See No Evil

In a quiet South St. Louis neighborhood near Lindenwood Park, Denise Wolff rounded a corner and headed toward her tidy two-bedroom home on Bancroft Avenue. She was behind the wheel of her brand-new, loaded Chrysler Cirrus LX — fresh off the dealer’s lot just days earlier.

As a card dealer at the President Casino on the Admiral, Denise usually worked the overnight shift from 8 p.m.-4 a.m., and on this warm summer morning, July 17, 1997, she’d clocked out at 4:09 a.m. She’d been in an unusually good mood. She chatted with a co-worker who drove her to the lot where she had parked under the Poplar Street Bridge, plucked off her car a note written by a man she’d been having an affair with and, still a bit giddy over the relationship, told her friend she had a “pocketful of them.” Denise then drove off. She stopped briefly at the drive-through of a Hardee’s on Hampton Avenue to pick up a breakfast sandwich. It was still dark outside, and as Denise neared her home, only the mercury-vapor street lights cast a faint glow on her surroundings.

The 39-year-old mother of two was terrified of the South Side Rapist — a notorious serial rapist who wasn’t caught until late 1998 — so much so that she had had a motion-activated floodlight installed near her driveway. When she came home before dawn or after dusk, she would almost always pull her car straight into the garage. This Thursday morning, Denise did not. Instead, she got out of her car, walked down the driveway and — perhaps toward someone or something — across the sidewalk in her frontyard. She made it past only a few squares of concrete before a sudden burst of gunfire brought her crashing to the ground. The bullets pierced the garage door, the trim, the frame of a front window. They ripped through Denise’s legs and torso.

The noise roused slumbering neighbors up and down Bancroft and on nearby Wenzlick and Prather avenues, many of whom peered out their windows and called 911. They reported the sound of gunshots, and most of them also described seeing a gray or silver conversion van driving away from the scene with its headlights off, heading east on Bancroft, then north on Wenzlick.

Denise lay crumpled on the sidewalk, her body riddled with bullet wounds. Her pink Bic lighter and a pack of Salems were scattered around her, along with her keyring and a brown paper bag containing her uneaten Hardee’s breakfast. Clutched in her fingers were the handwritten notes from her lover, a married man who also worked at the casino.

The first person to reach her was a neighbor, an off-duty police officer who awoke at 4:37 a.m. to the sound of gunfire — two controlled shots, then a rapid succession of 10 to 15 more. He found Denise lying facedown on the sidewalk, bleeding from numerous wounds. There wasn’t much he could do.

A police officer dispatched to the scene was told Denise’s husband lived about 100 yards away in a house at the corner of Bancroft and Jamieson avenues. He knocked at the door, and Larry Wolff, a city plumbing inspector who’d been legally separated from Denise for seven years, quickly answered, wearing a pair of boxer shorts. He told the officer he hadn’t heard a thing.

Paramedics arrived within minutes, and as they struggled to stabilize Denise’s condition, her husband stood in front of the ambulance. The police officers noted that his gaze seemed focused away from his wife, bleeding on the ground. Denise was transported, alone, to Barnes-Jewish Hospital. A doctor pronounced her dead at 5:41 a.m. The bullets had lacerated her kidney, colon, spleen, bowel and bladder, fractured several bones and caused massive bleeding.

It was a sudden and violent death for a woman who had led a rather unassuming life. Even in those early hours of the investigation, however, all of the signs suggested Denise was targeted for death, not the victim of some chance shooting. “This was a purposeful, vicious crime,” St. Louis Police Capt. Dave Heath would later say, addressing the television cameras. “We are not looking at this to be a random act under any circumstances.” Outside Denise’s home on Bancroft, police officers and crime-scene technicians strung up yellow crime-scene tape and placed a brown paper silhouette of her body on her sidewalk. This was a homicide investigation, and the questions on their minds were obvious: Who killed Denise Wolff? And why?

By all accounts, Denise was a devoted mother to her two girls, who were born 13 years apart in separate marriages. Jennie, who lived with Denise, was 10; Angie Erickson was married, with a 3-year-old son, and her belly was bulging with another child. Denise’s second grandchild was due at the end of September, and she couldn’t wait.

