Wages of Sin (18 page)

“Do you remember buying anything on Friday from a male subject who identified himself as Chris Hatton?” said Sawa to pawn employee Damon Cotter.

“Yeah, I did,” answered Cotter. “It was a ring.”

Sawa was known for his almost photographic memory. He handed Cotter the photo lineups created by Mancias. Cotter couldn’t identify either.

Manager Judy Willis, though, promised the detectives that she would get the purchased ring and turn it over to the officers. She gave them a video surveillance tape recorded on January 13, 1995.

Mancias and Sawa headed south to Bernie’s Wrecker. Employee Lisa Gonzales remembered Hatton’s beat-up brown truck and the couple that had retrieved it days before.

“It was around four o’clock,” she said. “He was a white man with a U.S. Navy military ID. And he had a white woman with him who was wearing black-framed prescription glasses.”

She looked at the photo lineups. She couldn’t identify either Busenburg or Martin.

“But I remember that he didn’t have enough money. I gave him directions to the Seven-Eleven at Slaughter and Manchaca. They came back awhile later, and I gave them their truck.”

Sawa talked to Aubry Hills apartment manager Dawn Trevino, Glenn Conway, and Lisa Pace.

Bad breakup. Crazed girlfriend,
thought Lisa Pace as she sat down in Sawa’s office.
I’m glad they’ve already apprehended these people because I probably would be a prime suspect.

“Do you think Chris would have tried to sexually assault Stephanie Martin?” Sawa asked her.

She looked at the cop. She remembered how she had had to pursue intercourse with Chris. “No.”

She thought about Chris’s strong legs, his sweet smile, his brown eyes, how he and she could just look at each other across a room and have to run to the bedroom.

“Look at the guy. Look how cute he is. Do you think he would have had a problem getting laid? No. He could go into any bar and pick up a girl. Do you think if he wanted sex that he couldn’t have called me at any moment and that I wouldn’t have
run
over?” She said run as if it were an exclamation mark. “That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

“If he was going to sexually assault her, would it be likely that he’d be wearing his underwear?”

“What?”
He probably would have been talking with her, drinking with her, getting her into a position where he could control things.
“No, I don’t think so,” she finally answered.

“What were his sleeping habits?”

“He slept so soundly that I could get up and drive to the grocery store and stay out for several hours without Chris ever waking up.”

She also told Sawa that Hatton slept on his back.

Sawa knew that fit the scenario. “What did he wear to bed?”

“He always wore underwear to bed, at least. He never slept nude.” Even after they’d had sex, Chris Hatton raced out of bed to put his underwear back on and then got back in bed. “If it was really hot, he slept only in his underwear. If it was cold or cool outside, he slept with sweatpants and a T-shirt on, sometimes shorts and a T-shirt.”

“How long have you known Will? Did you know Stephanie? What do you think about Will and his character?” Sawa asked.

“I wasn’t friends with Will or best friends or anything like that. We were just acquaintances—seeing him around at school and ROTC. I didn’t care for him. I didn’t like the way he acted. He gave me a weird feeling.” She really felt that he gave off weird vibes. “He was obnoxious. He was rude.”

She remembered the way he walked into the room, the way he presented himself, she didn’t even like that. She told the detective that one day she went over to Chris’s apartment and as she stood inside, she glanced out toward the patio. She saw a lump there, a piece of carpet over the lump, splattered blood, and feathers.

“What the hell is that?” she had said to Chris as she had walked toward the patio.

“Don’t go out there,” he had ordered.

Chris had explained that it was a dead bird, which he had been feeding and was getting on the tame side. “Then Will shot it with a shotgun.” He had left the blood and mess there on the patio.

“Then why don’t you clean it up?” Pace had asked.

Chris had changed the subject, obviously not wanting to talk about it further.

Lisa Pace looked up at Detective Sawa, her eyes tired from too many days of tears. “Will would talk about how he hated blacks and how he thought the Ku Klux Klan was great.”

“When was the last time you saw or spoke with Chris Hatton?”

“Either the fifth or sixth of January,” she said. “Chris asked me about our furniture.”

“Did he mention any problems he was having?”

