Chapter 13

There’s a lot I simply can’t remember that happened in the following few days we were stranded in Rock Hill. My attention was almost entirely focused on my overwhelming sense of grief. I was completely disconnected from the many events swirling around me. I guess I was hoping that Crystal might still be alive and would magically appear from somewhere. And when it was established that Crystal had been murdered at almost exactly the time that Judy Dildo made her brief appearance at the Penitence Club, the only relief I had from my overwhelming anguish was the intense hatred I could direct towards her. As it was with other members of the band.

“We don’t know for sure, do we?” said Andrea, one of the few brave enough to defend Judy in her absence. “Just because we haven’t seen her since ... since ... Just because of that doesn’t prove anything, does it?”

“So, why isn’t she here then?” said Jane. “What’s that bitch hiding from us? I’m not saying she actually killed Crystal...”

“She couldn’t have done,” said Jenny Alpha. “We saw her at the club when it happened. Even Judy couldn’t have been in two places at the same time.”

“It can’t be a fucking coincidence that we’ve seen fuck all of the bitch since she burst in like that,” said Jacquie. “What did she know? Where did she fucking run off to? She knew something, didn’t she?”

“I don’t know what Judy did or didn’t know,” said Philippa, also striving to be diplomatic. “But you’re right, Jacquie. Judy took Crystal to a dark place she wouldn’t have gone to otherwise...”

“Fucking Thrash Metal male orgies,” I moaned. “Fucking men, smack, dicks, sadomasochism and knives.”

“We don’t know about any of that stuff,” said Philippa. “Except the knives, of course. And the fact that Crystal was raped and pissed on just before she was killed...” I burst into a fresh torrent of tears that prompted my sister to wrap her arms around my shoulders. “Well that’s what happened, isn’t it? It could be that Judy had nothing to do with it at all. Maybe Crystal just happened to be walking along the Catawba River and was the victim of a random act of violence. We just don’t know.”

But what we did know and got to know for sure when we filed into the crematorium to identify Crystal’s abused and battered body was that she was undeniably dead. The woman on the cold marble slab whose eyes were discreetly closed and whose skin had already taken on the pale complexion of the recently deceased could be none other than Crystal Passion: the love of my life and the woman to whom I had literally sacrificed everything. Except my life, of course. And I don’t know how many times I thought to myself (and maybe even wailed aloud to my sister and my two black lovers) that I would gladly sacrifice that as well if Crystal Passion were still alive.

That Crystal was unclothed in the crematorium, despite the cold, seemed appropriate. That was how she’d been most of her life and how she was when discovered at the scene of the crime by three young black men who were originally detained as suspects despite their exemplary academic record and good behaviour. This time, she was naked simply because that was what all corpses are before an autopsy and for a case like this where murder was pretty much obviously the cause an autopsy was a necessary part of the police investigation. The fact that Crystal’s beautiful body, already scarred and disfigured by the violence that had killed her, would soon be scalpeled apart only made me sob the louder while the police officers looked on and Andrea, Jane and Jacquie tried to comfort me.

But my grief overcame me. My feet suddenly gave way beneath me and, still wailing, I collapsed to the floor. I gripped Jane’s tee-shirt so tightly when I fell that I tore it across the seams, but fortunately not so that her bosom fell loose. I crouched on the floor in despair and shouted out to the world, just like you see people do in the kind of movies that I never usually watch: “Why? Why? Why did this have to happen?”

“Gee! She’s taking it bad, ain’t she?” remarked one of the brawnier police officers.

“She was Crystal’s closest friend,” said Philippa.

“She was Crystal’s lover,” the Harlot clarified.

“Well, whatever they felt for one another,” said the police officer sympathetically. “This gal certainly feels it strong. I don’t often see grief that bad. And I’ve seen some pretty crazed shit I can tell you. That Crystal Passion chick must have been one heck of a gal!”

The responsibility of positively identifying Crystal Passion’s body was only the first of a series of duties we all had to do, including Matt and Joe, and even Skull. And on this occasion the police were on our side. Whatever they might have privately thought about a dozen oddly dressed British women and their unorthodox lifestyles was expressed only inadvertently. This was a murder case and, for the moment, the chief suspect was Judy Dildo.

Her alibi was in no way helped by the fact that she hadn’t returned to the Paradise Hotel at all on the night following the gig nor on the following days. As a result, much of the police interrogation was focused on Judy and what we knew of her whereabouts in the few days we’d been in Rock Hill (and from before the time we’d crossed the South Carolina State Line). It didn’t occur to me that we should hide the fact of Judy’s acquisition of a quarter weight of dope and to the credit of the police, although they confiscated what was left for forensic testing, there was no mention that we were complicit in a criminal offense. Jane observed with a bitter laugh that when Judy Dildo did return she’d be busted whether she had anything to do with Crystal’s murder or not.

