five times.
Was it possible for bullet wounds to escape notice? Viggiano
learned from the family that Howell's body had been cremated.
No one at the funeral crematorium actually opened the body
bag, so the detective traveled to Pittsburgh and to the Homewood
Cemetery where the ashes were buried.
With the family's consent, Viggiano had the ashes exhumed
and sent to the police department lab for analysis.
Tests for traces of lead came up negative.
Though he believes the NYPD lab to be equal to any in the
country, he sent the ashes to the FBI lab in Virginia as well.
Technicians there found some signs of metal, but nothing
conclusive. Viggiano
and Tierney then went to Howell's home.
At this point, over a year after Howell died, the house had
been sold and was undergoing a gut renovation.
Still the detectives had the entire house dusted for prints
and checked for bullet holes in the bedroom where Howell died.
To no one's surprise, they came up empty.
By
the time they went to the Adirondack Correctional Facility in
September to see Amann, eight months had lapsed since Amann last
spoke to Pineau and Buschel.
During the first conversation, Amann essentially repeated
his earlier story: he watched the house from across the street and
later waited in the garage while Colon and Russo went upstairs.
He said Russo fired the shots which Amann only heard.
Amann said he saw the gun, which was silver with a wooden
handle and looked like a .22 caliber.
Amann told the detectives that Russo told him, "There
was a guy upstairs and he put a cap in him." The
conversation went on for hours because Amann "couldn't shut
up," Tierney said. "He
just kept talking, talking talking-- talking about his whole life,
his tales of woe from childhood on."
Amann, it seems, was never very popular in school and he
missed having a father growing up.
They talked a lot about cars.
Solid, with rounded, Irish-cop features, Tierney played the
good listener, sharing an occasional story about the old
neighborhood (Tierney was raised in Kingsbridge, right next door
to Riverdale) but made a mental note of certain points to use
later on. The one
that stood out was Amann saying, "I'm looking and I see the
old man in the kitchen."
After
taking a break to inform Castro what was happening, Tierney and
Viggiano went back to him. "How
did you know the old man was in the kitchen?" Tierney asked.
Amann said he saw him from across the street.
But Tierney knew from his own observations that it was
impossible to see into the kitchen from where Amann sat.
"You're full of shit," Tierney said.
"You were in the house and you even ate food
there." Amann
stopped talking. He
looked at the detective and said, "You got me." Howell's
butler had told the detectives that on the day after the night of
his employer's death, he had noticed that three boxes of fig
newtons were missing from the pantry.
He thought nothing of it, though, until he learned that
Howell had been murdered. But
now, the fig newtons provided the key to putting Amann inside the
house. Then
Amann put himself upstairs. He
said when he heard the shots, he and Colon ran to the bedroom
where he saw the old man face down "choking on his own
blood." Amann
admitted he picked up the man's wallet, which was lying on the
bed, thought about taking some credit cards, but decided against
it. On the way out of
the bedroom Amann cleaned the blood off his shoes with toilet
paper and jumped over the body to avoid tracking more blood.
Russo, however, stepped on the man's back, and the man
growled, Amann said. Making
their way back to the garage, Amann said the three of them helped
themselves to some glass figurines and the candlesticks.
Amann said also that he didn't think of calling for help
for the old man, even anonymously, because he was scared of being
implicated in what Russo had done.
"I was worried about saving my own ass," Amann
said. On
leaving Adirondack, Viggiano, Tierney and Castro had all they
needed. Even if Amann
was just a lookout-- and he had now admitted to being more than
that-- his involvement in the robbery made him legally culpable.
Under a doctrine known as felony murder, he was as guilty
of murder as if he had pulled the trigger himself.
But Amann had already proven himself a liar.
They decided not to settle on the confession, but to seek
the truth. In this,
Tierney says, they were taking a risk.
Because if they went back to Amann with more evidence, he
could recant his earlier confession. To
date, no one in law enforcement had spoken to Colon, who Amann
said was in the house, or to Russo, who Amann said had fired the
shots. Viggiano and
Tierney checked their backgrounds.