“No.” She looked down.

Before Lisa left Sawa’s office, he asked her to identify the bicycle, a silver necklace, a school ring, a gold ring, and six watches. “What’s the deal with all these watches?” he said.

Pace couldn’t help but laugh. That was Chris. And it was either laugh or cry as she stared at a photograph of a gold ring with three diamonds. It was the gold ring she’d given Chris for Christmas in 1992, the day he’d asked her to marry him.

What rang in Sawa’s mind after Lisa left was her statement, “I always considered Will to be violent.”

The phone rang on Sawa’s desk.

“My name is William Earls,” said the caller. “I regularly go to the Yellow Rose to have a drink and relax, and I got acquainted with Stephanie Martin. She told me some things that I think I probably need to discuss with an investigator.”

“Um-mm,” said Sawa as he took notes.

“But I probably need to talk to Stephanie first. I don’t want anybody to get into trouble.”

William Earls hung up.

The room was silent at sheriffs department headquarters as detectives sat in front of a TV watching the EZ Pawn video. In Sergeant Tim Gage’s eyes, Stephanie Martin and Will Busenburg were dancing around the pawnshop like lovebirds looking for a wedding ring.
Unbelievable,
he thought.

On the scratchy, black-and-white video that flashed like a bad movie, Martin and Busenburg casually strolled into the store. He was wearing light-colored clothes and a baseball cap; she was wearing her dark-framed eyeglasses and her hair pulled back into a ponytail.

He stood calmly at the counter. She drifted from jewelry case to jewelry case, studying the contents, and once pulled Busenburg over to look at an item. She crossed and uncrossed her arms, ducked her head as if trying not to be seen, and watched—and appeared to laugh at—another customer. He still stood calmly.

After the pawn deal was closed and just before the couple was handed the cash, Martin turned to Busenburg, wrapped her arms around his waist, and gave him a good, long, hard hug.

 

 

The phone rang in Roxy Ricks’s apartment.

“What is Stephanie’s last name?” said the caller.

“Martin.”

“Well, you need to turn the news on.”

Ricks turned on the TV. “Oh, shit.” There was Stephanie, under arrest for murder. She dropped the phone. She couldn’t believe it. “Oh, my, god.”

Her disbelief was so strong that she picked up the phone again and called and called Stephanie. It didn’t soak into her head that her best friend was in jail and couldn’t be reached at her apartment. She left message after message.

“Stephanie, pick up the phone. You need to call me back. Something weird’s going on. There must be a mistake.”

On Tuesday, January 17, 1995, Robert Martin opened the
Austin American-Statesman
newspaper. The lead story on page one of the city and state section scrolled across the entire width of the newspaper: “
FRIENDS ARRESTED IN KILLING, MUTILATION
.”

Three photographs centered the story: a respectful military head shot of Hatton; a mug shot of Busenburg; and a frowning, blank-eyed mug shot of Stephanie Martin.

He skimmed down the page. “Stephanie Lynn Martin, 22, . . .” His daughter’s name was the first three words of paragraph two. “. . . and William Michael Busenburg, 22, . . .”

Martin reread: “William Michael Busenburg, 22.” He fumed. The boy had lied. He was three years younger than what he had told the Martin family.

Robert Martin continued to read. In paragraph three, he saw, “Martin, a dancer at the Yellow Rose . . .” He stopped. He read it again. And again. This was not the start of a good new year. He’d just learned that his daughter was a topless dancer. But at that point, after learning that his daughter had confessed to murder, nothing could bother him. He was too numb.

Charges were filed that day against Stephanie Martin and Will Busenburg.

Stephanie Martin looked up from her shackles and smiled over at Roxy Ricks, who was in the courtroom for moral support. Everyone knew Martin was soon going to be released on bond.

Martin watched the judge’s face as he was shown the photographs of Hatton’s burned and mutilated body. Ricks wanted to see the photographs, too. She wanted to see what her best friend had done. The judge slammed down his gavel. Bond was set for Busenburg and Martin at $100,000 each. Martin wouldn’t be going home with her family.

