Matson's Case No. 5: Matson Case Files, #5

By Pablo Zaragoza

In another trip down memory lane, New York Chief of Police Robert Matson remembers the 1980's case of Oscar Ortiz, a Cuban-born national who arrived with the first wave of the Mariel boatlift people by order of Castro. Some of the boat people arriving with refugees were known criminals and the mentally ill who settled down in Miami, New York, and other American cities.

 

Ortiz's case hit the headlines when he protested being denied his religious freedom. The New York Times story portrayed him as a victim having been prosecuted because of his Afro-Cuban religious beliefs, with no mention of his gruesome murders, extortions, and rapes, all committed in the name of his occult rituals.

 

Matson wondered why the Times story never gave Ortiz his due and explained his crimes; instead making him into some kind of victim deserving of reverence.

 

Detective Matson and his partner, Smith, had their work cut out for them to track down Ortiz and render justice for the young women he kidnapped and murdered. Matson has a moment when he explores his own beliefs while exploring the practices of Caribbean-African religions brought to these countries by slaves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pablo Zaragoza
• Release date: Jan 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224753611

Book preview

The Occult Serial Murders

Pablo Zaragoza

In loving memory of all those

who have passed away:

my father, mother, cousins, and friends

who, in some way, find themselves

in the pages of my books

Table of Contents

Title Page

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

EPILOGUE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BOOKS BY PABLO ZARAGOZA

COPYRIGHT

PROLOGUE

One afternoon in 2005 while waiting to go to yet another function, I was in my office at One Police Plaza, taking my scrapbooks off the shelves and thumbing through them: from the fanatical murderer who killed street women and displayed them in tableaux ranged according to the stations of the cross to the Chinatown murders, the airport bombing investigation, and other high-profile cases. Those were the ones that made the headlines, but many others didn’t.

I remembered when detective work wasn’t dependent on DNA samples, using them to compare by a computer to a database that contained millions of offender samples. In 1985 Alec Jeffery first used a blood sample from an unknown individual and determined that person’s identity. It would take another year for the technique to be applied to two British rape cases, making forensic DNA analysis the norm, not only for cases of rape but also in murder, robbery, and other crimes.

Forensic serology that used to determine blood group, and Rh in a semen or blood sample, now uses the presence of microRNA to characterize a specimen as semen, stating that the sample is miR135b or miR10b.

Long gone are the days of checking countless fingerprint cards and trying to line up eight to twelve points for a match, and then have two persons agree that they were a match. Now we have AFIS, a computer with thousands upon millions of fingerprints stored in Washington DC. No longer do we use the Bertillon System of fingerprint analysis or Francis Galton’s Book and Methods of Fingerprinting or Henry’s classification. We just run a fingerprint through the computer, and if the perpetrator’s prints are in there, the machine will pop out his name.

We have a similar machine for facial recognition and biometrics, ABIS. When we give the system a face, it will give us not only a name but medical history, height, weight, and ethnicity. It’s gotten to the point that standard detective work requires a PhD. It’s a good thing I have two of them and an eidetic memory.

In my scrapbooks, I saw one small article from the 1980s with an eye-catching headline: OSCAR ORTIZ CLAIMS HE’S BEING DENIED HIS RELIGIOUS FREEDOM. This case required legwork, science, and good old deductive reasoning, using the Sherlock Holmes method: When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Oscar was always trying to get out of prison. The New York Times and their bleeding-heart editorial board would now and then drag out this tar baby pleading for clemency, but what this man did was horrific. His followers feared him and wouldn’t talk about him or their religious beliefs. At the time he popped up on our radar, we were getting the first wave of the Mariel boatlift people from Cuba. Most of them were hardworking poor people who had found their way to the Peruvian Embassy, where a bus crashed the gate, and fifty asylum seekers were granted refugee status.

The Cuban government told soldiers guarding the embassies to leave their post. Then Castro, gauging the political opportunity, told his people, If you want to go to Miami, go. Cuban families in exile sent boats of all kinds to Mariel Bay, while their families waited to be rescued. It became a mad dash for freedom for thousands of people.

Castro had done this before with the Freedom Flights starting in 1965, and for six years, they brought some 250,000 Cubans to our shores. These were the doctors, engineers, accountants, and other professionals who hadn’t left the island with the fall of Batista’s government in 1959. The wealthy, the politicians, and others had fled their homes already.

The folks in the Airlift could take only one suitcase and the clothes on their backs. They packed their worldly goods in grocery bags and left. Their homes and jobs had been stripped away months before they left Cuba, and they traveled to a country where they didn’t know the language or the customs, and they tried to reestablish themselves. Many doctors and lawyers served found themselves in interim jobs as busboys, garbage collectors, and janitors in New York City.

