Town note
In the 1730s a group of Quakers moved north from Purchase, New York, and settled what is now Chappaqua, building their homes on Quaker Road, later renamed Quaker Street.
about 0:05:42The story
Chappaqua, New York, is a wealthy hamlet in Westchester County, about thirty minutes from New York City. He told the police that a stranger had forced their Mitsubishi Montero to the shoulder of the Saw Mill River Parkway, climbed into the back seat and opened fire.
His mother took him back to Puerto Rico, where his grandparents raised him, and at about the age of four he went to live with his mother's brother Ramon, an attorney in San Juan, and Ramon's wife Mercedes, a teacher. They brought him up comfortably. He was bright, read and wrote by the age of four, was thrown out of several private schools, and later attended the American school in Puerto Rico, where his English improved. He wanted to go to Columbia University in New York, and he did, graduating before returning to the University of Puerto Rico School of Law. He disliked the politics of the law school and, through an arrangement with Ramon, spent a year at Columbia Law School before finishing his degree in Puerto Rico. He became a lawyer in San Juan, won his first nine cases and, by the age of twenty-five, was a rising defence attorney in the middle of the drug trade boom. He defended drug traffickers and was paid well, often in cash.
Peggy Hall was born in Lexington, Kentucky, on 3 September 1951, one of nine children in a middle-class Catholic family. Her father worked for the National Weather Service. She graduated from high school in 1969, worked in Lexington for a year and then applied to Eastern Airlines, becoming a stewardess based in New York. She had never flown before. They met for dinner, danced, and spent the next day together in the rainforest outside San Juan. They took an apartment in the Bronx. After about six months he left Legal Aid for private practice, and most of his work was drug-related. In 1984 their second son, Merced, was born, and they bought a house in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. In 1987 they moved to Chappaqua, where they bought a modest five-bedroom colonial. He suffered for months before seeing a doctor, was treated with antibiotics and given Prozac, collapsed once in a hospital and was out of work for two months. The family moved back to Puerto Rico in 1996, but Peggy hated it and they returned to Chappaqua in 1999. Peggy began work as a teaching assistant at Douglas Grafflin Elementary School, a job she loved even though it paid less than $22,000 a year.
His legal career came apart in 2006. He was under investigation for professional misconduct, including misappropriating client funds. The disciplinary committee found a pattern of misrepresentation, neglect and failure to return unearned fees, noted a prior discipline in 1998 and the loss of his Puerto Rico licence in 2000, and disbarred him in 2006. His income stopped, the mortgage and credit cards fell behind, and he began talking about bankruptcy. He also took out several life insurance policies on Peggy and increased the coverage in the months before her death.
She later married and moved to suburban Atlanta, where she worked as an assistant manager at Kohl's, and the affair continued. On 16 November 2006 he called 1-800-Flowers and ordered a birthday bouquet to arrive on 18 November.
At about 12.30 he bought a frozen pizza at D'Agostino's for them to share. They left home at about 3.30, drove into Manhattan, saw a show at about four o'clock and then window-shopped around Fifth Avenue. At about eight o'clock they went to Frère Jacques, a French restaurant on 37th Street, where they drank cosmos. They left at about 9.30. At about eleven o'clock, on the Saw Mill River Parkway near the exit for Reader's Digest Road, a car forced them onto the shoulder and a man got into the back seat. He called 911, refused to pull over and drove to Northern Westchester Hospital, where the Montero ended up wedged in the emergency entrance. Peggy was declared brain dead the next day and was removed from life support a couple of days later.
He gave a description of the gunman that changed from Hispanic to white but not Irish white. He said the shooting happened at one spot on Route 100, but blood and shell casings were found farther north, near Echo Lake, and a few days later divers found a pre-Second World War Walther PPK in the lake. Forensic examination found no fingerprints, DNA, shoe prints or signs of forced entry in the car, and no blood in the back seat. The medical examiner found the fatal shot had been fired from close range inside the car, with the muzzle against the headrest, and the defence expert disputed the stippling evidence. His right hand tested negative, but his left hand was bandaged and not swabbed. His financial records showed a checking balance that fell from $65,732.97 in May to $2.97 in November, $178.09 at Citibank, a $9,528.19 credit card balance and two HSBC cards in collection.
The prosecution argued that he had killed his wife for the insurance money and to escape his debts, and pointed to the gun, the headrest, the residue, the insurance policies and his affair. The defence, led by Robert Buckley and Christopher McClure, argued that the shooting was a random roadside ambush, that the 911 call showed genuine panic, that the affair was over and that the forensic case was unreliable.