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was clearly required, so Cali cast about for another approach. Unofficial Investigation Cali had noticed several things in the basement which to him indicated a struggle. Needing an expert to confirm or refute his interpreta- tion, he got in touch with John Cronin, a highly regarded pro- fessor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. Cali took Cro- nin through the house, pointing out what he felt indi- cated the presence of a killer. Renee’s hair was in curlers when she died, yet several curlers were found loose on the floor. Her glasses were some dis- tance from her body. A watering can was overturned. The assumption that Leslie had killed her mother might explain these clues, but Cronin was fascinated. The obvious conclusion, he felt, might not necessarily be the right one. Renee’s open purse was probably, Cronin concluded, an indication of robbery. There was $3 in it, but Cali insisted that his wife had cashed a $100 cheque just a day or two before she died. And Jonna discovered $20 in cash missing from her room. The chest which served to anchor the rope around Renee’s neck had been empty; Cronin agreed that it would hardly support enough weight to strangle a person unless she was unconscious before she was hanged. Cronin finished his unofficial inves- tigation and told Cali he thought the women had been victims of a very clever killer. The $3, he said, were left behind to throw police off. The differ- ences in the knotted ropes showed that the killer had gone about his crime with terrible deliber- ation; it was a double murder made to look like a murder-suicide. Turnabout With Cronin’s reasoning to back his own gut feelings, Cali went back to Lordi. The prosecutor decided to call his own expert: Dr Milton Halp- ern, New York City’s famous chief medical examiner. In the meantime, Dr Edwin H. Albano, New Jersey’s state medical examiner, entered the case. He had reader ’ s digest 10   may 2026 not performed the first autopsy, but the strange circumstances of the deaths caught his attention. He decided to do a second autopsy. He found several previously unnoticed small bruises on Renee’s upper arms, which indicated, he concluded, a “firm, steady grip”- not, significantly, the kind of grip that Leslie would have been able to apply. Then he found smaller bruises on Leslie. He, too, was inclined to a double- murder theory. Albano’s findings came to Lordi just as Dr Halpern reported that a two-hour inspection of Cali’s house had convinced him that Cronin’s findings were correct. Cali’s efforts had finally paid off. The consensus of the three experts put a very different interpretation on the evidence. The cut on Renee’s cheek could be further evidence of assault. The fact that both women had the tops of their swimsuits pulled down now seemed an unlikely coin- cidence. Lordi himself became con- vinced that Cali’s view - double mur- der - was correct. Using the list that Cali had pro- vided, detectives began questioning everyone who had been to the Cali home in the weeks before the kill- ings. All visitors seemed to have a solid alibi for May 14. Tension was building in the prose- cutor’s office, for investigators knew that anyone who could kill so coolly might soon kill again. And the strain on John Cali was enormous. The shock of losing his wife and daughter, the intensive, and continuing, effort to clear their good names, and the pres- sures of running a highly competitive business were taking their toll. But constant support from his fam- ily sustained him. Chilling Reality On June 13, Cali had noticed a small item buried in a local newspaper. Robert Petrarca, a window washer, had been arrested in South Orange, a few kilo- metres from the Cali home. Petrarca had gone to the home of an 83-year- old woman on a job and tried to strangle her with a rope. The story sent Cali’s head reeling. Petrarca worked for the Aristocrat Window Cleaning Service, and Aris- tocrat had billed Cali for washing windows at his house on May 13, the day before the double killing. Leslie, Jonna recalled, had showed Petrarca The shock of losing his wife and daughter, the intensive, and continuing, effort to clear their good names, and the pressures of running a highly competitive business were taking their toll. readersdigest.com.au     11 RD Classics