The Ending
Over the years, there have been several unsolved murders that continue to haunt us to this day. Sometimes our fascination with them is passed down from one generation to the next. Despite the decades that have passed, people are still trying to determine the identity of Jack the Ripper and the Zodiac Killer, and we remain ever hopeful of learning who killed the Black Dahlia and JonBenet Ramsey.
Such a case was that of Anna Maria Rossellini, a beautiful young high school student who was found murdered in the summer of 1954. It was one of the most shocking crimes to strike Massachusetts, surpassed only by the killing of Andrew and Abbey Borden and the murders committed by the Boston Strangler.
It's been more than fifty years since Anna Maria's battered body was found in an abandoned warehouse along the waterfront in Gull Cove. During that time dozens of books have been written about the murder, and it has been the subject of several truTV and A&E specials. Yet it wasn't until Desi Winkler—a director known primarily for his early Eighties martial arts films—learned of the details of the case that Hollywood chose to exploit the dead girl in a full-length motion picture.
Barclay Earle, a bestselling true crime author, was chosen to write the screenplay, mainly because he grew up in nearby Woodhaven and was familiar with many details of the murder.
"Naturally, I wasn't born back then," he told his director, "but my parents remember the case well. In fact, my uncle was one of the detectives that investigated the murder."
"Is he still alive?" Desi asked eagerly.
"Yeah, he lives in a retirement home in Seaview."
"Great. Do you think he'll help us out if we need a technical consultant?"
"I don't see why not. He could probably use a little extra bingo money."
* * *
"Here it is," Barclay proudly announced as he placed the draft of his script on the director's desk.
"Fantastic! I can't wait to begin reading it," the director declared. "So, who's the killer?"
Barclay cast a puzzled look at him.
"Don't worry about spoiling the ending for me. This isn't an Agatha Christie novel. I want to know who the killer is before I start reading."
"The case was never solved."
"So?"
"So, there is no killer in the screenplay, no all-questions-answered denouement."
Desi shook his head.
"I'm not directing The Blair Witch Project. I don't want the audience leaving the theater scratching their heads and wondering what the hell happened. We need a good ending for this movie."
"But then it won't be a true crime story."
"Don't be so damned particular. I hired you to write a movie script, not a news article for The Boston Globe."
"What am I supposed to do? Just make the ending up?"
"That's what all the great writers do, kid."
Barclay winced at being called kid by a man who wasn't even five years older than he was, but Winkler was the boss, so he wisely kept his temper.
"You know what you should do?" the director asked, not waiting for a reply before continuing. "Go see that uncle of yours in the old folks' home. Maybe he could help you out."
"I suppose I could develop a character based on a compilation of all of the known suspects."
"Great idea! You've got until the end of next week to write a good ending. If you can't do it, then I'll have to find another writer who can."
* * *
A young nurse led Barclay down the hall to the solarium—a fancy name for a rather small enclosed porch at the Laurel Springs Home for the Aged. "Red" O'Malley, who had honorably and meritoriously served on the Gull Cove Police Department for over thirty years, was spending his retirement playing bingo, completing jigsaw and crossword puzzles and reading Western novels.
"Hello, Uncle Red," Barclay said warmly, eyeing a dog-eared paperback copy of Louis L'Amour's Kiowa Trail. "I would have thought you'd like to read mysteries."
Red smiled and shook his head.
"I've seen enough crime in my day; I don't need to read about it now. It's been a while since I last saw you. How have you been? I hear you're working for some Hollywood guy—writing Kung Fu movies, I believe."
"You heard right. I'm working on a script for Desi Winkler at the moment. Only this movie isn't about martial arts; it's about the Anna Maria Rossellini killing."
"I was hoping this was a purely social visit," Red said with disappointment.
Barclay hung his head, feeling guilty about not having visited his uncle for more than a year. O'Malley affectionately clapped his nephew on the back.
"Don't worry. I know you've been busy working. Now, what exactly do you want to ask me about the Rossellini case?"
"I wrote the script based on actual events, ending with the fact that the case was never solved and that the identity of the murderer was never discovered."
"And I bet this director fellow didn't like that one bit."
"You got that right! He wants me to tie up all the loose ends in true Hollywood fashion."
"You mean he wants to tell the audience who did it?"
"Yeah. I've got less than two weeks to hang the murder on someone. I thought it would be a good idea to create a character based on a compilation of the known suspects."
"That would be logical. The only problem is there never were any suspects."
"You're kidding me, right?" Barclay asked with disbelief. "The case has been open since 1954, and in all that time the police haven't had a single suspect?"
