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Again I couldn’t believe that Wiggie had slipped up by calling Dwight by his nickname, but what the heck.

  As Dwight came downstairs, he asked what we were going to do with the occupants of the house. He got no reply from me or Wiggie. There was a pause of inexperience.

  “Lady, where’s the rest of the money at?” Wiggie yelled. “I know y’all got more dough!”

  She didn’t say peep. She just kept crying.

  Dee told Wiggie that he had already found some cash upstairs in the medicine cabinet.

  “No!” Wiggie said. “I know this rich white chick has some more money somewhere in this house. Lady, where is the money!” Wiggie insanely shouted.

  “I don’t have anymore money,” the lady said as her voice cracked from fear and from crying. “Why are you doing this to me? Please, just leave us alone.”

  Wiggie tapped me with his gun and told me to check them to see if they had anymore money on them. One by one I went through each of their pants pockets. I took the repairman’s wallet. The young white boy didn’t have anything on him. When I got to the white lady, she screamed.

  “I don’t have any money on me. Here, take my rings, but please just don’t hurt my baby.”

  So as she bear hugged the innocent looking tiny baby who was dressed in a pink and white dress along with little white dress-up baby shoes, Wiggie became enraged.

  “What?” he screamed. “What did you say? Yo, ain’t nobody gonna hurt your baby!”

  The lady screamed and sobbed even stronger. I guess she was feeling a bit more insecure.

  “Oh, so you’re calling me a killer?” Wiggie asked. “Put the baby down!” Wiggie instructed her.

  The lady clutched tightly to her baby.

  “Lady, put the baby on the floor right now!”

  “Mom, listen to him,” the son pleaded.

  Finally the lady placed the little girl on the floor next to her. Wiggie then proceeded to immediately kick the little girl. He literally punted the baby as if she were a football. The baby began screaming and her mother continued to cry, helplessly reaching her arms out in an attempt to grab her daughter.

  Bang! That was the next sound I heard.

  Oh man! I thought to myself as my heart raced and my eyes opened as wide as they could possibly open. Wiggie had just shot the little baby. I couldn’t believe it! The one slug from Wiggie’s .45 caliber hand gun was so powerful, that it had literally ripped the baby in half. The baby’s whole right side had been blown away.

  As I looked at the baby’s jagged lifeless body lying on the floor in a pool of blood, and watched her brains trickle down the living room curtains, I was in total shock, disbelief, numbness—you name it and I was in it.

  My eyes stayed wide, my heart continued pumping fast, and I was breathing hard—the type of breathing where you can see your whole diaphragm rise then fall, rise then fall. My widened eyes scanned the room and stopped after focusing on Wiggie.

  “Oh my . . . No! No! Noooo!” I heard the repairman screech. Then I heard, Boom! Boom!

  Wiggie had shot the repairman. What in the world is going on? I began to think of a way to stop this Satanic-like episode.

  The white lady, who was fiendishly on her hands and knees trying to scoop up her daughter’s insides, had her back turned and didn’t even notice that she was about to get whacked.

  Boom! Dwight shot the lady once in the back and watched her plop face down next to her dead little girl.

  As the repairman and the white lady lay bleeding and motionless alongside the dead little girl, only one person remained, which was the white, teenaged boy. He curled his body up into a big ball, cringing and preparing for the worst to happen.

  And the worst was what he received as Wiggie let off his gun. Pop! Pop! Two bullets entered the kid’s body, which caused his curled up body position to slowly unfurl.

  Unlike the other three victims, the young, white boy was still alive after having been shot. He’d momentarily escaped death by surviving the first two rounds. His eyes were open and he was breathing very anxiously. You could sense the fear that he had inside him.

  “Holz, kill him!” Wiggie instructed.

  I hesitated.

  “Holz,” Wiggie screamed, “if you don’t shoot him, I’ll kill you right now! Word! Now shoot him!”

  Again I hesitated. But I knew that Wiggie was dead-up serious about blowing me away if I punked out on the execution.