“That’ll fucking teach the bitch!” she said.

“That doesn’t seem fair,” said Tomiko. “If Judy had nothing to do with it, why should she be punished?”

I was so wrapped up in my own sorrow that I didn’t pay much attention to how the others were reacting to Crystal’s death. I suppose I assumed that I had the most cause for sorrow having always been Crystal’s primary lover in the band, but in fact everyone was grieving. Jane and Jacquie could sublimate their grief with their anger. My sister was distracted by my near nervous breakdown. But we were all in a state of shock and distress: Philippa, Thelma, Bertha, Olivia, the Harlot, Jenny Alpha and, most of all, Tomiko.

I suppose it was because I’d always thought of Tomiko as being somehow different from the rest of us that I never imagined she’d get so distraught. Tomiko was an ethnic Japanese woman with a Public School education and an Irish passport who managed the sound deck and was more often stoned than straight. But while we were in the crematorium she wept silently as she hovered over Crystal Passion’s body. She ran her fingers over the body, even over the knife wounds that had slit open the stomach, and then she unexpectedly exploded into a torrent of tears.

“It’s real!” she sobbed, as Olivia and the Harlot comforted her. “It’s really happened! I didn’t imagine it possible. Crystal’s dead. She’s dead. Dead! Dead!”

Polly Tarantella has somehow managed to obtain a transcript of the police investigation into Crystal’s murder and almost all of it is transcribed in her biography. There are exact details in the coroner’s report (which I couldn’t bear to read at the time) which describe the nature of the knife wounds, present an analysis of the semen found in her vagina and anus, itemises where she was hit and the likely cause of each bruise, and confirms that the urine traces over her body were fresh at the time of her murder. The fact there’d been no attempt to hide her body was evidence that the murderers weren’t professional criminals. And the evidence from the semen and the nature of the violence was that there’d been at least two and possibly as many as half a dozen men involved in the crime. But in the early 1990s when there was no such thing as DNA profiling and when America was drowning in a national crime wave, there was little likelihood the criminals would ever be found. Unless the forensic evidence exactly matched the other evidence the police had in their files (which were mostly written on paper rather than stored in a computer) or one of the perpetrators had left behind some tell-tale evidence (as so often happens in American cop shows) there was almost no chance that Crystal’s killers could be identified unless Judy was able to help the police with their inquiries.

Given that so much of the police investigation related to Judy Dildo, Polly has a lot of ammunition for her claim that Judy was Crystal’s evil nemesis. There’s a lot of redaction in the police files which as far as I could see was more to protect the witnesses (such as me) than to hide the truth. I can tell from the transcripts that it was Jane and Jacquie who had the most vicious things to say about Judy, though I was surprised to discover the extent to which some in the band continued to defend her. Though I don’t know for sure, I think Judy’s chief champions were Tomiko, Jenny and the Harlot. She was described in a much more positive way than I’d have predicted. I didn’t know before reading these accounts just how great Judy’s love for Crystal had been. Nor how much she’d admired me. And this makes me feel especially ashamed given how much I hated and despised Judy at the time.

Polly’s thesis of Judy’s great treachery needs more than a few unkind comments from Jane and Jacquie (and probably also from Philippa and Bertha), but the necessary proof, at least as far as Polly’s concerned, came to light on the third day of the police investigation

At this stage we’d got used to reading reports in the Rock Hill Herald and the other local newspapers from the Charlotte metropolitan area about the ‘English Rock Star Murder’ which on the local television news channels was also known as the ‘Crystal Passion Riverside Knifing’. There was nothing much more said about Crystal or the band in the reports beyond the facts that we came from London, England, and that we were all women (except for ‘local boy, Matt McGinnis’). There was no mention now of the controversy that had agitated the Christian faithful nor of the chequered history of our American tour. But the cliché of finding out about a story from a news bulletin rather than directly from the police (again so familiar from American cop shows) was true in our case.

“Breaking,” said the news reader on whatever local affiliate was associated with NBC. “We have new information about prime suspect Judith O’Hara in the Catawba River Killing. After the break.”

And so Andrea and I, holed together in our hotel room, had to endure an endless series of advertisements for local realtors, automobile sales and legal services until the news reader appeared on the screen again.

