As Leslie closed the door of her white Buick, she heard someone familiar utter her name from the corner of her three-car garage: Russell Kirby, her husband Charlie’s friend and handyman, who had no reason to be lurking on their property at that hour. She’d never liked the man. Before she could ask what he wanted, Kirby attacked, striking her on the head and shocking her in the neck with a stun gun. He punched her in the stomach and tied her hands with white rope so tight the fibers cut into her wrists. Then he tackled her to the ground, bound her feet, and forced her into her own car.
Her knees, beneath the smart cranberry skirt she’d put on only hours ago, were bruised from the attack. Her personalized key chain — a metal heart engraved with “Leslie” — jingled as he sped by Angie’s Pizza, where she and Charlie ate dinner every Friday.
Kirby had stopped at his ramshackle home briefly, but they’d been driving for hours now, and Leslie had no idea what he wanted. He had demanded nearly $10,000, but he wouldn’t let her write a check. He was “thinking,” he kept saying. But as the car traversed the backroads of her hometown of Mystic, Connecticut, she realized he was stalling — and hatched a plan. She had a spare car key in her jacket pocket; she just had to get to it.
As they zoomed down I-95 again, Kirby said he felt the car shimmying; he pulled over to check out the problem. This was Leslie’s chance to escape. Kirby even untied her hands when she complained that her wrists hurt. And as he circled the Buick to check on the malfunction, Leslie wriggled into the front seat, jammed her extra key into the ignition, and peeled off toward home.
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When she burst through the door, Charlie rushed to meet her. He had already called 911 twice when she didn’t come home. Instead of falling into his arms, though, she yelled, “I hate you and I hate Russell Kirby!” Charlie called the cops for a third time as she wailed in the background.
At 4:37 a.m. on May 3, 2002, Kirby, 64, was arrested for the kidnapping of 57-year-old Leslie Buck. In Leslie’s car, they found an olive-green duffel bag holding a stun gun, a bottle containing some kind of alcohol, gloves, and a Colt .45 revolver, among other things.
Still, after a trip to the emergency room, Leslie went back to teaching grade school at Dean’s Mill School that day. Her students needed her. And it was important to her that people understand what she had just gone through.
“She wanted people to know that she was kidnapped, and she was showing me the bruises,” says Barbara Hatch, who taught with Leslie. She also wanted her friends to know that her husband of nearly 25 years had been stepping out on her. “Charlie’s got himself a girlfriend,” Leslie told Hatch, adding, “If I should die in the next couple of days, I want to be buried with all my money. That bitch is not getting anything of mine.”
The next day, Leslie was dead.
BACK IN MAY 2002, I DIDN’T KNOW any of this. I was 17 years old, no one had asked me to dance at the previous night’s junior prom, and I had to study for an AP Bio exam. When I came down to the kitchen that morning, feeling sorry for myself, my mom was sitting at the table in her flannel nightgown crying, the newspaper spread out in front of her. My first-grade teacher was dead, she told me — her husband had found her crumpled at the bottom of her stairs the night before.
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Everyone in town seemed to walk through that day in a daze; Leslie’s name was spoken in hushed whispers. I remember rushing out of the grocery store, upset, when I heard two women murmuring that Leslie was in a better place. I cried with my fourth-grade math teacher during yoga at the YMCA; she’d been friends with Leslie.
Nothing seemed real; I’d just seen Mrs. Buck at the library. In my memory, she was hand-cutting colored paper, a voice reading Clifford the Big Red Dog. And that kind of thing didn’t happen in Mystic, a touristy escape from New York City complete with bobbing boats and sea lions doing tricks at the aquarium.
I’ve spent 20 years writing around Leslie’s story — from the true-crime blog I started in grad school to memorialize shooting victims who the papers ignored to my work with Rolling Stone and the young-adult novel I based loosely on her death. I never really felt like I could tell it outright; I worried about hurting people, reopening old wounds, or sullying her memory. Still, I’ve been haunted by what happened for decades — by her death, yes, but also what a dramatic end does to a person. How it becomes entertainment.
I once asked a friend and fellow crime writer, Sarah Weinman — who also writes for this magazine — how she chooses which stories to tell. “A crime story only appeals to me if there are deeper questions to pursue, and they generally seem to revolve around ‘Who is this person as a person? What responsibility do artists have with respect to real-life trauma and pain?’” she told me. That hit home. There were definitely lingering questions about my teacher’s death — and she deserved to be remembered beyond the dusty newsprint.
And so I started asking around my hometown, determined that if I got any pushback from Leslie’s loved ones, I would drop the story. But, as more and more friends and family wrote back to me, the consensus was unanimous: No one had forgotten her, even all these years later — and no one was satisfied with the explanation for how her story ended.