"Not a one."
"I read that some guy confessed to the crime, but the district attorney didn't have enough evidence to prosecute him."
The retired Gull Cove police detective chuckled.
"We had more than a dozen people confess to killing her. A murder—especially one that makes national headlines—always draws the loonies out of the woodwork."
"How do you know none of them did it?"
"Most of them were habitual confessors. They routinely came into the station and confessed whenever a murder was committed. Did you know three men from this area even admitted to having been the unknown gunman on the grassy knoll and taking part in the Kennedy assassination?"
Barclay laughed, but it was a half-hearted attempt at best. He had hoped his uncle would provide him with information that would enable him to develop a believable ending for his screenplay, but now he found himself back at square one.
"If you're interested," O'Malley continued, "I could get you a copy of the file on the false confessors. Maybe you could use one of them as a model for your fictional killer."
Barclay's spirits immediately rose. He thanked his uncle profusely and promised to take him to a Red Sox game before he returned to the West Coast.
* * *
According to the police file, sixteen men had confessed to killing Anna Maria Rossellini, and more than three-fourths of them were treated for psychiatric problems or personality disorders at one point during their lives. With the exception of two, all the men had taken credit for other crimes as well, not only in Gull Cove but also in the surrounding Massachusetts towns and as far away as Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Maine.
"You'd have to be crazy to confess to a murder you didn't commit," Barclay reasoned. "Not only would you be taking a chance of actually being convicted of the crime, but you would also be hampering the police investigation. Think of all the time the police must have wasted in checking out these nuts. They ought to be charged with obstructing justice."
Barclay shuffled through the reports in the file. There was a World War II vet who had lost a leg in the Battle of Arnhem and returned to the United States a bitter, disillusioned man who drowned his sorrows in a bottle. Police investigators determined that at the time of the killing, he had been drying out in a VA hospital. Another man, after having been jilted by his fiancée while in Korea, developed a severe case of misogyny. This hatred of women may have led him to confess to several killings, but he was by nature a peaceful man, and there was no evidence that he had ever exhibited violent behavior toward anyone. The stories behind the other confessions were similar, although most were not as dramatic. All the men were social outcasts who probably enjoyed the fifteen minutes of fame their false confessions brought them.
Had Barclay been a cop, the file would have been useless, but as a writer, he found the information extremely helpful. As he reread the police reports, he took a small wire-bound notebook out of his pocket and began taking notes.
* * *
Three months later, the actors and film crew of the movie descended upon Gull Cove, Massachusetts. Nearby residents were thrilled by the idea that a major motion picture was being filmed in their community, even though it would probably dredge up painful memories and attract curious onlookers. Each day when the exterior scenes were shot, the crew was surrounded by locals, eager to observe the filmmakers at work.
Barclay Earle, having completed his script, had little to do but watch the filming and wait for Desi Winkler's demands for occasional rewrites. Until needed, the screenwriter stood on the sidelines. By the end of the first week, he began to recognize a few of the people who showed up regularly. One man in particular caught his attention.
Stanford Prendergast was a distinguished-looking man, one more likely to be found in a boardroom than hanging around a movie set.
"Excuse me," Stanford addressed the writer one day while the shooting had temporarily stopped so the cast and crew could eat lunch. "Aren't you Barclay Earle?"
"Yes, I am."
"So, you're the man responsible for this movie."
"I can't take all the credit for it. I'm just the screenwriter."
"And yet you solved the crime after more than fifty years of failure by the police department."
Barclay blushed with embarrassment.
"No. I didn't do that. The ending of the movie is pure fiction, I'm afraid."
"I see. A little literary license?" Stanford asked with a laugh.
"You can call it that. By the way, what's your interest in this movie? I've seen you here every day since we began shooting."
"I'm just curious," the elderly man replied with an indifferent shrug of his shoulders.
"Did you live here in Gull Cove at the time of the killing?"
"Seaview, actually, but I was away at college then."
"Still, you must have heard about the case. It was in all the papers from Boston to California."
"Sure, I heard about it, but I was too busy trying to keep from failing trigonometry that I didn't have time to stay abreast with what was happening back home."
When everyone returned from lunch and shooting resumed, the two men fell silent, but from time to time Barclay sensed the older man's eyes watching him closely. At the end of the day, when Earle was about to head back to his hotel, Prendergast invited him out for a drink.
"I want to apologize. I wasn't completely honest with you earlier," the professor confessed. "It's more than simple curiosity that brings me to the movie set every day. I knew Anna Maria. Not well, mind you. I dated her sister when we were in high school."
