A Jailhouse Interview With David Goodell
The letter sat on my desk like a dead bird. Just seeing my name written in that familiar handwriting with the capital letters and the loops sent me backing away.
I knew right away it had come from the Bergen County, N.J., jail, from David Goodell, Inmate No. 93313. I had spent a year investigating Mr. Goodell as part of a series of articles that I wrote for The New York Times about New Jersey’s troubled halfway houses.
He was a career convict who in 2010 had escaped from a halfway house in Newark and murdered a former girlfriend, Viviana Tulli.
I had read his parole officer’s reports and studied the crime scene photos. I had pored over dozens of letters he wrote to Ms. Tulli, letters that veered from boyishly innocent to menacing in a single page.
“What’s the good word, Mama?” they always began.
Now, I opened his letter to me.
“Mr. Dolnick,” he began, “what’s the good word?”
He wanted to talk.
In September, a week after Mr. Goodell’s letter arrived, I went to Hackensack for his sentencing. He had pleaded guilty in June to murder.
The courtroom was packed, and more than a dozen court officers lined the walls. From the makeshift press box, the room looked like a gruesome mockery of a wedding — her loved ones filled the benches on the right, his sat on the left.
Only about five people showed up on his side. They shifted quietly in their seats, trying not to look at the Viviana T-shirts and the framed portraits that her family clutched across the aisle.
As the crowd waited for the judge to appear, a film crew from MSNBC fiddled with recording equipment and chatted with the court officers. Finally, with multiple cameras trained on the courtroom door, Mr. Goodell, shackled and surprisingly slight, was ushered in.
He wore an orange jumpsuit open at the chest to show off his tattoos — a huge 7 surrounded by elaborate script that read “Only God Can Judge Me.”
He had a thin, manicured beard, a shaved head and a small tattoo on his temple. He wore immense black and gold aviator glasses that swallowed his face, making him look like a deranged Mr. Magoo.
With the cameras rolling, he seemed to take to his role as master villain, licking his lips and adjusting his oversize glasses. Mr. Goodell, 33, smiled as the judge sentenced him to 45 years in prison.
“You have no conscience, no remorse, no soul,” the judge said.
Mr. Goodell barely stifled a laugh.
Moments later, as he left the courtroom, he looked back over his shoulder and yelled, “If it ain’t life, it ain’t long!”
Then he laughed. “Ha HA!”
The correction officer told me to leave everything behind except for a pen and paper. He pointed me toward the visiting room, through a heavy door and past a metal detector. Mr. Goodell would be waiting for me there.
He was sitting on the other side of a clear, plastic divider. His orange jumpsuit hung open, revealing his collage of tattoos. He nodded at me and smiled. He motioned for me to pick up the black phone hanging on the wall.
My first question was about those glasses, which he wasn’t wearing now. He laughed. “Those are the Louis Vuittons! Millionaire glasses, fall ’08 editions,” he said. A friend had bought them for him on eBay.
As for his courtroom performance — the taunts, the smiles, the outfit — he said he did it “to be funny.” He wasn’t interested in a public display of remorse. “You want me to cry? You’re not going to see that,” he said.
He was jittery, cutting himself off in midsentence, jumping from thought to thought and then losing his way.
It took less than five minutes for him to begin arguing that Ms. Tulli, who was 21 when he killed her, was not as innocent as she appeared — precisely the kind of debate I didn’t want to have.
He reached into a stack of folders two feet tall, his entire case file, and pulled out a packet of photos. “Here! Look! Look at the tattoo on her shoulder!” he said, thrusting the picture against the clear divider. He flipped to the next one, taken at a different angle, then another and another.
He seemed untroubled that they were autopsy photos.
In court, Mr. Goodell’s lawyer said his client had never been given a chance, and Mr. Goodell now agreed, though he thought his lawyer had laid it on a bit thick. “He had me feeling bad for myself,” he said.
His parents were alcoholics and drug addicts. He grew up shoplifting with his father — a trip to do the laundry ended with the laundromat arcade games sticking out of the car’s trunk, he said. “It was a life of crime from Day 1,” he said. “I live in jail and visit the streets.”
His schooling stopped before the ninth grade. By the time he was 15, he had been arrested for robbery and been in court on charges of aggravated assault, weapons possession and criminal mischief.
He is meticulously organized, and picked out of his stack of papers a 1995 psychological evaluation. It said that his mother, who was unemployed, could not control him, and that his father “has not been seen in quite some time.” It described him as angry and hostile and cited a “severe character pathology.”
He put the paper down. “If I was brought into another family, I would have been all right,” he said.
I asked him about the first time he met Ms. Tulli. He sat back and described a classic suburban scene: He spotted her in a mall parking lot when she was just 16. (He was about 25.) “Nice little body, cute face,” he said.
Ms. Tulli was from a stable, middle-class family, the youngest of three children. Her mother was from Puerto Rico, her father from Argentina. She doted on her Chihuahuas, Mikey and Hennessy, and was known in her circle as the practical joker, the one who still thought water balloons were the world’s greatest joke.
Their relationship began in earnest when he went back to jail — he has spent about half his life behind bars — and they began writing letters back and forth. But it was stormy, off-again-on-again.
He had her name tattooed down his entire forearm, and again on his wrist. He opened his mouth to show me the word “PRINCESS” messily etched on the inside of his lip. “I really loved her,” he said. “I wanted everything with her.”
But he soon became suspicious that she had other boyfriends. He called her incessantly and would get furious when she wouldn’t answer. When she said she was going bowling with friends, he would call the bowling alley to ask if she was there.
Finally, he said he couldn’t take it anymore. At Logan Hall, a Newark halfway house, he faked a seizure so he would be taken to a hospital and he could make his escape from there, he told me.
He said he had pulled the same stunt at least a half-dozen times before, so he could bring back drugs to sell inside the halfway house. (A parole board official confirmed that Mr. Goodell had been taken to a hospital several times.)
He met up with Ms. Tulli at a friend’s house, and they stayed up late watching “Reservoir Dogs.” He pretended everything was fine, but it was an act, he said. “I’ve got murder on my mind,” he said.
He went on to describe the killing in methodical detail, getting more and more animated as he talked. There was no shame or remorse in his account. At times, he seemed almost proud. He stood up to demonstrate what he had done, describing each step with eerie precision.
I thought about walking out. I didn’t.
He kept talking, manically, describing how he drove around with her dead body for hours. In the car, he slashed himself with a blade. He said he was determined not to go back to jail, and “the last thing I wanted to see was her.”
But he didn’t die. He was spotted in a school parking lot, and arrested soon after.
A police report said that the day after the murder, he requested a photograph of Ms. Tulli for his cell. He asked the detective to apologize to her family for him.
I asked him what he felt in the days after the murder.
He leaned forward and said: “After I killed her, I slept better, I ate better. Because I didn’t have to worry about what she was doing. I felt better.”
It was time to go, I felt that I'd seen and heard enough. Two days later I recieved a note
“If there is anything else you need, contact me,” Mr. Goodell wrote. “It was a pleasure.”
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