So, now, after more than a year of delving into police files and court records; interviewing friends, family, law enforcement, and witnesses; donning plastic gloves to look through the contents of Kirby’s kidnaping kit; and digging up information that wasn’t public back in 2002, I’m ready to put the pieces together, to try to find the truth about the violent death of a woman so many people loved.
LESLIE’S BROTHER, DICK EDMONSTON, is a plainspoken man with a Maine brogue and neat gray hair. When I get him on the phone over the summer, he’s anxious to talk. “I think about Leslie a lot now because I’m dying of leukemia,” he says without a trace of self-pity.
He’s talking to a journalist for the first time in more than a decade; he’s been reticent to talk to the press in the past after, he says, he was tricked into doing an interview with a true-crime TV show after Leslie’s death. I assure him that I don’t really want to talk much about what happened to his sister — just about who she was. And, over a series of phone calls, he tells me.
The siblings grew up in Maine, where their dad worked for the state and their mom was secretary at Farmers’ Almanac. It was the 1950s, and the neighborhood kids would gather in the streets every night to play, but Leslie wasn’t all that interested in sports — save the occasional game of Capture the Flag. Instead, she’d spend hours in the bath reading. She was very much an inside child, Edmonston says; she hated shoveling snow and often tried to wriggle out of the yearly trip to the Christmas tree farm. She was fiercely close to her family — even transferring from Boston College to Saint Joseph’s, only 30 minutes from home.
So, it was a big deal when she finally moved to Connecticut in the late Sixties at the behest of her teacher friends. For a while, she lived the single life in an apartment near downtown Mystic; Edmonston would visit every weekend to do his laundry, listening to Dylan and the Stones on her record player while she went out with friends. “She kind of picked up after my mother,” he says. “She spoiled me. Thanksgiving, she’d make a big-enough turkey so I could take home bunches of dinners.” And then she met Charlie.
Charlie Buck was a native of Stonington, Connecticut, and was well-off, according to his childhood best friend, Neil Baker. His dad ran his own electrical business and his mom kept the books. He had a brother who was much older; they weren’t close. “Charlie had a convertible,” Baker says. “He was not well-liked, because he could be obnoxious, but he had a lot of toys.” It was Charlie’s cars that led to a friendship with Russell Kirby.
Kirby’s family moved to Stonington when he was young, and while Charlie spent his summers water skiing and hanging at the marina, Kirby rolled up his pants and dug for clams. They bonded over their shared passion of cars, though, after Charlie bought a 1940 Buick Limited from him in 1969. “Charlie had money, and my brother really didn’t have that much,” says Kirby’s brother, Stratton.
That money seemed to keep him insulated from too much trouble — even the serious kind. Around 1969, Charlie was drunk when he wove into the wrong lane going 80 miles per hour on a side road, slamming into a Ford sedan. The drivers of that car, a doctor and his wife, nearly died. At least, that’s how the couple told it to their daughter, Maggie Jones. Charlie was never charged with a crime. “We grew up always with that in the back of our minds,” says Jones, who runs the local nature center where I went to camp as a kid. “He’s a dangerous man, and he does awful things.”
Charlie didn’t come out unscathed; he got more than 100 stitches in his face and suffered what Baker suspects was “some brain injury,” which he believes changed Charlie’s behavior, too. “He was always chasing after women and making foolish comments,” Baker adds. “I used to have the girls in the bars come up to me and say, ‘I don’t understand why you’re hanging around with this guy. You’re such a nice person, and he’s a pig.’ But everybody would say, ‘That’s just Charlie being Charlie.’”
Charlie was a different person around Leslie, though, whom he met at his cousin’s wedding in 1975, when he was 29. His cousin worked with Leslie at Dean’s Mill School. He was divorced from his first wife at that point, with a daughter and a son he refused to acknowledge as his own, certain that his ex had cheated on him and that the boy wasn’t his, according to Baker. “Charlie pursued [Leslie] pretty heavily — flowers and candy,” Edmonston says. She turned him down when he first asked her out. When I ask Edmonston what he thought of his sister’s suitor, he says, “He was such an egotistical person. He basically made her family feel unwelcome. He was OK with my mother, not great with my father, and I think he detested me because I drew her attention from him.”
Most people Leslie and Charlie knew said the couple made an odd match. I always thought Leslie looked like Beauty from the Disney movie: dark-brown eyes and hair, hairbands that matched her massive shoe collection. She was a devout Catholic, quiet, sweet. Charlie … even his friend Baker had few kind things to say about him.
The two got married at Leslie’s church, Saint Mary, in 1979, when Leslie was 33 years old. Leslie glowed in a white veil; Charlie, then 32, looked “bored to death,” according to Baker’s wife, Marianne, who was also friends with Leslie.
