in places where stolen vehicles were often dumped. He’d been a campus investigator eighteen years, so he knew all the spots where hot cars had been found. After he checked those areas, lie went out to Game Farm Road and looked behind Cornell’s poultry bams; another location for stolen cars. He drove through the East Hill apartment complex, checked the area around Best Western Motel and behind East Hill Plaza, then swung around to the plaza parking lot, which was filled with cars and shopping carts by then. He drove slowly up and down each parking lane.
Across from the plaza was Ides Bowling Lanes and he remembered finding two stolen cars way in the back of the building on separate occasions. As he drove to the rear of Ides and around toward Marine Midland Bank, he spotted a van that looked like the one described in the bulletin. He got out of his car and glared at the license plate. It matched. Ingersoll radioed his base on campus what he had found. It was 10:38 A.M.
Ted Palmer and Charlie Porter went up to Ides to check out the van reported by Cornell safety. And an ID man was ordered to gather whatever evidence they could find in and around the vehicle.
A light coat of snow covered the van (it had been snowing off and on since 4:00 A.M.) They cordoned off a fifty foot area around the vehicle to prevent disturbance to the scene. Patrol cars and police stood at the various entrances to Ides Bowling Lanes and Marine Midland Bank to block cars and pedestrians from interfering with the site. Porter brushed the snow off the left rear comer of the van and peeked inside. He half-hoped he’d find a body in there—the boyfriend who shot himself after killing the family. He still yearned for a straightforward solution to the homicides. But he didn’t see anything in the van.
They took pictures and the ID investigator fanned the snow back from the door of the driver’s side with a 3 by 5 index card. He found three or four large footprints headed toward Ides Bowling Lanes and then disappear in a mishmash of tire tracks. The prints indicated the person could have been running. They took photographs of the footprints. Porter arranged to have the van towed to the police lab in Port Crane, near Binghamton, where technicians would go over it with a fine tooth comb for evidence.
Palmer went inside the bowling alley and talked with employees. They told him they saw a van like the Harrises parked in the same location at various times Friday night and early Saturday morning; later they talked with a few Friday night bowlers and they, too, remembered seeing a van like the Harrises parked outside.
While Palmer spoke with people inside the lanes. Porter knocked on the doors of houses close to the Marine Midland bank and Ides to see if anyone noticed the van or persons around it the previous night or early that morning. No one knew anything about the van.
At times like this when he was working for McElligott, Porter never forgot for a moment what a tyrant the man could be when it came to investigating a homicide. He was his best friend, but friendship had nothing to do with solving crimes with McElligott. He demanded more than a hundred percent and if you didn’t ask all the right questions, he’s say you screwed up, even if fifty people were around. He remembered when he was doing his first case as an investigator on a Binghamton homicide, involving a woman strangled and left in the trunk of a car. He came back to the station after interviewing the paperboy and McElligott said to him: “How’d you do with the Perkins kid?” McElligott began firing questions like bullets from a machine gun: Did he tell you this and what did he tell you about that? There were over thirty investigators on the case and Porter noticed McElligott did the same with each one of them, never referring to notes. He had all the facts in his head.
Investigators had to reconcile these van sightings at Ides with fresh tire tracks that Trooper Beno saw at 7:20 A.M. Saturday on the Harris driveway and across the lawn. Did the killer stay all night or come back before daybreak Saturday to bum the evidence? And there was always the chance that witnesses were mistaken about the vehicle they saw in the parking lot. The Harrises van was a common model and color and at night in snowy conditions, vehicles can all look alike.
Tall, good looking David Harding, the upcoming star investigator with the ID section who had trained Lishansky in identification work arrived at the crime scene and joined Lishansky inside the house. They had worked on many cases together that led to convictions and praise from their bosses. Harding called the shots and Lishansky followed.
They knew this one would take longer than the usual crime scenes they faced involving one or two rooms. They had a big house to deal with and to make things worse the fire left water damage and perhaps had destroyed evidence. Their work required technical skill and a calm, methodical approach to collecting evidence. But the immediate excitement of entering a murder scene pushed the adrenaline up a notch or two. Neither man had seen anything so horrendous before.
David Harding loved being in the hot spot of an investigation. When he entered the room, he’d work it like a politician shaking hands with everybody and smiling broadly. He wanted his colleagues to like and admire him. Most of them did.
Harding and Lishansky soon realized that circumstances surrounding the multiple murders on Ellis Hollow Road were out of the ordinary: A well-respected, affluent family of four murdered in their own home three days before Christmas wasn’t an every day event. This was a major case. A piece of evidence they found at the scene and preserved might be the ammunition needed later to nail the killer. And if they fouled up and let something important slip by, it would not be pleasant facing McElligott.
Harding wanted to get the telephones working again and the furnace back in operation. He could see his breath when he walked inside the house. Icicles had formed on the kitchen faucet. It seemed to him there was no point in freezing while they did this long, painstaking job.
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