Murder and Salutations - By Elizabeth Bright Page 0,72
and she’s a good-looking girl.”
The thin man smiled coldly. “We don’t like to imagine these fellows out there. They’re the sharks in the harbor. That’s why it’s a high risk to go running alone, to be isolated at six o’clock in the morning in a park, on a pathway—particularly for an attractive girl.”
Gill’s face lost color. He didn’t doubt Walter, but it seemed a tragic, absurd end to Heidi Berg. The questions from the VSMs had seemed relatively weak. Someone had actually asked Gill if he had checked Berg’s phone records. “Of course,” Gill had shot back. What were they accomplishing?
The next month was even more disappointing to Fleisher. On the morning of Tuesday, July 3, 1984, Donna Friedman, thirty-three years old and eight and a half months pregnant, left her two young children with a babysitter and went to her regular obstetrics appointment. Friedman, a doctor’s wife, was due the second week in August. She received great news from her obstetrician, Dr. Robert S. Auerbach. The baby was a “perfectly formed, healthy baby boy,” Dr. Auerbach said. “She was very happy and doing beautifully. She said that she didn’t care whether it was a boy or a girl. She had only wanted it to be healthy. She lived for her other two children so completely.”
Leaving the doctor’s office, Friedman said she had some shopping to do. First Friedman, who was redecorating her suburban Philadelphia home, went to All-in-One Linens to inquire about bedroom curtains. Then it was on to Toys“R”Us to look for a stroller for her brother’s newborn son, a gift for the child’s bris. Unable to find the special stroller, she called her brother at about 1 P.M., and he suggested she go to Cramer’s Juvenile Furniture on Frankford Avenue, which was advertising the stroller. She bought it with a credit card, and asked a clerk to help carry it to the trunk of her car. The store clerk watched her drive away at 3:30 P.M.
When she didn’t return home by 4:15, her husband, hematologist Dr. Alan Friedman, was worried. Donna was always punctual and knew she had to be home to relieve the babysitter for Scott, eight, and Lee, four. The couple also planned to attend a 6 P.M. birthday party for Dr. Friedman’s grandmother at a local restaurant. When his wife didn’t show up for the party, Dr. Friedman called hospitals and the police.
Police began an urgent search for the missing woman. Dr. Friedman spent two days retracing his wife’s steps. At 8:25 P.M., Thursday, police found the family’s 1984 Oldsmobile Cutlass parked on Ogontz Avenue, a few blocks from the Cheltenham Square Mall. Blood was seeping out of the trunk. Friedman and her unborn child were both found dead in the trunk. The young mother had been bludgeoned to death with two blows to the skull, then shot twice in the back of the head, “for good measure,” the police said.
Fleisher choked up listening to Philadelphia Police Department detective Frank Diegel describe the case. Fleisher had grown up not far from the Friedmans. At the funeral service for mother and unborn child, people wept and cried out in anguish. The rabbi had told the story of a man who cried over the death of a loved one.
“Why do you weep?” the man’s friend asked. “Your tears will not bring back your loved one.”
“That is why I weep,” the man replied.
A week after the murders, the Philadelphia Daily News offered $10,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction “of the person or persons responsible for the murder of Donna Friedman and her unborn child.” Family and friends of the Friedmans offered a separate $10,000 reward. Homicide detective Diegel had a primary suspect, but the police investigation foundered. The money was never collected. No one was ever arrested for the crime.
The Vidocq Society discussion was spirited. The society helped focus and reenergize Diegel on his primary suspect, whom VSMs were convinced had killed the pregnant woman. But in the weeks that followed, Fleisher was deeply frustrated. “We know who did it, but it was never pursued by the police. It was stonewalled, and we don’t know why.”
Fleisher said they were taking on a Sisyphean task if they tried to solve cold murders. Police often interviewed the killer within forty-eight hours of a murder, but if they didn’t recognize him, the case dried up fast. Memories faded. Evidence disappeared. Other cases clamored for attention. Once a case officially went cold, the difficult turned nearly impossible. “There