The couple, who never had kids, became staples in the Stonington community, tooling around in Charlie’s cream-colored MG Roadster in matching driving jackets. I’d see them outside our local roadside ice cream stand, Sea Swirl, every summer — and even years after I was a gap-toothed kid in her first-grade class, she always remembered me, asked what belt I was up to in karate. I don’t recall ever talking to Charlie.
Over the summer, I meet up with my second-grade teacher, Anna Greene, at a Dunkin’ Donuts not far from where my parents still live in Mystic. She was a close friend of Leslie’s. After regaling me with embarrassing stories about childhood-me, I ask her to tell me about the Leslie the adults knew. “She had a lot of friends. She would call one of us [teachers] every night,” she says, reminiscing about pool parties in the Bucks’ backyard. “She remembered every kid,” Greene says. “I guess that was what she found important, was the kids in school.”
I wonder aloud if Leslie was lonely. Greene doesn’t contradict me. Neither she nor Edmonston seem to know if Leslie wanted kids of her own, but they knew she would do anything for the ones she taught. She attended her students’ first Communion, and stood up for any kid she felt was treated unfairly. “She had a couple of twins that were consistently late, and she knew it wasn’t the twins’ fault, it was the mother’s fault,” Edmonston says.
What she was putting up with at home, it seems, was much darker.
CHARLIE BUCK’S REPUTATION AS A “horn dog,” as Baker puts it, was apparently common knowledge in downtown Mystic, which was much less-upscale back in the 1990s and early 2000s than it is today. Most people only know my hometown because Julia Roberts filmed Mystic Pizza there, but fellow “Mystic Kids” remember the way it used to be before it became what The New York Times has dubbed “Connecticut’s Culinary Corridor.”
Mystic has always been a tourist town, with its quaint downtown and historic houses, but now, developers have swooped in and built sleek businesses along the main drag in glass and gray-scale. My childhood bookstore, which my brother-in-law now owns, relocated to facilitate a massive jewelry emporium. A James Beard Award-winning restaurant opened right down the street from where there was once a bare-bones bar called, simply, John’s. The few businesses that have withstood the test of time include the Army Navy Store and the record store, Mystic Disc, whose owner once told me that he’d die on the floor before selling.
The Mystic of my childhood, though, had a modicum of edge — kids with anarchy symbols on their jackets skateboarded outside a coffee shop that reeked of weed, and locals got rowdy at a dysfunctional watering hole called the Draw Bridge Inne. That spot — which boasted a dusty jackalope head on the wall — stood in the shadow of the Mystic River Bascule Bridge, a 1922 marvel that lifts on command to let ships pass. The DBI also employed a woman named Carol Perez, a raven-haired beauty who manned the bar. She became the object of Charlie’s intense admiration in the winter of 2002, 23 years into his marriage, when the company he inherited from his father was doing electrical work at the bar.
Charlie started coming in even after the work was done to nurse a Coke at the bar and stare at Perez, who was more than 20 years his junior. “He would eat her with his eyes,” Jennifer Wolcin says. She worked at the DBI with Perez. “But she was eating it up at the same time.”
Soon, Charlie started giving Perez money and expensive gifts. “One day we’re sitting, rolling silverware, and she’s like, ‘Buck’s coming today. What should I ask him for?’” says Wolcin. “And I was like, ‘Could you ask for some art supplies and you could give them to me?’” But the gifts were much more substantial than paintbrushes. All told, according to the local paper, The Day, Charlie gave Perez $235,000 to buy a house, $3,000 for a downpayment on a Monte Carlo, as well as a laptop, shoes, money for bills — you name it. His electrical business was apparently thriving.
Charlie’s spending was a longtime issue in his marriage to Leslie. She was terrified of dying poor, and was an avid bargain-shopper and coupon-cutter. Charlie liked shiny things. “Charlie always talked about building a pole barn over at their house because he had a couple of collector cars, and he wanted a place to put them. And she said, ‘No, I don’t want to spend the money on a pole barn,’ which kind of irritated him,” Baker says. “And then he wanted to buy a new boat, and she said, ‘No, you don’t need a new boat.’”
At some point, Leslie found out about Perez; a DBI employee named Ralph Hill found Charlie in tears in his car one day behind the bar, according to The Day. He had told Leslie about the other woman, he told Hill, and now he was worried that his wife would “take him for everything he has.”
And he wasn’t shy about the solution to his woes. Harry Longinidis, the owner of Angie’s Pizza — where Charlie and Leslie would go every Friday — remembers that Charlie bellied up to the bar, joking that he wished his wife was dead, in between creeping on the waitresses. He also directed his ire at Perez’s ex; he asked Hill if he knew anyone who could take care of the man for him. “I don’t want him breathing,” he said, The Day reported.
Leslie didn’t seem happy, either. Despite her strict Catholic upbringing, according to the police investigation, she asked a friend about divorce and restraining orders before her death.
