Detective Never Closed Case of Court Buff Thrown to Her Death : Murder: Solving the slaying of an old lady beloved by neighbors took six years and included the trial of the wrong man.

Just after noon, in the marble hallway on the seventh floor of the Bronx County Courthouse, Al Randby said goodby to Mabel Wayne.

The frail, white-haired court watcher said she was going shopping before heading home. And she had something else on her mind. “Someday I’m going to be looking down on my boys and girls from heaven,” she told the court officer. “I want you all to bury me.”

Randby, Mabel’s favorite of all the “boys and girls” who patrolled the courthouse, just laughed and said: “Oh, come on, Mabel! You’ll live forever.”

Mabel Wayne, 84, didn’t live past lunchtime. When she arrived at her apartment with $47 from her pension check, there was a scuffle and neighbors heard screams. Two boys playing outside the building looked up and saw a pair of hands drop the old woman from her fourth-floor window.

Back at the courthouse, Randby got a call from a neighbor. “Miss Mabel told me to call you if anything ever happened,” she said. “Somebody killed Miss Mabel. She’s lying in the courtyard.”

Randby ran to the building and found Mabel’s body covered with a sheet.

His 20 years in the Bronx courts had hardened him, but nothing had prepared him for this. Later, he said he had wondered at the time when the monster would be brought to justice.

It was July 3, 1985. Six years would pass before he would have a satisfactory answer.

Mabel Wayne was an anachronism--an elderly white woman living in the South Bronx, but a popular one with her black and Latino neighbors.

Born and reared in Stony Point, N. Y., when Rockland County was forests and farms, she moved to the Bronx in the 1930s with her husband, Jack, a chef.

When the neighborhood changed, the couple stayed: after Mabel was mugged, after Jack was mugged, after their dog, Tuffy, was kidnaped and held for ransom. On Feb. 1, 1978, Jack was robbed on the street a second time and died of a heart attack. Still, Mabel stayed, though her niece begged her to move in with her family in Rockland County, now thoroughly suburban.

“I can’t go up there,” the childless widow told Al Randby. “My family is here at the courthouse.”

Mabel was the most prominent member of a shrinking band of trial watchers who showed up every day at the Bronx courthouse, a massive limestone block amid a sea of shabby apartment buildings.

She was as much a fixture of the Grand Concourse as the building itself. Mabel Wayne had been attending trials for 10 years when Randby arrived in the Bronx.

Each morning she would walk two blocks from her apartment, carrying a shopping bag filled with gum and candy. She handed out the treats so insistently that diet-conscious officers occasionally tried to avoid her.

She was just as quick with her smile and advice, much of it directed with motherly concern toward the court officers.

“She’d always be telling you, ‘Be careful, take care of yourself,’ Randby recalled.

On the other hand, she wouldn’t let anyone walk her home, even as her vision began to fade and her step began to falter.

She did her own shopping and cleaning, surviving on $225 a month. When her doctor gave her a cane she turned it into a prop. She carried it on the crook of her arm but never deigned to use it.

Her only vice was smoking--she favored slim, brown cigarettes --and even that afforded the chance to offer a match to anyone in need.

Every Christmas, Mabel brought two huge boxes of cookies to the court officers’ locker room and left a card outside each locker. The officers gave her a plant each Mother’s Day and always found her a seat, no matter how crowded the courtroom.

She sat in on so many big murder trials that one judge still refers to her as “the 13th juror.”

Mabel’s favorite judge was Lawrence Tonetti, a friend since his days as a junior prosecutor. She would start each day in his mahogany paneled ceremonial courtroom; sometimes he would call her up to the bench to chat about cases that only the two of them remembered.

She also had friends on the other side of the aisle, including the famous defense lawyer William Kunstler. “She used to tell me, ‘Mr. Bill, that was a bad cross-examination.’ And she didn’t like my hair. She thought I should cut it--’You’ll do better.’ ”

“What was unique about Mabel was that she appreciated the finer points of the system,” Court Officer Kevin McLaughlin said. “She wasn’t looking to see people get sent away just because they were accused. If a prosecutor didn’t have a case she’d tell him: ‘You don’t have nothin.’ ”

Every year Mabel had fewer companions in the back rows. “People don’t come down here any more to watch trials,” Randby explained.

In 1978, Mabel Wayne was made an honorary court officer in a ceremony presided over by Tonetti. She even received her own shield.

In death, Mabel was granted her last wish. The court officers gave her a formal “inspector’s funeral,” rich in white-gloved ceremony. At her request, pallbearers were chosen from various ethnic groups and races. The officers paid for the funeral and for the headstone in the Rockland County cemetery where she was buried with her shield.

The headstone bore this inscription: “Mabel Wayne, 1901-1985. Your boys.”

The murder of Mabel Wayne was one of 10 committed in New York City on July 3, 1985. Many of the killings were related to the latest plague in the South Bronx: crack.

The case was assigned to Detective John McCarthy, a burly, 51-year-old 6-footer with slicked back, graying hair. Like the victim, the investigator was from a vanishing breed: tough Irish cops who work nights on bad crimes in bad neighborhoods. McCarthy was eligible to retire in a year, had it occurred to him.

Until Mabel Wayne, most of McCarthy’s cases “wouldn’t mean anything to anyone outside the Bronx,” he said. “Or to some people in it.”

