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  AFTERMATH, INC.

  AFTERMATH, INC.

  CLEANING UP AFTER CSI GOES HOME

  Gil Reavill

  GOTHAM BOOKS

  Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Gotham Books, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © 2007 by Gil Reavill

  All rights reserved

  Gotham Books and the skyscraper logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Reavill, Gil, 1953–

  Aftermath, Inc.: cleaning up after CSI goes home / Gil Reavill.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-1689-7

  1. Crime scenes—Case studies. 2. Criminal investigation—Case studies. 3. Forensic sciences—Case studies. I. Title.

  HV8073.R43 2007

  363.25'2—dc22

  2006102542

  Photo credits appear on the end of this book.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  For Eric Saks

  socii criminis

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE:

  “You Could Smell the Hate”

  CHAPTER TWO:

  Wisconsin Death Drive

  CHAPTER THREE:

  The Samaritans

  CHAPTER FOUR:

  The Human Stain

  CHAPTER FIVE:

  Father Time

  CHAPTER SIX:

  Every Unhappy Family

  CHAPTER SEVEN:

  The Destroying Angel

  INTERLUDE ONE:

  Man Versus Machine

  CHAPTER EIGHT:

  Ageless

  CHAPTER NINE:

  The Long Pig

  INTERLUDE TWO:

  Nonlethals

  CHAPTER TEN:

  In the Black Museum

  CHAPTER ELEVEN:

  The Left Hand of God

  CHAPTER TWELVE:

  Cold

  EPILOGUE:

  The Dead House

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  AFTERMATH, INC.

  You sending the Wolf?…Shit, Negro, that’s all you had to say!—Samuel L. Jackson as Jules in Pulp Fiction, on the imminent arrival of the crime scene cleanup facilitator “the Wolf” (Harvey Keitel)

  The truth of things lies in the aftermath.

  —Sophocles

  Author’s Note

  With a few exceptions (most notably the Dettlaff-Belter family), the names and identifying particulars of the crime victims in this book have been changed for reasons of privacy.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “You Could Smell the Hate”

  Nicole Brown Simpson’s front walkway

  I write of the wish that comes true—for some reason, a terrifying concept.

  —James M. Cain

  Mil Grabbers [are] designed to be used for entry and egress in a MOUT [Military Operations in Urban Terrain] environment….

  —Instruction manual, TRG grappling hook

  After all his elaborate preparations for dealing out death, Nicholas Mazilli wound up knocking on the wrong door.

  On a sweltering night in August 1998, Mazilli kicked things off by setting fire to his own trailer home outside Joliet, Illinois. He carefully made a videotape record of the conflagration.

  His co-workers at the cavernous metallurgy shop of Northwest Tool and Die in Chicago Heights had been needling him, relentlessly twisting the blade every single day the way herd-mentality males sometimes do.

  “Hey, Nick,” one had said to him the day before. “I think I smelled Pam’s perfume on Tommy just now.” Hoots of laughter rang out from the half-dozen machinists.

  Pam Mazilli was Nick’s estranged wife. Tommy was his co-worker and best friend of twenty-five years, Thomas Johnson. Pam and Tommy had taken up together, and the thought of it was eating Nick Mazilli alive.

  Maybe it was the heat, the succession of suffocatingly humid ninety-degree dog days. Maybe it was Nick having to endure seeing Tommy’s shit-eating grin at work every day. Maybe it was the boiling tension he’d felt since he served as a Marine in the First Gulf War. Whatever it was, Mazilli snapped. After he burned down the green-and-white Kenilworth trailer in which he had been living ever since he and Pam split up, Mazilli headed east on Illinois Route 30, passing through the dark, heat-thick countryside across the state line into Indiana. He videotaped the drive too.

  As the tape rolled, catching glints of all-night convenience stores and the occasional streetlamp, Mazilli’s face was lit by the green glow of the dashboard light. “Tonight’s the night,” he said in a tight, choked voice, turning his face from the road to look into the lens of the video camera. “It’s happening right now.”

  Cradled in his lap was a Remington 12-gauge pump-action shotgun. An AR-15 assault rifle lay beside him on the front seat with five hundred rounds of steel-jacketed ammunition, along with a Beretta 9mm machine pistol. He wore dark clothing and had carefully camo’d his face with charcoal. In the front pocket of his jacket he carried a can of lighter fluid and a butane lighter.

  The videotape record was for his mom. “I want you to know, Mom, why I’m doing what I’m doing,” he said into the camera. “I want you to tell them why this happened.”

  He continued, his voice robotic: “I’ve been going to bed every night wishing that Tommy was dead, and then waking up the next morning wishing he was dead. So that’s what I’m going to do.”

