titantoo
04-23-2005, 10:32 PM
April 24, 2005
Asking Again if Father Is a Killer
By MICHAEL WILSON (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=MICHAEL%20WILSON&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=MICHAEL%20WILSON&inline=nyt-per)
In a bedroom of his Brooklyn apartment, Roscoe Glinton II called his family together: two teenage sons, a 12-year-old daughter, his wife and their infant girl.
It was April 6, three days after the body of Mr. Glinton's former girlfriend was pulled out of the Hudson River in Chelsea. She had Mr. Glinton's son in her womb and a bullet in her head.
What followed in the Brooklyn apartment was a version of a family meeting that most families might find strange, but that this family may have been expecting for three long and difficult days.
After all, this was not the first time.
In a recent interview, Mr. Glinton's 17-year-old son, Donovan, described the family meeting this way: "He said he was sorry this situation had happened again to us, and that he had nothing to do with it, and he's trying to figure out what happened." It had been more than six years since Donovan's mother, Deborah, Mr. Glinton's first wife, had disappeared from their home in Newburgh, N.Y. Her body - what was left of it after three years in the woods - was found in 2001. The case was ruled a homicide, but no one has ever been charged.
Mr. Glinton, 42, was indicted last week and arrested on Friday, accused of second-degree murder in the death of Lisa D. Eatmon, 33, his former girlfriend. He has declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this article. His lawyer, Steve Kirschner, said on Friday that though there were "terrible coincidences," Mr. Glinton had not committed either crime.
At least one of his children is not so sure.
In the bedroom meeting at the Glintons' home in East New York, no one spoke at first, Donovan said. Then, he said: "I asked him, 'Do you want me, of all people, to believe you had nothing to do with it? It's too many coincidences. It's too hard to believe, you being the main suspect in both situations.' "
Then his older brother said the police were sure to watch their father closely, Donovan recalled, and Mr. Glinton's wife said she could not imagine the children going through something like this once, let alone twice. The family meeting ended as abruptly as it had begun. Mr. Glinton, a New York City sanitation worker, said, "If no one else has anything else to say, I guess you can go back to what you were doing, " Donovan recalled. He said his father wished him luck on a test at school.
The killing of Mr. Glinton's ex-girlfriend has renewed interest in Mr. Glinton's past. And in Newburgh - 70 miles north of Manhattan, in Orange County - thoughts have returned to a case that grew cold long ago. The disappearance and death of Deborah Glinton has long frustrated Detective Sgt. Margaret R. O'Neill, who filled four boxes with files of tips and leads that in her mind point only to one suspect: Mr. Glinton.
"You always think," she said in a recent interview, "is there something else that could have been done to be able to arrest him for what happened to Deborah?"
On June 20, 1998, Sergeant O'Neill was 38 years old, with 14 years on the job, when a Newburgh dentist's office called the police to report that an assistant named Deborah Glinton, an unfailingly punctual worker, had not arrived for her shift, and that her home telephone had been disconnected.
The sergeant drove to the Glintons' two-story house on Saratoga Drive. Neither parent was home, but the three children were: two boys, 11 and 10 years old, and a 5-year-old girl. They said they thought their mother was at work. The children told the police that their parents had argued the night before, over money.
The sergeant started looking around the house.
"The first thing that really bothered me was that Deborah's car was in the garage, and her pocketbook was in the car," she said. "No one just takes off. She's not going to leave without her pocketbook."
Officers found Mr. Glinton in Manhattan, between shifts that night at the Department of Sanitation. He told the police that he and his wife had quarreled, that she had slept on the couch the night before and was still there when he left for work at 4:30 a.m. He said he did not know where she had gone.
Detectives interviewed her family and co-workers, as well as her husband's. Mrs. Glinton's relatives told them that he had had extramarital affairs, Sergeant O'Neill said, and that his current girlfriend was a New York City police officer. The officer, Debora Hailstalk, acknowledged her relationship with Mr. Glinton, but said that she had not known that he was married, Sergeant O'Neill said. Eventually, Officer Hailstalk involved a union representative in her dealings with Newburgh police investigators, and then stopped speaking to them altogether, Sergeant O'Neill said.
Ms. Hailstalk retired from the Police Department as a sergeant in 2002 after 20 years of service, and is now the chief contracting officer for the city's Commission on Human Rights. Through her lawyer, Bruno V. Gioffre Jr., she declined to comment.
