Her hand shaking, Jenny put the picture back inside the album. In her delirium the day before she died, Gran had said those names: Sarah … Vincent … Barney … Or had it just been delirium?
A large manila envelope, its bright yellow color faded with time, was next. Opening it, she found it filled with three separate files of crumbling news clippings. There’s no place to read these here, Jenny thought. With the manila envelope tucked under her arm, she walked into the dining area and settled at the table. Careful not to tear the clippings, she began to slide them from the envelope. Looking at the date on the top clipping of the three sets, she realized they had been filed chronologically.
“Murder in Union Square” was the first headline she read. It was dated June 8, 1949. The story followed:
The body of twenty-three-year-old Sarah Kimberley was found in the doorway of S. Klein Department Store on Union Square this morning. She had been stabbed in the back by person or persons unknown sometime during the hours of midnight and five a.m.…
Why did Gran keep all these clippings? Jenny asked herself. Why didn’t she ever tell me about it, especially when she knew I was planning to go into criminal law? I know she must not have talked with Mom about it. Mom would have told me.
She spread out the other clippings on the table. In sequence by date, they told of the murder investigation from the beginning. In the late afternoon, Sarah Kimberley had been modeling the dress she was wearing when her body was found.
The autopsy revealed that Sarah was six weeks pregnant when she died.
Up-and-coming designer Vincent Cole had been questioned for hours. He was known to have been seeing Sarah on the side. But his fiancée, Nona Banks, an heiress to the Banks department store fortune, swore they had been together in her apartment all night.
What did my grandmother do with the dress she had? Jenny wondered. She said it was the prettiest dress she ever owned.
Jenny’s computer was on the table, and she decided to see what she could find out about Vincent Cole. What she discovered shocked her. Vincent Cole had changed his name to Vincenzia and was now a famous designer. He’s up there with Oscar de la Renta and Carolina Herrera, she thought.
The next pile of clippings was about the arrest of Barney Dodd, a twenty-six-year-old man who liked to sit for hours in Union Square Park. Borderline mentally disabled, he lived at the YMCA and worked at a funeral home. One of his jobs was dressing the bodies of the deceased and placing them in the casket. At noon and after work he would head straight to the park, carrying a paper bag with his lunch or dinner. As Jenny read the accounts, it became clear why he had come under suspicion. The body of Sarah Kimberley had been laid out as though she was in a coffin. Her hands had been clasped. Her hair was in place, the wide collar of the dress carefully arranged.
According to the accounts, Barney was known to try to strike up a conversation if a pretty young woman was sitting near him. That’s not proof of anything, Jenny thought. She realized that she was thinking like the deputy district attorney she would soon become.
The last clipping was a two-page article from the Daily News. It was called “Did Justice Triumph?” It was about “The Case of the Five-Dollar Dress,” as the writer dubbed it. At a glance, she could see that long excerpts from the trial were included in the article.
Barney Dobbs had confessed. He signed a statement saying that he had been in Union Square at about midnight the night of the murder. It was chilly, so the park was deserted. He saw Sarah walking across Fourteenth Street. He followed her, and then, when she wouldn’t kiss him, he killed her. He carried her body to the front door of Klein’s and left it there. But he arranged it so that it looked nice, the way he did in the funeral parlor. He threw away the knife as well as the clothes he was wearing that night.
Too pat, Jenny thought scornfully. It sounds to me like whoever got that confession was trying to cover every base. Talk about a rush to justice. Barney certainly didn’t get Sarah pregnant. Who was the father of the baby? Who was Sarah with that night? Why was she alone at midnight (or later) in Union Square?
It was obvious the judge also thought there was something fishy about the confession. He entered a plea of not guilty for Barney and assigned a public defender to his case.
Jenny read the accounts of the trial with increasing contempt. It seemed to her that although the public defender had done his best to defend Barney, he was obviously inexperienced. He should never have put Barney on the stand, she thought. The man kept contradicting himself. He admitted that he had confessed to killing Sarah, but only because he was hungry and the officers who were talking to him had promised him a ham and cheese sandwich and a Hershey bar if he would sign something.
That was good, she thought. That should have made an impression on the jurors.