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The evidence:
'There's nothing there to connect him to this'
'Everybody ran with this letter as a motive. Well,
I found it just the opposite. . . . She was willing to see him, and she knew
it wasn't going anywhere.'
-- Ronald D. Carter
BY GERALD M. CARBONE and CATHLEEN F. CROWLEY
Journal staff writers
Detective Edward T. Johnson stood near Vickie Cushman's
body, surrounded by evidence of a murder: the dead woman on the living-room
floor, dressed in a pink bath robe, knees slightly bent; beneath her was a blood-soaked
rug; nearby a pair of dishwashing gloves turned inside-out, their fingers a
ghostly white; an arms-length away from Vickie's body lay a heavy, red fire
extinguisher that the killer had used to bash her skull.
Rain drummed on the roof shingles outside an open window
of the second-floor apartment. The killer had apparently come across the
porch roof and entered through this window.
Though it was a summer's day, Aug. 11, 1989, the day was
so gloomy that detectives beamed a flashlight across the floor, scouring for
clues.
Johnson leafed through some mail piled on a small table.
He noticed an envelope wedged between a clock and a candy jar.
The outside of the envelope bore a handwritten name: Scott
Hornoff.
Johnson recognized the name. Scott Hornoff was a fellow
detective on the Warwick police force. Johnson sliced the envelope with his
pen knife, and pulled out two yellow sheets of legal-sized paper. The letter
read:
Scott,
I know how hard this whole situation must have been for
you -- as you said -- a major dilemma. I wanted to be the kind of person who
was strong enough to say -- "your best interests come first, I'll let you go
easily." But I couldn't and I can't.
I have so much fun with you, you are always making me
laugh. I feel like a million dollars when I'm with you. And everytime
I look at you my knees get weak, I get goose-pimples all over, and it
takes every bit of will power I've got not to maul you immediately. I
think of you as soon as I wake up, and you are my last thought as I put
my head down to go to sleep. During the day I wish for you to either call
or come in, and my day doesn't feel complete until I see you. I'm hooked
on you.
I love to kiss your arm where the elbow is. I love to
nuzzle your neck and ears. I think your body is gorgeous and I love to touch
it, running my hands over every inch of it. I strongly believe you only live
once and you should make the most of it -- we are too well suited (see -- I
didn't say anything about chemistry) for us not to spend time together.
If I wait for you to try and work things out I fear I
will lose you -- you are saying now that I can't lose you because I never had
you, but you're wrong -- we had a lot over these past few weeks. Something special
happened, that I can't easily deny or ignore.
I know you are married with a beautiful little boy --
I know you don't want to risk losing that. But you admitted that things were
not on an even keel at home, it sounds to me that making love with me won't
make matters worse.
I know that there isn't much hope for any kind of future
for us -- but at least there can be a present. I miss you terribly already.
I want to see you so very badly.
Vickie.
ON THAT rainy Friday morning, Scott Hornoff was sleeping
off a hangover from the policmen's party. His brother Dave called him
around noon.
The way Scott remembers it, Dave said: "There was a murder
on Maple Street."
"Yeah," Scott said.
"Well, you know who lives on Maple Street."
"Yeah, so do a hundred other people," Scott said.
Maple Street is cut in two by the railroad tracks; the
side Vickie lived on was industrial and dead-ended at the highway but dozens
of houses lined the other side of Maple. Just because somebody had been killed
on Maple Street didn't mean it was Vickie.
Scott worked second-shift detectives; his shift started
at the police station at 4 p.m. He arrived at work and went through his usual
routines, opening a desk drawer to get his flashlight, badge and gun. He asked
a group of detectives from the first shift, "Who was killed on Maple Street?"
Detective Michael J. Babula knew about the letter to Scott.
He pinched the bridge of his nose as if deep in thought. "Victoria Cushman,"
he said.
Scott literally dropped into his chair. He looked pale,
Babula would later testify.
"I knew her," Scott told him. "I knew her very well."
He asked if Scott was all right.
"I knew her very well."
Scott picked up his phone. Babula heard him say, "Vickie
is dead. Vickie was murdered. She was the one who was killed."
