(Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.)
In January, 2001, five months after the death of my girlfriend, I started dating again. It wasn’t something I’d planned or even thought much about, but, like many of my actions during that time, going out with Teresa Smith, a tall, bi-racial cutie with curly hair and glasses, was an impulsive decision that began suddenly, blossoming before I realized what was happening. What began with a drunken kiss in an East Village bar one Sunday night quickly turned into a relationship by the following week. Like the emotionally damaged characters in a Tom Waits song, both Teresa and I were walking wounded with me still in mourning while she was going through a divorce.
We first met a few years before when Teresa was an editor at Billboard and I was writing for various publications including Vibe and Spin, amongst others. She struck me as a cool, friendly woman, though, with the exception of running into her at music industry parties, I didn’t see her much. However, at the beginning of the new millennium, when she started running the New Media division of a major hip-hop label, Teresa became buddies with my friend Hanna, who worked for the same record company.
Back when many people thought the internet was a fad, Teresa was on the frontline of the future as she established the company as online pioneers. We had a lot in common including a passion for good food, strong cocktails, great movies and potent pot. Nevertheless, while I was still buying $20 sacks of weed from local corner boys on Franklin Avenue as well as a delivery guy named Lando in Brooklyn, she was purchasing major weight of exotic, expensive bud that had catchy names (Jingle Bells, Piney, Whopper and White Wolf) straight out of stoner flick. Throughout that frosty winter there were many nights when we just chilled at her New Jersey condo listening to Blur or watching the newest Criterion Collection release while puffing her primo cheeba.
One night when I went to pick-up Teresa from her midtown office she told me, “I need to make a stop before we go home.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, “and where’s that.”
“I want to go see Jennifer. She’s the weed dealer.”
I laughed. “I didn’t know your weed man was a woman.”
Teresa was a workaholic who was often in her office long after most of the employees were gone, but that night we left promptly at seven o’clock. “I told Jennifer we’d be there by seven-thirty. She doesn’t like it when people are late.” The dealer’s place was a few blocks away at 854 Seventh Avenue, directly next door to the Carnegie Deli.
Located diagonally across the street from Carnegie Hall, the deli opened in 1937. It was known for its generous servings and walls adorned with 8×10 headshots of famous people. Back in the city’s gritty golden age of the 1970s, director Bob Fosse hung-out in the back with his buddy, writer Paddy Chayefsky, while in 1984 Woody Allen shot portions of Broadway Danny Rose there. More than a decade before, I had worked around the corner, but had only gone into the deli a couple of times. A steady stream of tourists flowed down 7th Avenue as we made our way to the front of the building. Teresa pressed the intercom and moments later there was a buzz.
The apartment was a long walk up six flights of stairs. By the time we reached the top I was huffing and puffing like the big bad wolf. The front door was bright pink and, if I hadn’t been so winded, I might’ve laughed. Inside the apartment, after I finally caught my breath, Teresa introduced us. Every weed dealer I’d had since I was 15 was either a Black or Hispanic male, so I was shocked to meet this bubbly attractive blond woman. Jennifer was 39-years-old, but looked younger.
“Michael is a music journalist,” Teresa said. Jennifer smiled and shook her head. We followed her from the front door to the nearby carpeted living-room. “Make yourself at home; I’m going to get us some wine.” Minutes later she returned with three glasses and a bottle of red, and we sat on the couch as though we were old friends. Jennifer also sparked-up a spliff of some very strong ganja.
By the time we finished the bottle of wine, I knew some of Jennifer’s life story including her being raised in Titusville, New Jersey and having appeared in the film Dirty Dancing. Both women laughed when I confessed to having never seen the hit 1987 movie. “I’m surprised,” Teresa said, knowing that I was a film buff who had seen a wide variety of movies. Not long after the women excused themselves to take care of business. There were a few hand-written menus on the wall with various brands and prices that ranged between $200 and $600 an ounce. Over the next few months, I returned to the apartment more than a few times with Teresa.
On my second visit Jennifer showed me her home recording studio and musical equipment. She gave me a CD of her songs which included “Ganja Woman,” a catchy track she recorded a few years before. Whenever Teresa and I went to Jennifer’s place (“I’ll never get used to those stairs,” I always said), she was always very nice and kind, treating us pot patrons more like house guests than customers.
