Who Killed Chrissy?: The True Crime Memoir of a Pittsburgh girl's Unsolved Murder in Las Vegas Read online

  Who Killed Chrissy?

  The True Crime Memoir of a Pittsburgh Girl’s Unsolved Murder in Las Vegas

  By BEVERLY SIMCIC

  Copyright © 2012 by Beverly Simcic. All rights reserved.

  Published in 2012 by Beverly Simcic.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, contact [email protected]

  “Every single word in this book is the truth to the best of my ability after thirty years of time lapse. A few names have been changed and a few have been fabricated due to no recollection at all of their real ones.”-Beverly Simcic

  DEDICATION

  For Chrissy…

  Table of Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PREFACE

  ONE: RIVERVIEW PARK

  TWO: THE DRIFTER

  THREE: LAS VEGAS VACATION

  FOUR: PANIC AT THE POOL

  FIVE: THE PRIZE FIGHTER

  SIX: HOLMES VERSUS COONEY

  SEVEN: PREMONITION

  EIGHT: WARNING VISION

  NINE: LURKING AND KNOWING

  TEN: DENIAL

  ELEVEN: ROBBERS AND SCAMMERS

  TWELVE: DIVINE INTERVENTION

  THIRTEEN: PITTSBURGH—GLORIOUS PITTSBURGH

  FOURTEEN: THEORIES

  FIFTEEN: DISCOVERIES

  SIXTEEN: QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I want to thank all the people on this page for their support in this project. A very special thank you to my lifelong friend, Dana Katselas, for her guidance and highly skilled technical knowledge. Without your help I would have never finished this book!

  True Crime Authors:

  Ron Franscell

  Dennis Griffin

  Terri Jentz

  T. A. Powell

  Linda Principe

  Friends—Editors—Readers:

  Tamara Arrington

  Cathy Fleetwood

  Cyndee Kaule

  Melissa Miller

  Susan Redmond

  Dana Reed

  Chuck Werner

  Officials—Experts:

  Detective Mike Blasko

  Detective David Hatch

  Dr. Cyril Wecht

  PREFACE

  “I believe that you meet people who are vital to your transformation only when the conditions are right, when the tenacious concerns of the unconscious break into awareness. Then such kindred spirits are drawn to each other like iron shavings to a magnet.”

  –Terri Jentz, Strange Piece of Paradise

  Christine Casilio was found dead and decomposing in the bathroom of her small efficiency apartment in Las Vegas, Nevada on June 25, 1982.

  During a summer of average daytime temperatures of 99 degrees and up, the air conditioning unit in her apartment had been purposely turned off, therefore causing her body to decompose at a higher than normal rate.

  Chris was twenty-three years old and someone who had been my friend and neighbor in Pittsburgh, before we mutually decided to hop a plane to Vegas for a vacation and the possibilities of new jobs and extensive dream weaving.

  Chris was sent back to Pittsburgh in a body bag, while I returned to a life that would carry the mystery of her death in my heart and mind for twenty some years before overcoming the paranoia and debilitating fear in order to begin telling the story. Angeline and Josephine Casilio, Chris’s aunts in Pittsburgh, would spend the remainder of their lives searching for answers in their niece’s death. They were both near sixty at the time that Chris died. They are both deceased at this writing.

  A miracle, a vision, a premonition, and an unsolved death in Las Vegas have hung in my memory like a broken antique for the last twenty-four years of my life. I’ve had that long to think about the reason it all happened in the first place and why I was drawn to, and ultimately placed in the old apartment building on Riverview Avenue in Pittsburgh. If you believe that nothing happens by accident, or if you have lost your faith, this true story of fate and divine intervention will shed a bright light on all the possibilities….

  I’ve had this true story locked in my mind since June of 1982. I have never told this story to anyone—for reasons of paralyzing fear and the fact that the murder has never been solved.

  There has been no time for stillness in my life. Life changed drastically for my husband and me in the summer of 2006. We lost our clothing stores to (what I call), The Great Retail Depression—the U.S. economy was on a down swing and we were right in the middle of it. My husband returned to truck driving with a local steel erection company, and I was lost. I had never felt this alone in my entire life; it felt like I’ve been thrown down a well and left there in the dark filthy water.

  What does a fifty-something woman who’s owned her own business for twenty-three years do when there’s no more business? That’s only one question that arose; there would be a hundred more in the months to come.

  I’ve come so far since the summer of 1982—a single working mom until the 90s, and now a former business owner who walks the garden daily for inspiration.

  I have my computer, but what do I now Google? I can Google anything; every single morning I try to think of things to Google. Looking for jobs, mainly jobs—I must find something to do, but what do I do? I can’t rush this, it doesn’t feel right, and it doesn’t feel worthy right now. I don’t feel worthy of anything. I feel defeated, angry, and full of nothing—empty as hell.

