The Imagined Middle

The Imagined Middle

WGNU Radio Host Charged with Murdering Woman

(KSDK) - A St. Louis radio talk show host is charged with murdering a young woman.

Leonardo Drisdel, 46, is accused of beating, cutting and biting Cassandra Kovack, 28. Drisdel told his wife he was smoking crack with Kovack Saturday night when he heard voices that told him to attack her. Kovack's body was found Sunday. Police say she had been kicked, beaten, stabbed and bitten. Drisdel is being held without bond. He worked for WGNU as the host of "The Human Factor.

Prelude

She dressed carefully for dinner. A simple white turtleneck and khaki slacks were what she ultimately chose because she didn’t want to chance him thinking dinner was an invitation. As the noodles cooked she pulled her hair into a bun and lit some incense, vanilla, then pulled out two wine glasses and set the table with mismatched dinnerware from a garage sale.

She’d known him for several years, though not the kind of knowing that makes for close friends, spent many late nights at the diner laughing over the antics of painted drunkards and listened quietly to his complaints on the fall of society. She wouldn’t have trusted him in a romantic way, for what kind of man would leave two young children and a wife at home while he gallivanted about town, but he was a harmless kind of guy; principled, opinionated, self-righteous, and a small town celebrity.

Cassandra was the kind of woman who trusted, marginally, but never very deeply. She would befriend a man like Leonardo, feel sorry for his story of another lonely birthday, cook him dinner and be polite but not the kind of woman to really invite him in. That sacred right was an earned one and took a very long time to achieve.

As she tossed the salad she thought about the approaching week. Her brother was coming to visit on Friday, and she was a little nervous about it. A few years back she’d been hospitalized for a psychiatric problem and, though she knew she wasn’t sick, it was hard to convince her brother that she was really getting it back together. Of course, it didn’t help that she was currently unemployed, but it wasn’t like she couldn’t get a job if she really had to. He wanted her to move back to Chicago with their dad, but she liked it in St. Louis, this was where her life was, and she planned to stay for the foreseeable future; she even had an interview for a job at the coffee shop lined up for the next day.

Everything for dinner was done and she sat on the sofa to pet her cat and tried to read Voluntary Simplicity while she waited. Leonardo was due to be there in ten minutes and she wondered if he would be on time. She had trouble reading, always nervous before a guest showed up, and pulled out her cat’s favorite toy to play with her on the carpet for a few minutes before getting the food finished.

When the knock finally came, the noodles were draining. A thin red sauce was simmering on the stove, and the bottle of chardonnay was chilled. She opened the door with a smile and asked him to have a seat while she moved everything to the table. “Play with God,” she said, smiling, as she pointed at the cat.

***

“How’s life on radio treating you, Leo?” she asked as they sat down to dinner and she thought it must be going pretty well if a conservative black man could make it on the radio in St. Louis.

“There’s always some crazy bum to talk about. Just last week a little girl was shot riding down Newstead on her bike. They’re crazy out there! I just wonder why people let drugs and evil take over their lives,” Leo answered as he brought a bite of salad up to his lips.

“Hmm… well maybe they just don’t think about what they’re doing. A lot of people say they get trapped in a cycle of violence because it’s so hard out there…”

“That’s bullshit, Cassandra; I grew up in that kind of neighborhood. I saw evil everyday but I got out,” he said with disgust.

“But you had a good mother,” she answered solemnly as she wondered if she’d have ended up like that if her father hadn’t been so supportive of her when she was growing up.

“Yeah my Momma was good; she would have beat me good for acting a fool like those other kids. But it’s more than a Momma that makes a man. It’s a drive to escape, to have a better life and give it to your kids. A real man wouldn’t be sittin’ in the hood making new little thugs with a crackhead and killing little girls.”

She agreed that this was true. She would never consider such a person to be a real man. “But it’s not all their fault, I don’t think, Leo. I mean you got out but you had opportunity. I never lived in a rich neighborhood either, but we both had the chance to go to better schools and learn to think in a different way.”

“I like your innocence, Cass, but you’re too nice about it. If they had wanted to, they would have busted their black asses and got an education. There’s a hundred ways to go to college but most of them won’t even go to school, then they complain about not bein’ able to get a good job and make happy on welfare and stealing from old ladies. It’s pathetic.”

This was often the way of their conversations. Cassandra was known by many to be a bit of a conservative, she believed in responsibility and hard work, but Leonardo was a very right wing and unsympathetic man; he always brought out the most compassionate side of Cassie.

After dinner they retired to the living room and resumed their conversation about the world. Cassie suggested playing a game of cards and Leonardo said “Excuse me for a minute first.”