  He arrived at the apartment building where his estranged wife lived with Tommy, in Merrillville, ten miles south of Gary. Mazilli, in full commando mode now, used a TRG military “Grabber” grappling hook and a nylon rope to scale forty feet up past the security gates to an open-air vestibule on the third floor.

  But after all his preparation, he didn’t know which door led to his wife’s apartment. He chose wrong, knoc
king on the door of Apartment 3B.

  Rachel Peterson answered with her baby daughter, Molly, in her arms. Her toddler son sat at the kitchen table, eating cereal. She stared wide-eyed at the heavily armed ninja commando standing before her.

  “Where’s Tommy?” Mazilli demanded. “Does Tommy Johnson live here?”

  Wordlessly a frightened Peterson gestured across the hallway to Apartment 3A.

  Mazilli moved toward 3A, then turned back to Peterson. This is it, the paralyzed woman thought, I’m dead. She started to curve her arms protectively around her baby, ready to plead for her life.

  “Get in the bathtub,” Mazilli ordered her, employing the gruff command voice he had picked up in the Marines. “Get in the bathtub and pull a mattress over yourself and your kids.”

  The woman didn’t move.

  “Do it now!”

  Rachel Peterson slammed the door shut and did as she was told. But she brought a phone into the bathroom with her and dialed 911.

  Nick Mazilli planned on beating any police response. He didn’t waste time. He strode across the hall and used his machine pistol to blast a pattern around the door lock of Apartment 3A. Nine 9mm bullets tore huge chunks out of the wooden door. The noise was terrific, but the world was muffled now by his orange foam-rubber earplugs. By the time he was finished, the lock mechanism was attached to the door only by splinters.

  Mazilli kicked open the door and bulled his way inside, the Remington 12-gauge at ready position.

  The door-blasting had taken only seconds, but Tommy Johnson was ready for him. He knew Nick well, knew his penchant for weaponry, and in his worst fantasies knew that something like this might happen. Johnson had armed himself with a 9mm Colt automatic of his own. He had just come out of the bedroom hall to the right of the living room area when Mazilli barreled into the apartment.

  Johnson raised the Colt and fired, hitting Mazilli squarely in the chest.

  It was a kill shot, and the night would have ended there, fodder perhaps for an NRA newsletter on firearm owners protecting their homes. But Nick Mazilli wore Kevlar body armor that night. Johnson’s bullet slammed into his torso with the impact of a baseball bat home-run swing, but the projectile didn’t penetrate and the blow didn’t stop him.

  Mazilli racked the Remington and pulled the trigger. A tightly choked pattern of triple-zero buckshot pellets hit Johnson’s left thigh, dropping him to the floor of the living room. Mazilli stalked up to the fallen man and kicked the Colt handgun away.

  “Pam!” Nick bellowed. “Pam!”

  Pam Mazilli cowered in the bedroom, one room away.

  “No, Nicky!” she screamed, sobbing hysterically. “Don’t do it, Nick!” She curled up in a ball and clutched a photograph of the couple’s three-year-old son, Aquino, holding it up toward the door to the living room like a charm to ward off evil.

  “Motherfucker,” Nick Mazilli said, looking down at his former best friend. “Cocksucker.”

  He switched weapons, bringing up the AR-15 that he had been carrying slung across his back. Firing methodically downward, he blasted at Tommy Johnson’s left arm, severing it completely from his body. Then he adjusted his point-blank aim to do the same to Johnson’s right arm, and both his legs.

  The fusillade of bullets tore through Johnson’s body, ripping apart the carpet beneath him and blowing cavities into the concrete underfloor below. Blood, bits of flesh, and bone fragments exploded everywhere. The supersonic assault-rifle rounds created pressure pockets as they sped through the air, and blood and body fluids were sucked into these pockets, so that the gore splashed back at Nick Mazilli as he fired and splattered across the walls and ceiling beyond him too.

  Mazilli stopped firing. Police would later estimate that he expended 350 rounds of ammo tearing Tommy Johnson’s body apart.

  “Just kill me, Nick,” Johnson begged, miraculously still alive but groaning in pain. “Just kill me.” Mazilli could hear Pam’s terrified sobs from the bedroom.

  He was not done yet. He poured lighter fluid over Johnson’s crotch area and set his testicles on fire. After allowing the flames to burn for a long beat—his best friend screaming at his feet, his estranged wife weeping one room away—Mazilli used his machine pistol to put a coup de grace bullet through Tommy Johnson’s heart.

  I first heard about Tommy Johnson’s murder from Tim Reifsteck and Chris Wilson, who own and operate Aftermath, a bioremediation company they founded in 1996 to clean up crime scenes after police forensics specialists had gone home.