As a single mom who’d been legally separated from her husband for years, Denise had gone to dealer’s school because it seemed like a fun way to make a decent living without investing huge amounts of time or money in training and education. She’d made her family and friends play cards every night when she was enrolled in dealer school, shuffling and shuffling until she got it just right. She was a night owl, so the first chance she got, she asked for the overnight shift. It also gave her more time to spend with Jennie. Denise stood about 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighed about 140 pounds. Of Lebanese descent, she had dark eyes and hair that she dyed a shade of red. She spent her nights working at the President Casino, earning more than $40,000 a year dealing cards at blackjack tables and spinning the roulette wheel. She loved the lights, the sounds, the slot machines, the people, the excitement of it all. “It’s like going to a party every night,” she’d say. Denise had worked on the Admiral about three years after first breaking into the business at the Casino Queen.

When Denise wasn’t working, she was almost always with her family, whether she was bass fishing or playing bingo with her mother in Washington County near Potosi or taking her grandmother, who lived a block away from Denise, out for a day of shopping and French onion soup at Famous-Barr. She liked to putter around her gray frame home, making sure it was “just so,” tending to the zinnias in her garden or her multicolored rosebush, splashing around with the kids in her backyard pool. On her days off, she’d have pajama parties with Jennie — an evening of popcorn and movies, just the two of them huddled in front of the VCR. If Johnnie Brock’s had a new shipment of Beanie Babies in, Denise could be found waiting in line, because Jennie loved them. Every Christmas, she showered her daughters with gifts, racking up charges on her credit card no matter how tight the family finances. It was her favorite time of the year. She’d have the tree up and decorated the day after Thanksgiving, without fail. She favored holiday sweaters, much to her older daughter’s chagrin, especially a green one with a snowy landscape scene. She could be incredibly soft-hearted, and her generosity extended beyond her family. One year Denise took in a young girl and her mother who’d ended up at a Salvation Army shelter, buying the child a heap of presents that she could scarcely afford. When one of her friends, also a single mom, was struggling at Christmastime, Denise handed her one of her credit cards and instructed her to shop. “Pay me back whenever you can,” she told her.

Denise’s birthday was creeping up on her — her 40th would have been in August — and she was dreading it. At the same time, though, family members had begun noticing a surge of confidence and optimism in Denise that they hadn’t seen before, or at least in a long time. At Angie’s urging, Denise got a different haircut, a more up-to-date style. She was going to a tanning booth occasionally, getting manicures, talking about the men at work who flirted with her, such as a St. Louis Blues hockey player who repeatedly asked her out. Denise was flattered by the attention. She was also proud of the career she had carved out for herself, and she cherished the rewards of her hard work, trading her old Ford Escort for the white 1997 Chrysler Cirrus complete with the gold trim package. In the car, Denise listened to the same kind of music as her daughters and kept up with the latest tunes. In July, she and Jennie went out and bought a Third Eye Blind CD with the song “Semi-Charmed Life.” “She used to say that was her life,” Angie recalls. “She’d say, “This is the life I live, a semi-charmed kind of life.'”

It certainly hadn’t been an easy one.

Denise grew up in South St. Louis the eldest of four daughters. Even as a child, Denise could be outspoken, hot-tempered and strong-willed. At 16, she insisted on moving out, dropping out of high school and marrying her high-school sweetheart. Her mother, Sandy Cantrell, described that time as Denise’s “hippie stage.” She was pregnant two months later and gave birth to Angie at 17. But the marriage was rocky, and Sandy says her daughter moved back home when she was pregnant. Denise and her husband gave it a second try when their daughter was 3 months old, but it didn’t last. The marriage ended in divorce.

Denise married a second time when Angie was a toddler. But that marriage was also short-lived. It lasted about a year-and-a-half until Denise met, and fell in love with, Larry Wolff, who was a friend of her second husband’s. They married in 1983 at a ceremony at City Hall. The wedding made the television news. “I didn’t even know she was getting married; I tried to talk her out of it,” Sandy recalls, describing Larry, back then, as a man with long hair who wore chains and boots with big heels. “Denny says to me, “Mom, you ain’t gonna believe this, but watch Channel 4. We got married on TV.’ City Hall had just decided they were going to do small ceremonies, and they wanted to do a little advertisement of what they were doing,” Sandy says. “They had a cake and everything. It was bizarre.”

That marriage was often rocky. Both Larry and Denise could be stubborn and hot-tempered, Sandy says, and when they had a big argument, the two would race to get home first and move all the furniture out of their house or apartment. Things seemed to settle down somewhat after a few years, and their daughter, whom they named Jennifer Sue, was born in 1987.