All of these things are what we can guess about the beginning of that night. Things we can assume because we knew Cassandra so well and have listened to Drisdel on the radio. It was not uncharacteristic of Cassie to cook dinner for a friend and she, too, was an opinionated individual. From here, though, everything becomes a bit murky, for we know the end and it makes no sense. The middle is where the questions lie; choose your poison and I’ll try to uncover the truth.

A.

Cassie cleared and washed the dishes while she waited for Leonardo to finish. She played with God for a little while and glanced frequently at the hall as she began to wonder if he was OK. The chairs were all pushed under, the magazine flipped through twice, before she stood and walked down the hall to knock on the door. “Are you all right Leo?” she asked softly.

He opened the door and said, “Yeah, you want some?” He was standing in front of the mirror holding a glass pipe out as if it were a normal thing to be offering.

“Leo! What the fuck? You can’t do that here! After all the times you yell about people doing this shit you come here, in my house, and smoke crack?”

“Chill out Cass, it’s my birthday, just a little something to cheer me up and make it memorable… you know?”

“No! I don’t know and I don’t want to know. You have to leave. Get out!” She realized she was screaming and it was probably not the best way to deal with someone who was all drugged up, but she was very pissed off and struggling to keep her temper in check.

He took the last puff of the rock and seemed to think about what she’d said. She could tell he was getting angry but she didn’t care. How dare he bring crack into my house? How dare he judge all those other crackheads when he is in my bathroom getting high? She thought in outrage.

“No baby, I’m not gonna leave now. It’s my birthday. I don’t feel like leaving yet.” he said with a friendly smile as he put the crack pipe, now empty, back into his pocket.

She refused, loudly and long, until he smacked her across the face. His hand left an angry red mark on her ivory skin and knocked her into the wall. She didn’t know what to do, at first, no man had ever hit her before.

After the first hit, so often the hardest, he gained his stride as he slapped her again and then closed his fists and began to hit her like she was a man. She began to fight back and tried to run at the same time. She went backward, into the living room, as he punched her and kicked her along. Tears streamed down her face as he ripped her hair from her scalp, punched her and sliced her arm with his pocketknife.

When he grabbed her head and bit down on her nose, she was already close to unconscious but still she wondered how anyone could bite someone like that. She’d screamed at the top of her lungs, fear giving her the strength to fight on, but no one ever came to stop him.

B.

Cassie cleared and washed the dishes while she waited for Leonardo to finish in the bathroom. She played with God for a while and flipped through a magazine twice. Finally, he emerged and seemed in brighter spirits. He sat down beside her and looked at her in a way that made her slightly uncomfortable.

“You know, I can think of a better game to play than cards,” he said with a lascivious grin.

“You’re married, Leonardo,” Cassie replied as she wondered how to get him out without hurting his feelings.

He leaned over and caressed her hair gently. “You have such beautiful hair, Cass. I can imagine what it will look like hanging down your back as I fuck you.”

She looked at him incredulously, her skin crawling under his touch, as she firmly told him “it’s not going to happen Leo. I wouldn’t have asked you over if I thought you’d think that…”

“You know you want me baby, why else would you cook me dinner and have me over here alone?”

“I know you won’t like this answer… but I felt sorry for you, Leo, you said it was your birthday and your wife wouldn’t be doing anything. You seemed lonely and you’re a friend. That’s the only reason I invited you at all.”

“Are you saying you don’t want me? You? You should be happy that a man like me would even consider fucking your fat ass. Look at you! You ain’t nothing! You live in one of the worst hoods in the city, you don’t have a job, you’re FAT and you can’t get a man. You’re turning me down? I don’t think so!” He got angrier and angrier with each word he said and Cassie became more and more afraid. This was not the Leonardo she’d spent hours of early mornings debating issues with. This was some scary guy who she could barely even imagine, and while she’d known some real losers in her life, it was not until this time that she’d ever really been afraid of one.

“I think you should leave now,” she quietly replied. She didn’t want to say anything to make him angrier and was a little lost about what to do.

“No, bitch, I think I should stay right here while you suck my cock!” and he grabbed a chunk of her long curly auburn hair and pushed her face toward his crotch.

It was then that she started fighting. She realized he was ready to rape her if she wouldn’t give in willingly, so she clawed at his hands and fell off the sofa in an attempt to escape him, but she couldn’t break free of his grasp. He stood up, pulling the whole chunk of hair from her scalp and began to kick her as she tried to get back on her feet.

“You bitch!” he screamed over and over.

“Help! Someone help me!” she rang out in reply. Once she regained her footing, he began to punch her in the face and all over her body. She tried to fight back, her heart raced and the tears of surprise and pain covered her cheeks, she punched and kicked at him but couldn’t get anywhere… he was six inches taller than she was.

