The black, wheeled hockey bag had been left on a grassy area, with the bottom still resting on an adjacent sidewalk so that the blood leaked out across the pavement.
But Glenn Van Nostrand, who had been led to the bag by his two Rhodesian Ridgebacks while returning home from walking the dogs in Forest Park in Queens, has poor vision in his left eye. He did not see the blood as he stepped around to pull the zipper at the top of the bag.
When he peered inside, he did see a pair of bare feet. A woman in black jeans had been stuffed inside the bag head-first, he said. He called 911 at 8:02 a.m. Saturday.
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Bodies have been dumped in this spot—just off the Jackie Robinson Parkway—over the years because it affords a handy U-turn back to a rough part of Brooklyn where killings are common. But a blood trail that extended across Metropolitan Ave. told police that this body was different.
This one had been wheeled there from well-to-do Forest Hills.
The blood led police through the leafy lanes to the side door of the $2 million Tudor house at 72-24 Juno Street, where 51-year-old Orsolya Gaal lived with her husband and two teenage sons. The police executed an emergency entrance and saw much more blood on the first floor and even more in the basement. The medical examiner would identify the woman in the bag as Gaal and determine she had been stabbed 58 times.
“We think the attack happens on the first floor,” a senior NYPD supervisor familiar with the investigation told The Daily Beast. “We think he then goes to the basement to figure out, you know, how to clean up the mess and get rid of her.”
The official noted that the number of wounds suggested that the killer was in a fury.
“It’s what the profilers call overkill,” the supervisor said.
One lesson was that a picturesque area can—for a terrifying few moments—become the most dangerous place in the city.
“A safe neighborhood where these things aren’t supposed to be able to hurt you, and then violence reaches right into her home on that quiet street,” the supervisor said.
Gaal’s husband, 51 year-old Howard Klein, was in another part of the country touring colleges with their 17-year-old son at the time of the murder. The only person home at the time was a 13-year-old son, who police found on the top floor. He was apparently unaware of the horror downstairs, but was brought in for questioning, arriving barefoot at the station house, somebody who was present told The Daily Beast.
The son was soon after released. The NYPD supervisor said this was in part because police had recovered surveillance video of a figure who was clearly not the son pulling the wheeled hockey bag along what was becoming the blood trail shortly after 4 a.m.
Howard Klein could not be reached for comment for this story, and no member of the family is suspected of involvement in the murder.
As dawn broke, police were left with several immediate questions.
“Who’s the mystery man and what’s the motive?” the supervisor asked.
And then there was this:
“Why would the killer take the body away?”
The NYPD supervisor said that a neighbor told detectives Gaal headed into Manhattan around 6 p.m. Friday evening, saying she was going to see the opera. She had attended the opera at Lincoln Center in the past and police were able to place her in the vicinity on Friday. But police were not able to establish immediately that she attended that night’s performance of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro).
Police did determine that she returned to Forest Hills around 11 p.m. She spent around 45 minutes in a bar near her home and appeared to be waiting for somebody, the supervisor said. (The New York Post was first to report on the bar visit and some other details in this story, which conformed with what The Daily Beast learned independently.)
Nobody had joined her when she left the bar and headed home just before midnight. Somebody was either waiting for her outside the home and pushed their way in or had another means of entrance, the supervisor said.
She may have known the person and let him in. Or the killer could have had a key.
As was first reported by the Post, one person police want to question is a man who they believe had a romantic relationship with Gaal. The ferocity of the attack leads them to believe it was a crime of passion.
According to the supervisor, police are less convinced that the motive is to be found in texts PIX11 reported Klein received after the killing indicating that the “whole family is next”—and that the killer was seeking revenge for Gaal having supposedly caused him to be jailed years before.
In the meantime, police have subpoenaed phone records to determine who she spoke to that night. She suffered defensive wounds, which suggest she put up a struggle. And knife-wielding killers have been known to cut themselves in such a situation.
Police are examining the blood evidence to determine if any of it belongs to the man who stabbed her and for some reason stuffed her body in a black hockey bag and pulled it through a well-to-do neighborhood where nothing happens until it suddenly does.