Barclay stared at Prendergast over his bottle of beer, thinking that the mild-mannered professor from Seaview might prove to be a useful source of information further on down the road.
* * *
It was while the production was in its sixth week of shooting that Desi Winkler decided more changes needed to be made to the screenplay.
"Look at this scene here," the director cried, pointing out a highlighted section in his copy of the script. "It's just not believable."
Winkler's previous movies were packed with martial arts action and high-speed car chases and liberally seasoned with beautiful, half-dressed women, but they were sadly lacking when it came to plot and dialogue. Yet now he was behaving as though he were Martin Scorsese.
"What do you want me to do?" the writer asked with resignation.
"Give the killer more depth—and do it by the end of the week. I don't want to fall behind schedule."
Barclay went back to his parents' house, took his laptop out of its case and placed it on the desk where he once did his homework as a boy. He sat for more than forty-five minutes with his hands occasionally hovering above the keyboard, but he couldn't think of what to write. Fiction was just not his forte. He was used to writing about real criminals and victims, not ones he had to manufacture in his head.
At a loss on how to give the imaginary antagonist of his screenplay more depth, Barclay went back to the file his uncle had given him.
"There must be something more I can use," he said, leafing through the stack of police reports once again.
While rereading the false confessions given by emotionally troubled men, Barclay found a collection of photographs protected by polyurethane sheets. The first was a high school portrait of Anna Maria Rossellini, wearing a cap and gown and holding a diploma. The second picture was of her body taken shortly after it was discovered in the abandoned warehouse. The rest of the photos were of the men who had confessed to her murder. Barclay vaguely remembered seeing them the first time he went through the file, but he had been too involved in writing his screenplay to pay much attention to them. Curious, he held the first sheet of snapshots up to the light.
"What a motley-looking crew these characters are."
One man looked like Willie Nelson on a good day and another like Nick Nolte on a bad one. There was not one man on the first page who was clean-shaven, not one who looked like he held a job. Those on the second page were not much better. The faces looked like those found in a Salvation Army soup kitchen. The men on the third sheet were somewhat better, or at least they were younger and exhibited a higher level of personal hygiene.
Barclay was about to turn to the fourth page when his eyes were drawn to a photograph at the bottom of the sheet. The young man looked familiar, but the writer could not immediately place him. He took the picture out of the protective sheet and read the name printed on the reverse side: Vic Rafferty. Barclay couldn't immediately recall the story surrounding Rafferty, so he dug through the file and found the detective's notes detailing the man's confession.
The police report described an investigation that was superficial at best. The lead detective wrote Vic off as a crackpot, one who had confessed to three previous murders in northeast Massachusetts.
"I don't believe it," Barclay murmured. "The police didn't even bother to find out where this guy was at the time of the murder."
The writer put down the report, picked up the photograph and studied it again. He racked his brains for several minutes, but the door to that particular memory remained firmly shut.
"Oh, well. I'm sure it will come to me later. Right now I've got to rewrite those scenes. If I don't get them done, my ass will be on the line. I'll ...."
Barclay fell silent as the door to his memory was suddenly thrown wide open. Though the professor was much older, Stanford Prendergast's features were strikingly similar to those of Vic Rafferty.
* * *
After Barclay handed Winkler the revised pages, he was free to investigate Rafferty and his possible relationship to Stanford Prendergast. An Internet search yielded no results for Rafferty, not even an address or phone number. Prendergast's name came up with over a thousand results on Google, mostly in connection with the college at which he taught.
"This information isn't of much use," Barclay complained.
In the course of researching his true crime books, Earle had the opportunity to befriend many police officers, private detectives and lawyers who became a valuable source of information. Merve Arquette, a detective with the Massachusetts State Police, often helped Earle simply because he enjoyed seeing his name in the acknowledgments. Barclay phoned the detective and made an appointment to meet him at the coffee bar of Woodhaven Barnes & Nobel at three o'clock. When the writer walked through the shop door at 2:50, he saw Arquette already sitting at the counter, reading the back cover of a Patricia Highsmith novel.
"What have you learned?" Barclay asked.
"I ran a check on both names. Vic Rafferty seems to have vanished off the face of the earth back in the Fifties. There are no DMV records, bank accounts, tax returns—nothing. My guess is he's a John Doe in some department's cold case files."
"And Stanford Prendergast?" Barclay prompted.
"All Prendergast's credentials check out. He attended UCLA from '54 to '58. After graduation, he began teaching at a community college in San Francisco. He moved to this area in 2005 and took a job as a professor in Seaview."
"Makes sense. He was from that area originally," Barclay remarked.
