The Disappearance of Alexa Sacchi
01Oct
It was only later that I came across Detective King and the Albert Fish case, and all the others the department conveniently files under the same heading — which is to say I didn’t start my career as the NYPD’s resident occultist. And I can’t say I ever intended that. It’s not like you know where you’ll end up when you step off the straight and narrow. But there was never any doubt why I did it. I had a clear reason. I wanted to save a child.
Alexandra Sacchi — Alexa to her friends — wasn’t a normal girl. She didn’t just have Down’s Syndrome but autism as well. Not that she threw tantrums or had any of the other awful stereotypes. She could talk more or less as well as any kid, except with a very minor impediment, and she liked to draw. She was good at it, in fact. But she did have some odd difficulties looking after herself. Food preparation, for example, always eluded her, which meant she ate a lot of crap. Her friends said they’d often walk into a room to find her sitting silently by herself, drawing animals and monsters, surrounded by empty packages of junk food, chocolate-colored crumbs at the corners of her mouth.
Alexa’s mother was an alcoholic with a history of bad decisions, and all of her children were in and out of the foster system. It was during one such stay that Alexa’s foster parents noticed she would speak to imaginary people and talk about them casually as if they were real. When it was suggested they weren’t, Alexa became confused. She assumed everyone had seen and heard the same things she had. She suspected her foster parents were trying to trick her and became increasingly sullen with occasional tense outbreaks. She was eventually hospitalized, and stayed there until she was a teenager, when she was released to her older half brother, Dominic.
Dominic Sacchi was a young man at the time, but he was working successfully as a professional stage magician, and he had recently married another young performer, Palmer Bell, a fortune teller and tarot card reader whom he had met on the job. The couple worked for a touring sideshow and freak act called The Dani Rose Circus, and their relationship was by all accounts pretty toxic from the start. Dominic, well-groomed and handsome, had been involved with Dani Rose, seventeen years his senior, right up until a week before his marriage to Ms. Bell, all of 20. Witnesses reported it wasn’t long before the couple started arguing, usually over Alexa, who was difficult to care for. Police were called on two occasions — once in Atlanta and once outside Tokyo, where the circus had accompanied a music festival. None of the officers involved had much to say. Run-of-the-mill “he said/she said” domestic disturbances, I was told, as if two sets of cops from two jurisdictions in two completely different countries were reading from the same script.
Then, about seven years ago, on the night of October 24th, Dominic Sacchi called police and claimed he’d been attacked by his wife, but when officers arrived — this was in London — he recanted and said there’d been a misunderstanding and that the sliver cuts on his hands and face were the result of an accident with a new act he was developing for his show. He showed the officers a collection of throwing knives and said his wife wasn’t even home, that she was with their daughter in the city and had been all night, and that Alexa would corroborate his story.
Two weeks later, The Dani Rose Circus was in the middle of a four-night stretch in Brooklyn when both Dominic Sacchi and Palmer Bell didn’t show up for work. Dani Rose checked their rooms, where she found all of their belongings, including dirty clothes on the floor and a hair dryer still plugged into the wall. But no family.
Dominic was traced by his cell phone to a rent-by-week motel in Flushing, where he was alone and panicked out of his mind. Neither his wife nor his 15-year-old daughter were anywhere to be found. Clearly distraught, he claimed Palmer had left him and took the girl, and the shock and embarrassment drove him to flee the circus. He just couldn’t face his friends and colleagues, he said — especially the domineering and vindictive Ms. Rose, who was “as jealous as a polecat.” The responding officers weren’t convinced, however, and the case was remanded as a possible homicide to me and my then-partner, Craig Hammond.
Thing is, it’s hard to prove a murder when you don’t have a body, or even evidence of one. But when one day turned to two, and two days turned to a week, and a week turned to a month and there was still no sign of either Palmer Bell or the girl, everyone suspected the worst.
Certainly, the more Hammond and I dug, the more we got the sense that there was definitely something very wrong. For one, Palmer’s parents hadn’t heard from her since she quite literally ran away to join the circus at 17, despite having been an honors student and an active member of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. They hadn’t gotten a single email or text message — that is, until she miraculously showed up at their house the week before our call. She was still there, they said, although when we talked to her, she predictably contradicted her husband, whom she claimed was the one who had left, taking Alexa with him.
