M. William Phelps has given ICB an “exclusive” excerpt from his new book, DEADLY SECRETS.
As the marketing for the book proclaims …
In the lovely town of Pleasant Valley in upstate New York, the maple trees were ablaze with fall's blood-red color. The air was crisp. And a woman named Susan Fassett left her weekly choir practice at a church - when a killer emerged from the shadows and mercilessly gunned her down...Stunned, the police immediately suspect Susan Fassett's husband and surround his home. They couldn't have been more wrong. Susan Fassett had been living a secret life, entangled in a passionate web of dominance, lesbian sex, betrayal - and a depraved plan for murder. After detectives untangled a web of secrets and corruption hidden in plain sight, the town of Pleasant Valley would be rocked again when a shocking trial exposed the whole sordid truth...
This gripping book has extortion, prostitution, government corruption, group sex and murder at its core. Amazingly, the killer, Dawn Silvernail, who refused to speak to reporters about the case, gave M. William Phelps exclusive interviews.
“That is how this case is being marketed,” Phelps said recently. “And, for the most part, it is all true, in some sort of quasi-Lifetime Television way. For me, however, this book is about hubris, abuse of power, small-town politics gone haywire (a brilliant word, incidentally, few of us use anymore), and influence going to one man’s head. But it is also about a son coming to terms with the death of his mother, who he valued as his best friend. This book proves that when a sociopath truly wants you dead, there’s very little you can do to stop it.”
Prologue
On that morning, after she dragged herself out of bed, put on her large-framed glasses, lit that first cigarette of the day and looked out the window, she began to think about her life. The wooded area surrounding her house reminded her how much she adored living in the Catskill Mountains. It was where she belonged. So secluded and pastoral. The air fresh, full of vitality. Almost too perfect a picture, really. This morning there was no wind. No snow. Temperatures in the high thirties, with just the right amount of punch in the air, reminding most that winter was soon coming. In fact, it occurred to her, as she sat, smoked and sipped her coffee, that Halloween was three days away. The kids would soon dress in plastic masks of former presidents, Power Rangers, Batman and Barbie, and walk up and down the neighborhood streets with pumpkin flashlights and toothless smiles.
The bliss. The splendor. The silence of the morning.
How had such a simple life, she thought, come down to this?
As she sat and considered things, the beauty of autumn and the innocence of living in the country meant little. She was in a terrible spot. Full of anxiety. Panic. Dismay. Even fear. Her gun was in the drawer underneath her waterbed, and whenever she walked by that area of the room, or sat down on the bed, it seemed to speak to her.
Finish the job.
Don’t do it.
But he’ll kill my son.
I must go through with it.
Indeed, there was one time not too long ago when she woke up in the middle of the night for no apparent reason and realized she was on the floor, staring at the open drawer, the gun sitting there atop her folded clothes looking back at her. And yet, she had no idea how she had gotten there.
“Psychologically,” she later explained, “it was working on me 24/7.”
It seemed so darn simple when she tossed it around in her mind. The threats to her family, she later claimed, in one respect, terrified her, and in another, made it easier to think about actually going through with his plan. She had known him for twenty-plus years. “He had a reputation,” she once said, “for being able to make bad things happen to people. Good people.”
He had connections in town—or, rather, that’s what he led people to think.
“I believed he was as powerful as John Gotti,” she later admitted.
“I know people,” he had once told her. “I’m connected,” was how he put it.
And that’s how this entire idea of murder began: a few idle threats and a seemingly routine telephone call with an invitation. “Come to my house,” he said. “We need to talk about things.”
He sounded serious and, all at the same time, urgent, which he could accomplish with that almost mature natural inflection of his. His tone, she said, could be menacing and put fear in you, but without alarm. He could intimidate and bully in subtle ways, without raising his voice.
The master manipulator.
The man with the gun in his hand.
The marionette who pulled the strings.
He was all of these.
And more.
Weeks before that October 28, 1999, morning, she drove the hour south from the Catskills, down into Pleasant Valley and on into Poughkeepsie, then Hyde Park, where he had lived all his life.
His wife wasn’t home when she arrived.
She never was.
“Come in,” he said, answering the door. “Come. I want to show you something.” He had a cocky smile on his face. He was up to something. She knew it.
Pulling into the driveway moments before, she had glanced over at the new garage out in back of his house. Nearly $500,000 dollars’ worth of metal, wood, concrete and aluminum. Where’d he get the money for that? Moreover, she knew the inside of that garage as if it were her own home. She had been in there with him—and her—and the others. She later said she hated herself for doing it. But then, he had that kind of control over people. He had always made her do things she didn’t want to.
And she did them.
For him. It was all for him.
Or so she said.
Walking into his house, she looked toward the dining room table, where he had a collection of photographs in a scattered pile, all spread out so she could see each one clearly. He encouraged her to take a closer look, saying, “Go ahead.” Then, pointing to one in particular, “You see that one?”
At first she was confused. Then horrified, she later said: “My mom, my son, my sisters, my stepchildren, my in-laws, my husband, everybody that was close to me. These were pictures that captured each one of these people in a setting where they were by themselves in a lonely place.”
