The Killer Across the Table

After dinner, they dropped me off back at the hotel, where I opened the case files and began several hours of review. My role was to see what I could determine about McGowan’s state of mind—then and now. Did he know the nature and consequences of his crime? Did he know basic right from wrong? Did he care about what he had done? Did he have any remorse?

What would be his demeanor during the interview? Would he recall specific details about the crime? If released from prison, where did he intend to live and what did he intend to do? How would he earn a living?

My one cardinal rule of prison interviews is never to go into the encounter unprepared. I also made a practice of not going in with notes, because that could create an artificial distance or filter between the subject and me when the time came to really bore in and search for the deepest layer of his psyche.

I didn’t know what I was going to get out of this interview, but I figured it would be illuminating. Because as I said at the beginning, every time I talked to “the experts,” I learned something valuable. And one of the things to be determined was just what kind of expert Joseph McGowan would turn out to be.

I sifted through the case files, reexamining the evidence and organizing my thoughts for the next day’s interview.

As I did, a grim story unfolded.

About 2:45 on the afternoon of April 19, 1973, which her mother Rosemarie would always remember was Holy Thursday, Joan Angela D’Alessandro noticed a car pulling into the first driveway on the right, on St. Nicholas Avenue, which intersected with Florence Street, where she lived. Joan and her older sister, Marie, had managed to sell Girl Scout cookies to just about everyone in a four-block area in their quiet Hillsdale, New Jersey, neighborhood. At that time, kids of that age going out by themselves to sell the cookies was a normal activity. Since they went to a Catholic school, the D’Alessandro girls had the day off for the religious holiday and spent part of it delivering orders. The people who lived in the house on the corner were the last customers they had to deliver to and then the cookie orders would be complete. Typically, Joan wanted to get the job done.

She was seven years old, a four-foot-three-inch bundle of playful energy and charm—a pretty, proud, and enthusiastic Brownie. In fact, she was enthusiastic about everything: school, ballet, drawing, dogs, dolls, friends, and flowers. Her second-grade teacher called her a “social butterfly,” who naturally attracted people around her. Her favorite music was the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. She was the youngest of three children, born close together. Frank, known as Frankie, was nine and Marie was eight. They were more serious, Rosemarie recalls. Joan was more happy-go-lucky.

“Joan was empathetic right from the beginning. She was always concerned with other people’s feelings and hurts. And she had a natural spunkiness about her.”

There is hardly a photograph of her at this age in which she isn’t smiling: Joan in her Brownie uniform with its orange tie and beanie, hands clasped in front of her and long auburn hair symmetrically draping her shoulders; Joan in her black leotard and white tights, hair in a ponytail, arms outstretched to one side, demonstrating a ballet move; Joan in her navy blue plaid jumper, white blouse and red bow tie, as if she’d just turned to camera, bangs brushing her forehead and hair cascading around her adorable face; Joan sitting on her heels in a light blue party dress, hair pinned up, meticulously adjusting the bouquet in the hand of her Miss America Barbie doll. All of them represent different Joan personas. The two commonalities among them are the angelic smile and the innocent magic in her blue eyes.

A friend of Frankie’s said, “She was so down-to-earth. I would have married her!”

Her Italian-speaking grandfather adored her and used to say, “E così libera!” She is so free! She had a hearty laugh and Rosemarie envisioned her acting in plays as she got older. She was going to be taking piano lessons after her eighth birthday.

This afternoon, she was outside playing by herself. Frankie had gone to play at his friend’s house in the neighborhood and Marie was at a softball game.

Suddenly she raced back inside and said to Rosemarie, “I saw the new car. I’m going to take the cookies over there.” She grabbed her Girl Scout carrying case lying in the foyer with the two boxes of cookies inside.

“Bye, Mommy. I’ll be right back,” she called out as she bounded out the front door. It hadn’t even closed since she’d come running inside. Rosemarie remembers her ponytail bobbing up and down, held in place by an elastic band with two little light blue plastic balls on the ends, as Joan skipped down the front steps to the driveway and out onto the street. It all went by in a blur.

