6:21 a.m. Monday, April 18, 1983

“911. What is your emergency?’

“I think I just shot my husband. Please hurry. A man is dying. I must call my lawyer. I believe I shot him. I didn’t mean to, but I did.”

The caller hung up, but police traced the call. They got the distraught woman back on the line. “I believe I shot my husband,” she repeated. They asked if her injured husband was moving. “Not at all,” she said.

She said he had been shot “right in the throat." “I don’t know how to do first aid—please help me."

The operator asked how it happened. “Anger," the woman said, “but not intentional, never, never, never.”

When detectives from the East 21st Street station arrived at the fifth-floor apartment in the luxury Manhattan high-rise at 30 Waterside Plaza overlooking the East River, they found 43-year-old Felix Pappalardi in his underwear, dead in his bed with a gaping, bleeding wound in his neck, a .38 caliber two-shot antique derringer pistol by his side. His wife, Gail Collins, 42, refused to speak until her attorney arrived. She was arrested and led away in handcuffs, taken to Bellevue Hospital after complaining of severe headaches before being booked in Rikers Island on charges of second-degree murder and criminal possession of a weapon. The neighbors told police they heard the couple loudly arguing during the early-morning hours, but that was nothing new.

Felix Pappalardi met Gail Collins almost 20 years before in Baltimore, where he was backing some folk singers at a nightclub. Pappalardi was an emerging fixture on the booming Greenwich Village folk music scene. They spent all night talking and never looked back. Collins had married as a teen and was the mother of two sons but had left her home, divorced her husband, and was looking for a more artistic lifestyle in the bohemian underworld. She was a talented artist, a poet and musician who could read and write music and play almost any instrument.

Pappalardi grew up in the Bronx, studied classical music at the prestigious High School of Music & Art in Manhattan and the University of Michigan Conservatory of Music, where he learned orchestration and arranging. He relocated to New York and drifted to the burgeoning world of folk music in Greenwich Village in 1964, where his musical knowledge found purchase. Pappalardi became everyone’s secret weapon—he made records with folk singers like Tom Rush and Tom Paxton, wrote arrangements for records by Mimi & Richard Farina, Ian & Sylvia, Richie Havens, Buffy Saint-Marie, played with Fred Neil, did some work with a young Mama Cass in her group the Mugwumps, all the time touring in a ragtime band with pianist Max Morath. He played bass on Tim Hardin’s “If I Were a Carpenter.”

He and Gail became a couple. She went wherever he did and was no shrinking violet or any shy, retiring musician’s old lady. An attractive blonde, Gail was a force of nature and a power behind the throne of their household. Felix was a swashbuckling knight of the realm, an intense torrent of musical knowledge and ability, personable and handsome. He stood out, even in the crowd of characters assembled in Greenwich Village. They lived in bohemian squalor in a dingy apartment in the rundown MacDougal Alley off Eighth Street, amidst the roaches and dirty dishes, in the heart of the Village.

The whole idea of folk-rock swept through the Village like a fever in the summer of 1965, following Dylan’s historic Newport Folk Festival performance and the breakout success of “Do You Believe in Magic?” by former Village folkies calling themselves the Lovin’ Spoonful.

In early 1966, Felix became besotted with the house band at Café Feejon, a Village hot spot where a loose mix of Middle Eastern musicians called the Feejon Group played nightly. Out of Feejon Group regulars, Felix put together the Devil’s Anvil, playing bass and Indian tamboura, to blend the traditional Mideast sounds with contemporary rock. Felix’s friend David Rubinson, a young producer also on the rise around town working at Columbia Records, signed the band and titularly supervised the album, while Felix managed the music. Gail encouraged his ambitions, pushed him in the direction of record production. He didn’t fully evolve into this new role until after his initial work with the Youngbloods, and he went to Los Angeles to run sessions with folk singer Hamilton Camp, backed by Hollywood session players. And he was getting noticed around town. His work came to the attention of Ahmet Ertegun, founder of Atlantic Records, who tried out Felix with a group out of Canada called Energy. The resulting single went nowhere, but Felix made note of the energetic drummer, Corky Laing.

He did a single and some sessions for an unreleased album for Atlantic with a Long Island bar band called the Vagrants featuring a red-hot guitarist named Leslie Weinstein, who would shortly thereafter change his name to Leslie West. He was circulating in the Atlantic orbit and hanging out at the office when engineer Tom Dowd came in to discuss sessions that he was holding with a new British rock trio called Cream.