Explaining further, she said there was a photograph of her aunt, for example, walking her dog. Just a casual stroll around the Catskill neighborhood where she lived with her husband. It was secluded and woodsy, where gun shots are a common occurrence. Someone had snapped an image of her aunt from afar, as if the photographer was conducting surveillance.
She picked it up off the table and pulled it closer. She couldn’t believe it.
“It would be a real shame,” he said as she lifted her glasses off the bridge of her nose to get a clearer view, staring intensely at the photo, “if there were a hit-and-run accident. That lady could be get badly hurt.”
She couldn’t believe what he was implying. He had said it with that low monotone: a clever little caveat implicit in the nuance of his voice she knew all too well. He didn’t need to make a direct threat. No doubt something he had perfected from his years of bossing people around as the water superintendent in nearby Poughkeepsie. He loved that: the control. To be able to tell people what to do. It made him feel like he was somebody. Being short in stature, many later said, he had that dreaded short person’s chip on his shoulder: a Napoleon complex. Today, though, standing in his kitchen, with those photos spread across the table as she stood next to him and trembled, he was larger than life. Ten feet tall.
She winced. Are you serious?
“In addition to members of your family staying healthy,” he snapped, “I’ll exonerate that debt you owe me.”
The photograph of her son hurt more than any of them. Her son was standing on the dock of the building where he worked, smoking a cigarette, staring off into the distance.
Man, how she loved that kid, her only child.
To put it into context, she later said, “This building is out in the middle of nowhere.”
He watched as she stared at that photo. He let her think about it some. Then he said, “It’d sure be a shame if there was a drive-by shooting and your son was hit. Out there, nobody would ever know. The noise of all those machines inside the building …”
He sort of laughed to himself.
Standing, thinking about the photographs and his threats, she went through their life together. She remembered that his first wife had been terrified of him. During the divorce proceedings, he had hired someone to run her off the road. Then, apparently, she later heard, he hired a dump truck driver to swerve into her lane and hit her. It never happened. But the implication was always there that no one refused him when he wanted something.
“If this man would do that to a woman he supposedly loved,” she told herself, “what’s he going to do to people he doesn’t even know?”
Some friend. She had believed, in so many different ways, that they were friends. She had known him for so long. Two decades and counting. She’d slept with him when no other woman would have him. Kept him company when his wives walked out. He’d even proposed marriage to her once; but she turned him down. “Friends with benefits,” was the deal between them. Nothing more. She could never love him that way. They had been through so much together. Births and deaths. Wives and husbands. Sure, she owed him a bundle, borrowing $300 here, $400 there, running a tab of close to—and again, this is her count—five thousand dollars. But when she borrowed the money, he had always told her, “Don’t worry about it. No need to pay me back.”
Now she knew why. Now he wanted that money back—but in a different way. It was as if their lives together, and so-called “friendship,” had led up to this one furtive, seminal moment that would help shape their future. He had been grooming her. She could wipe out her debt to him in one fatal moment, he suggested, and, at the same time, save her family from being hurt.
It was her choice. Take it … or, of course, leave it.
But then, if she walked away, she’d have to live with the consequences, he insisted, which were sitting on the table in front of her.
She felt involved to a point where there was only one way out—or at least that’s how she saw it. She had to do what he wanted. There was no other way. He would hurt her family. He would expose all of those nasty, salacious sexual acts she had been doing for him with those other men and that other woman, whom he now wanted dead—sexual acts he had on videotape. It would destroy her reputation. Ruin her marriage. She’d lose the respect of her son. Not to mention her job.
Was there any other choice?
Deadly Secrets Excerpt © Copyright M. William Phelps 2009. All Rights Reserved.
M. William Phelps is the author of 12 books: Perfect Poison, Lethal Guardian, Every Move You Make, Sleep In Heavenly Peace, Murder in the Heartland, Because You Loved Me, If Looks Could Kill, I’ll Be Watching You, Cruel Death (2009), Deadly Secrets (2009), Nathan Hale, and Failures of the Presidents
On July 7, 2009, M. William Phelps’s tenth true-crime book, CRUEL DEATH, drops. It is the story of thrill killers Erika and Benjamin “BJ” Sifrit, those snake-loving, Xanax- and cocaine-snorting Hitler fans who committed one of the most heinous crimes of the past ten years.
photographs, police reports, military reports, depositions, interviews with the perpetrators, and scores of other documents to write this book, a process of which becomes, at times, like putting together the pieces of a puzzle. But here, within the pathos of this case, the way the victims were treated before, during and (especially) after death was so profoundly evil and cruel—there are not enough adjectives in the English language to describe the treatment these victims endured—that as I wrote about it, a part of me began to drift into a despair I had never experienced while writing true-crime. It made for an incredibly bumpy road—emotionally. There were days when I had to put this project aside, due to the graphic nature of what I had uncovered, and work on something else. There were also days when I thought I could not go back to it.
BJ Sifrit was honor man in a class of seventeen Navy SEALs; a quiet, clean-cut, wholesome looking twenty-something from Texas. Erika was from a loving, caring, wealthy family; a business owner; an all-American high school basketball player.
