by Abby Goodnough and Bruce Weber
July 2, 1997
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.
LACEY TOWNSHIP, N.J., June 29— A month ago, 18-year-old Melissa Drexler was just a quiet, somewhat introverted high school senior who wanted to graduate from Lacey Township High School here, get on with her summer job at a retail store on the beach and hang out with her boyfriend. By all accounts, hers was an undistinguished life, she an ordinary girl. ''Really mellow,'' one friend called her. She'd gone to dancing school. She wanted to be a fashion designer. She liked club music. She was looking forward to the prom, trying on dresses with her friend Rebecca.
But on the evening of June 6, shortly after she and her boyfriend, John Lewis, arrived at the Garden Manor in Aberdeen, some 40 miles north in Monmouth County, Melissa gave birth to a boy who was found shortly afterward by a maintenance worker in a bag of trash. At that moment she ceased being a normal teen-ager and began her new life as the focus of an agonizing mystery.
Was the baby born dead, as friends of Miss Drexler said she had told them, or alive, as John Kaye, the Monmouth County prosecutor who has charged Miss Drexler with murder, contends?
It is also unclear who, if anyone, knew Miss Drexler was pregnant. Her parents have said they did not. Her boyfriend, Mr. Lewis, who is the likely father, has said he did not. There are even some friends of Miss Drexler's who wonder whether she herself knew.
''As far as I know, she did not know she was pregnant,'' said Sarah Dorrick, who, like Miss Drexler, graduated from Lacey Township High School last month and said the two ate lunch together daily. ''She never said anything, and there was no change in her behavior in school to indicate she was.''
Lynn Ganelli, the mother of Miss Drexler's friend Rebecca, said that Rebecca had suspected nothing when the girls went shopping for Miss Drexler's prom dress a few weeks before the event.
''She was trying on small sizes,'' Mrs. Ganelli said. ''There's no way she looked eight and a half months pregnant.''
And finally, the prosecutor's account of what happened on June 6 has been disputed by friends of John and Melissa's. According to Mr. Kaye, the six-pound baby was born alive, then was either strangled by Miss Drexler or suffocated after being tied up in a plastic garbage bag. He says that afterward, Miss Drexler returned to her table, ate a salad and danced at least one dance before school officials questioned her about the bloodstained bathroom stall.
The Drexler family, Mr. Lewis and everyone connected with Lacey Township High School declined to comment on the case. But Tim Hoban, a close friend of Mr. Lewis's who also knew Miss Drexler well, said that according to what both Mr. Lewis and Miss Drexler told him in the days after the prom, she had no idea she was going to deliver a child that night.
''She went into that bathroom to go to the bathroom,'' Mr. Hoban said.
Both Mr. Lewis and Miss Drexler told him that the baby had been born dead, he said, and that Miss Drexler had disposed of the tiny corpse in a panic.
''The reason she did what she did was the color of the baby really scared her when it came out,'' Mr. Hoban said. ''She told me the umbilical cord was wrapped around its neck when it came out and the baby was blue.''
Still, even Mr. Hoban, obviously shaken by the events and speaking in full support of his friends, indicated that neither version satisfied him. In the prosecutor's account, an unnamed friend of Miss Drexler's accompanied her to the bathroom, waited for her outside the stall, then left when Miss Drexler assured her she was fine. But Mr. Hoban, along with some others, wondered how she could have delivered the baby on her own.
In any case, Mr. Hoban said, ''John told me nobody would ever really know the truth, except Melissa, and someone else, if someone else was in there with her.''
It is this combined sense of horror and incredulity that has gripped the residents of this unassuming, pleasant and ordinarily friendly town of 23,000, where teen-agers are hard to find on the street because they are in supermarkets and fast-food shops working summer jobs. Ambiguity reigns; though it is not hard to elicit pro-Melissa or anti-Melissa sentiment, the majority of people seem to be simply thunderstruck. And the reporters and television cameras that have overrun the place have made many people withdraw in disgust.
The Drexlers, by all accounts, are decent, ordinary people, stunned by the events of June 6 and their sudden notoriety.
''My heart goes out to these people,'' said their lawyer, Steven Secare. ''This is their first encounter with the criminal justice system.''
The case is to go to a grand jury in a few weeks. If Miss Drexler is indicted, goes to trial and is convicted, she could face 30 years to life in prison.
''These are very unsophisticated, very humble people,'' Mr. Secare said. ''These people don't have a disingenuous bone in their bodies. There is nothing special about them. They are religious, they are well liked in their neighborhood. Now they are prisoners in their own house. They just don't understand what has happened to them. They are bewildered.''
Melissa Ann Drexler, an only child, has lived most of her life in a cedar-shingled ranch-style house on a shady street.