A month after Mrs. Glinton disappeared, detectives asked Mr. Glinton to take a lie-detector test. He refused, the sergeant said. "Pretty much from there on in he would not speak to the police," she said.
During the rest of the summer of 1998, the police kept Mr. Glinton under surveillance and continued speaking to his co-workers. Irritated, he gave an interview to a television reporter, and the police saved a tape of it.
"I just pray and I hope that she shows up and somebody knows of her whereabouts," he said in the interview, speaking of his wife and dabbing at tears. He said the police had harassed him. "I don't need to be playing games," he said. "Why should I have to take a polygraph test?"
He said the investigation was dragging on and criticized the detectives: "I'm not going to say that they're idiots directly, but when you wait a long time later to ask for this and ask for that - what's the purpose of asking for something six months later?"
The reporter asked him if he had killed his wife. "No," he said. "I can't even begin to think what happened."
Sergeant O'Neill said there was only one inconsistency, one place where he seemed to change his story. He initially told detectives that he had taken the New York State Thruway to work the day his wife disappeared. But when they asked him to retrace his route while they rode along, he went a different and longer way into Manhattan, over the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge and through Westchester County, the sergeant said.
The inconsistency grew in importance three years later, on Nov. 24, 2001, when a hunter found a skull and bones under some leaves about 100 feet from the southbound lanes of Interstate 87, at mile marker 48.6 of the Thruway, in woods 12 miles south of Newburgh.
The body yielded no clues. "Given the poor nature of the skeletal remains, the cause of death could not be determined," said Dr. Michael Baden, medical examiner for the New York State Police. "Many of the bones were missing because of animal activity. We identified her by her teeth." Because it appeared that the body had been dumped, the death was ruled a homicide.
The police tried to question Mr. Glinton again. "He was called, and basically the gist of his response was, 'Contact my lawyer,' " Sergeant O'Neill said.
With no useful physical evidence and no known witnesses to Mrs. Glinton's disappearance, the detectives moved on to new cases and the Glinton investigation stalled, Sergeant O'Neill said. "It's not easy," she said. "I hope whoever did it gets caught. But again, he seems to be the only real suspect."
After Mrs. Glinton disappeared, her mother took in the three children. Mr. Glinton filed for custody, and the children were returned to him in 2000. Donovan, then 12 years old, said the memory of his mother hung between him and his father. "When we would have arguments, I would bring up the situation," he said. " 'What did you do? I know you had something to do with it.' Stuff like that."
"Sometimes he would bypass it and not comment, and sometimes he would say, 'No, I didn't have anything to do with it, and I know you feel that way, and I'm sorry you feel that way,' " Donovan said.
Relatives found a journal that they said had been written by Mrs. Glinton. The handwritten pages describe mistrust and fighting, sometimes physical, between her and her husband. "This man has put a gun to my head while I was speaking on the phone to my sister," she wrote. "This man has tried to drag me out of our apartment naked, because I was out with my mom and aunt and came home late."
Donovan's older brother, named Roscoe after his father, went away to school in Pennsylvania while Donavan attended Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn. Donovan said he first met Lisa Eatmon in 2001, when she was his father's girlfriend. He said he did not know when they broke up, but said she remained in touch with him and his brother and sister.
Mr. Glinton remarried, and he and his wife, Darlene, had a daughter, Donovan said. So he was shocked when he learned from his sister, just last month, that Ms. Eatmon was pregnant, and that the child was his father's, he said. Ms. Eatmon was eight months pregnant at her death.
He never had a chance to ask her about it, Donovan said. He learned she was dead when reporters appeared at the apartment.
The family meeting came a few days later. Two days after that, on April 8, Mr. Glinton was arrested, accused of leading police officers on a chase on the Belt Parkway at speeds above 100 miles per hour, with his daughter in the sport utility vehicle with him. He was charged with reckless endangerment and endangering the welfare of a child. Then, on Friday, he was charged with second-degree murder in Ms. Eatmon's death.
In Newburgh, Sergeant O'Neill said that while Mr. Glinton's indictment was of no use as evidence in her case, it might provide an opportunity for detectives to try to question him again. "I'm sure we'll give it a whirl," she said.
Soon after Mr. Glinton's arrest on the traffic charges, his wife moved out, Donovan said. She told the teenager that he could call her if he wanted to talk, but that she could not stay.
Donovan left a day later to live with relatives. The whereabouts of the other children was not known.
Donovan's approaching graduation from high school is almost an afterthought. "I don't really have a plan," he said.