Their first album, Fresh Cream, had done very well by Atlantic standards. Although the album sold only 300,000 copies, not even enough for a gold record award, the pop market was so much larger than the rhythm and blues field in which Atlantic specialized, that was more than three times the number of albums Atlantic sold with their soul queen Aretha Franklin. Ahmet saw the potential in the band but thought a lot of the songs were what he called “psychedelic hogwash” and wanted to refashion the band in a more standard blues vein with guitarist Eric Clapton as vocalist, a vision not shared by the band. When Ertegun suggested Pappalardi might help out on the ongoing sessions for a second album at Atlantic Studios in New York, the band immediately accepted Felix as a more sympathetic ear. Pappalardi had been a huge fan—like many musicians—since he heard the first album.

With Cream, Felix graduated from the provincial Greenwich Village scene. Even without widespread commercial success, the British power trio had captured the moment on the rapidly evolving rock scene, merging British electric blues with the improvisational fire of the San Francisco acid-rock bands. Along with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, they were reshaping the sound of modern rock, and Felix was in the wheelhouse with the band on the highly anticipated second album.

In the studio with savvy engineer Dowd, the three musicians were bashing out an Albert King-flavored version of an old blues song from Chicago blues veteran Junior Wells, “Lawdy Mama,” that the band had been playing live for many months. Felix came back the next day with a new set of lyrics he and Gail wrote called “Strange Brew.” Some of her lyrics may have been slightly autobiographical (“She’s a witch of trouble in electric blue...”). Felix and Gail also provided “World of Pain,” which referenced their MacDougal Alley place (“Outside my window is a tree...”).

Felix fit right in. He and bassist Jack Bruce shared classical music backgrounds. Felix played on tracks with the band. He spent more time on the studio floor with the musicians than in the control booth. On a break from recording, he took Clapton to Manny’s Music, the famed 48th Street musical instrument store, and had him try out the newfangled wah-wah pedals. They took one straight back to the studio and overdubbed it on “Tales of Brave Ulysses.”

Even before the album was released, Felix and the band were back in the studio recording the next album in London and New York. Felix added bass and keyboards. He played viola on “White Room” and trumpet on “Pressed Rat and Warthog.’’ With “Sunshine of Your Love” a major hit single and Disraeli Gears at the top of the charts, a genuine million-seller, Cream made a triumphant return in March 1968 to the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, where the band had astonished the entire vaunted San Francisco music scene the previous August. Felix duly captured the return on tape. The resulting hit single of the Robert Johnson blues “Crossroads,” recorded that weekend at the Fillmore, put the band’s third album, Wheels of Fire, at No. 1 on the charts for four straight weeks.

Drugs, ego, and success soon spelled an end to the juggernaut, and Cream closed shop with a series of farewell concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in London that November. At the final recording sessions in London in October, Felix played piano with George Harrison on rhythm guitar.

Felix continued to produce other acts—Boston rockers Bo Grumpus, Kensington Market from Canada, Greenwich Village folkies Bunky and Jake; nothing of the stature of Cream—and undertook production of the solo album by Leslie West, the rotund guitarist from the Vagrants whom Felix had recorded for Atlantic. Felix took over the bass chair on the sessions and caught West’s fat, fiery guitar tone in a power-trio setting that recalled Cream. The album was titled Mountain as a nod to West’s physical stature, but even before the album was released, West and Pappalardi were talking about forming a band together called Mountain. The fourth gig by the new band was at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in August 1969. After years of ascending the ladder and brushing up against the biggest names in the business, Felix was ready to become a rock star himself.

Felix recruited Steve Knight from the Devil’s Anvil to play organ over the objections of West, who didn’t care for Knight’s more formal musicality and reluctance to improvise. He replaced West’s drummer with Corky Laing from the Canadian group Energy, whom Felix had produced at Atlantic. They went into New York’s Record Plant to record the band’s debut album, Climbing. Jimi Hendrix, also recording at the studio, admired the playback. The band hit the road and played a grueling 132 shows in the first year, crisscrossing the country in a Learjet costing $600 an hour.

