Talk of the Town

A Starbucks queue is one of the unlikelier places, in the 21st century, for a spontaneous face-to-face conversation to break out. Anybody under 40 is staring down at his or her smartphone. Most people over that age either are doing the same or, like me, are crabbily wondering exactly when standing idly for a couple of minutes became unendurable.

There’s something about a quadruple homicide, though, that gets mouths to moving.

I’m referencing here a recent crime in DC that was noteworthy enough in its heinousness, but particularly in its specific location, to make not just the local but the national news. A rich industrialist and his wife, their 10-year-old son, and a 57-year-old housekeeper were held captive and later (after $40,000 had been delivered at the threatened homeowner’s behest) murdered in their own home, which is located in an upscale neighborhood in Northwest between the National Cathedral and the US Naval Observatory. The residence then was set afire in an unsuccessful attempt to cover up the crimes.

It didn’t take law enforcement long to link the murders to a former employee of the slain industrialist. His whereabouts quickly were traced to Brooklyn and then back to DC, where he was arrested in Northeast and now is in custody.

Even in Washington—a city well-used to all manner of crime, deceit and spectacle—the slaying of four people, including a child, within a half-mile of the vice president’s residence was attention-getting. So much so that it prompted two smartphone-wielding young women—20-ish, I’d say—to look up from their screens in the Starbucks line on New Mexico Avenue NW, near American University, and verbally express their shock to each other. Whereupon a woman roughly 50 years their senior offered them her Washington Post to Read All About It in old-school newsprint. As one of the young woman gingerly held the paper in front of her, like a dusty musket at a firearms museum, and read the headline—“Suspect in Quadruple Killings Captured in DC, Police Say”—I chimed in with, “Thank God the guy just had to have pizza.”

This was because the big break in the case was a fingerprint left on a Domino’s box by the man later arrested. According to police, just as the husband had been forced by his captor to order thousands of dollars in cash delivered to the residence, the wife had been forced, the night before she and the others were killed, to order a couple of pies from the Domino’s in the nearby Tenleytown neighborhood.  

(My friend Joey in Charlotte later commented by email that, for a man with such a flamboyant approach to killing, the alleged murderer has surprisingly pedestrian taste in pizza. My response was that you’d think a guy who was plotting out such an elaborate crime would’ve thought to pack himself a sandwich.)

The four of us in the Starbucks line last Friday morning agreed that the whole pizza thing did not exactly bespeak “criminal mastermind.” The older woman opined that death would be too good for the accused—torture being a necessary antecedent to capital punishment. The younger women seemed noncommittal—possibly because they don’t believe in the death penalty, but more likely because the incensed senior spit out the word “torture” with a demented glee that suggested she likely has wet dreams about Dick Cheney.

I elected not to share with the others the fact that I’d just completed a morning run past the murder scene—lest I seem, like the older lady, a little too personally invested in the whole sordid affair. But the fact is, I’d parked my car in Northwest that morning and set out for Woodland Drive—a street I knew well from past runs—with the express purpose of finding out exactly which house we were talking about here.

It wasn’t hard to spot. The patrol car out front, the abundant crime-scene tape, the burned-out shell behind that tape, and the scent of smoke in the air all conspired to give the location away. So, now I’ve got another Murder House past which to run on my morning rounds of the city and its close-in suburbs. As I’d noted in my blog post of June 2, 2012, “Grim-Reality TV,” it’s a tour of tragedy that also includes, but is not limited to, the Maryland house in which an ex-State Department employee bludgeoned his family to death in the 1970s, the wooded hillside in Rock Creek Park where slain internist Chandra Levy’s remains were found in 2002, and the Northwest DC house in which a promising Indian-American poet—a tenant of prize-winning novelist Howard Norman—stabbed to death her two-year-old son and then herself in 2003.

I’d brought my own Washington Post to Starbucks from home, so once I got my coffee I read the article the older woman had pointed out. I’d already heard the basics about the arrest on the radio, but the newspaper story held other interesting details. For one thing, the accused—one  Daron Dylon Wint, age 34—was traveling in a caravan when arrested, with a white box truck ahead of him. The two guys in the truck were believed to be relatives of Wint’s, and the truck contained “at least $10,000 in cash.” I’m not an attorney, but I sense that detail could bode ill for the defendant at the time of trial.

Speaking of the trial, the other thing in the article that piqued my interest was the name of a one-time defense attorney of Wint’s who opined that his former client was “the last one I’d suspect of anything like this.” The lawyer’s name was Robin Ficker. As Joey put it in his email to me, “That Robin Ficker.”

Ficker is well known to sports fans like Joey because he achieved regional infamy decades ago as a heckler at Washington Bullets (now Wizards) basketball games. He is better known now to his fellow Montgomery County, Maryland, residents, like me, as an insufferable blowhard who’s perpetually running for political office and petitioning against pretty much all forms of government taxation, no matter how essential they might be to things like maintaining the public order and keeping the bridges from collapsing.

I hadn’t realized until I read that article that Robin Ficker’s day job is defense attorney, which strikes me as a surprisingly constructive societal role for him to be playing, although Ficker himself undoubtedly sees it as one more way of screwing with The Man. I’d have guessed that a guy with Ficker’s public skill set might, rather, be the proprietor of a bullhorn company, or headmaster of a training academy for Tea Party candidates.

Ficker had represented Wint, according to the Post, in “about six minor criminal and traffic cases,” and hadn’t seen his former client in 10 years. “He’s not a match for this type of activity at all,” Ficker said of the murders, before adding that line about Wint being “the last one I would suspect.”

First of all, the last person I’d expect to commit murder would be a nun or the Dalai Lama, not a guy who was in need of constant representation for criminal and traffic offenses, however “minor.” But second of all, you’d think a local defense attorney might have caught wind of some of Wint’s more recent run-ins with the law, like threatening the life of his own father (who received a restraining order), punching and groping a woman at a bar, and being rousted out from behind a gas station dumpster, where he was found to be carrying a machete and a pellet gun.

Sure, Wint is innocent until proven guilty, and all that. But he’s not the last guy I’d suspect of the murders on Woodland Drive. I'm just sayin’.   

In fact, I may bring that up if I’m on standing line at a Starbucks during the trial. Because I have a hunch that the kinds of juicy details that tend to come out during public testimony will get people talking.