Stolen Pages

One of the great unsolved mysteries in my small, upscale town of Westbridge, New Jersey, stumped police and amateur detectives for almost five years.

A high-end home in one of the most prestigious neighborhoods in town had burned to the ground six months after the murders of two relatives and the suicide of the home’s owner. One of the community’s continuing mysteries stemmed from the fact that authorities never found the arsonist who torched the home.

Shock had gripped that Thanksgiving weekend in 2001 when we found out about the bloody shootings by Peter Rollinson, a troubled advertising executive.

Rollinson had a few of his highest producing accounts taken from his firm by a young account executive who he brought into the agency. The account executive then left for a competitor, taking with him Rollinson’s most productive account and getting Peter fired.

On top of that, Scarlett, the wife of the deeply religious executive, had confessed an affair with a defrocked priest prior to her marriage to the ad man. From that liaison, she had brought a case of syphilis into their home and infected Peter.

Also, their teenage daughter had taken up with an online vampire worship group based in New Orleans.

Rollinson’s tribulations piled into his psyche like a New York subway train speeding into an underground tunnel. While drowning his sorrows with alcohol in a Greenwich Village dive bar he bought an illegal handgun from a local thug.

Local police investigators concluded he took the rush hour express from Manhattan to Westbridge, rushed home and did away with his Satan-infected wife and daughter before putting his 357 magnum into his mouth and pulling the trigger.

The Rollinson story captivated the community for half a decade and provided fodder for a host of books and even a widely-released movie, Sins of the Family,” based on a novel written by local personality and town historian Hewitt Jackson

Jackson spent about three years interviewing surviving members of the Rollinson family, ministers and members at the family’s church and town and police officials. Also, Jackson’s personal relationship to Rollinson and his participation with him in many church projects enabled him to provide an insight into the psyche of the murderer few of the other authors could match.

The mystery of the home fire continued to elude Jackson and every other chronicler of the tragic tale. This made Sins of the Family the hottest selling item on the shelves of the few independent bookstores to which Jackson distributed it. I, luckily, had known the author for many years as a fellow member of the Westbridge Historical Society. Prior to his death in 1977 Jackson gifted the last remaining copy to my bookstore, the Bloodhound.

I kept it locked in a cabinet in the back of the store where I stored my most treasured possessions. In fact, only my trusted assistant, Amy Blanchard, knew of its existence and my secret hiding place. Since Amy also had worked on church matters with the family and had worked with me for 10 years, I believed I could trust her with this confidence.

The book remained secure for three years. Because of its rarity and its value, at least for the time being, I had no intention of selling it. I believed the only way it would leave my possession would be as a bequest in my will or in a special provision of a sales contract should I ever close the Bloodhound.

Then, one morning, while inspecting my rare book collection, I opened the locked cabinet where Sins of the Family normally resided to find an empty shelf staring back at me.

“Amy,” I yelled, “come quick. The Rollinson novel is missing. Have you seen anyone in or near this area? Has anyone inquired about the volume recently?”

“No,” she replied. “Of course, some local history buffs inquire from time to time about the last existing copy of the book, but I don’t think they know about its storage space.”

Then, I carefully examined the locks on the cabinet for signs of tampering and found that one of them seemed to have an unusual amount of scarring, as if someone had tried to force it open. Yet, we saw no sign that someone actually had opened the lock or the cabinet.

A thought then flashed across my mind. About a week prior to the volume’s disappearance we had hosted a wine and cheese party to give some of our local authors a chance to autograph copies of their latest releases carried at the Bloodhound.

One of them, Tom Harpincher, had recently completed a historical piece on unsolved mysteries of Compton County, the area that included Westbridge. After the party I found him looking around a section of the store blocked off from customers and getting a little too close to my hiding place for the book. A week after the Bloodhound gathering he suddenly moved out of town and left no forwarding address.

Investigating Harpincher’s background, the local police found he had worked for several years as a locksmith prior to obtaining his degree in library science and had begun working in the Westbridge Public Library. Shortly after that he began doing extensive research on his book on Compton history.

The police also found that one of Harpincher’s brothers, Harry, had served time in New Jersey State Prison in connection with an arson in Lincoln, the town adjacent to Westbridge. Both brothers had moved to Westbridge shortly before the Rollinson murders and became close friends with the murderer.

They often had drinks together at a local bar around the time of Peter’s downfall. The owner of the tavern had overheard him loudly complaining to the brothers about his troubles. Rollinson also often bragged about the rare paintings by the great masters he had collected over the years and mounted in his home.

Out of Peter’s earshot one night, after more than a few beers, Tom said to Harry, “Might be worth our while to get our hands on some of that artwork. You probably have connections on the black market from your prison stretch. They can help us dispose of it for a handsome profit. Peter just gave us the perfect way to cover our tracks. Sounds like he’s about to off his family. Once the cops finish nosying around, what if we sneak in to steal what we need? Then an accidental fire destroys the Rollinson mansion and the evidence of our theft goes up in smoke? They might even Peter put somebody up to it when he planned the murders.”

The mansion did go up in smoke, and everything apparently fell in line according to Tom’s plan, except the shroud of secrecy the brothers thought they had wrapped around the blaze. Turned out bar owner Tony Caradaso moonlighted as a historical fiction author and amateur private detective. After hearing them discuss the plot he had followed them to the Rollinson home and hid in the bushes outside the mansion. He saw them commit the arson and hinted at it when Jackson interviewed him for Sins of the Family.

Although Caradaso had died six months after the fire and its mention in the book, the brothers believed some local snoop might unravel the mystery and land both of them in the state prison for the rest of their lives. They then waited in the shrubs outside the Bloodhound one night and broke in 10 minutes after I closed up. Harry, with burglary skills learned in the Jersey lockup, disarmed my alarm system and the duo made off with the book.

They didn’t know I had planted a hidden secondary alarm inside the book’s cover. It linked into my smartphone, which started buzzing just as I reached home that night.

I waited around the corner from the Bloodhound with two local detectives and they escorted the brothers to the Westbridge Municipal Jail in handcuffs.