|
The confession:
'I did a horrible thing to that girl'
BY GERALD M. CARBONE and CATHLEEN F. CROWLEY
Journal staff writers
A chill rain fell on that Saturday, Oct.
26, 2002, drumming the ground, gurgling in the gutters, knocking the last
remnants of fall's colors from the hardwoods. Todd Barry was housebound,
too much of a mental mess to go outdoors. His wife, Donna, was out with
their 6-year-old son.
"My little baby was still in the house," Todd remembers.
His daughter, just 2, was laying there beautiful, innocent. Then, Todd
says, "whoosh, the volcano happened."
He had to tell Donna; but he was afraid of how she
would take it. He thought: I've got to get someone up here. The obvious
choice was Ward, the oldest of the seven Barry siblings. Ward was the
big brother, a former police officer, "a rock solid guy."
Donna came home, and Todd told her he was calling
Ward. He said he had to tell them "something very important."
While they waited for Ward, Todd went into the bathroom;
Donna noticed he was in there a long time. She opened the door and found
Todd staring in the mirror, his face masked in shaving cream and tears.
Ward arrived with another brother, Jay. Todd sat
at the kitchen table with his wife and two big brothers, exhaustion in
his face. After 15 minutes of prodding, Todd told them: "I did something
very, very bad."
As Todd remembers it, on that October night with
his family gathered around him, he said, "I got something that's bothering
me. I thought I could hold on, but I couldn't hold on anymore."
"I killed Vickie."
Donna said she didn't want to hear the details.
But Todd continued, mumbling between sobs.
"I killed her with my bare hands."
SHELDON WHITEHOUSE was not the attorney general
when Scott Hornoff stood trial for the murder of Vickie Cushman, but he
was well-grounded in the case. He was in office when Scott appealed the
conviction. When the state Supreme Court rejected the appeal, essentially
condemning Scott to life behind bars, Whitehouse wrote a note to his appellate
division saying: "Well done." He was now in his final months in office.
Six days after Todd Barry confessed to his family,
his two lawyers met with Deputy Atty. Gen. Gerald Coyne and dropped the
bomb: their client had killed Victoria Cushman. They said that Todd was
down in the lobby, waiting to turn himself in.
Coyne sent for Whitehouse, who came down the hall
from his office. He flopped down on the chair closest to the conference
room door. "What's up?" he asked.
Coyne told him a man had confessed to the Victoria
Cushman murder. Oh great, Whitehouse thought, we've got a nut.
Someone slid Todd's handwritten confession across
the table. Whitehouse began reading the story, scrawled across five, unlined
pages:
The next thing i remember was hitting Vicky in
the head with what i believe was a fire extinguisher, and she was on the
floor. I was horrified and in shock and left the apartment, for over thirteen
years i have been living in fear, sorrow, guilt and mental suppression
over the death of Vicki Cushman. I always thought i was going to be questioned
immediatel after her death. That never happened. I was very much in a
state of denial and confusion. I could not live with myself any longer
and had to turn myself over to the authorities. [This excerpt is printed
verbatim.]
The admission struck Whitehouse as logical and dramatic;
not the writing of a lunatic. Yet, it didn't have enough detail to make
it 100-percent convincing.
Todd's confession left prosecutors in a precarious
situation: the state had enough information to suspect Todd Barry of murder
and to doubt Scott Hornoff's guilt; yet there wasn't quite enough evidence
to arrest Todd or release Scott. They needed to know more about this mystery
man.
A team worked through the weekend, wiping the dust
off the case file and studying it to make sure Todd's story matched the
facts.
Investigators talked with Todd's wife, brothers
and sisters.
Donna said she had been married to Todd 10 years;
they had a good marriage, but he had kept the killing a secret.
Todd's brother Jeffrey told state police detectives
that he had met Vickie at his parents' house. He recalled that she and
Todd had been golfing.
The detectives said Jeffrey was "extremely nervous"
during their three-hour interview at state police headquarters, in Scituate.
Jeffrey told them that on an August night in 1989,
Todd came home with "the look of the devil in his eyes." He saw stains
on Todd's hands and arms "that looked like dried blood."
Jeffrey's lawyer, Christopher S. Gontarz, complained
about the state police tactics.
"I've been doing this for 30 years," Gontarz said.
"It's the strangest case I have ever seen. Psychological coercion was
exercised on my client. They [the police] throw thoughts out that people
adopt during the course of the conversation, because they're scared."