Which brings us back to her great escape — how she outsmarted Russell Kirby on the side of the highway, returning home bruised, beaten, and livid.
BEFORE LESLIE FINALLY ARRIVED HOME, Charlie had called 911 twice — first at 10:17 p.m., then at 10:30 p.m. On the first call, he told the operator that Leslie had been due home an hour and a half ago from an event with her teachers’ sorority at the nearby Hilton. “Have there been any accidents or anything around?” he asked over the crackly line, before oddly launching into his whereabouts that evening. He had some meetings at the various fire departments he volunteered with, he said, adding that he’d arrived home after 10 p.m. to find the house empty.
During the next call, he told the operator that he’d rang two of Leslie’s friends who were also at the meeting — including Anna Greene, my second-grade teacher — who told him Leslie had left the Hilton at a quarter past eight. The hotel was only an eight-minute drive from the Bucks’ house on Mason’s Island, a tony community on the water. During a third 911 call, at 11:07 p.m., Leslie screamed in the background.
“He’s so sick!” she yelled as Charlie told the operator that his wife had been kidnapped by his best friend. “I told you I never liked him.… He punched me in the stomach.… He has our house keys.” Leslie seemed most concerned about that — her 90-year-old mother’s house keys were on that key ring. Luckily, when Kirby was arrested early the next morning, the keys were apprehended. Leslie never got them back, though. I know because I held the heavy ring in a gloved hand under the buzzing lights of the New London Superior Court last summer.
When police brought Kirby to the station early the next morning, he refused to give a statement. “[He] stated that he did not want to go through the trouble of talking and just wanted to be charged with his crimes,” according to a police report.
Still shaken and bruised, Leslie was taken by ambulance to Lawrence and Memorial Hospital in nearby New London. When Charlie arrived, the ER doctor attending to Leslie felt like he wasn’t getting the full story. A nurse also suspected the couple were leaving things out, and another medical professional told police that Charlie didn’t seem emotional at all. But when staff wheeled Leslie away to get an X-ray, Charlie told them, “Take care of her. She’s my whole world.”
Separated from her husband, Leslie became much more animated, the X-ray tech told police, rattling off the details of her abduction and fidgeting with a gold bracelet. “Why would someone give something like this if they’re going to do this?” she asked one of the techs. When Leslie got back from getting X-rays at around 3 a.m., Charlie asked if they could leave. And, according to one of the techs, Leslie went “back into her shell.” She had a voice “like a little girl’s,” the tech told police. She had abrasions on her hands and legs, and broken capillaries around her eyes and throat.
Another staff member watched the couple leave the hospital not much later. She “saw Charles grab Leslie by the upper right arm with his left hand and pull her with force,” according to a police report. “[She] said it was not affectionate at all and she thought to herself, ‘She was just kidnapped, why is he pulling her like that.’”
A few days later, Charlie called the police at 5:38 p.m. “Oh, sweetheart,” he cried over the phone while the 911 operator listened on. He described a bruise on his wife’s neck, a cut on her head. “Oh, she’s cold, her face is ice cold,” he moaned. The police and paramedics arrived moments after. When they saw her, at 6:05 p.m., they knew she was dead.
NEIL BAKER AND HIS WIFE, MARIANNE, went over to Leslie’s mother’s house the morning after Leslie’s death, worried about their friend Charlie’s state of mind. Surrounded by Leslie’s teacher friends, Charlie’s emotions ping-ponged all over the place, though. He went from describing, in detail, how Leslie’s body looked crumpled at the bottom of the stairs to crying hysterically.
“The thing that strikes me is I’ve never seen Charlie have any kind of emotion — not anger, not love,” Marianne says when we talk last summer. But that morning, the display just seemed like “this faking, fakey thing,” she says. “I thought, ‘That’s a fake emotion.’ Leslie was always true.”
Baker says, “That’s when we realized that he was responsible for her death.”
The Bakers went home and mulled over the things they previously overlooked or dismissed about Baker’s childhood friend. How Charlie had told Baker about something he called “the Equalizer,” a heavy length of wire he kept in the spare room at the top of the stairs for protection. He cut a length of the same material and gave it to Baker; a cop friend later told him that it was considered a “deadly weapon.” They remembered the couple’s money issues, and how Charlie had chased one of their babysitters around a room. They later gave that information to the cops, who’d begun investigating Charlie for his wife’s death.
Dave Knowles, Joe Coco, and Cody Floyd were all on the case back in the early 2000s, and they are eager to tell me about their investigation into Charlie Buck. Floyd, then a detective, has been bothered for decades by Charlie’s last 911 call, during which he described Leslie’s injuries in detail, including a deep cut on her forehead. “You can’t tell that there’s a cut to her forehead, initially,” Floyd says. “If you look at the autopsy photos, obviously you can see that cut. But at the crime scene, between her hair and the blood, there’s no way. So there’s no way he would have known that, right? Unless he put the cut there.”
