Death on the River Read online

  DeQuarto, remembering the inconsistency with this statement and what she’d told the News 12 reporter, prompted, “Did he say anything else to you?”

  “No,” she said firmly. She then told him about her efforts to reach Vince but how, despite all her paddling, the distance between them kept increasing. “I watched him bobbing up and down in the waves.”

  She described the call to 911, that she’d known she was rambling but couldn’t stop, and the operator’s repeated commands to stay on the line. She told DeQuarto that Vince always worried about her safety, was very protective of her, and always made sure she had everything she needed.

  “When you say he was always protective of you, how did that make you feel?” the investigator asked.

  “Limited,” Angelika said.

  “Limited?”

  Rubbing her hands together again, she said, “Yeah, caged.”

  “Like you wanted to break free.”

  “I just wanted to be myself.”

  “Okay. And how could you accomplish being yourself?”

  “How? Letting go?”

  “Letting go of your relationship? Letting go of Vinny?” DeQuarto pressed. “Did there come a point in your life, particularly on [that] Sunday, when you realized it was the opportunity for you to let go?”

  Angelika admitted that, in a spiritual sense, something had felt off about their return from the island, but she’d set it aside, believing that Barbara—the Bannerman volunteer coordinator—and her husband were watching them from up on the hill and that all would be well.

  “When you went to Bannerman’s Island that day, did it cross your mind that you would be leaving there alone?”

  “Not on the island.”

  “When you were in the water?”

  “When I saw that his boat was starting to sink in the water,” she said, lowering an outstretched hand increment by increment.

  “Why did you think his boat was sinking into the water?”

  “Because the plug had been taken out.”

  “Did you feel relief when you saw him going into the water?”

  “No. I was frustrated with him because he rushed me. He always pushed me and rushed me. ‘Go, go, do this,’ and I’m like, ‘Just give me a minute.’” She added that she felt a bit like that right now.

  DeQuarto explained that it was important that they know everything right now. Angelika had raised up on her knees from her cross-legged position and readjusted her body. When she settled back in the chair, she sat back on her heels in a slouched hero yoga pose.

  Angelika continued to be vague as DeQuarto tried to nail down a confession. When the investigator asked her why she had removed the plug, she explained she’d wanted to use it to make a cat toy. But earlier, she’d told him she had taken it off so that the cat wouldn’t play with it.

  “No. No. No,” DeQuarto said. “You’re going off on a tangent. Let’s stay on track here. On the way over here in my car, you said you felt better. I want you to feel that way again, okay?”

  “I will. We all will,” she said.

  “And what’s the only way to get to that point?”

  “The truth.”

  “Exactly,” the investigator agreed, leaning forward.

  “The truth is,” she said, turning away from DeQuarto and grabbing her stomach, “I wanted to have kids and to be married and live happily ever after. He told me he wanted the same thing.”

  She continued listing the problems this had caused and then said, “He said he couldn’t take it anymore.”

  “Couldn’t take what?” DeQuarto asked.

  “Me.”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you feel free now—free now that he is gone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You feel that you can do everything you want now?”

  “Um-hmm.”

  “Do you feel happy now?

  “Um-hmm.”

  “That’s understandable ’cause you’re you, right? You have to be you,” DeQuarto said, trying to keep her focused. “What did you guys discuss on the island, though? Did you discuss any of this before the incident?”

  Angelika shook her head. “Not this. We concentrated on taking pictures, selfies.”

  “When we talked before, I asked you, I said, ‘Do you think you contributed to the drowning?’ Do you remember that?”

  Angelika said she did.

  “Do you think it had anything to do with that plug you’d taken out?”

  “Well, obviously,” she acknowledged.

  “What about the oar—uh, the paddle?”

  After saying initially that she’d taken the ring off, Angelika now changed her story, stating that Vince had removed it.

  DeQuarto pressed for a more definitive answer on when and where she’d last seen the ring, but Angelika insisted she was trying to remember. He told her being honest now would be in her interest, since “everything is going to surface, sooner or later—whatever transpired in your relationship and that night.”

  She kept insisting she was trying.

  “I’m not going to judge you for what you tell me—I’m not going to think of you differently for anything you tell me in this room,” DeQuarto said. “The only way we are going to get around this and over it—close it—is to lay all the details out. It’s got to be the truth, Angelika, everything that happened, so I can piece it all together. Otherwise, we’re never going to close it. I want that, and I want you to know I think you are a great girl and I think you need to know. Am I right when I say that?”

  “Not necessarily. A little bit.”

  “A little bit? That’s what I’m here for, to give you support. But I need you to give me the truth—reciprocating this, okay?”

  His next few questions didn’t make much progress with Angelika. Then he asked, “How did you know the ring wasn’t on the paddle that Sunday?”

  “Because I saw it somewhere.”

  “On Sunday you saw it?”

