Death on the River Read online

“No,” she said. Still not looking at Skarkas—still maintaining a firmly erect spine. She said that she had to go home and take care of her cat and asked to finish the discussion later.

  “Angelika, the reality is this, okay?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You killed Vinny. Right?”

  “You’re telling me.”

  “No, I am asking the question and I want to you to tell me the truth.”

  “I am telling you the truth.”

  “What is the answer to the question?”

  “I didn’t want him—”

  Skarkas cut her off, “Angelika, what is the true answer to that question?”

  “All right. I’ll give you the fucking statement.”

  “What is it?”

  “I wanted him dead and now he’s gone. And I’m okay with it. I’m okay with it.”

  “That’s not good enough.”

  “I want to do my yoga and I need to pee again from that fucking coffee.”

  “Angelika, here’s the thing: when somebody is dead, there’s a certain amount of accountability we all have to take.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay. And you obviously have a level of accountability that you have to take.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Am I going to jail?”

  “Yes. I’d say it’s a pretty good possibility, yes.”

  She nodded.

  “I’m thinking you knew that, right, when you came here?”

  “No. What about my cat?”

  “We’ll take care of your cat, I promise you that. Is there someone you want us to call to come get that cat, that you feel comfortable caring for it?”

  After some protesting, Angelika gave him a few names and Skarkas left the room to find someone to take her to the bathroom. As soon as he departed, Angelika eased into a casual slouch, as if a huge burden had been lifted from her shoulders. Moments later, Skarkas popped open the door to let her know that her cat had already been taken care of by Laura—he had food and water and was doing fine.

  Every minute must have felt like eternity as she sat in that bland room with no object to take her mind off her current state of affairs. How could she keep her mind focused? How worried was she about going to jail that night? What did she expect? The abyss of the unknown stretched in front of her and the investigators made it clear that she only had herself to blame.

  When Skarkas returned, he asked again about the location of the cell phone she’d lost. She again said she did not know where it was and denied that she had destroyed it.

  Skarkas then asked a series of questions that would become a key point of contention with the defense team. “Your journals, what were they written in?”

  “Russian, but some in English.”

  “But obviously, you’re well versed in reading and writing in English.”

  “My native language is Russian.”

  “But you can read and write in the English language, correct?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Skarkas asked if she wanted coffee and she expressed a desire for tea. A few minutes later, a female in uniform walked in with a tray and served it to her.

  The investigator asked a few more questions and then told her that they had background and paperwork to do and he would check with her later. Again, as soon as he left the room Angelika’s posture relaxed.

  After sipping some tea, she got to her feet and practiced yoga breathing and some basic poses. On occasion, her poses lapsed into awkward stillness, as if the reality of her situation was interfering with her ability to maintain her focus on yoga.

  Skarkas came back with more questions about some belongings in the apartment she’d shared with Vince. He wanted to know where to find the keys for the lock boxes, her diaries, and any weapons. Angelika provided what information she could and the investigator started to leave the room.

  “May I ask you a question?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Miranda warning. What is Miranda? Who is Miranda?”

  “That’s what Donnie read you—”

  “I know. who is Miranda? Why that name?”

  “That was named after a case.”

  “Which case?”

  “The People versus Miranda.”

  “A case?”

  “A court case.”

  “Who versus Miranda?”

  “The People.”

  “So, a person is named Miranda. Who was Miranda?”

  “That was a person who got arrested.”

  “I want to know the story.”

  “You’re going to have to look it up.”

  “Give me my phone,” she said with a grin.

  Skarkas laughed and exited. When he returned, Angelika was sitting cross-legged on the floor. She remained there, seeming more relaxed in his presence that she had been previously. He questioned her further about Vince’s life insurance policy. She stuck by her original story: that it was Vince’s idea and she had no idea about the amount of money involved.

  As soon as the investigator departed, she recommenced her yoga practice, incorporating ujjayi breathing and more challenging poses than earlier. She appeared to achieve a higher level of focus this time around. When she came to the end of her routine, she relaxed in Savasana, or corpse pose. Then, after a swig of water, she kneeled by the table and rested her head on her folded arms.

  By midnight, she’d been in the room alone for more than an hour and a half. A few minutes after midnight, Investigator DeQuarto entered the room to see if she needed anything. All she wanted, she said, was to go outside. DeQuarto said he’d ask his boss for her.

  Forty minutes later, as she was still alone and sitting at the table, the boredom had to have been driving her batty. Shortly after 1:00 am, she reread the Miranda warning, set it down, and started playing hopscotch. Finally, a female officer led her out of the room for a much-needed change of scenery. When she returned to the room, just after 2:00, she sat down in the far corner where nothing but a fraction of her arm and skirt were visible to the security camera, as if she just realized the position of the device and how to avoid it.

  Finally, DeQuarto and Skarkas entered the room with a third man, a Russian interpreter. “Angelika, we found someone from your home country,” DeQuarto said. He introduced the man and asked her if she wanted to sit up at the table, but she declined.