Those wounds, Floyd and the other cops say, match the scalloped pattern of the wires that make up the Equalizer — which went missing after Leslie’s death. It had to be murder, they all thought.
And then there were Charlie’s actions. The day of Leslie’s death, Charlie, a volunteer fireman, didn’t respond to an emergency call right near his house — despite usually being the first one out, the cops say. They wondered if it was because he was with Perez. Perez came to the police station in the days after news of Leslie’s death broke to tell police that Charlie was at the DBI the day his wife died. “I took a statement from her, which, looking back, she left out certain parts,” Coco, a detective at the time, says wryly. Namely that she and Buck were involved. That came out later, via police interviews and The Day.
“What we always surmised about Carol [Perez] is she wouldn’t give you information, but if you hit her with it, she would provide that information,” Knowles, a former detective sergeant, says. “So she was always playing both sides.”
Charlie’s behavior at Leslie’s funeral also raised suspicions, despite telling the press days before, “I keep hoping I’ll wake up and it isn’t true.… She was just everything to me. She was my whole life.” The church where Charlie and Leslie got married decades before flooded with more than 300 mourners, including Leslie’s fellow teachers, who arrived on a yellow school bus. Many steered clear of Charlie, though, including Leslie’s mother, who jerked away from him when he tried to take her arm, clinging to her son instead. Baker was alarmed when Charlie slipped him a card for his newly hired lawyer at the reception, in case he needed bailing out, adding, “Murder cases are expensive.” He’d already spent $310,000 on a defense, he told Baker.
Meanwhile, the news — both local and national — seized on the case, churning out story after story peppered with allegations about Charlie’s relationship with Perez. “It was something you would read in the New York Post, with all the details about the girlfriend and the crazy circumstances that led up to this,” says Joe Wojtas, who has worked at The Day for 37 years and was one of the reporters on the case. “We started to get tips from the community.… He kind of became a pariah. People thought he killed his wife, and, as you know, you had the beloved elementary school teacher.”
There was the story in the paper in which Perez alleged that on the day of Leslie’s death, Charlie told her, “There’s nothing in the world I wouldn’t do for you.” The one where Perez claimed that Charlie had called her multiple times after Leslie died, telling her he “would have to mourn for about a year for appearances sake,” and then they’d run away together. Charlie denied the alleged affair, dismissing it as “vicious rumors,” according to The Day.
Then there were the allegations that didn’t make the papers. A year after Leslie died, the owner of the DBI sold the venue, and finally talked to the cops. “Carol told [the DBI owner] that Charlie told her that he had killed his wife,” Coco remembers. “She hadn’t spoken about this before; she was afraid because Buck was still around.” In police records, Perez denied telling the DBI owner that Charlie killed Leslie. “Carol’s version is that [her boss] offered her opinion that Buck killed her and Carol agreed with her,” according to those documents. The owner has since died.
Meanwhile, Russell Kirby was working his way through the criminal-justice system for Leslie’s kidnapping, and cops uncovered a piece of evidence that potentially tied him to Buck — a note with a series of times and dates on it, which police put together was Charlie and Leslie’s comings and goings the day before and the day of the kidnapping.
But that note was never entered into evidence. It was found in Kirby’s truck, which the cops didn’t have a warrant to search, since it wasn’t involved in Leslie’s abduction. “We couldn’t tie it to the actual kidnapping,” Knowles says. That also meant it was useless in any case against Charlie.
In addition to the lost note, Floyd tells me, Kirby’s brother Stratton had been visiting him in the days before the kidnapping, and he had overheard Kirby on the phone with someone who sounded like Charlie. It seemed like they were discussing dates and times, Floyd says. (Stratton did not recall this when we spoke for this story.)
Leslie’s family filed civil suits against Charlie in 2005 — three years after her death — seeking both to take control of Leslie’s estate and accusing Charlie of paying Kirby to kidnap and murder her. But the cops were still jammed up by 2006, mainly because the medical examiner didn’t definitively rule her death a homicide. They brought in experts, including Barbara Wolf — who helped get O.J. Simpson acquitted — and Michael Baden, the former chief medical examiner of the city of New York, who worked on the Phil Spector case, as well as, recently, the George Floyd murder. Both concluded that Leslie had been hit over the head and strangled.
Much to the cops’ chagrin, Kirby wasn’t talking — the cops tried to get to him multiple times while he sat in jail awaiting trial, and he stonewalled them all.
When people complained about the seemingly stalled wheels of justice, the chief state’s attorney told the press, “CSI and Law and Order offer some nice fiction. But they’re not the reality we deal with every day.” In 2006, four years after Leslie’s death, the cops called in reinforcements: the cold-case unit.
