At some point thereafter, a rescue squad had arrived in the room, summoned by Ocean County detectives who’d been following him. A detective had explained to him that—fearing he might try to take his own life—they’d phoned his room at 1 A.M. to check on him. When he failed to answer, they’d called for medical assistance.
To Sal, it almost seemed like September 7 all over again. Roby went to one phone to call Chris at Lehigh. Sal went to another to call his wife and ask her to call Gene Leahy. Somebody had to call Maria’s parents before they heard it on the radio. But this time, Sal realized, there was a different, scarier edge to everything. The police had followed Rob to the motel. That meant they must have been following him everywhere. That meant they weren’t fooling around. That meant the gossip was right again. Rob was a suspect.
Later in the morning, when Gene Leahy arrived, Sal stopped him in the hall outside the room to which Rob had been moved and told him what Rob had said about giving the Louisiana investigator, Ernie Grandshaw, a cash payment at the casino.
“Cash?” Gene said. “Rob never paid eight hundred in cash for anything in his life. But forget that, forget that. You’re telling me Rob hands eight hundred bucks to some joker from Shreveport, Louisiana, in a gambling casino, and an hour later he pulls off the parkway and somebody murders his wife? Listen, Sal, if the police know about this they’ll grab Rob right here. Today. This is trouble. We’ve got to get Roby and John out of here. We can’t let them be here for that.”
Roby protested, saying he wanted to stay by his father’s side, but after a conference with Gene and Sal, Rob himself ordered the boys home. Once they were gone, Gene Leahy began to question Rob.
“What is this about eight hundred dollars? What the hell did you pay the guy eight hundred dollars for?”
“I owed him,” Rob said.
“For what?”
“An investigation.”
“You just told me three days ago you sent him three thousand. Only then it was supposed to be a bet on a basketball game.”
“That was actually for the same investigation.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Sal said. “You told me you sent Grandshaw twenty-five hundred, not three thousand.”
“I did. But that was a different payment.”
“What?” Gene said. “You sent the guy money twice?”
“Twenty-five hundred and then three thousand?” Sal said.
“And then you paid him eight hundred cash?” Gene said.
“What the hell was he investigating, the lost continent of Atlantis?” Sal said.
“I told you,” Rob said. “There was blackjack money missing.”
“What,” Sal shouted, “thirty-five hundred? So you pay some clown from Shreveport fucking Louisiana fifty-five hundred to try to find it?”
“Sixty-three hundred,” Gene said quietly.
The two of them were on opposite sides of Rob’s bed now, looking at each other, not at Rob. A doctor stepped into the room, drawn by the noise. “This was an attempted suicide,” the doctor said. “This patient should not be disturbed. In fact, only family members are supposed to be in here.”
“I’m his brother-in-law,” Gene said. “And an attorney.”
“And I’m his uncle,” Sal said, scowling. “His uncle Sal.”
“All right, gentlemen, but please allow the patient some tranquility.”
“This is nothing, Doc,” Sal said. “Wait till the cops get here.”
The police did not arrive. By evening, it seemed apparent that if they had intended to arrest Rob at the hospital they would already have done so. The boys were called and told they could return. Chris, however, who had just arrived in Toms River from Lehigh, refused to come.
When Roby had first called him to say that their father had attempted suicide, Chris had been so angry he’d just hung up. Instead of driving straight home, as had been expected of him, he’d stayed at Lehigh and had competed in a swim meet, his fury driving him not only to win but to set a new personal record in the 100-yard backstroke.
Once home, he said that was as far as he was going. If their father was selfish and stupid enough to risk putting them through the agony and shock of his own death less than three weeks after the murder of their mother, just because he was afraid that the police were fabricating some charges against him, then he could lie there and rot in his hospital bed for all Chris cared.
“How could he do this to us?” Chris shouted at Roby.
“He did it to himself, Chris, he didn’t do it to us,” Roby said.
“All it does is prove he doesn’t love us.”
“Oh, shut up, Chris, you little baby. All you can think about is yourself.”
“No, Roby. All Dad thinks about is himself. If he cared about us one bit he could never even think about killing himself.”
“You don’t have any idea the stress he’s been under. You haven’t even been here. You’ve been tucked away safely at school, Chris, you don’t have a clue about what things have really been like.”
“Sounds to me like the police have a clue,” Chris muttered.
“What are you talking about?”
“Nothing,” Chris said. “I just don’t want to go to the hospital. I don’t want to see Dad right now.” For two weeks he’d been hoarding his guilty, secret, evil fear. The last thing he wanted to do was blurt it out to Roby in the middle of an argument.
“You’re just so selfish, Chris. You’re just such a selfish little brat,” Roby said.
“Maybe,” Chris said. “But I’m also stubborn. And there’s no name you could call me that could make me go up to the hospital tonight.”
An hour later, however, when Rob himself called and said, “I need you, Chris. I want to see you, why aren’t you here?” Chris relented tearfully. And before leaving the house, he took a large photograph of the three boys down from the mantelpiece. At the hospital, he wrote a note that said, “Think about what’s important.” The three brothers signed it and gave it to their father with the picture. The presentation was followed by hugs and tears.
