Wages of Sin (11 page)

“Bathroom stuff. Mail,” she said.

“Do you know where Will was this past week?”

“I was with him.” She stopped, then changed direction. “He was with me, uh, for the past three weeks to a month.” Then she changed again. “We were, uh, at Will’s this past weekend, and Chris was there on Saturday.”

“Can you tell me about Chris?”

“He used to go visit his uncle. He drank J.B. Scotch, whiskey, and beer. Chris owed Will some money and hadn’t been paying his share of the bills. He had a reputation for being an asshole. He was constantly getting into fights at the Lumberyard and Dance Across Texas. He liked to hang out at those places,” she volunteered. “I met Chris when Will brought him in to the Yellow Rose, where I work.”

“What do you do there?”

“Dance.”

Gage knew that meant topless.

“Chris, uh, used to come in there and watch me dance.”

“Everything you’re telling me, Stephanie, is contrary to what I’ve heard about Chris, and I feel like you’re lying to me.”

“If you’re going to accuse me of something, I’m going to quit talking to you!”

“I’m not accusing you of anything but being less than truthful with me.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to get Will in trouble.”

“I just want to get any information that you can provide me about what might have happened.” Gage leaned toward Martin. As he did, he noticed paint on one of her dark shoes. “Where’d the paint on your shoe come from?”

“It’s not paint.” Then she looked down at her shoe. “I, uh, don’t know. If you’re going to accuse me of something, I’m going to stop talking to you.”

Detective Mark Sawa walked into the office, staring for the first time at Will Busenburg. Busenburg’s brown hair was thick. His eyes were intense. His chin receded behind his stubble of new beard.

Mancias introduced Sawa to Busenburg. Sawa looked again at Busenburg, then glanced at the desk. Lying on top of the desk, he saw the signed green TCSO Miranda card—Busenburg had been informed of his rights. He and Mancias were already in the middle of the interview.

Busenburg politely turned to include Sawa in their conversation. “I was moving out of the apartment and in with my girlfriend, Stephanie Martin. By the end of December, I’d already moved ninety percent of my stuff, almost everything except for my computer desk.”

“How’d you and your girlfriend meet?”

“I met her at the Yellow Rose, where she works as a dancer.”

Sawa next went to Sergeant Gage’s office.

Gage told him he’d also already started his interview with Stephanie Martin.

“Miss Martin, this is Detective Sawa.”

Sawa sat down, listened, and watched. Martin was calm, very calm, and relatively relaxed. He asked her about her work hours, about Will’s work hours, and then Sawa got up and went back to Mancias and Busenburg. This was tag-team interviewing.

Gage looked into Stephanie Martin’s eyes. “Did you work any this past week?”

“No. Uh, I don’t want to get Will in trouble.” There was silence in the cluttered room. Stephanie finally spoke. “I can’t remember if it was Tuesday or, um, Wednesday, but one of those days we moved a couch. Will’s sick; he contracted a terminal disease in the Persian Gulf War. Because of that, I’m not sure which days he worked. He may have taken off a half day on Wednesday, uh, being sick, you know.”

“Does Will have any guns?”

“Chris has a shotgun. I have, uh, a green shotgun, and that’s the only gun I have. Will has lots of guns.”

“What about Chris’s truck?”

“He used to have a dark-blue Dodge Dakota truck, but his ex-girlfriend has it now.”

“Do you know her name?”

“Uh, Michelle, I think. She lives in Round Rock.”

“How did Chris get to work?”

“He walked or had people give him a ride.”

Sergeant Tim Gage left the room to confer with Mancias.

 

 

“What were you and Stephanie doing at the apartment?” asked Mancias as Sawa listened.

“We were there to clean it up,” said Busenburg, not hesitating a millisecond.

“Do you know anybody who’d want to hurt Chris? Do you know any enemies of his?”

Busenburg sat passively.

“Do you know anybody who would want to kill Chris?”

“Stephanie killed him.”

