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The interrogation:
Creating a state of 'suspect paranoia'
BY GERALD M. CARBONE and CATHLEEN F. CROWLEY
Journal staff writers
Rhonda Hornoff pulled the car door shut and
looked at Scott in the driver's seat. She could see that her husband was
upset.
"What is going on?" she asked.
Scott confessed to his wife that he had cheated
on her with Vickie Cushman back in 1989, just before Vickie was murdered.
Now nearly three years later, reporters from The
Providence Journal had just come to their house and told him he was a
suspect in Vickie Cushman's death.
Rhonda was angry, but she remained calm. She had
to deal with Scott's infidelity, and even worse, that he was a suspected
murderer.
She said, "We'll deal with situation number one.
We'll deal with number two."
To dodge reporters, they drove to Scott's mother's
house a few minutes away.
They shut themselves inside Scott's boyhood bedroom.
"What did you do?" Rhonda asked.
Scott told her about a brief fling with Vickie:
oral sex, then sex, then oral sex again.
"He kind of rolled the whole story into like one
time," Rhonda said during Scott's trial.
Joshua, their 3-year-old, wandered in and the discussion
ended. Rhonda drove Scott to the Warwick police station, where he worked
as a second-shift detective.
Six months later, on Nov. 12, 1992, while Scott
was at work, state police investigators approached Rhonda at the Hornoffs'
new house in West Greenwich. They asked her about Scott's affair with
Vickie and she told them she knew about it, that it was a one-time fling.
Brace yourself, the detectives said.
"They insinuated that this was not a short-lived
affair," Rhonda recalled.
She felt hurt that Scott hadn't told her the whole
truth. When he arrived home, she asked him point-blank about Vickie's
murder.
Scott remembers her saying: "I'm sorry. I just want
to be totally positive in my mind. Did you have anything to do with her
death?"
No, Scott replied.
Rhonda felt that her husband was telling the truth.
SCOTT HORNOFF knew how a guilty man acted. He'd
say "Call my lawyer" and hang up the phone. As a Warwick policeman, he
had heard that line plenty of times.
But Scott had not killed Vickie Cushman; he had
nothing to hide. To prove it, he offered to go to state police headquarters
and answer questions without an attorney.
His lawyer, Joel S. Chase, hesitated to let Scott
go alone. As a former prosecutor turned defense lawyer, Chase had seen
both sides of the coin. He knew what skilled interrogators could yield
from a suspect, especially a guilty one.
"Look, if you didn't do anything wrong, it's one
thing," Chase told him. "But if you did anything wrong, then I've got
to be with you."
"Well, I guess I can go alone then," Scott said.
"I didn't do anything wrong."
If Chase ever saw a client who could handle himself
in a police interrogation it was Scott, a veteran police officer and an
innocent man. OK, he said. Go talk to the detectives.
Scott had faith that the state police would quickly
figure out there was no substance to the allegations that he killed Vickie,
that it was just gossip. He planned to volunteer for another polygraph.
Scott assumed he was just one of many suspects.
He didn't know that the investigation now focused exclusively on him.
On a crisp Friday the 13th in November 1992, Scott
drove to state police headquarters, his car bearing vanity plates reading:
INOCNT. Inside the Scituate barracks, state police detectives Lt. Richard
H. Hurst and Cpl. Thomas A. Denniston read him his rights.
Hurst, the shorter, more senior of the detectives,
asked most of the questions. They talked casually for more than an hour.
Denniston took notes. At 3:30 p.m., they began recording. Scott's responses
were full of clouded answers like "I don't recall," "maybe" or "possibly."
He blamed it on his memory. More than three years had passed since Vickie
Cushman's murder.
Scott testified that the detectives instructed him
to signal -- a quick slash of his hand across his throat -- to stop the
tape if his memory was hazy on something. With the tape off, they tried
to pin down the dates and details then they'd resume recording. Scott
said they stopped the tape often and told him to take his "best guess."
Denniston later denied that.
They asked Scott about his brother Dave driving
him home from the party, then dropping him off in front of his house.
"And you never entered your house?" Hurst asked.
"No, I didn't."
"You're positive?"
"I'm pretty positive, yes. I don't think I went
into the house."
Scott felt compelled to fill in the blanks. He thought
it would be helpful. It wasn't. Instead, he spun threads the state police
used to snare him in a web of inconsistencies.
The police asked: "The last time you had sex with
her to the time she was found?"
"I guess it was -- I'm only guessing -- two weeks.
I don't really remember," he said.
The detectives asked a series of questions about
Vickie and his marriage.
Q: Did she ask you if you were happily married?
A: Yes.
Q: Did you tell her you were or you weren't?
