THE DETAILS OF THE MURDER ARE gruesome. The victim was bound with telephone wire and blindfolded with a rag. Her ribs were broken, and bruises discolored portions of her body. The official cause of death was suffocation; she had choked on the pink tissues that had been taped inside her mouth. Her gracious Manhattan apartment had been ransacked and looted of furs, jewelry and money. But what really grated on New York City police Det. Denis O'Sullivan was the victim's age. She was 85 years old.
The 1982 murder of Alice Serghiescu, a frail but formidable widow who lived alone, struck a nerve with the Irish-born detective. Despite a maddening absence of witnesses, hard evidence and immediate suspects, he was determined that justice would somehow be done and that this brave, aristocratic woman, an anachronism of sorts in an increasingly brutal city, would not die unavenged. His obsession turned into more than six years of frustrating, often fruitless legwork crammed in between other cases. But last May, O'Sullivan—by then retired from his $45,000-a-year job—finally broke the unbreakable case. It was, he says simply, something he had to do. "I got to know Alice better than any homicide victim in any investigation that I became involved in," he says. "I honestly felt that I knew her. There were times when I actually spoke to her. I'd say, 'Listen, Alice, tough day. But we're not giving up.' "
It was the kind of murder that has become all too common—and luckily it passed to an uncommon cop. Many nights O'Sullivan would pad into the bedroom where his wife, Terry, 41, a public school special-education teacher's aide, was watching television. "I'd get into bed with the folders," says O'Sullivan. "She'd say, 'Alice again?' " Jimmy O'Sullivan, now 14, was 8 when his dad first took over the investigation. "Alice was the only case that all of the family knew about," says Jimmy. "When he came home from work, we'd go up to him and say, 'How's Alice?' And he'd say, 'Oh, Alice is still eating at me.' When he had a bad day with it, he would go outside by the pool and sit there with the dog, Sully, and cool out."
To this day, O'Sullivan, 47, cannot completely explain why the murder of an aging Romanian immigrant whose last name he cannot pronounce (it's Jer-ghee-ES-ko) had such a profound impact on him. A Vietnam combat veteran, he had spent years dealing with murder and mayhem, and his cop skin had grown thick. One reason for his fixation, he says, may be the four years he worked on the NYPD's Senior Citizens Robbery Squad. "Some big guy, about six-foot-two, 200 pounds, would punch [an elderly woman] right in the face, rip her ring off," he says. "Sometimes he'd pull the skin off or pull her earrings right through. These guys were brutal, and you'd say to yourself, "it's the last f—ing thing that I ever do, I'm going to catch them.' "
Serghiescu no doubt would have approved of O'Sullivan's professionalism. "Alice was a no-nonsense person," says her close friend Mary Williams. "If you were full of malarkey, she wouldn't let you get away with it. She could step on you." James Egan, the superintendent of her Upper West Side apartment building, put it another way. "She was a rather tyrannical person, but not in a malicious sense," he says. "She was from the pseudo-aristocracy from Europe and never lost sight of her former style."
Alice Irimia Gheorghiu's father was a wealthy regional governor in Romania. During World War I she married a general's son, Stefan Theodor Serghiescu. He became a delegate to the League of Nations in Paris, where Alice had studied both French and English as a child. In 1921 the couple moved to New York City so that Stefan could pursue his real love, mathematics. He taught at Columbia University and was director of the school's Mathematics Library when he retired in 1956. He died in 1974.
The Serghiescus, who had no children, led a rather formal life in their spacious, two-bedroom apartment not far from the university. They dressed for dinner every evening. They ate only in the dining room. And they always used a silver service set they had received as a wedding gift. Once, says Mary Williams, she saw Stefan "kiss her hand and thank her for dinner."
Alice's avenger, his associates say, was the kind of cop you'd want on every street corner in the city. "Denis is probably the hardest-working, most dedicated detective I've ever met," says Jim McKenna, the retired commanding officer of the 26th Precinct on Manhattan's Upper West Side. But O'Sullivan didn't just work hard; he worked smart too. "Denis is the type of person who could interview someone at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in the Oval Office or a pusher at 3 o'clock in the morning.... Not all detectives can do that."
At first O'Sullivan was involved only on the periphery of the Serghiescu case. But so disturbing to him was the image of the battered dead woman that he voluntarily ran down leads on his own time for another detective. When that officer was transferred in late 1984, O'Sullivan promptly asked to take over. He was officially assigned the case on New Year's Day, 1985. "I went over to the two-six [26th precinct]," he says. "I spent the whole day reading the case file."
