Mary: Mrs. Walentowicz

Just in case the police missed anything, I contacted the security department of St. Francis Hospital in the hopes that one of their security cameras happened to capture some or all of the crash. The staff were most gracious and allowed me full access, but unfortunately all of their cameras were pointed inward at the parking lot itself and failed to capture anything of interest.

My first interview with a resident was the witness named in the police report, Mrs. Justina Walentowicz. What I'm going to say next may sound as though I'm blowing my own horn, or even have the effect of making me sound like some kind of con woman, but I think it's important to know why I do what I do and what makes me good at it. I've been told that I have a "kind face", and I've always been what you call a people person, which is actually how I got into process serving. The art of serving depends on getting someone (many times a criminal) to trust you, and to do so within two or three seconds. That's all it takes for their guard to drop and actually admit they are who they are so you can serve them with legal documents. This ability to generate quick trust is not something most policemen have, and in fact their uniforms tend to have the opposite effect of creating fear. Fear can force a witness to tell the bulk of what they know, but trust can unlock other doors if coupled with patience.

All of this is a rather long-winded way of telling you that I got Mrs. Walentowicz to trust me, it won us some very useful information and it took no small amount of patience. Mrs. Walentowicz welcomed me into her home, ushered me into a 1970's style kitchen (photo of it at left) and gave me a cup of burned black coffee. The kitchen walls had a yellowish coating from years of cigarette smoke, and after two hours sitting there with little ventilation as she chain-smoked, I felt like I had acquired something of an unhealthy sheen myself. Mrs. Walentowicz spent most of the time waxing on about her all-consuming passion for the game of BINGO, her beloved, now-dead wiener dog Roch, and her family's long and involved history as ironworkers back in Poland.

(Mrs. Howland, you said you were looking for more of a journal instead of a log of these events, is this what you're looking for? Would you prefer to have photographs included? This isn't the way I'm used to writing case reports, so if you'd prefer something else please let me know.)

As far as the information, I wanted to focus mainly on the truck, since that's virtually the only thing she saw. Acting essentially as a sketch artist, I painstakingly went over the little details she may have made out in the darkness. The word she kept using to describe the front of the truck was "sleek", which I eventually determined meant a bit rounded and slanted. She also described the grill of the rig as "to be rid of cows". This took a while to sort out, but I believe she meant that it looked similar to a classic "cow-catcher" on old locomotives (photo from wikimedia)

Mrs. Walentowicz also gave an unusual description of the semi's air cleaners (those cylinders on the exterior on each side of the truck. I had to look it up, so don't feel bad if you didn't know it either. Sample photo from Big Stock Photo). The air cleaners each had a row of four or five lights down the side of them, and had a very distinctive, sleek look.



Finally, she believed at first that the big rig's mud flaps each had a picture of "the angry, red-haired man with guns"-i.e., Yosemite Sam, from the Loony Toons cartoons-but now she isn't certain and said she may have just remembered that from a television show.

At this point I thanked her for the coffee and made my way to the next house, where I continued conducting interviews for the better part of the day. I received no other information of substance, though many of the neighborhood residents asked me to pass along their deep condolences to you, Mrs. Howland.

At the end of the day I drove back to the Howland residence and attempted to shampoo the cigarette smell from my hair. I'll spend tomorrow interviewing truck salesmen and mechanics and see if I can't narrow down the make and model, then return to Mrs. Walentowicz with photographs for a positive identification.