Helping orphan piece past together

Helping orphan piece past together

SINGAPORE - Among items gathered by investigators at the New Jersey apartment in which the family of Ms Colleen Turzynski was murdered were video tapes, lots of them, showing everything from birthday celebrations to family members counting the money her grandfather had saved.

Mr Harold Pegg, 69, a retired police officer who investigated the case some two decades ago, recalled watching hours and hours of footage as he looked for clues as to what happened that day.

"We searched through all the tapes, looking for anything that would tell us anything about anything," he said. "They videotaped every event that happened in that house, whether it was a party, a holiday."

Mr Pegg told The Sunday Times that he is now trying to get some of these videotapes out of the police archives so that he can share them with Ms Turzynski, whose search for her Singaporean family members has touched the hearts of so many.

He has been so moved by Ms Turzynski's tragic tale that he is doing all he can to help her piece her past together. "I have made a call to the police department in Clifton, New Jersey. I have to get the OK from the prosecutors office," he said, although he is not sure how long it will take. "A friend of mine still works up there. I don't think they will release all of it but they can transfer some onto CDs for her."

Mr Pegg said the tapes ultimately did not play a key role in the investigation, although they did raise some troubling questions.

For one thing, he is convinced that at least one videotape is missing - the one showing who was in the apartment on the day in 1990 when Ms Turzynski's Singaporean mother Lee Kui Yin, 39, her Polish father Kazimierz Turzynski, 35, and grandfather Mieczyslaw Turzynski, 61, were stabbed to death.

Police discovered the bodies only one week later when neighbours complained about a smell, and were stunned to discover 17-month-old Colleen had survived a week alone in the apartment by eating Cheerios and drinking water from the toilet bowl.

Mr Pegg said he concluded that the family had had a celebration in the apartment on that night and may have shot footage.

The family attended a St Patrick's Day Parade on the day of the murders and stopped at a tobacco store to buy cigars. Based on some open bottles of alcohol found at the scene, he is sure it was no ordinary night in the working-class Turzynski household.

"It was pretty obvious something was going on that night, and it was pretty obvious they would have taped it because they taped everything else," said Mr Pegg.

Some 20 years on, though he has long since retired from the force and moved two hours away from the town of Clifton, he can still remember the case vividly. He keeps newspaper clippings of the crime and a brown manila envelope of photos of the crime scene.

He has no trouble drawing a floor plan of the small two-bedroom apartment from memory.

The case, he said, was the hardest one he has ever worked on.

When he visited the apartment, he said he found the place had been ransacked, although it was not always clear how much of the mess was made by the killer and what was caused by baby Colleen.

Clothes covered the floor, and the living room was a mess except for a picture of Colleen that sat atop the TV set. Dried blood was splattered on the walls and pots and pans were strewn across the small kitchen.

Then there was the problem that their prime suspect, Pakistani national Abdul Qudoos, was deaf.

"He claimed when he did the interview that he didn't understand the signing when we hit the key questions," said Mr Pegg.

"Everyone knows from TV, good cop, bad cop - we couldn't even do that because he couldn't care less who was the good cop, who was the bad cop. How do I tell the sign interpreter, sign that I am yelling at him."

Still, there were elements of Mr Qudoos' story that just did not add up for Mr Pegg, including that the video camera and the same sum of money seen in the video of the Turzynskis counting was in Mr Qudoos' possession.

Also, though he claimed Ms Turzynski's father drove him home, neighbours never saw the family car move, and while he claimed he had borrowed the video camera, the carrying case was found in the apartment.

"If you are borrowing a video camera, wouldn't you borrow it with the carrying case? These are little things that, as a detective, make you say, wait a minute..."

Prosecutors ultimately dropped the charges against Mr Qudoos, however, and instead deported him to Pakistan, a move Mr Pegg said he cannot understand.

"I thought about this over the years; to this day I think about it and I am convinced he's the guy," he said.

All that is likely water under the bridge now and he said the case cannot be solved unless "someone walks through the door and admits to it". His focus is simply on helping Ms Turzynski obtain the videos seized as evidence.

For Ms Turzynski, whose parents met while her mother was visiting friends in Poland, knowing those videos exist is significant. They offer her a glimpse of her late parents that she simply cannot get from photos. She is deaf, as were her mother and father.

"I want to see my mother sign," she said.

This article was published on April 20 in The Straits Times.

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