Asking Again if Father Is a Killer
By MICHAEL WILSON (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=MICHAEL%20WILSON&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=MICHAEL%20WILSON&inline=nyt-per)
In a bedroom of his Brooklyn apartment, Roscoe Glinton II called his family together: two teenage sons, a 12-year-old daughter, his wife and their infant girl.
It was April 6, three days after the body of Mr. Glinton's former girlfriend was pulled out of the Hudson River in Chelsea. She had Mr. Glinton's son in her womb and a bullet in her head.
What followed in the Brooklyn apartment was a version of a family meeting that most families might find strange, but that this family may have been expecting for three long and difficult days.
After all, this was not the first time.
In a recent interview, Mr. Glinton's 17-year-old son, Donovan, described the family meeting this way: "He said he was sorry this situation had happened again to us, and that he had nothing to do with it, and he's trying to figure out what happened." It had been more than six years since Donovan's mother, Deborah, Mr. Glinton's first wife, had disappeared from their home in Newburgh, N.Y. Her body - what was left of it after three years in the woods - was found in 2001. The case was ruled a homicide, but no one has ever been charged.
Mr. Glinton, 42, was indicted last week and arrested on Friday, accused of second-degree murder in the death of Lisa D. Eatmon, 33, his former girlfriend. He has declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this article. His lawyer, Steve Kirschner, said on Friday that though there were "terrible coincidences," Mr. Glinton had not committed either crime.
At least one of his children is not so sure.
In the bedroom meeting at the Glintons' home in East New York, no one spoke at first, Donovan said. Then, he said: "I asked him, 'Do you want me, of all people, to believe you had nothing to do with it? It's too many coincidences. It's too hard to believe, you being the main suspect in both situations.' "
Then his older brother said the police were sure to watch their father closely, Donovan recalled, and Mr. Glinton's wife said she could not imagine the children going through something like this once, let alone twice. The family meeting ended as abruptly as it had begun. Mr. Glinton, a New York City sanitation worker, said, "If no one else has anything else to say, I guess you can go back to what you were doing, " Donovan recalled. He said his father wished him luck on a test at school.
The killing of Mr. Glinton's ex-girlfriend has renewed interest in Mr. Glinton's past. And in Newburgh - 70 miles north of Manhattan, in Orange County - thoughts have returned to a case that grew cold long ago. The disappearance and death of Deborah Glinton has long frustrated Detective Sgt. Margaret R. O'Neill, who filled four boxes with files of tips and leads that in her mind point only to one suspect: Mr. Glinton.
"You always think," she said in a recent interview, "is there something else that could have been done to be able to arrest him for what happened to Deborah?"
On June 20, 1998, Sergeant O'Neill was 38 years old, with 14 years on the job, when a Newburgh dentist's office called the police to report that an assistant named Deborah Glinton, an unfailingly punctual worker, had not arrived for her shift, and that her home telephone had been disconnected.
The sergeant drove to the Glintons' two-story house on Saratoga Drive. Neither parent was home, but the three children were: two boys, 11 and 10 years old, and a 5-year-old girl. They said they thought their mother was at work. The children told the police that their parents had argued the night before, over money.
The sergeant started looking around the house.
"The first thing that really bothered me was that Deborah's car was in the garage, and her pocketbook was in the car," she said. "No one just takes off. She's not going to leave without her pocketbook."
Officers found Mr. Glinton in Manhattan, between shifts that night at the Department of Sanitation. He told the police that he and his wife had quarreled, that she had slept on the couch the night before and was still there when he left for work at 4:30 a.m. He said he did not know where she had gone.
Detectives interviewed her family and co-workers, as well as her husband's. Mrs. Glinton's relatives told them that he had had extramarital affairs, Sergeant O'Neill said, and that his current girlfriend was a New York City police officer. The officer, Debora Hailstalk, acknowledged her relationship with Mr. Glinton, but said that she had not known that he was married, Sergeant O'Neill said. Eventually, Officer Hailstalk involved a union representative in her dealings with Newburgh police investigators, and then stopped speaking to them altogether, Sergeant O'Neill said.
Ms. Hailstalk retired from the Police Department as a sergeant in 2002 after 20 years of service, and is now the chief contracting officer for the city's Commission on Human Rights. Through her lawyer, Bruno V. Gioffre Jr., she declined to comment.