JACK EDWARDS HAD BEEN TRYING to retire for decades. He was a cold-case inspector for the Connecticut State Police, though, and it’s all he really liked to do — dig into a case until it cracked. Edwards wasn’t the lead investigator in the Leslie Buck case, but he was arguably the most obsessed. “Jack is 100 miles an hour,” Knowles tells me, laughing.
I meet Edwards at the Stonington police station, which is across the street from my old high school. It’s a cozy little brick building, but the conference room has fluorescent lights befitting a morgue, and we squint under the glare as he takes me through some case materials. Edwards, who is in his eighties — and finally retired — has the air of an old-school cop: a raspy, low voice and steely gaze. But he smiles with his whole face and has a propensity for telling me “good job” and “I’m proud of you.”
He launches into all the things that bothered him about Leslie’s death when he started digging in. How when Charlie called 911 when Leslie went missing, he needlessly brought up his own whereabouts that day, as if he was giving himself an alibi. That mysterious note from Kirby’s truck that wasn’t allowed into evidence. How her autopsy pointed to something far different from a fall down the stairs.
“She has many more injuries than she had from the kidnapping,” Edwards explains, pointing out that gash that the cops homed in on. “There was also a deep impression on her throat that wasn’t there when she went to the hospital after escaping Kirby,” he says.
Back in 2002, Charlie clashed with cops over Leslie’s hospital records following her kidnapping, and their intention to interview the staff. He claimed he didn’t want them obtaining the files because he was considering suing the hospital, and wanted the records himself, implying that they missed something that night which then later led Leslie to get dizzy and fall down the stairs. He never did file a suit — and the cops ended up getting their way — but an X-ray tech claims that everything was aboveboard. “Her husband tried to say that the hospital was negligent, that she had a head injury [from the kidnapping] and that we didn’t do a CAT scan,” the tech tells me. “But she did not have a head injury when she was brought in.”
Edwards was also struck by the lack of blood at the scene. If she’d fallen and hit her head, there should have been tons. His theory is that Leslie was actually killed at the Bucks’ other house, where Leslie’s mother lived, then driven back to the place on Mason’s Island and staged at the bottom of the stairs. A neighbor had seen them driving by that day, Edwards says that when the neighbor waved, neither Leslie nor Charlie responded as usual. Charlie looked mad, the neighbor said. No one got warrants to search Charlie’s car or the other house. “When you looked at the photographs and the autopsy, she was beaten up pretty bad,” Edwards tells me. “It appeared that she had been dragged on her knees or something. So I thought that the attack happened somewhere else, because there wasn’t anything at the scene that would lead to those kinds of injuries.”
The other cops don’t ascribe that theory — they think she was killed at home.
SEVEN YEARS AFTER LESLIE’S DEATH, and three years after the cold-case unit was brought on, Charlie was arrested on Jan. 22, 2009, right outside the doughnut place where he’d get his morning coffee. Joe Coco, one of the cops on the case, had retired by then, but he came back to see the man in cuffs. In the back of the cop car, Charlie told officers, “You know, this case is just based on innuendo,” Coco says.
At that point, the cops had no physical evidence. The Equalizer had gone missing, and, of course, Charlie’s DNA was all over the house. He lived there.
Meanwhile, Kirby’s kidnapping case orbited Charlie’s murder case like a distant moon. Charlie refused to testify in Kirby’s trial in 2004, since he was under investigation for Leslie’s murder, and Kirby refused to talk to the cops about Charlie.
“Oh, Kirby, we wanted to talk to him,” Dave Knowles, one of the other cops on the case, says. “He wouldn’t talk to us. He canceled everybody on his visitation list.”
In 2004, Kirby was convicted, but it was overturned two years later after the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that Leslie’s statements to the police should not have been admitted as evidence, as she was already safe at home. At his second trial, Kirby argued that the contents of his kidnap kit were actually meant to ward off an angry dog he encountered during a job repairing heavy machinery. Leslie had attacked him, he claimed. No one bought that. In 2010, Kirby was found guilty of kidnapping for a second time.
Kirby was sentenced to 21 years; he was released early in 2020. I tried to reach out to Kirby several times over the past year, but he never replied.
After his arrest, Charlie spent 20 months in MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution awaiting trial, roughly an hour and a half from home, where he apparently found Jesus. He wrote letters to Leslie’s mom about God, Dick Edmonston, Leslie’s brother, says. He’s not sure if their mom ever read them. Charlie was released on bond two months before the trial, scraping together the $1.5 million by leveraging his houses. The trial was swift — about a month and a half — and Leslie’s teacher friends took turns sitting in the courtroom. Charlie’s lawyers opted for a three-judge panel rather than a jury, so the prosecutors were left to present the cold, hard facts, as opposed to playing on 12 people’s emotions. And that proved to be an issue for the prosecution, who didn’t have much in the way of physical evidence. “[I was bothered by] the fact that we were never able to find what we considered to be the weapon that inflicted the injury,” prosecutor Paul Narducci tells me.