  “No. Before that. I saw it in the apartment on the floor.” After more prodding from the investigator, she said that she’d also seen it in the back of the Jeep that Sunday. She insisted that the paddle hadn’t concerned her, since it could function even without the ring. She claimed, however, that she was concerned about the missing plug. She littered this information with more rambling about the psychological nature of her relationship with Vince and a premonition she’d had as they left the island that he wouldn’t make it back, calling his accident “destiny.”

  DeQuarto made another plea for her to open up and tell the truth to help the investigation. “Vincent’s gone—not mentally, not emotionally, but physically. That’s it. And there are people who need closure with this. You need to just open up with me, okay?”

  Angelika hung her head and sniffled. The investigator scooted his chair a bit closer and patted her knee, hoping to comfort her. She turned her head away to the far corner of the room and used both palms to wipe her face of tears. “Talk to me,” DeQuarto encouraged. “Everything that’s inside of you—let it out. I’m telling you, you’ll feel so much better than you are once you do it. That weight—that knot that’s in your shoulders now? That will be gone.”

  Angelika continued to talk about the love she and Vince had shared and made a strange remark: “He wanted to go,” she said.

  DeQuarto dragged her back to the core question. “You know exactly what took place and that’s what I’m trying to get to. This girl felt like a trapped person—”

  “I had a lot of anger issues,” Angelika interjected.

  “She was forced to do things that she did not want to do, and that’s why this took place. I can’t explain you saying, ‘He wanted to go.…’ How did you want to get rid of him? What did you do to do that? I know how much it can build up inside you. I know how the anger can explode. Am I right when I say that?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “I need to know what happened that led to him drowning.
That’s what I need to know. That will put closure to this whole thing and a lot of people will be able to move on from this. So, I need you to explain that to me.”

  After a long pause, Angelika said, “The bottom line is I just wanted to be free.”

  “How did you obtain that? How did you make that happen?”

  “By being myself.”

  “How did being yourself bring you to this point?” DeQuarto pressed.

  “I’m drifting,” she said, putting the heel of her hand against her forehead.

  “Don’t drift. This is the hurdle we need to get over, right here at this point. Once we get over this—”

  Again, Angelika slid into another side issue and the investigator brought her back to the point.

  “We’re talking about him drowning—drowning in the Hudson River. You know what happened that day. You,” he said, pointing an index finger at her. “We’re eventually going to know what happened, after this whole thing is said and done. I wanted to hear it from you, exactly what happened so I can help you. If I find out through our investigation—which we will—I can’t help you. You need to tell me, you need to be honest with me, about everything that happened in that river and what led up to him drowning.”

  Angelika was silent for a while, sighing and resting her forehead on the palm of her hand from time to time. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “I don’t expect it to be easy—I really don’t. But I do expect that you want to tell me the truth.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you want to help yourself, at this point. And that’s why I’m here for you.”

  DeQuarto leaned forward, his posture a mirror image of Angelika’s. So close, their knees were nearly touching. But although he kept his eyes on her face, she turned hers away, staring at the floor or the wall. “I’m going to be honest with you,” he said. “You know I’m an honest person. I’ve been talking to you all day. What happened out there I don’t believe was an accident. It wasn’t an accident. All right? I don’t believe that at all. There’s a lot of people who believe this. I know there is more to this story. You’ve got to tell me the story. There’s no clear-cut way around it.”

  “It’s a big, long, drawn-out story, there’s a lot to it.”

  “[What] I am trying to focus on is that it wasn’t any accident. It was destiny, or it was supposed to happen, you say. Okay?”

  “The circumstances. Everything.”

  “The circumstances that caused him to drown. That is what I need for closure, what you need for closure.”

  “You need me to take the blame,” Angelika said, staring at the wall.

  “It’s not that, Angelika. It’s not that. Believe me. This is turning into something where people need to move on, okay?”

  Still, Angelika insisted she needed more time.

  The investigator urged her not to think about it, just let it all out. “You know what happened that night. You need to tell me. You need to be honest with me. It needs to be the truth.”

  After a protracted pause, Angelika said, “It’s hard to say.”

  DeQuarto acknowledged she was right but said, “Tell me exactly what happened in that river.”

  Finally, Angelika said, “What led up to his drowning was me, my actions letting him go.”

  “Like what? You letting him go in front of you is not going to cause him to drown. He sunk in his kayak, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “That was not accidental. I don’t care how you look at it, it wasn’t accidental. Did you take that plug out to get yourself free?”

  “Could be.”

  “Is it ‘could be’ or is it ‘yes’?” DeQuarto urged.

  “I’m just trying to understand myself. Like how and why did I do that?” she said, as if to herself.

  “Do you maybe take that plug out because it was an escape for you to set yourself free?”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t want to kill him,” Angelika insisted.

  “Did you want to be free?”

