Murder in Little Egypt (35 page)

They saved their farewells for the funeral parlor, where they returned to pick up the flowers. Dale followed Kevin and Charli in his Blazer, flashing his lights and stopping at a liquor store on the way to buy some vodka for the trip.

Dale helped them put the flowers in their car. Charli was crying, and Dale confronted her, saying that he was sorry for causing the ashes controversy. She had been right, he told her.

“Last night—it never happened, okay?” Dale said, exchanging hugs and kisses. He would be in touch. He would see them in Illinois at Christmas. He told them that he loved them, got in his car and drove away.

Kevin noticed that a police car, which had been parked up the street, took off in the same direction as his father. He hoped that Dale would have the sense not to speed until he got clear of the city.

Throughout that night Marian, who was not leaving until early Wednesday morning, came into Charli and Kevin’s bedroom several times, weeping, hoping that Patrick, asleep in the living room, did not hear her. She was having terrible nightmares, she said. She kept dreaming about an infant with Sean’s head. The body was that of a newborn baby, but the head and the face were Sean’s as he was before he died.

“It’s my fault,” Marian wept. “It’s all my fault. I never should have left just to get married. I never should have left poor Sean.”

Kevin and Charli tried to reassure her. Charli said that she thought everyone would feel a little better when the police had the killer in custody. Dave Barron had promised her that they would make an arrest by Christmas.

The arrest had already been made, just before five that afternoon. Dave Barron stopped Dale’s car less than half a mile from the funeral parlor. Dale seemed completely surprised but offered no resistance. Barron did not bother to handcuff him.

“Dale,” Barron said in the police car, deliberately addressing him by his first name to let him know that things were different between them now: There would be no more Dr. Cavaness courtesies. “Dale, I know you were just blowing smoke up my ass at the funeral, when you were telling everybody what a great detective I am.”

“Hey, no, Dave,” Dale said. “I know you’re a great detective.”

“Let me tell you something, Dale. I am a fucking good detective, and you’re going to find out just how good I am.”

21

DAVE BARRON BROUGHT DALE INTO A WINDOWLESS, EIGHT-BY-seven-foot interrogation room on the second floor of the South Central station in Clayton and made sure that he understood his rights as established by the Constitution and defined by the Miranda decision. He presented him with a St. Louis County Police Department Warning and Waiver form and directed him to read over carefully his rights not to speak and to have an attorney present. Dale initialed each clause and signed the form stating that he wished to waive each right and was willing to answer questions concerning the investigation. Detective Nisbet joined Barron for the interrogation.

Dale stated again that he had last seen Sean four weeks before, in November, and had had no more than one telephone conversation with him since then.

“Dale,” Barron said, “we have witnesses saying that they saw you at Sean’s apartment on Wednesday evening. That was December 12, the night before Sean was found.”

That was impossible, Dale said. He was in southern Illinois that night.

Barron showed him a photostatic copy of the grocery bag with his license-plate number written down by the witness. Dale said that he had no idea who had given Barron that information, because it was false. He said that he had worked all day in Eldorado at Pearce Hospital and had eaten dinner at the hospital. He had gone out to his Hickory Handle cattle farm that evening to change the dressing on a heifer’s leg, was home in Harrisburg watching television by ten, and after that was in bed asleep with his lady friend, Martha Culley, who was living with him. He had left his house, he said, at about nine the next morning, had driven to the K mart store to buy medical supplies for the heifer and then spent most of the morning at the farm.

“We’re going to check out your alibi,” Barron informed him. “I think you ought to know that we have two St. Louis detectives waiting in southern Illinois for word to start talking to people. I am going to go call them right now. They’ll talk to your girlfriend and to other people. So while I’m calling them, maybe you’d like to think over what you’ve told me.”

Barron left the room and telephoned the detectives, Jack Plummer and Larry Fox, who were with Jack Nolen at the D. C.I. office. He told them Dale’s alibi and directed them to interview Martha Culley first. Nolen had already taken them to the state’s attorney, who had issued a complaint for a search warrant for the house on Walnut to see whether a .357 magnum or a .38 pistol, a red-colored flashlight, and Sean Cavaness’s wallet and keys were there. Judge Michael J. Henshaw of the First District Court, Saline County, had issued the warrant by three o’clock that afternoon. A second judge was prepared to issue a warrant to seize the Oldsmobile Toronado. The detectives were ready to roll. Jack Nolen would escort them.