Chris didn’t know what to think or what to believe or what to feel. What he felt mostly was the pain of his mother’s death. That had seemed to be getting worse day by day, as the numbness of the initial shock began to fade.
Rob’s other visitor that night was his new lawyer, Carl Seely, who had been speaking to his client throughout the day via the car phone in his BMW and who arrived, in slacks and sports shirt, at about 8:30 P.M. Seely was accompanied by a psychiatrist who was prepared to sign Rob out of Point Pleasant Hospital and admit him to a private facility in Pennsylvania.
Seely was a pudgy man in his midfifties with a notably round face, a deep tan, a thick Rolex watch and dark gray hair slicked back hard as in a 1950s Brylcreem advertisement. Upon his arrival, he spoke privately to Sal Coccaro in the hallway.
“We’re going to take Rob out of here tonight. I think he’ll be much better off in Philadelphia,” Seely said.
Half an hour later, Rob was whisked away through the emergency room exit and rushed to the temporary refuge of a neighboring state while Sal Coccaro drove his three sons back to the house in which, until three weeks earlier, they had lived as members of what had seemed to be a happy family.
That night, he sat up late with them. “Well, guys,” he said, “I guess I’m all you got left for a while, except for each other. So it’s time to stop calling me Mr. Coccaro. I’m Uncle Sal to you guys from now on.”
The three of them nodded, tears in their eyes. The house was quiet and, except for the living room in which they sat, it was dark.
“It’s time to level with each other, fellows,” Sal said. “There’s a very big question that I haven’t heard asked yet in this house. Outside, it’s different.” He motioned toward the street. “Out there, all over town, it’s the only question I hear. You guys aren’t stupid. You know what it is.”
The three of them nodded. But no one else spoke. “I don’t know what your
own feelings are and I don’t care. You might not even know yourselves yet. And no matter what happens I’m never going to push you guys in any direction. I’m just here for you any way you need me, anytime.
“But I’ve got to tell you something, boys. You’re going to have to help each other through this. There’s things you can do for each other that nobody else can do for you, not even your dad. Maybe especially not your dad.
“Frankly, fellows, I’m concerned. There’s a lot of things I’m hearing that I don’t like. Your father is probably the best friend I have in this town, but a lot of things he’s telling me don’t add up.
“I’ll come right out and say it, and then you can throw me the hell out of here if you want to: I’m worried that your father might have had something to do with killing your mother.”
Sal stopped speaking. The silence grew. Nobody made a move to throw him out. Finally, Sal spoke again.
“Anybody else feel that way?” he asked softly.
John, the youngest, spoke first. He spoke immediately. He said, “No.”
Roby said, “Once in a while. But I put it out of my head. It just can’t be.”
Chris said, “Yes.”
No one else said anything. After a minute, Sal stood to leave. “There’s only one thing I’d ask you, boys, and it’ll be the biggest favor you can ever do yourselves. Whatever your own feelings are, and no matter how strongly you hold them, don’t ever stop respecting the other guys’.” He leaned forward and put one hand on Roby’s shoulder and one hand on Chris’s. “And no matter how angry you get at anyone else,” he said, “don’t let yourselves get angry at each other.”
Then, with tears in his own eyes, he hugged all three of them hard and said good night.
10
The suicide attempt prompted a new wave of outrage against Rob in Toms River. Had he succeeded in taking his life, he would have deprived the town of the spectacle of a trial. And already the trial had become a delectable topic of speculation. Would Felice testify? What would she say? What would she wear?
To Carl Seely, the strength and unanimity of the anti-Rob feeling in Toms River had come as a shock. He’d needed to spend only a day and a half in the town to learn that his client was viewed in approximately the same light as the Ayatollah Khomeini. He found this surprising, because Rob had assured him that he was a highly respected civic leader. “Beyond reproach” was the phrase Rob had used.
Now, as he looked ahead to the day when a jury might have to be chosen in the Ocean County Courthouse in the center of town to decide the question of Rob’s guilt or innocence, Seely felt more than a passing twinge of dread.
Extensive negative publicity, however, if it rendered selection of an impartial jury impossible, was sometimes grounds for change of venue. Seely began to make himself available to the press.
First, he dealt with the apparent suicide attempt. In a series of interviews with wire services and area newspapers, Seely said that while he had not been able to listen to the tapes his client had made because the police had apparently confiscated them, it was his understanding that Rob, while professing his innocence, had wondered aloud whether anyone would ever believe him.
Rob had been under a lot of stress due to publicity surrounding the murder, Seely said, and from innuendo suggesting that he had been involved. Seely also said that any insinuations that there was “some kind of a causal relationship” between Rob’s apparent overdose of sleeping pills and the arrest of Andrew Myers were way off base. “That, I don’t believe and the doctors don’t either,” Seely said. “The primary reason seems to relate to his children. He feels this whole situation is putting his family in an unbearable situation. I guess he somehow felt it would put everything at peace. It was not like all of a sudden he heard about the investigation in Louisiana and said, ‘I’m going to kill myself.’”
