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CHRIS TISCHThe evidence points to one man who had not been heard from in years. How to find him? The answer brings comfort to one family and adds to the sorrow of another.
Detective Joe Coyle was getting close.
For the first time since William Cosco was viciously stabbed to death in his Largo apartment in 1986, the evidence pointed to a killer.
A bloody palm print found on Cosco's closet door jamb had been matched to a nomadic man named Jeffrey Scott Payne. Though he had a busy criminal record until the mid 1980s, Payne seemed to vanish after that.
Coyle, who had inherited the Cosco investigation in 2003, knew he had to find Payne to solve the case.
His search for Payne would produce a number of surprises. It also would force the detective to make a difficult choice as he sought answers for Cosco's family.
Around 3:30 a.m. on Jan. 15, 1985, a silent alarm at a school in Sacramento, Calif., went off. Two maintenance workers found that a classroom window had been broken. Inside, they found a man sleeping under a table. They called police.
Sacramento deputies went to the school and woke the man up. He smelled of alcohol. He refused to give deputies his name. He carried no identification.
He fought with deputies as they cuffed him for trespassing. He kicked at them and rolled on the ground. He swore at them and threatened to kill them. He was booked under the name John Doe, charged with a misdemeanor and released.
Fingerprints later showed the man was Jeffrey Scott Payne. He was 29 at the time. But that would be the last time he would be arrested. After that, he was gone.
Detective Coyle wondered: Where had he gone from there? And how had he wound up in William Cosco's apartment?
From police reports and court records from around the country, Coyle started to outline Payne's life. He learned that Payne was born in Duluth, Minn., in 1955, the youngest of four children. He was the only boy.
As Payne grew, he clashed with his father, a sergeant in the Air Force. Payne's family moved frequently because of his father's career, and Payne had trouble adjusting to each move. He often became quiet and depressed.
Payne told court-appointed counselors after one of his arrests that he had had "two major accidents" when he was a boy; the records about these accidents are edited from court records. His mother also was interviewed by counselors. She described her son as "accident-prone."
Payne's mother told counselors that her husband sometimes beat the boy and, at one time, claimed that the child was not his. This created a great deal of confusion for Payne, who often asked his sisters who his real father was.
At a young age, Payne had above-average intelligence scores in school. He was moved up from fifth to seventh grade because of his smarts.
But Payne began sniffing glue at age 12. He was taking LSD by his mid teens. He often ditched classes, and he dropped out of high school around age 16. Not long after that, his parents divorced.
Payne left home to work as a busboy in a casino in California. He later drifted around the country. At one point he returned to Minnesota and worked as a longshoreman.
In August 1976, a 20-year-old Payne was arrested for aggravated robbery in Duluth; he claimed it was the result of a cocaine deal gone bad. He received probation but violated the conditions and was sent to prison. He escaped, was captured, escaped a second time and left the state.
Payne again roamed the country, maintaining a diet of drugs and alcohol. He said he went years without seeing his parents.
He eventually made his way to Florida. He worked odd jobs and was arrested a few times, including once in West Palm Beach for shoplifting. He later went to Colorado, then, in 1979, made his way to Phoenix.
Not long after getting there, he committed the most serious crime of his life up to that time. He walked into a bank and tossed a wadded-up $10 bill to a teller. When she unwrapped it, she found a note stapled to it that read: "Give me all of your one hundreds, fifties, twenties, tens, don't look up or I'll blow your head off."
The teller handed over $3,690, which included bait bills that triggered a surveillance camera. Payne took the money and walked out the door. The teller yelled that she had been robbed, and a customer chased Payne.
Payne jumped into a cab, but police had no trouble catching him.
Payne spent more than two years in an Arizona prison. He was released but was still on probation, which he transferred to the state of Washington. He began living with one of his sisters and her husband in Port Angeles, on the Olympic Peninsula north of Seattle.
His sister told one counselor that Payne had a recurring nightmare in which he was stuck in a room. Something bad was about to happen, but he could never get out of the room. The dream often startled him out of sleep.