About ten minutes later the next-door neighbor, as she told Rosemarie afterward, heard the insistent barking of her dog, Boozer. Joan loved walking and playing with Boozer, and Boozer loved her.

When Joan didn’t come back right away, Rosemarie didn’t think much about it. She had probably gone to her friend Tamara’s house on the corner of St. Nicholas Avenue and Vincent Street. It was that kind of neighborhood, where you could go in and out of the houses of people you knew. The social butterfly could always find someone to hang out with or something to do. About 4:45, when the music teacher came for Marie’s piano lesson, Rosemarie started to get worried. She didn’t want to convey it to the children, so she tried to hold herself together. After all, it was a safe neighborhood, with an FBI agent and a minister living nearby.

She started making phone calls. Joan wasn’t at any of the houses she called, and no one had seen her.

Her husband, Frank D’Alessandro, got home about ten minutes to six and Rosemarie told him Joan was missing. Frank was a computer systems analyst, methodical and taciturn by nature. Rosemarie could see instantly how worried and tense he was, but as usual, he held it all in. Rosemarie said, “We have to call the police.” Frank agreed and made the call. Then he went out with Frankie and Marie to drive around the neighborhood looking for Joan. They covered the entire area.

When they returned without having spotted her or found anyone who had seen her, Rosemarie decided to go out herself. Frank didn’t want to come. She remembered that as Joan ran out, she’d said something about collecting on the last of her cookie orders because she’d seen “the new car” on St. Nicholas Avenue. The car belonged to the McGowan house. Joseph McGowan taught chemistry at Tappan Zee High, just over the state line in Orangeburg, New York. The house was owned by his mother, Genevieve McGowan, and he lived there with her and Genevieve’s mother—his grandmother. The public schools had class that day, so this would have been about the right time for him to be coming home.

Reluctantly, so she wouldn’t be alone, Rosemarie took Frankie with her and together they walked up Florence Street and turned onto St. Nicholas Avenue. It was ten minutes to seven. The McGowan house, a redbrick-and-beige-siding bi-level with a driveway and two-car garage in the left front, was the first one on the right, occupying the corner lot.

They both climbed the five front steps and she rang the bell. She told Frankie to stay on the landing.

Mr. McGowan answered the door. He seemed as if he’d just come out of the shower. He was holding a thin cigar that Rosemarie didn’t notice at first. He was a twenty-seven-year-old bachelor. Rosemarie didn’t know him, but “my children said he was very nice.”

Rosemarie stepped into the foyer; she wanted to stand exactly where she knew Joan had recently stood. She was already starting to get an eerie feeling. She introduced herself. “Have you seen my daughter Joan?” she asked. “She came here to deliver cookies.”

“No, I never saw her,” he replied.

He spoke in a casual, matter-of-fact manner. And it was at that moment that Rosemarie D’Alessandro felt everything go cold.

“After standing in the foyer for a couple of minutes, I noticed a long fire truck parked in front of his house,” she said. “We had called the police, and when I saw that they were responding this way, it just all came to me at that moment and I knew my life would never be the same.”

She was almost immediately struck by McGowan’s reaction—or rather, his lack of reaction. “As I was standing there in the foyer with him, tears were welling in my eyes. And he looked at me like he absolutely didn’t have one ounce of feeling. And what he did at that moment when he saw my tears, he walked up the steps to the upper floor, and he stayed right there facing me, holding his slim cigar, and waited for me to leave.

“Walking back to my house I knew that he knew what had happened to Joan.”

After the police arrived and spoke to Rosemarie and Frank, a neighborhood search for Joan was organized. Boy Scouts volunteered. As did Joseph McGowan. Hundreds of people turned out and organized themselves into small teams, checking every house, backyard, trash and garbage cans, woods, and park in Hillsdale and the surrounding towns. The police brought in bloodhounds to aid in the search. Several people climbed on the fire truck Rosemarie had seen parked. One of them was Joan’s seven-year-old “boyfriend,” Rich. They rode out to the reservoir near Woodcliff Lake.