He used a butter knife on her arms, pulled out every last lock of her long beautiful hair, and she couldn’t help but ask herself “Why?” as she tried to shield herself from his attacks. He bit off her nose and part of her cheek; by the time it was over there was little left of her to identify but she’d screamed until the end, pleading with God and her neighbors to save her. No one even called the police.

C.

Cassie cleared and washed the dishes while she waited for Leonardo to finish. She played with God for a little and glanced frequently at the hall as she began to wonder if he was OK. The chairs were all pushed under, the magazine flipped through twice, and Cassie sat on the couch petting God and humming an aria from Madame Butterfly until Leo finally sauntered down the hall.

“Sorry I was so long. Are you ready to get your ass kicked?” Leonardo asked with a smile as he pushed something deep into his pocket.

“You wish!” Cassie laughed as she pulled the coffee table closer to the sofa and began to deal the cards. “Is Rummy okay?”

“Sure.”

Cassie grabbed a pad of paper from the cubbyhole inside of the table and quickly wrote their names to keep score. “I used to play this all night with my friends down at the Grind. It brings back memories.”

“Yeah, Rummy’s always good for some laughs. Are you any good?”

“Passable. I have a friend who is pretty hard to beat… I thought I was good until I played her.” Cassie helped God resettle herself on her lap and asked, “Have you ever heard a cat purr as loud as God does?”

“I have to admit I never have.” Leo smiled and then picked up his hand to start the game.

They played several hands of Rummy with casual conversation interspersed. They were evenly matched at first, but Leo’s concentration rapidly deteriorated and soon Cassie began to wonder what was going on with him. “Hey, Leo, are you doing okay over there?”

He looked at her and then upward before answering. “I’m fine… are you okay?”

“Of course.”

“Well I’m starting to think you’re not okay Cassie… I’ve been hearing some really fucked up things about you lately.” Leo looked at her with an odd gleam in his eyes, and she wondered what he could have possibly heard about her; they didn’t exactly run in the same circles.

“Okay, I give. What have you been hearing?”

“Well… that you are evil. That you’ve got the devil inside of you and you need to be killed.”

Cassie laughed at his absurdity. “That’s pretty funny Leo. I’m evil and full of the devil? I’ve never heard that one before.”

“You don’t think I’m serious, do you?”

“Well… no, how could you be? That’s crazy.”

Leo stood up then and Cassie began to worry that the odd gleam in his eye was something to be afraid of. She stood and stepped backward until he had her against the wall.

“You’re scaring me, Leo.” Cassie quietly told him.

“Maybe you should be scared,” he answered as he leaned his face close to hers and closed his eyes momentarily. She could see he was battling something, but she didn’t really believe he could actually have meant the things he had just said. “Don’t move,” he told her as he took a step back. “Just give me a minute here.”

Then he leapt upon her without any warning, raining blows down upon her pale skin and tearing her hair out from the roots.

“Why, Leo, why are you doing this?” She screamed as he began to beat her in earnest.

“God has told me the truth about you. You have to die!” he screamed as he pulled his pocketknife from his pocket.

He used the knife to slice her arm but it was not big enough to do much damage. He would have to finish it with his hands. He punched her everywhere, as hard as he could and tried to block out her screams. He’d never used such violence but it came to him quickly once he’d begun.

Cassie couldn’t believe what was happening to her. She tried to block his blows and think of any way to reason with him. She pled for her life and cried, and even prayed to the God she’d never believed in, but she knew it was hopeless when she opened her eyes to watch him bite off her nose. No sane person would try to eat someone. She screamed even louder, knowing there were a hundred neighbors around her and hoping that they would get there in time. No one ever came.

Afterward:

Leonardo had beaten Cassandra to death with his bare fists. He’d slashed her with a knife, but it was not deep enough to kill her. It would have taken at least half an hour to do the damage he did with his hands, and he’d also bitten off her nose and part of her check.

He said that the night had begun innocently. That she had cooked him dinner, then they smoked some crack together and God had told him that Cassie had the devil in her and must be killed. He didn’t seem to regret that he’d killed her and, in fact, seemed to feel he had done the right thing… on orders from God.

As I drove myself over to the memorial service for Cassie I was haunted by an endless collage of memories and my imaginings of what her last moments might have been like. I imagined her face, full of terror, as she stared into the eyes of her murderer and tried to understand what was happening and I imagined how awful it must have been when the life drained from her beautiful eyes, eyes I remembered as being the perfect shade of summer afternoon middling blue, and disappeared forever.

I worried that there wouldn’t be many people, for all of the friends we had once shared were no longer in touch with her, and that I would have to face her family, and my own guilt, alone on that beautiful June day. My worries were unfounded, though, for as I pulled up to the pavilion where we would honor Cassie I saw a crowd of faces, both familiar and not, filling the grounds and helping to set up the long table of pictures and memories that we would fill in the course of the afternoon.