A: I told her I was.
Q: Did you ever tell her you were having problems
at home?
A: I told her things were going pretty good.
The detectives had a love letter from Vickie that
contradicted Scott. In her plea to continue their relationship, Vickie
wrote, "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."
They asked Scott how many drinks he had had at the
Gallucci party. He told them six beers and a cup or two of spiked punch.
He actually had drunk 2 six-packs and 7 to 10 cups of punch, but Scott
didn't want them to know just how drunk he was when he drove that night.
The interview lasted three hours and Scott answered
964 questions. His responses -- his guesses at three-year-old events he
could not clearly recall and his white lies -- tangled him even more deeply
in the murder of Vickie Cushman.
SCOTT FIGURED that this time he had better tell
Rhonda about his affairs -- all five of them.
Lying in their bed, he told Rhonda about Kerri,
a young woman who grew up in his neighborhood. He didn't tell her that
the affair began when he and Rhonda were engaged and continued after their
honeymoon.
He told her about Natasha, the woman from a wealthy
family who had wanted him to elope. They used to have sex in Goddard Memorial
State Park outside his squad car.
There was Vickie of course, two times.
After Vickie, there was Gina, the sister-in-law
of a colleague. At the Galluccis' second annual summer bash, a year after
Vickie's murder, Deborah Gallucci nearly caught Scott and Gina necking
on a couch in her basement.
And there was one time with Karen, who worked at
a dress shop. They had had sex inside the Kent County YMCA.
"Is this the life that you still want?" Rhonda asked.
"If you want to leave now then leave now, and that is what you want to
do, otherwise right now this is not what is going to happen."
Scott promised he would never, ever, ever cheat
again.
THE STATE POLICE turned up the heat in early 1993.
They talked to Rhonda again, and then they interviewed David Hornoff.
A heavy snow fell on interior Rhode Island, but Dave mushed through to
state police headquarters for his interview with Denniston and Hurst.
Like Scott, Dave didn't think it necessary to bring a lawyer.
The detectives asked him about dropping Scott off
after the Gallucci party.
Dave said he watched Scott leave his Jeep and go
into his house. "I wanted to make sure he got in" before pulling away.
Then they asked about the next morning, Aug. 11,
1989. How did Dave hear about Vickie's murder?
As Dave remembered it, he saw a news flash on TV
about a murder in Warwick. He called the police station and learned that
the victim was Vickie Cushman.
He called Scott.
"I told him Vickie Cushman was killed," Dave told
state police. "He was shocked.
"He said, 'No, I can't believe it; you're lying;
you're kidding me. Don't do this, you're lying to me' type thing."
Dave said, "No, honest to God. Call the station,
watch the news."
Dave's story that he was the one who told Scott
that Vickie was murdered presented problems.
In his interview with Hurst and Denniston, Scott
had remembered it this way: Dave did not know that Vickie had been killed.
Dave called and 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."
If Dave was telling the truth -- that Scott heard
at noon that Vickie was murdered -- why did Scott act so surprised at
4 p.m., when Sgt. Michael J. Babula told him at work that Vickie Cushman
was the murder victim.
Did Dave surprise him with the news at noon? Did
Babula surprise him? Had he ever really been surprised at all?
IT WAS TIME to have another chat with Scott. On
a March evening in 1993, the detectives placed a call to the Warwick police
station and asked Scott to come in; they wanted to clear up some "discrepancies."
Scott felt excited by their call. This nightmare
of being a suspect was finally fading. He turned to his partner, Michael
H. Turner, and said, "It looks like this is it. It's all over. I'll be
back in a couple of hours."
Turner just shook his head. To Scott, the expression
on his face said: I don't think so.
The detectives were troubled by the inconsistencies
in Dave and Scott's accounts of the phone call. And some of Rhonda's story
didn't jibe with the accounts of other witnesses. She said she knew when
Scott came to bed, after the Johnny Carson show ended but before David
Letterman came on at 12:30 p.m. Yet two sober witnesses, Deborah Gallucci
and a patrolman, swore they saw Scott return to the party between 1 and
2 a.m. Gallucci saw him pass by her with a "blank" look on his face.
As Scott drove to state police headquarters in a
Warwick cruiser, he mulled over a couple of clarifications he'd like to
make for the record. Both Dave and Rhonda had told him that after Dave
dropped him off from the party, he had entered his house before going
back to the Galluccis' to pick up his tapes. He figured they were probably
right.
Also, he and Dave had gone to see the movie A Nightmare
on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child just after Vickie's murder. In his first
interview, he told the police they had gone to the movies on Aug. 11,
the day Vickie's body was found; now he thought they probably saw the
Freddy Krueger film the next night.