“The body of Judith O’Hara, the English rock guitarist the police have been looking for, has been found in Rock Hill less than a quarter mile from the scene of the horrific murder of English Rock Star, Crystal Passion. At this stage, we don’t yet know whether the cause is suicide or foul play, but we do know that Miss O’Hara’s dead body was found hanging from a tree by local walkers in River Park. We’re expecting a statement from the Rock Hill PD in the next half hour. Stay tuned.”

And following this there was a totally unrelated story about the preparation for the following year’s Come-See-Me Festival at the historic, award-winning Glencairn Garden, more on which I was in absolutely no mood to find out about.

“I don’t fancy waiting for this talking head to get round to what’s happened to Judy,” said Andrea. “We’ll get someone to drive us to the police station and get the story from source, shall we?”

My sister had clearly decided that whatever small benefit we might get from getting the news from the detectives investigating Crystal’s murder before the formal announcement would be worth our while because we’d be busy doing something instead of having to wait anxiously in a hotel room by the television screen for a spokesperson to loom into camera view.

“As long as we can keep the radio tuned to a news station while we drive there,” I said as I jumped up with a fresh sense of purpose. We then bundled into the Chevy with Jenny at the wheel and both Tomiko and Thelma for company.

“Hey, ladies,” said Nate, the receptionist at the Police Station who we’d got to know quite well during the last couple of days. “I was expecting to see some of you here after what what’s been found. I guess you wanna talk to the DI?”

“Is Luke here?” I asked.

“No,” Nate admitted. “He’s gotta make an official announcement for the TV cameras. It’s big news round here as I guess you ladies already know. But some of the other guys will fill you in. Wait here. I’ll see who I can find.”

It was Inspector Matthew Papadopoulos who escorted us into a quiet office that was reserved for just this kind of discussion to describe what had been found and what had been determined from the evidence. It was evident that he’d had to do something like this many times before. Even though it was Inspector Mark Evans who’d actually attended the scene of the crime and examined the evidence, Inspector Papadopoulos gave such a vivid depiction that it was difficult to believe that his was a second-hand account.

Judy had indeed been found hanging from a tree in River Park. The walkers who came across her body weren’t the first to walk past it, but they were the ones who’d noticed it first. The body was hanging just above head height and was obscured by dense foliage. In those days, there were very few cell phones, even in America, and none of these walkers owned one, so a couple of them remained by the scene of the crime (which must have been gruesome), while the other two raced off to a nearby drug store which was the nearest place where they could find a telephone. What they’d witnessed was exactly like those photographs that illustrate the Billy Holiday song Strange Fruit, only unlike those lynched bodies so indelibly associated with the Ku Klux Klan and the Gallant South, this corpse was of a woman of white ethnicity. At least she hadn’t also been found naked.

It wasn’t an easy job for the police to get Judy’s body down from the branch from which she’d been hung. Evidently, her murderers were quite expert at hanging people they didn’t like.

“They probably had to loop the rope from an elevated position,” Inspector Papadopoulos explained, “so we’re looking for evidence of snagged clothing. Our main task is to establish for sure that this wasn’t a suicide, although I can’t see how it could have been. In any case, we ain’t heard anything from you ladies to suggest that Miss O’Hara was the suicidal type. Suicides don’t normally involve as much cooperation and planning as went into Miss O’Hara’s killing.”

The evidence was that the hanging was what actually killed Judy but that this was only the final act of violence in a series of horrific abuses that she’d suffered. Inspector Papadopoulos didn’t give an account of the actual lynching, but I have a vivid image in my mind (derived from some of the more gory horror movies I’ve seen) of Judy’s body pulled taut at the neck with her tongue and eyes bulging out from asphyxiation while her last energetic kicks were only helping to hasten her death. And before that ordeal, she’d already been beaten, punched and raped. The inspector didn’t describe in detail how she’d been violated, but those interested in learning more can find all the repulsive details of the violence against Judy’s body described in Polly’s biography of Crystal Passion. There’s almost as much detail about Judy’s final suffering as there is regarding Crystal herself. The only compensation for Judy is that she hadn’t been stabbed to death, but I can only hazard a guess at how much terror Judy must have felt as her murderers slipped the noose around her neck and tugged the rope upwards.

The inspector went to great pains to explain to us (rather more than I’ve ever seen in a Crime Thriller) how cautious they had to be in arriving at conclusions about Judy’s murder. What was almost certain was that, as with Crystal Passion (who was consistently referred to as Miss Giordano), the death of Miss O’Hara was the result of homicide. What could not be determined were the motives for the murders, the identity of the perpetrators, the exact number of perpetrators, and certainly not their age, ethnicity or nationality: though the presence of semen in both cases strongly suggested that the murderers were all men and that there was more than one in both murders.