  Because I had spent a lot of time writing about crime, I was naturally intrigued by the level of violence, knowing the kind of overkill that Nick Mazilli exhibited was a hallmark of crimes of passion. The broken heart doesn’t just want to kill. It wants to obliterate.

  Later on, I would talk to some of the principals of the crime, those who had survived, and to the detectives and police who were involved. I’d get a fuller picture than the thumbnail Reifsteck and Wilson had given me. All standard operating procedure for a crime writer. But talking to Tim and Chris allowed me to think about a question that, oddly enough, had not occurred to me over a full two decades of writing about the violence humans do to each other.

  What happens afterward?

  Reifsteck and Wilson were at a funeral when their crews arrived to deal with the mess in Apartment 3A.

  “Our cell phones started going off—boom, boom, boom,” Reifsteck recalled. “We could tell the calls were all from our crew. We kept clicking them off, but as soon as we did, another one would come in.”

  “When I finally answered one of the calls,” Wilson said, “I was pissed. ‘What? You know we’re at a funeral.’”

  The crew chief sounded panicked, though, like a young child left alone at home. You’ve got to come out here right away. We don’t know what to do.

  At the same time that Reifsteck and Wilson’s Aftermath crew recoiled at the carnage in Apartment 3A, Pam Mazilli’s cohorts at the insurance office where she worked were receiving a bouquet of flowers that had been sent by Nick Mazilli. The note with the flowers extended Nick’s condolences upon Pam’s death.

  But Pam Mazilli hadn’t died the previous evening. Because she was the mother of Nick’s son, Nick decided to allow her to live. Still weeping, she slipped past her doomed husband and her dead lover, through the blood-spattered living room, and out the door.

  “I didn’t look at him, but I knew he was standing there at the window,” Pam said.

  Mazilli held police at bay for two hours before putting a bullet through his own head.

  The crime was so horrific, the details so gory and extreme, that on the day after the murders the Merrillville City Council debated whether to have the whole apartment building torn down as the only way to expunge the violence of the crime.

  Still in their funeral clothes, Reifsteck and Wilson arrived at Tommy Johnson’s apartment on the heels of the crime scene technicians and the coroner’s office. From a funeral to a slaughterhouse.

  “You could smell the hate in that room,” Reifsteck says of Apartment 3A’s living room. “The strange thing about it was that the bedroom next door was totally undisturbed. It was decorated all in white. So you had this perfect-looking room with white curtains, white carpet, and white bedspread, and then you took two steps into a room where every square inch was covered with blood and body parts.”

  If their crew was stymied by the abattoir atmosphere, Reifsteck and Wilson were not. They rolled up their sleeves and set to work. What was left of Tommy Johnson’s body had been scooped up and taken to the morgue by the coroner, but where he had died exhibited a clear silhouette, like a parody of a chalk body-outline. The blast marks of AR-15 bullets traced the dead man’s torso. The burn mark at the crotch was still visible.

  And everywhere, all over every surface in the twelve-by-fifteen living room, there was gore. The average human body contains about three six-packs’ worth of blood. All of it seemed to be splattered at the scene. Victim’s blood had mi
ngled with killer’s in a last ironic nod to poisoned friendship.

  “It was like someone had taken a spray gun and painted the living room red,” Wilson says. Pieces of brains, intestines, and bones remained embedded in the walls.

  Reifsteck and Wilson quickly established a “clean zone” by taping three-mil plastic sheeting over a twelve-square-foot section of floor near the front door of the apartment. They lay the same plastic sheeting in long rolls down the stairwells on the way to the ground floor, and out on the sidewalk to where their company trucks were parked in the apartment building cul-de-sac. Their company logo was emblazoned across the side of red GMC seventeen-foot trucks in twelve-inch-high orange letters. Inside the trucks were plastic-lined boxes with red-and-black “biohazard” labels on them.

  Reifsteck and Wilson and every member of their six-man crew wore white hazmat (short for “hazardous materials”) containment suits and eye goggles, protection against blood-borne pathogens that for all anyone knew were lurking in the remains of Johnson or Mazilli. They set up two banks of thousand-watt floodlights to illuminate the scene. They ripped up the blood-soaked carpet, wrapped it, and carried it down to discard it in the biohazard boxes.

  Meticulously, they began to wash the room, using CaviCide (a disinfectant and decontaminant) and hand rags, transferring bloody and contaminated materials to the clean zone, then bringing them downstairs to the boxes in the truck. Slowly they expanded the clean zone. They scrubbed the loosely coagulated blood that had collected in the small, cuplike holes blasted into the concrete underfloor by Nick Mazilli’s assault rifle.

  The job took three days, over ninety man hours.