  I must regress myself to the time before I owned my business; what did I do? I don’t want to regress in any way—it’s depressing. Why is regression so painful, so anxiety ridden? I haven’t figured it out yet, and I don’t care to. I want to feel motivated, enthusiastic, like I felt every single day when I had my business. But, there’s no more business.

  I should be thinking about the bankruptcy and the realization that we almost lost the house; I want to have some kind of real passion for something, a project, a career, a something—something.

  One afternoon while putting out seed for the backyard birds, I have a passing thought about Chris. I wonder what she’d be doing today if she were still alive. I don’t know how old she’d be; I can’t remember and don’t want to remember. As I’m listening to the questions coming at me in my head, I ease myself into the lounger—heaven. This is the first attempt at relaxing, breathing, taking in my woodland gardens surrounding me, sun on my face, arms, warming my entire body. I close my eyes; I see Chris, and she’s standing there, telling me she’s sorry. I mumble to myself, “What are you sorry for, Chris?” She sighs, “I’m sorry I left you thinking I didn’t like you; I’m sorry I couldn’t listen to you then; I’m sorry I missed out on life.”

  So I’m taking this in stride, this conversation with a dead person, someone who’s been gone since 1982, someone I haven’t thought much about in all these years. It’s my memories that are trying to resurface, and I don’t want them. I don’t want those memories because I’ve deliberately suppressed them; I can’t allow it. I know that if I allow Chris back in, Marty and Fred will follow. The terror will overcome me; the fear that paralyzed me in the eighties will sweep back in, stalk me, and snuff me out. This small willingness to allow regression
of my memories must be a sign that something’s happened…something I’m not yet aware of. Marty could be dead now, gone forever, and I won’t have to think about him anymore. I’m suddenly relieved that Marty is probably dead, and I can feel the tension drain out of my body like rainwater running down my garden hillside. He’s older than I am; he really could be dead by now.

  Fred is probably in prison, and he was from Philadelphia so he’s not around here. Or Marty could have done away with him in 1982.

  Sun on my shorts, feels like warm butter, slipping into half sleep, I’m there. I’m hot and paralyzed in a hundred degrees on my belly on the towel in the grass, next to the pool at the Woodbridge Inn in Las Vegas. It’s getting ready to happen. The memory is suddenly vivid again, the delicate robed hand touching my shoulder, the meek whispering voice telling me, “Get up and go to your room right now”…bright white light strobe flashes like a camera going off, shocking me awake like a cattle prod had been thumped on the back of my head and shoulders.

  It’s the first time I’ve allowed myself to open this memory, and it’s frightening me to the point that I have an immediate overwhelming desire to tell someone about it. There is no one to tell! There hasn’t been time in my life for close friends. I’ve lived a hectic, narrow, pointed-in-the-right-direction life since Chris was murdered in 1982. I am a product of raising a child on my own and not having one minute to think about anything except earning money to pay my bills and support my child. The emptiness inside me is an aching pain that has lodged itself in my body and I can’t shake it. I now know I have to pursue this until it’s out of my body, out of my psyche. It’s been lodged like a splinter in my brain for too long, and if I don’t get it out it will become a giant block of wood that eventually crushes me. Weeks go by before I approach the only person who is there for me now.

  I attempt to talk with my husband, Jake, and he listens, but he is a black-and-white thinking guy and his psyche operates in straight, balanced lines. We are completely opposite for philosophical thinking; his opinion is un-cluttered with emotion and he’s very direct on solutions. I haven’t told anyone this story, my story—no one knows it until now, when I finally trust someone enough to tell them. Jake handles it well, without emotion, only with his balanced and deliberate evaluation.

  Why would I want to open up this can of worms that has been lying dormant for all these years? Especially since the murder has never been solved, and considering the fact that Marty lives right here in Pittsburgh. Marty could be dead by now, or...

  He then adds more intense descriptions of how Marty could still come after me or that (in his opinion), there could have been some sort of cover up by the Las Vegas Police, because in the eighties there was so much crime going on out there that the police could have had a tendency to dismiss it and cover it up quickly and silently. I had to consider all these things.

  After telling the love of my life the entire story from beginning to end for the first time, he runs all the scenarios at me. The “what ifs,” the dangers, the complications, and all of his other sensible theories and opinions. I love my husband with my entire being and I trust him with a trust that I never thought was possible for me. I value what he has to say, and I try to stop thinking about it.

