Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(46)
All the forensic evidence—the blood, the hair—was inconclusive, so the prosecutor had to rely on circumstantial evidence. For instance, her wedding ring was missing. A friend of Sanza’s testified that the next day, Saturday, he noticed Sanza wearing a feminine ring on his pinky finger and that “it looked a little gay.” The following day, Sanza stole one thousand dollars from his sister and took the Greyhound back to Florida, where, in the span of three months, he raped two other women, one of whose wedding rings he also tried to steal. It was Sanza’s gruesome trademark of stealing his victims’ wedding rings that helped Cha’s detectives link her case to the cases in Florida. By the time her detectives caught up with Sanza, he was already arrested and in custody for his Florida sexual assault cases.
The Puck housed primarily printing presses until its $8 million restoration, under way at the time of Cha’s death, in which the interior was updated into condos for commercial use. During the building’s renovation, the police scoured the building for weeks, looking for the crime scene. They even had a bloodhound named Mandrake at the site. But much to the shock and embarrassment of the police, it was actually Cha’s two brothers, John and James, and her husband, Richard, who, after they decided to go on their search mission themselves, found the crime scene in the building’s unused sub-basement.
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John, now in his seventies, has written his own memoir on Cha’s murder, called The Rite of Truth: telling/retelling. It was originally published in Korean and he’s now in the process of translating it to English. Much of the book, which I read, documents the murder trials, where he, his siblings, his mother, and Cha’s friends were present. John now lives in the Bay Area, where he works as a writer and translator.
Cha writes about John in Dictee. In the chapter “Melpomene/Tragedy,” Cha gives a dramatic account of the mass demonstration in April 1960 when South Koreans rose up against the authoritarian leader Syngman Rhee, who was appointed by the United States after Japan lost control over Korea. Everyone, including middle school students, was out on the streets, until the militia began to openly shoot at the crowd. Cha writes how John, then a high school student, was eager to join the demonstration but their mother refused to let him out of the house: “You do not want to lose him, my brother, to be killed as the many others by now, already, you say you understand, you plead all the same they are killing any every one.”
I interviewed John twice over Google Chat and corresponded with him over email. It’s hard to see him now, in T-shirt and bifocals, as that hardheaded young schoolboy. He has a kind, round face and the relaxed, easygoing manner of someone who’s spent most of his life in California. Until I talked to him, I felt uneasy contacting Cha’s living relatives. More than a few scholars gave the impression that they didn’t mention her murder because they didn’t want to trouble her family. I was therefore relieved that John was more than happy to talk, although his story on how he found the crime scene complicated my intention to get the facts straight about Cha’s homicide.
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For the first trial in 1983, the prosecutor brought in three of Sanza’s victims from Florida. One woman testified how Sanza broke into her house and sexually assaulted her with a gun to her head. Afterwards he tried to steal her wedding ring. Sanza was convicted in that first trial but the decision was overturned in 1985 because the appellate court found there weren’t enough similarities between Cha’s case and the other three rape victims who testified against him. Among their terrible reasons: Sanza was “polite” when he raped the other women in Florida compared to his vicious assault against Cha. The second trial, in the fall of 1987, ended in a mistrial when the prosecutor Jeff Schlanger referenced a polygraph test that was inadmissible in the New York court system. Finally, for the third trial, in December 1987, the detectives found a key witness, Sanza’s ex-girlfriend Lou, who testified that before Sanza fled to Florida, he called her from a pay phone the day after the homicide and confessed he “fucked up” and “killed someone.” It took the jury less than one hour to reach a decision. Sanza was found guilty of first-degree rape and second-degree murder.
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When Cha didn’t show up later that night to meet them for the movie, her friends Susan Wolf and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis had dinner together instead at Dojo, a cheap vegetarian restaurant right across from St. Mark’s Bookshop. While eating, Flitterman-Lewis and Wolf saw Dictee displayed and spotlit in the arched window of the bookshop and were excited to tell Cha her book was being featured at the legendary store. They toasted to Cha’s success.
I met Sandy Flitterman-Lewis for tea in Chelsea. She is a small, vivacious Jewish woman in her sixties who’s now a professor at Rutgers in feminist film studies. She’d known Cha since graduate school in Berkeley and always admired her work, comparing it to filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s work because of the way it transcended category. She was eager to talk about what happened: “People only say that she died young,” she said. “They never indicate the horror.”
Flitterman-Lewis was there for the last trial. She remembers Schlanger showing a chart with twenty-two pieces of circumstantial evidence, to make it explicit to the jury that all of them pointed to Sanza. Out of all the evidence, she was most disturbed by the scratch marks. The friend who noticed Cha’s ring on Sanza also said there were deep scratches all over Sanza’s forearms and on his face. Years later, Flitterman-Lewis attended a poetics conference where a graduate student made confusing, pretentious claims about Cha’s passivity as rape victim being a kind of performance art. Flitterman-Lewis stood up during the Q&A and told her about the marks.