Detectives Hurst and Denniston could not have cared
less about when Scott saw A Nightmare on Elm Street. At this interview,
Denniston testified, they hoped to force Scott into a state of "suspect
paranoia." They wanted to bend Scott's state of mind to the point where
he was "guessing, and thinking, and wondering, worrying. . . . You want
him, like I said, suspect paranoia. You don't want him to know what you
know."
For this interview, Denniston said, "we turned up
the heat."
They hit Scott with the blatant discrepancies between
his story of how he learned that Vickie was the woman murdered on Maple
Street, and his brother's recollection of that same event.
They showed him his brother's statement saying that
Scott was surprised when Dave told him Vickie was dead.
"He became very defensive of his brother and said
his brother wasn't lying; he was mistaken," Denniston recalled. Then Scott
said, "Or if he told me it was Victoria Cushman, I forgot."
Yet Sergeant Babula said Scott looked surprised
when Babula told him it was Vickie who'd been killed. Babula had seen
Scott place a phone call from the police station after hearing that Vickie
was the victim. The detectives pressed him on this point: Who did you
call?
Scott said he hadn't called anyone. They read him
Babula's statement. Scott said he had called Dave. They told him there
was no need to call Dave, because Dave had called him to say that Vickie
was dead. Who did you call, Scott?
Maybe it was his lawyer, Joel Chase.
But Chase did not know Victoria Cushman, so it wasn't
Chase. Who was it, Scott?
Maybe Rhonda.
Denniston said: "You called your wife to tell her
your girlfriend was dead?"
Scott grew upset; he said that if he had killed
Victoria Cushman, he would commit suicide. He said maybe Vickie killed
herself. Hurst scoffed: "Scott, you're a police officer for eleven years.
You're a detective. How do you think a girl like Vickie Cushman is going
to hit herself over the head multiple times with a 20-pound fire extinguisher?"
Scott could not believe this was happening. It felt
like an episode from The Twilight Zone, an out-of-body experience where
he could see himself sitting there being grilled.
Denniston said of Scott: "Oftentimes [he] would
put his head down in his hands, look at the floor, whimper, cry . . .
Happened quite a bit."
Scott says he never cried. "There were a lot of
deep breaths, just from being exasperated."
Denniston recalled, "Oftentimes when speaking with
Scott you asked a question about one of those contradictions he wouldn't
answer the question, and you'd just find yourself looking at him; he'd
be looking at you and nothing was said."
The interview ground on for nearly four hours. Hurst
and Denniston read him excerpts from Vickie's love letter. What did she
mean when she wrote "you admitted that things were not on an even keel
at home."
Scott said Vickie lied; he'd never said such a thing.
The detectives asked: "What possible reason would
she have to lie in a letter to you?"
Scott sat with head in hands, staring at the floor.
Hurst broke the silence: "Is she crazy?"
"Yes, she's crazy," Scott said. "She's nuts."
Scott told the police what Vickie was wearing the
night he'd said goodbye: a cotton robe tied at the waist. He had said
his goodbyes while standing just inside the door. This is the place her
body was found, the clothes she was found in. To the detectives, Scott
practically put himself at the murder scene.
About a half-hour before midnight, the detectives
stopped grilling Scott. They left the room, and he was surprised to see
his colleague, Lt. Thomas E. Nye, come in. Nye told him that the state
police suspected Scott had killed Vickie and suppressed the memory.
Scott said, "I don't know about you but there is
no way I could do something like that and bury it to a point where I wouldn't
remember it."
Scott remembers Nye saying, "You know it happens
and if it did happen to you, it doesn't mean you're a bad person."
Turner, Scott's partner, showed up to drive Scott's
cruiser back to the station, while Nye and Capt. Joseph A. Duquette drove
Scott home. They felt Scott was too frazzled to drive.
Chase, Scott's lawyer, says he learned a valuable
lesson that night: "You can't let true innocence and the truth give you
an overconfidence. I would never, ever allow a client to go to a police
station without me ever again."
THE CASE building against him began to "consume"
Scott; it crept into his thoughts, his conversations, his dreams and his
nightmares. He was 32 years old, a father of two, with a shattered career.
A psychiatrist put him on an antidepressant to ease his stress and back
pain.
The "Twilight Zone" experience at state police headquarters
left Scott eager to clear his name. More than a year later, he saw that
chance: A grand jury had been called to hear the state's evidence against
him.
Grand juries meet in secret. Their purpose is to
determine whether the government has enough evidence to bring a suspect
to trial. The grand jury hearing Scott's case met behind the high chain-link
fence of the National Guard's complex, in East Greenwich. Scott told his
lawyer that he wanted to appear before those grand jurors to tell them
what he knew.
