Serial Killer's Apprentice: And Other True Stories of Cleveland's Most Intriguing Unsolved Crimes - Softcover

Renner, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1598510460 ISBN 13: 9781598510461

Publisher: Gray & Company, Publishers, 2008

Synopsis

"James Renner is genuine. He cares about these victims . . . When it comes to true crime, this is the kind of writer we need." — Crime Shadow News An investigative journalist confronts 13 of Northeast Ohio’s most intriguing unsolved crimes and attempts to crack open dark secrets that have baffled Clevelanders for years, including: · Abduction—In 2003, sixteen-year-old Georgina DeJesus disappeared on a West Side street corner, almost exactly one year after teenager Amanda Berry vanished just blocks away. · Stolen Identity—Joseph Newton Chandler of Eastlake was not who he claimed to be. Some think he was the Zodiac killer; others say he was D.B. Cooper, or even Jim Morrison. · Suicide or murder?—Joseph Kupchik hid gambling problems from friends and family until he was found at the bottom of a nine-story parking deck in downtown Cleveland—with multiple stab wounds. · Heist—In 1969, Lakewood bank employee Ted Conrad nabbed $215,000 from the vault one day after his twentieth birthday. The FBI still shows up at his high school reunions. · Controversy—Jeffrey Krotine was thrice tried for the grisly 2003 murder of his wife and ultimately acquitted, to the frustration of Cuyahoga County prosecutors, detectives, and even jurors. These stories venture into dark alleys and seedy strip clubs, as well as comfortable suburbs and cozy small towns, where some of the region’s most horrendous crimes have occurred. Renner’s unblinking eye for detail and unwavering search for the truth make this book a gripping read.

About this title

About the Author:

James Renner is a novelist, freelance journalist, and blogger. In his spare time, he hunts serial killers. His true crime stories have been published in the Best American Crime Reporting and Best Creative Nonfiction anthologies. His film adaptation of a Stephen King story was an official selection at the 2005 Montreal World Film Festival. A graduate of Kent State University, Renner lives in Akron, Ohio.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Dream a Little Dream of Me

The Unsolved Murder of Joseph Kupchik

In dreams, Joseph Kupchik never remembers that he’s dead. Seems unaware that he plunged to his death off a parking deck in downtown Cleveland in 2006. It’s always up to his twin brother, Johnathan, to give him the bad news.

John’s dreams started shortly after Joe died and haven’t let up since. Sometimes the two of them are at home, playing video games. In this one, they’re shooting hoops. Joe bounces the basketball against the backboard, into the net, then returns it to his brother.

Joe, you’re dead, says John. You died.

But Joe only stares at him, uncomprehending.

He’s confused, John thinks. Or maybe I’m the one who’s confused. Maybe this is real.

It’s not, of course.

Joe is dead in the Real World.

The cops think Joe committed suicide. But if it was suicide, he found an unusual way to do it. A growing number of friends and family believe Joe was murdered.

Either way, when John wakes up, he’ll have to leave Joe behind. So let’s give them a moment alone. They’ve got a game to finish just now.

Joe and John Kupchik were hard to tell apart. Both inherited their mother’s deep, dark eyes and their father’s coarse, burgundy-brown hair. They had the same smile and gently sloping shoulders. Joe was slightly taller and had a larger nose and tilted his head when he met someone, almost bashfully. But they looked enough alike that John is reminded of Joe every time he looks in the mirror. He misses his twin and sometimes feels him, like an amputated limb. Their connection, that odd closeness that their sister Kate calls “the creepy twin thing,” is still being severed.

The Kupchiks live in a modest two-story home inside a nondescript subdivision in Strongsville, domiciles of the shrinking middle class. Joe―“Kuppy” to friends―graduated from Strongsville High School in 2004. He wasn’t much of an athlete; couldn’t make a lay-up to save his life, friends say. But he played games of pick-up football in the neighborhood and loved watching the NFL on weekends, Green Bay in particular. He often wore a giant cheese head in the living room, though it’s long been suspected he chose the team for its colors. Sometimes he made minor bets―a dollar or two―with John or his older brother Michael.

In the fall of 2004, then-18-year-old Joe and John decided it was time to discover their own destinies. John set off for the University of Dayton. Joe stayed home and enrolled at Cuyahoga Community College, taking accounting classes at the main branch in Parma.

During this time, Joe met many of his closest friends while working at Wendy’s on Pearl Road. Joe was a crew leader and opened the store on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Megan Rachow, who still works at Wendy’s, remembers Joe’s knack for making endless shifts a little more entertaining. During lulls they played tic-tac-toe on the parking lot with chalk. Sometimes Joe put sandwich buns in the fryer. In retaliation for some prank she can no longer remember, Megan once put a ladle of cheese sauce in Joe’s hat, but he noticed before putting it on. Out back one day, she offered him his first cigarette, the single puff coming out in loud coughs a moment later as he laughed and laughed.

