Deadly masquerade

by Richard T. Pienciak

Wall Streeter Joseph Pikul and his second wife, Diane, an assistant to the publisher of Harper's magazine, were the archetypal successful couple: they had an apartment in Greenwich Village and a house on Long Island, N.Y., regularly attended the theater and dined out, had two children in private schools. But the husband was a wife-abuser, a cross-dresser, probably a bisexual. Shortly after the market crash in 1987, he killed his wife and, in a bizarre odyssey, took her body first to Massachusetts, then to upstate New York, where he disposed of it.