Under the photograph in tiny print, each boy’s full name was spelled out. Charles William Mulholland, George Rupert Dunleavy, Steven Philip Smith, Alan James Houghton…
It took me a second to recall where I’d heard the name Alan Houghton before and then it did come back. Oh yes, I remember. The missing blackmailer.
Hubris, putting a photograph like this on public display?
Not necessarily. Probably no one ever took time to read the names. But even so, I wouldn’t have done it. Perhaps Charles wasn’t as clever as I thought.
I washed my hands and face, grinned, decided it was time to go.
Robert saw me to the front door and with forced, deliberate calm, I said:
“Wonderful party, mate.”
The next morning, I skipped the Areea-John lovefest breakfast and Pat’s martinis and after a nice hit of Afghani black tar heroin I walked to the Denver Public Library and did a search on Alan Houghton. Nothing. Next I tried the Governor Bright Academy lacrosse team. A lot of stories, but the big one, the one that interested me, happened back in 1973 when Charles would have been sixteen.
The Denver Post gave me the gist, but the Post itself had only two short articles and after a couple more questions, it didn’t take long before I was looking at the more extensive coverage in microfilmed copies of the Denver Dispatch, a now defunct newspaper that had covered the foothill communities to the west of the city.
The Post index had told me that an incident involving members of the lacrosse team had happened in May 1973.
Governor Bright Academy dated back to 1890, an all-boys boarding school in the southwest of Denver that, although not in the same league as Andover or Exeter, was far and away the best school in the state and indeed attracted pupils from all over the country. Bright took the boys at age eleven and kept them until they were seventeen. Academics were important, but Bright also encouraged each pupil to take part in a team sport. American football, soccer, baseball, ice hockey, basketball, lacrosse, and even cricket and rugby were offered. Those pupils who couldn’t make a team took up fencing or cross-country running or some other similar endeavor. Winter Fridays were devoted to skiing. Although Bright was a boarding school, its regime seemed to be popular with its pupils and almost half went on to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Academic excellence was important, but sporting achievement was rewarded with scholarships and other perks.
The lacrosse team was one of the most prestigious in the school. Lacrosse is a game unknown in Ireland, so I did some side research to find out what it was. Le jeu de la crosse. A French-named Indian game, popular among private schools. Played by the elite, mainly in the Atlantic states and Colorado.
The incident had happened on May 1, 1973, but had gone unreported by the Post and Denver Dispatch until two days later.
Maggie Prestwick was the daughter of the stable manager. Bright had its own riding school, with a half dozen show horses and another half dozen ponies for trail hiking. Tommy Prestwick, a single father, had a grown-up daughter at college and Maggie, who lived with him in the house over the converted stable block. Tommy had a lot of responsibilities and Maggie, he told reporters, was an independent girl who he thought could look after herself. He hadn’t noticed she was missing until the morning of May 2. He called the principal, who called the police. Bright, I suspected, had good relations with the Denver police department and they could be expected to be discreet.
Of course, the outcome of the police search was not good. My heart sank as I read the microfilm.
Along with a grainy picture of a derelict building, the May 3 issue of the Denver Dispatch had, as its front page lead, this:
Margaret Prestwick, the 15-year-old daughter of Tommy Prestwick, the stable manager at Governor Bright Academy, was found dead yesterday evening at the site of Rookery House, a former hotel, a mile from the Bright campus. Police are not releasing details of the incident and a spokesman for the Denver Police Department, Officer Anthony Sutcliffe, said that it was “too early to determine the cause of death or whether Margaret Prestwick had been sexually assaulted.” However, a spokesman for the Denver Coroner’s Office said late last night that Margaret Prestwick had been the victim of foul play….
In the next few days, the Denver Dispatch discovered further details of the incident. Margaret Prestwick had not been raped, but she had been sexually assaulted and then strangled. There were no scenes of struggle outside the property and the speculation was that Margaret had known her assailant and had arranged a liaison with him at Rookery House, a hotel that had suffered extensive fire damage years before and had lain empty since. In the weeks that followed, the Dispatch’s sense of frustration grew as little progress seemed to be made with the crime. The police interviewed many people, but no one was charged and there were no arrests. It must have been an important story within the community, for even two months later, the Dispatch’s crime reporter, Danny Lapaglia, was still writing about the unsolved murder.
This Fourth of July, the campus of Governor Bright Academy is quiet. School has been out for two weeks and the new term does not begin until after the long summer vacation. When school does begin, the new students at Bright will doubtless have heard of the ghastly events of the first week of May, when the daughter of the school’s former stable manager was brutally strangled a mere mile from where this reporter sits. As the weeks have gone by and the Denver police have seemingly run into a wall, it is no wonder that Tommy Prestwick, the murder victim’s distraught father, has resigned, leaving Bright Academy to be close to his only surviving daughter in New Orleans….
The story disappeared until November of that year, when Danny Lapaglia came out with a scoop. By this time, though, his article was only the lead on page five.
This reporter has learned that the Denver Police Department interviewed all the members of the Governor Bright lacrosse team in connection with the murder of Margaret Prestwick in May of this year….
The article went on to explain that a tiny piece of a lacrosse team tie had been found in Maggie’s teeth. Great significance had been attached to this. Every boy at Bright wore the same school uniform, black blazer, black trousers, white shirt. However, any boy who was a member of a team was permitted to wear his team tie rather than the school tie. If, indeed, the murderer was a member of the lacrosse team, that could leave only thirteen suspects. In Bright there were three soccer teams and two basketball teams, but only one lacrosse team, with ten players and three reserves. Only thirteen pupils in the whole school were permitted to wear the lacrosse team tie. All thirteen had been thoroughly interviewed but none had admitted to any knowledge of the murder. The police had not ruled out the possibility that a pupil who was not on the lacrosse team had used a team tie as the murder weapon.
But the police didn’t have the information that I had. That twenty years later Alan Houghton from that lacrosse team had been blackmailing Charles Mulholland from the same team. Maybe the blackmail was about something else, but maybe it was not. It certainly was worth looking into further.
I didn’t know how I felt. Ecstatic that I might have a lead, but it was a lead that would mean Charles, Amber’s husband, had killed more than once. Was Amber in any danger? In any case, I had to find out more.
I tried to speak to Danny Lapaglia, but his widow explained that he had died of cancer in 1983. Probably be a waste of time after twenty-two years but, anyway, I called in sick at CAW and took a trip out to the school.