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The murder:
Fatal attraction
BY GERALD M. CARBONE and CATHLEEN F. CROWLEY
Journal staff writers
The way Scott Hornoff remembers it, the seduction
began on a summer's evening by the sea. He stood on the top deck of the
Coast Guard
House restaurant in Narragansett, enjoying a cold beer and the salt breeze.
Daylight lingered well into evening on that Friday in July 1989; the waves
broke
rhythmically on the rocks below.
Scott had just run in the Blessing of the Fleet road race.
He had showered and felt good, clean and relaxed after the 10-mile run. He was
young, blond, green-eyed, and a Warwick police officer.
A slender, freckled woman with short brown hair approached
him. He recognized her as Vickie Cushman, the woman who worked at the Warwick
sporting goods store where he often filled his scuba tanks. At age 29, she was
almost three years older than Scott.
"What are you doing here?" he asked Vickie.
"I came to see you," she said.
Vickie said that she'd been visiting a nearby beach club,
where her boyfriend tended bar, but she'd left to see Scott. She asked whether
he needed a ride home; Scott said no. He was with his brothers, Dave and Ronnie.
Dave was also a Warwick police officer and Scott's best friend. Scott said Dave
would drive him home.
Vickie said, "Do you cheat on your wife?"
"No," he lied.
"Would you like to?"
Scott had known Vickie for about a year, but she didn't
stand out in his mind until that night. Her bold solicitation flattered him.
That night, nothing happened.
Scott can't remember who made the call but a day or two
later, they spoke on the phone and agreed to meet at her place. Scott worked
second-shift detectives, so he had a ready-made excuse for being out nights
away from his wife. He drove to Vickie's house on Maple Street in his unmarked
car, wearing a dress shirt and tie.
Vickie lived on the second floor of a small, white house
next to the Alpine Ski/Sports shop where she worked. Her apartment was on a
dead-end street of factories, stores and parking lots.
Scott sat on a couch in her living room. Vickie offered
him iced tea or lemonade, and they talked. Vickie went into the bathroom. She
emerged half dressed. She sat next to him and kissed his neck and ear, and then
put her hand on his thigh.
Scott shifted and said something like, "I don't think
this is a good idea." But he stayed.
They had sex on the couch, and then she led him to her
cramped bedroom, where a large gold Oriental fan hung on the wall above the
bed.
Soon after, Scott went back to work.
The affair thrilled Vickie. She couldn't keep it to herself.
A week after the Coast Guard House encounter, Vickie was
locked in a back room of the ski shop with Kerri C. Martin, a coworker, and
Joan Jacober, whose family owned the store. They were counting cash collected
during "Sniagrab" -- bargains spelled backwards -- Alpine's popular summer sale.
Vickie announced she was having an "illicit affair."
Is he married? they asked. Who is he?
Vickie told them to guess. They ran through a list of
"suspects" -- mostly coworkers -- but each time Vickie said no. Her lover, she
revealed, was a Warwick police officer who filled scuba tanks at the store for
the police dive team: Scott Hornoff.
She told Martin that Scott's wife had just had a baby
and there was a strain on their marriage.
"She was a very aggressive, upbeat personality, very vocal,
not shy about anything, very direct," Martin said in court testimony. "She was
aggressively pursuing the relationship. She wasn't intimidated by the fact he
was married."
Scott first thought Vickie was lonely and in need of a
friend. But as he got to know her, he had a change of heart. He realized she
had plenty of friends and, he believed, a few sexual partners. Some time in
early August of 1989 -- after two trysts in Vickie's apartment -- he stopped
by and told her that they couldn't do this anymore. She coquettishly let a breast
slip out of her robe, but he ignored the attempted seduction.
"I remember she was sad, she was sad," Scott told a grand
jury in 1994. "She said, 'But I want to keep seeing you,' or something to that
effect." She curled her bottom lip into a pout.
And that, as Scott remembers it, was the end of their
relationship -- and the last time he saw Vickie.
VICTORIA E. CUSHMAN spoke five languages. At Alpine, she
used to speak in Farsi to the Iranian-born UPS deliveryman. As a teen she had
attended Buxton, a small Massachusetts prep school where tuition cost as much
as a year in a private college. The daughter of divorced parents, she had two
older brothers and a younger sister.