At about 9:20, a priest from St. John the Baptist Church arrived at the house with a state trooper and a German shepherd. Rosemarie led the K-9 team to the clothes hamper so the dog could sniff Joan’s panties, then they went out into the neighborhood. Rosemarie had the overwhelming sense that the dog understood what had happened and “felt” deeply for her and Joan. With an obvious sense of mission, he cased the area up to and around the McGowan’s house, and went to the front door and the garage door.

But nothing turned up anywhere.

Word of the missing girl and the impromptu search spread quickly. Newspaper and television reporters swarmed the neighborhood. As Rosemarie herself had observed, this kind of thing just didn’t happen in Hillsdale. She spoke frequently to the media, hoping that someone who might have seen something would come forward. Her main memory of the media session was the dirty footprints that had turned the light-brown carpet on the steps a charcoal gray.

The anxiety in the D’Alessandro house that night was almost unbearable. Frank often displayed anger when he was frustrated. The night before, he had an outburst over not having a box in which to wrap an Easter gift. “He could be calm and patient for long periods and then change in a moment,” Rosemarie recalled. “He had a good job, but he wasn’t communicative, and he was never really my soul mate.”

Hillsdale police chief Philip Varisco was on vacation in Florida when he was informed of Joan’s disappearance. Hillsdale was the kind of community, and Varisco was the kind of leader, that made it unthinkable that the chief not be present for a trauma like this. He rushed back home. Varisco, who passed away in 2012 at the age of eighty-nine, was a complete professional. He attended the FBI National Academy program in Quantico to make himself and his force as effective as possible.

The chief went to the D’Alessandros’ house the next day. Rosemarie was sitting on her front steps when he came up the walk. He told her he was taking personal charge of the investigation. While not promising the happy outcome he knew was unlikely, he calmly assured her that everything would be done the right way. He asked for a photograph he could release to the newspapers. Rosemarie went to a picture of Joan in her school uniform, hanging in the hallway, took it off the wall and out of its frame, and handed it to Varisco.

Frank told newspaper reporters that if whoever had taken Joan would bring her back safely, he would ask the authorities to waive prosecution. During a television interview, Rosemarie described Joan to reporter Vic Miles, how special she was and how much she was loved, pleading for her to be returned. Years later, one of Joan’s classmates told Rosemarie she remembered the broadcast as if it were yesterday because Joan’s mommy was asking on TV for her to come back. Only two months before, Rosemarie had suddenly had the terrible thought of what would happen if one of her children died, and how utterly, unimaginably heart-wrenching it would be.

The police questioned several possible suspects, including a man seen driving around the neighborhood about an hour before Joan disappeared and another wandering the area on foot. The first turned out to be looking at neighborhoods in which to move and the second was simply lost. There are almost always loose ends and red herrings in major cases. But the investigators focused quickly on Joseph McGowan. Though he had no criminal record, it had been his house to which Joan said she was going and Rosemarie had related her creepy encounter with him. Her father had seen him taking out the trash the day after Joan’s disappearance and, pointing to the house on the corner, said to Rosemarie, “Something’s not right over there.”

Police officers and detectives spoke to McGowan both Friday and Saturday, asking him to account for himself in the minutes and hours after Joan went to his house. He was calm and amiable but denied that he saw Joan on Thursday. Instead, he claimed he was at the nearby super­market buying groceries at the time Rosemarie said her daughter went to his house. What about the car Joan saw pull into the driveway? Did anyone see it leave the garage? No, he walked. At which cash register did he check out? He didn’t remember. Could he show them the grocery receipt? He thought he threw it away. Might it still be in the trash? He thought the trash had already been picked up. What days did the trash collectors come? He wasn’t sure. What did he buy? Steaks and apples, among other things. Were the steaks still in the refrigerator? No, he and his mother had eaten them. What about the apples? He wasn’t sure.

Seasoned detectives develop a natural sense for knowing whether a suspect’s story and profession of innocence is true. Over lunch one day, Mark Olshaker asked retired LAPD detective Tom Lange when he came to his own conclusion that O. J. Simpson was the prime suspect in the murders of his ex-wife Nicole and her waiter friend Ronald Goldman in 1994. Lange replied that though O.J. was cordial and cooperative during the interview, he asked no questions regarding the details of Nicole’s death, whether or how much she had suffered, whether the police had any idea who had done it—all of the normal things any close survivor would instinctively want to know.

