‘Sure’ he was killer all along
Health aide tipped cops in ’15
She knew it from the start. A Brooklyn home health aide who discovered the body of a NYCHA serial killer’s first victim was convinced he was the killer from day one.
But it would take five years — and two more slayings of elderly victims — before the handyman neighbor was finally arrested for murder last week.
“Had they caught this fella, those two people would have been alive,” the home health aide, Patricia Goodman, told the Daily News Sunday. “Had they only arrested him.”
Goodman, 63, visited Brownsville’s Woodson Houses on Powell St. near Dumont Ave. on Nov. 9, 2015, to check on her client, 82-year-old Myrtle McKinney, but couldn’t get into her sixth-floor apartment.
After knocking multiple times, calling agency supervisors and even going to the grocery store McKinney frequented to try to find her, a worried Goodman called cops.
Police forced the door and found McKinney dead under her kitchen table. In what Goodman feels like was a rush job, the death was deemed an accidental fall.
There were no signs of forced entry and McKinney, frail and reclusive, had no obvious enemies. But Goodman suspected foul play from the start.
“When I saw her, I know something was wrong,” Goodman said. “I said, ‘This is not right.’ They say, ‘Oh, she fell.’ I said, ‘Come on, if you fall, how would you get right up under your kitchen table like that?’ I said, ‘And her tongue is out of her mouth. Something is wrong. Something is not right.’ ”
It wasn’t until the mortician in charge of McKinney’s embalming, Wayne Watts, discovered a stab wound in the octogenarian’s neck that police labeled the death a homicide.
“I thought it looked suspicious, that’s what I was supposed to do,” Watts said Sunday, referring to when he alerted the medical examiner of the wound.
It took police another five years to arrest Kevin Gavin, who lives right down the hall from McKinney’s apartment in the NYCHA tower for senior citizens.
Gavin lived with his older brother, Leon Gavin, who died in April 2020. His death was deemed to be of natural causes, but authorities are now taking a fresh look.
In a bizarre twist, Leon Gavin told the News in 2015, following McKinney’s death, that he was shocked anyone would kill the kind woman.
“Who in their right mind would do this to a sweet old lady?” said Leon. “How did [cops] miss it?”
Goodman told detectives to look into Kevin Gavin, a neighbor and handyman known for befriending elderly women in the building and charging them for odd jobs. Police said last week they long considered Gavin a suspect but did not have enough evidence to charge him until after a third victim in the building died on Jan. 15.
“I think he is kind of not right up here,” Goodman said of the suspect. “He took advantage of them because they were living alone. And they would ask him to do things for them. So that was the advantage to me that he had, going into the home, doing things for them. And they trusted him, as a neighbor and a friend.”
Goodman’s suspicions peaked after she ran into Kevin Gavin in the victim’s hallway right before she discovered McKinney’s body.
“She got a lot of money, you know,” Gavin told Goodman as he got off the elevator, she said Sunday. “She went to the bank, she got a lot of money.”
All of the slayings were motivated by petty payments Gavin claimed the women owed him for odd jobs, according to NYPD Chief of Detectives Rodney Harrison.
On April 30, 2019, Jacolia James, 83, was found dead of trauma to the head and torso inside her apartment on the 11th floor of the building.
After his arrest last week, Gavin confessed he choked James and stomped on her neck three times, according to court documents.
“I hope the guy they caught ... is prosecuted so that my family may have closure,” said James’ grandson, Lamaar Crafton, at a press conference Thursday. “At the end of the day, I can’t get my grandmother back.”
Crafton and his family are suing the city over the killing.
In the most recent death, Gavin allegedly strangled Juanita Caballero, 78, with a phone cord. Gavin stole Caballero’s electronic benefits card and used it shortly after the murder, tipping detectives off. They finally arrested Gavin Thursday.
“Nobody’s surprised it’s him,” Esther Williams, vice president of the building’s tenant association, said on Thursday. “To a lot of people in the building, he was intimidating. He was always approaching people in the building for money. There was no way to get rid of him.”
Gavin was charged with three counts of murder. He was ordered held without bail at his Brooklyn Criminal Court arraignment Friday.
McKinney’s death haunts Goodman, who still shops at the same grocery store where she went looking for her client. When she heard the news of the arrest she felt relief mixed with regret.
“Finally! Finally they caught him,” she said. “And they didn’t even catch him when he killed the other lady. They catch him when he killed this last one.”