Like many of the residents of the greater New Haven area, Lenny Paquette is Italian, sort of. He is a dog behaviorist and someone who will tell you to “have a sparkling evening” and mean it. He is a singer-songwriter who released an album of Kenny Rogers covers in the late 90s (they’re pretty good) and has played at Toad’s Place. One of the songs off that album was the honkytonk pick of the week on a Belgian radio station. Paquette has written a children’s book, Everett the Evergreen, inspired by his Native American grandfather. He also practices reiki, a spiritually-charged Japanese healing practice whose name means “a laying on of hands,” so he can tell you where your chakras are. But I did not know any of those things when I first met Lenny.
Here is what I did know: his niece, Dawn, had been murdered 11 years ago, and Lenny was working on the case with some paranormal researchers by the name of Scott and Jillian Hamilton. I was writing an article about the case, and I contacted Lenny to ask him about it. In the end, Lenny’s story was as much about recovery as it was about loss.
***
It is a brisk fall day outside Blue State Coffee on Wall St., and Lenny Paquette is hustling towards me, hand outstretched, ready for the shake.
“Vittorio? E un piacere, messier.”
I told him over the phone that my name was Victorio and that I was Uruguayan, which means I’m “a little bit” Italian. He seems to have really taken to that last part, and says Vittorio with relish. I roll with it. I tell him it is nice to meet him. No, he says, it is nice to meet you.
We walk to the Silliman Courtyard and choose a bench to sit on. He comments on the beauty of the leafy green space all around, and I agree. I’m not sure where to start, not sure how to ask someone about their dead niece. I look at my notepad. Blank. I look at Lenny. Expectant. Lamely, I settle on an uncontroversial question.
“How are you?”
Lenny saves me.
“I’m excellent, excellent. I’ve had an amazing year, when it comes to Dawn, and her murder.”
Lenny brings a big, three-inch binder between us on the bench. It is full of documents related to Dawn’s murder. It contains the coroner’s report, the letter Lenny wrote to obtain the aforementioned report, timelines of before and after the murder, clippings from newspapers about the murder, and more. More than enough information to give me an understanding of the case. But it is here, Lenny tells me, just in case we need it. He tells me he is “inclined to be loquacious” and can probably tell me all I need to know.
When I ask him if he “met with the police” about the murder, he lightly corrects me, explaining that he “met with them pertinent to the case.” One of the suspects, in Lenny’s estimation, was a “borderline sociopath.” Getting off the bench, he describes how Dawn was found: pointing to his lower leg, he says that “the lividity—or where the blood settled—was here.”
Dawn was reported missing on July 24, 2005. She was found dead by asphyxiation at a friend’s house on Jul. 26, though the police searched the premises of the house where she died once before then and failed to find her body because they did not go far enough inside. The Connecticut Department of Corrections prints cold case victims on packs of cards given to inmates; the hope is inmates might know information about those pictured and tip off investigators. Dawn’s card was the king of diamonds. To date, no arrest has been made. According to Lenny, an arrest warrant has been written up, but the DA of Middletown, Connecticut had yet to sign it.
Lenny says all this solemnly, but ten years after the murder, as we sit on a bench in a leafy quad, he seems at peace. He takes a call from his wife, answers “Hi, honey boo boo,” tells her where his black pants are, and returns to telling me about how the murderer covered his tracks. He thinks of Dawn, he tells me, not through the lens of grief but the lens of love. Lenny has suffered, mourned, and come out on the other side, but he struggled deeply to arrive there.
“I would just come in and sit in my man cave chair,” he says, recalling the months after the murder. His business as a dog behaviorist suffered. “Wasn’t bringing in any new clients. I had written a will.”
***
Lenny is usually upbeat, but when he lingers over the days and months after Dawn’s death, he speaks more slowly. Lenny shares this part of his story several times over the course of our later interviews. Whenever he mentions the will, it is laden with meaning. And, inevitably, it is followed by a name: Richard Jackson.
“Richard Jackson saved my life.”
Richard Jackson, according to his website, is a “Psychic Medium” and “Specialist in Solving Spiritual Anomalies,” among other things. He warned Lenny that he would be dead in three to six months if he kept grieving for Dawn. Lenny remembers this moment vividly, and he thinks Richard’s words brought him out of his mental fog. His insight, according to Lenny, came from his paranormal sensitivity.
“I’ve always had a belief that there’s more to life here than we realize. There’s skilled people, sentient people.”
He thinks Richard Jackson is one of those people who are attuned to other powers. For example, Lenny was writing a book about the murder, A Dawn to Remember, but whenever he wrote, “near tragedies,” — once, a near-collision on the highway happened. Richard suggested these were a result of the negative energy surrounding the book. Lenny stopped writing, and the incidents seemed to abate.
Talking about Richard Jackson has got Lenny on a roll, “loquacious” as he is. The next part of our conversation is a whirlwind tour of Lenny’s experiences with the supernatural. When he was stationed in France with the armed forces, he saw a hypnotist perform a “life regression” on an officer’s daughter. She had been born and raised in America, but under the spell of the hypnotist she began to speak in an unintelligible language. According to Lenny, the officer recorded this speech and took it to a French academic, who told him such a language had not been spoken since the 1500s. Lenny had a life regression done on himself, and he learned that he had been with his wife in three past lifetimes.
When Dawn went missing, he consulted with a sensitive (what we, the uninitiated, might call a psychic) named Samy, and Lenny says she knew Dawn had been asphyxiated before the police did. Lenny has been friends with Samy for a long time, and he gave me the number I could call to schedule an appointment, explaining it would be $125 but worth it. Maybe I appear less than convinced—he assures me that the FBI has used Samy many times.
For Lenny, these supernatural occurrences form a context in which, unlike in our seemingly arbitrary world, things matter. A past life manifests itself in archaic speech. A source of bad energy acts as a magnet for tragedy. A murder tears a hole in the moral fabric. It makes sense, then, that Lenny’s mourning process happened partly in this liminal, ghostly space.
***
As we leave the Silliman Courtyard and walk to his car, Lenny tells me about how he applies the supernatural in his job as a dog behaviorist. Usually, he can figure out what is wrong with the dog using normal strategies, but every once in a while he comes across a dog he terms idiopathic, “Which is a wonderful way to say ‘your dog is fucked up and I don’t know how.’” In these cases, Lenny says he opens his “third eye,” focuses, and tries to send the dog a picture of Lenny perplexed, with his arms raised in puzzlement. He demonstrates the puzzled arms and confused face. He assures me that Italian researchers are producing work that validates this.
As the interview draws to a close, Lenny tells me he has to “boogie.” At his minivan, he gives me one of his business cards (“Canine Cadre”) and one of his records (Dances A Lot, his Kenny Rogers cover album). He also slides open one of the car’s doors and shows me Cato, his very large dog, who barks at me. Lenny assures me Cato is really quite nice. I thank him for the interview.
“No, Vittorio—thank YOU.”