In regard to Myers, Seely said it was “no secret” that the Louisiana man and Rob had been involved in business dealings. He said that Rob, who had been getting into estate-planning work as well as life insurance sales, had prepared an investment portfolio for the hardware store clerk. He would not, however, disclose how the two men had met or how long they’d known each other. “I don’t want to get into all the details of what our defense might be if we ever get to that point,” Seely said. He added, “I can tell you categorically that we do not intend at any time to use an insanity defense.”
While the county prosecutor’s office continued to refuse all requests for comment or even to acknowledge that Marshall was under suspicion, Seely kept talking. In an October 3 interview with the Asbury Park Press, which was printed under an eight-column headline across the top of page one, the lawyer acknowledged for the first time publicly that Rob had insured Maria’s life for approximately $1.5 million and that “it’s pretty much a matter of record” that he’d been having an affair.
He was quick to assert, however, that those factors provided no motivation for murder. “If every man who had an extramarital affair and had a life insurance policy on his wife was automatically suspected of her homicide, then we’d better start building a lot of prisons real fast,” he said.
Three days later, again under an eight-column, page-one headline, Seely told the Press he expected his client to be indicted for murder. He based this belief, he said, upon his knowledge that authorities had searched Marshall’s offices and had taken, among other things, records of long-distance telephone calls.
Seely explained that Rob was indeed acquainted with the Bossier City, Louisiana, hardware store clerk, Andrew Myers. Rob had met Myers in the spring of 1983 when Myers had been in New Jersey visiting relatives.
In addition to advising Myers on investments, Seely said, Rob had asked the clerk to put him in touch with a private detective from Louisiana. Rob had suspected that Maria was having an affair of her own, Seely said, and he wanted someone to follow her. His reason for hiring an investigator from as far away as Louisiana, Seely explained, was confidentiality. “In Toms River,” Seely said, “everybody sooner or later pretty much knows everybody else’s business.”
The investigator, Seely disclosed, was a former deputy sheriff from Caddo Parish, Louisiana, named Ferlin L’Heureux, who, in his dealings with Rob, had used the alias Ernie Grandshaw.
It was Seely’s contention that the Ocean County prosecutor’s office had made the erroneous assumption that Rob had hired L’Heureux, whose name he thought was Grandshaw, to kill Maria instead of to follow her. Such a notion, he said, was preposterous. “A reasonably intelligent person devising a well-thought-out, methodical plan such as the one the prosecution is suggesting would not make traceable phone calls and meet alleged accomplices in public places,” he said.
Seely told the newspaper that he realized he was being unusually candid in discussing the case against his client in so much detail even before his client had been labeled a suspect. “What I’m trying to do,” he said, “is to correct some of the misinformation which, in my opinion, is being designed to poison the minds of the public against my client. There’s certainly been lots of publicity, innuendo and rumor.”
Meanwhile, Rob was residing comfortably in a private psychiatric facility in Philadelphia. Having never ingested any of the Restoril mixture, he’d suffered no physical ill effects and, as far as Roby, who visited him daily, could tell, he seemed mentally and emotionally the same as ever.
It was Roby, actually, who was beginning to feel as if he were losing his grip. Every day he went to class at Ocean County College. Every evening he worked at Feet First. Then, every night, he had to drive seventy miles to Philadelphia to see his father in order to deliver the day’s mail.
Rob, while hospitalized, insisted on keeping up with his work. He told Roby that it was a necessity that he stay absolutely current with his correspondence. What Roby privately believed was that his father was hoping that Felice would write a letter saying she would take him back again, but it didn’t matter what the motive was: the effect was that Roby
had to drive 150 miles round trip every night to deliver the mail.
With Chris back at Lehigh, his father hospitalized and John temporarily sent to live with Gene Leahy’s family in Delaware, Roby would return home to a silent, empty house every night. Sal Coccaro—Uncle Sal, as Roby had actually begun to call him—was nearby, but he had his own wife and three daughters to take care of. Most of Roby’s friends were away at college, as he would have been had he not been suspended. He had lost romantic interest in Susan Salzman. And his mother, whom he’d always leaned upon first at times just like this, was nothing but a few cupfuls of ashes.
Roby himself began to think about suicide. The death part was fine. That would be nothingness. Just the absence of pain. It was the dying part that gave him trouble. He didn’t have a gun and if he did he’d be afraid to use it. He could probably get sleeping pills somewhere but he knew he’d be afraid to swallow them. He could lock the car in the garage and turn on the engine except they didn’t have a garage. He’d always been most afraid of the feeling of not being able to breathe, so that ruled out hanging himself. What he found himself longing for was some sort of simple self-destruct button he could push.
I am, he told himself, the definition of genuine chickenshit: I don’t even have the guts to do a cowardly thing like kill myself. Still, he found himself pushing the accelerator pedal of the Mustang to the floor on his late-night trips back from Philadelphia. He’d go 100, 105, on flat, narrow, two-lane Route 70, not caring if a tire blew, almost praying for a deer to jump into the road, forcing him to swerve into the pine groves on the shoulder and the obliteration that waited there.
The feelings of anguish and despair continued to intensify throughout the first half of October, not helped by Roby’s reading of the newspapers every day. What the hell was Seely talking about, his mother having an affair?