Sandra Martin’s scowl was as hard as an iron frying pan. Robert Martin ducked his head as if in prayer. He hated to admit it, but he was embarrassed by the whole ridiculous nightmare. Ira Davis gathered Stephanie’s stunned supporters and rushed them out the back way so that they could escape the media glare.

As he did, Sandra Martin flashed her eyes at the cameras. “Exotic dancer”—the word shook furiously in her brain. That’s all she believed the media was interested in.

The Martins walked into the Del Valle county jail facility. A tiny, poor suburb southeast of Austin, Del Valle was not a community the prosperous family from Round Rock frequented, or expected to frequent.

Separated by a window, Sandra and Robert Martin sat across from their daughter. In her jail clothes, Stephanie was hunched in a small, hard, straight-back chair, her knees curled up to her chest, her arms wrapped around her legs, sobbing and shaking.

To her parents, she looked like she’d been through hell. This was not the life expected for a Christian girl from white, upper-middle-class, well-educated Round Rock.

Sandra and Robert Martin were literally a good sight for Stephanie. Days before, Stephanie had had to remove her contact lenses and since then had been without any sort of seeing aid. At Del Valle, her parents were allowed to give her her eyeglasses.

Robert Martin wondered,
What’s happened? How can you be confessing to being raped by this man? You don’t even hardly know him.
But Robert Martin wasn’t about to ask any direct questions. There were officers standing nearby. He thought that perhaps a hidden tape recorder was recording their every word.

Mrs. Martin wanted to hold Stephanie, but her daughter was behind that window, and she couldn’t do a darn thing for her child. She reached for the telephone as she watched Stephanie through the glass partition. “We love you. We’re here for you. Your lawyer will be here for you. We’ll get through this.”

 

 

I feel completely like shit,
Lisa Pace thought as she awoke on Wednesday, January 18, 1995—the day of Christopher Michael Hatton’s memorial service.
But I’m going to put on some makeup, and I’m going to fix my hair, and I’m going to look nice.

Lisa Pace drove herself to the funeral home, arriving early, when only family was there. She noticed that Chris’s brother, Brian, wore a new suit. “You look really good.”

“Thanks,” said Brian, shy and embarrassed like his brother.

Pace reached for a doughnut and took a bite.
This doesn’t taste like a doughnut. I don’t feel like I’m eating a doughnut.
She threw it away.

“You know who did all of this?” Chris’s grandmother whispered in her thick Eastern European accent. “Holly. Holly’s so nice. She got this coffee and doughnuts for everybody. And she took Brian and got him a suit to wear. Doesn’t he look nice?”

“Yeah, he looks really nice,” said Lisa. “Everything looks really nice.” But Pace was ticked. She was ticked at Bill Hatton. Sitting on top of Chris’s casket was a large photograph of Chris. The photograph’s frame had an enormous crack in it. It ticked Pace off that Bill Hatton had brought a photo with a huge crack in the frame, that he hadn’t asked her if she had any nice photographs of Chris in day-to-day life, with friends and family.

Officers from the Round Rock Police Department began to arrive for Holly and officers from the Travis County Sheriffs Office were there for Bill.

Lisa Pace hugged and kissed Glenn Conway hello. Conway couldn’t believe he was at a funeral for his best friend. He pushed Lisa back and focused on a dot in the future, forcing himself to be ice cold, displaying no talk and no show of emotion.

Pace walked over and hugged more people, forcing herself to keep busy so that she wouldn’t fall apart. She helped Jim Fletcher, Holly’s fiancé, select Chris’s favorite songs to play during the service—“The Dance” by Garth Brooks, “Stand by Me,” and “Sweet Home Alabama.”

Chris’s grandfather took Lisa by the shoulders. “You’re part of the family. You’re going to sit over here with us.” She sat with Holly and Brian; Bill sat a row away.

As guests left, Lisa Pace watched their faces and thought about how much Chris was loved. Tears flooded her face. She thought about how much he was going to be missed. She looked at Holly and saw her makeup had run down her cheeks.
Great, I thought I’d make myself feel better by wearing makeup, and that’s probably what I look like.
Pace’s laughter was a mere distraction from the agony in the casket.

She looked back at it one more time.