Her father worked as an aeronautics engineer for Pratt
& Whitney in Hartford, Conn. With his blessing, Vickie joined the Army after
high school, where she was assigned to an intelligence unit specializing in
languages. After the Army, she earned a bachelor's degree from the University
of Maryland. At her murder trial, friends described her as bright, friendly,
headstrong and ambitious. Yet she was socially awkward.
Her sister, Jennifer C. Boghossian, testified: "She wanted
to be liked very much by anybody that she met and, unfortunately, she would
become very boisterous, extremely aggressive, in trying to make friends, to
keep friends. And, unfortunately, it pushed people away that she wanted to become
close to. She scared people because she was so intense."
Before she worked at the Alpine store, Vickie worked and
lived in Providence. It was in Providence that she met Todd J. Barry, a 30ish,
dark-haired carpenter who lived with his parents.
She met Todd on a summer's evening in 1988, about a year
before she met Scott. The meeting place was a trendy bar on the waterfront,
the Hot Club, with an outdoor deck above the Providence River.
Todd told the state police that he was a partying kind
of guy in those days. Weeknights, after pounding nails, he'd drink 4 or 5 beers;
weekends he'd drink 10 or 12. He smoked pot a few days a week.
Todd lounged on the Hot Club's deck enjoying the sun,
drinking Rolling Rock beer, and Vickie was there with a group. Todd and
Vickie made small talk; he found her attractive. She asked him back to
her apartment on the East Side.
On the way they stopped for a bite to eat on the corner
of Wickenden and Brook. At her Waterman Street apartment they drank beer and
kissed. She told him that she was dating someone, but that she was going to
ditch him. The night grew late, and Todd thought that he'd fall asleep on Vickie's
couch. Then, Todd remembers, she said, "Come in and sleep with me."
She was "a free spirit," he says. "Frisky." They had sex
that night, and dated a couple more times. Then Todd felt that Vickie was becoming
"a little obsessive."
He was working on the East Side, on the historic John
Brown House; Vickie dropped by uninvited. "That spooked me a little bit," Todd
says.
In late summer, Todd said he didn't want to see her anymore;
Vickie didn't want to let go. She called his parents' house; she cornered him
outside of Babe's, a Wickenden Street bar. As Todd recalls, she said she didn't
care about a long-term, affectionate relationship; she just wanted sex.
He says he told her: "If that's what you want to do, [but]
I'm not guaranteeing you anything besides that." So they continued having sex
into the late fall.
"The girl struck me as a fatal attraction type of girl,"
Todd says.
By winter, the relationship was over. Occasionally they'd
see each other around town, at the Hot Club or other bars, and they'd make small
talk. She told Todd that she was working now at the Alpine Ski store. He was
familiar with the place; as a child his parents had bought him his first set
of skis there.
He went to Alpine that winter and saw Vickie. They stepped
out of the store and chatted. It was cold. She told him she lived in the white
house across the parking lot, upstairs. He says she told him to stop by any
time.
As storm clouds gathered on a summer night in 1989, Todd
took her up on that offer.
THIS IS what Todd Barry told the state police in a video-taped
confession about the night he killed Vickie Cushman: After work he went to the
Hot Club and milled around on the deck, beer in hand. He was a regular there,
and as usual he saw people he knew, Simon and Wally, two Irish students who
were in the country working as carpenters. They worked with Todd for a small
construction company.
"We were having a good time, nice time, drinking beers,
pounding beers," Todd recalls. "Good time." He drank four or five beers at the
Hot Club, and a couple of shots of whiskey. Then the trio headed over to Club
Rocket, a punk-rock bar on Richmond Street.
It was just getting dark, around 8:30 or 9 p.m., when
they went inside. Todd drank three or four more beers, and a kind of hard liquor.
Then he joined some people outside the club to smoke pot.
He walked back inside. "It's getting crowded, crowded,
crowded. I'm feeling pretty good. I'm getting cocked. I'm buzzing, I'm buzzing,
'cause now I've had a multitude of beers. . . . And then I had a bad experience."
In telling the story, Todd becomes animated, spreading
his arms wide. "I'm drinking this drink. It didn't seem like it was in my hand.
Wow -- something hit me all of the sudden right then and there."
He remembers he was standing by the stage, a punk band
was playing. He thought: Something's wrong here. Bad wrong.
"At this time I really felt like I'd been drugged -- like
not pot, alcohol thing. And then that whole -- what seemed like a pretty normal
-- night really started to spin out of control."
He started to sweat. The walls closed in; he felt panic,
and he wanted to leave.