  “Yeah, but I still wanted to have kids with him.”

  The investigator reiterated his certainty that it was not an accident and exuded empathy for the love she and Vince had shared, her mixed emotions, and her perception that Vince had been preventing her from being herself—all in an effort to get her to confess. “You had mixed emotions—you wanted him to drown, but you wanted him to stay living. Yes or no?” DeQuarto asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I want to know what he did to lead up to this night to make you want him to go. It almost feels like this was an outburst in reaction to the way he treated you. That’s what I think. Am I right when I say that?”

  She agreed.

  “It was almost a way to get back at him for the way he treated you?”

  “Kind of.”

  “You said, ‘I’ll take the plug out. I’ll take the ring off—’”

  “I didn’t take the ring off,” Angelika said.

  Although disappointed she was contradicting what she told him earlier that day, he let it go and moved to another topic: “When you watched him in the water, was a part of you saying, ‘My worries are goin’ away now, and I’m free’?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you were almost…”

  “Euphoric?” Angelika volunteered.

  “Euphoric that he was gonna be gone?”

  “I was just—I was…”

  “You felt that way?” DeQuarto prompted.

  “Yes,” Angelika said. “I still do.”

  The investigator acted unfazed by that concession, but he had to have felt an icy chill creep up his spine when she acknowledged the sociopathic part of her nature. “Did you feel that the only way to get away from him was to—was his drowning?”

  “That night, when I saw him already there in the water,” she said, spreading her arms out wide. “I guess that’s true.”

  “Do you think deep down inside of you, if you really wanted to, that you could have saved him?”

  She nodded her head.

  “Did part of you decide not to because you want to be euphoric and free? Is it correct that you wanted him to drown because of all this stuff that built up over time?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Do you think you could have saved him by holding on to the oar—or paddle?”

  “I couldn’t—”

  “When you took the paddle from him—”

  “I didn’t take it. He pushed it. It floated to me and I took it.”

  At the one-hour mark, DeQuarto rose to leave the room. Angelika pushed up on the arms of her chair and unfolded her legs, commenting on the pins and needles and requesting a bathroom break. The investigator knocked on the door. When it opened, he walked out of the room, followed by Angelika.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  When they returned from the restroom break, Angelika said, “The truth is: he didn’t really love me. And I was ready to let it go.”

  But when DeQuarto asked if she had something else to tell him about what happened that night, Angelika clammed up again and told the investigator she was hungry. He left again to order a pizza.

  Alone in the investigation room, Angelika stretched her legs straight out from the chair and rotated her ankles before bringing her feet down to the floor and swinging them back and forth. When DeQuarto returned, Angelika suggested that she had a lot of stories she could tell him. He reminded her of the focus of the session: a missing person who was probably on the bottom of the Hudson River. He brought the conversation back to the matter at hand: “I asked you when we talked about Bannerman’s: what actions did you think contributed? And do you remember what you told me?”

  “It could be me,” Angelika recalled.

  “Then I asked you why could it be you? What did you do?”

  “I wanted to be free,” she said, wrapping an arm around her midsection.

  “You wanted to be free, but I said, what did you do physically that caused him to drown? And let’s see if you remembe
r what you told me.”

  She pleaded an inability to remember, and he offered to refresh her memory. “You said, by taking the plug out of the kayak and taking the ring off the oar or the paddle. Does that sound correct?”

  She wouldn’t quite admit to her previous statement, but she admitted that things had sort of come together. DeQuarto suggested that the accident was a perfect opportunity and she agreed.

  “Am I going to find anything else when I do a search of your house?” the investigator asked.

  “Well, we had guns—”

  “No. I mean anything else pertaining to this incident.”

  “The ring will be in the house—in the car or in the house.”

  “What are your diaries going to say when our Russian interpreter reads them?”

  “You’re going to read all my thoughts and how I was unhappy.”

  “Did you talk about his death at all?”

  “No. I might have mentioned that I just want to get away. I never wrote anything that said I want to kill him or anything like that.”

  DeQuarto circled back around to the location of her cell phone. She rambled on, talking with her hands and demonstrating moves she’d made as if she was trying to mentally re-create the night and her phone’s role in it. Eventually, the investigator told her not to worry about it, that they would get the complete records from her cell carrier.

  She said there was one more thing he needed to know: Vince was mad at her for stopping her birth control. “To be honest with you, I think I had a miscarriage.”

  “Just now?” DeQuarto asked, stunned.

  “I’m sure of it.”

  “Do you need an ambulance?”

  She said, “No.”

  “Are you sure?” he insisted.

  She assured him she was fine and there was nothing to cause any worry or concern.

  Taken aback by her laissez-faire attitude, he continued and asked why she’d had the car keys that day.

  She explained that both of them always carried a set of keys.

  “You brought both sets with you on the kayaks?”