Being a naturally introverted sort of person, I spent several moments in my car before I was able to step out and face Cassie’s father. I felt somewhat responsible for her death, you see, for I had once promised her father, on a day very much like the day of her memorial, that I would look out for Cassie and make sure she was OK. It wasn’t only that I’d failed in my charge but that I’d completely given up on trying very shortly after the illness that caused Cassie’s father to ask the favor of me. I couldn’t help but think that if only I’d tried harder to keep up with her, if only we’d been friends still, then maybe she would have been with me that night and this terrible thing would have never happened. I wondered if he would remember my promise to him and blame me, as I blamed myself, for the death of his only daughter. He did not.

Her father wandered about the pavilion with swollen eyes and tangled hair. He looked twenty years older than he had only a year before, and I’m embarrassed to admit that in the face of his grief I was not brave enough to do more than give him a passing “I’m so sorry” before I wandered to a slightly removed picnic table to smoke alone.

Her mother and stepfather came to say hello. I offered them condolences then thanked the Lord that the service was about to begin and I could escape to the other end of the circle.

We all held candles, our flames dancing in a stiff June breeze, and stood quietly as a priest droned on about the passing of life and whatever else they talk about. I found it very hard to listen to him as I wondered why a priest should officiate a memorial service for an atheist and remembered the day Cassie found God in a parking lot and brought her home.

We hadn’t needed another cat but neither of us could ever refuse to help a poor stray. God had followed Cassie from her work to her car and, with her muddied fur and skinny body, Cass could not resist the urge to take her in and give her a better life. We discussed the name for this hungry cat for several days before we came upon “God.” It was my contention that everyone should talk to God sometimes and that this way there would be no excuse for her to forget. She laughed and her cat was christened.

The priest was still talking and suddenly I wondered what had become of Cassie’s “God.” The poor cat must have been there when it happened and… it was hours before the police came. I began to cry anew at the thought of Cassie’s beloved pet mewling beside her body; traumatized by the horrible thing that had taken her mommy.

The priest had finished his sermon and Cassie’s mother took the microphone. I came out of my terrible reverie to listen but soon wished I had not. Colette was telling us that it had been her job to identify Cassie at the morgue. She said when they pulled the cover down to show her the body, she couldn’t, at first, tell if it was Cass. Her body had been so mutilated and brutalized, her hair even torn from the scalp, that she had to look very carefully for any clue that might reveal her identity. After some time she finally noticed a mole below the ear. She said it was Cassie’s mole, “No one else has that mole and then I knew it was my baby.”

She must have said something after that but I could not hear it. I was mesmerized and horrified by the mental image of my friend on a cold metal slab and that she was so battered as to be unrecognizable to her own mother. I wanted to run away but I could not, so I forced myself to keep it together for the rest of the service.

Cassie’s brother spoke, quite eloquently, about growing up with Cassie. About how they’d had the normal sibling fights and all of the things he’d always admired about her. He cried as he revealed to us that he was supposed to have come to the St. Louis on that very day to pack Cassie up and help her move back to Chicago with their father, then he bravely pulled himself together enough to thank us for coming to celebrate his sister’s life and to reassure us that the autopsy had shown she had done no drugs with Drisdel. She had still been the Cassie we knew and loved.

When Cassie’s dad took the microphone, he tried to speak, to tell us everything he needed to say about his baby, but in the end was only able to sob at the horror of it all. His family crowded about him with hugs and support and the microphone found its way to a man that none of us knew.

He identified himself as Michael, Cassie’s neighbor, and informed us that he had come to represent the neighborhood. He said that everyone had like Cassie, that she was a good person, and that he wanted us to all know that the neighborhood was not such a bad neighborhood after all. “We all look out for each other,” he said, “and if we would have known what was happening to Cassandra we would have come and helped her.”

It was hard to contain my anger at those words. If Drisdel would have tried to beat Cassie to death in a nice suburban neighborhood, the police would have been there in five minutes or less. Cassie died because no one wanted to get involved, because no one called the police when they heard her screams, but most of all she died because she was too poor to live somewhere where people call the police when they hear a woman screaming.

After the memorial was over, we all left to return to our own lives and dramas. Perhaps many of us have been able to overcome the horrible way she died and only remember her as she was when she was alive. I fear that I will never be able to get over her murder, though, and the nightmares that still haunt me. I cannot remember Cassandra without imagining her mother trying to identify her on a cold metal slab or, worse still, the look that must have been on her face as he attacked her. I have come to accept that I will never know what really happened on that night, and now I only wish I could escape the imagined middle.