Determined Detective Gathers Clues, Makes Arrest in 13-Year-Old Murder : New York: One police officer refused to give up on the case, in which a doctor was shot for the $5 in his wallet.

As tears ran down their faces and soaked their surgical masks, the doctors did everything they could for the surgeon who’d worked with them in that very emergency room earlier that very night.

But they could not save Dr. John Chase Wood Jr., who went out for supper and came back with a bullet through his heart.

That was Nov. 2, 1981. Wood, 31, was walking back to Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center from his apartment after dinner with his pregnant wife. He wore doctor’s whites and a green scrub shirt. Someone shot him for his wallet, which contained all of $5.

Even to crime-jaded New Yorkers, the slaughter of the pediatrician-in-training seemed like the bombing of a Red Cross hospital. Police assigned about 60 detectives to the case and told them to work as long as they had to.

One was Jerry Giorgio, fresh from helping solve the backstage murder of a violinist at the Metropolitan Opera. He soon concluded the Wood case would not be solved easily: no reliable eyewitness accounts, no murder weapon, no prime suspects. It reminded him of a jigsaw puzzle.

Diana Wood’s prospects were even grimmer. In six months she had become a nurse, a bride, an expectant mother. And now, a 24-year-old widow.

After a while she returned to work at the hospital, because that was part of the world she and John had shared. But one day she started crying and couldn’t stop; a patient had asked why she always looked so sad.

Diana Wood and Jerry Giorgio would not meet for 13 years, but each had embarked on a search. He was looking for pieces to a puzzle, she for a new life.

They also shared this question: How long would it take?

*

The evidence in case No. 1744 started out in a single folder.

Giorgio and the others interviewed hundreds of people in the weeks after the shooting. They tracked down scores of tips, shot down as many rumors. The neighborhood around the hospital was tough, and they weaved their way through a miasma of street names and slang, of hearsay and mendacity.

The first break came in 1982, when Giorgio was interviewing an informer about the highly publicized killing of a showgirl on Manhattan’s East Side. The informer fingered Patrick McDowell, and said he thought McDowell shot “that doctor,” too.

McDowell, 17, told Giorgio he didn’t shoot Wood. He admitted trying to rob the showgirl, but said the shooting was an accident. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter, and went off to serve 10 years in prison.

The Wood case stagnated until Nov. 9, 1983, when an anonymous caller to a police crime tips line identified McDowell and two other men as Wood’s assailants. The caller never called back.

Years passed. Giorgio’s first partner on the case retired, then his second. The case bounced from one prosecutor to another. Giorgio was all that was left of the detective army of late ‘81, and he had lots of other cases.

But Giorgio says he never forgot John Wood or Patrick McDowell, never stopped poring over the file, turning the facts over in a corner of his mind.

One reason might have been that the Giorgios had a child born with water on the brain who survived thanks to three operations. Jerry Giorgio knew what good a pediatric surgeon could do, and knew what his loss meant.

He was convinced his original impression was correct: The Wood case was a jigsaw puzzle. So he continued to fill his file with countless pieces of information, regardless of how they fit.

He compiled a “hit parade,” a list of everyone related to the case. Whenever a hit parader was hauled into the precinct house, he or she would get an audience with Giorgio, who was ready to trade leniency for information or cooperation.

The file grew year after year, until Giorgio had to move its contents into a big brown cardboard box marked “CITY OF NEW YORK POLICE DEPARTMENT.”

By now, Giorgio had no illusions about his prospects. McDowell’s arrest would have to be based “on what people say they were told, or what they say they saw.”

Most of the witnesses would be street people or criminals whose stories began, “I was getting high. . . .” or “We was strippin’ a car. . . .”

“We didn’t have a priest or a bank president who was passing by,” he says. “We had to work with what we had.”

By April of 1992, when McDowell was paroled, what they had still wasn’t enough. It began to look like the case would outlast Giorgio, 58, who joined the force two years after the Giants left for San Francisco. He’d been eligible for retirement longer than most of his colleagues had been detectives.

If this was a jigsaw puzzle, maybe it was like the kind you find in a summer rental home--too many missing pieces.

*

John Chase Wood III was born in March, 1982, after his mother had moved to a quiet neighborhood in suburban New Jersey.

A New York Times reporter who visited the Woods that summer reported that little Johnny had a cleft chin like his father’s, and that Diana Wood had taken up her husband’s instrument, the French horn.

She also had decided she wanted to be a doctor--not for her husband, as some surmised, but for herself.

“I was 25 years old and I didn’t know what to do with myself,” she recalls. “I got this idea I’d go to medical school to have something for me, something that no one could take away.”

She had to take some preliminary courses in calculus and physics, but Columbia’s medical school admitted her and waived tuition.

Relatives helped her care for Johnny, and in 1988 Diana Newton Wood--granddaughter, daughter and widow of physicians--got her own M.D. After four years of hospital training in anesthesiology, she joined the Lahey Clinic outside Boston.

If there had been little time to grieve over her husband’s death, there was even less to mull the fate of his murderer: “For a long time it didn’t matter that much to me. He’d taken what he’d taken, and nothing was going to bring John back.” For a decade she heard nothing from the police.

Then, early in 1993, she got a call from a Detective Giorgio, who claimed to have a break in the case. He called a few more times, but a year later he still hadn’t made an arrest. The prosecutors always wanted more evidence; to them, the puzzle still looked like Cubism.

She was home the night of Friday, July 29, when the phone rang. It was Jerry Giorgio. The pieces finally fit; he’d made an arrest.

*

Giorgio won’t give details, but he says his persistence paid off in early 1993 when someone came into the station house with information implicating McDowell.

About a year later, he says, “a guy I’d been waiting to get pulled in finally got pulled in, and he’s cooperating.” This man allegedly said McDowell spoke to him about Wood’s murder.

He says prosecutors were ready to draw up charges when, on the morning of July 29, patrolmen arrested Patrick McDowell for threatening people on the street with a 9mm pistol.

At the precinct McDowell greeted Giorgio by name and said, in referring to the Metropolitan Opera and other cases, “I’ve been following your career.”

Giorgio could have said the same, for he’d been watching McDowell from afar for years, waiting for him to slip. Instead he told him, “I guess you know what we’re going to talk about.”

They sat in a dirty yellow cinderblock interrogation room. McDowell didn’t confess, but Giorgio says he got a statement “that may trip him up”--reveal something only someone on the scene that night would know.

*

Giorgio lives to tell a relative, “We’ve made an arrest.” But Diana Wood took the news quietly.

At age 37, she had never remarried, and only recently began to really face the loss she’d endured. Now this.

“I didn’t quite know what to say because I had mixed feelings,” she said. “It reminded me of a person who was different from the one I am now. I had a sense of not wanting to go back to all that again.”

An arrest was merely an allegation, a prelude to a trial that would revive the past and could clear the suspect. But, the widow concluded, a trial might also provide a sense of closure. At any rate, she’d be there.

The next day she told Johnny: “I have some news that’s going to seem good and sad at the same time.”

The 12-year-old was unequivocally delighted; the bad guy was caught. But later in the weekend, just before he had to head back to camp, Johnny was somber, his mother said.

“He said, ‘I see what you meant.’ It had reminded him of the father he never had.”