Wages of Sin (21 page)

He had to do more research on Busenburg. He found a pattern of grandiose ideas and blatant lies.

Still,
he wondered,
can somebody really have that kind of control over you? Yes,
he thought.
Historically, there’s been people that could do that.

Charismatic people. People with charming personalities. Like Charles Manson.

Drew McAngus believed it was possible. He knew; he taught police officers about abnormal personalities. He wanted to talk to Busenburg. But Busenburg wasn’t talking;
it’s as though,
thought McAngus,
he had something to hide.

 

 

Robert Martin answered the phone. It was Ira Davis.

“I guess you do know your daughter better than I do,” he said.

“Why?”

“You were right. She’s changed her story. She told me today that she wasn’t being raped. That it was all a cover-up. He told her to say it.”

Martin hung up the phone. The call that was supposed to make him feel better only made him feel worse.

“I wanted to tell the truth,” Stephanie told her mother. “I didn’t know if I should call Ira or tell Dad. I kept wanting to say I’ve been telling a lie this whole time about this. I didn’t shoot Chris Hatton. I didn’t know what to do. I knew when this investigator came with Ira that I was going to tell him.”

Stephanie Martin wasn’t the type of person who could sit silently with her thoughts and feelings. She was a woman of talk and action. Ira Davis had told her time and again to sit and be quiet, but it was like telling a chicken not to cluck.

On Friday, February 24, 1995, Stephanie Martin sat in the Del Valle jail battling her urge to cluck. She had too many questions that she couldn’t stand to go unanswered, so she wrote Will Busenburg a half-page letter, telling him she hadn’t written lately due to her lawyer’s advice. But, she said, she’d “been doing a lot of thinking and praying about what has happened, and I’ve asked clergy people and God for guidance. I do not understand all this. If you truly love me, why have you allowed me to be so involved in this, and why have you let this go on so long. How can you let people think these horrible things about me? I can’t see that your love really runs deep for me if you allow this to keep going. Please think about this Will, and pray for guidance. Love, Stephanie.”

For Stephanie Martin, it was a very short, to-the-point letter.

Four days later, she wrote Busenburg again.

“Hi love. Yes, my lawyer will not let me write. And yes, he has all your letters. There are very important reasons why we are doing this. Please hold yourself together, I know you are feeling a lot of pain right now, along with loneliness and confusion. But Will, this is the way it has to be. You must do the right thing, for both of us.”

Half a page down, she wrote, “I will definitely be calling counselors from Riverbend [Church] to come see you as often as possible. I will pray for you every single day. Please open up to your family and to counselors about your abuse, because I truly believe that is the cause of all of this nightmare for you. I will be going to my mom’s by the end of this week, my parents probably won’t want you to call for awhile, we need a little time to have peace and forget about this for awhile. Will, please talk to someone. I can’t stand to think of you in such pain. Remember I do love you, and I always will.”

 

 

On March 1, 1995, Stephanie Martin shuffled into the courtroom for another bond hearing. Martin wanted to glance up from her shackles and chains to look at Will Busenburg, but she didn’t dare. If she did, she might start weeping on the spot. She would want to reach out from her chains and touch her skin to his.

He’d already written her about how his bond had been raised to $250,000 and how he was hopeless, scared, and panicked. She still had hopes that her father was going to get her home by paying fifteen percent on a $130,000 bond.

Martin glanced over at the Hatton family. She thought she was going to faint under the heat of their glares. She looked at the judge and saw it in his eyes. Her bond, like Busenburg’s, was $250,000.

Stephanie Martin wrote her mother a birthday letter on March 6, 1995. She wanted to give her mother the best gift a daughter could give from jail.

“You’ve been extremely strong and supportive through all this. I don’t want you to
ever
think you did something wrong as parents. I take full responsibility for my actions and for the irrational decisions I made. I’ve been the biggest fool and the biggest idiot,” she wrote.

