Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [61]
Bobby Violante and Stacy Moskowitz pulled up under a street lamp, the only available parking spot. And there was a full moon that night. It was not dark enough for what they had in mind, so the two of them went for a walk in the park nearby. They walked over a bridge and spent a few minutes playing on the swings. Near the public toilets they noticed a man in jeans, who they described as a ‘hippy type’, leaning against a wall. He was not there when they walked back to the car. Back in the car, they kissed. Stacy suggested that they move on, but Bobby wanted one more kiss. It was a mistake. While they were embracing, Bobby Violante took two bullets in the face, blinding him and exploding his eardrums. He could neither see nor hear, but he felt Stacy jerk violently in his arms, then collapse forward. He feared she was dead. Bobby threw himself against the car horn, fumbled at the car door, cried for help, then collapsed on the pavement.
In the car in front, Tommy Zaino had seen the shooting in his rear-view mirror. He had watched as a man approached the car from behind and pull out a gun. From a crouching position, he had fired four shots through the open passenger window. When his girlfriend, Debbie Crescendo, heard the shooting, she said ‘What’s that?’
‘Get down,’ he said. ‘I think it’s the Son of Sam.’
Zaino watched as the gunman ran towards the park. He looked at his watch. It was exactly 2.35 a.m. A patrol car was just five blocks away at the time.
Stacy Moskowitz was still conscious when the ambulance arrived. One bullet had grazed her scalp, but the other had lodged in the back of her brain. She died 38 hours later. Bobby Violante survived, but his sight could not be restored.
Tommy Zaino gave a good description of the killer. He was stocky with stringy, fair hair. This matched the description given by Donna DeMasi and Joanne Lomino, but not the one of the dark curly-haired man described by Jody Valente and the neighbour in the DeMasi/Lomino case. The police wondered whether he was wearing a wig. A beautician and her boyfriend were seated by the entrance to the park when they heard the shots. They saw a man wearing a denim jacket and what they took to be a cheap nylon wig. He jumped into a light-coloured car and drove off, as if he had just robbed a bank. A young girl on a bicycle identified the car as a yellow Volkswagen. A nurse who looked out of the window when she heard the shots, also said that she had seen a yellow VW. It almost collided with another car at the first intersection and the driver was so incensed that he gave chase, only to lose the car after a couple of blocks. The yellow VW’s driver, he said, had stringy brown hair.
But an even more vital witness took a little longer to come forward. She was Mrs Cacilia Davis, a 49-year-old widow, who had been out with a male friend. They had returned to her apartment, two blocks from the park, at around 2 a.m. They sat and talked for a few minutes but, as they had been forced to double park, they kept an eye open for other cars. A little way ahead, Mrs Davis saw a police car and two patrolmen writing out parking tickets. Some way behind was a yellow Ford Galaxie. It was parked by a fire hydrant and a few minutes before an officer from the patrol car had given it a ticket. A young man with dark hair walked up to the Galaxie and irritably pulled the parking ticket from the windscreen.
Mrs Davis invited her friend in for coffee. He declined, saying that it was 2.20 a.m. already. At that moment, the police car pulled off. So did the Galaxie, but it could not get past Mrs Davis’ friend’s car. The man in the Galaxie impatiently honked the horn. Mrs Davis hurriedly