As he made notes, certain facts began to emerge. "The blindfold indicated to me that without a doubt it was somebody she knew," he says. Then there was the fact that Serghiescu had been released from the hospital with a broken hip only two days before her murder. At the hospital's suggestion, she had hired a home-care attendant, a woman named June Plow. "Flow's alibi wasn't good," he says. "They couldn't find her for a week after the murder, and then she said she was at the home of a girlfriend."
O'Sullivan started sifting through Flow's life. It turned out that she had an arrest record for petit larceny. So did her alibi, Patricia Coates, who lived off and on with her sister, Janet. O'Sullivan decided to find out as much as he could about the women. He theorized that one of the three—all of them immigrants from Jamaica—might have had a boyfriend who committed the crime. Or, possibly, one of them might have told an acquaintance something about Alice Serghiescu. "Sometimes you pick up bits of information from places you'd never think of in a million years," he says.
He started by scouring rap sheets and criminal records kept on microfilm in the Bureau of Criminal Investigation in lower Manhattan, hoping to find the names of-people arrested at the same time as any of the three women, whose rap sheets were growing every year. "It's common that people do talk to people about murders while they're in jail," he says. But the search led him down one blind alley after another. A brother of the Coates sisters, doing time in an upstate New York prison for homicide, said he knew nothing. A Jamaican hit man who had once dated Patricia Coates was on the run, a fugitive from a murder charge. An intriguing tip that the three women had committed the crime—that no boyfriends were involved—could not be developed because the tipster disappeared.
But the biggest setback came when O'Sullivan convinced a former boyfriend to tape a telephone call to June Flow. "The guy smooths her into the whole thing," O'Sullivan recalls. Afterward, he says, the boyfriend reported that she told him "everything...what they had taken, the money and the jewelry, and that she didn't really want the old lady to die." But when O'Sullivan turned on the tape recorder, he discovered it had malfunctioned. "It only picked up his side of the conversation," he says. "Her voice wasn't on there at all."
In late 1987, O'Sullivan finally learned about a friend of Patsy Coates's, someone he had never heard of before. It wasn't much—just the nickname Brownie—but it turned out to be the detail that broke the case. Unfortunately, finding Brownie wasn't easy. O'Sullivan still hadn't done it in March 1990, when he was scheduled to retire after 20 years as a cop. He wanted to stay on; he felt he was getting close. But family considerations precluded that. "I had a lot of personal problems with my children during the investigation," he says. His two daughters—Therese, 12, and Meghan, 9—both suffer from cerebral palsy. "A lot of guys in the office said, 'You'll never leave this job until you finish that case,' " he recalls. "It was very hard to decide, but I had to think about my family."
And so he turned over the voluminous case file to Det. Mike Burke, 31, and began a new job as chief of security for Columbia University's real-estate division. "He's very well-respected as a detective. I look up to him," Burke says. "For him to come to me and say, 'Take care of the case,' was an honor." It was also a steady date. Burke met O'Sullivan at least three times a week while the younger detective tracked down Brownie to an upstate New York prison. Brownie, whose name has not been released, pointed Burke (and O'Sullivan) toward another man, known on the street as Johnny. This spring Burke found Johnny, whose last name is being withheld, on the island of Jamaica and persuaded him to come to New-York City. "He had great details on the case," O'Sullivan says. "Johnny was on the money with everything. I was elated. I went crazy!"
O'Sullivan says that according to Johnny, one of the women, whom he knew, told him all about the crime, making admissions about the case that were so damaging that a grand jury indicted all three women in May for murder and robbery. (A trial date has not yet been set.) Flow was already in jail on drug charges, but when Burke brought the Coates sisters to the 26th Precinct, O'Sullivan was waiting, a huge grin on his face. "They weren't too happy to see me," he says. "I said to Patsy, 'Remember when I interviewed you out at Kennedy Airport [after she had been arrested in the late '80s] and I said, "It will never go away"? Remember that? It will never go away.' "
Later, O'Sullivan went out for a beer by himself. "There was a parking spot right in front of Alice's building," he says. "So when I got out, I said, 'Alice, I told you I wouldn't let you down.' " Had Alice been able to reply, says friend Mary Williams, "she might have been impatient that it took so long. Yes, I can hear her say it now: 'What took you so long?' "
—JOE TREEN; VICTORIA BALFOUR in New York City
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