The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [19]
I pitched this story to my editors at Sports Illustrated who, to their eternal credit, encouraged me to pursue it, despite the tangential relation to sport (and marginal sport at that). While Murray declined to be interviewed on advice of his Moroccan counsel, plenty of others were happy to help me piece together the stranger-than-fiction narrative. At this writing, Murray’s alleged coconspirator, Paul (the Enforcer) Allen, having been extradited back to the UK, faces a retrial for involvement in the heist, after his first trial in winter 2009 resulted in the equivalent of a hung jury. Murray remains in jail in Morocco. And only a fraction of the fifty-three million pounds has been recovered.
Dan P. Lee
BODY SNATCHERS
FROM Philadelphia magazine
DAN OPREA’S MOTHER, Rose, was always fiercely self-reliant. Born in 1923, she grew up at 5th and Oxford. After graduating from Hallahan Catholic Girls’ High School, she married Daniel Oprea Sr., with whom she had a son. When the two divorced after seven years, Rose took it upon herself to enroll in Drexel University, where she studied electrical engineering. She became an engineer with RCA. With her only child, Rose Oprea carved out a happy life. She was not afraid of aloneness.
She and her son remained close—geographically and otherwise—as he grew older, despite the fact that they were opposites of sorts; Rose was bookish and artistic, while Dan, who took a job with the Navy, enjoyed working with his hands. (They shared a common interest in movies, something Rose instilled in her son from a young age.) Dan married and had two sons, to whom Rose was especially devoted. When Dan and his wife Mary Rose tragically lost their 26-year-old son Stephen in 2001, the mother-son bond grew stronger.
In her later years, Rose developed her share of health problems; she’d had a kidney removed years earlier, she suffered from angina and diverticulitis and a low iron count, and there was some slippage mentally. Dan and Mary Rose worried about her—her continued driving was of particular concern—and tried repeatedly to convince her to let them move in with her in the three-bedroom rancher in Huntingdon Valley that Rose had always said Dan would someday inherit. But Rose, who at 82 kept herself busy painting American Indian–style works and running errands in her Chrysler Concorde, would have none of it. Dan and Mary Rose lived a few miles away, and Dan visited his mother every Saturday, mowing the lawn, raking leaves, changing light bulbs, whatever she needed done. The two spoke on the phone, without fail, every day.
One day in late December 2004, Dan tried to reach his mother. She didn’t answer. He figured she was out rummaging the after-Christmas sales, and wasn’t immediately worried. When it turned six o’clock and they still hadn’t heard from her, Dan and Mary Rose drove to her house. They found her car parked in the driveway. Dan used his key to unlock the front door. Inside, they called out, flipping lights on as they searched. In her bedroom, they discovered Rose lying contorted on the floor. Her dachshund Sparky stood vigil beside her.
At the hospital, doctors determined that Rose had suffered a stroke. She was completely paralyzed on one side, and she was disoriented. She could no longer speak, or write. As the days wore on and her condition stabilized, she regained little of what she’d lost. After two weeks, she was transferred to a nursing home.
The Opreas visited Rose at Luther Woods Convalescent Center as frequently as possible. Though she struggled to communicate, it was clear she was uncomfortable—she tried often to wiggle out of bed—and wished to be home. She once managed to express to her son her worry that she was causing trouble. He told her she was no trouble at all. Late on the night of April 18, 2005, the Opreas rushed to the nursing home after receiving