|
The suspect:
'Again we came back to Detective Hornoff'
BY GERALD M. CARBONE and CATHLEEN F. CROWLEY
Journal staff writers
On the last night of Vickie Cushman's life, she
sounded as happy as she had ever been. Her father phoned her at about 9:30;
to Robinson Cushman, his daughter's voice was "bubbling" with
happiness.
Vickie looked forward to the next day, Aug. 11,
1989; she was supposed to step up into a new job as warehouse manager
of the Alpine Ski/Sports store in Warwick, where she worked. Vickie lived
above the corporate offices of the store, in a gabled white house next
to the shop.
Vickie told her father she was "exhausted,"
worn down from "Sniagrab" the store's big, weeklong sale. The
two talked till around 10 p.m.; she told her father she planned to go
to bed early.
On the floor below Vickie's second-story apartment,
Alpine's president was conducting high-stakes negotiations. He wanted
to buy out a competitor, Ski Town USA, but the negotiations had hit a
snag, forcing Ski Town's president to come down from Boston.
At 8 p.m., Alpine's team broke for dinner and returned
about two hours later. After dinner, Alpine's marketing manager, Russell
Long, worked until about 10:30 p.m. Just before Long left, he heard Vickie
moving about her apartment: water running, a toilet flushing. He knew
the sound of Vickie's footfalls. At 102 pounds, she walked softly.
The two corporate presidents continued talking until
nearly 1 a.m. Neither of them heard anything in Vickie's apartment that
night. Nobody heard a man crawl up the side of the house, jimmy a screen
and crawl into Vickie's apartment. Nobody heard the thump of Vickie's
body hit the floor or the sound of a 17-pound fire extinguisher crushing
her skull.
The medical examiner who autopsied Vickie's body
noted that by 10:30 a.m. rigor mortis had stiffened her neck and limbs.
Given the temperature (about 80 degrees), Vickie's height (5 feet 6 inches)
and weight, she likely was murdered between 9:30 p.m. and 3 o'clock that
morning.
Russell Long had heard her alive at 10:30 p.m.,
and the two company presidents heard no violence on the floor above them
before they left just before 1 a.m. That created a two-hour window for
Vickie's murder, somewhere between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. on Friday, Aug. 11,
1989.
Warwick police would soon learn that witnesses saw
Scott Hornoff out and about during that "window," contrary to
his wife's alibi that he was in their bed by 12:30 a.m.
TWO MONTHS after Vickie's death, Lt. Thomas E. Nye
received a promotion to lieutenant of Warwick's second-shift detectives.
Nye was a heavy-set man with his dark brown hair combed back. To this
day, he hangs on his wall a plaque inscribed with the homicide detective's
credo: "No greater honor will ever be bestowed on an officer, or
a more profound duty imposed on him, than when he is entrusted with the
investigation of the death of a human being."
Nye noticed that things were often slow on second
shift. His old patrol partner, Sgt. Richard M. Santos, was now working
days as head of the Major Crimes Unit. Nye asked his buddy if there were
any unsolved murder cases that he could pry into during slow times.
Santos had a keen interest in the Cushman case:
he kept a photograph of Vickie Cushman pinned to his wall. Santos gave
Nye the case.
Nye studied the file over the next month. He was
surprised at what the file did not contain: there were no reports from
the detectives who had gathered evidence at the murder scene; a detective's
report about an interview with a suspect was missing.
That suspect was Scott Hornoff, a married Warwick
police detective who had grudgingly acknowledged having sex with Vickie
a couple of times in the weeks before her death.
Santos and Nye worked different shifts, but at shift
change they'd have quick conversations about the case. Together they helped
run down a number of theories and leads.
Detectives put one man under 24-hour surveillance
and trailed him to Boston before concluding he hadn't done it.
They probed a theory that someone had broken into
Vickie's apartment looking for documents about Alpine, but the corporate
espionage theory did not pan out.
They studied the movements of recent parolees, to
no avail.
They talked to a man who had broken into a house
in a nearby neighborhood to assault a girlfriend; he had an alibi.
Robinson Cushman noted Vickie's background as an
Army intelligence linguist. She had once applied to work for the CIA.
Maybe the CIA was involved?
All of the theories proved implausible. All except
one: Scott Hornoff had killed Vickie because, as she wrote in her letter,
she could not accept his decision to end their affair. He feared disclosure
of the affair might cost him his job, his marriage, his family. He had
motive.
"We exhausted all of our leads that we had
developed in the investigation, and again we came back to Detective Hornoff,"
Nye testified.
Nye and Santos agreed Scott needed to be investigated
more. The boss of detectives, Capt. Ronald D. Carter, had moved on to
the chief's job in Richmond, putting a new man in charge: Capt. Joseph
A. Duquette.
Duquette was short, but his body was powerful, well-muscled.
He was good friends with Scott's brother, Detective Dave Hornoff.
Nye and Santos told Duquette they wanted to further
investigate Scott Hornoff as a suspect in Vickie Cushman's murder. Duquette
asked the chief and he agreed to let them.
Just before Christmas in 1990, a little more than
a year after the murder, Nye and Santos set a date when they would spring
a surprise interview on Scott. The way Santos remembers it, as the day
of the interview approached, Duquette called it off.
"He didn't want to upset anybody's holiday
vacation," Santos testified.
While Duquette testified that he did not block that
interview, Nye and Santos both testified that their superiors were stonewalling
their investigation of Scott.
Santos and Nye continued to press the case. They
paid a visit to the hosts of a policemen's party that Scott had attended
on the night of Vickie's murder.