When Barron returned to the interview room and informed Dale that the detectives had been contacted, Dale repeated that he had nothing to hide.

Barron drew a map of the area around Sean’s apartment and, referring to his conversations with Peggy and Ralph Kroeck—Barron had reinterviewed them on Sunday; their account had not changed—described to Dale the exact movements of his Toronado that night, noting the U-turns and the various passes in front of Sean’s apartment. Barron told Dale that two witnesses saw him hug his son under the streetlamp, heard him go upstairs and leave again with Sean in the early hours of Thursday morning. His license number, moreover, had been confirmed.

Barron kept going over the Kroecks’ account for two hours. At around seven-thirty, Dale finally broke.

He had been lying, he said, throughout the investigation.

“Why have you been lying to us, Dale?”

“Because I didn’t want to be thought of as a suspect.”

“Why did you think you would be a suspect?”

“It just seemed logical.”

When Barron asked him why he thought that the St. Louis County Police Department would think that somebody who was truthful would be a suspect, Dale had no answer.

Dale admitted that he had driven up to visit Sean and had arrived at approximately ten-thirty. When he saw that there were no lights on, he drove around as Mr. and Mrs. Kroeck had described, finally parked, and took his flashlight so that he could see the doorbell. Sean had walked up. They had embraced. He entered Sean’s apartment with him and stayed until about one-thirty in the morning, when he drove his son to a Quick Shop convenience store for a pack of cigarettes. He brought Sean home and watched him climb the porch steps and disappear into the door of his apartment building. He then headed home to Harrisburg.

He had come up to St. Louis on the spur of the moment, Dale said, to check on Sean’s welfare. Sean had seemed entirely normal during the evening. They had discussed holiday plans. They had not been drinking, only a little beer which he had brought with him in a plastic container.

Barron could see that the interview had reached an impasse. Dale had changed his story only enough to cover his tracks in view of the irrefutable evidence that he had been seen by the Kroecks that night. He could stick to that version indefinitely. Barron excused himself to take a call from Detectives Plummer and Fox in Illinois.

They had interviewed Martha Culley at her home. At first she had said that the doc had been with her, and that she had used the Oldsmobile herself early in the evening to go to a beauty-shop appointment. But when she was told that the Oldsmobile had been seen in St. Louis and that at that very moment, as she was being interviewed, John Dale Cavaness was being questioned about his participation in his son’s murder, she changed her story. Dr. Cavaness had not been at home when she returned from the beauty parlor, and he had stopped by the beauty shop to exchange cars with her. He was not at home when she went to bed, and the next morning she had found him asleep on a couch downstairs. She did not see him again until they went to a party together that night, Thursday. He had appeared to have a good time at the party; they had stayed late. He had said nothing about going to St. Louis to visit his son.

The detectives reported that they had found none of Sean’s belongings in either the house or the garage. From the Oldsmobile they had taken a flashlight but nothing else relevant to the case; Martha Culley had turned over to them a .357 magnum pistol which she said was kept in the house for security purposes.

Barron returned to the interview room and had Dale run through his story several more times. He had sandwiches, coffee and soft drinks brought in, tried chatting amiably with Dale, got nowhere. He asked Dale whether he would voluntarily submit to a lie-detector test. Dale said that he gladly would.

Just after midnight Sam Yarbrough, chief polygraph examiner for the St. Louis County Police Department, arrived with his machine to administer the test. Yarbrough advised Dale of his constitutional rights and presented him with a second waiver form, making sure that he read and understood each right, initialed each paragraph, and signed his name without coercion. When Dale said that he suffered from buried cataracts and could not see the print clearly, Yarbrough read the form aloud.