So on Dec. 14, 1994, Scott climbed into the witness
chair. The rules of grand juries did not allow his lawyer to be present.
The prosecutor, Randall White, shredded Scott's
credibility. In 12 years of trying cases in Rhode Island, White had earned
a reputation as a good prosecutor, fair but tough. In his mid-40s, he
was tall, aquiline, with deep-set eyes and long gray hair that fell over
his shirt collar.
During two days of testimony, White and the jurors
hammered Scott with 2,022 questions, mostly concerning events that had
happened five years earlier. One of the grand jurors asked Scott why his
memory was so bad.
"We're relying on five-year-old memories from a
drunken night," Scott replied.
Around question 1,283 they got to the nub of his
relationship with Victoria Cushman.
"I really wasn't that interested in her," Scott
said, "it was just a casual -- it was just sex. . . . I'd had affairs
before and after her. It was just one of those things; the opportunity's
there for police officers. I'm not trying to degrade anybody, but a lot
of women are interested in police officers, and Vickie was just one of
a few."
White asked Scott about his brother Dave dropping
him off at his house on the night of the murder.
Q: Did you go in the house?
A: See, that's another thing.
Q: Answer the question: Did you go in the house?
A: Now I don't think so because --
Q: But three years ago you did think so -- two years
ago you did think so.
A: I guessed.
White zeroed in on the affairs with Kerri, Natasha,
Karen, Gina.
Q: How many times have you been with Kerri, sexually?
A: I don't remember. It was while I was engaged
and I think after we got back from our honeymoon.
Q: Did you tell Rhonda that?
A: I don't think so, no. I told her I was with her,
I was unfaithful.
Q: You haven't told Rhonda that you were with Kerri
after your honeymoon with Rhonda, right?
A: Right.
Then White asked about Natasha.
Q: How many times did you tell her you'd had sex
with Natasha?
A: I didn't tell her how many times.
White pressed him about his relationship with Gina.
Q: Wasn't it over a period of years that you had
a relationship with Gina?
A: I think it was a year. I'm guessing.
Q: Did you tell your wife it was over a year?
A: No, I didn't. . . . it's the hardest thing in
the world to tell your spouse.
Scott said that he told Rhonda "as little as I thought
I could while still being truthful."
Q: Are you doing that to the jurors, telling them
as little as you thought -- think you can get away with and being truthful
without telling them the whole truth?
A: No, sir.
Scott told the state police that he drank a six-pack
and maybe a glass or two of spiked punch at the Galluccis' party. He was
more candid with the grand jurors; he fessed up to drinking 2 six-packs
and 7 to 10 cups of punch, then driving from his house back to the party.
"You've just testified that you were drunk when
you got home," said one grand juror. "Yet you got in your car and drove."
"That's one thing I'm not too proud of," Scott said.
A woman on the grand jury said, "Um, you lied to
Captain Carter about your affair with Vickie?"
"Yes," Scott said.
"You've lied to your wife a number of times. Why
in the world would we sit here and think that you're not lying to us?"
"I know what you're saying, Ma'am. I didn't do it."
THE JURY voted on Dec. 28, 1994, a Wednesday. Scott
knew that a vote was scheduled for that day. Everything was on the line.
If grand jurors voted to acquit, the nightmare was over; if they voted
to indict, it had just begun.
Scott waited for the results at Dave's condominium;
Rhonda was there, too. By sundown, there was no news, and they took that
as a good sign. They began to feel relief creeping into the room.
Then they heard the squawk of a bullhorn: Scott
Hornoff!
Dave stepped outside and saw the state police cruisers
there. He talked with the police, then Scott came out with his hands up.
In his career, Scott had heard the sound of handcuffs hundreds of times;
this time the click bound his own wrists.
By a vote of 15 to 2, the grand jury had indicted
Jeffrey Scott Hornoff. Upon hearing of Scott's arrest, Vickie's father
said: "I am delighted to see this first step on the way towards justice.
We shall see where it leads."
As Scott Hornoff prepared to stand trial, his life
tanked. The Police Department suspended him without pay; his mother mortgaged
her home to post his $150,000 bail; and he searched for a job -- any job
-- to pay his bills.
Meanwhile, Todd Barry, the real killer, was building
his life, with a wife, a new house in Pawtucket and a baby on the way.
When Todd heard the news of Scott's indictment,
he felt "very surprised . . . what the hell was going on?" Another man
was about to stand trial for the murder of a young woman he had killed.
Todd felt guilt -- and fear.
"I was scared, scared, scared, scared."
TOMORROW:
The Conviction
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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