  “We just have a couple of quick things. In the house, Vinny had guns, right?” DeQuarto asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know, technically, what kind of guns they were?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Because there’s one gun that’s missing. There are magazines for it and bullets for it, but the gun’s not there. Do you know where that one gun might be? Have you seen all of his guns?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “I don’t know how many he had, maybe four.”

  “The fourth one’s not there.”

  “I remember seeing the rifle. I remember seeing one handgun. I think he had another.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “Yeah.”

  DeQuarto moved on. “As far as your diary here, I’ve taken a bit of a look. Pretty interesting stuff. But at the end of it, does it just end, or is there another continuation page or another diary that continues from this one?”

  “On this last page here, obviously I can decipher this.…”

  The Russian interpreter stepped in and spoke to her in Russian, reading from the last page. After they had conversed for a while, Skarkas stepped in. “Angelika, where’s the plug?”

  “It’s in the drawer,” she whined.

  “That’s for the oar.”

  “The ring was in the drawer then?” she asked.

  “Yep. Where’s the plug?”

  Angelika could not—or would not—give an answer. Skarkas kept pressing. “If we put divers in the water over there, are we going to find it?”

  She then insisted that it was in the car but could not sa
y where. As the questioning continued, DeQuarto left the room.

  “Obviously,” Skarkas said, “if we find it in the water, you’ve just destroyed your credibility with that. I don’t care if you tell us, ‘Yeah I took it out before we left the island.’ That makes sense. ‘I tossed it in the river,’ that’s great. Whatever. But it was taken out before that, you said, so it’s either in the car or in your apartment.”

  “Yes.”

  “So, if we have to send someone back there to look for it, where is the most likely place to find it?”

  “In the car.”

  “Where would it be in the car? In the trunk? In the seat? In the glove box?”

  Angelika mentioned a couple of possibilities and added, “Obviously, I don’t remember.” She added that since she had a little kitten, it could have been knocked around anywhere.

  “You think about it and let me know,” Skarkas said, and left the room. The interpreter followed him out.

  At 2:30 am, a female guard walked in and asked Angelika to stand. When she did, the guard led her out of the interview room.

  The eleven-hour ordeal was over. A new one was about to begin.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  On Monday, after Angelika Graswald had spent eleven hours in an interrogation room, Investigator DeQuarto filed a felony complaint against her stating that she had committed second-degree murder, intentionally causing the death of Vince Viafore.

  The document, however, contained no indication of how she’d accomplished this act of second-degree murder.

  Later that day, Major Patrick Regan, the Troop F Commander of the New York State Police, stood before reporters at the state police barracks in Middletown and read a statement: “‘The New York State Police at Montgomery and the Orange County District Attorney’s Office announce the arrest of Angelika Graswald, age thirty-five, of Poughkeepsie, New York, for murder in the second degree, a Class A-one felony.

  “‘On Sunday evening, April 19, 2015, state police responded to a report of a missing kayaker on the Hudson River. At approximately seven forty pm, Angelika Graswald contacted Orange County nine-one-one and reported that she and her fiancé, Vincent Viafore, both of Poughkeepsie, New York, were kayaking on the Hudson in between Plum Point and Bannerman Island. Graswald reported to nine-one-one that Viafore’s kayak capsized due to choppy waters and she could not locate him in the river.

  “On Wednesday, April 29, 2015, State Police Investigators who had been pursuing leads in this case obtained enough information to charge Graswald with intentionally causing the death of Viafore.

  “The investigation into the circumstances surrounding the murder remains ongoing. Anyone with information is requested to contact the New York State Police.…

  “Graswald was arraigned in the Town of New Windsor Court under the Honorable Richard W. Thorpe and remanded to Orange County Jail without bail.

  “The body of Vincent Viafore is yet to be located and efforts to locate him remain ongoing. The New York State Police are seeking the assistance of the boaters, hikers, and fishermen on both sides of the Hudson in locating Mr. Viafore’s body and preserving the discovery area for any possible forensic evidence that may exist. If anybody encounters anything that they believe might be connected to this incident, they are asked to call the New York State Police before disturbing anything in the area of the find.

  “In efforts to pinpoint or reconstruct the last hours, minutes, and seconds of Mr. Viafore’s life, the investigators have maintained contact with Ms. Graswald. Initially, we believed her to be a survivor of a tragic accident. [While] … trying to piece together the best places to locate him in the river and what may have led to what occurred, some inconsistencies of the accounts she gave of those last minutes led investigators to be suspicious.”

  When a reporter asked about the inconsistencies, Major Regan responded, “She implicated herself in her involvement in his intentional death.” He added that they believed Vince had been killed in the water, not on the island. “We believe we know what happened. We believe she indicated how this occurred.”