By Sunday, Nov. 3, investigators were convinced
that Todd was mentally and physically sound. He was not terminally ill,
a fact that torpedoed the theory that someone may have paid Todd to take
the blame because he had nothing to lose. He was healthy, married, employed.
He had children and had just bought a house.
Now, the state police needed to talk to Todd one-on-one.
For nearly five hours that Sunday, Todd's lawyers negotiated with prosecutors
before reaching a deal: Todd would talk if the attorney general's office
promised not to charge him with first-degree murder. The prosecution would
also set a limit of 30 years to serve; if a judge demanded more, then
the prosecution could not use Todd's confession as evidence.
At 10 that night, Todd Barry entered a small, white
room at state police headquarters where, for nearly 3 1/2 hours, detectives
pulled the story of Vickie Cushman's murder from him one question at a
time.
A video camera high in a corner of the room recorded
the story. Two detectives -- the lanky Lt. Thomas A. Denniston and a shorter,
stockier colleague, Cpl. Eric L. Croce, listened to Todd's tale.
AS HE TELLS his story, Todd sits in a black chair,
flanked by two detectives. He wears gray pants, a vest, a flannel shirt.
His voice is nasal, tinged at times with a Rhode Island accent.
Cooperative but strained from nearly two sleepless
weeks, Todd's demeanor ranges from amiable to testy, indignant to apologetic.
He says he broke into Vickie Cushman's apartment
through her living-room window. He raised the window screen from outside
and "plopped in."
It was dark inside, or kind of dark. He found his
way to her bedroom. Vickie was sleeping. Todd nudged her shoulder. Vickie
woke. She wasn't startled. She said, "What are you doing here?"
Todd did not have an answer to that question. He
said something like, "I don't know, Vickie man."
Todd stumbled and fell to the floor. He was drunk
and stoned. He'd had four or five beers at the Hot Club and a couple of
shots of whiskey. At Club Rocket, he had chugged three or four more beers
and a few shots of a hard liquor. Then he had smoked some pot, and it
felt as if the pot or one of his drinks had been spiked with drugs. He
felt "whacked out."
Vickie helped him up and they moved through her
bedroom door into the living room.
"We started talking about our relationship, and
I never thought it was a healthy relationship, and then she brought up
this police officer. . . . He was gonna leave his wife and kids" to begin
a new relationship with her. "And I was like, 'Oh man, Vickie, I don't,
I just don't think that's gonna happen.' "
Todd said, "Vickie, you're going to ruin this guy's
life, don't you understand that?"
She said, "No, he's gonna leave, he's gonna leave."
"I know how she obsessed with me and she was obsessing
with this guy," Todd tells the police. "And I really thought she was going
to ruin this guy, you know?"
Todd told her that the cop would never leave his
wife and kids, that was just her fantasy. Vickie objected; the talk grew
tense. Then Vickie saw the screen raised high in the window. She feared
that her cat had gone out the open window; with cars whizzing past on
Route 95 just a few hundred feet away, she worried about that cat.
Todd tells the detectives: "I just remember she's
getting tense and then something about the cat. Some weird thing about
the cat getting out of the house, and her going to sue me about the cat.
And that's probably when I spun out of control."
Denniston says, "When she said that, sue you about
the cat, it almost seems like a joke: 'If the cat gets out I'll sue you,'
I mean . . . "
"Oh no," Todd says. "She was pretty serious."
"What kind of cat was it?" Croce asks.
"Black cat. That whole tone: 'Something happens
to the cat, I'm gonna sue you.' And then -- " Todd whistles -- "I just
lost it."
Denniston: "What happened?"
Todd: "I jumped, I just like attacked. Jumped on
her, and uh, and uh, and uh."
Todd says he strangled her.
"With your hands?" Croce says.
"Yeah, my hands."
Todd shakes his head slowly. "I think she was just
being overcome by me strangling her. I was just going out of my mind."
"When you were strangling her, was she facing you
or facing the other way?" Denniston asks. "She was looking at you? She
was facing you?"
Todd pauses for 20 seconds, then says "maybe." Nobody
speaks.
Croce breaks the silence. "Have a drink of water,"
he says. "Take your time. You're doing well."
Todd swallows. "I'm sorry," he says. "From the front."