For example, in the old building where Aunt Beatrice, Sissy, and I lived, a Cuban refugee worked as a dishwasher to provide for his family. Dr. Jorge Medina had been a pediatrician in Havana, but here he scraped discarded spaghetti into the garbage and washed dishes. By the time Sissy and I left the projects, he had passed the necessary tests for practicing medicine here. He took care of my kids when they came into the world.

Now between April and October 1980, Castro opened the jails, the prisons, and the insane asylums and put them on boats with ordinary people, sending all his problems to us. He laughed out loud as we took all comers: inmates who had robbed, murdered, raped, the schizophrenic, and the psychotic were put on boats with people they didn’t know. The captains of those vessels had been told that if they wanted their own family members also to leave Cuba, they had to take on these disreputable passengers.

Jimmy Carter didn’t know what he was getting as these people were offloaded and let loose on an unsuspecting Florida population. However, some of the criminal refugees were gathered up and sent to Atlanta for housing under detainment without due process without having committed a crime here. Others continued their life of crime in Miami, New York, and Chicago. The ones we arrested here were shipped to Attica, Bedford Hill, Fishkill, and Woodbourne Correctional.

By this time, I was running the Manhattan North Homicide Squad, still investigating Mattie James’s cold case, when we caught a new case that blew us away. Many of these Mariel boat people who had mental health records and criminal histories had fallen through the cracks.

I had just read a few lines of text in the Local News section of the Times and wondered why they hadn’t covered the gruesome murders, extortions, and rapes Ortiz had committed in the name of his religion. The story made him into some kind of victim deserving of reverence, that he had been prosecuted because of his Afro-Cuban religious beliefs, with no mention of his victims, no mention of the harm he had caused.

The crimes happened in September 1980 before John Lennon’s murder in December. I was thankful that I hadn’t caught that Lennon one because it was high profile, and I was working on the Ortiz case. Steven Spiro and Peter Cullens were the first on the scene where they found Lennon in front of the security office at the Dakota. He yelled that he’d been shot twice before collapsing to the floor. Yoko Ono was with him, getting out of the cab after finishing a recording session at Plant Record. According to Jack Sullivan, the investigating detective, Lennon had been shot five times. Spiro and Cullens found Mark David Chapman, the gunman reading The Catcher in the Rye on 74th Street, just waiting to be arrested.

My secretary Stella came into the room and stood next to me. You going over that again? Stella said in disgust. She knew how upset I got when I reviewed cases like Ortiz’s.

"He’s locked away. Even after the protests, the letter-writing campaign, and the false narratives written by the Times, he still went away," I said. I was still angry at the way they portrayed my unit as some Nazis trying to crush this poor Cuban immigrant, that we goosestepped down the hall and smashed into his apartment to arrest him in the middle of a religious ceremony.

Stella brought me back, taking my scrapbook from me. You have a 2:00 p.m. luncheon at the Rotary Club, where they will give you a distinguished service plaque. Get your head in the right place. Your wife Sissy will wait for you at 273 Bowery, close to Katz Delicatessen. I hope they serve you a Reuben sandwich for lunch.

They’ll serve cold chicken with potato salad, like they always do. I smiled as she put the scrapbook back on the shelf.

Stella started to walk out the door. The Ortiz case was a win, boss. You shouldn’t feel bad about it.

It upset me to think that after all this time, the New York Times was still hashing out misinformation and downright lies about this monster, but the press never likes the truth if it doesn’t satisfy their narrative. The press resurrects Ortiz every so often because they can’t admit that they were wrong, that his crimes had nothing to do with his religious beliefs but were all about his twisted psyche. I resented being called a Nazi, having done my duty in Europe and Asia, fighting against the very thing they accused me of being. Stella is right. I shouldn’t let Ortiz upset me. He’s never getting out of prison.

Let me tell you about it, though. It’s a strange story.

A tall redhead with green eyes stepped forward and said, Light goes through the aperture and hits the sample in question through a holographic grating, diffraction grating formed by an interference-fringe field of two laser beams whose standing-wave pattern is exposed to a set of photosensitive materials. The principle behind this is the Beer-Lambert Law. She paused.

When the budget cuts came into effect, we had fewer police on the job, forcing some of us to double up, take robbery and fraud cases in addition to what usually was strictly homicide. I would look over the bullpen to see a dozen empty desks and a handful of men dealing with the surge of crime, the bloody wave of criminality washing over the city.

In the subways, 250 felonies per week were being committed, and more than 2300 crimes committed in the one-block stretch on Times Square. We had become the Rotten Apple. Crack cocaine had come to the city that never sleeps. The drug was cheap and highly addictive, and the results spawned an increase in violence.

There were days when Smith and I would go to apartments where the domestic violence had gotten out of hand. A woman with a crushed skull, her blood oozing onto the greasy linoleum floor. Her boyfriend’s eyes were wide open and red, and he would be shaking. I asked her to stop nagging me, but she wouldn’t stop, so I made her stop.