By 1990, the couple had moved into a double-wide trailer in Robertsville, Mo., near Pacific, where Larry’s parents owned 3 acres. Denise felt isolated and bored there with no money and no car. Cathy Hatton, one of Denise’s younger sisters, says Larry would often stay at Cathy’s house in St. Louis, because he was working for the city as a plumbing inspector and had to have a city address, but often, when Denise called to speak to him, Larry wasn’t home, Cathy says. “He stopped buying groceries and paying the bills down there, and he wasn’t coming home,” she says. Denise’s older daughter, Angie, from her first marriage, also did not get along with Larry. Family members disagree on precisely what the final straw was, but eight months after moving to Roberts-ville, Denise called Cathy and told her to rent the biggest U-Haul she could find and help her move out of the trailer while Larry was at work. Cathy did.

Soon, Denise filed a petition for divorce from Larry. But Larry persuaded her to settle for a legal separation instead, and she agreed.

Within a few years, Denise bought the home on Bancroft with the help of her grandmother. Larry bought a house a short distance down the street, on Jamieson. Some of Denise’s friends and family members questioned the wisdom of such a move, particularly if Denise ever decided to go through with a divorce, but she told them she figured it was best for their daughter. “When he moved down the street, I said, “You’re nuts. What happens when you’re done with this guy and you want a boyfriend?'” Cathy recalls. “She said, “This is perfect. This way, he can keep Jennie.'” The arrangement seemed to work, at least for a while. Over the years, Denise struggled to make ends meet, working as a waitress at the downtown Radisson Hotel and the Missouri Athletic Club, going to cosmetology school but then deciding hairdressing did not pay enough, cleaning houses and, ultimately, attending dealer school. With their homes so close, Jennie could sleep over at Larry’s when Denise was working nights at the casino. The two maintained an unusual relationship, relatives says. Though they were separated, Larry sometimes slept over at Denise’s and, up until about a year before she died, they occasionally had sex. From time to time, he’d help with the bills, and he regularly cooked meals for the three of them. On holidays, they were together.

In the six or seven months before Denise’s death, however, things began to change. Denise told her older daughter and her sisters how she was yearning for independence. She told her mother she was tired of having “no life” and needed to find herself a husband she could get along with. She talked about divorcing Larry. And in the few months before she died, she talked about her new lover.

If Larry knew of any of the changes going on in Denise’s life, he certainly didn’t let police know in the hours after his wife’s murder. Larry told police he didn’t have a clue. He knew of no problems Denise was having; he had no idea why anyone would want to hurt her.

Angie, Denise’s older daughter, was at Larry’s house, in the same room with him, when police questioned him. A detective asked her to step outside for a brief interview. Who could have done this to your mother? the officer asked. Angie, visibly shaken and crying, motioned with her head back toward Larry, who was inside the house. Her mom had been trying to divorce Larry, she said. They’d been fighting a lot. She’d been dating a man she worked with on the Admiral.

Other witnesses provided additional tantalizing details. Detectives spoke with Scott Baird, a financial planner with the Travelers Group, who had been working with Denise on obtaining a debt-consolidation loan. He had met with her one week before she was killed; she had told him she was in financial trouble. She was in debt, with a new car and a house payment, and she had cosigned for her husband on his $9,000 car loan, but he hadn’t made payments in more than a year. She also told him she was planning to finalize a divorce from her husband. The loan was approved on July 16, but the financial planner hadn’t been able to reach Denise to give her the news.

Some family members offered a variety of possible theories that did not point to Larry.

Denise’s sister Cathy told detectives that Larry fixed Denise meals almost every day, helped her with bills and, even though Denise treated him badly at times, he stuck around and loved her. She said Larry had never shown any signs of violence and that it was Denise who had the short temper. She told police she suspected Denise’s “big mouth” might have had something to do with her murder.

Another sister, Sue Doetzel, told detectives that although Larry and Denise were separated, she felt they loved each other. They had keys to each others’ homes and, when they were getting along, Denise would ask Larry to help around the house and ask him for money. When Denise was mad at Larry, Sue said, she would tell him she wanted a divorce, and though she had been telling Larry that for several years, she hadn’t actually made an attempt to get one. There was never any violence between the two, as far as she knew. Sue knew of her sister’s affair, and she asked Denise what she would do if Larry found out. “She said she was separated,” Sue recalled, “and it was her house and she could do what she wanted.”