Todd says that when he grabbed her throat his momentum
knocked her off her feet. He strangled her as she laid face up. "I remember
being [expletive] shocked, almost like -- 'What the hell am I doing?'
while I was doing it."
Todd sighs.
Croce asks: "Do you stop? How long does that activity
last for?"
"Ten, 30, 15, 30 seconds, I don't know. Thirty seconds."
"What do you do now? You realize, 'What are you
doing?' And you realize what's happened, what do you do?" The detectives
gently prod Todd. Still, he doesn't mention the murder weapon: the fire
extinguisher.
Todd puts his right index finger on his nose, deep
in thought. He pauses for 20 seconds, then whispers something that ends
in "I don't have any strength."
His voice returns to normal: "Fast, fast, fast,
furious, fast, fast. One big, I mean, everything's fine and it happens
in one swift continuous motion, and then finally I stopped and I'm like
-- oh my God. And I'm like -- I don't know. I don't know what I was thinking."
The whole thing, he says, from the time he broke
in until the time he killed her, took less than 10 minutes.
"And then I whack her on the head with something
that was on the coffee table, close by . . . a small object." He simulates
the motion with his left hand.
"Then I just don't know what. Instantaneous, the
fury. I mean I was -- I went from not being provoked to this thing about
talk about our relationship and then the cat, and then something spun
in my mind. I jumped on top of her, choked her for a while, and then grabbed
this thing, whacked her a few times in the head. And then I thought she
-- I didn't take her pulse or anything. I thought she was dead."
DENNISTON LISTENS carefully to Todd's confession.
"Before you left," Denniston asks, "did you do anything
to cover up the crime scene? Think about this. . . . This is important,
because I know the scene, and I know what was done there, and it's important
to correlate what you say was at the scene."
Denniston knows that the killer had worn dishwashing
gloves; that Vickie had been wearing a thick dental guard to keep her
teeth from grinding in her sleep; that her skull had been cracked by a
heavy fire extinguisher. Todd hasn't mentioned any of those details.
Todd stammers, "Uh, uh, uh -- and then I remember
some yellow gloves."
Todd changes his story about the attack: "Vickie
went out to get the cat," he says. "Vickie actually stepped out. Vickie
did step out on the porch overhang."
The dishwashing gloves were there in the kitchen.
While she was on the roof, Todd slipped on the gloves.
"So this is slightly different than what the original
version you gave us," Denniston says. "Because you must've thought about
it, you put the gloves on, you thought about what you were gonna do then."
Todd: "Yeah, I did, but I didn't think, you know.
I'm telling you honestly, I did think but I didn't think. I, I, I can't
say -- I mean I must have thought about it -- but I didn't really. To
me, the whole thing, it went from me being, or us talking, and how it
got to that point and that, my loss of control, what stemmed that is,
is, I wish -- that's the answer I don't have for me, for you guys, for
anyone."
What about her mouthpiece, Croce says. Did she have
that between her teeth?
Todd does not recall Vickie wearing the mouth guard.
He says, "If that was in her mouth, she took it out immediately, because
it was a clear conversation, it was not a garbled kind of thing."
But the mouth guard was clenched between Vickie's
teeth when medical examiners looked at her body. That would have made
it difficult for her to have a conversation about her and Todd, about
Scott, about the cat.
The investigators press Todd on what he used to
strike her. "Some kind of thing that was raised," he says. "It wasn't
totally smooth."
To the investigators it was clear that he was talking
about the heirloom jewelry box with its textured porcelain top.
The investigators ask: What about the fire extinguisher?.
"I, I, I I'm getting a little visual -- fire extinguisher.
I mean um -- fire extinguisher," Todd whispers.
He recalls mentioning the fire extinguisher in his
written confession, but he cannot remember it sitting there with detectives.
"I mean -- I was trying to put together what I hit her in the head with"
when he wrote his confession. "At the time I had this vision of a fire
extinguisher, not that I'm having -- block-out of a fire extinguisher
right now."
There were problems with Todd's story. Vickie was
found wearing a mouthpiece; Todd hadn't mentioned the dishwashing gloves
until pressed; and he could not remember that the instrument that crushed
Vickie's skull was a fire extinguisher.
But parts of his story lined up with the facts:
the method of entry; Vickie's obsession with her cat's safety; he knew
she'd first been struck by something small -- the heirloom jewelry box.