“When I left Todd, I was weak and still dependent on others. I thought by leaving him and moving in with Roxy I would become more independent, instead I went right into a relationship with Will. Will made me feel alive and satisfied. I was infatuated with him because I thought he was dangerous, heroic, powerful, intelligent, and still a little boy that desperately needed me.”

She explained how he lured her with his lies.

“I don’t know if Will loves me or not, maybe he really tried in his own strange way. But he’s definitely manipulative and self-pitying in a major way. I am certain he’s got a personality disorder and cannot rationalize Chris’s death and how he got me involved in it. I don’t know if he realizes Chris and me are the victims in this, he may think he is the victim and now I have deserted him.”

Again she talked about Busenburg’s lies to her.

“[Will] said [Chris] should pay with his life for stealing from Will and betraying him after he had helped him. Well then I said, you and Chris go camping and have a boys night together and maybe Chris will break down and tell you he stole the check. Will also had another plan to drug Chris and make him pass out, so we could come in like spies and find the money on him or in his room. I even somewhat committed murder in my heart, because I knew that the sleeping pills could kill Chris but I didn’t care. I even prepared myself that it might happen, and I still didn’t care.”

She explained that she was home at her apartment when Busenburg, she said, shot Hatton.

“When we were arrested, he told me I better take the rap for him, and he stared at me the whole time we were on our way to the sheriffs station.... I shouldn’t have done those things to the body, they were grotesque. Just know that I did whatever Will wanted me to do and I did everything possible for him to not get caught. I didn’t want or think of those things, like burning the body and getting rid of the hands. Sorry I wasn’t stronger and got away from him. And I’m sorry I lied for him to everyone. I have messed up my good life for someone who wasn’t even real. I hope that you are able to live somewhat of a normal life during this. I truly am sorry.”

Martin wished her mother a happy birthday and said, “I’ve given up on Todd, he doesn’t want my troubles to interfere with his life. Here were his exact words to me on the phone last. ‘I stuck with you when you were depressed. How much do I owe you now? I don’t have time for your troubles and I can’t support you through this. I can’t have my name tarnished by you and your murder charge. Everyone tells me to stay away from you.’ Well, that’s all I need to get the hint. Me calling him only hurts me more than before I called him. He’s still selfish and uncompassionate. I’m better off forgetting him. I’ll just visit Sheba [the dog] every once in awhile if I get out on bail.”

 

 

Detective Mancias took a sworn affidavit on March 7, 1995, from Valerie Denise Cornnor, a former cellmate of Martin’s. “About a week after I was locked up with Stephanie, she told me that she had shot and killed a guy named Chris.”

Cornnor was in Del Valle on a check forgery charge.

“About a week or two later, we got a new roommate named Nicole Foltz. When Nicole came into our cell, Stephanie told her the same story that she told me about Chris trying to rape and kill her.”

Cornnor said Stephanie left the cell in mid-February and returned crying. She had gathered up some letters from Will and left again. When Martin returned to the cell, she was still crying. “She began to tell me that her lawyer had brought the truth out of her.”

Cornnor asked Martin, “What’s the truth?”

“I really didn’t shoot Chris. Will did.”

Martin explained the circumstances of the shooting to Cornnor. According to Cornnor, Martin said, “Will told me that he put two pillows over the barrel of the gun so no one would hear it.”

Cornnor told Mancias, “Stephanie said the next day they went back to the apartment about eleven
A.M
. and they took Chris and hung him by his feet in the bathtub, to let all of his blood go out of his body.... I asked Stephanie what he looked like and she said that the top part of his head was gone, like from right underneath his nose on up. I asked her if it made her sick and she said no.”

Cornnor talked about how Busenburg and Martin burned the body. “Stephanie said that later in the week they went to see if Chris’s body and truck were still there, and Chris’s body was but that the truck wasn’t.” They then got the truck out of impound. “And when they got the truck back,” said Cornnor, “Chris’s body parts were still there. So they went to the campground and put his arms and legs into a Dumpster at a little store.”

The inmate wound down her statement. “I haven’t seen Stephanie for about a week now because I got moved to a different cell after she and I got into an argument and I slapped her.