He clashed with the husband and was kicked out of the house. He moved in with his girlfriend but had trouble finding work.
On Oct. 14, 1982, Payne robbed his second bank, this one in Port Angeles. Again he handed a teller a note threatening to blow her head off. Again he received bait money that tripped an alarm. He ran away with $738.
Payne tore off his shirt as he ran from the bank, then slipped into a bar and used $20 of the stolen money to buy a T-shirt from a patron. His girlfriend worked at the bar, and when police got a tip that the robber had been there, she told detectives it was probably him.
Police found Payne hiding in a tree in the back yard of her home. He told police he had dynamite and planned to blow himself up. He told officers to shoot him. He eventually climbed down and was arrested.
The next day, Payne broke free from a jail officer and began to run away. The officer fired twice at his legs but missed. He was soon captured; again he asked officers to shoot him. Two months later, he attempted suicide by slashing his arm.
Payne, who seemed to have an ability to make court counselors feel sorry for him, received a year in jail and a deferred prison sentence for the Washington robbery. He also was placed on probation.
In the summer of 1984, Payne fled the state. Warrants were issued for his arrest. When he was arrested in Sacramento for sleeping in the school seven months later, no one realized that he was a wanted man.
Payne's intersections with the criminal justice system ended that day. No police officer had put him in handcuffs again.
In fact, there was only one piece of evidence to prove that Payne even existed after that: the palm print he left on William Cosco's closet door jamb, smeared in Cosco's blood.
In July 1986, John Carroll had felt a rush similar to the one Coyle was experiencing now. Carroll, who today is the deputy chief of the Largo Police Department, had been the primary detective on the Cosco investigation.
Carroll had chased one hot lead that turned out to be a red herring. Then the case went cold. Almost two decades later, Carroll still was frustrated that it had not been solved. He thought of it every Fourth of July, which was about the time Cosco was murdered in 1986.
Now, Coyle was bounding into Carroll's office, giving him updates on the investigation. Carroll, a hands-on deputy chief, told the younger officer that he was jealous and wished he was still on the case.
All Coyle had to do was find Payne and he would close a cold case, a giant feat for a homicide detective. Though advances in technology have helped solve more old murders, resolutions are still relatively rare.
But just as the investigation had progressed and as Coyle felt he was getting close, he discovered something stunning.
For the previous 11 years - through the uneasy Fourth of July holidays endured by Carroll, through the hundreds of fingerprint examinations sought by detectives, through the exciting sprint Coyle had seen the case take over the previous few weeks - the detectives had been chasing a ghost.
Jeffrey Scott Payne was dead.
Or was he?
Coyle had asked an agent with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to help research Payne's past. The agent learned that Payne may have died in Sacramento in 1993, possibly from AIDS.
That seemed to make sense because Payne's criminal record had come to such a sudden end.
"This is a guy who's been arrested everywhere," Coyle said. "Why else would he stop? Either he's dead or he's found Jesus."
Coyle called the coroner in Sacramento and learned that a man named Payne had died in 1993. But there had been no autopsy and no fingerprints or pictures taken. The dead man had been cremated, so exhumation was impossible.
Payne had lived such a crooked life, cooking up a dozen bogus identities, that Coyle couldn't be certain that Payne was the man who had died. For all Coyle knew, Payne was living a crime-free life somewhere under a new name.
Coyle received a copy of Payne's death record from California. He learned that Payne had died at a home in Sacramento that belonged to his sister. A background check found that she was no longer living in California.
She lived in Duluth, Payne's hometown.
Coyle and his partner booked a flight to Minnesota.
The April afternoon was cold and blustery in Duluth, but Coyle left his jacket in the rental car.
Fresh off a plane from Florida, Coyle wore a short-sleeved polo shirt. He got out of the car and stood in front of a two-story condo. Spits of cold Minnesota rain splashed on his arms. He had a chill.
"I hope she's home," he told his partner.
Coyle figured she would be. They had asked a Duluth detective to check her out before their arrival. They knew she got home from work in the afternoon. They also knew she had a child, a regular job and lived a normal life.