Yarbrough, a man in his early thirties whose entire professional life was devoted to administering lie-detector tests, did not believe in the infallibility of the polygraph but saw the device as a useful police tool which, if properly interpreted, could indicate in a general sense whether or not the subject was a reliable witness to his own or to others’ crimes. Yarbrough treated Dale with elaborate courtesy, acknowledging that as a physician he probably understood better than most people what the polygraph entailed. He asked Dale whether he was taking any medication—Dale said that he was on a regular dose of thyroid pills and nothing else—and ran through the principal questions in advance. Yarbrough presented himself as a sincere, friendly professional who was concerned only with the truth.

“Let me tell you about something, okay?” Yarbrough said. “There’s a lot of suspicion here, Dale, not only because of the unusual circumstances of you coming to St. Louis on this particular night, but because most of us have children ourselves, you know? We have sons and daughters. Our children aren’t as old as yours, I mean Dave Barron’s kids and my own kids, but we’re all fathers. Let me say to you that I project, if I can use that term, project a few years on down the road, to where my son is Sean’s age and I’m the father visiting the son. Then a few hours later my son is found dead. I think my reaction would be first of all shock, and after that I would want to catch the person who did it, especially given the manner in which your son died. Being shot. And the only way to catch the killer is to cooperate with the police. But here we have you lying about where you were, whether you were in St. Louis and so on, and you can understand, the investigators are going to say whoa, wait a minute, this guy is lying to us.

“Why, Dale, why did you not say, oh, my God, I just saw my son, and the last time I saw him was one-thirty, two o’clock in the morning on Thursday? Why didn’t you say that? You understand—there’s a lot of suspicion here. It’s out of character, if I may say so, for a father to deny when he last saw his son, when the son has been killed. Those of us with children, Dale, children we love, we just don’t understand why you’ve responded in this way.”

To this and to other extended, friendly-sounding inquiries, Dale replied that he had simply not wanted to appear a suspect.

“I’ m not talking to a fool,” Yarbrough said. “You may be from a rural part of Illinois, but you’re a medical man, an intelligent man. I’m sure you’re a very perceptive man. You’ve got to realize that if you lie, it’s going to cause suspicion in our minds. We’re not fools either, see what I mean? Why did you lie? Were you afraid?”

“I suppose,” Dale said. “I just had the feeling that if I leveled with them, they would involve me unnecessarily.”

“Let me tell you something, Dale. These investigators—Dave Barron, the rest—they are going to find the person who’s responsible for your son’s death, because they are that tenacious. You’ve got to believe this. You can’t bullshit these guys. Maybe you don’t understand, even though I know you’re an intelligent man. These guys are for real, Dale. They’re that dedicated. They are smart enough to smell it when something’s not right. Do you understand this? Do you understand that you are dealing with a bunch of guys who are totally honest and are going to find the killer? This is the way it is in St. Louis, Dale. There is no bullshit here, do you understand that?”

Dale said nothing.

“You’re a physician,” Yarbrough said. “Let me make an analogy, if I can. It’s just like when you make a diagnosis. The disease here is murder. When somebody smells of murder, our guys are excellent diagnosticians, understand me? Your symptoms are everything you’ve lied about. You tried to fool us, but you couldn’t. You know that now. If you smell of murder, Dave Barron is going to smell it, see what I mean? like some patient of yours who stinks because he’s rotting away from something. Dave Barron is going to arrive at a diagnosis sooner or later. If you want to help, this will all be over sooner. If you don’t want to help, we are going to arrive at a diagnosis eventually. Don’t you think it would be beneficial to us if you helped us in making the diagnosis just like you make a diagnosis as a doctor?”

“I understand now, yes,” Dale said.

Dale Cavaness, the man of a few thousand words, the fellow who had always been able to survive on a raft of countrified rhetoric, gave minimal, terse answers to all of Yarbrough’s questions about his whereabouts on the night of the murder, his feelings about Sean’s death, and his reactions to Mark’s death years before. Yarbrough’s bluntness had the effect of rendering Dale nearly speechless. Confronted with his past—the reckless-homicide and deceptive-practice convictions, everything that Dave Barron had learned from Jack Nolen—Dale could only mumble: