Michael Capuzzo - The Murder Room - The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World’s Most Perplexing Cold Cases

Standing on the soft Pine Barrens sand, Fleisher continued his theory. “So now we’re supposed to believe Zoia shoots herself once in the chest, has the strength to shoot herself twice more, once in the heart, then puts the gun in a bag and moves it nearly thirty feet away?”

The big man smiled. “Yeah, this was a suicide, and Gordon is Elvis Presley.”

On the way back to Philadelphia, Fleisher drove them to a New Jersey psychic who claimed to have insights about the case. Standing in her kitchen, the psychic closed her eyes and whispered that the spirit of Zoia Assur was present, yet afraid to talk. Fleisher said tenderly, “It’s OK, Zoia, you can trust us.” He reached out into the air to gently touch her, making a gesture as if he was stroking her reassuringly on the arm or head.

They got no new information from the spirit world that evening.

As the car crossed the dark Jersey flatlands in the moonlight, Bender felt he’d never had more fun with the Vidcoq Society, all of them working together. O’Kane howled in laughter. “Bill, you will never live down the night you petted a ghost.” O’Kane couldn’t believe it. He kept saying it over and over. “He petted a ghost!”

O’Kane’s booming laughter was joined by the artist’s, the polygrapher’s, and that of red-faced Fleisher himself. “Maybe Bill scared her away.”

As Fleisher and Gordon prepared to run the test, Bender strolled into the outer office with Laura Shaughnessy, his girlfriend and Andronico’s old high school buddy. Laura was distraught. She had screamed at Bender in the car: “I should never have brought you in on this!” The relentless Bender and his Vidocq friends were trying to expose her good friend Kenny as a murderer, and Kenny couldn’t have done it, she said. Bender was grinning now. Seeing that Fleisher and Gordon had matters well in hand, he left, saying, “Laura and I are going to go grab some lunch.”

Fleisher laughed. “Leave it to Frank. We’re trying to solve a murder and he runs off for a tryst.”

Fleisher and Gordon turned to the interrogation of the man they suspected in the murder Bender’s affair had brought to their door. Fleisher studied Dr. Andronico with hard eyes. When he looks in a mirror, Fleisher thought, he finds his fiancée’s killer.

Wired to the machine, Andronico was supremely confident. He said he’d flown up to Philadelphia to take the test and rule himself out as a suspect-then maybe the Vidocq Society would help him find his fiancée’s killer.

“He’s agreeing to take the polygraph because he thinks he’s smart enough to fool you and fool the machine,” Walter told Fleisher before the test. Walter had completed his profile of Andronico after studying the crime scene. The shooting and disposal of Assur like rubbish confirmed his analysis of a power-driven killer of psychopathic arrogance.

Andronico had said he didn’t believe Zoia killed herself, either. He suspected Zoia’s brother-in-law, the state police sergeant who was having an affair with her. The P7 handgun found at the scene, which fired the bullets that killed Zoia, was the sergeant’s service gun. But the police had ruled out the state trooper as a suspect, and the Vidocq Society believed he was innocent.

Walter scoffed at the doctor’s story. “He had plenty of motives to kill Zoia. He’s enraged to find out she’s sleeping with a married man, and doubly enraged that it’s her brother-in-law, under her sister’s roof. The doctor is power-driven. You don’t get rid of him. That’s an intolerable insult. He gets rid of you.”

The state police had also ruled out Andronico as a suspect. He was innocent in the eyes of the law. “So what’s he doing here?” Walter asked. “Why fly fifteen hundred miles to pay for a polygraph to prove his innocence to a bunch of private cold-case detectives who may show that he’s guilty? He thinks he is smarter than everyone, that’s why, and it gives him a thrill to beat us. He relives the excitement and sense of control of the murder itself. He’s playing that dangerous ‘catch me if you can’ game.”

Andronico had even agreed to allow his polygraph to be filmed by the Vidocq Society for possible future use and shown on 48 Hours with Dan Rather. The 48 Hours crew was scheduled to film the upcoming Vidocq Society meeting, where the society would investigate whether Assur’s death was suicide or murder and whether the doctor killed her.

Walter believed the doctor killed his fiancée, planted the gun to get rid of both betrayers, gulled the police, staged a murder, frame-up, and cover-up, and now would try to fool the Vidocq Society and CBS News in one nationally televised Machiavellian stroke.

Minutes into the test, Andronico’s cool evaporated. His readings shot for the moon: flushed, rapid breathing, shifty eyes, jittery arms and legs. His big, eggplant-shaped face was sweating like it sat in a steam pot.

Fleisher and Gordon had seldom seen a man so clearly deceptive.

Dr. Andronico had a great memory for how he spent each hour of each day. “But asked to describe his whereabouts on the day his fiancée is missing,” Gordon said, “he suddenly becomes very upset and no longer remembers clearly.”

“When did you last speak with Zoia?”

The night before she died, Saturday night, August 10, Dr. Andronico said, he spoke with his fiancée on the telephone. “He told her he was coming up that Monday morning,” Andronico’s father, Carmen, told the Atlantic City Press. Now Dr. Andronico insisted he never made the trip to New Jersey.

Andronico stuck to his alibi. He was at his father’s beach house in Florida more than a thousand miles from New Jersey on the Sunday Zoia disappeared. It was impossible for him to have committed the murder. His father corroborated his son’s story.

But Fleisher wasn’t convinced. Before the polygraph, he had checked airplane schedules between Florida and Philadelphia and the driving distance to the Jersey shore. He concluded there was plenty of time for Dr. Andronico to do the killing and return to Florida in one day. “That doesn’t mean he did it,” he said. “But it was possible.” Fleisher pushed Dr. Andronico hard on the point, and the charts showed the doctor was being deceptive about his alibi. “Why would a man who was innocent lie about his alibi?” Fleisher asked.

Fleisher and Gordon conducted the polygraph examination three times that afternoon; each time, the doctor failed spectacularly. His answers about the murder and his alibi were overwhelmingly deceptive. The Vidocqeans also tested Dr. Andronico’s father, who also registered as deceptive about his son’s alibi.

“It was classic deception,” Fleisher said. “I wish all charts were this easy to read.”

Andronico was so flustered at one point he said, “I have to get my story straight.”

But he did not confess to the crime.

In the topsy-turvy world of the psychopath, he must have been thrilled, Walter thought.

He was winning.

On May 17, 1992, 48 Hours with Dan Rather aired its episode on the Vidocq Society in Philadelphia, “Murder on the Menu.”

CBS correspondent Richard Schlesinger described the shooting death of twenty-seven-year-old Zoia Assur, a doctor’s fiancée, and asked: “Was it suicide? Or was it murder?”

“The setting is colonial, but the subject is crime,” he said. “Today, the eighty-two members will try to solve one before dessert.”

As the VSMs nibbled on the entrée, members reached a consensus that Zoia’s death was “definitely murder,” but several members said there was no suspect yet, nor a motive. Walter, Bender, and Fleisher made their case for Andronico as the prime suspect, including the doctor’s jittery, deceptive polygraph. Andronico had declined an invitation to the luncheon.