He remembers a wave of cool air as he burst out of the
club. His car, a silver Datsun B210 hatchback, was parked nearby. He doesn't
remember getting in it, but he does recall driving on Route 95, heading south
to his parents' house in East Greenwich. His drive took him toward Vickie Cushman's
apartment.
"You got to understand, it was a very, very, very crazy
experience," he says now. "I felt whacked out, drugged out . . ." This
was Todd Barry's state of mind as he steered his car off the highway and
round the wide loop of the Jefferson Boulevard exit to Vickie Cushman's
apartment on an industrial, dead-end street.
AROUND THE stroke of midnight on Aug. 10, 1989, at least
two drunken drivers prowled the streets of Warwick: Todd Barry and Scott Hornoff.
Though they did not cross paths, that's the night their fates became inextricably
intertwined.
Scott was off-duty and began his night of partying at
about 5:30 p.m., at the house of fellow patrolman, Raymond E. Gallucci. Ray
and his wife, Deborah, were hosting a house party that night, the first of what
became annual bashes for the Warwick police.
Scott is still not sure who drove him to the party, but
he arrived with a cooler full of his favorite beers, Michelob Dry in long necks
and Corona. Patrolman Steve Branch grabbed a punch bowl and poured a fizzy mix
of orange juice, Sprite, a half-bottle of wine, a half-bottle of vodka, a half-bottle
of gin and some fruit. Scott thought the punch needed a little pizzazz, so he
added Southern Comfort.
Not long after Scott arrived, his wife, Rhonda, showed
up with their 6-month-old son, Joshua. At 5 feet 10 inches, Rhonda stood a half-inch
taller than Scott. She was 22 years old, with blonde hair that spilled midway
down her back. She was just five years out of Seekonk High, where she had set
records in the javelin toss. She'd briefly attended the University of Rhode
Island, where she made the track team. In college she could bench-press 160
pounds and squat 450. Rhonda was still in good shape; she attended aerobics
classes three times a week with other cops' wives.
Rhonda saw 20 to 30 people at the party, in the Galluccis'
backyard; everyone was in a good mood. Scott was starting to get a "glow on."
Music blared over the Galluccis' stereo; Scott played
a few tapes of his own: rock by Alabama, and a tape of Christmas reggae music
that he brought to a summer party as a joke. He also played a bouncy reggae
number that was big in the late '80s: Don't Worry, Be Happy.
Before long the party split into two camps: the men, playing
Jarts, and the women, sitting in what Rhonda described as a "little sewing circle."
Scott and his brother Dave teamed up and hit a winning
streak playing Jarts. Under the rules of the game, the losing team had to chug
beer; the Hornoff brothers were winning, but after each game they chugged with
the losers. At times Scott held a beer in one hand, a glass of killer punch
in the other.
The party peaked around 10 p.m., when a neighbor called
the Warwick police station to tell the party of cops to quiet down. The baby
started crying. Rhonda pulled Scott aside and told him she was going home. She
wanted Scott to come, but he wasn't ready to leave. He'd get a ride home with
Dave, or with his friend, Steve Branch. Scott was drunk, almost slurring his
words.
Rhonda had a short drive home from the party, 10 or 15
minutes to her Cape house on a corner of busy West Shore Road. She dumped the
dirty baby bottles and diapers from the diaper bag, and put the baby to bed.
Then she brushed her teeth, removed her contacts, and picked out the next day's
clothes for her office job at MetLife.
From her bed she turned on the news, Channel 10, to check
out the weather. Rain was imminent. She dozed a little, but a policeman's
wife doesn't sleep easily until he's by her side.
DAVE WANTED to leave the party and go home. He told his
little brother: If you want a ride, I'm leaving. They climbed into Dave's red
Jeep, with its JDH-911 vanity plate. The Jeep's doors were detached for summer.
Night air whooshed through as they drove toward Scott's house on MacArthur Drive.
They didn't talk much; Scott was drunk and quiet, maybe dozing.
The Hornoff brothers were sons of a chemist and a stay-at-home
mom. They were born in Charleston, West Virginia, moving to Rhode Island when
Harry Hornoff took a job at the Ciba-Geigy chemical plant. Scott was 2, David,
9, when they moved, so their childhood roots took hold in Rhode Island.
But a few West Virginian traits lingered in the Hornoffs,
like the family's custom of calling Jeffrey Scott and his brother, John David,
by their middle names.