A month after Mrs. Glinton disappeared, detectives asked Mr. Glinton to take a lie-detector test. He refused, the sergeant said. "Pretty much from there on in he would not speak to the police," she said.
During the rest of the summer of 1998, the police kept Mr. Glinton under surveillance and continued speaking to his co-workers. Irritated, he gave an interview to a television reporter, and the police saved a tape of it.
"I just pray and I hope that she shows up and somebody knows of her whereabouts," he said in the interview, speaking of his wife and dabbing at tears. He said the police had harassed him. "I don't need to be playing games," he said. "Why should I have to take a polygraph test?"
He said the investigation was dragging on and criticized the detectives: "I'm not going to say that they're idiots directly, but when you wait a long time later to ask for this and ask for that - what's the purpose of asking for something six months later?"
The reporter asked him if he had killed his wife. "No," he said. "I can't even begin to think what happened."
Sergeant O'Neill said there was only one inconsistency, one place where he seemed to change his story. He initially told detectives that he had taken the New York State Thruway to work the day his wife disappeared. But when they asked him to retrace his route while they rode along, he went a different and longer way into Manhattan, over the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge and through Westchester County, the sergeant said.
The inconsistency grew in importance three years later, on Nov. 24, 2001, when a hunter found a skull and bones under some leaves about 100 feet from the southbound lanes of Interstate 87, at mile marker 48.6 of the Thruway, in woods 12 miles south of Newburgh.
The body yielded no clues. "Given the poor nature of the skeletal remains, the cause of death could not be determined," said Dr. Michael Baden, medical examiner for the New York State Police. "Many of the bones were missing because of animal activity. We identified her by her teeth." Because it appeared that the body had been dumped, the death was ruled a homicide.
The police tried to question Mr. Glinton again. "He was called, and basically the gist of his response was, 'Contact my lawyer,' " Sergeant O'Neill said.
With no useful physical evidence and no known witnesses to Mrs. Glinton's disappearance, the detectives moved on to new cases and the Glinton investigation stalled, Sergeant O'Neill said. "It's not easy," she said. "I hope whoever did it gets caught. But again, he seems to be the only real suspect."
After Mrs. Glinton disappeared, her mother took in the three children. Mr. Glinton filed for custody, and the children were returned to him in 2000. Donovan, then 12 years old, said the memory of his mother hung between him and his father. "When we would have arguments, I would bring up the situation," he said. " 'What did you do? I know you had something to do with it.' Stuff like that."
"Sometimes he would bypass it and not comment, and sometimes he would say, 'No, I didn't have anything to do with it, and I know you feel that way, and I'm sorry you feel that way,' " Donovan said.
Relatives found a journal that they said had been written by Mrs. Glinton. The handwritten pages describe mistrust and fighting, sometimes physical, between her and her husband. "This man has put a gun to my head while I was speaking on the phone to my sister," she wrote. "This man has tried to drag me out of our apartment naked, because I was out with my mom and aunt and came home late."
Donovan's older brother, named Roscoe after his father, went away to school in Pennsylvania while Donavan attended Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn. Donovan said he first met Lisa Eatmon in 2001, when she was his father's girlfriend. He said he did not know when they broke up, but said she remained in touch with him and his brother and sister.
Mr. Glinton remarried, and he and his wife, Darlene, had a daughter, Donovan said. So he was shocked when he learned from his sister, just last month, that Ms. Eatmon was pregnant, and that the child was his father's, he said. Ms. Eatmon was eight months pregnant at her death.
He never had a chance to ask her about it, Donovan said. He learned she was dead when reporters appeared at the apartment.
The family meeting came a few days later. Two days after that, on April 8, Mr. Glinton was arrested, accused of leading police officers on a chase on the Belt Parkway at speeds above 100 miles per hour, with his daughter in the sport utility vehicle with him. He was charged with reckless endangerment and endangering the welfare of a child. Then, on Friday, he was charged with second-degree murder in Ms. Eatmon's death.
In Newburgh, Sergeant O'Neill said that while Mr. Glinton's indictment was of no use as evidence in her case, it might provide an opportunity for detectives to try to question him again. "I'm sure we'll give it a whirl," she said.
Soon after Mr. Glinton's arrest on the traffic charges, his wife moved out, Donovan said. She told the teenager that he could call her if he wanted to talk, but that she could not stay.
Donovan left a day later to live with relatives. The whereabouts of the other children was not known.
Donovan's approaching graduation from high school is almost an afterthought. "I don't really have a plan," he said.