The detective had never heard of Mabel Wayne, but his first visit to her apartment building told him she was someone special. The tenants had hung a wreath in the lobby where she often sat. A teen-ager was crying in the hall outside her door.

Mabel’s apartment, including the bedroom she had shared with her husband, had been ransacked. After Jack’s death, Mabel slept in the living room and kept the bedroom as a kind of shrine, filled with his things.

That was where Mabel Wayne made her last stand. The screenless window, which Mabel always kept closed so her cat, Ginger, would not escape, was open. McCarthy could see the spot below where Mabel had landed.

It took her niece three days to coax the cat into a carrying case. Normally docile, Ginger hissed and clawed when approached. For months, the cat would go berserk at the sight of a man. “That cat must have seen something awful in that apartment that day,” the niece said.

There was one immediate break: four fingerprints were lifted from Mabel’s jewelry box.

The prints were sent to the police lab, and McCarthy went to work. In two weeks he spoke with at least 75 people--neighbors and criminals, adults and children.

One name surfaced quickly, he said: Percy Robinson.

Homicide detectives in the 44th Precinct, the most dangerous part of the city, get four days to investigate a murder before they start catching new cases. Soon McCarthy was swamped with other homicides, but he never forgot Mabel Wayne.

He kept asking around about the Wayne murder, often on his own time. And he kept calling the fingerprint identification unit, where Detective Kenny Eng was searching for a match.

At his desk on the fifth floor of police headquarters, Eng began by comparing the prints to those of robbers and burglars from that section of the Bronx. Gradually, he widened his search.

The police, however, have 1.6 million sets of prints on file; each set has 10 prints, one for each finger. Every homicide detective in the city has prints that need to be matched, and every one of them has Kenny Eng’s number.

A year passed, then two. On April 28, 1987, Mayor Edward I. Koch renamed the street just south of the courthouse Mabel Wayne Plaza. McCarthy, clutching a brown file folder marked “Victim: Mabel Wayne,” stood quietly through the ceremony.

The more he had learned about Mabel Wayne, the more he realized that her murder was exactly the kind of case that used to draw her to the courthouse.

When he saw McCarthy, Al Randby asked if he was still working on the case. McCarthy always gave the same answer: I never close a murder case.

After months of following leads to nowhere, McCarthy found Sharon Quarles, a former Bronx resident who had moved to South Carolina. An admitted crack addict, Quarles told McCarthy that one day after Mabel’s death, she shared a pipe with a man who confessed to having killed her.

“It wasn’t supposed to happen that way,” Quarles said the man told her.

The man, she said, was Percy Robinson.

On April 7, 1988, nearly three years after Mabel Wayne’s death, a Bronx grand jury indicted the 33-year-old imprisoned rapist and bail jumper.

Like many criminal suspects in the Bronx, Robinson was young, black and already behind bars. He was different in that he had grown up in a middle-class family in the affluent Long Island community of Great Neck. He had moved to the Bronx when he was 17 to live with his grandmother.

Robinson’s mother describes her son as a naive suburbanite who made some mistakes. She says he never killed anybody and was scooped up by police desperate for an arrest and unaware that the family could afford a good lawyer.

The family hired Mabel’s old friend, William Kunstler. After a judge was selected--Mabel’s many friends on the bench had to be excluded--the trial began on Nov. 28, 1989.

Quarles admitted her drug habit. The prosecution’s other key witness was a convicted kidnaper who claimed that Robinson talked about the crime while the two were in prison.

Robinson’s grandmother testified that he was with her the afternoon of the murder. Kunstler questioned the prosecution witnesses’ credibility and asked why Robinson’s fingerprints weren’t found at the scene.

It was a two-man job, the prosecution responded. The jury deliberated just five hours before acquitting Robinson of murder on Dec. 19, 1989.

McCarthy was back where he started; Kunstler says the trial wasn’t any easier for him.

“This is the only murder case I’ve ever done where I knew the victim, where the victim was a friend,” he said.

Another year passed. McCarthy had never solved a case that had taken so long. In the meantime, he had worked on 1,500 other investigations. He had one card left, and he played it each month, calling Kenny Eng.

In late May, 1991, McCarthy arrived at his desk to find a message from Eng. After years of checking, he had a match.

“I ran for the phone, and as soon as I got the name, I ran right out on the street,” McCarthy said. He was looking for someone named Billy Wilson, a convicted robber and burglar who lived five blocks from Mabel Wayne. He quickly found Wilson, but discovered that he was not the man whose picture was in the fingerprint file.

McCarthy then played a hunch. He showed Wilson the picture that accompanied the prints and fed him a story that he needed to question the guy in the photo about a jailhouse murder.

Wilson grinned and started to talk.

“He said, ‘I know this guy, he’s my cousin. But that’s not why you wanna talk to me, and that’s not why you wanna talk to him,’ ” McCarthy recalled. “So I said, ‘You be honest with me; I’ll be honest with you.’ ”

The man in the picture was Raymond Canario, 39. He was in Henderson, N. C., his cousin said.

“I wanted to go right down and get the guy as soon as I could, before he got blown away on the street,” McCarthy said. “I wanted him alive.”

But when he called the Henderson police, McCarthy learned that his man was already in jail, awaiting trial for stealing checks.

The detective flew south on June 12. Canario, who was sick with AIDS, confessed to the killing. Finally, John McCarthy felt the Mabel Wayne case would be closed.

“After he gave the statement, that was it,” McCarthy said.