The whole family used to cheer on Dave at Toll Gate High
School hockey games, where he was a hard-hitting defenseman with shoulder-length
hair and a wisp of a mustache.
Scott was 12, Dave, 19, when Dave was accepted to the
police academy. Dave asked Scott to be his jogging partner as he tried to get
in shape for the police boot camp. Scott, a short, stocky boy, didn't want to
jog. He had thick legs, "hockey thighs," he says, built more for sprints; but
his big brother made him run for distance.
As they grew stronger, they ran farther. Dave would talk
about the police academy, and when he became a policeman, he would recount his
on-duty adventures: the time a man took his family hostage and urged Dave to
shoot and kill him; his undercover work probing Warwick's drug culture; the
time Dave almost died when a barroom drunk kicked him in the throat.
He told Scott how good it felt to capture the bad guy.
By age 13, Scott knew he wanted to be a cop. His high
school guidance counselor didn't even suggest college to the kid with a mop
of blond hair combed flat against his forehead. He wrote in Scott's year book,
"Good luck on the police force."
In 1983, he won a slot in the police academy. To celebrate
his new career, Scott decided to get a vanity license plate reading: JUSTICE.
But the word was one letter too long and he couldn't find a shorter version
that he liked. So he settled on a different word, shortened it, and attached
it to his "arrest-me red" Datsun 260Z. He kept that plate on every car he owned
until the day he went to prison. The plate read: INOCNT.
DAVE DROPPED off Scott at his house around 11:30 p.m.
and watched him go through the front door.
The music signaling the end of the news was coming up
when Rhonda heard Scott slam the door downstairs. He came up the stairs and
asked, "Did you feed the dogs?"
"No."
He went back downstairs.
The Hornoffs had two dogs, Kilo, a black German shepherd,
and Whitney, a Newfoundland. Whitney had stomach trouble and needed a special
diet of dry food, yogurt and hamburger that had to soak for 15 minutes.
Rhonda heard the dog bowls clanging in the sink. She heard
water running. She heard Scott growling and roughhousing with the big dogs in
the yard.
But Rhonda never heard Scott start his car.
She did not know that he had decided to go back to the
party for a drink and to pick up the tapes he'd left there; he'd lost tapes
at a party once before. He got into his silver Subaru and drove a few miles
to the Galluccis.
At the party he saw some new faces, second-shift detectives
who had just finished work. He said hi to a couple of the new arrivals and drank
a half-cup of punch. Not much was happening so he didn't stay long, 5 or 10
minutes, before making the short drive back home.
Rhonda heard Scott coming to bed when the music of Johnny
Carson was giving way to the Letterman show, about 12:30 a.m.
She remembers that Scott was back in their bedroom "amusingly"
drunk, making a game of trying to slip off his socks without using his hands.
Then he pulled a pillow over his head and dropped into a deep sleep.
Scott's return trip to the party, though brief, put him
out of the house around the time of Vickie Cushman's murder.
KERRI MARTIN arrived at work at the usual time, a little
after 9 a.m. She expected to see Vickie Cushman, her coworker and friend, waiting
for her in the break room. Every morning she and Vickie drank coffee together
and chatted before beginning their shifts at the Alpine Ski/Sports store in
Warwick.
Martin liked these morning coffee klatsches; she just
never knew what would come out of Vickie's mouth. She asked a colleague to telephone
Vickie's apartment just across the parking lot from the store. Vickie didn't
pick up. The answering machine snapped on.
Martin crossed the parking lot to knock on Vickie's door.
A blacktop path, freshened from a falling rain, ran from the parking lot to
Vickie's porch. Vickie kept a colorful garden in front of her house; she babied
her flowers. On this rainy morning, plants that had been ripped out by their
roots littered the path.
Martin opened the front door and climbed the curved staircase
to Vickie's small flat. She climbed to the top step and saw the door to Vickie's
apartment was open.
"Vickie?" she called. "Vickie?" She heard nothing.
In the dim hallway a black cat leaped. The cat sunk its
claws into Martin's shirt, clinging to her chest.
Martin shut the door behind her and ran. Down in the main
office she told Deborah Laffey that Vickie hadn't come to work. Would Laffey
come upstairs with her to check on Vickie?
Halfway up the stairs Laffey grew nervous; she suggested
that they have a man come with them. The first man they saw was Gary Anderson,
the hard goods buyer. The three of them climbed the stairs.
"Gary went in first," Martin later testified. "I was behind
him, then Debbie was behind me. . . . And as he opened the door his hands went
out, his face turned white."