That first year at Tri-C, Joe pulled a C average. He figured his shifts at Wendy’s were impacting his studies, so he quit in the fall of 2005. His transcripts show an immediate improvement. That semester, Joe took a full course load and earned two As and three Bs. He also became treasurer of the Tri-C Philosophy Club. Around this same time, he discovered online gambling.

The bets were small at first. He and John anted up $35 apiece to start an account at BoDog.com to bet on NFL games. They schemed over the phone and usually picked at least four winners for every seven games. By Christmas, their initial investment of $70 had ballooned to nearly $1,600.

Then Joe began betting on college basketball on their account, laying down more money and losing more often than not. When John complained, Joe gave him half their winnings―about $800―and changed the password.

During the long winter break from school, Joe also started a new job at Steak ’n Shake in nearby Brunswick. He worked the grill at first and then began to wait tables. A co-worker recalls that Joe charmed many of his regular customers but had a hard time fitting in with other employees. They picked on him for bobbing his head when he talked, a nervous habit. And for talking too smart. Joe complained to a close friend that co-workers often changed his schedule, giving him less profitable shifts. (According to a former manager of the Brunswick Steak ’n Shake, employees were allowed to change the schedule as long as someone showed up.) All Joe’s parents knew was that before leaving for work, he always left a note with his hours on the kitchen counter.

The morning of February 11, a Saturday, Joe’s father, George, gathered receipts and W-2s for the family’s tax filings. He also planned to fill out student loan paperwork, so that Joe could transfer to the University of Cincinnati later that year. While Joe was still in bed, George stuck his head inside his son’s room.

“How much money do you have in your bank account?” George asked, waking him up.

“Seven thousand dollars,” Joe replied.

After talking to his dad, Joe got up and dressed for work―black pants and a white button-up shirt. Before he left, Joe jotted down his work schedule for the day: noon to 10 p.m. George heard Joe shut the door of his Honda Civic. The sound echoes in George’s mind still: the last noise he ever heard his son make. It was a little after 11 in the morning.

Only later would George learn that Joe had lied about his savings account. Some of the money had been loaned out to family and friends, but a lot had gone toward online bets. That morning, Joe’s balance was $4.46.

Adam Worner, age 22, left the Blind Pig on West 6th that Saturday night around 1 a.m. and began the long walk back to his apartment on the east side of downtown Cleveland. His path lead him down Ontario Street. As he passed Fat Fish Blue, he came upon the body of a young man lying on the cement, just inside a thin alley, below a nine-story parking deck. He wasn’t the first one on the scene. Later, he would say that he saw a black man, about his age, dressed in jeans and a nice jacket, standing over the body.

“I don’t want to get into the blood and guts and gore of it,” Worner says. He’ll only say that the body belonged to a young man. That he was a bloodied wreck and unconscious, but not dead. That he was not wearing shoes. Worner used his cell phone to dial 911.

Sometime during the frenzy of activity as the EMS crew arrived and loaded the body into the ambulance, the black man quietly walked away. Worner is not sure he could recognize him if he saw him again on the street.

Officer James Foley arrived at the scene first and searched the garage. On the top floor, he found a Honda Civic with its driver’s side door open, the keys dangling from the ignition, the engine turned off. The driver’s seat was bloody, and a rolled-up white shirt covered in blood lay between the seat and the door, beside a bloody leather jacket. A pair of shoes rested on the floor under the steering wheel. A trail of blood snaked from the door to the railing. A six-inch fillet knife lay on the snowy cement a few feet from the car. Written on a piece of paper on the dash was Joseph Kupchik’s phone number and home address. (George later recognized the handwriting as his son’s.)

At 1:47 a.m., Joe arrived at MetroHealth Medical Center. EMS had placed him in a backboard and neck brace and had him hooked up to a ventilator. ER doctors discovered myriad injuries: broken ankles, a shattered pelvis, internal bleeding, and a punctured lung, the result of a stab wound in the left side of the chest, just below the collarbone. They tried to save him, but the damage was too extensive. Joe was pronounced dead at 3:08 a.m.

About seven hours passed before the Kupchiks learned any of this. As they arrived home from church at 10:30 a.m., police and media showed up simultaneously. Within minutes of the parents’ learning that their son was dead, Channel 5 was at the door seeking an interview. The family shut the reporters out to grieve alone, but the media smelled a mystery and weren’t about to forget it.

Dr. Frank Miller III, a pathologist for Cuyahoga County who was later appointed coroner, performed the autopsy on Joe’s body. There were some strange details, for sure. Take that stab wound below Joe’s left collarbone. Dr. Miller discovered the wound was quite deep, and that the knife had traveled front to back, downward, and left to right. That’s Joe’s left and right. So it didn’t come in straight, but at an angle, pointing down and toward Joe’s right side.

The other serious injuries were confined to Joe’s lower body. His skull was not busted and his teeth were not broken, even though he is presumed to have fallen nine stories―Dr. Miller maintains his injuries were consistent with a fall from that height. It appeared that Joe had landed feet first―both ankles, both legs, and four ribs were fractured.

