A
dark secret that had been kept for more than 33 years may finally have
burst into the light last week when, law enforcement officials say, a
Milwaukee man told his wife, a counselor, a TV station and finally the
police that he had killed a girl.
The
fate of Carrie Ann Jopek, 13, gripped the city when she vanished in
1982, and again when her body was found, but then it faded into a very
cold case. On Saturday, at long last, someone was charged in her death:
Jose E. Ferreira Jr., a neighbor who was 16 at the time.
“I
always prayed that we would find out, that we would find closure, but I
had to wait,” Carrie’s mother, Carolyn Tousignant, said in a telephone
interview. “It’s a relief.”
Mrs.
Tousignant, who still lives in the same house, on the block where her
daughter was killed, said she had known Mr. Ferreira as a teenager, and
“he didn’t seem that bad,” so she always thought it unlikely that he was
the killer. But one detail, she said, gave her pause.
“After they found Carrie’s body, he told me she was haunting him,” she said.
Carrie
was last seen alive on March 16, 1982, at a party in a neighbor’s
house, and at first it was not clear whether she had just run away from
home. Almost a year and a half later, her body was found buried under
the back porch of the house where the party was held.
Mr.
Ferreira, now 50, was at the party, lived two houses away from her and
had always been considered a suspect, but the police were unable to
build a case against him or anyone else.
Then
on Oct. 11, Mr. Ferreira’s wife walked into a police station and said
her husband had just called her and “told her that he was responsible
for killing a female and burying her body under a porch in Milwaukee,”
according to the criminal complaint filed against him.
That
same day, a local television station, WISN, and a counselor at a mental
health crisis hotline both reported to the police that a caller had told them much the same story.
In both cases, the caller provided information that seemed to identify
him as Mr. Ferreira. The police arrested him the next day, and he gave
them an account of that long-ago party.
He
and Carrie started down the basement stairs. But when she had second
thoughts about being alone with him, the complaint says, “he pushed
Carrie down the stairs and observed her body strike the railing and the
wall and fall to the basement floor.”
An autopsy later found she had a broken neck, a fractured skull and a fatal hemorrhage.
“The
defendant states that he thought she was ‘knocked out,’ and saw this as
‘an opportunity,’ ” feeling her breasts through her clothes, the
complaint says. Then, realizing that she was dead, it says, he carried
her out a basement door and buried her.
At
a brief hearing on Saturday, Mr. Ferreira, who was charged with
second-degree murder, was ordered held on $200,000 bond, pending a
hearing on Oct. 27.
On
the day she died, Carrie was sent home early from school, suspended for
being out of class without permission. Her mother said she might have
been trying to get suspended, so she could go to the party.
“She
was basically a good girl, but if you told her one thing, she did the
opposite,” Mrs. Tousignant said. “Even if she came home that day, she
would have snuck out. She had a mind of her own.”
Source: NY Times
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