To make matters worse, we had no witnesses. To anything. No one would talk to us. They would never say that, of course. They would just say there was nothing to tell. But in my experience, everyone has something to tell. Even when they don’t know anything at all, people will fill your ears with gossip and speculation. Hammond and I got the distinct impression they’d been intimidated — at first we thought by Dominic. But the more we pressed, the more we realized the person they really feared was Palmer Bell.
I did find one acquaintance, a sword-swallower turned dog groomer named Bea Wimbly, who’d had a falling out with the couple over their treatment of Alexa and who subsequently quit the circus. Bea agreed to talk to us, but only off the record. She wouldn’t testify to anything, she cautioned. Then she told us a story that still gives me chills.
Bea said she noticed spots of blood on the back of Alexa’s blouse, and when she asked the girl about it, she casually reported that Palmer had sewn a crystal into a cut in the middle of her back, where she couldn’t reach. Bea was of course skeptical of such a story, but when she asked why Palmer would do such a thing, she was told it was to drive away the evil presence that possessed her. Spooked, Bea Wimbly immediately looked under the girl’s shirt, over her protests, where she discovered a long cut along the spine. It had been sewn shut with twine. And there was a hard bulge under the skin.
Ms. Wimbly immediately opened the wound with scissors and removed a crystal shard. But as soon as she tried to clean and bandage the wound, Alexa turned violent and nearly stabbed Bea with the scissors resting on the ground. The girl ran home and Bea called social services.
The next day, Palmer Bell showed up at Bea’s door. At first she denied everything, but eventually she declared, in hushed tones, that it was in the girl’s best interests, that Bea had no idea what was going on, and that Alexa’s business was hers and Dominic’s and no one else’s. Bea said she was given a very vague threat, something about her needing to stop worrying about other people’s families and pay more attention to her own, lest anything bad happen. She said she thought it was odd given that she was childless and single.
Two days later, Bea’s best friend, an eight-year-old black lab named Betty, who minded her every word, bolted out the door of their apartment — as if driven by a terrible fright — and was struck by a car and killed. Bea left the circus and never returned.
Then there was the case worker who oversaw Alexa’s release from the hospital the year before her disappearance. The woman said it had been welcomed, that institutionalized kids with a severe mental handicap often never leave, especially as they get older. Someone like Alexa required plenty of patience and care. The only real oddity, she said, was Ms. Bell’s insistence that her name be left off all the documents and that Dominic should be affirmed as the girl’s sole guardian, despite that the couple were legally married.
Hammond asked why she would release a difficult, mentally unstable child into that kind of home environment and got a defensive, roundabout reply and that same feeling that she’d been another victim of intimidation. Whatever her initial reservations, it seems the woman justified it to herself on the grounds that no couple was perfect and that the alternative for Alexa was life as a ward of the state.
“Alexa wanted it,” we were told. “She wanted a home, same as any other child. I didn’t want to be the one to take that away from her.”
Everyone knew the girl was the key to the case. But she’d vanished without a trace.
Detective Hammond and I instructed Dominic Sacchi not to leave the state. When he did anyway, a warrant was issued, which was executed several days later by a Virginia state trooper. Dominic was brought back to New York, along with his now-ex-wife, and both were charged with felony child endangerment and second-degree murder. But without any physical evidence, and without the testimony of Bea Wimbly, who staunchly refused every request, the prosecution had nothing but the secondhand accounts of Dani Rose, who took the stand in studded leather and whom the defense easily painted as a jilted lover. Both Dominic Sacchi and Palmer Bell were found not guilty and released.
I had my theories about what really happened, about the crystal and strange murmurings we heard when we bugged the Bell residence. But I couldn’t convince Hammond to take them seriously. A few months after the acquittal, I requested a transfer, which was approved, and I moved downtown.
To this day, the disappearance and presumed death of Alexa Sacchi remains officially unsolved.
a rough cut from the third mystery in my forthcoming supernatural thriller FEAST OF SHADOWS.
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You can read the chapters in order:
6-Who keeps a shotgun in the bathroom?
art by Yuri Schwedoff