***
The afternoon of May 10, 2001, I was at home in Crown Heights, Brooklyn when Teresa called, inviting me to come out to Jersey that night. “After work I’m going to go see Jennifer and then I’m going home to cook dinner.” It all sounded great to me and we agreed that I would meet her later that night. I had planned on leaving my house around 8:30 pm to get to Jersey City by 11 o’clock. However, before I left, the phone rang. It was our mutual friend Hanna. “Have you spoken to Teresa?” she asked. From the tone of her voice I knew something bad had happened.
“What’s the matter?”
“The woman Jennifer that you guys get your weed from…she was killed this evening. Somebody robbed her and killed her.” For a moment it was difficult for me to breathe. I had lived in New York City almost forty years and had never known anyone who’d been killed.
“Teresa was headed over there. Did she…?”
Hanna cut me off. “Teresa’s fine. She got stuck in the office and never made it over there. She’s headed home now.”
“Oh, thank God.”
“Yeah, she found out because the police called her. Apparently her number was one of the last on the caller ID.” A couple hours later I was in Jersey City. Teresa was crying hysterically. Though neither of us said it aloud, we both knew she could’ve easily been sitting in Jennifer’s apartment sipping wine and noshing cheese when the bad guys walked through the front door.
Television news reports named two Black males, later identified as Andre Smith, 30, and Sean Salley, 29 as suspects in the murder. Jennifer knew them as customers. As with many heists, what sounded perfect in theory turned out to be far from perfect in practice. Driving in from Newark, Jersey in a black 1991 Ford Escort, Smith and Salley must’ve hoped that Jennifer was alone, but, instead, she was in the middle of entertaining company. Her guests were hair stylist Anthony Veader, 37, Stephen King, 32, a musician and health-club manager, and two friends, Charles Helliwell, 36, a prominent music promoter, and jeweler Rosemond Dane, 36. Helliwell and Dane, who lived on the Virgin Islands, were engaged to one another and were staying at the apartment for the weekend.
Unmasked, Smith and Salley were recorded from a surveillance camera on the second-floor landing of the apartment building. They came into the apartment with the supposed intention of robbing the joint, but, with seconds of entering the apartment, everything fell apart. A witness remembers Smith wearing an unseasonable coat and pulling out a gun and duct tape. Smith held the gun on Jennifer as she made her way into the studio to get the product. “Don’t hurt anyone! Take everything and leave!” Jennifer said as she stuffed Salley’s knapsack with pot. Though she didn’t know it at the time, those were her last words.
Salley claimed that Smith gave him the gun, screaming at him to point the .38-caliber revolver at Jennifer and not the floor. Salley said he got “nervous and shaky,” which caused the gun to fire by accident. “At the time I was so scared, I hoped she had just fainted,” the New York Times reported Salley saying at his trial a year later. He claimed that he had dropped the gun and started making his way out of the apartment. “My head was so boggled, all I could think of was to get out of there.” He supposedly heard four more shots as he kept running.
Salley and Smith were only in the apartment for six minutes, but in that short amount of time they caused much damage, destruction and death. However, two guests, Ms. Dane, and Mr. Veader, survived. Veader was able to dial 911. “A bunch of us have been shot!” he screamed. “I’m bleeding out of the side of my head and I’m losing a lot of blood. Please, God. They came in, they broke in and they had guns.” His rush of words slowed down. “Hurry please, hurry up.”
Although an episode of the cheaply made true crime program I (Almost) Got Away With It claimed that Smith and Salley escaped by subway, they actually drove back to Newark, where the money and weed was divided. “While the two men fled with $1,000 and 12 quarter-ounce bags of marijuana, the police said there had been more in the apartment: an additional six pounds of marijuana and $1,800 in cash,” the New York Times wrote on May 23, 2001.
William K. Rashbaum, a New York Times reporter wrote on May 16, 2001, “One investigator said Mr. Salley had worked for George Clinton of the Parliament-Funkadelic performing troupe, also known as the P-Funk All-Stars. Mr. Clinton’s tour manager, Dana Pennington, said last night that Mr. Salley was fired as a production worker for the band about a year and a half ago.” Salley lost his job after allegedly slugging a woman on a band tour bus. “The police contacted Mr. Clinton on Monday through his lawyer,” Rashbaum wrote, “and Mr. Clinton’s associates provided the last phone number they had for Mr. Salley.”
