The trial dragged on for weeks, but the outcome was never in doubt. Both juries convicted the monsters on all counts.
At sentencing, Judge Tomei told Pearson and Hendrix he would not call them animals.
“That word is not appropriate because animals do not torture each other,” he said. “You are a deadly human virus... a deadly vessel of human terror.”
Then he sent them to jail forever.
“You’re going to be consigned to a place where there is no love, there is no compassion — [a place that is] cold and lonely. And you’ll be consigned to that place for a very, very long time,” he said.
Elle Carmichael sued the city for more than a million dollars, claiming that delays in searching for her daughter — along with the fact that the police closed the case while Romona was still alive — contributed to her death.
But for Carmichael, money is the least of her concerns.
She moved from the home she shared with her daughter and went for months of psychological counseling. She carried a picture of her smiling daughter as a kind of talisman to ward off thoughts of Romona’s final terrible days.
“The one question I always ask is, Why did it happen? I feel like at my worst times, when I feel most helpless, that’s the question I ask,” she told a reporter. “It puts me into a trance sometimes, so I try to avoid that question. But I still wonder, Why did this happen?”
The killers have their own chilling answer to that question.
“We did it for fun,” Pearson said at his second and final sentencing, when he got an extra twenty-two years for the bloody escape attempt. “It was fun to see a system that has so much power and control lose it in a second. The judge — he’s the one with all the power — was running away, bumping his knee. That was the most fun I’ve had all my life.”
Getting to know Mad Dog
by Robert Knightly
Bushwick
It is a convention of crime fiction that the detective is haunted by the case he did or didn’t solve. Me, I never was a detective. Too many off-duty incidents in bars.
But I did have some memorable moments, as in hairraising, as a patrolman in the 1970s in Bushwick specifically, the self-styled “Fighting 83rd” Precinct. And not without justification.
The ’70s in New York City was the worst of times, in that crime was rampant. The city was on the brink of bankruptcy, had laid off a quarter of the police force, and arsonists — for profit or revenge — were busy burning down the wood-frame tenements of Bushwick, to the point where whole blocks had the look of a lunar landscape.
But the ’70s were also the best of times, in that a cop never had a dull moment. Cops of the Fighting 83rd were a tight band of brothers; female officers had yet to debut in the patrol precincts. We were bound together by the shared perils of the street.
On the night of July 13, 1977, the lights went out in Bushwick and everywhere else in the city. In what the media has referred to as “blackout looting,” larceny commenced forthwith along a two-mile stretch of Broadway, the main shopping artery dividing Bedford-Stuyvesant from Bushwick. Bodegas, supermarkets, discount furniture emporia, a gun shop, jewelry, clothing, and shoe stores had the gates ripped from doorways, and the contents inside were carried off into the night. For extra measure, the stores were then set afire.
All that night and into the next day, we cops roamed streets that looked like the siege of Atlanta as pictured in the movie version of Gone with the Wind. And yet, despite the Sturm und Drang, it is not the events of that blackout night that remain in the forefront of my memory. That place of honor belongs to Joseph “Mad Dog” Sullivan.
Mad Dog and I met in an after-hours Puerto Rican social club on a cold January night in 1977 when neighborhood cops — myself among them — were motoring through the streets of Bushwick in what was known as a “precinct conditions car,” an umarked Plymouth sedan, a.k.a. the “brown car,” the scourge of drug dealers, gunsels, chop shop operators, counterfeiters, and after-hours social clubs that catered to the ungodly.
Shortly after midnight, we exited said vehicle and burst through the barred front door of the Puerto Rican club on Jefferson Street, just off Knickerbocker Avenue.
As we made our entrance, glassine envelopes and various drug paraphernalia floated to the floor like autumn leaves. But what caught my attention was two white guys sitting by themselves in a corner, the only non-Latinos present. So my first words to the two, as they sat at the table looking up at me, were, “On your feet and against the wall.”
I gave the muscular guy to my left a little push against the wall, off which he bounced, spun around, and stood stock still, staring at me. He was Irish-looking, five-foot-ten with a mustache and chiseled features.
Thus, without benefit of names, did I make my initial acquaintance with Joseph “Mad Dog” Sullivan.
The first thing I noticed about Mad Dog was his flat, dark, dead eyes, with which he assessed me for a long minute, then slowly turned around and assumed the position. His Italianlooking tablemate did the same, without objection.
Looking down at the floor, I found something that didn’t surprise me — a Beretta semi-automatic, which, I would later discover, was loaded with seven live rounds, one in the chamber. I hollered “Gun!” whereupon the four other cops with me focused attention on the two guys I had on the wall.
I didn’t find out who these desperadoes were until we got back to the precinct house for arrest processing. We had a dozen other patrons of the bar for various drug possession counts, but only Mad Dog and his companion for the gun.
In those days there were no computers. You made a phone call to the Bureau of Criminal Identification at NYPD headquarters in downtown Manhattan. BCI eventually identified one Joseph Sullivan, a.k.a. “Mad Dog,” on lifetime parole as a convicted murderer. His Italian cohort was Anthony “Snooky” Solimini, a Genovese soldier out of place here because around the corner on Knickerbocker Avenue were the Bonanno lads sipping espresso and plotting mayhem.
In those days, everything was done manually. You took a prisoner by the hand and rolled his fingertips over an ink pad and then pressed each one onto a print card. Then you handcuffed the prisoner and went through his personal effects. Then you vouchered (recorded and packaged) drug evidence for the police lab and the gun for ballistics, after which you transported the guy downtown to Central Booking, which back in the day was on Gold Street in downtown Brooklyn. There he would be processed further, and a cop like me would be interviewed by an assistant D.A., who would draft charges based on what I told him.
With these particular arrests, both my prisoners stood to be charged with felony possession of a loaded gun if I wanted to go by the book — but it was a tenuous charge to lay against both. What I had to do, practically speaking, was select the one more likely to have possessed the weapon. Based on my estimation of Mad Dog’s background, he was elected as the guy who made a motion under the table to toss the gun. A complete fiction, but no more of a fiction than those invented by prosecutors and judges in criminal court, where they are known as “legal fictions.”
Although my statement to the assistant D.A. could be seen as a lie, it was in fact expected as a professional courtesy. The last thing a prosecutor or judge wants to hear in a criminal case is what actually happened. What they wanted was what they could put together to make a solid case against whomever the perpetrator was that I had dragged downtown. So every cop in my day would say what he was expected to say in order for the wheels of justice to grind exceedingly slowly and for no bad guys to escape. This is no doubt true even today, as I do not expect anything has changed. So, the D.A. was pleased to accept my legal fiction that I saw Mad Dog ditch something under the table. After all, he had Mad Dog’s complete and lengthy history on his yellow sheet, so-called because a criminal record was then printed on yellow paper. Mad Dog had been paroled after being sentenced to twenty-to-thirty years in 1967 upon conviction of manslaughter. Yet there he was in 1977 in my clutches. Which was a mystery to us all.