As Attorney Tony Tanke pointed out, in any thorough investigation into a suspicious death such as my brother Mark’s in September 2003, the authorities would consider carefully what happened with money, especially insurance policies. The original post of this blog (September 22, 2010) briefly raised the problem of insurance related to my brother Mark’s death, and a subsequent post (March 23, 2011) discussed that issue in greater detail. This post is a follow-up on the NY State Police investigation into the insurance issue.
My concern with the issue of insurance relevant to my brother’s death arose from a comment by Mark’s daughter Christie (then 23 years old) in a telephone conversation the very evening of his death. She stated that her father had left her a suicide letter, which she was concealing to protect the insurance money. I quickly reported that information to Edward Kalfas, the lead detective of the investigation into Mark’s death. In an entry in the police report for October 25, 2003, recording his interview with Christie (the name is redacted), Kalfas states that she “had no information regarding rumors of a suicide note.”
In an interview with Kalfas and his then superior Sr. Inv. John Wolfe in September 2005, Atty. Michael Kelly raised the issue of Christie’s statement to me. As Kelly informed me, Kalfas told him that Mark’s daughter denied knowing anything about a suicide letter and that he did not know what to do about it. As well as not pressing Christie about the alleged suicide letter (on which, see posts of September 22, 2010; November 23, 2013; January 21, 2018; and July 31, 2019), Kalfas apparently did not question her concerning her comment about protecting the insurance money.
In 2006, a nephew informed me that during the week after my brother’s death a sister of Mark’s wife Susan had told him that it looked as if Mark’s death was going to be ruled a suicide and that she had asked him if he had heard reports that Susan would be getting a large insurance payment. As he informed me, my nephew replied that insurance companies would not pay out for a suicide, but Mark’s wife’s sister told him that as she was a lawyer, she knew they would pay out.
Relatives and acquaintances of Mark’s informed me in the months following his death that they believed there had been a fair amount of life insurance on him. In the copy of the police report that I obtained in September 2004 through a FOIL request, Kalfas mentions contacting two insurance companies in an entry of his narrative for October 10, 2003, but the remainder of that entry is redacted (blacked out). So, no further information on the particular policies is accessible. In his interview with the two NYSP investigators, however, Atty. Kelly was informed that one of those two policies was paid out with double indemnity but was very small.
In a meeting in September 2010 with current Cattaraugus County D.A. Lori Rieman and former NYSP Sr. Inv. John Ensell, Kalfas’s superior at the time of my brother’s death, I asked about the insurance issue. Ensell informed me that the life insurance was only $17,000 total, adding that they had used the New York State insurance data base. But when I expressed my surprise about this amount to Atty. Kelly, he was also skeptical and stated that he had been told in 2005 by the NYSP investigators that they did not know how much insurance there actually was. Kelly also informed me that another police investigator, not a member of the NYSP, who looked into the insurance issue told him that he did not know how much insurance there was on Mark.
In a subsequent e-mail exchange with Ensell in December 2010, Ensell stated: "As far as life insurance is concerned, I did have a contact during that time frame [i.e., during the investigation in late 2003] with an Investigator with the New York State Insurance Department. His disclosure was that the Pavlock name did not stand out as [a] name associated with any large amount of money concerning insurance. As far as the $17,000 is concerned, that is a matter of the information that was supplied in the report."
However, as mentioned above, that information was not made available to me in the redacted police report or relayed in any form to Atty. Tanke during the investigation or to Atty. Kelly after the investigation. In any case, Ensell’s statement “did not stand out as name associated with any large amount of money concerning insurance” is vague and does not preclude considerably more than the $17,000 figure he specified.
After further expressing dissatisfaction with various aspects of the investigation, including the insurance issue, I was in contact with NYSP Capt. Steven Nigrelli. In September 2014, Capt. Nigrelli informed me that a request for information had recently been sent through the NYSIC (New York State Intelligence Center) concerning insurance policies in relation to Mark’s death. At that point, he stated, no additional policies had materialized. In January 2015, Nigrelli reaffirmed his previous information, stating that “information requests were sent to over 1,000 insurance agencies nationwide via NYSIC with no evidence of other policies in existence found.”
It is unfortunate that such a more sustained effort had not been made during the investigation into my brother’s death. As I have learned, insurance companies are required to preserve records on policies in most states for six or seven years (six in New York). So, other than the $17,000 the original investigators discovered, there is now no definitive information on insurance policies paid out on my brother.
