The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace by Jeff Hobbs

and spoons dusted with cocaine residue, a bag of marijuana, a plastic container of cocaine, an empty black gun holster on a chain buried beneath dirty clothes, two black cestuses (fighting gloves weighted with iron studs), and a thick Rolodex.
    By now, investigators and medical personnel had begun arriving, including Captain John Armeno and Detective Sergeant Alan Sierchio. Without a warrant, they were permitted only to “look around” the apartment, specifically for weapons. They found no firearms, but Captain Armeno did gravitate toward a conspicuous framed photo lying on its side on a built-in shelf. In the photo, Skeet Douglas wore a bright green tuxedo complete with top hat, and—bizarrely—he was swinging a bejeweled cane. Armeno immediately sent this photo to University Hospital, where Georgianna was lying on a gurney in the emergency room, in critical condition due to shock and blood loss. She had been intubated and couldn’t speak. But she remained conscious, and when asked whether she knew the person responsible for the shootings, she nodded. The officer took out the photograph and asked her whether the pictured person was the shooter. She nodded again and began to cry. Later, she would admit that she had never actually seen who pulled the trigger, but she would claim to have recognized Skeet’s voice talking to Estella in the kitchen. She’d met Skeet once, a week before the murders, when he’d come over to the sisters’ apartment to fix their faulty door.
    That same afternoon, Detective Sergeant Sierchio used this exchange to obtain an official search warrant for 2D and access Skeet’s Rolodex. A short time later, Frances Peace received the call inquiring as to Skeet’s whereabouts, and she relayed this to both Jackie and Carl.
    The following day, using information gleaned from Skeet’s Rolodex, Detective Sergeant Sierchio and three uniformed officers knocked on Irving Gaskins’s third-floor apartment door. Mr. Gaskins, seventy-eight years old and a longtime friend of Skeet’s family, lived on 13th Street in Newark proper, a few blocks from Branch Brook Park, where Rob was currently enrolled in the summer camp. They were admitted entry by a woman. In the apartment, a group of children played on the floor. Mr. Gaskins was hooked to an oxygen tank due to a combination of emphysema, diabetes, and heart disease. The suspect, Robert “Skeet” Douglas, was seated nearby, and after a brief, charged confrontation during which Mr. Gaskins begged the police not to shoot—because a stray bullet might explode his oxygen tank and harm his grandchildren—Skeet was put in handcuffs. According to the police report, the arresting officers found a .38 caliber Taurus Spesco revolver tucked in Skeet’s pants, loaded with six rounds of ammunition, with five more live rounds in his pocket. In the days following, ballistics experts would confirm that striations on the bullets removed from the murdered women’s bodies exactly matched those within the flute of this revolver, and in turn the revolver had unique markings etched on the outer surface of the barrel that matched the holster found in Skeet’s apartment.
    At his desk in the prosecutor’s office, Thomas Lechliter reviewed dozens of transcripts and reports, photographs, and inventory lists, and he constructed a clear narrative of the murders. As he did so, his confidence grew that not only would this evidence lead to a conviction, but also that a conviction would represent justice in the world. In other words, the defendant was guilty. He did not overlook the many loose ends presented within the story: the single witness who had been inebriated, strung out, severely overtired, and hungover at the time of the murders, and who had identified a suspect, by voice only, whom she had encountered once in her life and never spoken to directly; the very odd time lapse between when the murder was said to