"No. He was born in California."
"He told me himself he was from Seaview."
"Not according to his records. I followed his social security number back to San Diego where he was born and raised."
The writer shook his head. If Prendergast had grown up on the West Coast, he couldn't have known Anna Maria or dated her sister. Why had he lied? Had he wanted to make himself seem more important than he actually was?
When Barclay returned to his hotel room, the first thing he saw was the file opened to the photograph of Vic Rafferty. Once more the writer picked it up and examined it closely.
"I have no idea what became of you. Perhaps you are a John Doe in some cold case file, but you certainly have an uncanny resemblance to Stanford Prendergast."
Coming to the conclusion that the likeness was nothing more than an odd coincidence, Barclay returned the photo to the file and vowed to forget the whole matter.
The following day when Barclay arrived on the set, Prendergast was already there. The professor greeted him enthusiastically, but Barclay brushed him off.
"Is something wrong?" Stanford asked.
"No," Barclay lied.
"Then why the cold shoulder all of a sudden?"
"I've just been thinking about the murder."
"Such a tragedy, wasn't it?"
"For you especially. I don't know how you can watch these scenes when you knew the poor girl—a classmate of yours, I believe you said."
"That's right. We went to high school together, but she was a couple years behind me."
"And her sister?"
"Sister?" Stanford asked, perplexed.
"I thought you told me you dated her sister, but I must be getting my facts mixed up."
Barclay turned and walked away, hiding his triumphant smile from the professor. He had already learned from Merve Arquette that Anna Maria Rossellini was an only child, so Stanford's story about dating her sister was nothing but a lie.
* * *
Later that evening Barclay had dinner with a group of old friends at McGuire's Irish Pub. After finishing his third after-dinner coffee, he decided to call it a night. He bid his friends goodbye and drove to his parents' house. When he got out of his car, Barclay found Professor Prendergast waiting for him in the driveway.
"Can I talk to you for a minute?" Stanford asked, holding open the front passenger door of his Lexus.
Barclay looked at his watch.
"All right, but only for a minute. It's getting late, and I have to be up early tomorrow morning."
When the writer got into the car, the driver moved quickly, and Barclay felt a sharp prick in his upper arm.
"What the hell?"
"You look tired," Stanford laughed malevolently. "Why don't you take a nap?"
Barclay was about to suggest that the professor have carnal knowledge of himself—or words to that effect—but he suddenly found his eyes were too heavy to remain open. He slumped forward onto the dashboard, and Stanford Prendergast drove away with his kidnapped passenger.
When Barclay came to the following day, he found himself in the cellar of an abandoned farmhouse on Naumkeag Hill. A thick layer of dust covered every surface, and cobwebs hung from the ceiling. He tried to move, but he was secured to the chair by a thick rope.
"Prendergast!" he shouted.
His voice echoed back through the deserted house.
Barclay waited—and waited. His muscles ached, his throat was dry and his stomach growled with hunger. Just before the sun set he heard a vehicle on the gravel driveway followed by a single door slam. There were footsteps on the floor above him. A door opened, and a beam of light shone down through the growing darkness.
Stanford walked down the stairs and stood before his captive.
"Writers!" he spat angrily. "I should have known you'd be a nosy parker."
The professor reached into his jacket pocket, took out the police photograph of Vic Rafferty and the report of his confession and burned them in front of his bound hostage.
"See what all your snooping got you."
"I don't even know what your connection to that guy is."
Stanford chuckled.
"Come now, Mr. Earle. Feigning ignorance won't get you anywhere."
"I'm not lying. I noticed a resemblance, but that's all."
"It was a bad photograph," Stanford admitted. "I guess you might not have recognized me after all, but I couldn't take that chance."
Barclay was stunned. Despite the strong resemblance, he had never guessed that Stanford Prendergast and Vic Rafferty were one in the same person.
"Who are you then, Prendergast or Rafferty?"
"I'm Vic Rafferty."
Barclay had to ask the question that had been troubling him since he read the police report.
"Why would you confess to a murder you didn't commit?"
A sardonic grin spread across Rafferty's handsome face.
"What makes you think I was lying?"
"You confessed to three previous murders. There was proof you couldn't have committed ...."
Suddenly, the writer grasped the truth.
"You confessed to three murders you didn't commit so that the police wouldn't take you seriously when you confessed to the one murder you did."
"Brilliant, wasn't it?"
"You must have planned the murder for some time."
"Actually the planning stage was relatively short. It was the waiting for three women to be murdered that was hard. But patience paid off."
