Safe Harbor: A Murder in Nantucket

by Brian McDonald

Overview

Elizabeth Lochtefeld was a glowing, charismatic and driven woman who'd built a million-dollar fortune in Manhattan before settling into a new life in one of America's most elite resort communities. She'd planned to dedicate the rest of her life to charity-and to marry and finally start a family of her own. When Lochtefeld met thrity-seven year-old Tim Toolan— a tall, strapping, handsome, and Columbia graduate and Wall Street ace who'd made it to Vice President at Smith Barney-she thought she'd found Mr. Right. She told friends she was in love. She hinted at marriage. But soon she saw past the Golden Boy facade, finding a deeply troubled man with a history of erratic bahavior — a man given to violent mood swings who'd been fired from his position at Smith Barney after trying to steal an $80,000 Roman bust from a Park Avenue antiques show. Two days after she ended the affair, she lay dead on the floor of her Nantucket cottage.This is the story of love gone terribly wrong.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250025845
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/30/2006
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	444,622
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.64(d)

About the Author

Brian McDonald contributes frequently to New York City newspapers, including The New York Times. His first book, My Father's Gun, won critical raves and became the subject of a major History Channel documentary series. McDonald is also the author of Last Call at Elaine's and Indian Summer. He lives in Manhattan.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Tom Lochtefeld stood on the Forty-second Street side of the New York Public Library and glanced at his watch. It was late October, and the first of the huge golden leaves from the London plane trees that line Bryant Park gently swirled to the ground. Rush hour had started to wane. It was nearly six. The last of New York City's daytime workforce rushed past him, some disappearing into the subway station, others hurrying down the street toward Grand Central Terminal and trains to the suburbs. He looked again at his watch. His sister was running a little late.

Tom hadn't seen Beth in about six months. Not really that long, considering their circumstances. Tom worked for a Japanese bank in midtown. His was the harried life of a Metro North rail commuter with a family in Connecticut.

Beth had no such parental duties. In fact, she had very few attachments at all. It had been a year and a half since she sold her architectural consulting business. She was subletting the apartment she owned in Greenwich Village and renting a cottage on Nantucket. But she was traveling a lot, to California and Europe. She sponsored a chair at the Allen Room, Jazz at Lincoln Center, but, just recently, a trip to Seville, Spain, to see an open-air performance of Carmen had fallen through. She was also trying to sell a book project containing her father's artwork, a book for which she had written the accompanying text.

And then there was romance.

At forty-four, Beth was still single, but, finally, that status looked as though it might change. More than at any other time in her life, a life that she had lived as though she were in a hurry, a life that was by turns joyously brimming and hauntingly lonely, Beth was available for marriage.

Tom Lochtefeld saw her rushing toward him along the crowded sidewalk. She was smiling that thousand-watt smile of hers that always made him feel like a little brother: safe and comfortable. Beth looks great, he thought to himself. She did look good, in the best shape of her adult life. She had been taking classes in aikido, a martial arts discipline, for a year, and had lost over twenty pounds. Her hair was cut short and blond, a color that suited her. The sea air, California's and Nantucket's, gave her a healthy hue. Some of Beth's friends thought it was love Beth radiated.

Brother Tom wasn't so sure.

Copyright © 2006 by Brian McDonald

Editorial Reviews

McDonald received praise for his memoir, My Father's Gun, about his family of cops, but he seems out of his element with this true-crime account of the murder of Beth Lochtefeld, a successful, outgoing woman who, at 44, was anxious to find a mate and settle down. In McDonald's account, Lochtefeld's desperation made her overlook the faults of Tom Toolan, a suave but seriously troubled man. After Lochtefeld tried to break off with Toolan, she turned up dead in her Nantucket home. In an awkwardly constructed narrative, McDonald further confuses matters by suddenly shifting voices, from omniscient narrator who seems to know Lochtefeld's and Toolan's thoughts (though his sources are unclear) to journalist ("Sources say"). Nor does he get beneath the surface of Toolan, an alcoholic with a self-destructive streak who had lost his Wall Street job and been caught trying to steal an $80,000 sculpture from an art gallery. McDonald further tangles his narrative by ending it shortly after the 2004 murder, without providing details of what happened after Toolan's arrest. (He has pled not guilty and has yet to stand trial.) 8 pages of b&w photos. (June) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

In early September 2004, Beth Lochtefeld, a beautiful, vivacious Nantucket resident in her early forties, met handsome, charming 37-year old Thomas E. Toolan III, a sometime bank executive in New York. By late October she was dead, murdered two days after breaking off the relationship. McDonald (My Father's Gun: One Family, Three Badges, One Hundred Years in the NYPD) relates the poignant story of Lochtefeld's life, portraying a woman who worked her way up to riches as an architectural consultant but who trusted the wrong man at the wrong time. Toolan's Golden Boy image hid a sadistic, jealous, and deceitful soul. This is not a police procedural but rather a tribute to Beth herself and the lives she touched. In fact, the murder gets very little space in the book, possibly because its explication in Toolan's trial is yet to come. McDonald's chronology can also be confusing, even allowing for his alternating chapters between Lochtefeld and Toolan. Still, the story has all the elements of a grand tragedy, and Beth's life deserves this respectful chronicle. Essential for regional collections and a good choice for public libraries.-Deirdre Bray Root, Middletown P.L., OH Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

McDonald (My Father's Gun, 1999) fashions a poignant, occasionally repetitive, but truly chilling tale of the 2004 murder of self-made New York businesswoman Beth Lochtefeld. An architectural expediter who built her business over 15 hard-going years in the corrupt world of Manhattan construction, Lochtefeld at age 44 decided it was time to change tacks and find a mate. She sold her business at a terrific profit and spent a lot of time at a rented cottage in Nantucket, where she had summered as a child. She traveled, dabbled in writing fiction and tried to promote a book of her father's artwork. For six weeks during the fall of 2004, Lochtefeld dated Tom Toolan, 37, a smooth, dapper character who had been fired from Smith Barney. Toolan maintained an expensive apartment on West End Avenue in the city and frequented the Dublin House bar, where he was known as a big talker, drinker and gambler. Smith Barney had first fired him for drunkenly insulting his superiors at a party, then rehired him, only to fire him again in 2001 when he was arresting for trying to lift a 60-pound marble bust from the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue. Lochtefeld began to grow wary of Toolan's drinking, smoking and secretive, aggressive ways; moreover, after only a few weeks of courting, he was insisting that they marry. Toolan was apparently in financial straits, and the couple had discussed cosigning a lease for his office space. However, the relationship deteriorated, and Lochtefeld fled to Nantucket; he stalked her to her refuge and stabbed her repeatedly with a cheap fishing knife. To creepy effect, McDonald discusses an ominous astrological chart that haunted Lochtefeld for years and the fears that ledher to study aikido for self-defense shortly before her murder. Straightforward, non-sensational and sternly unwavering in its sympathy for the victim.

Kirkus Reviews

"The story has all the elements of a grand tragedy, and Beth's life deserves this respectful chronicle."—Library Journal

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