 

 

A devout Christian, Lynn Carroll, Stephanie’s Austin Community College study partner, never dreamed she’d be sitting across from a homicide investigator talking about a friend accused of murder on the same day of the murder victim’s memorial service.

“I met Stephanie Martin around the first of September 1994,” said Carroll to Detective Mancias. “We met in an intro to chemistry class. At first we were only acquaintances and talked only in class. But around the end of October, we started talking more. We were both going through some personal problems.”

Carroll’s face was tight with anxiety. “She took me out to lunch sometime around October 25, 1994. She told me she was moving out because her relationship with her boyfriend was going nowhere and she had met someone else that she was interested in. That person was Will Busenburg. . . .

“The day she took me out to lunch, she told me about Will . . . that Will was in the CIA and frequently left the country to do government jobs. She told me that she had met Will for the first time at the Yellow Rose, where she danced. She also told me that Will was twenty-four, originally from Montana, had a premed degree, and was a millionaire. She told me that he killed people—terrorists and drug dealers—in other countries for the U.S. government and was paid millions to do it.

“She also told me that Will had part ownership in Intermedics Orthopedics and was going to inherit thirty million dollars when he turned thirty. A week or two went by before we spoke again outside the classroom. We were going to have a chemistry test and we decided to study together.” Carroll, petite and pretty, looked down.

“We decided to study over at Roxy’s. This was the first time I met Will Busenburg. The next time I saw him was at Stephanie’s apartment a couple of weeks later. Stephanie and I were studying for another chemistry test. We stayed up late and decided to go to bed and study some more the next morning.

“However, Stephanie was rather afraid to stay there alone because she said some guy had been calling her. She decided we would stay at Will’s apartment that night. Will had no objections. Truthfully, I felt safer at Will’s, also. That night was the first night I met Chris Hatton.”

As she spoke, tears for Chris Hatton were still wet on the faces of police officers, friends, and family.

“He seemed like a quiet, nice, friendly guy. The four of us —me, Will, Stephanie, and Chris—stayed up and watched
Sleepless in Seattle.
The next morning, Stephanie, Will, and I went back to Stephanie’s apartment.”

She and Martin met several other times to study, usually with Carroll staying for only a couple of hours, then leaving for her own home, she told Mancias.

“I rarely saw Will these nights since he worked until eleven
P.M
. At some point during these few weeks, Stephanie began to tell me about things that Chris had done or had been doing.

She told me he was always very depressed when she and Will would go over to Will’s apartment.

“She told me he would stand around cussing and yelling about what a rotten world he lived in and would throw knives at a target in the living room. She told me Chris had warned Will about her, saying that Will should stay away from her because she was only after his money.

“Stephanie was always excited when she would tell me about Will’s adventures he had while working for the CIA,” said Carroll. “She would tell me the same stories that he had supposedly relayed to her about killing people. She told me that she wanted to go along with Will when he did something local—a killing—and she told me, ‘I want to pull the trigger.’ ”

“Those were her exact words?”

“Yes. I thought she was joking because she was always laughing when she talked about Will and all the people he had supposedly killed.”

Carroll wanted to stop but knew she couldn’t.

“Somewhere during this time frame, Stephanie started to tell me that Chris was stealing money from Will. She told me that Will would give Chris money to pay the rent or utility bills and Chris would spend it on something else instead and then come back and tell Will about it, laughing all the while. She told me Chris was irresponsible and couldn’t keep a job. She began to tell me that he should be ‘put out of his misery.’ ”

“Is that an exact quote?”

“Yes. She told me that he didn’t deserve to live. He was expendable. I told her and Will to get him some help if he was so depressed, and they kept saying, ‘Oh, we will.’ She told me Will was going to sit down and have a talk with Chris.

“One night, when Stephanie and I were at the apartment studying, she told me she and Will had been riding around the night before in east Austin looking, and I’m quoting, ‘for the nigger who had been calling her.’ When they couldn’t find him, they were going, and I’m quoting again—I don’t talk like this—they were going to ‘kill a nigger in east Austin.’ And she wanted to ‘watch their face’ as Will killed them or she wanted to ‘pull the trigger herself.’ ”

“She actually said that?”