They were, in Tierney's words, "tough, knockaround
guys," but had no criminal records.
He and Tierney went to see them to ask about Howell and
about Amann. Viggiano
visited Colon and Russo, who both denied any involvement in
robbing Howell's house or his death.
They were at work at the time of the robbery.
They admitted that they did know Amann, but they were far
from friends. Amann,
they said, used to hang around Riverdale, especially the area near
Ewen Park, where they also lived.
Amann would show up driving a new, expensive car and he'd
offer rides to girls in the neighborhood, many of whom accepted.
Colon and Russo suspected he was a thief and disliked him.
They told him to stop coming around.
When Amann didn't listen, they bullied him and once beat
him badly enough to dislocate his shoulder.
There was, then, no way that they would ever join Amann in
a burglary, the lawyers said.
And on the day in question, their employers and payroll
records confirmed they were both at work.
Tierney and Viggiano decided that by implicating Colon and
Russo Amann was killing two birds with one stone. The
detectives now knew Amann had likely acted alone.
But they still needed physical evidence to tie him to the
crime, which would leave him no wiggle room.
They went to T. Fox.
The owner of the store denied he knew Amann.
But when Castro got a warrant that would have permitted him
to search through the store's entire inventory and all its
records, he produced a a
photocopy of Amann's resident alien card, which he made when he
bought the candlesticks from the thief.
(A city ordinance requires all pawnshops or secondhand
stores to make a copy of the ID of anyone from whom they purchase
goods.) The
owner said he no longer had the candlesticks themselves, having
melted them down for the silver months earlier. Amann
had told Pineau and Buschel that he had stolen an electric lug nut
remover from the garage. The
fig newtons were long digested.
The candlesticks, so it was said, had been melted down.
But maybe the lug nut remover was still out there.
As a thief, Amann had a bit of Robin Hood about him.
He liked to share some of what he stole as a way of
currying favor in the neighborhood.
He told the detectives that he'd given the lug nut remover
to a tall skinny guy with huge fang teeth named Dirty Richie.
Amann said he didn't know Dirty Richie's last name or where
he lived exactly. But
he did know he would walk his dog, a big Akita, on the streets
near Manhattan College. Richie
might have been a crook at one time.
But he came by his nickname honestly-- he was literally
dirty. Richie was
what Tierney called a half-assed mechanic.
He got dirty from working on cars, his own and friends'.
Recently, he'd started tinkering with computers as well.
As
a homicide detective, Tierney was specialized in finding
fugitives. In fact,
when his old boss on Bronx Homicide, Vernon Gerberth, was revising
his book Practical Homicide Investigation, he asked Tierney
to draft the chapter on tracking escaped killers. Finding
Dirty Richie should have been cake, but Tierney couldn't catch a
break. He walked in
and out of bars in Riverdale and Kingsbridge asking if anyone knew
a guy named Dirty Richie. People
did, but no one knew anything more, like an address or a last
name. He would
canvass the street asking dog owners if they had ever seen a tall,
dirty kid with an Akita. Some
had, but none knew who he was.
He even asked the kids in a Manhattan College dorm to keep
an eye out. Tierney
would get calls at home from the students, saying the guy with the
dog was nearby. But
by the time the call came, Dirty Richie was already gone.
Finally,
Tierney got a call from a student, who said he was looking at
Richie-- or who he assumed was Richie-- from his dormitory window.
Tierney asked him to follow the guy and find out where he
lived. The student
did as told, and managed to track Richie to a block of two-family
houses on Irwin Avenue. But
the student lost the trail before Richie got where he was going. Tierney
called Viggiano, and the pair went house to house, telling
residents that they were investigating a case where a child was
bitten by an Akita. One
of the folks on Irwin Avenue pointed to a house where they said a
kid with an Akita would come and go-- again he didn't know his
name. The detectives
rang the bell, but found not Richie but a Chinese woman.
The woman said she'd moved in recently, but when she did
the place was filthy, full of dog shit and white hair.
This was, it seemed, Richie's place, but he'd moved out. The
Chinese woman wasn't sure but she thought Richie still lived
elsewhere on the block, perhaps renting a basement apartment.