That was a key detail that had received little publicity. The dainty legs
of the jewelry box lined up with the bruises on Vickie's neck.
"I did a horrible thing to that girl," Todd says.
"She didn't deserve to die."
At 1:15 in the morning, after more than three hours
of listening to Todd Barry spill his guts, the detectives were convinced:
they had their guy.
And the wrong man was in jail.
JOEL S. CHASE habitually came in early, before calls
began pouring into his one-man, one-secretary practice. The Hornoff case
had consumed him. He worked on Scott's case every day, talking to him
on the phone, reading his letters, researching, writing.
On Monday morning, Nov. 4, he was preparing for
a meeting with state prosecutor Randall White to discuss new DNA testing
on the evidence collected in the Cushman murder. White called and told
him he wanted to meet at the prison.
"Why there?" Chase recalls asking.
"I can't go into details on the phone, but something
significant has happened," White said.
"A good significant or a bad significant? You can't
leave me hanging," Chase said.
"Well for you, I think it's a good significant,"
he said.
Chase hung up the phone. And it hit him: this is
what he had been praying to hear every day for more than six years. Chase
sat back in his chair, and he cried.
His secretary, Linda Kelly, heard her boss's sobs.
"What's wrong?" she asked. "What's wrong?"
Nothing. Chase was crying tears of joy.
RONALD D. CARTER had been the captain in charge
of detectives in the Warwick Police Department at the time of the Cushman
murder.
He had left one church because he believed some
in the congregation thought he was covering up for a police officer who
was a murderer. At his new church they told him to keep a "prayer journal,"
to write down those subjects important enough for him to pray over. That
way he could track the effectiveness of prayer.
He wrote in his journal that he needed a clear sign
of Scott Hornoff's guilt or innocence. Carter knew he was human, capable
of error; but he never thought Scott had killed Vickie Cushman. He prayed
to know: "Did I make a mistake and let a murderer go?"
One of Carter's daughters had married a state police
detective. When the police decided they could release the news of Barry's
confession, she called her father to scoop the TV stations.
He remembers the call: "Dad, dad. I gotta tell you
something. Somebody stepped forward to state police and admitted killing
Vickie Cushman."
His prayer was answered.
From the living room, Allison Carter heard her husband
cry into the phone: "Vindication!" he said. "Vindication!"
INSIDE SUPER MAX, the maximum security wing of the
state prison, Scott was summoned to the conference room. He saw the cops
and prosecutors as he walked in; his heart sank.
He thought: Oh great, what are they going to accuse
me of now?
They asked him if he knew anyone named Todd Barry.
He did not.
The prosecutors told him that Barry had confessed
to killing Vickie Cushman. But the cops and prosecutors still couldn't
believe Scott's hands were completely clean. They questioned him: Did
he go to Vickie's that night, see her body, then return to the party?
"Even then, they wanted me to admit to going to
Vickie's apartment the night she was murdered just so it would fit their
scenario," Scott says. "They wanted me to admit to going there and seeing
her lying dead and just taking off."
This time, Scott wouldn't "fill in the blanks."
He wouldn't tell them what they wanted to hear even if it meant staying
in jail. He couldn't say he went to Vickie's that night because it was
not true.
After his chat with prosecutors, Scott called his
mother. She heard his voice break as he said, "Mom, I'm coming home."
TWO DAYS later, Scott waddled into the large courtroom
sandwiched between two sheriffs, his legs chained, his hands in cuffs.
This was the same Providence County Superior Courtroom where he had been
sentenced to life in prison more than six years earlier.
Scott kneeled on a chair so the sheriffs could reach
the locks binding his manacled ankles. His back turned toward the judge's
bench, Scott looked out into the crowded gallery.
Tina Dauphinais was there, wearing a custom-tailored
hockey jersey with his name -- HORNOFF -- stitched in red block letters
above the number 94, his old Warwick police badge number.
His brother Dave was there, too. Dave was husky
now in middle age, with a heavy beard and black leather jacket that made
him look less like a retired detective than like a biker.
His mother, Betty June Hornoff, was wearing a sprig
of yellow ribbon in her lapel. She had sold her house and spent the profits
investigating her son's case, trying to win his freedom. She silently
mouthed Scott a message; he smiled.
With a click, Scott's manacles came off. After 6
years, 4 months, and 18 days in prison, he was free.