Sandy, Denise’s mother, says she had her suspicions about Larry, but she wasn’t ready to tell detectives. Instead, she spoke about the casino: Could it have been a disgruntled customer who lost money there? Could it have been related to a complaint her daughter filed against the casino with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission? Sandy told detectives that Denise had been demoted from supervisor to dealer, which meant a cut in pay. Denise’s father, Roy “Buck” Cantrell, told detectives the same thing. “He believes the murder was somehow tied to the boat,” a detective wrote in his report.

Kandi Maier, a friend of Denise’s and her co-worker at the President, told detectives that Denise had been seeing a male co-worker, John DeBoer, at the casino for about three months and that he was Denise’s first boyfriend since she and Larry separated seven years earlier. Kandi said she had tried to get Denise to date before but that her friend always refused, telling her that her husband “would kill her if she dated another man,” according to police reports. Denise had begun complaining to Kandi that Larry seemed to be watching her every move, so much so that she had begun parking at the rear of her home and entering through the back door to avoid detection. She told Kandi she thought Larry knew of the affair; during a recent phone conversation, he walked in and demanded to know to whom she was talking. When she told him it was none of his business, according to police reports, he replied: “It’s either Kandi or John.”

Another co-worker and friend, Joyce Jeraldine, told police that Denise told her she and Larry argued all the time, though he did not physically abuse her. On one occasion, Jeraldine said, Denise described how Larry put a gun to her head, then pulled the trigger. She told her friend Larry was doing it “just to scare her. The gun was empty.” She said Denise told her that if Larry learned of her relationship with John, he would “blow her fucking head off.” Denise was falling in love with John, she told Jeraldine, and about two weeks before the murder she had given him an ultimatum: Leave his wife or end the relationship. She said he told her he needed time to decide what to do. And recently, Jeraldine added, Denise’s attitude toward Larry had changed. She was bolder. She told Jeraldine: “Fuck him — I don’t care about what he thinks.” She said she wished Larry would find a woman and get on with his life.

Detectives questioned John DeBoer, Denise’s lover, at length, and he was told he was a suspect in the murder. A former New Jersey police officer who was married with children, DeBoer told police that he had been seeing Denise for about six to eight weeks. During that time, DeBoer said, Denise had spoken at length about Larry and their marriage, how they once had a lot of good times but had grown apart. She told him she wanted a divorce from Larry, that she hadn’t loved him in years. She told him Larry lived across the street, which is why she always wanted DeBoer to come in the back door and park his car on Wenzlick. She told him that at times Larry had a violent temper and that he had once pointed a gun at her head.

The night Denise died, DeBoer said, he got off work at 1:30 a.m., left a note — the latest of three he’d written her that evening — on her car and went home. He said he woke his wife, spoke to her around 4 a.m. and didn’t leave home after that — which his wife later confirmed. He was asked to take a polygraph, which police later told him he failed. DeBoer was surprised. DeBoer, who says he was upset and scared when he took the test, said he was telling the truth, and he denied killing Denise.

Days later, DeBoer spoke to police again. He said he remembered another conversation with Denise, about a month earlier, in which she told him Larry had found her new birth-control pills. He was angry, she had said, and accused her of having an affair. DeBoer said Denise told him that she fabricated an explanation, claiming her doctor prescribed them to regulate her period. For about a week afterward, DeBoer said, Larry drove Denise to and from work.

Through the early days of the investigation, Denise’s family, for the most part, stood by Larry. Denise’s mother and sisters were reluctant to say anything that might implicate him. They wanted to give Larry the benefit of the doubt.

Over time, that would change.

For police detectives trying to solve a homicide, time is often the enemy. The more time passes, the less likely it becomes that a murder case will ever be solved. In the case of Denise Wolff, police had no murder weapon. They were unable to find the van seen driving away from the crime scene. If there were any eyewitnesses to the crime, none had come forward.

But such a violent shooting was an uncommon occurrence in the neighborhood near Lindenwood Park, and it was an area where many police officers lived with their own families. Numerous detectives canvassed and re-canvassed the area, searching for witnesses and hoping for a break. Detectives Ralph Campbell and Timothy Kaelin were among them.