Viggiano and Tierney started walking and peeking into
basement windows. Tierney
looked into one, where he saw a shambles and a computer.
"Frank," Tierney said, "We got him.
This is Dirty Richie." When
Richie, whose full name was Richie Feuerstein returned home, he
went inside and came out with the lug nut remover.
Later, the butler Alexander identified the tool as the one
that belonged to Howell. Another
year had passed before Tierney and Viggiano made the 10-hour drive
to see Amann at the Bare Hill Correctional Facility in Malone, New
York, near the Canadian border.
Amann was angry at the detectives at first because their
labeling him a murder suspect had caused becorrections officials
to transfer him in the middle of the night from Adirondack.
But the detectives gave him some car magazines and he
started talking again. They
confronted him with the fact that Colon and Russo were elsewhere
when Howell died, and with the photo they'd gotten from T. Fox.
"Now he started looking like he really fucked
up," Tierney recalled, and he started inventing theories
about how his old enemies could have faked their alibis.
The
detectives wouldn't have it and they showed Amann pictures of the
house that they had taken when they went back to it, when it was
being renovated. The
pictures showed floor boards being pulled up, wallboards being
yanked out, electrical wiring exposed.
Viggiano told him they pulled the place apart looking for
fingerprints and ballistics and asked Amann to guess what they'd
found. Amann looked
at the detective and rubbed his thumb and index fingers together.
"I knew I should have worn gloves," he said.
Finally, he was ready. "I
was in the house alone," Amann said.
"I was upstairs in the study across from the bedroom
looking in a closet at a big stereo.
This old man approached me while I was kneeling down.
He had a gun in his hand.
I kicked him and he fell back.
I grabbed the gun and hit him in the face.
I then shot him in the chest.
He looked at me and tried to grab me again.
I kept firing at him until he stopped moving.
Blood was pouring out everywhere." Amann
identified the lug nut remover he'd give to Dirty Richie and
described the gun he'd used as a
.22 caliber that said "High Sierra" on the side.
He said he had tried to sell the gun, but couldn't be sure
whether he'd sold it or thrown it into the Hudson River near the
Riverdale train station. He admitted he tried to finger Russo and
Colon because he "hated them and had had problems with them
for a long time." Amann
signed a confession and repeated it on videotape. On
Oct. 29, 1998, a Bronx County grand jury indicted Amann on two
counts of murder in the first degree, three counts of murder in
the second degree and for robbery, burglary, criminal possession
of stolen property, and criminal possession of a weapon.
As is typical, the indictment is redundant, pleading
various theories of Amann's crimes in the alternative.
The indictment accuses Nikolaj Amann of "caus[ing] the
death of Alfred Hunt Howell by striking him with a dangerous
instrument," not shooting him.
I asked Castro about the discrepancy.
He said that since they had no body, and no gun (Viggiano
had police scuba divers search the river, but they found nothing)
there was no proof beyond Amann's statement that Howell had been
shot. Also, legally
there is no difference between killing a man by shooting him as
opposed to striking him. When
Castro obtained the indictment, Amann was still serving time
upstate on his burglary convictions.
Bronx Supreme Court Justice Roger Hayes appointed Roy
Schwartz to represent Amann in his possible trial or for his plea
bargain. (Amann had
had two other lawyers previously, but he fired them.)
During this time, the Danish consulate took an interest in
the case, in order to make sure, according to consulate officials,
that Amann was treated no differently than a U.S. Citizen would be
treated. The
consulate hired a lawyer, who appeared whenever Amann was in
court. As the murder
case dragged on, Amann's release date on his burglary conviction
drew near.
Before
he was tried, Amann's prison term on the earlier burglary
conviction ran out. Since
he was an alien, Amann was released into the custody of the
Immigration and Naturalization Service, who were ready to deport
him back to Denmark. All
this was unknown to Castro. When
he called Bare Hill to tell them he needed Amann for his
sentencing hearing, prison officials said he was gone.