  I slowly walked over to the teenaged boy. I remember looking at him as if to say, “I’m sorry.” I was so scared and I felt so much compassion for the kid. I literally felt like crying. What was I to do?

  I mean I knew Wiggie wanted me to pull the trigger for the simple reason that if we ever got busted, then all three of us would be going up for murder-one.

  The scared look that the boy had on his face reminded me of the look Richie had on his face when he realized he was about to die.

  I cocked my gun and aimed it right at his ear lobe. I held my arm stiff and steady because I didn’t want to miss my target and have to repeat the grueling process. Then I squeezed the trigger . . .

  It was so weird because I didn’t even hear the gun go off. I just heard thin air. The sight of the boy’s blond hair flying up as if he had been electrocuted was all I needed to see to know and confirm to myself that enough damage had been done.

  I had just caught my first body. And it was literally the most sickening feeling that I had ever, ever, ever, ever felt in all my life. Hollywood had always made it seem so easy and effortless, but that was as far from reality as the ground is from the moon.

  The rest of that day became a numbing mystery to me. I honestly don’t remember a thing that happened after that moment. I don’t recall leaving the house that we’d robbed. I don’t even recall going to sleep or saying my prayers that night.

  All I remember are the very graphic and gory details of the murders, which depicted before and after pictures of innocent people’s lives—here one minute, and gone the next.

  Oh yeah, there is one more thing that I remember, and I know I will never forget it, because the sound is branded into my brain. That is the sound of laughter from Dwight and Wiggie after they’d watched me murder someone. Yeah, their laughter etched deep into my mind.

  Ain’t No Stopping

  It was already Wednesday. I still couldn’t remember what happened after I’d murdered that teenager on Monday. However, Tuesday was still very vivid in my memory bank. The act of me walking in on my mother and father as they spoke about current events was the start of a very remorseful day in my life. Not to mention the guilt, suspicion, and anxiety the day brought me.

  When I woke up Tuesday morning, my plan was not to read any newspapers. Watching the news was also a no-no for me, because I feared that I would have to relive what I had done the previous day. My plan failed from the time my mother, who worked the graveyard shift, came home from work at around eight thirty A.M. The first words out of her mouth the moment she stepped in the door made guilt ripple up and down my spine.

  “That’s a shame what happened to that family out on Long Island. I tell you, people in this world are sick.” Those were the words that my mother spoke to my father. My father gazed into the newspaper.

  “Yeah, honey, it’s getting bad out there. I bet you those were some niggas who killed those people out there like that. I bet you.”

  Right then I knew that they were talking about the killings in which I had starred in and won an Oscar for Best Supporting Murderer.

  “Mark, did you hear about this?” my father asked.

  “No, what happened?” I asked, trying to sound very concerned.

  “Here, read this,” he said.

  I looked at the front page of the newspaper. The headline read in bold letters: “Amityville Horror.” Underneath the headline I saw a picture of the house we’d robbed. The picture had the house in the background. The forefront and the most compelling part of the picture displayed a worker from the city morgue. The wor
ker was carrying a tiny black body bag, a body bag that contained the corpse of Michelle Fisher.

  Michelle Fisher, I later learned was the name of the little white girl whose life Wiggie had eliminated. The newspaper story said that police suspected there was a robbery attempt at the house. The paper also indicated that police had no suspects and there were no eyewitnesses. I learned that everyone except for the mother had died. The mother, however, was in critical but stable condition with a single gunshot wound to the back that narrowly missed hitting her spine.

  No suspects, no witnesses. Yes, I said to myself. The cops had no leads, so we probably wouldn’t get caught. But even if we managed to elude the police, I was certain that eventually all of us were going to pay a price for what we did.

  The guilt that I was feeling that day seemed to be non-existent in the rest of the crew. We had told the others of our murderous doings. They all seemed shocked, but at the same time, they all gave us praise. Arrest and prosecution were the main concerns of everybody in the crew. Randy mentioned that if anyone had gotten the license plate of the stolen car that we were in, then there existed a slight chance of us getting knocked. If not, we would be home free.