It was Sunday, July 20, 1997, three days after the murder. As Campbell and Kaelin began a re-canvass of the neighborhood, two other detectives told them that they’d gotten information from a tipster who suggested that they talk to a woman who was known to walk her dog between 4 and 5 a.m. in the area of the murder.

The two detectives went to the apartment building at 3934 Jamieson, and Campbell and Kaelin began knocking on doors. There was no answer at apartment 2-South, but they could hear dogs barking inside. As they were leaving the building, a woman walked out of that apartment. She identified herself as Laurie Lynn Chirco. She acknowledged that she had walked her dog the morning of the murder, around 4 a.m., but denied hearing any gunshots. She said she had no other information.

The two detectives weren’t satisfied. They asked her to come downtown to the police station. Reluctantly, she agreed. Inside Interview Room No. 2 downtown, she told detectives that she woke up around 3:50 or 3:55 a.m. Her dog was standing at the front door, wanting to go outside. She put on some clothes, put a leash on her dog and walked out to the front of the apartment building. When she left, she noticed the time on the digital clock in her living room was 4:07 a.m. She estimated she was outside for 5 or 10 minutes, then came in, made a glass of tea, turned off her alarm clock — set to go off at 5 a.m. — and left her apartment at 7 a.m. to go to work. Her 13-year-old daughter, asleep in the apartment the entire night, told Chirco she heard the air conditioner making a popping sound during the early-morning hours. Chirco again insisted she never heard any gunshots or police sirens.

The detectives didn’t believe her. In their reports, they wrote that she exhibited “non-verbal communication signs” indicating that she knew more. She told detectives she was worried about the safety of her daughter, that she didn’t want to get involved. They say they told her that her identity could remain anonymous, that she would be afforded protection if she was a witness. They showed her five photos, including pictures of Larry Wolff and John DeBoer. They said she scanned the photos and stared at Larry’s, shaking her head back and forth as a tear streamed from her eye.

Then her story began to change, the detectives wrote in their reports. She told them she hadn’t been truthful and that on the morning of the murder, she had actually walked her dog south on Jamieson, on the east side, toward Bancroft, and when she was two buildings south of her own, she saw a man standing at the northeast corner of Bancroft and Jamieson. She thought he matched the description of the South Side Rapist, and the man — white male, stocky build, wearing a T-shirt and blue jeans — began walking east on Bancroft, in the direction of Denise Wolff’s house. Chirco said she then turned around and headed home, reaching her apartment around 4:20 a.m.

She told the detectives she believed the man she saw was Larry Wolff.

If Laurie Chirco’s statement seemed like a big break in the case, that break would turn out to be rather tenuous, and it wouldn’t last for long. Something happened between the two detectives and Chirco inside Interview Room No. 2 — though precisely what happened may forever remain in dispute. So instead of cooperating with police after that day at the station, she hired a lawyer and filed a complaint with the police department’s Internal Affairs division, alleging she’d been mistreated by the officers. She then went on KTVI-TV (Channel 2) — identified as “Mary,” with her face slightly out of focus — to describe the detectives’ behavior and to publicly disavow witnessing the murder. She said detectives told her she was “playing with the big boys now,” and that they’d given her name to the prime suspect. She said she had decided to go on TV in case something happened to her.

At the time, Chirco was a 33-year-old nurse case manager for a hospice. She lived in an apartment with her daughter, and in January 1997 she had married Marcello Chirco, a Sicilian immigrant who worked as a meatcutter at Schnucks. They did not live together. Police noted that Marcello Chirco owned a gray GMC full-size van with a silver stripe and a red Ford Escort, in addition to a Chinese SKS rifle — similar to the gun used in the Denise Wolff shooting. Several witnesses reported seeing a gray van the morning of the murder, and a couple of others reported seeing a small red car. Marcello Chirco agreed to a search of his van, and he turned over his gun for tests, according to police reports. He was questioned by police — though it is unclear whether he was ever seriously considered as a suspect — and at least one witness viewed his van and said it was not the same one he saw driving away from Denise’s home the morning of her death.

In depositions taken more than a year after the murder, Chirco said she told the officers who showed up at her apartment building that day in July that she had seen nothing. When they didn’t believe her, one stood in the doorway of the building and told her, she said, “We can do it the easy way or we can do it the hard way.” Though she said she voluntarily agreed to go to the station, once there she continued to tell them she had seen nothing and asked to leave “more than 30 times.” When she asked to go to the bathroom, Chirco said, one of them handcuffed her wrist to a table.

