Among Murderers. Sabine Heinlein
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didn't discuss what we would talk about, Angel must have anticipated what I wanted to know.
All he had told me by this point was that he had killed “a friend” when he was eighteen. Through the Inmate Lookup Search Engine of the New York State Department of Corrections, I learned that he hadn't told me the whole story. In addition to the murder he committed, the site listed an attempted murder and an escape. Although it provided me with more information about Angel than Angel had provided, it amounted only to a peek through the keyhole. It obscured the circumstances under which he had committed his crimes, and the victims remained unnamed, as did the precise length of his prison sentence. His minimum prison sentence was given as fifteen years, but his maximum sentence was indeterminate: “LIFE years, 99 months, 99 days.”
A life sentence means that a prisoner can be denied parole and that even if he is released he could potentially remain on parole for the rest of his life. The additional “99 months, 99 days” are of course rhetorical: a murderer always remains a murderer, even after his death.
Angel wore a pair of mirrored sunglasses. All I could see was my reflection, glimpses of the river, and, once or twice, a barge passing by. He began to talk about remorse.
“I had just turned eighteen, and I committed this crime. This horrible, horrible crime. A terrible thing, and I always regretted it. People talk about remorse, but most people don't understand what the word remorse really means. Remorse means more than just saying ‘I'm sorry.’ Remorse means changing your life. Remorse is feeling sorry in your heart, feeling true regret, irrespective of what people think. Remorse is something that I have learned. I felt bad the moment after I did it. I had crossed the line and I could never go back. I think I wanted to go to prison. I wanted to pay. Which is strange. I confessed. I went to prison for something else, and they asked me about it and I confessed anyway.”
On February 27, 1978, Angel and his friend had met at 8:30 a.m. in an apartment on 118th Street and Pleasant Avenue. He had access because he had been helping a “drunk handyman” paint the place. He and his friend found themselves arguing about a kid who had accidentally shot himself in the head. “He had found his father's gun in the drawer, and he had pulled the gun and shot himself. And we were arguing about that—I said it was the parents’ fault; she said that it was the kid's fault.”
“She?” I asked. This was how I learned that Angel had killed a woman, and I was stunned.
I tried to gather myself. “Was she your girlfriend?”
“A girl friend, not a love interest,” Angel continued, seemingly annoyed by my question. “It was a girl—which is embarrassing to me.” He paused before going on to explain he had grown up with the girl. “So we got into this argument, which was stupid. She said it was the kid's fault, and I said it was the parents’ fault. And she goes, ‘You don't know nothing, you are stupid.’ And I said, ‘Don't call me stupid.’ She had an attitude, that's what it was. But no reason to kill somebody, because they got an attitude.
“She slapped me and that's all she wrote. I just lost my motherfucking mind.”
Angel strangled sixteen-year-old Olga Agostini with a rope he had been using to play cat's cradle.
“I was playing with a rope that I found, you know, making those little triangles in your hand? I was playing with that, and I strangled her with it. The moment I started, I realized, ‘Oh, my God! Look what you made me do!’ And that became an angle. How dare you put me in such a position.”
I noticed myself staring at Angel's hands. I found it uncomfortable to look at his mirrored glasses and see myself while he talked about strangling the girl. His hands are small, wide, and brown, with neatly cut fingernails. They are meaty and round. I lifted my eyes to his face and concentrated on his mouth. He has large, pink lips, speckled with gray, and plaque on his teeth.
“I was thinking, ‘Oh, my God! Look what I'm doing.’ Almost like, ‘How could you do this to me? How could you put me in this position ?’” Angel continued. “I just got angrier and angrier. All of a sudden, she became all my anger that I have ever felt, about my parents, about everything that had gone into my life at that point, all the disappointment. It just kept bubbling forth. There was such a rage. I think in that moment I hated my life. I hated life and everything in it. And I always said that to myself: I think in that moment I hated life and everything in it. That is about as intense as people get.”
After strangling Olga, Angel felt a sense of relief. He went to his apartment and waited.
“After I woke up from the moment of intense anger, she was still on the ground in the hallway, and I wasn't sure if she was dead or not. So I went up to her and I started feeling her pulse.” Angel touched his neck to demonstrate. “I realized, ‘Oh, my God!’ Anyway. I was like, ‘Oh, shit, what do I do now?’ So I went into panic mode. ‘I got to remove the body. I can't deal with this right now.’
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