  See, he figured if the cops obtained a license plate number they would figure out where the car was stolen from. Then the police department would simply try to pin someone from either Laurelton or Rosedale in connection with the murders.

  I knew if we all kept our mouths closed and gave things a chance to die down, so to speak, that we would be in the clear. Besides, there were no witnesses, at least up until that point anyway.

  Even with the murders hanging over our heads, we still went on with the same old plan. Again on Tuesday we had filled the day with robberies. No murders this time, thank God. However, we did change up as far as who we worked with, and again our means of getaway were stolen vehicles.

  Financially everything was right on course. For Monday and Tuesday combined we netted approximately three thousand dollars in cash and gold. We were still seven thousand dollars short of our goal. Fortunately we still had three days left to reach that goal.

  Seven thousand dollars seemed like it would be somewhat difficult to reach. Although we had three Gs, three murders, and one attempted murder as well as a double kidnapping in our front pocket, there was no stopping us. We were determined to put seven thousand dollars in the other front pocket.

  Our dreams of cash, fancy cars, and fly women were held in our back pockets. That must have been the force behind us. It woke us up everyday with kicks in the butt. Those kicks would carry us through to the night, getting us into all that was wrong, and tempting us to do all sorts of evil.

  Anyway, Wednesday we decided to use the same stolen cars that we’d used on Tuesday, a very risky move. The reasoning was that we would be pressing our luck if we had gone back to the LIRR to steal cars because undercover cops were bound to be staking out all LIRR parking lots by that time.

  Donnie had managed to come through big time for all of us. He found a chop shop. It was part of a junkyard near Liberty Avenue in South Jamaica, Queens. Rumor had it that a big time Mafia boss was connected to the chop shop. The owner of the chop shop, Donnie said, wanted only 1991 cars and nothing else. Of course the cars had to be top of the line, big brand names like Jaguar and BMW.

  As each three man crew went their separate ways, our goal for that day was to continue robbing people. We also had to be on the lookout for opportunities to steal a car that we could take back to the chop shop. Actually, trying to find a fly car became our most occupying thought. See, with chop shops, everyday they were getting busted by the feds. Therefore, they kept moving. A chop shop would be here today and gone tomorrow. Just like any sleazy business, they couldn’t stay too long in one place.

  On Wednesday I was working with Randy, Kwame, and Latiefe. Latiefe was our designated driver. We decided to drive to different restaurants and snatch people’s valuables as they were preparing to enter the restaurants. For obvious reasons, we were to have nothing to do with Long Island. If we went to Long Island the cops would definitely have been on our tails the moment we stepped foot in there. Our territory now consisted of anywhere in any of the five boroughs.

  The first stop for us was a high scale restaurant located on Queens Boulevard in the Rego Park section of Queens. We parked our car on the corner of Sixty-third Drive and walked along the busy boulevard. The empty side streets were usually where people parked their cars before walking to the restaurant. The atmosphere was reminiscent of a busy Manhattan street.

  Five minutes was all it took for Latiefe and Randy to pounce on a rich looking couple who had just parked their car. Kwame and I played lookout as Randy and Tee gobbled up the dough.

  Once back in the car we discovered that we had made away with $400 in cash and a diamond ring that the lady had been wearing. That was it for the day for us as far as robberies were concerned. We quickly left the Queens Boulevard area because we knew that in a matter of minutes there would be an APB out on us.

  After that quick robbery we wanted to concentrate our efforts solely on getting a car for the chop shop. After filling our stolen car’s tank with gasoline, we cruised everywhere. I’d taken over the wheel because if we happened to find a car that we could steal, and the situation called for quick action in stealing it, Latiefe would have had to handle it simply because he was the best at stealing cars. Also, if the car that we wanted to jack turned out to be a stick shift, that also catered to Latiefe’s talents because that’s what he drove best.

  We drove around for a while just bugging out and trying to relax. We cruised all over town and before we knew it we’d found ourselves in Brooklyn. Like comedians we continuously snapped on one another. But our laughing and horsing around had almost cost us an opportunity. Fortunately, Kwame’s sharp eagle eyes saved us.