CAPT. RONALD D. Carter, Warwick's captain of detectives,
met with his commander to hammer out a plan. In most investigations, the police
need to coax a suspect down to the station for questioning. In this case, Carter
had suggested that they just wait till Scott came in for second-shift roll call.
Then they'd "own him for the next eight hours."
And as soon as Scott came in, two officers would drive
to Scott's house to question his wife, Rhonda, about what he did the night before.
While he waited for Scott, Carter tested his tape recorder.
If Scott confessed to the murder, he wanted to tape it. Carter placed the letter
from Vickie face down on his desk. That was a trump card he could flip if Scott
denied knowing the victim.
Carter was in his early 40s with a bass voice, bulging
blue eyes and a wisp of hair left on his high forehead. He didn't smoke cigars,
but he liked to chew on an unlit stogie.
Carter had broken into police work with the Air Force
in 1964, as a military policeman in Vietnam. He liked law enforcement and had
reason to believe he was good at it: he finished first in his class at the police
academy, first on his tests for sergeant, lieutenant, then captain.
In rising to his rank as head of detectives, Carter had
worked more than 100 armed robberies and dozens of murders. He knew that his
days in Warwick might be numbered. He was a finalist for the chief's job in
Richmond; he looked forward to working in a rural town where monthly reports
would show animal complaints outnumbering violent crime by 37 to 1.
As Carter remembers it, he sent someone to summon Scott
from the detectives division into his office. Lieutenant Johnson, the detective
who found the love letter, sat in on the interview.
Carter says Scott strolled in wearing a bright yellow
short-sleeved shirt. His hair was bleached by the summer sun, his skin tanned
to bronze.
"Do you know why you're here?" Carter recalls asking Scott.
While he asked questions, Carter stole glances at Scott's bare arms, looking
for scratches from Vickie Cushman's nails. He did not see any.
He says Scott told him no, he did not know why he'd been
called in.
Carter told him he was a suspect in a murder. He read
Scott his rights and gave him a waiver form.
Scott told the grand jurors he remembered the tape recorder,
and he was afraid; he did not fear being charged with murder, because he didn't
do it. But he feared two things: the captain might learn he had sex on duty
and demote him from detectives to patrol; and his wife might hear a tape of
this interview.
No one kept notes of the session; Carter testified he
doesn't believe he ever rolled the tape, but to this day Scott can still hear
the whir of that recorder. Scott also says he never owned a yellow shirt.
Carter told Scott to relax, he just had some questions.
He asked whether Scott had ever heard of Vickie Cushman.
According to Lieutenant Johnson, Scott responded: "Doesn't
ring a bell."
Carter's memory differs. He doesn't recall Scott outright
denying that he knew Vickie. "He hedged a little, but he said he knew her" from
working details and buying things for the dive squad.
Carter said he had documentation that Scott and Vickie
were having an affair -- the photocopy of Vickie's letter. He remembers telling
Scott, "We are not going to tell your wife about this, but you have got to come
forth and let us know everything you know."
The captain didn't care about Scott's personal life. This
was too important; a young woman was dead. Carter recalls saying, "Look, I'm
not gonna be the one to ruin your marriage; you're doing a good enough job on
your own." He remembers Scott saying, "Oh, my wife and I are no longer having
problems. We straightened everything out."
The captain assured him that if he were completely honest,
the fling with Vickie need not affect his status.
Scott then acknowledged that he and Vickie had had oral
sex a couple of times. He said their relationship was over.
Carter asked, Where were you last night?
Scott said he had been at a party.
The captain asked Scott if he killed Vickie.
He told them no, absolutely not; he agreed to take a polygraph
test.
Carter ordered Scott to hand over his gun.
Scott felt like he was in a movie where the hero's stripped
of his weapons and drummed out of an army. He drew his gun from its holster,
pulled out the clip, and loudly ejected a bullet from the chamber.
Scott wanted to call his lawyer, but he did not want the
entire detective division to hear his conversation. He slipped downstairs to
make the call. He told the lawyer, Joel S. Chase, that he had offered to take
a polygraph.
"Did you do it?" Chase asked.
"No."