Coyle had mixed feelings about the visit he was about to make. He knew it would bring precious answers to the long-suffering Cosco family. He was just as certain it would bring anguish to the woman who would answer his knock.
Talking to her was the final step in solving the puzzle that had beguiled homicide detectives for 18 years. Coyle now had it nearly figured out. The woman who lived in Duluth held the last needed clues. She just didn't know it yet.
Coyle knew he couldn't tell her everything right away. He didn't want her to get upset and tell him to leave before he got all his answers.
He knocked on the door and waited. The door swung open, and a woman greeted him. Before Coyle could even take out his badge, she invited him inside.
Coyle couldn't believe Payne's sister was so nice.
She sat him and his partner, Keith Barton, on stools in her kitchen. She offered them coffee.
Coyle didn't want to alarm her by revealing that her brother was a murder suspect. He said they were there investigating a case but didn't say what it was about. He said they were from Largo, which Payne's sister said she had never heard of.
She began filling in the missing parts of the time line Coyle had put together of Payne's life. Before he died, she had last seen him in Sacramento in 1985, around the time he was arrested for sleeping in the school. He then went to Florida.
She heard from him again in 1991. He called from Cincinnati, where he was living in a gay community, apparently crime-free. He said he had AIDS. She thought it was a lie.
Two years later, he called again. That time, he said he was dying. He asked her to wire money to him for a bus ticket so he could come to her home and die. This time, she believed him. He took a bus to Sacramento. Two months later, he was dead.
During the interview, Coyle pulled out the mug shots of Payne that he had received from other police departments. She said it was her brother.
Finally, Coyle knew he had the right person.
"It was at that moment, when she said that, that I could actually relax," he said. "I knew that we had the right person. We knew that the palm print had made a match. And we knew that the person who died in Sacramento was indeed Jeffrey Scott Payne."
Coyle figured that Cosco probably met Payne somewhere in Pinellas County, then took him back to his apartment. What could have prompted such violence would be known only to Cosco and Payne, both dead.
But the hardest part was to come: Coyle had to tell her why he was there.
Though he was happy to have finally solved the case, Coyle had to watch as the woman's face twisted in anguish when he said her brother was a murderer.
"I felt good. But at the same time, I felt bad because here's this lady who is a regular citizen . . . and contributes to society - just a good person - and here I am saying, "Oh, by the way, your brother was a murderer.' "
Payne's sister declined to be interviewed for this article, saying she feared publicity would harm her family. Coyle said Payne's sister did ask him to express her sorrows to Cosco's family, which he did.
"They have their answer; now I have my nightmare," she told the detective.
Coyle had kept Cosco's cousin Robert Palmiero, who lives in Pinellas County, abreast of the investigation.
Palmiero in turn told Cosco's sister in New York, Barbara Gotte, what was happening. She was pleased to hear that the killer had been found, even if he was dead.
"It doesn't change anything, it doesn't bring him back," Gotte said of her brother. "Just the fact that (Payne) is not enjoying life is enough for me."
She didn't tell her parents about the arrest right away. Her father is 92, and her mother is 87. They still live in Utica.
Her mother gets upset whenever Billy comes up in conversation, and she was grieving the loss of a sister at the time. Gotte waited about a week before telling them one afternoon as they ate lunch together.
"Oh, by the way, Bob called and said the police have solved the case," she told them.
"Good," her father said, his eyes moist with tears. Her mother also began to cry but said she was happy. They finished their lunch.
Gotte couldn't tell them much more than that, and they didn't ask.
She didn't even know the killer's name until months later, when a St. Petersburg Times reporter called to interview her. She asked that her parents not be interviewed because of how upset they get.
On June 30, Cosco's parents celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary. The day was also the 18th anniversary of their son's death, though the first year they knew his killer had been identified.
Gotte wrote Joe Coyle a letter, thanking him for his efforts.
She wrote: "This will be the first anniversary that they will be truly happy again."
Coyle keeps the letter in his files.