“Yes, she did.” Carroll said that Martin kept talking about Busenburg and the CIA, adding more to the tale every day. “She told me he had told her about this abusive, alcoholic, and drug-dependent father. She told me that Will had said his father used to beat him and his brothers and sisters and sexually assaulted Will.”

Carroll then reiterated the story about Will killing his father, about going to the boys’ home, about joining the military and becoming a sharpshooter. “That was how he was able to join the CIA. She told me that she had seen Will being followed, while she was with him, by the bad guys in the CIA.”

Busenburg and Carroll rarely talked, she said, but he did tell her some guys were after him. And whenever Stephanie talked of the CIA around Will and I, Will would just shake his head up and down and agree with whatever she said. However, there were times when Stephanie would start talking about the CIA that Will would just look sharply at her and say, ‘We don’t have to talk about that right now.’ Needless to say,” said Carroll, “they were very convincing, and I was very scared.”

“When was the last time you saw Chris?”

“Somewhere around December thirteenth. Stephanie and I were studying for the chemistry final and, again, we ended up staying the night over at Will and Chris’s. I do remember that Will kept a shotgun in his room in a dark-green case. He also kept a shotgun under the seat of his truck. At some time during the night, Will, Stephanie, and I were awakened—

“We were all sleeping in Will’s bed—to shouts coming from the living room and a loud pounding on the floor. Chris was in the living room yelling at the neighbor downstairs and pounding on the floor with something very heavy. He was yelling because the downstairs neighbor was playing his radio too loud. He was yelling”—she looked down—“ ‘turn your goddamn radio down, you fucking nigger!’

“Stephanie and I were alarmed until Will said, ‘Oh, that was just Chris showing off for y’all. He gets mad when the guy downstairs has his radio on too loud.’ I told Will and Stephanie that they needed to get Chris some help. They said they would. I even offered to talk to him.”

The next morning, said Carroll, she got up and went into the bathroom across from Chris’s room to get ready to go to school, and she saw Chris. “His door was open, and I saw that he was uncovered and wearing only a T-shirt and boxer shorts. I also saw a bunch of gifts on the dining table addressed to members of his family. Stephanie told me later that Chris had bought those gifts with Will’s money, money intended for the rent. She also told me Chris had bought some clothes for himself.

“When Will and Stephanie and I would talk about Chris’s condition, they would tell me he was suicidal because he started keeping a gun by his bed. They even told me that he had bought the gifts for his family as a good-bye gesture.”

Just before Christmas, said Carroll, Martin told her about the check she and Busenburg claimed Hatton had stolen. “When I asked Will why he didn’t just move out or stop paying the bills, he would just say, ‘Because Chris is my friend.’ ”

“When was the last time you saw Stephanie?”

“On January sixth, she called me at home to tell me this was the last day she was going to have her ex-boyfriend’s dog. . . . She wanted me to come to her apartment, but I told her I was too tired. So, she said that she and Will would come out to my house and bring the dog. She said they wanted to ‘take a walk.’ I said okay. Stephanie had never been out to my house before.”

Around 5
P.M
., said Carroll, Martin phoned and said they were going to pick up Busenburg’s mother at the airport at 6:30
P.M
. They would then drop his mother off, close to the airport, and then come out to Carroll’s house.

“I told her not to worry about coming. It would be too dark by the time they got there. She told me that that was okay, we could take a walk in the dark. She kept saying they were going to come out so that we could take the dog ‘for a walk.’ They didn’t arrive at my house until around nine
P.M
. And needless to say, it was late and we did not take a walk.

“They made up some excuse for being so late. They did not stay long. Before they left, however, they looked up Chinese restaurants in the phone book because they were going to order takeout to take back to Chris. They said they were being nice to him so that they could get their money.

“Outside,” said Carroll, “I asked them what they were going to do to him, and they just said they were going to get their money.”

Mancias was so impressed with Carroll that he let her type up her own statement. Besides, she was a faster and better typist than he was.

 

 

A headline ran that day in the
Dallas Morning News
—“
PAIR CHARGED IN MURDER, MUTILATION OF EX-CLASSMATE
.”