Deborah Gallucci, who threw the party with her husband,
a Warwick patrolman, told them that on the night of the party, she had
been standing atop a short staircase at the side of her house, taking
a breather. Scott Hornoff walked past her toward the back of the house.
She thought he looked strange. She was surprised Scott didn't flirt with
her, like he normally did. "There was just a blank look on his face,
staring off into the distance," she said.
Gallucci told the detectives that she saw Scott
walk past her between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. That put Scott out of his house
within the two-hour time-frame of Vickie Cushman's murder. Nye and Santos
had long believed that Scott had a motive; now they thought he had also
had the opportunity.
There was, in Nye's words, "a feeling within
the department that [Scott] might have done it." By the second anniversary
of Vickie's murder, the department had split into two camps: those who
thought Scott was innocent, and those who believed he might be a killer.
Nye, Santos, and Detective Kenneth J. Anderson stood squarely in the second
camp. They decided that if their superiors would not investigate Vickie's
Cushman's murder, they'd take it to someone who would: the state police.
AT THE END of a workday in October 1991, Kenny Anderson
and Dick Santos drove to state police headquarters. When they arrived
the building was quiet, the evening dark.
Brian Andrews, then commander of the state police's
detectives, listened as the Warwick policemen told their story of the
Cushman murder: missing reports, stymied interviews, a polygraph exam
that even the examiner found suspect. Santos and Anderson felt the evidence
pointed to Scott Hornoff.
Andrews was surprised because he always thought
the Warwick police had a great detectives division. Listening to their
story, Andrews didn't sniff a coverup; but he did sense incompetence,
a lack of leadership. This should have been a top priority of the Warwick
department, especially when they thought the killer might have been one
of their own. He wondered how they could put that on a back burner.
In his 20-plus years with the state police, Andrews
had learned this about criminals: "Good people, when they become
desperate, do crazy things. Why should a police officer be any different?"
Even with a strong suspect and his best detectives
on the trail, this would be a tough case to crack. In a murder investigation,
time is of the essence. Memories fade over time; people listen to one
another and their own recall gets mixed up with something they heard;
perspectives change.
"If you think in your own mind someone might
have done it" you might misremember a detail in a way that makes
that person look guilty, Andrews says.
Now more than two years had passed, and the Warwick
police had botched those critical early days. They had identified a suspect,
but they had not impounded his car or seized his clothing. If those items
had come back blood-free, that might have helped clear Scott.
"Everybody kind of danced around him instead
of treating him like a suspect," Andrews said.
After hearing out Santos and Anderson, Andrews decided
to send in two of his best detectives: Cpl. Thomas A. Denniston and Lt.
Richard H. Hurst. They were outstanding investigators and this was their
kind of case. They paid attention to detail.
Hurst was a stocky man with light brown hair; he
could be funny, a practical joker.
Denniston stood 6 feet 2 inches, was in good shape,
with short dark hair. He was more serious. Andrews recalls, "You
could give him something to do that was so complicated you thought it
would be impossible to clear, and Denniston being the digger he was"
could clear it.
Hurst and Denniston pored over Warwick's files on
the Cushman murder, and what they saw troubled them: a detective's fingerprint
card with Scott Hornoff's office phone number had been found in Vickie's
apartment; now it was gone. And the computer-generated files that showed
where police cars had been dispatched had a serious gap: the 24-hour period
before and after Vickie's murder.
The state police targeted Scott Hornoff as their
number-one suspect.
BY THE SPRING of 1992, a rumor made its way to The
Providence Journal's West Bay bureau: Victoria Cushman was killed by her
lover, a Warwick cop.
Reporter Liz Rau heard that the state police were
investigating, and that they had hired the famous forensic expert Henry
Lee to help. Tim Murphy, then the regional editor of The Providence Journal's
West Bay bureau, recognized this as a huge story.
So on May 22, 1992, Murphy and Rau knocked on Hornoff's
door. Hornoff looked groggy. He had worked the night shift, and although
it was after noon, the reporters had woken him. Murphy apologized. He
explained the tip about the state police investigation. And they got to
the point: "Did you kill Victoria Cushman?"
"No," Hornoff said.
Murphy said he was struck by Scott's reaction, the
flat inflection in his voice. "It was just a very weird response,"
Murphy says. "He wasn't hostile. I thought he knew he was a suspect.
We assumed he knew that."
But he didn't. Scott had no idea that the state
police had taken over the Cushman case. He was curt but polite. "I
thought she was flirting with me," Scott said of Vickie. "Maybe
it was ego. . . . I'd like to help you if there was something to say,
but nothing went on."
While he appeared calm to the reporters on his doorstep,
Scott's stomach "was doing flip-flops." With state police and
the famous Henry Lee looking at the case, the truth of his relationship
with Vickie would likely surface. He knew this was going to hit the papers.
Scott knew he had better come clean with Rhonda -- at least partially
clean.
"He was at home, I was at work," Rhonda
Hornoff recalled of the day Scott told her about Vickie. "He called
me at work and said that reporters from The Journal-Bulletin were at the
house."
After she hung up, she felt outrage. How did the
reporters get her home address? They had no right being there. She was
shaking and she wanted to go home but had no car. The Hornoffs were buying
a new house in West Greenwich and had sold one car to clear debt for the
purchase. She called Scott and said, "Come get me."
As she pulled the car door shut, she could see that
Scott was upset.
"What is going on?" she asked.
Scott said: "I'm gonna lose you one of two
ways: either you're going to leave me for cheating on you or they're gonna
try and put me away for something I didn't do."
TOMORROW:
The Interrogation
Gerald M. Carbone can be reached at gcarbone@projo.com
and Cathleen F. Crowley can be reached at ccrowley@projo.com.
|
