Conflicting Claims about a Suicide Letter

This post takes up the claim made to me by my brother's daughter that he left her a suicide letter.  This troubling issue was briefly discussed in the original post (September 22, 2010).  Because another claim about this alleged suicide letter was recently reported to a relative and brought to my attention, it is important to re-examine this problematic issue.

As indicated in the original post, I was not notified about the fire and my brother's injuries until the following morning and was thus unable to get to the Erie County Medical Center in Buffalo before he died.  After I made numerous unsuccessful attempts to reach his wife during the afternoon, their son Brian answered the phone in the early evening but informed me that his mother was in the shower.  Although Brian told my cousin Dennis very soon afterwards that Mark had been burned while putting gasoline into the tank after the truck ran out of gas (see posts of July 22 and September 22, 2012, and July 28, 2013), he said nothing whatsoever about the cause of the fire to me that evening.  Instead, he told me that his sister wanted to speak to me.

Christie calmly asserted that her father had committed suicide and added that she was not telling anyone else, except for her mother and brother, in order to protect the insurance money.  When I expressed skepticism about Mark taking his own life, Christie explained that my brother had been depressed over the deaths of our father and mother.  However, I knew that my brother had long ago got over the loss of our father, nearly nine years earlier, and had not shown any difficulty dealing with the loss of our mother, nearly three years before.  In addition, Christie, a psychology student at the time, connected Mark's alleged suicide with what she called his “low self-esteem.”  Never having observed any noticeable problems with Mark's sense of self-worth, I continued to express skepticism about Christie's claims. 

Even more surprisingly, Christie added that Mark had frequently told her that he no longer wished to live.  As became very clear in the weeks and months ahead, however, my brother had expressed no such desire to end his life to anyone else with whom I spoke.  Finally, Christie offered more tangible support for her claim: Mark had left her a suicide letter.  When I expressed disbelief, she claimed that the letter began as follows: “By the time you read this, I will be dead.”  Those words, however, did not ring true: my brother was in no way melodramatic. 

The statements made by Christie raise two serious questions.  First, why did Mark's twenty-three year old daughter make such transparently dubious claims about her father's death?  To my knowledge, daughters (myself included) are normally grief-stricken at the loss of their father and would shrink from fabricating anything that would make him seem culpable for his own death.  Second, why did she bring up the issue of insurance money?  It seems strange for a daughter to have any knowledge of her father's life insurance and even more so for her to express such a concern just hours after his death. 

As observed in the original post, I promptly informed the State Police investigator of Christie's claim about a suicide letter.  I also reported the information by letter to D. A. Edward Sharkey in December 2003.  In both instances, I offered to take a polygraph test in case they had any doubts about my credibility.  Inv. Kalfas declined my offer, stating that he didn't know what good it would do.  Mr. Sharkey said nothing.  Although her name is redacted, an entry in the police report for October 25, 2003, indicates that Inv. Kalfas asked Christie about the alleged suicide letter.  Here is what he recorded: “She has no information regarding rumors of a suicide note or pre-planned funeral arrangements.”  But since her statement in the police report contradicts what she told me the evening of Mark's death, Christie clearly lied either to Kalfas or to me.  Given the flimsy basis of her suicide story, it would appear that she lied to me.  But that lie was a serious one in itself and all the more so in connection to an expressed interest in insurance money.

Furthermore, these contradictory statements about the alleged suicide letter should have raised concerns for Inv. Kalfas because Christie was implicated in another contradiction at that same interview in October 2003.   In denying that she knew anything about “pre-planned funeral arrangements,” Christie was clearly indicating that she did not know why Mark had been cremated.  Yet, according to my half-sister Carol McKenna, Mark's wife explained that he had told Christie he wanted to be cremated.  Susan's statement to Carol and Christie's to Kalfas on the issue of cremation are obviously contradictory.  One of them must be false. 

As with so many suspicious elements surrounding Mark's truck fire, the investigating authorities failed to probe in any meaningful way the problem of the alleged suicide letter.  At their meeting in 2005, Inv. Kalfas told Atty. Michael Kelly that when Christie denied knowing anything about a suicide letter, he did not know what to do about it.  To judge from his entry in the police report in which he refers to asking her about “rumors of a suicide note,” Kalfas does not seem to have tried very hard to elicit the truth from Christie.  His phrase “rumors of a suicide note” is hardly a fair description of the detailed first-hand account that I gave him of Christie's claims just hours after my brother's death.  Should he not have mentioned very specific statements Christie made to me, including the matter of the life insurance, and judged by her reaction if she was telling the truth or lying? 

When I brought up the alleged suicide letter to Sr. Inv. John Wolfe in October 2005, he said that he wanted to talk to Christie about the issue but that she had not returned his call.  When I raised the issue with Capt. George Brown in February 2006, he simply insisted that Christie had just said something foolish on the spur of the moment.  But would a twenty-three year old college-educated woman really say such outrageous things about her own father “on the spur of the moment,” just hours after his death from third-degree burns?  I think not.  When I raised the issue with former Sr. Inv. John Ensell in May 2010, he insisted that Christie had been interviewed twice.  However, the police report mentions only the interview on October 25, and no other officials referred to more than one.

A few months ago, I was surprised to hear that the claim of a suicide letter had again been made by one of Mark's family members.  This time Mark's wife was reported to be the source of the claim.  My nephew Tom McKenna mentioned that, not too long before, his mother had referred to going out for pizza with Susan and Christie in Arizona, where they all live.  According to Tom, Carol told him that Susan had said that Mark really did leave a suicide letter.  Christie reacted, Tom added, by dropping her mouth in shock.  Tom himself shared my skepticism about the existence of any suicide letter by Mark.  But, regardless, what could have prompted Mark's wife to make that claim about a suicide letter nearly ten years after his death?  Could she have forgotten that she had firmly denied the existence of a suicide letter to Inv. Kalfas during the investigation in 2003?  Here is what Kalfas records in his entry for his interview with Susan on December 12, 2003: she “also stated that there was [sic] no notes or letters left by the victim.”

There can be no doubt that the questionable statements and contradictions made by Mark's wife and daughter should have been scrutinized by the State Police investigators, namely Inv. Kalfas and his immediate superior Sr. Inv. John Ensell.  Why weren't those State Police officials troubled by the problems discussed here, among so many others?  My brother not only lost his life in that suspicious fire but also lost his reputation by those allegations of a suicide letter.  Mark cannot have his life back, but his reputation can be restored.  It must be.  What it will take is an honest investigation.