In July, 2000, l lived with my husband and four year old son in a condo building that was once a factory. Each unit had big windows and thick floors and consisted of two bedrooms and one bath. My neighbors were friendly and came from diverse backgrounds. One of my neighbors in particular was a striking white woman. She was fashionably thin with long straight blonde hair and perfect make-up. She always wore pristine business suits and carried a briefcase. Clearly, she was a real estate agent. I would often see her at the end of the day when I was coming home from work and she was leaving, probably to meet with clients for evening appointments. I’d always say “Hi” to her when our paths crossed – and they crossed frequently. Our parking spaces were next to each other and our units were kiddy-corner across the hall from each other. She had a coveted corner unit that had only one shared wall, located in her living room. My neighbor was shy. She’d softly respond to my greetings and barely looked me in the eye. She rarely said anything else; in fact, I didn’t even know her name. In spite of her shyness, she seemed nice. She lived alone and I wondered how a shy person could be successful enough in the real estate business to support her condo, her great clothes, and her sports car, but it wasn’t my business, so I didn’t dwell on it too much.
At the time, I was working as an attorney in a court in downtown Boston and commuted to work by subway. In the division of household labor, I was the one who picked up my son at the end of the day and it had to be done by 5:30. At 4:30, when I got out of work, the daily gauntlet began to get to the subway, walk home and then drive to day care. Late pick-ups cost $1.00 per minute after 5:30, so every day ended in a harried rush. By the time I arrived home, I was usually a mess: I was tired and my clothes didn’t fit right because I was still carrying a lot of weight from my pregnancy, my hair was frizzy, my make-up was reduced to smudges and my clothes were rumpled from the subway and stained from being around a 4 year old. My neighbor was usually getting into her car when I was getting me and my son out of mine. She’d cooly slide into her sports car and motor off. I was sure she was going to a bistro for white wine and lobster bisque while I, on the other hand, would be serving up taters n’ fraters. In those days, I liked to see everyone coupled up, so I hoped her dinner companion was nice and urbane.
The week after July 4th was sweltering and humid. Our condo unit was blissfully air conditioned but the carpeted hallways were not and the air would get stale and sticky in the summer. It felt like the carpet trapped additional moisture in the hallway. One day that week when I picked up my son from daycare, he said, “Mommy, my stomach doesn’t feel so good”. We made it home and into the elevator and I murmured encouragement to him to hang on until we got to our cool condo. We stepped off the elevator, and in slow motion, I turned to my son and watched him vomit all over the hallway carpet and then looked up to see about four men standing outside the door of my real estate neighbor’s unit. They looked at me and my son. I looked at them. “Ummm…I’ll be back for this”, I said, and left them in the vomit and humidity.
As I set up my son in front of Spongebob Squarepants with some ice water, I thought about the men hanging out in the hallway. The building was key entry only, so it was unusual to see people hanging out there. And as someone who worked in a courthouse, I knew some things. For example, I knew that when a number of men are quietly hanging outside your door who look like they’re in their 30’s with buzz cuts wearing Red Sox/Patriot baseball hats, they’re probably detectives. And detectives can certainly figure out a way into a locked building. But what could detectives possibly want with a shy, retiring real estate agent? I returned to the hallway to clean up the vomit. They watched me. “Heey,” I said. “Sorry you have to stand here with all this smell.” They assured me that they understood. “Sooo,” I said, “she’s not home, huh?” They said no. “There’s, ah, nothing going on there that I should know about, is there?” They said no, of course not, they just wanted to talk to her. “Ah”, I said. They told me not to worry about it, that nothing was going on. Obviously, something was going on and equally obvious was that I was not going to find out what from these guys. I left them in the humid, smelly hallway and returned to the air conditioning.
A week or two went by and life and work took my mind off of the mystery of my neighbor. I don’t even remember if I saw her or if her car was parked in its parking space. Then, one night, when returning from daycare pick up, I pulled up to my building and saw news trucks everywhere. I gathered up my son and his things and walked towards my building. There was a reporter standing near one of the trucks by the front entrance of the building and I called out to him as we approached, “What’s going on?” His reply was breathless, “there’s a dominatrix that lives here and someone died during a session around the 4th!” I hustled my son into the building. That night I watched the news and confirmed what I had begun to suspect: she wasn’t a real estate agent after all. The next few days, news people swarmed around and more details were revealed. Reporters snuck into the building and one knocked on my door and asked me if I wanted to comment on camera about my reaction to living next to a dungeon. I shut the door in his face. My reaction?!? Angry. My life had become a grind and I created a fantasy life for my neighbor that couldn’t be farther from reality. Strangers sexualized the building where I was raising my son. So…I was angry. My neighbor never returned to our building.
It turns out that a truly sordid story had unfolded next door. The first shocker for me was that my neighbor didn’t even live in my building. She just did her work there. She actually lived in an expensive waterfront apartment building that had views of the Boston skyline. It is an exclusive building where many local celebrities live, including New England Patriots’s own Tom Brady, who lived there for a short time after this event. The man who died was 6’ 4” and weighed about 275 lbs, and his death was caused by a heart attack that occurred while he was hooded with a BDSM mask and strapped to a rack. When he lost consciousness, my neighbor panicked and five minutes later, called her boyfriend. He arrived about ten minutes after that and they then took the man down from the rack. He had died by this time. My neighbor didn’t want to call the police because she ran her dungeon business under the legal radar. Her boyfriend, who, turns out, was not nice and urbane, had a Fargo-like solution to the problem: get rid of the body by dismembering it and dumping the parts in a dumpster. She must’ve agreed because they used a hacksaw to dismember the body in an American Standard bathtub just like my own. Looking back, I don’t know how I could have missed the sound of a hacksaw coming from the unit. When giving my son a bath after hearing that part of the story, I contemplated the smallish size of the bathroom and the dimensions of the tub and wondered how they had the space. Better not to know. After they dismembered the man, they put his body parts in eight different trash bags and dropped them in a dumpster at a chinese restaurant in Maine.
The man’s family reported his absence to the police when he didn’t come home. They traced the last transaction on his credit card to my neighbor. When the police spoke with her, she confessed all and it looked like manslaughter charges were sure to come. But then time passed and the criminal charges seemed a lot less certain because the police couldn’t find any part of the man’s body. It wasn’t until November 2002 that she was finally indicted on charges of manslaughter and improper disposal of a body. By this time, her boyfriend left her and ran off to Argentina. The Commonwealth’s theory was that she waited too long to seek help when the man became unconscious. The trial occurred in 2006 and the district attorney conducted a portion of the closing argument while wearing the mask and taking the position of someone who would be on the rack. The defense hammered on the fact that there was no body or physical evidence to support this wild story my neighbor allegedly confessed. In the end, the jury found my neighbor not guilty of both charges.
Life went on. My husband and I had another child and moved into a house. I began working in another courthouse in the suburbs. I didn’t think of my neighbor. Then one day, I saw her in the hallway of my courthouse because she was being evicted from her apartment. We passed each other in the hallway a few times. Her eyes looked at me and passed me by. I then realized that she wasn’t shy at all – just detached. I passed her by, too – I had work to do.