"Then, go ahead, take the polygraph."
CAPTAIN CARTER felt that the Warwick Police Department's
polygraph expert, Sgt. Edmund F. Pierce, was possibly the state's best lie detector.
Pierce had come in from home as ordered, but he did not
want to test Scott Hornoff. Pierce explained that it's bad policy for a polygraph
operator to question a colleague. He told Carter he was especially cautious
in Scott's case, because Scott had once prosecuted Pierce's son for a traffic
violation, and the two men had had harsh words. Pierce worried that if Scott
didn't like the results he could claim they were tainted.
Pierce remembers telling Carter that an outside agency,
perhaps the state police, should quiz Scott. The captain testified that he ordered
Pierce to perform the test.
Pierce hooked rubber tubes over Scott's stomach and chest
to measure his breathing; he hooked metal discs to Scott's fingers to record
sweat gland activity. He started asking questions.
"Do you live in the United States?"
Scott said he did.
"Do you intend to answer my questions truthfully?"
Yes.
"Do you know for sure who killed Vickie Cushman?"
No.
"Did you murder Vickie Cushman?"
Scott said that he did not. The machine indicated he told
the truth.
The only question that yielded "concern" from Pierce was
question eight: "Just after Vickie Cushman's death, were you in her apartment?"
Scott said no. A needle jumped a bit, but not to the point
where it showed "definite deception," Pierce recalled.
Throughout the 2 1/2 hours of testing, Scott seemed unnaturally
calm, Pierce said, not at all nervous like the "average person" who's a suspect
in a murder case.
Pierce told the state police that Scott's demeanor did
not surprise him, because he knew Scott.
"Scott Hornoff's personality is unique," Pierce said.
"I mean, Scott is Scott." He's "very lethargic, matter-of-fact type personality
. . . just -- keeps on tumbling-along-type personality. . . . He doesn't get
overly excited about a whole lot."
At 7:21 p.m., Pierce finished the polygraph test. He told
Carter: Scott was telling the truth. He was innocent.
CARTER MULLED the evidence: Scott had passed the polygraph;
his visible skin showed no scratches or bruises; the party provided an alibi.
"There's nothing there to connect him to this other than
a letter he didn't get," Carter recalls. "No physical evidence, no motive; an
alibi. There's nothing there.
"Everybody ran with this letter as a motive. Well, I found
it just the opposite." Carter saw no threat in that letter. "She was willing
to see him, and she knew it wasn't going anywhere."
Carter says he could have seized Scott's car and asked
for the clothes that he had worn the night before to look for Vickie's blood
and hair. But, he says, "We work under a Constitution. We have to have probable
cause to do things."
Soon after Carter heard Pierce's report, Scott knocked
at his door. Carter motioned him in. Scott shook his hand and apologized for
lying about his relationship with Vickie Cushman. He said that he was married,
had a family, and had a lot to lose.
After more than 20 years in law enforcement, it didn't
surprise Carter that a man would lie about cheating on his wife. Carter handed
Scott his gun, and told him to take the night off.
Carter told the Major Crimes Unit to put Scott Hornoff
on the back burner. He told them, "I want you to get out there and beat the
bushes."
SGT. RICHARD M. Santos was "shocked" that Carter was conducting
the interview with Scott, the chief suspect. Santos had 19 years on the force
and was supervisor of the Major Crimes Unit, yet he found himself driving out
to talk to the suspect's wife.
Carter instructed Santos and a partner to interview Rhonda
Hornoff without divulging Scott's affair with Vickie Cushman. They invented
a story that a motorist had complained about an "altercation" with Scott on
the previous night.
Santos and another officer stood on the porch of the Hornoffs'
house, a small Cape on a corner of busy West Shore Drive. He hadn't even knocked
on the front door when it opened; Rhonda was on her way out to the mall.
Santos and Rhonda would later have very different recollections
of the interview.
As Rhonda remembers it, she asked the two policemen to
come in and sit down. They sat on her couch; Rhonda sat on the floor, cradling
her infant son. The Hornoffs always turned on the TV when they left the house
so there would be light and movement inside to deter burglars. The TV was on
now, with the volume off.