TWO MONTHS later, Scott watched from the gallery
in Kent County Superior Court as Todd Barry stood in shackles before Judge
Nettie Vogel. Prosecutor Randall White outlined Barry's confession.
Scott listened with a detective's trained ear to
the account of Todd Barry's story. To him, Todd's confession didn't make
total sense: before he even tried the door, he came in through a second-story
window? A woman who woke in the night to a man standing over her bed had
calmly asked, "What are you doing here?" The dental guard found in her
mouth? Just try putting one of those in and having a conversation -- it
can't be done.
Scott didn't doubt that this time they had the right
guy. But he did not believe that he was hearing the complete story of
Vickie Cushman's murder.
His theory -- and he stresses that it's only a theory
-- is that Todd had been to Vickie's apartment earlier that day. They
had had a discussion, perhaps about their past relationship, and argued.
Todd got drunk, perhaps to steel himself for a confrontation. He returned
to her apartment, broke in, and slipped on the gloves. Vickie confronted
him, her mouth guard still in place. And Todd killed her.
Judge Vogel approved the attorney general's deal
with Todd's lawyers: second-degree murder, 30 years to serve.
"It is sometimes said that justice delayed is justice
denied," Vogel said. "In this case, although justice has been delayed
for a very long, long time, justice will not be denied.
"Today we will have justice at long last."
SCOTT HORNOFF doesn't feel that justice has been
served, not yet. He's been out of prison nine months now, and he feels
pressure from the Family Court to work, to pay child support. He says
he'd like a job, but what's he going to do? He can't return to police
work. He says he wouldn't be fit for it now; he'd be hard-pressed to arrest
anyone for a crime he didn't witness.
Scott has asked the City of Warwick for $1 million
in back pay and benefits and $10 million in damages. So far the city has
refused, setting up a potential showdown in court.
When Scott gets five hours of sleep, he considers
that a good night. He has nightmares of people chasing him, of strange
prisons and bizarre courtroom scenes. Tina says he kicks and punches in
his sleep.
Sometimes the cushioned thump of a car door closing
outside his house sends his heart racing; he worries it's the state police
coming to arrest him for something else he did not do.
Tina supports him through her job as a massage therapist
at The Westin Providence and her private massage business.
ON THE LAST Friday in July, Scott laces up his sneakers
to run in the Blessing of the Fleet road race in Narragansett. He wears
high, white socks, shorts that come to mid-thigh, and a T-shirt bearing
an eagle and one word blazoned across it: Freedom.
As he pounds along with thousands of other runners
on Ocean Avenue, the sea breaks rhythmically on the rocks; a salt breeze
cools the sweat on his skin.
The race marks the 14th anniversary of the year
Vickie Cushman flattered Scott with her proposal of an affair as he stood
drinking a beer on the deck of the Coast Guard House. At the time he was
26, a detective, a husband, a father, a homeowner. Now most of that is
gone: his youth, his dream career, his wife, his house.
But he is still a father. Waiting for him at the
finish line are his three blond boys, ages 6, 12, and 14. With them stands
Tina, his fiancée. In retrospect, Scott says, he's happier now
with almost nothing than he was then, when he seemingly had everything.
"I'm a poster boy for fidelity now," he says. "I
found the girl I was looking for."
It takes Scott one hour and 43 minutes to run the
10-mile course -- 32 minutes more than it took him in 1989. The race ends
downtown at the fairgrounds, strung with Christmas lights and smelling
sweet of cotton candy.
Scott's shirt is soaked with sweat. Tina gives him
a big hug.
"Good job, honey!" she says.
Scott needs a hot shower, so the family waits for
a yellow bus to shuttle them back to the high school. As they wait, Scott
looks across the street, toward the ocean.
"That's the Coast Guard House," he says.
"In all its glory," says Tina.
"See where those guys are leaning against the rail
right there?" He points to two men silhouetted against a pink cloud. "That's
where I was standing . . ."
Scott stares at the men on the deck. He just wants
to get his shower and take the boys back to the small apartment he shares
with Tina. Their place is cozy, with a thick couch, Tina's massage table,
fragrant candles, and Scott's pencil drawings on the walls.
Just above the door to their living room hangs Scott's
20-year-old license plate, the blue paint of its letters worn but legible:
INOCNT.
Scott says he might try to register that plate again,
or he might just leave it hanging on the wall and get a new one.
He's thinking of: TOLDYA.
|