Busenburg said it placidly. It had taken him all of a half hour to come up with that answer. Mancias tried not to show his shock.

“Stephanie killed him.”

The detective had psyched himself up to be ready for the long haul. Now there was no more need to pick a story apart. He had to change tactics, and change tactics rapidly.

“She shot him after he tried to rape her.”

Mancias walked out of the room. Gage needed to know this.

 

 

“She’s real cold,” said Gage. “She’s not saying anything.”

“He says she killed him,” Mancias replied, and then walked back to his office.

Gage returned to Stephanie Martin. “Are you going to give me a truthful statement as to the events surrounding the death of Chris Hatton?”

She glared back at him and repeated for the last time, “If you’re going to accuse me and Will of something, I’m gonna quit talking to you.”

Gage acted as though he was going to walk out on her. Then he turned and casually said, “That’s fine. We’ll just use Will’s statement.”

Martin’s eyes widened. “What’d he say?”

“Enough.”

“I’ll tell you,” she cried. “I shot him.”

 

 

Mancias and Sawa both stared at Busenburg. “You want to explain the events that occurred that led to the death of Chris?”

Busenburg was still composed. “About a week ago, I was missing a money order that was made out to GMAC for fifty-seven hundred dollars, and it was taken from a lockbox I had in my bedroom. I suspected Chris had taken the check.

“On Monday, January ninth, sometime after I got off from work, I went over to Chris’s. Chris and me had a couple of drinks. We drank until eleven-thirty or twelve o’clock.”

“What hours did you work that day?”

“I worked from two
P.M
. to eleven
P.M
.”

“What happened then?”

“Then I went back to my girlfriend’s apartment.”

“Where’s her apartment?”

“On Cameron Road.”

“What’s the address?”

“I don’t know. But it’s behind Pappadeaux’s.”

They knew Pappadeaux’s. It was a seafood restaurant off of I-35 that was popular with locals and traveling businesspeople on an expense account. But it wasn’t exactly a neighborhood considered to be high apartment living.

“When I got home, Steph wasn’t there, and I wondered where she was. Then around two
A.M
.—”

“You’re talking about Tuesday now?”

“Yeah. So, around two
A.M
., she came home. She was frantic, and she was crying. I asked her what was wrong, and she said she’d shot Chris because he’d tried to rape her. She said she’d gone there to try to get Chris to give her the money that he owed me. She said while she was there, Chris was drunk and tried to rape her.”

With a stone face, he looked straight at Mancias and continued to speak in a calm voice.

“She said he tried to drag her into his bed, then she broke free, and grabbed Chris’s twelve-gauge shotgun. She told me she pointed the shotgun at Chris and pulled the trigger.”

The detectives thought about all the shotgun boxes that littered the bloody apartment, and in particular, the boxes in the bedroom empty except for a computer desk.

Tiny tears began to well in the eyes of Will Busenburg.

“I know that Chris kept the shotgun loaded and ready to shoot.”

“How do you know he always kept his shotgun loaded?”

“I know from previous experience.”

Their looks indicated he should continue.

“Stephanie said she just sat and stared at the body for a while and then drove back to our apartment. That’s when she told me what she’d done. Then we both drove back over to Chris’s. It was only when I walked in that I realized how bad he was shot and that he was dead. His face was no longer there. From the nose up, his face was gone.

“When I stared at Chris, the wheels in my head started spinning. All I could think about was how I loved Stephanie, and I didn’t want to lose her. That’s all I knew. She’s the only person who’s ever loved me. So we decided to do something with the body.” He sat erectly.

“What was Hatton wearing?”

“A dark-colored T-shirt and underwear. He was lying on a sheet and a sleeping bag. We wrapped him up in them and carried him into the bathroom that I used when I lived at the apartment. We put Chris’s body in the bathtub so that the body would drain out all of the blood. Then, around four-thirty or five-thirty in the morning, we left and went back home.”

“Still Tuesday morning?”