From the corner of her eye, Rhonda could see a news flash
on the TV screen; a simple graphic showed the chalk outline of a body. It spooked
her to have the police in her house asking questions while the TV flashed news
of a death.
The police asked what Scott had done the night before.
He'd gone to a party, she said, at the home of a fellow officer. She met him
there around 5:30 or 6 p.m. She left before him at about 10:30; Scott came home
when the 11 o'clock news was ending and Johnny Carson was beginning. She remembers
telling them that Scott must have come to bed about 12:30 a.m., because Carson
was ending and David Letterman was coming on.
The sergeant asked: "Was he there when you got up in the
morning?"
Rhonda found the question offensive; she said of course
he was. She grew "fidgety" sitting on the floor holding her son. After about
five minutes of questioning from both men, they left.
Sergeant Santos remembers it differently: he and the other
officer sat on the couch; Rhonda sat in an armchair, facing them. The TV was
on, and the volume was on. He asked all the questions while his partner remained
silent; the interview lasted 15 to 25 minutes.
He wrote in his notes that Rhonda said she arrived at
the party around 7:30 p.m. and left the party before Scott, between 11 and 11:30
p.m. She said Scott came home around midnight. She heard him putting the dogs
out.
The sergeant didn't write this in his notebook, but he
later recalled that Rhonda didn't remember Scott coming to bed. In his mind,
she didn't say anything about TV shows. Though his notes didn't show it, the
sergeant was certain that Rhonda didn't know what time Scott had come to bed;
all Rhonda knew was that Scott was asleep when she woke up at 6 a.m.
The visit from the police frightened Rhonda. What had
Scott gotten into? She tried calling her husband at the police station, but
couldn't reach him. She figured Patrolman Steven W. Branch would know. He was
one of Scott's best friends on the force. The way Rhonda remembers it, she called
Steve and asked, What happened after I left the party?
Branch couldn't remember much about the night, not even
how he got home. But in recalling that phone conversation for the state police,
he said that Rhonda didn't know if Scott ever came home the night of the murder,
or "if he had been at the party until the sun came up."
VICKIE'S FATHER, Robinson Cushman, was an engineer by
trade but he possessed an artist's soul; after leaving Pratt & Whitney, he made
a living sculpting metal.
A few days after Vickie's murder, Robinson received his
daughter's ashes from a crematorium. He never found the words to describe the
shock of receiving Vickie's ashes, of seeing his "smiling, loving daughter"
reduced to a six-inch cardboard cube.
Robinson borrowed a sailboat; with a few friends and family
members aboard, he sailed past Newport, beyond Brenton's Reef. There, beyond
the sounds of the city, he poured Vickie's ashes into the sea. He watched through
tears as they briefly clouded a small patch of ocean. And then she was gone.
A few days later, the Warwick police allowed Robinson
Cushman access to Vickie's apartment so he could retrieve her things. Just inside
the door, a square yard of carpet had been cut out as evidence. Even the exposed,
padded underlay was saturated with his daughter's blood. Black fingerprint powder
dusted table tops and chairs.
For the next few days, Robinson Cushman walked through
what he described as a "ghastly scene" as he packed Vickie's belongings and
carried them to his car. He was in tears, and broke down often, but he stoically
forced himself to pack her things until the apartment was empty. He harvested
the tomatoes and basil still growing in her garden. He used them to make a "wonderful,"
bittersweet sauce.
Though his daughter's murder had generated much publicity,
the media had left him alone. At first, Robinson was grateful for the chance
to grieve in silence. But three weeks after his daughter was killed, Warwick
was rocked by the city's most gruesome murders since King Philip's War in the
1600s. Under cover of night, someone had broken into a suburban home where Joan
Heaton lived with her two daughters, ages 8 and 10. The killer had used Joan's
brand-new set of carving knives to commit unspeakably savage murders of the
woman and her girls.
Suddenly, Vickie Cushman's murder was something of an
afterthought. The Police Department put 30 investigators on the Heaton murders;
with only two detectives on Vickie's murder, Robinson Cushman feared that his
daughter's killing would be forgotten.
TOMORROW:
The Suspect
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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