“When I made the decision to speak with the detective about what Stephanie told me, the thought of a favor from the sheriffs or district attorney’s office never came to my mind. I don’t expect to receive a favor because of the information which I gave. I decided to speak with the police because I feel that what Stephanie and Will did to Chris is a horrible crime and both of them need to be punished.”

 

 

Martin wrote on March 9, 1995, a 5 ½ page letter to Busenburg professing, again, her undying love for him.

The following month, Stephanie Martin sat down and took a polygraph test, without the presence of district attorneys or deputy sheriffs.

“Did you kill Chris Hatton?” said polygrapher Doug Farris.

“No,” she answered.

Stephanie Lynn Martin passed the test.

Ira Davis contacted the District Attorney’s Office and offered to have Martin take a polygraph test for them. He also contacted the press.

On April 24, 1995, the
Round Rock Leader
ran the headline: “
WOMAN CHARGED WITH MURDER RECANTS CONFESSION
.”

“ ‘She is denying shooting him,’ said Ira Davis, Martin’s attorney. ‘It’s the truth.’ ”

Chris Gunter responded to Davis’s statement. “ ‘If that’s what she’s saying, we dispute that’.... ‘Mr. Busenburg did not participate in the killing of Christopher Hatton.’ ”

 

 

On May 9, 1995, prosecutor Frank Bryan met with Lynn Carroll. “Stephanie talked about violence and death all the time,” she told Bryan. “One time, at the kitchen table at Stephanie’s, Will told her that the next time he went on a mission, she could go watch. Then Stephanie said, at the kitchen table, he’s going to let me pull the trigger. She said that three or four times.”

Detective Mancias and Frank Bryan drove to the Travis County jail on Friday, June 2, 1995, at 3
P.M
., to meet Mac “Chubby” Opara, an inmate buddy of Will Busenburg.

“Meeting with us will in no way help your pending case,” Bryan emphasized to Opara. “We’re here to only discuss the Busenburg case.”

Opara answered, “I’m only talking with you because I feel it’s the right thing to do.”

A native of Nigeria, Opara had come to the United States, he said, to attend college. Then he split with his wife, left her and the kids, and said, “I’ll be back.” After eventually making his way to Austin, he was picked up on an assault charge.

“That’s when I met Will. We were thrown in the same tank. He started to talk to me about his case. He told me that he had shot his best friend, a guy named Chris, with a pump shotgun. He said he shot him because he thought that Chris was trying to take Stephanie away from him. He said he told the girl to stay away from Chris.

“He said he went to Chris’s apartment to see if Stephanie was there with Chris. But when he got there, Chris was asleep in the bed, facedown. He said he shot him with a pump shotgun that belonged to Chris.”

Mancias thought back to the guns he had found in Stephanie Martin’s apartment. They were the same kind of Remington that was issued to sheriffs deputies.

“Will said Stephanie wasn’t there when he shot Chris. He said he called her after he shot him and had her come over to the apartment. When she got there, he said, she tried to leave, but he stopped her and asked her to help him. Will also said that Stephanie was the one that told him to cut off the hands so that nobody could identify the body. So, Will cut them off.”

“Did Busenburg say how he killed Chris?”

“Once in the face, point-blank range. He said his face was blown off.”

“Did he say where the gun was before he shot Chris?”

“He told me it was either in the apartment or Will’s truck.” He shook his head. “I can’t remember which one he said. But he told me that Stephanie had gotten an attorney and that she has to tell the truth now. He said that he first told Stephanie to tell the cops that Chris had tried to rape her and that would make it look like self-defense. He said, ‘I can’t believe this thing happened. I can’t believe I killed my best friend behind a bitch.’ ”

“Did you hear about the case through the media before, or even after, you met Busenburg?” said Mancias.

“No.”

Mancias and Bryan walked out the door, Bryan dwelling on Opara’s words—Busenburg cut off Hatton’s hands. That’s one thing that Stephanie Martin had never denied doing. It was the one part of her story that had never changed.

“I’ll let you know if I want an affidavit from him,” said Bryan.