Every once in a while a news story jumps off the page and this one,
with its echo of Poe’s “The Black Cat” and “The Cask of Amontillado” was one of
them. While the facts of the murder were
reported by numerous news outlets, The New
York Times did the most in-depth story.
Called “In
a Cluttered Home, a Dark Secret 3 Decades Old” by Vivian Yee, it takes us
inside the home of James and JoAnn Nichols at 720 Vassar Road in Poughkeepsie
NY.
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| 720 Vassar Road |
The story began two days after Christmas when neighbors realized they
had not seen Mr. Nichols, who was retired from his job at IBM, for nearly a
week and called the police. When the officers arrived to do a wellness check,
they found him slumped in a chair, dead of natural causes at age 82. This isn’t an uncommon occurrence. Neither was the fact that the house was
filled with decaying books, tools, trash, cameras and computers. Several sheds behind the house were also
filled with junk. Mr. Nichols had lived
there alone there since 1985, when he reported his wife missing. Their son had died three years earlier in a
drowning accident.
Six months later, contractors
went in to clean out the decaying house and found something odd in the
basement: a hollow-sounding false wall.
Behind that wall was a container like a barrel and inside the barrel
were the skeletal remains of Mrs. Nichols, wrapped in a black garbage bag and
tied with a rope. The Dutchess County
Medical Examiner determined that she had died of blunt-force trauma to the head.
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| JoAnn Nichols |
So this man killed his wife, shoved her into a garbage bag and stuffed
her in a barrel, then walled her body up in the basement. Then he lived alone in that house for the
next 27 years.
Did anyone think Mr. Nichols was normal?
The neighbors weren’t surprised.
He made them feel uneasy; they called him weird, odd, unemotional and
“kind of cold.” His wife didn’t say much
but complained that he kept their dead cat frozen in the refrigerator because
it creeped her out when she cooked. She
also didn’t like the way he kept the vehicle that had been involved in their
son’s death parked out in the driveway.
The police weren’t surprised. A
detective on the case called Mr. Nichols, “the coldest individual I have ever
dealt with.” Although they suspected
him, they had no grounds for a search warrant.
Too bad. A quick walkthrough with
a cadaver-trained dog would have found Mrs. Nichols pretty quickly.
He worked at IBM for his entire career.
Were his co-workers surprised?
Did they suspect him or think he was normal?
I think about all the people who worked with him for those years and
wonder whether they accepted him as a normal person with a few idiosyncrasies. After all, who suspects a co-worker of
bludgeoning his wife to death? Did they include
him in their activities or avoid him in the hall? Did he go out to lunch with them or eat alone
in the cafeteria? Did his boss like
him? Did he supervise others? Did anyone complain about him? Was anyone afraid of him?
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| IBM Poughkeepsie NY |
The articles don’t say what Mr. Nichols’s job was at IBM or in which of
the Poughkeepsie facility buildings he worked.
We do know this, however. In a company as large, as structured, as
organized as IBM, Mr. Nichols must have received a performance review every
year. Human Resources must have had an
employee file on him.
I wonder what it said. Was he described as a quiet man who got things done? Was he a problem who got passed from department to department? Or was it “Heckuva job James!”
I wonder what it said. Was he described as a quiet man who got things done? Was he a problem who got passed from department to department? Or was it “Heckuva job James!”
The files are confidential so we’ll never know. What we do know is that IBM hired him and
employed him for many years without finding anything sufficiently problematical
in his performance or his conduct to dismiss him. This speaks to the willingness of
companies, particularly technology companies, to put up with aberrant behavior.
It also tells us something about the power of denial. However odd Mr. Nichols’s behavior might have been, he
clearly never committed a firing offense.
People at IBM may have found him strange and unlikable but certainly not
homicidal. His behavior at work had no
impact on his performance or his ability to do his job, which would have been
the only thing that mattered.
Once the crime scene tape comes down and the buildings have been
cleared, the
house at 720 Vassar Road will be sold.
I do hope that the spirit of JoAnn Nichols isn’t haunting it. After 28 years, she deserves to get out of
there.
Related posts:
- Denial Part 2: Why Would He/She Do Something Like That?
- Law Professor M.E. Evans Takes Us Inside the Mind of a Sociopath
- Why Would He/She Do Something Like That?
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