“We knew going in that it was a problematic case, and that there certainly was no guarantee that we were going to get a conviction, but we had gotten to the point where we didn’t think the case was going to get any better. We had a sincere belief in his guilt, but we knew that some of the evidence that convinced us probably wasn’t admissible,” adds his fellow prosecutor Larry Tytla, who points to the note from Kirby’s truck as an example. “And so, at that point, you try the case and see what happens.”
During the trial, Narducci ran into Charlie at Mystic Pizza, where the prosecutor was picking up a Hawaiian pie. “Charlie turns to me, and he goes, ‘I don’t know much Hawaiian, but I do know a couple of phrases,’” he tells me. “He said, ‘The only thing I know is, ‘Come on, you want to lei me.’ At which point I blushed.” Narducci wasn’t sure if Charlie recognized him — why would he tell a dirty joke to the man trying to put him away from murder? But Narducci says Charlie’s lawyer told him her client was well-aware who he was talking to. “‘Oh, he’s so incorrigible,’” he recalls the lawyer saying. (Charlie’s lawyer did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
As it turns out, Charlie was right to feel buoyant. He was acquitted on Dec. 15, 2010, and the civil cases were withdrawn; Charlie and Leslie’s family agreed to split her estate. I’m not able to tell you exactly what went down at trial — those records are now sealed — but, in the end, it came down to dueling medical professionals. The state’s experts said Leslie was murdered; the defense argued that she died of a previously undiagnosed heart condition that struck while she was standing at the top of the stairs.
“That shocked me that two people at the very top of their profession could have such diametrically opposed conclusions,” Tytla says. “My experience had usually been that experts would be nuanced and come to different conclusions, but I mean, these two would look at the exact same evidence and draw completely contrary conclusions from it.” The medical examiner for the defense has since died.
“I was upset,” says Floyd, one of the detectives. “I’d lived that case for eight years. It was a hometown couple.… In my mind, there was no doubt in my mind that Charlie murdered her.”
WHEN I FOUND OUT ABOUT THE ACQUITTAL, I was living in New York City in a shabby apartment, trying to be a journalist. It was a shock to hear that this saga that engulfed my hometown for nearly a decade was finally over, that a man everyone was convinced was guilty had walked free.
It’s not like Charlie went back to life as normal, though. He was banned from one of his favorite pizza joints, Angie’s, and after making a crude comment to a waitress at a volunteer firefighter party, he was kicked off one of his squads. His life became very small.
In 2016, Charlie fell off the roof of his childhood home, where he’d moved after losing his house to pay for his lawyers. He died not long after at the same hospital where Leslie was cared for after her attack; there was no funeral. His name was carved on the same gravestone as Leslie’s, on a shady plot near the sea, but his ashes were scattered somewhere far from her bones.
“Everybody thought I [pushed him],” says Jack Edwards, the retired cold-case cop. “Seriously, it wasn’t me. St. Michael, he’s the protector of the policeman. There’s no doubt in my mind, [Charlie] killed that girl. So, St. Michael fixed his ass.”
Since Charlie can’t speak for himself, I set out to try to get his side of the story. Neil and Marianne Baker have changed their minds regarding their friend, and Charlie’s daughter died years ago. I managed to connect with his niece, Kelly Bonser, but she didn’t know him well. In fact, she was shocked to learn she had another cousin: Charlie’s estranged son (who didn’t reply to my letters). Her father and grandmother — now both deceased — believed Charlie was innocent, but no one else agreed. “She needs justice,” Bonser says of Leslie. “It’s a shame how he got away with it.”
I find Charlie’s old Facebook profile; he’s smiling awkwardly in one photo, shirtless in another. He has only four friends, all pretty young women. I message them all, and connect with Nanette Wilson, who met him through a friend at a local pizza joint. He was always kind to her, she says; they never talked about Leslie beyond him saying he missed her.
“He was a sad person. I mean, everything had been stripped from him,” she says. She used to work with older people, and has a soft spot for the lonely ones. “We used to ride through Stonington, and people would see his convertible and say, ‘You fucking murderer.’ I mean, they would scream it. When people think you killed your wife, even if you’ve been [acquitted], it doesn’t matter. Of course you’re gonna be lonely — especially in this town. ”
She’s right. For some foolish reason, Charlie and Carol Perez, the DBI bartender, appeared on Dr. Phil in 2016, where they denied ever having a physical affair — plus, they’d both since moved on, they said. Perez also accused Charlie of trying to kill her more than once. Charlie smiled and seemed to revel in the audience’s laughter. I found out about the appearance at a friend’s wedding, and remember the palpable disgust of my tablemates, some of whom had Leslie as a teacher too. I couldn’t watch that video for years. I struggled to watch it again to write this story.
