Deadly Charm: The Story of a Deaf Serial Killer

19. 1982: Follow-up on the Myer Investigation

19 1982: Follow-up on the Myer Investigation Make no friendships with an angry man. Proverbs 22:24 Nearly a year after John Myer’s death, police were still continuing the search for clues in the case. More and more their attention focused on Patrick McCullough as the probable killer. In addition to employees at the garage, they interviewed a number of people in the community who had known their principal suspect, Patrick McCullough. Additional evidence of Patrick’s involvement in the Myer murder came from Rose Marie Harriman, who lived in the same house on Market Street where Patrick was living at the time of the murder. In an interview conducted by Detectives Barr and Burke she stated that she had first met Patrick through her fiancé, Ron Forest (pseudonym). Harriman indicated that she had felt Patrick’s strength would afford her some degree of safety. “I got Pat to move into the house. He had been evicted from his other apartment, and my fiancé and I were fighting, and I felt I needed a little bit of protection. I offered Patrick to move in at a rate of fifty bucks a month if he would also help me with maintenance around the house. This was around Christmas, 1981. [This would have 130 been approximately two and a half months before the Myer murder.]” Harriman replied yes when asked if she, her fiancé, and Patrick were living in the house when the Myer murder occurred . Next she was questioned as to whether or not she had discussed the murder with Patrick; she replied that they had talked about it around ten or eleven o’clock on the morning after the murder. When describing how that conversation had occurred, she said, “I was asleep and Pat came upstairs and started pounding on my door, hollering for me to open up. He started rambling on that somebody was killed, that somebody had been murdered, that his friend was dead. It took me a while to calm him down enough for him to explain to me what happened. He said his friend who worked in the parking garage was murdered and robbed. I asked him how he knew this. He said he had gone there looking for a job. He said he had seen the body lying in the alley, and he couldn’t understand why somebody would do this to his friend. He carried on like that for about a half an hour.” When asked if she had ever seen him excited like that before , Harriman replied, “Yes. Usually when he was aggravated or upset with something that somebody had done that he thought was wrong. Then he would get real excited. Like if somebody owed him money or something wasn’t going right, it was normal for him to go on like that where you couldn’t understand him.” The interviewers then asked, “Did he tell you he was at the parking garage the night the murder happened?” She answered, “He said he had cut through there sometime between 1 and 2 a.m. on his way to Chick and Ruth’s Deli to get a Coke. He said that John Myer was sitting in the office reading a paper and that he waved to him and said ‘hi’ as he went by. Then he said that later he saw the body lying in the alley like Myer was trying to crawl away.” Deadly Charm 131 132 McCay Vernon and Marie Vernon She mentioned the fact that John Myer had trusted Pat. “Patrick used to stop by the garage and bring him coffee,” she said. “The two of them used to sit in the booth and talk and drink coffee together. Myer had once been robbed at the parking lot and he was always scared it would happen again. Patrick said Myer told him he felt safe when he [Patrick] was around because he knew Patrick was strong.” “Before the murder, did Patrick ever talk to you about trying to get a job at the garage?” the investigators asked. “All that I understood was that they did not know if they were going to have a position open or not. They were thinking of replacing somebody.” “After the murder, did you see Patrick with large sums of money?” Harriman replied, “He did have some money and he came home with some new clothes. He had a new leather...