  I gave the flat facts to the detectives in Las Vegas in 1982 and then the more emotional, intricate story to Marty upon returning to Pittsburgh after Chris’s murder. Marty insisted I tell him the story because he was at that time, a Pittsburgh cop and one of Chris’s unofficial boyfriends, the one who had the key to her apartment while she and I were both in Las Vegas.

  Marty was the chosen one by Chris’s family to interview me when I returned from Las Vegas, the last person to see Chris alive—other than her killer. Marty was the guy everyone looked to for procedures and interrogations, because Marty was a cop.

  My premonitions, and the fact that I firmly believe I was saved from being murdered too, were pushed into the back of my mind because (as I now know) I was in shock and was living with secondary trauma syndrome, which is similar to post traumatic stress disorder in that it changes the way you look at life and creates fear and stress to the point that it interferes with how you function every day. I realized this quite suddenly in 2009 after accidentally finding Terri Jentz’s book, Strange Piece of Paradise. I had been voraciously reading every true crime book I could find and still hadn’t found the book to inspire me to dig up the truth, investigate the survivors of the crime and bring the entire story to some kind of truthful meaning. Strange Piece of Paradise was so intense that it jarred me back into writing again after being frozen and stopped dead, because somehow, I couldn’t get to the real reasons I was stumbling on my every attempt to write. I must thank Terri for her inspiration and encourage anyone living with crime trauma to read her inspiring book. The bravery of this woman is beyond belief—her story is one you’ll never forget.

  Since I personally have never been able to return to Las Vegas after Chris’s murder, I found it difficult to believe the level of courage that Terri Jentz had to muster within herself to return to her haunting, horrifying, unsolved crime scene.

  This is the stuff of nightmares, my friends, real nightmares that regular people never believe will happen to them. Unless you experience it first hand, you will never know how it feels.

  I know that I must write this book for Chris, and I must write my story for myself as a cathartic exercise that’s been long overdue in my lifetime.

  I have not given Chris much thought through the years; I have never tried to conjure up a vision of her, or a memory of her, and I know why—because the fear would bite me hard again. I left it alone; I left it lie buried.

  This book has been a six-year journey.

  When you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot?...As you’re moving ahead, it just unfolds, often in random twists. Just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance become leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others….

  It is as though there were a single intention behind it all, which always makes some kind of sense, though none of us knows what the sense might be, or has lived the life that he or she quite intended.

  I have to remind myself of this when I don’t know how to get where I want to go, or when I’m not sure where my current interests are leading.

  If you worry about finding your path, ask yourself this: what if your path isn’t clear to you because it doesn’t exist yet?

  –Joseph Campbell

  151 Riverview Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

  ONE: RIVERVIEW PARK

  “The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.”

  –M. Scott Peck

  “I’m lying naked on my bed with Marty.” Chris spins around and grabs the 12-inch stainless steel knife off the old porcelain sink, points the sharp edge so it’s touching her hipbone, then presses it against her stomach and drags the blade across the bottom edge of her gray tank top. As she runs the point of the knife up across her breasts then circles and runs it back down across her stomach, she is grinning with delight. I am bug-eyed and ready to jump up out of my chair but I stay put and wait for her to stop playing with the knife, and I can’t speak. She has moved from the sink to the old stove where she’s cooking up wedding soup, and I’m absorbing the wonderful smell of chicke
n broth while trying to process why this story is emerging from her.

  “Marty lays me out on the bed and runs a knife all around my body,” she blurts out.

  I don’t know what to say; it freezes me up in my chair, and I can’t imagine why she’s telling me this story—which I find frightening and odd.

  The uncomfortable wooden chair feels like I’m sitting on a cement block, and I am studying her while she stirs the simmering broth.

  I’m not sure this is a lovemaking scene; maybe it’s a just a story she made up, but I am thinking as she’s talking, and I feel strange and uncomfortable and I want to walk out…For a moment she shuts up and I sit there thinking to myself that she’s nuts. I don’t want to think this about her, I truly don’t, but I don’t know what else to feel right now as I sit in silence wondering what she will say next. This isn’t the kind of story that I like hearing from female friends; I prefer romance and drama with some glamour added….

  I look upon Chris as smaller than me, although she is about five foot six. She appears short because her hips are wide and she has a “rumble butt,” which she hates; she told me so. She has the tiniest waist I’ve ever seen—and I envy her for it—along with the tightest toned stomach muscles. Her thighs are thick but match her larger athletic calves and strong ankles. Her upper body appears frail—toned, but still frail—small breasts and delicate arms with tiny wrists, like I could grab them and twist them off her body.

  I love Chris’s crooked smile; it’s a smile that invites you to enter her strange world of what I sometimes think is a fantasy realm that she has been fabricating since her childhood. Her wide-eyed enthusiasm is always present; she is curious about everything.