He told Martin: Call the police.
JOHN A. OSCARSEN worked first shift, uniform patrol. He
was driving his cruiser along a rain-slicked Jefferson Boulevard that August
morning, when he got the call to head to 56 Maple St. As he pulled up, he saw
Kerri Martin standing in the street. He knew Martin from working private details
at Alpine; he knew Vickie Cushman, too.
Martin yelled out that someone had killed Vickie.
"Where is she?" he said.
Martin pointed to the white house with the flower garden.
"Upstairs."
Oscarsen had learned in the police academy, seven years
before, that no one but the homicide detectives should be allowed at a murder
scene. He told Gary Anderson and two rescue workers to leave the apartment.
For a couple of minutes he was alone with Vickie's body;
he looked for clues. She lay on her left side on a beige rug saturated in blood.
She wore a pink bathrobe, still cinched at the waist.
Oscarsen testified he had seen Vickie while working a
detail at Alpine less than a week before. It seemed as though every time he'd
seen her lately she had asked him about his fellow police officer, Scott Hornoff.
Is he a nice guy? she had asked. Is he happily married? And then, the weekend
before she died: Do you think he would leave his wife? Oscarsen had not known
how to answer; he didn't know Scott well.
To protect the crime scene, Oscarsen stood on the porch.
The patrol supervisor arrived. Oscarsen told his supervisor he could not go
up, but the sergeant pulled rank and ordered the patrolman to step aside.
A lot of higher-ranking people tramped by Oscarsen on
their way to view the murder scene. A couple of assistant medical examiners
came to study the body.
Oscarsen let Sgt. William J. McDonald pass. McDonald was
supervisor of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation, the unit in charge of collecting
evidence at a crime scene.
McDonald asked everyone to leave the apartment. He wanted
to use the department's new video camera. It was the first time the Warwick
police videotaped a crime scene.
The batteries died part way through the 12-minute tape.
The medical examiners and other officers could be heard bantering and joking
in the background.
McDonald filmed the outside of the apartment, focusing
on an electrical conduit that ran alongside the front porch to the second floor.
He zoomed in on a scuff mark next to the conduit, some broken shingles, and
an open window with the screen raised. Those clues led investigators to believe
that someone had climbed onto the porch roof and broken into the apartment.
Inside, McDonald's camera panned over Vickie's body.
An assistant medical examiner noticed red splotches in
the whites of Vickie's eyes, a sign of strangulation. The mouth guard that she
wore to prevent nighttime tooth grinding was still clenched firmly between her
teeth. The examiners pronounced Vickie dead at 11:45 a.m.
A 17-pound fire extinguisher -- the likely source of the
fatal blow -- lay two feet away. Also on the floor nearby was a pair of yellow
dishwashing gloves turned inside-out.
A shattered porcelain jewelry box lay inches away from
her head. The box still held a handwritten note from Vickie's grandmother, explaining
the heirloom had been handed down through generations of Cushman women since
the 1860s. The box's cover was now dented, its porcelain coating smashed.
Through his camera Sergeant McDonald saw a pink flower
pot that had been knocked over, but for the most part, the apartment was in
good shape. Nothing had been ransacked. Vickie's pocketbook lay a few feet away
from her body. Nothing had been taken.
Investigators believed Vickie interrupted an intruder.
An autopsy found no evidence of rape or intercourse. Her skull was shattered
in three places. The worst fracture ran from ear to ear. It was called a hinge
fracture because the front of the skull detached from the rear, making the skull
move as if it were on a hinge. It is a rare injury usually seen in automobile
accidents and high falls.
McDONALD'S VIDEO revealed an apartment of a woman with
an active mind and a busy life. Books spilled from shelves: The Imperfect Gardener;
The Crossword Puzzle Dictionary; a vintage children's book, A Story About Ping.
Every surface was cluttered with magazines, letters and papers.
Detectives at the scene flipped through Vickie's papers.
Stuck to her refrigerator they found a card that detectives carry to collect
fingerprints. Scott's work phone number was scrawled on the fingerprint card.
On a telephone table in the living room, Lt. Edward T.
Johnson found an envelope squeezed between a clock and a jar of candy. On the
outside of the envelope in Vickie's handwriting were the words: Scott Hornoff.
TOMORROW: The
Evidence
Gerald M. Carbone can be reached at gcarbone@projo.com
and Cathleen F. Crowley can be reached at ccrowley@projo.com.
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