  * * *

  In the immediate aftermath of the charges being filed against Angelika, her friends refused to believe that she could possibly have done anything to harm Vince. Some of his friends found it difficult to accept, too. “I do not want to believe she murdered my friend,” Sean Von Clauss told People magazine. Amanda Bopp, who’d known Vince since before he started dating Angelika, said, “She made him so happy. I know he was so in love with her. I’m not passing judgement on Angelika at all yet. I don’t know what to think.” She added that she found it impossible to believe that the petite woman could have overpowered Vince.

  * * *

  After her arrest and incarceration at the Orange County Jail in Goshen, Angelika, like all inmates, was screened for placement and suicidal ideation. Although she was not deemed at risk of taking her own life by standard assessment procedures, the transporting officer reported that he thought she might be, because she was acting in a strange, “almost cheerful manner” for someone who had experienced a significant loss. She was placed under “constant supervision” because of his input and “due to the severity of her crime.”

  * * *

  After her arrest, Angelika gave a series of interviews to local and national media. She insisted to Blaise Gomez of News 12 Westchester that she had been falsely accused of intentionally causing Vince’s death. The reason, she believed, was the diary entries she had written about Vince’s interest in rough sex and threesomes. She’d also written that she wished he were dead. She claimed those statements were made in anger during a problematic patch in their relationship. She asserted that she was very much in love with Vince—they loved each other, problems and all. She told People magazine that she felt the police had tricked her into telling them what they wanted to hear. With regards to her suspicious behavior in the immediate aftermath, she told WNBC New York, “Of course I didn’t do it. He was the love of my life. It was a crazy time. I was doing crazy things.”

  * * *

  An attorney with the Legal Aid Society of Orange County prepared for Angelika’s preliminary hearing, scheduled for May 5 before Judge Richard W. Thorpe in the Town of New Windsor. But the hearing was canceled because the grand jury was still in session working on the case.

  Soon after her incarceration, Angelika was sent into lockdown for yelling an expletive at a female corrections officer and adding, “I will spit in your face.” This was the first of four incidents requiring disciplinary action in her first few weeks behind bars.

  May 8 was a consequential day for Angelika. The Embassy of the Republic of Latvia in Washington, D.C., entered the fray, with a fax requesting to be informed about any court dates and their outcomes. Even more pivotal was the arrival of Richard Portale as Angelika’s new defense attorney. Portale had short brown hair, prominent cheekbones, and an engaging smile—when he chose to use it.

  Portale came on the scene with a rather unusual past. He’d begun his career as a campaign consultant for then–Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro, now a Fox News personality. She won reelection in November 1997, and Portale was hired by her office that December.

  His employment there raised a few eyebrows since he had a questionable past—he’d been arrested twice in Niagara Falls. The first arrest occurred on May 29, 1993, when he was at the Pleasuredome dance club and bar with Timothy O’Keefe. When an employee tried to eject O’Keefe for vandalizing the restroom, Portale had allegedly punched the employee in the eye. Ultimately, the charges were dismissed against both. The second time, he was charged with speeding, expired insurance, driving without a seat belt, and driving with an expired license. The violations were settled without a criminal charge.

  After those two incidents, Portale went to Cleveland-Marshall College of Law and spent the following summer working for a lowly six dollars per hour as a law clerk for an attorney in Niagara Falls. Until he graduated from law school in 1997, he earned mone
y as a beer vendor for the Cleveland Indians and, for a short time, as an assistant manager of the Fitness Shops in Lyndhurst, Ohio. Eventually, he settled in New York to work for Pirro and kept out of further trouble for four years, while he worked in the Westchester District Attorney’s Youth Violence/Gang Unit. In his spare time, he played rugby and played it well, competing in the Empire State Games. In 1999, he was named to the USA National Rugby Team.

  Then, in December 2001, he traveled to Florida to compete in a rugby tournament as a member of the semiprofessional New York Knights. He and his teammate Arlen Gerritson were arrested at the Days Inn in Tampa. According to the sheriff’s office, the men had hired two exotic dancers but then decided they wanted sex. When the 18- and 25-year-old women insisted they were only there for dancing, Portale would not let them leave the room, leading to a charge of false imprisonment.

  In addition, one of the women called her bodyguard and when he arrived an altercation broke out. Portale and Gerritson were both charged with battery. Portale’s attorney, Anthony Quinn, said that the charges were an act of revenge against Portale for an accusation he’d made that the women’s bodyguard had stolen items from his teammates’ rooms. Later, one of the alleged victims dropped her complaint and the charges were dropped.

  The district attorney’s office suspended Portale, but he continued to receive his $72,131 annual salary. He officially resigned from his position on January 14, 2002, and went into private practice. In 2015, he took on Angelika’s case.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  On Mother’s Day, according to People magazine, an individual visiting another jail inmate was disturbed by Angelika’s attitude. “She doesn’t look like she’s mourning the death of someone she loved. To me, she’s not well up there,” she said, tapping a finger on her temple. She added that Angelika had flitted around wishing “Happy Mother’s Day” to all visiting moms.

  She talked about the tastiness of the food in jail and laughed uproariously with visiting friends. Was she making the best of a bad situation? Or did she actually like the place—and the media attention that accompanied her situation?