  “Kwame, what’s up?” Randy asked after seeing the hunger in Kwame’s eyes.

  “Over there, across the street, that 735 BMW. The one that that black girl is about to get in! Holz, hurry up and get over there now!” Kwame hollered.

  No sooner had Kwame spoken, than my foot was on the gas pedal. I swung the car around, causing a screeching sound, not to mention making an illegal U-turn and running a red light.

  “Let me out here,” Latiefe instructed.

  The car came to a screeching halt as I slammed on the brakes.

  “No, no, stay in the car!” Randy cautioned. “Don’t run up on her ’cause she might get scared. Play it smooth. Yo, Holz, drive up to her real slow.”

  As I drove alongside the young lady, Randy, while rolling down his window, leaned out and spoke to the lady.

  “Um, excuse me, sweetheart, but can I talk to you for a second? How you doing? . . . Oh you’re doing fine? . . . That’s good, ’cause you look fine, but you probably already know that though, right? . . . Ah, I see I got you laughing, so before I mess things up, let me ask you, do you have a name? . . . Ayesha? . . . That’s a pretty name, you know. It’s like it’s not too white and it’s not one of those over exaggerated African names like Shaniqua . . . Oh, you laughing at that too? . . . I know that you don’t have all day, but, Ayesha, this is my friend Mike, that’s Keith, and oh yeah, my name is Willie, and that guy over there, that’s my man, Steve.”

  Ayesha returned the crew’s hellos. At that point Latiefe opened his door, got out, and walked over to Ayesha.

  “Ayesha, nice to meet you,” Tee said. “Yo, that’s a real nice car. Word!”

  Ayesha must have sensed something because she immediately started to make her way back to her car.

  “Yeah, this is my man’s car.”

  “Well,” Latiefe said while pulling out his Mac-11, “it was your man’s car, but it’s my car now. Give me the keys or you’ll be lying dead right hear on Atlantic Avenue! Now you wouldn’t want your man to see you like that, would you?”

  Faced with the choice of life or death, Ayesha grudgingly handed over the keys. She also admonished us for
being suckers who had to use a gun in order to carjack a female.

  We didn’t fall for her reverse psychology tricks. Latiefe grabbed the keys and we were out with a spanking ride. We headed straight for the chop shop. Kwame, Randy, and I followed behind Latiefe.

  Coincidence had it that once we arrived at the chop shop we saw Dwight, Earl, and Wiggie. They had made off with a plush, money green Jag. While we discussed the intricate details of our separate jackings, Latiefe, who had con artistry in his blood, hunted around the junk yard for a man named Sal.

  It took him a while to find Sal, but when he found him he quietly explained that we were friends of Donnie and that we had just grabbed two late model cars. He told Sal that the cars had been snatched less than an hour ago. Such a quick time frame had to give Sal some reassurance because the last thing that a chop shop wanted was merchandise that was simply too hot to handle, such as a one week old stolen car.

  Sal was real cool about the whole situation. As he spoke he used a lot of hand gestures.

  “Tell your friends to get outta here,” he said with a slang, New York Italian accent. “I’m dealing with you and only you. This is not a social club. When I do business, I only speak to one person. You know what I’m saying? You make money, I make money, you know? So if you want to talk business, let’s talk.” After speaking, Sal rudely walked away as if he were disgusted.

  Latiefe instructed us to wait around the corner or wherever. We argued with Latiefe because we all wanted to be in on the intricacies of the deal. Latiefe seemed a bit heated by our sinister eagerness to be in on the deal-making. He gave us two options, which were, either we could let him and Sal do their thing so we could get some loot, or we could be hard-headed and let our efforts go down the drain. Needless to say, we all understood the point that Latiefe was trying to make. We reluctantly left him alone with Sal and we patiently waited around the corner for everything to unfold.

  How could someone kill a two-year-old? I thought to myself as we waited. I couldn’t seem to get the murders earlier that week out of my head. A little girl who had everything to live for, how could it happen? She couldn’t even have ratted on us to the cops. Man, a two-year-old baby—she probably just learned to talk.