A Noise Downstairs(9)
He had work to do.
At one end of the kitchen, on the street side of the house, was a small room the original owners had designed as an oversize pantry— it was no bigger than six by six feet—but which Paul had turned into, as he had often called it, “the world’s tiniest think tank.”
He’d cut twelve inches off a seven-foot door that had been left in the garage by the previous owner after the reno, mounted it on the far wall as a desk, added some supports underneath, and filled with books the shelves lining two of the other walls that had been intended for canned goods and cereal boxes. By removing a few shelves he’d managed to carve out enough space to hang a framed, original poster for the film Plan 9 from Outer Space. He’d found it in a movie memorabilia store in London years ago. As there was no window, he’d lined the wall at the back of the desk with cork, allowing him to hang articles and calendars and favorite New Yorker cartoons where he could see them.
Centered on the desk was his laptop. Also taking up space were a printer and several cardboard business boxes filled with lesson plans, lectures, bills, and other files.
Paul dropped himself into the wheeled office chair and set the beer next to the laptop. He tapped a key to bring the screen to life, entered his password.
He stared at the computer for the better part of five minutes. He thought back to when he was six years old and his parents started taking him to a community pool in the summer. It wasn’t heated, and Paul couldn’t deal with getting in at the shallow end and slowly walking toward the deeper part, the cold water working its way incrementally up his body. It was torture. He took the “ripping off the Band-Aid approach,” which was to stand at the edge and jump in, getting his entire body wet at once. The only problem was, the rest of his family could be ready to go home before he’d taken the plunge.
Paul was standing at the edge of the pool again.
He knew what he had to do.
He needed to understand what had happened to him. And where there were holes in the story, he’d attempt to fill them in with what might have happened. Weren’t there photo programs like that? Where the image was grainy or indistinct, the computer would figure out what was probably there and patch it?
What did Kenneth say to these women before he’d reached his decision to kill them? What were their intimate moments like? What lies did Kenneth come up with when questioned by his wife, Gabriella?
Even a partly imagined story would be better than no story at all.
Paul opened a browser.
Into the search field he entered the words “Kenneth Hoffman.”
“Okay, you son of a bitch,” he said. “Let’s get to know each other a little better.”
Paul hit ENTER.
Four
Paul thought the best way to begin was with news accounts of the double murder. He’d read many of them before but never with quite the intensity he wanted to devote to them now. He recalled that when Kenneth was sentenced, one of the papers had carried a long feature summing up the entire story. It didn’t take long to find it.
The New Haven Star carried it. Paul remembered that he had given an interview to the reporter. The story ran with the headline “A Scandal in Academia: ‘Apology Killer’ gets life in double murder.”
He leaned in closer to the laptop screen and began to read:
BY GWEN STAINTON
There are some things even tenure can’t protect you from.
So it was that yesterday, longtime West Haven College professor Kenneth Hoffman—the so-called Apology Killer—was sentenced to life in prison for the brutal murders of Jill Foster and Catherine Lamb, and the attempted murder of colleague and friend Paul Davis, bringing to a close not only one of the state’s most grisly homicide cases, but also perhaps the most bizarre scandal of academia in New England history.
A lengthy trial might have brought out more details, but Hoffman waived his right to one and pleaded guilty to all charges. It was not difficult to imagine why he might have made that decision. When Hoffman was arrested, he was in the process of disposing of the bodies of the two women, and had just knocked Davis unconscious, striking him in the head with a shovel.
Had he not been discovered by a Milford police officer who’d decided to go after Hoffman’s car—it had a broken taillight— Hoffman most likely would have buried all three in the woods. He was in the process of finding a suitable location when police happened upon him.
Paul reached for his beer. Look at the words. Read them. Don’t look away. The man was going to make sure I was dead and then he was going to put me in a grave.
The point of the exercise was to face this head-on, he told himself. No shying away. It occurred to him, for not the first time, that whoever’d bumped into Hoffman’s car in the faculty parking lot and broken that light had effectively saved his life.
After conducting extensive interviews with court and police officials, friends and family of Hoffman and his victims, as well as people from the West Haven College community, the Star has been able to put together a more detailed, if no less puzzling, picture of what happened.
Kenneth Hoffman, 53, husband to Gabriella, 49, father to Leonard, 21, was a longtime member of the WHC staff. While his areas of expertise were math and physics, he was perhaps even more skilled in one other area.
Fooling around.