Now that they had money, Felix and Gail moved to a bucolic seven-room farm on the island of Nantucket in Massachusetts. In May 1969, they married, although it was never anything like a conventional marriage. Felix had a girlfriend on the side and even wrote her name into one of the songs, although most of the lyrics were written by Gail, who was well aware of his sideline activities. Monogamy was not part of their marriage. Gail took a commanding role in the new band. She not only wrote lyrics for the songs but took the band photos and drew the album cover art. They wrote seven of the album’s 11 songs. She designed the stage clothes. Heroin started to creep into their scene. Their relationship may have been turbulent, but their musical partnership remained rock-solid.

Nantucket’s rich history of whaling attracted Felix, who began collecting scrimshaw carvings and other artifacts of the whaling era. Inspired by the true story of the 1820 whaling ship Essex, a voyage that also served as the basis for the novel Moby-Dick, Felix and Gail crafted an epic piece about the disastrous trip that ended in cannibalism called “Nantucket Sleighride,” a term to describe what happens when a harpooned whale dives down in the ocean and pulls the boat along behind.

Leslie West hated the tune. It was a complex composition that West found difficult to play. He exploded in anger when he was handed a copy of the album Nantucket Sleighride when it was released in January 1971. “Gail’s name was all over the cover,” he said. “Felix and her called all the shots. I was just the lead guitarist and sometimes the lead singer, but she was listed in so many different places it was ridiculous. Even on the cover art she drew herself—just like on the first album she painted herself standing in front of a mountain. I hadn’t realized it before, but then it hit me and left a very bad taste in my mouth.”

Mountain hit the road for the rest of the year, but the pounding his supersonic bass rig gave his ears had taken a drastic toll on Felix’s damaged hearing. After a British tour in February 1972, increasingly hard of hearing, tired of the road, riddled with drugs, he pulled the plug on the band and stepped back from music. He retreated to Nantucket, where he indulged his interests in sex, drugs, and guns. Corky Laing recalled Felix wheeling around the island in his Rolls-Royce, high on Percodan, shooting out glass resistors on telephone poles. He and Gail would shoot holes in the walls of their home. They had a contentious relationship—argued constantly—and Gail often kicked Felix’s skinny ass.

His respite didn’t last. By the end of the next year, Felix had persuaded West and Laing, who had enjoyed a rewarding collaboration with Cream bassist Jack Bruce in the interim as West, Bruce & Laing, to take a big-money deal to play a series of concerts in Japan and make a live album in August 1973. West was reluctant but eventually agreed as the money was irresistible and he had never been to Japan. Corky Laing was replaced after he suggested the band might use another producer given Felix’s hearing problems and Felix smashed him in the face.

Reforming the band had been a desperate move. The musicians did not get along. Drug problems only exacerbated the personal conflicts. The other two were tired of Felix’s dictatorial control and had grown to hate Gail’s involvement in everything, but it was Felix’s band and they went along. When the Japan trip made Felix think he would like to continue the reunion, West agreed only on the condition that they brought back drummer Laing. The reconstituted band (with a second guitarist) hit the road in November 1973 and, except for a break to record a new album early the next year, stayed on tour until September 1974, by which time Felix wanted out again. Nevertheless, the band came back together as a trio in October for 30 final shows, culminating with a farewell performance on New Year’s Eve at the Felt Forum in New York.

Off the road at home in Nantucket, Felix and Gail settled into their unconventional domestic life. Special education teacher Frank Deeluca, a houseguest invited by Gail, was surprised to learn that Felix and Gail slept with their live-in girlfriend, Norma Mayes. Before he left, he too had slept with Gail.

They were using lots of drugs and playing routinely with firearms. Felix, something of a gun collector himself, bought Gail a derringer that she carried in her purse. They went to the shooting range together. Francy Laing, wife of drummer Corky Laing, would recall Gail pulling the small pearl-handled pistol on her in a parking lot outside the Chicken Box restaurant in Nantucket in August 1975. Francy, Gail, and her girlfriend Norma went out of the noisy diner to continue a heated discussion, and an upset Gail brandished the weapon at Francy as she sat in her car. Gail had always been a problem for the Laings; she continually propositioned Corky.

“One night when they were sitting in the living room,” Leslie West said, “they heard a continuous buzzing noise coming from inside the walls. Felix was probably high, so he started shooting at the walls from his chair. Turns out that the contractors on the house had stuffed hornets’ nests between the walls after Gail refused to pay a bill. So Felix was trying to shoot hornets.”