About two hours after she arrived, the interview became more and more contentious, Chirco said. Campbell, she said, told her he was getting fed up with her and that “I was no better than the person who pulled the trigger. That this woman had suffered, and that I was a bitch.” She said he also remarked that he “wondered what my priest would think of me.”

Campbell left the room and returned with pictures of a woman at the morgue. Chirco recalled: “He said, “Take a good look at that.’ He said her legs looked like Swiss cheese and the photographer didn’t do her justice….” Chirco described a variety of good cop/bad cop tactics used by the officers. Soon, she said, they brought in a series of photographs of men.

“I looked at them,” Chirco said, “and said that the man, well, at first I didn’t say anything. Then Detective Campbell started slamming his fist on the table … saying that I nonverbally identified somebody in the photographs.” Eventually Chirco told them the man in the first photograph — Larry — “looked like someone” she saw on the corner that morning while she was out with her dog.

She had asked to leave again, but the detective, Chirco said, told her that her husband was “in bed with another woman right at that time.” Throughout the interview, Chirco said, she was subjected to a barrage of verbal abuse. She said the detective, at one point, threatened to pick up her daughter and put her in foster care. She had mentioned a prior miscarriage, she said, and the detective told her she must have been having so much sex that she caused it herself. At one point, she was accused of “screwing” Wolff. Throughout the ordeal, she said, she was not allowed to leave or use the telephone. When she insisted that the most she saw was a man on the corner, they were not satisfied: “When I told them that was all I saw, and that is all I told them that I saw at the time, then as time went on, it got worse. The longer I was there, the worse it got.”

Chirco also insinuated that something physical occurred in the interview room. She described how one detective insisted she take off her jewelry, her wedding band, her belt. She asked why. She asked for a female officer. She was told to take it off now, Chirco said:

“Campbell says: “Look at how quick she can get that belt off. She is used to taking her belt off and taking her pants down.” He mocked the baby she miscarried, Chirco said, and told her “I didn’t deserve a child.”

After Chirco agreed to give a taped statement, she was released. It was 11 hours after she had first been brought to the police station. She complained about her treatment to Mayor Clarence Harmon. She filed a complaint with Internal Affairs — though in February 1998, Chirco was notified by mail that her complaint had been ruled “not sustained.”

In the days and weeks after being questioned by police, Chirco said, she was repeatedly contacted by various police officers, asking her to meet with them, asking for more information. One, she said, told her she was “hindering prosecution” — a felony punishable by 10 years and a $10,000 fine. Another stuck his card under her door, told her of a reward, apologized for what the other officers had done. One, she said, told her police could take away her child and turn the girl over to the state until she cooperated. Chirco refused.

In September, Chirco said, she got a call from a sergeant. She told him she thought she had been followed in her car by someone she believed to be Larry Wolff. She said he told her police couldn’t offer her any help: “If you can’t help us, we can’t help you.” She hung up on him. And not long after the murder, she moved out of her apartment on Jamieson.

As police pushed forward with their investigation, the family of Denise Wolff struggled to deal with their grief — without much success. And their feelings toward Larry began to change.

Sandy didn’t want to point a finger at Larry in the early hours of the investigation. “For the first couple of days, we tried to act like, you know, somebody else did it, till we knew. You can’t jump to conclusions,” Sandy says. “But after a couple of days, we knew. Everything that come out of his mouth was a lie. First he said he was sleeping so sound he didn’t hear anything, when people three blocks away heard it. First he said his dogs didn’t bark, then he said the dogs did bark, and he went out to see the dogs. Then he told my niece, “I heard it, but I just lay there in bed.’ Then he told someone he was under a window air conditioner, but he has central air — the air conditioner is on his sun porch. He wasn’t sleeping out there; he was in his bedroom.”

She began replaying scenes in her mind, the way Larry acted strangely at a fish fry Larry and Denise attended at Sandy’s house the week before Denise’s death, and how he told her he wished Denise would drop this “talk about a divorce.” She began thinking about the way Larry could be possessive — how he raised two dogs from pups and, Sandy says, chose to kill them rather than give them away when he and Denise were moving from one rental property to another. “Someone said, “Why don’t you give those dogs away?'” Sandy says. “And he said, “They’re my dogs, and no one is going to have them but me.’ He took them out and beat them with a crowbar and a hammer,” she says.