My apartment's grisly history

Gabriel Cohen — (Image credit: (Narratively/Jem Cohen))

The summer of 2005 is the worst time in my life. My landlord decides to sell the Boerum Hill house I've rented an apartment in for 16 years, and then — in the aftermath of arguments about where to move — my wife suddenly walks out on our marriage. In the midst of a ferocious heat wave and at the peak of one of New York City's most inflated housing markets, I trudge across Brooklyn searching for a rental I can afford on my own, on a freelance writer's budget. One tiny apartment's only window looks out on a grimy airshaft. Another is a dark basement below the office of a doctor who practices adolescent gynecology.

The asphalt is so hot that it sticks to my shoes. The date when I have to leave my old apartment looms closer and closer. I'm panicking that I'll end up homeless when a miracle occurs: I stumble across a funky, eccentric Park Slope realty office where a petite, friendly French woman tells me that she has the perfect solution. She drives me to Ditmas Park, a surprising, little-known neighborhood full of grand old Victorian houses, and she shows me a large ground-floor apartment. It features a front porch, a big back patio, stained-glass windows, even a chandelier. And here's the miracle: The price is $700 or $800 a month below market value. She says that the landlord lives out of town and his brother manages the property. The whole thing seems too good to be true, but I follow the proverbial advice about gift horses and sign the lease.

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Over time, I begin to grow accustomed to my new home. I set up my office in the big middle room with the stained glass windows. While I write, dreaming up fictional homicides all over south Brooklyn, I do my best not to imagine the real killing that took place a few feet from my desk. Even so, the bathroom — walled, incongruously, in black and green Art Deco tiles and silvery disco-era wallpaper — is where I shave every morning and brush my teeth every night, and it takes a while before I stop looking for bloodstains.

Another eerie moment: For the first time, I follow the steps down to the dark basement and one of the most desolate sights I have ever seen. I click on a dim bare bulb, which reveals that the entire space is filled with a waist-high sea of furniture, clothes, children's toys, hair dryers, and Little Mermaid and Finding Nemo DVDs, all tossed there to clear my apartment for rental. My landlord, I will soon learn, had two daughters, aged three and 14 when he killed their mother. They were in the house at the time.

I try to imagine how powerful a rage a person would have to be in to do such a terrible thing. I have my own reasons to think about anger. I consider myself a cheerful guy, and my wife and I got along peaceably for most of our time together, but when we hit our rough spot, tempers flared. I remember one argument during which I suddenly felt like the Incredible Hulk — I saw red, shouted, slammed a door. Yet I never came close to physical violence.

At first, I don't want to know anything more about the murder, especially not gruesome particulars, but curiosity creeps up on me. In time, and with a little effort — a nervous internet search, a few questions over a beer with my neighbor, a visit to a library newspaper archive — a picture inexorably emerges, detail by graphic detail, like a crime scene photographer's print in a slow developing bath.

My landlord, an immigrant from Jamaica, was 39 at the time of the killing. He and his wife, who was the same age and hailed from Barbados, bought this big house for $325,000 back in 1999. The man was not some sort of career criminal; he had a full-time job as a supervisor for a beer distributor, and his wife owned her own beauty parlor (which explains the hair dryers and salon chairs heaped in the basement).

The story of that fateful night doesn't end there, but it isn't until a year later, when I come across an old newspaper story, that I learn the extraordinary next installment. Distraught over what he had done, my landlord jumped into his 1998 Lexus, wearing only his underwear — I suppose he must have stripped off his bloody clothes — and sped off into the night. Six miles away, near the Belt Parkway, he saw a fuel tanker parked at a gas station and decided to end it all. Spurred, perhaps, by the thought of fireballs on TV shows, he floored his car and slammed into the truck — which didn't explode. The tanker leaked two thousand gallons of gas and the crash just mauled the man; he ended up in the Riker's Island jail infirmary with a shattered hip and other severe injuries.

Another part of the picture emerges when I read that my landlord has finally appeared in court. Though he was charged with second-degree murder — as well as ramming the tanker and endangering lives in the gas station — his lawyer argued that he had acted in a state of "extreme emotional disturbance." He pled guilty to first-degree manslaughter and was sentenced to 18 years in prison, where he now resides.

As the years pass, the house suffers a severe lack of maintenance. The roof leaks, leading to a little waterfall in my bedroom closet every time it rains; a family of raccoons moves into the crawlspace above my kitchen; the chimney begins to tilt at an alarming angle. The tenants — myself, my neighbor upstairs, and a very nice young Japanese family on the third floor — make do as best we can, but the front steps crumble, porch floorboards cave in, and an overhanging section of the roof collapses in a snowstorm. The place begins to look like what, in fact, it is: a haunted house.

In the daytime, I work on new novels. At night, as I lie in bed, I think of my landlord, upstate in his prison bunk. In my writing life and personal life, I'm fascinated by what makes people tick. (Myself included.) I've spent countless hours trying to write complex, believable fictional characters, and also struggling to make sense of my divorce. How did two well-meaning people, so deep in love, manage to go so wrong?