Miller also noted marks on Joe’s stomach that looked like small cuts. There was no food in Joe’s stomach, just a small amount of a red-brown liquid. Most likely, it had been several hours since he’d eaten. The red-brown liquid was never identified.

Joe’s clothes were examined, too. His socks were clean, but his pants were caked with a white substance that turned out to be calcium sulfate, a compound found in de-icing material. His t-shirt, once white, was now mostly red and stiff with dried blood. It had been cut off during surgery and mended temporarily, like Joe, so that it could be photographed.

Cleveland Detectives Ignatius Sowa and James Gajowski were assigned to the case. They declined to be interviewed, but I managed to get my hands on a copy of their notes.

The detectives returned to the parking garage and got the video from the security camera that faces the entrance. Although they could not make out who was driving Joe’s Honda when it pulled into the garage, the time on the video matched the time-stamped ticket discovered inside Joe’s car: 1:04 p.m. Which means that the car was in the garage for over 12 hours before Joe’s body was found on the street below. (The only thing they know about his travels between leaving home and entering the garage is that he stopped at the Wendy’s on Pearl Road where he’d once worked and ordered a chicken nugget meal at the drive-through.)

Near the space where the car was parked in the garage, the detectives found a pack of Newport cigarettes, two pens, and a beer bottle. On the street, they recovered Joe’s belt buckle, which apparently had snapped off upon impact.

Sowa also noted that Joe had a roll of money tucked in his pocket: $103 (a ten, 5 fives and 68 singles). On the passenger seat they found Joe’s book bag. Inside were two printed magazine articles, “Decisions About Death” and “The Harm That Religion Does.” On the floor below was a textbook titled Deviant Behavior.

The detectives wondered what a preppy kid from Strongsville had been doing in a downtown parking garage for 12 hours. They wondered if it had something to do with the Ontario Café, a small bar next to Fat Fish Blue that turns queer after dark on weekends. They spoke to a regular twist known to frequent the club, but the man said he didn’t know Joe.

Sowa and Gajowski interviewed co-workers at Steak ’n Shake. The schedule for the week of February 11 showed that Joe was supposed to come in at 5 p.m., not noon. So they spoke to the managers who had been on duty at 5 p.m. that day, Amber Cooper and Matt Magale, who told them because it wasn’t a busy night, they decided not to call Joe’s house when he didn’t show up for work. One employee said Joe had appeared agitated during his Friday night shift and had forgotten to clock out.

Then the detectives learned the extent of Joe’s gambling habit. In a two-day period in January, Joe had lost $1,800. It appeared he’d withdrawn money from Charter One after a significant loss to his BoDog account. The night before he died, Joe placed a $450 wager on college basketball.

They also reviewed the contents of the computer disks found in Joe’s bag. Shortly before he died, Joe had written this passage:

Expectations can either be positive or negative, but rarely am I ever right. Whenever I anticipate an event probably to make my dreams come true, something usually happens where the situation turns into a nightmare.

Adding this up with the gambling, the somber reading material, and the helpful note with name and address left in the car, the detectives informed the coroner’s office of their conclusion: the kid had sat in his car for hours, stabbed himself, then jumped from the building. Suicide.

Dr. Miller has seen several cases in which people utilized multiple methods of suicide. There was the man who roped a noose around his neck before putting a shotgun in his mouth, for example. So he accepted the detectives’ theory. Dr. Miller postulated that the scratches on Joe’s stomach were probably “tick marks” where he’d tried to stab himself before finally getting the nerve to really push. He wrote up his own report for then–County Coroner Dr. Elizabeth Balraj.

Again, the media knew before the Kupchiks.

George Kupchik, Joe’s father, is director of operations for a company that manufactures silicone sealants and greases. The job is as exciting as it sounds, but after years of analyzing data George’s mind has become a finely tuned machine. When something isn’t working at the factory, it’s his job to find out why. He has learned from experience not to make rash decisions until he has reviewed all the evidence.

George was watching TV on May 22 when a local reporter for 19 Action News announced that his son’s death would most likely be ruled a suicide.

George demanded a series of meetings with Dr. Balraj and her staff to convince them that his son was murdered before the ruling was made official. George presented Balraj and Miller with his own report on Joe’s death, which he’d worked on during the Cleveland police investigation. He titled it Questions and Facts about Joseph Kupchik. There were many more questions than facts:

Where is Joe’s cell phone? (It should have been on him or in the car, but to this day it has not been found.)

Why did Joe not call off from work if he didn’t want to arouse suspicion?

Where is the other man who found Joe’s body and why didn’t he stay to talk to police?

With all the blood in the car (which George had to clean himself), would Joe have had enough strength to walk to the railing and climb over?

If Joe was covered in blood, why was there no blood on the railing where he would have boosted himself up?

Why would the police assume Joe was despondent over money, when relatives and friends owed him a combined $7,300 and he owned stock worth $4,000?

If he was contemplating suicide, why did Joe place an online bet the nig...

About this edition

• Publisher: Gray & Company, Publishers
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1598510460
• ISBN 13: 9781598510461
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 216