"The police didn't believe you were guilty, so why was it necessary for you to change your name to Stanford Prendergast?"
"For two reasons. One, there was always the outside chance that some bright detective might stumble upon the truth. And, two, I wanted to get on with my life, go to college, have a career—all the usual things. I didn't want my confessions coming back to haunt me, so I picked up a man at a gay bar—one who fit my general description. I killed him, took his ID and buried his body in the woods. Then I applied to UCLA using his name. The rest, as they say, is history."
"You committed the perfect crime," Barclay said with a certain amount of awe. "Why come back here then?"
Stanford shrugged.
"Some perverse need to be near my roots, I suppose. Or maybe I wanted to be near her. I don't know, but something drew me back here just as something drew me to the movie set."
"Where you met me."
"Yes. A bit of bad luck there."
"What, may I ask, do you intend to do with me now?"
"Why, I have to kill you, of course. I can't let you live. You know who I am and what I've done."
Barclay hoped to talk Vic Rafferty into sparing his life, but he never had the opportunity. The professor had the gun out of his pocket before the writer could open his mouth.
* * *
The cast and crew of The Murder of Anna Maria wondered what happened to Barclay Earle. No one had seen him for three weeks. The friends whom he had dinner with the night he was last seen were questioned by the police, but they could offer little help.
"We left him at McGuire's shortly after eleven," the spokesman for the group declared. "And none of us has seen or heard from him since."
Filming continued on schedule despite the screenwriter's unexplained absence. If there were scenes Desi Winkler wanted revised, he was forced to rewrite them himself.
Meanwhile, Stanford Prendergast continued to show up on the set every day. No one suspected that the mild-mannered history professor had killed the missing writer and buried his body in the crawlspace of an abandoned farmhouse.
On the day the murder scene was to be shot, Vic felt butterflies in his stomach. The thought of watching Anna Maria's death reenacted both terrified and exhilarated him. Although the dialogue in the screenplay was all wrong, the actual physical act—based on the autopsy notes, police reports and crime scene photographs—was essentially correct.
"Quiet on the set," someone shouted, and silence soon followed.
Vic's heart beat wildly as he watched a relatively unknown actor attack the leading lady who was playing Anna Maria.
"Why are you doing this?" she cried as the killer pursued her. "What have I ever done to you?"
Vic felt a shock. This was not the way the scene read in Barclay's script.
"I loved you," the supporting actor cried, "but you only used me, just like you use all the other men in your life."
Vic began to sweat. Where had the actors gotten those lines?
"I never wanted to hurt you," the pseudo-Anna Maria insisted. "I was in love with someone else. I tried to let you down easy, but you kept calling and showing up at my house."
Vic began to tremble, oblivious of the others in the room. In his mind, he journeyed back more than half a century to the scene of his humiliation.
"That's a lie!" Rafferty suddenly screamed. "You led me on; you used me!"
"Cut!" the director shouted, angry at the sudden interruption.
"You were a tease, a tramp, and you deserved what you got," the professor continued.
"Security," Winkler ordered, "remove this man from the set."
For someone nearing seventy, Rafferty moved with great speed and agility. He bounded across the set and grabbed the actress by the throat.
"You heartless, lying little bitch. I killed you once before; I can kill you again."
Two security guards, three extras and the supporting actor managed to pull the professor off the terrified actress. Meanwhile, the assistant director called 911 on his cell phone.
By the time the Gull Cove police arrived, Vic Rafferty had confessed to murder one last time.
* * *
Desi couldn't believe his good fortune. Word of the death of the author-turned-screenwriter and the discovery of Anna Maria Rossellini's killer spread like wildfire.
"This free publicity is worth a fortune!" he exclaimed as he prepared to wrap up shooting on his picture.
"Lucky for you the killer got an attack of conscience," the leading lady declared.
Desi laughed and shook his head.
"No, lucky for me Barclay Earle wanted revenge on his killer. The day all hell broke loose on the set I found his revisions to the script in my hotel room. It seems our late screenwriter penned them from beyond the grave, knowing those lines would flush out his murderer."
"You don't really believe that supernatural crap, do you?"
"See for yourself," Desi suggested as he took Barclay's wire-bound notebook out of his pocket. "These pages are dated almost three weeks after Barclay disappeared."
"Well, I'll be damned," the actress concluded after examining the writer's notes.
Then, before the startled eyes of the director and his leading actress, the ink on the page faded, leaving only blank sheets in Barclay Earle's notebook.
Image in upper left hand corner is from a cover of True Crime magazine.
I don't suppose you-know-who will confess to eating the last of my Godiva chocolates!
