A young black woman was an accessory to the gruesome murder of a
white male.She got 25 years. Ten years into her term, at a time when
sentences are getting harsher, her imprisonment raises disturbing
questions about punishment meted out to women who kill men, to minority
women in general, and about the nature of imprisonment--and
redemption.
Girl gang seized in trunk slaying, ran the headline in the tabloid
New York Post on April 8, 1985. The full-page article--and other articles
and columns in the New York Times and various local papers--went on to
describe one of the most sensational crimes of the year, a Nassau County
to New York City kidnapping and murder that required 10 detectives in
Long Island and nine in New York City working overtime to break the
case.
Donna Hylton has been in prison 10 years for her part in the
brutal, spectacular murder, in which three men and four women tortured a
Long Island real-estate broker and, once he was dead, shut him up in a
footlocker to decompose.
She has haunted me from the first moment I walked through the gates
of the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women and she came down to
meet me. She is 30 years old. Her dark hair was pulled back in a
ponytail, and she was wearing a white turtleneck and green prison
pants.
She is quite beautiful, but more than beautiful--she has a hypnotic
kind of sweetness that made it hard to concentrate on what she was
saying. I preferred simply to watch her, as one might watch a monologist
on an empty stage, lit by a single, bare bulb. "I don't know why," she'd
said on that first visit, "but I keep feeling things are going to get
better. It's like a fairy tale. There's going to be a
happy-ever-after."
Hylton has 15 more years to go on a sentence of 25-years-to-life.
What does that sentence look like from the inside? The political noose is
tightening around criminals at this very moment: New York, as of
September, will have the death penalty and a new life-without-parole
sentence. At the same time, no-frills prison acts around the country are
cutting prison programs intended to rehabilitate mind and body--from
exercise equipment to college education. The special program at Bedford
Hills that allowed Hylton to receive a college education was cut this
year.
Are harsher sentences and starker prisons what we want? Who is the
cell block door--a symbol of justice administered slamming shut on every
night?
The victim was 62-year-old Thomas Vigliarole, a balding real-estate
broker cum con man whose partner in crime, Louis Miranda, thought
Vigliarole had swindled him out of $139,000 on a mutual con. The two men
had sold shares in a New York City condo and meant to pocket the money
for themselves, but Miranda hadn't gotten his share.
The two men had so many potential cons going that, according to New
York City Detective William Spurling, "it took me three months to
catalogue them. They were contemplating kidnapping a judge in New Jersey
and a head of state in the Philippines."
Miranda had hired Woodie George Pace, the kind of man who boasted
about putting an electric drill through victims's hands, to help him.
Woodie and a former girlfriend, Selma Price, who became known during the
trial as "the fat lady" (she literally weighed almost 500 pounds, and had
to be taken away in a special van because she couldn't fit into a regular
car), had been implicated in a similar kidnapping and torture in 1981.
"Selma," recalled detective Spurling, "admitted she sat on the victim and
beat him. She was so fat that sitting on him would have been torture
enough."
Ultimately, Miranda would ask for a ransom of over $400,000--even
after the victim had died. He never got it. Maria Talag, who according to
Donna called Miranda her godfather, invited Donna and two friends, Rita
and Theresa, to participate in the crime. Their cut was to be $9,000
each; Donna wanted hers to pay for a picture portfolio to help her break
into modeling.
Vigliarole believed the three girls were prostitutes who were going
to have sex with him. Instead, they picked him up on March 8 in Elmhurst,
Queens, at Maria's home, and drugged him to make him drowsy. Then they
drove him to Selma's apartment in Harlem. The apartment had already been
prepared for an extended torture session: The closet door had been cut, a
pot put in it for use as a toilet, the windows boarded.
For the next 15 to 20 days (police aren't sure just when Vigliarole
died), the man was starved, burned, beaten, and tortured. (Even 10 years
later, Spurling could recall Rita's chilling response when they
questioned her about shoving a three-foot metal bar up Vigliarole's rear:
"He was a homo anyway." How did she know? "When I stuck the bar up his
rectum he wiggled.")
The three girls took turns watching the man. It was Donna who
delivered a ransom note and tape to a friend of Vigliarole's, who was
able to get a partial license plate number of the car she was driving. He
notified the police, who traced the plate to a rental car facility. On
April 6 the suspects were arrested, and detectives spent 36 hours
straight interviewing the seven men and women. "We had to keep going back
and forth and catch them in lies," said Spurling. "It was a never-ending
circle of lies."
Tags:
bedford hills,
correctional facility,
crime,
dark hair,
donna hylton,
empty stage,
fairy tale,
first moment,
footlocker,
four women,
girl gang,
gruesome murder,
incarceration,
local papers,
minority women,
monologist,
murder,
nassau county,
new york post,
pace,
ponytail,
prison,
real estate broker,
sensational crimes