I wish I could say I had some smoking gun, some final puzzle piece that would click in place and bring the truth to light. I have some leads: the note, rumors that Charlie confessed on his death bed — that he saw Leslie’s ghost in his hospital room. I’m still digging. I’ve tried to contact Russell Kirby, who’s 89 years old and lives in his car somewhere in Connecticut. But when I ask his brother Stratton for Russell’s number, he writes back: “NO! He is to be left [alone],” a sharp turn from the friendly man who had chatted on the phone with me before. As for Perez, I emailed, called, texted, and wrote her physical letters. No response. Finally, a year after I began reporting, I knocked on her door.
IT’S A HUMID EVENING IN MAY, the lush green trees humming with birds, when I pull into Carol Perez’s driveway in Gales Ferry, about 20 minutes from my parents’ home. Her house — which I’m almost certain is the one Charlie bought her — is a pleasant robin’s-egg blue, with a wheelbarrow in her yard, which abuts the darkening woods. I expect to feel more nervous as I knock on her door. At first, no one answers — but, soon, a light turns on upstairs, and I watch as the silhouette of a woman approaches the door.
When it opens, I feel the same sense of disorientation I sometimes do when interviewing a favorite actor: There’s the version in my head, and the reality. And there she is now — Carol Perez, now Stephens — a spectre from childhood. Not a boogeyman, quite, but something adjacent. She’s still strikingly beautiful, even in leggings and a T-shirt, hair long and graying now, but eyes bright.
“I’ve been trying to reach you,” I say, my voice higher and younger-sounding than I’d like. “I’m a former student of Leslie Buck’s, and I have a story about her coming out in a few months. I’d just … like to hear what you have to say.”
I brace for her to yell at me, slam the door in my face, but she just leans against the jamb. “Sure,” she says slowly. “I can’t right now, but …” I key her number into my cell and text her my name.
“I kind of wanted to write a book,” she says softly as I type. “I never wanted to [do] any news media, because I was damned already. This guy, he’s insane,” she continues, referring to Charlie. “I had to wait.” Until he died, I guessed.
I soften toward her then. I don’t know much about her life before Charlie, but I know that it wasn’t easy. And that awful Dr. Phil episode. Still, I’m not sure why, but I doubt she’ll answer when I call her, so I take my chance right then.
“I’ve spent 24 years wondering what happened to my teacher,” I say, my voice even higher than before. I sound like I’m 17 again.
She rushes to speak before I finish. “I never met her, but I met that guy after everything happened. I had no idea what happened to her. It was so creepy. I didn’t believe it, that she died — that he would, that he could do that.”
I tense up. I know that half of what she just said is untrue. She didn’t meet Charlie after Leslie died — several people reported to the police that Charlie was at the bar all the time, that he showered her with gifts. I cut in gently, not wanting to scare her. “Did he tell you he did?” I ask, meaning: Did Charlie confess to murder to you?
“No, I would have already been to the police,” she rushes out. My head is spinning; she did go to the police. Does she mean before Leslie’s death?
“He never talked about it?” I press.
“No, no, he didn’t trust me like that,” Perez continues, her hand on the door now. “He trusts me more than most people, but he still wouldn’t trust me. I definitely will talk to you.” She blinks at me. Conversation over. It’s clear now that it’s time to go, so I say goodbye and confirm that I’ll call her the next day.
I call once, twice, three times over the next week. I text — more than once. She answers once and tells me she’d had a family emergency. I wait a week, then try again. Nothing. I still haven’t given up hope, though, that Perez will answer one day. That she’ll be willing to tell me the truth about everything.
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In the end, no, I didn’t solve a murder, but I did learn more about Mrs. Buck, someone I’ve spent decades thinking about. Dick Edmonston, who died last winter, taught me that Leslie perfected the art of the chocolate chip cookie. Neil and Marianne Baker told me about the pool parties Leslie threw every summer. “That’s the memory I will hold onto,” Marianne says.
And Anna Greene, my second-grade teacher, told me about the poems she found in Leslie’s desk after she died — that she read at the funeral. There’s one about the kids who are different, “who don’t fit,” who “dance to a different drum.” For some reason, that hit me harder than police reports or autopsies. More than the horrors that true-crime often focuses on. I still can’t read it without crying. Maybe because I definitely was one of those kids, or maybe it’s just because it shows that she truly saw her students — all of them. Or maybe it’s a much-needed reminder that Leslie Buck isn’t a story, a case to be solved. She was a person. And she deserves to be remembered. %!s(