Joan’s friend Rich recalled a large crowd in front of the police station on Central Avenue as McGowan was inside being questioned. To his young eyes, it seemed as if the entire town had gathered there.

As the seeming holes and contradictions in McGowan’s statements grew increasingly glaring, the detectives asked him to submit to a polygraph examination at the station. He agreed.

McGowan failed the polygraph, and when detectives informed him, they confronted him with all his statements that didn’t add up. Finally, exhausted and without any more answers, he asked for a priest. He and the priest met privately, and McGowan confessed to him. He then confessed to the detectives, and told them that after he killed Joan, he drove her body across the New York state line and deposited it in Harriman State Park in Rockland County, about twenty miles away.

Chief Varisco took it upon himself to be the one to tell Rose­marie and Frank. It was a little after four P.M. A deeply sensitive man, he brought a Catholic priest with him, and together they sat with Rosemarie at the kitchen table. Rosemarie remembers removing the tablecloth from the white table to delay, if only for a few moments, what she knew was to come.

When the chief told her what McGowan had said, she cried, “I want to kill him!” She says she was feeling rational and in control as she said it, knowing at the time she didn’t mean it, but needing a way to release the anguish consuming her.

The priest admonished her not to speak that way.

“What do you expect, Father?” Varisco said.

2

“I SLEPT WELL”

Dr. Frederick T. Zugibe, the chief medical examiner for Rockland County, New York, said Joan’s case was one of the most emotionally difficult in his long and distinguished career.

Word had spread quickly from the Hillsdale Police Department to the Bergen County district attorney’s office, and from there to the Police Division of the Rockland County sheriff’s office. So early in the afternoon on Easter Sunday, Officer John Forbes drove to the location described to him in Harriman State Park, just off Gate Hill Road, near the southern end of the park.

There he found the naked and battered body of a young white female. She was faceup in a wedge-shaped crevice between two boulders, on a leafy slope under a rock ledge. Her head was twisted sharply to the left and she was facing down the slope. Forbes had four young children of his own and struggled not to break down.

He called in the crime scene team.

By the time Dr. Zugibe arrived, less than an hour later, the cordoned-off crime scene was already populated by a horde of police officers and crime scene technicians, detectives, FBI agents, reporters, press photographers, and the generally curious. He immediately ordered the officers to move all nonessential personnel away.

Richard Collier, the D’Alessandro neighbor who was an FBI special agent working out of the New York City field office, came in to identify the body.

Yes, it was Joan.

Though the crime scene was no longer pristine, her body had not been moved or touched. Dr. Zugibe immediately noted the lividity—the purpling of the flesh around her abdominal area. This told him she had not been killed at this spot. If she had been, the lividity would have been concentrated in her back due to gravity. Since that type of blood settling takes at least six hours, he also knew that she hadn’t just been dumped here. He took her body temperature and found that it matched the temperature of the air. That indicated she had been dead at least thirty-six hours, the time it takes for a body to cool completely. The finding was confirmed for him by the absence of rigor mortis, a postmortem stiffening of the muscles that begins several hours after death and subsides within twenty-four to thirty-six hours.

Taking all the observable physical evidence together, Dr. Zugibe estimated that Joan had been dead for about fifty hours. When he was able to do more sophisticated tests during the autopsy, he upped his estimate to a minimum of seventy hours, which meant that she had died within a couple of hours or less of when Rosemarie last saw her.

Sheriff’s officers conducted a thorough search of the surrounding area and found a gray plastic shopping bag printed with the Mobil logo. According to Zugibe, the bag was neatly packed rather than haphazardly stuffed and contained the clothing Joan had been wearing when she disappeared: a pair of red and white sneakers, a turquoise shirt, maroon pants, white socks, and white panties, stained red with her blood.

Before the body was removed, an officer called the Marian Shrine in Stony Point, New York, and asked that a priest come to the scene. When he arrived, illuminated by the police lights and in the presence of officers, detectives, FBI agents, and reporters, he administered last rites to Joan Angela D’Alessandro. Once the priest was finished, Zugibe officially pronounced death, a seemingly obvious observation but a necessary formality in any murder investigation.