We’d cuff the bastard. He’d keep asking if she was going to be all right as the technicians put the white sheet over her lifeless body and lifted it onto the gurney. That’s how our day would start, and many times that’s how it would end.

I left the office later each evening, due to the added paperwork I had to complete. The salaried personnel had to stay and finish the work while those drawing an hourly wage couldn’t get overtime. Thank God for Stella who would stay, despite not getting paid overtime.

I’d get home and become human again. Sissy and the kids would gather around, telling me how they had gotten an A on a spelling test, how they had hit a ball so far, and how they loved the oatmeal raisin cookies Auntie Beatrice made for them. When they had cleansed me of all the horrors I had seen that day, I took them upstairs and kissed them good night. Sissy would ask how my day was, and I’d try to minimize the scenes I had seen, the results of yet another senseless murder.

I came in one night without taking my coat off and fell into the recliner in the living room. I stared into the void. I could hear the children asking their mother what was wrong with me. She saw the anguish on my face. The horror of what I had just witnessed was beyond even my comprehension.

Sissy took the children upstairs, and Aunt Beatrice brought me hot chamomile tea with plenty of sugar. As it went down and warmed me, Sissy sat down next to me. She threw her arms around me, and I felt at peace in her arms.

What happened, baby? she asked.

The captain sent Smith and me to help with a murder on Avenue X and 1St Street in Gravesend Brooklyn. A group of transit workers had stopped at a bagel shop to have breakfast before going home. Some young thugs surrounded the car, opened the passenger door on their old Chevy, and dragged Willie Turks out.

Suddenly, I had to rush to the downstairs bathroom. I had seen death in Italy and Korea, I had walked the streets of this town now for almost ten years, but I had never seen hate incarnate before. I washed my face after flushing the toilet and went back to my wife and aunt who sat quietly waiting for me.

Sissy knew how cruel the streets could be. She’d been a high-priced call girl, working for Bumpy Johnson that’s when I met her working the Via Dolorosa murders of prostitutes in the city. After that, I had joined the police force after my buddy Smith told them that I had a photographic memory. I had worked with Smith in the Military Police in Italy and Japan he had seen me work and knew my methods. Now Sissy now was a psychologist at New York University, teaching forensic psychology, and practiced at Bellevue. Who better to teach it than someone who knows the streets? I sat next to her, wrapped me in those beautiful, freckled arms of hers, and asked what got me so upset.

They took another man out, but he was able to defend himself while the driver sped away. They took Willie Turks’ head and repeatedly kicked it back and forth like a football. Then one of the assailants smashed it to the ground and cracked it like a walnut, smearing blood, and gray matter on the black asphalt. They killed him because he was black, because he wasn’t from the neighborhood, because he went into their bagel shop. They did it because it was easy and fun to kill a coon.

Baby, I know it was hard to see, but you’ve seen worse.

Yes, in war by sick serial killers, but not from kids in the neighborhood, getting their kicks from brutally murdering a man who had a wife and kids.

Aunt Beatrice had been listening to all of this. I could see tears rolling down her cheek.

Robert, do you know who did this?

We have an idea it was eighteen-year-old Gino Bova and others. We know where he lives, and officers will pick him up tonight. The 61st Precinct thanked us for our help, and their Sgt. Pucci handled the details that Smith and I provided.

Any idea who else was involved? Sissy asked.

Yes, Paul Mormando and Joseph Porella. There was one other involved, but we don’t have a name. This group has been hanging around the neighborhood, causing trouble but nothing like this before.

The tea had calmed me down, and Sissy led me by the hand to the kitchen table. Aunt Beatrice had made roast beef with mashed potatoes which smelled so good. As I ate, I thought it couldn’t get worse, it just couldn’t. When I had finished the slice of my aunt’s blueberry pie, I went upstairs, tucked the children in, and kissed them good night. As I looked at them, I hoped that this hate, this prejudice, this insanity would never visit them, but I knew that as long as there was envy, jealousy, and hatred in the world, crimes like this would occur.

The following day, Smith and I found out that they had captured Bova and charged him with second-degree murder, two counts of first-degree assault, one count of riot, and one count of discrimination. Powell was still at large and hadn’t been seen in Brooklyn.

At that point, I felt justice would be served, and at least this one would see the inside of a cell. Seventeen-year-old Paul Mormando was also arrested in connection with Turks’ murder, and the grand jury indicted him with second degree murder. He would be sentenced later to a term of five to fifteen years. One woman in the gallery yelled, Stop racist murder! Death to the Klan! I was in the back of the courtroom thinking the same thing.

The following morning, I was confronted with the most bizarre case, even more so than my first, the murder of prostitutes and portrayal of scenes from the Via Dolorosa in flesh and blood.

CHAPTER TWO

Smith picked me up the morning after the Turks’ murder in Gravesend. Smith had his camera with him and handed it to me as I slipped