"What do you mean 'gone'?" Castro demanded. Amann
had been let out a
few days earlier. The
INS had him. Castro
found out that the killer was now in the INS detention facility on
Varick Street in downtown Manhattan.
When Viggiano went down to get him, he was hours away from
being put on an airplane to Copenhagen.
Had he landed there and met his father, whom he barely
knew, he might have walked away because Denmark will not extradite
one of its citizens to a country where he could face the death
penalty.
Schwartz
and Castro reached an agreement.
Amann would plead guilty to one count of manslaughter in
the first degree and one count of burglary in the first degree.
As part of the bargain, Amann swore in open court that he
shot Howell. He was
sentenced to a total of 15 years imprisonment.
In Schwartz's view, this was "a very good deal"
for Amann. He was
able to plead to the lesser count, both he and Castro said,
because there was still no physical evidence that Howell had been
murdered. Amann had
confessed in writing and on videotape, but still "he could
always say they forced him into it, that type of thing,"
Schwartz said. Why
did he confess? Why
did Amann, who by all accounts is a bright guy, keep talking and
talking, even at a time when no one was looking for him.
I wanted to ask Amann, but my several letters to him at the
maximum security Clinton Correctional Facility, his current
prison, also near the
Canadian border, went unanswered.
I called his mother, who still lives in the Bronx, but she
hung up on me. I
asked Nancy C., his ex-girlfriend, to whom he confessed as
well, but she refused to talk about Amann, demanded to know how I
had gotten her name, and threatened to sue me.
The
answer the detectives give, both in Westchester and in the Bronx,
is that, in Giorgio's words, "You have some people who love
the sound of their own voice.
Nick was a talker."
He was
also trying to help himself, the detective say.
He knew he had been caught red-handed by the police in
Harrison and he figured he could reduce his sentence by offering
information about other crimes.
He thought, in Schwartz's view, "he could ingratiate
himself by being a snitch."
The detectives, of course, encouraged this belief. The
Bronx detectives believe that Amann thought he could trick them.
He believed that the whole world was looking for him and
there would come a day when he would have to answer questions
about the house at 4602 Palisade Ave.
In offering information, he thought he could put the crime
off on Russo and Colon, whom he hated anyway, and that the cops
wouldn't follow up. "I
guess maybe he believed, and it's good for us, that we're as
stupid as some people make us out to be," Giorgio said. All
of this is no doubt true. But
still there are questions that only Amann can answer.
Why, for example, did he persist in bringing up the
Palisade Avenue burglary even after detectives ignored his first
confessions? Did he
really believe that his story about Colon and Russo would be taken
at face value, even after the men he accused denied it, as they
obviously would? Was
he just playing the system, seeking better treatment, all without
calling a lawyer? Or
was guilt at work? Did
Amann, in his heart of hearts, want to be caught, but was unable
to admit to his crimes directly. Then
there is the question of whether Amann really shot Howell.
He said he did, of course.
But he said a lot of other things, too.
He fired four shots or more, but no one heard any noise.
Is it really possible for at least half a dozen people to
look at a body, to move it, and that not one would notice the five
bullet holes that were supposedly there?
What was Amann doing with a gun in the first place
considering that he never had one any of the other times he was
arrested? Amann did
have an air gun when he was arrested in Harrison, and he did say
he took the gun from the old man, but his family told Castro that
Howell did not own a gun. Castro,
for his part, believes that Amann did shoot Howell and that, at
the end, he had no motive to lie.
But he concedes that only Amann knows for sure. My
theory is that Amann never fired a gun.
I believe that Howell surprised him, that he hit Howell,
perhaps with a candlestick, and knocked him down.
Howell then banged his head and bled to death.
Amann made up the story about Russo shooting the old man,
and then decided to stick with it, or at least part of it, even
when he said it was him who did the killing. I would like to send Amann a copy of this article and ask him if he lied, even as he confessed, right up to the time he entered prison. I would like him to read it as he notches off the roughly 5,328 days until his release. I would like him to reconsider his story as he lies in bed at night dreaming about Corvettes and BMWs. Perhaps then he will offer a true confession. But for now, Nikolaj Amann is done talking. |