For the next few days both Teresa and I were a bundle of nerves as we simultaneously mourned Jennifer’s brutal death and thought about how close Teresa was to being one of the victims. As essayist Grant Barrett wrote in the Village Voice the following week, “And of course we all wonder: What if I had been there that evening, buying some pot?” It was reported by the New York Times that her father Robert was a package food executive and her mother Joyce ran a ballet school, but Jennifer always had a “rebellious” streak. Reading that put me in mind of Jersey “girl” Patti Smith and others I’ve known over the years who had that punk spirit that made them escape suburbia for the wild city, and never looked back.
On May 12, 2001, the Times published an in-depth, mostly condescending story titled “A Fading Actress, a Pile of Drugs and 3 Slayings.” Penned by Dan Barry, the piece seemed to go out of its way to insult Jennifer, portraying her as the black sheep from an “affluent family (growing-up in) a picturesque hamlet along the Delaware River, about 15 minutes north of Trenton.” Barry made fun of her acting career that was highlighted by an appearance at the end of Dirty Dancing in 1987. “Ms. Stahl had forgettable roles in forgettable movies: Cat in ‘Necropolis’ (1986), Mindy in ‘Firehouse’ (1987) and Woman with Professor Bob in ‘I’m Your Man’ (1992)…the closest she came to fame was renting a tired apartment house above the Carnegie Deli.”
Barry talked to Heather Lea Gerdes, who was also in Dirty Dancing and had known Jennifer since they were teens in dance school. “She sold marijuana for as long as I’ve known her,” Gerdes said. “She felt she had to do everything illegal. She wanted to have fun all the time, but she secretly also wanted to be a star.” Nowhere in the piece did the writer talk about Jennifer’s kindness and generosity, which included giving free weed to AIDS and cancer patients. “To many people, she’s a heroine,” former High Times writer Callum Francis told the New York Post, “a lot of people were completely devastated by her death.”
A few weeks passed before a paranoid Smith turned himself in, while Salley went on the run. Two months later, after a segment about him aired on America’s Most Wanted, Salley was arrested in Miami not far from the homeless shelter where he was staying. According to Manhattan South Homicide Detective Bill McNeely in a 2016 interview with Eugene S. Robinson, it was the building’s security footage that sealed the deal. “The surveillance was brilliant,” he said. “That really helped us.”
Four months later, 9/11 happened, and our minds became focused on other heartbreaks that pushed other tragedies to back of my brain. Still, there was no way I could ever completely forget. The next June, both men were in the State Supreme Court in Manhattan blaming each another for the murders. Survivors Dane and Veader, both of whom were grazed, testified.
Dane painfully recounted of Smith and Salley, “When their energy entered the room, everyone was on high alert.” She also recounted, after the killers fled, sitting next to her dying boyfriend as he took his last breath. Though tried at the same time, Smith and Salley were assigned separate juries. Each jury deliberated for two days and in the end each received life sentences. “I hope each day is a hellish day for you,” Dr. Phillip King, father of victim Stephen King, said in court.
That October, Law & Order aired “Tragedy on Rye,” an episode inspired by the case. Three years later, the Village Voice published the Jennifer Gonnerman feature story “The Juror and the Convict,” which detailed the post-trial relationship between Lynne Harriton (the juror) and killer Andre Smith. As the foreperson of Smith’s jury, she believed his story about not pulling the trigger and felt uncomfortable that he had received the same sentence as Salley.
Harriton cried when she read the decision, felt physically ill after hearing the sentencing and began exchanging letters with the prisoner. The story showed Harriton’s compassion while revealing Smith as wonderful letter writer, which reminded me of fellow jailbird writer and sympathetic character Jack Henry Abbott, but, knowing how many cons are also con artists, I found it appalling.
Many years have passed since the spring evening of Jennifer Stahl’s murder, but there have been numerous times when I thought back to that tragic day. In 2011, when I was shot three times and spent two weeks in the hospital, I thought about her often and wondered about the senselessness of men with guns, the coldness of pulling the trigger in addition to the perceived power of taking a life. What did the bastards think seconds before firing those shots, and did they ever think about it again?
In 2017 the Carnegie Deli closed on New Year’s Eve. Three years later, at the beginning of the Covid-19 virus, I decided to stream films I’d never seen before, including Dirty Dancing. Near the end, I spotted then-twenty-five year old Jennifer Stahl smiling widely. Clad in a blue polka-dot dress, she channeled a 1963 teenager as she cheered from the venue’s sidelines. As Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze) and Baby Houseman (Jennifer Grey) proclaimed their freedom through dance, Jennifer jumped, laughed, clapped and looked simply radiant.