“Yeah, that was Tuesday morning, the tenth. I went to work that day. But I was sick all day. I got sick whenever I thought about Chris or Steph. After work I went to Stephanie’s apartment, and I just sat and thought for about an hour.

“I’d had Stephanie go buy a tarp during the day. Then that night we went back to the apartment and wrapped Chris’s body up in the sheet, sleeping bag, and tarp. We carried him out to his pickup truck. We put the body in the bed of the pickup, and we drove from the complex.”

“Who was driving?”

“I was driving Chris’s truck, and Stephanie was driving her cream-colored Nissan Stanza. I followed Stephanie as she drove for what seemed like three hours. We drove out to Paleface Park and a campsite. I’d never been there before. But Stephanie had. It was the only one that Steph could think of. When we got there, I helped Steph move Chris from the truck to a campground fireplace.”

“How’d you start the fire?”

“We’d stopped at a Randalls and bought firewood and lighter fluid.” Randalls was a grocery chain with a store in just about every Austin neighborhood. “Then after I helped move the body, I sat down on the bench for a while and then went to the rest room that’s out there because I had diarrhea.”

“What about the hands?”

“We’d brought a hacksaw that I had in a Sears tool chest. We were so afraid, even though we knew that there was nothing else we could do to stay together. We knew we had to hide Chris’s identity so that Stephanie wouldn’t go to jail. She took the hacksaw, and she sawed off Chris’s hands. We then set the fire.”

Mancias walked out of the room to go work on a search warrant for Martin’s apartment and Busenburg’s truck.

“What about the hands?”

“The hands were thrown in the fire, and the fire burned Chris’s face. When I looked at Chris, it was like he wasn’t real. We took the sleeping bag and sheet and put it in a trash can by the campsite. Then we left.”

“What time was it?”

“We left the campsite about five or five-thirty on Wednesday morning.”

“Where’d you go?”

Mancias came back in and listened quietly.

“We drove east on Highway 71 West.” That was back toward Austin. “And I noticed that Steph was falling asleep behind the wheel, so we stopped at a gas station at Bee Caves Road and Highway 71 west. We left Chris’s truck there and drove back to Stephanie’s apartment together.

“I was sick all day, so I called in sick to work. The next day, we drove back out to the gas station to get the truck. But we found out the owner had had it towed to Bernie’s Towing.

“On Thursday, January twelfth, we went back to Chris’s to clean up the apartment. I brought a can of paint with me to paint the walls and the ceiling with the blood on them. We scrubbed the carpet with beer and Vanish. I drank Dr Pepper during the cleanup trying to make my stomach feel better. We painted the walls, and we wore surgical gloves during the cleanup.”

“Where’s Chris’s truck and his shotgun now?”

“His truck’s at Stephanie’s apartment complex, and his shotgun is in her apartment.”

“How’d the truck get there?”

“On Friday the thirteenth, I got Chris’s military ID and went to Bernie’s to get the truck out of impound. I paid eighty dollars to get it out. Then I drove the truck back to the apartment and sat around.”

Mancias left again to work on the search warrants.

“We also went back to the apartment to check on the bloodstain.”

“When was that?”

“Still Friday the thirteenth. We only stayed about five minutes. The bloodstain was just as bad as it ever was, so we decided to return on January fourteenth to finish the cleanup.”

 

 

While Mancias waited on the warrants, he phoned Bernie’s Wrecker Service. He was told that a 1979 Chevrolet pickup with the Texas license plate 531 IPN had been stored by their company and that it had been taken out of the yard by a Christopher Hatton at 4
P.M
. on Friday, January 13.

Mancias went back to his office to listen to more of Busenburg’s statement.

“When we got back on Saturday, we met the police. I feel bad now that I tried to get away with this. I wish Chris was here so I could say I’m sorry. I can’t believe I thought everything would be all right and that Steph and me could live happily ever after.”

Sawa volunteered to transcribe Busenburg’s statement. He once again read Busenburg his rights. It was 8:30
P.M
., almost three hours since Mancias had first read Busenburg his Miranda warning.