Despite his continued hearing problems, Felix still produced records, although he was hardly circulating in the elite circles he once did. He joined Japan’s only blues band, Creation, for an album that he also produced, a subsequent U.S. tour, and a triumphant homecoming in Japan. He cut an album with Natural Gas, a band featuring Joey Molland of Badfinger. He held a reunion with Jesse Colin Young of the Youngbloods, although Young was also a long way from his salad days. While he was in Copenhagen producing the new album by Denmark’s most popular rock band, Gasolin’, he met guitarist Jorma Kaukonen backstage at a concert and wound up producing a live album by his band Hot Tuna at Theater 1939 in San Francisco, next door to the old Fillmore Auditorium where Felix had recorded Cream all those years before. He did an album with some former members of the Flying Burrito Brothers calling themselves Sierra that nobody heard.

In early 1978, Felix went to Miami to record the second album by punk rockers the Dead Boys at Criteria Studios, down the hall from where the Bee Gees were recording with their brother, Andy Gibb. The rough-hewn Cleveland transplants were regulars at New York's punk emporium CBGB, and the band boasted a raw, unvarnished style at odds with the kind of meticulous recording Felix customarily did. The drunken punk rockers battled in the studio with Felix, who responded by smoothing out the band’s rough sound, burying the guitars and bass in the mix, and showing up for the playback party at the end of the sessions wearing a suit emblazoned with marijuana leaves that he called his “listening party suit.” The culture clash did not produce the desired results. “I can’t believe you did this to us,” bassist Jeff Magnum screamed in Felix’s face at the party.

He made his first solo recording since “Love Someday” in 1964 for A&M Records in 1979, Don’t Worry, Ma, a collection of R&B songs recorded with a tight group of professional New York session players and produced not by Felix but by drummer Bernard Purdie. The release did not even leave ripples on the shore. In fall 1982, desperate to regain his footing, Felix approached the other members of Mountain about reforming, this time with Gail as a full member. That was not going to happen. Then he fell in love with Valerie Marron.

She was a gorgeous, damaged young woman, highly sexualized after her stepfather started abusing her at age 6. At 14, she was sent away to boarding school, and at age 16, she ran away and lived homeless on the streets of New York until she started acting in porno films. She starred with Georgina Spelvin of The Devil in Miss Jones in the landmark 1975 porno Wet Rainbow, where she injured herself having sex with a life-size statue that broke off inside her. Her father, Ron Merians, ran the noted Woodstock music club Joyous Lake, and she grew up around musicians. She started hanging out at CBGB and Max’s Kansas City in New York City. She dated Max’s owner Mickey Ruskin, who encouraged her to quit porn and concentrate on writing and singing her own songs.

She knew Felix from her father’s club and started seeing him. Felix told her that even with their open marriage, he and Gail had grown tired of each other. He admitted to Gail about Marron. Their relationship had grown serious; they talked about marriage, getting an apartment together, moving to Australia. In December 1982, Gail confessed to her father-in-law that their business and their marriage were breaking up. Disturbed and upset, she asked his father to talk to Felix.

On Sunday, April 17, 1983, Felix showed up at the Ritz in the East Village to see Jon Butcher Axis. He had contacted the band’s management about possibly producing their second album. Butcher, a black Bostonian guitarist and one of the many heirs of Jimi Hendrix, had never met Felix but gladly repaired to his hotel room with Felix and the rest of his band to discuss plans, drinking and talking late into the night. They decided to record at New York’s Record Plant and set a tentative schedule. Sometime after three in the morning, bassist Chris Martin put Felix in a cab for home. He expressed some trepidation at going home so late. “I’m going to be in trouble,” he told the musician.

Gail answered the door when the police arrived. “I just shot my husband,” she said.

“Where?” asked the officer.

“In the neck,” she said.

“No, I mean where is he?” said the cop.

She pointed them to their tiny Manhattan bedroom where Felix lay dead on the bed beside Gail’s little gun. From the position of the wound, Felix couldn’t have shot himself. He and Gail were alone in the apartment. Sherlock Holmes not required. Police found their wedding license, which customarily hung above their bed, torn in scraps in the wastebasket. The tabloid New York dailies loved it. “Rock Star Shot Dead," screamed the Daily News. At last, Felix was a rock star.

Gail needed money for her defense and sold the copyrights to their two Cream songs to Felix’s business partner for $25,000. She still could not raise the $100,000 bail and remained in Rikers until her September trial. In his opening statement, defense attorney Hal Myerson invoked the case of Jean Harris, the private school headmistress who unsuccessfully argued that she accidentally shot her longtime lover, Scarsdale diet doctor Herman Tarnower, while trying to kill herself. He also brought up the couple’s open marriage and admitted that both partners had “lots of casual sex,” but denied jealousy was a motive. He claimed that the shooting was accidental, that the gun went off unexpectedly when Felix was showing Gail how to use it. Assistant district attorney Maureen Barden disputed his account. She said the shots were fired in anger and their relationship had deteriorated.

After opening statements, Felix’s sister Celia Tardiboro took the stand and testified that she knew nothing about the couple’s open marriage, but did say that Gail had allowed that she sometimes contemplated killing her husband during a phone call the previous December.

Testimony grew considerably more heated the next day when defense called friends of the couple Laurie Calemari and Frank Deeluca. Calemari met Valerie Marron when they were both in Mount Sinai Medical Center recovering from nervous breakdowns. She said Felix and Marron were in love and that Gail had a good relationship with her husband’s girlfriend, even sent her flowers in the hospital. Deeluca, who experienced their open marriage as a houseguest in Nantucket, echoed that sentiment. “There was no jealousy at all between Gail and Felix,” he said.

Francy Laing testified for the prosecution about Gail pulling the gun on her in the Nantucket parking lot. She said Gail was quite proud of her gun and that both she and Felix carried guns and went target shooting together. She added that she and her husband had asked them not to bring guns into their home.

Wearing glasses, dressed in black pants and a prim green blouse closed at the neck, Gail took the stand the next day and, through racking sobs, told the court that she had shot her husband while he was instructing her on how to use the gun. She said he wanted her to be able to defend herself when he was out of town. “I cocked the gun and eased down the hammer,” she said. “He told me I was doing fine. Then he said, ‘Don’t be a baby. Face reality. Put ammo in the gun. You can’t make me go to Paris and make me feel you’re helpless.’” At this point, she broke down crying.

“I followed his instructions,” she continued. “I cocked the gun and eased down on the hammer. The gun went off. I was holding it.”

Gail had spent the evening at home, drinking vodka and talking on the phone. She called her boyfriend Michael Simbrom three times, twice before the shooting and once after. Toxicology tests conducted on Gail that night showed a massive dose of Percodan. Since Felix showed up at their apartment more than two hours after leaving the club, she clearly suspected he had stopped to see his girlfriend. He didn’t arrive home until 5:45 a.m. and was shot shortly thereafter after neighbors heard them yelling at each other.

The Perry Mason moment came during cross-examination when the district attorney asked Gail to show the court how she held the gun. A court officer brought the gun to her and placed it on the railing of the witness stand. Gail burst into tears. “I can’t touch that gun,” she blurted. “I just can’t touch that thing. I can’t. I can’t.” The judge called a recess. Gail burst into tears again when district attorney Barden closed her cross-examination by playing the tape of Gail’s call to 911.

The jury bought her act. After eight hours of deliberation over two days, they returned a verdict, finding her guilty of the lowest possible charge, criminally negligent homicide. Gail collapsed in her attorney’s arms. Until the last moments of deliberation, there had been 10 votes for acquittal. “We were impressed with her,” said juror Grace Walters. “We did believe her story. We were all in agreement that it was not intentional and that she didn’t mean to kill.”

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice James Leff did not see things the same way. At the sentencing, he made it clear he did not believe Gail’s story and blasted her defense attorneys for “shabby tactics.” He gave her the maximum sentence—four years. “All the clemency and all the leniency was given to her by the jury,” he said.

After a memorial service in Long Island, where Felix lay in an open casket, his neck swathed in a scarf, and a grief-stricken Leslie West threw himself over the casket, he was laid to rest next to his mother at Woodlawn Cemetery in Brooklyn.

Gail served a mere two years. After her release, she led boat tours around Manhattan for a while before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area and subsequently Vancouver, Washington. In 2005, she settled in Ajijic, Mexico, a mile-high town of 15,000 on Lake Chapala, just south of Guadalajara, a popular spot for expatriates since the ’60s—mostly hippies then, mostly retirees now. She lived in a $400-a-month apartment on the top floor of a three-story building with a view of the lake. She worked in local boutiques and got by on her modest copyright residuals and Social Security. She told neighbors she was taking experimental treatments for cancer in Mexico.

She was found dead in her apartment by her landlord in December 2013. The next day, a veterinarian collected her three cats. At her request, the cats were euthanized and cremated, their ashes mixed with hers.