Back at the medical examiner’s office in Pomona, New York, less than ten miles away, he began the autopsy. From my experience in dealing with many medical examiners over the years, I would say there is little that is more painful than having to examine a dead child, and absolutely nothing more agonizing than if the child has been murdered.

By the time he had completed the postmortem, Zugibe listed injuries that spoke to the utter depravity of the crime: fracture of the neck, manual strangulation, dislocated right shoulder, generalized deep bruising, lacerations under the chin and inside the upper lip, frontal fracture of the skull, fracture of both sinuses, swelling of the face, both eyes blackened and swollen shut, three teeth loosened, contusion and hemorrhaging of the brain, bruising of the lungs and liver, and rupture of the hymen.

Essentially, Joan was beaten, choked, sexually assaulted, and ultimately battered to death. But according to Dr. Zugibe, it was even worse than that. Had she died right after the beating and strangulation, her face and body would not have appeared swollen. Upon death, the homeostatic functions that cause swelling at an injured site shut down. And since swelling takes about half an hour to be completed, he concluded that Joan must have been alive for at least that long following the attack. Mercifully, she was almost certainly unconscious.

The medical examiner’s close examination of the neck revealed two areas of injury: the thyroid cartilage and the hyoid bone. His conclusion was that a half hour or so after the deadly attack, the offender, unsure that he had killed her, returned to finish the job with a second manual strangulation. This sounds completely believable to me. With someone like Joseph McGowan, an “inexperienced killer,” it would not be unusual for him to be unsure how effective he had been in dispatching his victim and wish to take no chances.

I had seen a similar sort of behavior in the Christmas 1996 murder of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey in her home in Boulder, Colorado. The medical examiner’s report listed two potentially lethal injuries: blunt force trauma to the head and ligature strangulation. Since there was no bleeding at the crime scene, I concluded that the cause of death was the strangulation and that the severe blow to the head was an attempt to make sure she was dead.

This scientific evidence suggested something highly significant from a behavioral perspective. No parent without a history of extreme child abuse could possibly, and systematically, strangle that child to death over a period of several minutes. It just doesn’t happen. Taken together with all of the other forensic and behavioral evidence, this did not tell us who killed JonBenet. But it told us who did not kill her: either of her parents. Mark and I came up against a lot of pushback and public condemnation for this conclusion, including from my old FBI unit, but the pursuit of criminal justice is not a popularity contest, and you have to let the evidence speak for itself.

Which was precisely what I would do with Joseph McGowan.

Joseph McGowan was arraigned before Bergen County judge James F. Madden. He was held in lieu of the $50,000 bail set by the judge. On Tuesday, April 24, 1973, he was indicted for the murder of Joan D’Alessandro.

Two days later, in the late morning, Joan’s funeral was held at St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic Church, whose school Joan attended. The children from her class were there, and after the service, they all lined up outside as her casket was carried out to say goodbye.

As an investigator of violent crime, you try to be as emotionally detached as possible, not only to maintain your objectivity and critical judgment, but also to preserve your sanity. In fact, having to put myself, as a behavioral profiler, into the head of every victim whose case I work has definitely taken its psychic toll on me throughout my career. Dr. Zugibe’s and Officer Forbes’s reactions to seeing Joan’s small body in the park were understandable. No matter how “professional” you try to be, you can’t not react to something like this.

What kind of a man or monster spontaneously does something like this to a seven-year-old girl? I asked myself as I read through the case file a quarter of a century later. That’s what I would seek to find out.

McGowan repeated his confession to Dr. Noel C. Galen, a forensic psychiatrist who had received his neurology and psychiatry training at Bellevue Hospital in New York and consulted for the New Jersey court system. The day after his indictment, McGowan detailed for Dr. Galen how he answered the door, and when Joan told him what she was there for, said she should come with him downstairs so he could get the money for her. She must have hesitated or resisted, because he admitted grabbing her and forcing her into his downstairs bedroom. Meanwhile, McGowan’s eighty-seven-year-old grandmother, hard of hearing, was watching television upstairs. His mother was at work.