Until the night of June 6, nothing about the Drexlers made them stand out, friends say. Mr. Drexler works as a shipping clerk at an importing company in Lakewood, about 15 miles up the Garden State Parkway. His wife works in a local bank. The family belongs to St. Pius X Roman Catholic Church, although friends said they do not attend regularly.
''There is nothing intriguing about them, nothing mysterious,'' said John Parker, who has known Mr. Drexler for years. ''They are absolutely wholesome.''
By all accounts, Miss Drexler is an even-keeled, quiet young woman who expresses her feelings with smiles and frowns, nothing more. Friends describe her as sensitive and supportive, willing to listen when they have a problem and offer soothing advice. ''She was always there for me,'' said Miss Dorrick. ''She was a caring person.''
Miss Drexler herself, though, was not one to bare her soul, according to friends.
''Nothing got her upset much,'' Miss Ganelli said. ''She was really tough like that.''
Miss Drexler did not mix with the popular crowd at Lacey Township High School, clinging instead to Mr. Lewis and a small circle of friends. One of them was Miss Ganelli, who said she befriended Miss Drexler in fourth grade. They became inseparable, Miss Ganelli said, spending weekends at each other's homes and taking dancing lessons together. Rebecca liked ballet because it was graceful. Melissa liked jazz because it was fast.
They quit dancing lessons when they started high school, turning their attention to shopping and boys, Miss Ganelli said. They would comb the Ocean County Mall in Toms River for stylish jeans and T-shirts, she said. They would go bowling, paint their fingernails and occasionally wander the boardwalk in Seaside Park, a resort town nearby. On nights when there was nothing to do, they would sit at the Ganellis' kitchen table and chat.
On one of those nights, when Miss Drexler was in 10th grade, Miss Ganelli introduced her to Mr. Lewis. He was two years older, and he lived down the highway in Barnegat. He was quiet, like her. They started spending all their time together.
''They were alike, and they just started hanging out,'' Miss Ganelli recalled. ''I don't think it was love at first sight. They liked each other.''
Miss Ganelli and others described Miss Drexler's relationship with Mr. Lewis as steadily affectionate. Mr. Hoban said the couple would bicker and sometimes even call it quits for a day or two.
''They would get into a fight for one day, break up for six hours, then they'd be back together,'' Mr. Hoban said. They loved each other, he said, adding that while they had apparently never discussed marriage, Mr. Lewis began to talk about it after the traumatic prom night. He remains a frequent visitor to the Drexler house.
Miss Drexler wanted to design clothes, and mornings she attended fashion merchandising classes at Ocean County Vocational-Technical School in nearby Brick Township. She would occasionally, though not often, show her drawings to friends.
''She wanted to get her future together, go somewhere, instead of staying in Lacey or Barnegat,'' Mr. Hoban said. ''She wanted to go up to New York and leave her fashion statement on the catwalk.''
Mr. Hoban said she spent most of her free time during her senior year with Mr. Lewis. She would finish her classes around 1 P.M., then spend the rest of the day at Mr. Lewis's house, he said. When Mr. Lewis left to work the late shift at Wal-Mart, around 8 P.M., Miss Drexler would go home, he said, where her lawyer said she ate dinner with her parents every night. If she went out during the week, she was expected to be home by 10 P.M., Mr. Hoban said.
The only indication that something was out of the ordinary, Mr. Hoban said, came in November, when Mr. Lewis confided in him that Miss Drexler's period was late. But a few days later, he reported that it had been a false alarm.
Mr. Lewis was unaware of his girlfriend's condition, Mr. Hoban said, until the night of the prom. He was sitting alone at a banquet table when school officials approached him. ''He was waiting for her to come out of the bathroom and the principal pulled him aside into a room,'' Mr. Hoban said. ''He said, 'John, your girlfriend just had a baby.' And he said 'What are you talking about?' ''
Mr. Secare, the Drexlers' lawyer, said that Miss Drexler's parents learned about the pregnancy only on the night of the prom, when the authorities called to inform them that their daughter had been admitted to Bayshore Community Hospital in Holmdel. Friends of the family said that Miss Drexler was close to her parents and that John and Marie Drexler would have helped their daughter if they had known the truth.
''It seemed like Marie and Melissa shared everything,'' said Mrs. Ganelli, who said the mother and daughter would visit shopping malls and amusement parks together. ''Marie must be dying inside.''
For the most part, the few townspeople who are still willing to discuss the case say that while they find it hard to believe that Miss Drexler played no role in the baby's death, it is not so hard to feel compassion for her. Over nine months, they say, she lost her way.
''She was not a violent girl, not a nasty girl,'' said Mrs. Ganelli, who added that her family would support Miss Drexler no matter what a jury decides. ''Something had to go wrong in her little brain.''