Wages of Sin (3 page)

“I’ll do whatever you need me to do.” She’d heard him say it was a matter of life and death.

They hung up. But a nervous Trevino pressed the reset button on her phone and dialed out again. She called a friend on the Austin police force and asked him to meet her at the apartment complex. She didn’t want to go to the Aubry Hills Apartments at midnight by herself, especially since she didn’t know if the caller truly was who he said he was—a homicide detective.

While Gage talked to Trevino, Gary Thompson phoned Mancias. He had Chris Hatton’s Social Security number. The last four digits matched what was printed on the sleeping bag.

Round Rock Police Department dispatcher Jim Fletcher phoned Holly Frischkorn.

“Dr. Jansa’s in Colorado, but his wife’s going to the office and pulling the charts.”

The information was relayed to Mancias, who then contacted the dentist’s wife. Deborah Jansa and Mancias agreed to meet at her Round Rock home to get the charts.

The investigation had become an unstoppable, rolling boulder.

At 11:42
P.M
., Friday, January 13, 1995, Mancias and Gage left TCSO headquarters. At midnight they obtained the dental records from Deborah Jansa and drove to the Aubry Hills Apartments.

The Aubry Hills was a gated complex with a swimming pool and tennis courts, large trees that smothered the noise of traffic speeding down multilane Lamar Boulevard, beat-up cars, crooked and bent mini-blinds, and razor wire atop one electric fence. Dawn Trevino anxiously waited alone in her office.

After identifying themselves, Mancias and Gage talked with Trevino for fifteen minutes.

“I spoke to Chris quite a bit during the week,” she said. Trevino was petite with long, dark hair. “He was upset. His roommate had left—”

“When?”

“In late December, and Chris was concerned about being able to pay the rent. We talked about possibly transferring him to a smaller apartment or possibly adding a new roommate. He said he’d let me know. Later he said he’d possibly found a new roommate and would probably be staying in his apartment. Later he said the new roommate hadn’t worked out.”

“Who’s his roommate?”

She showed Mancias and Gage rental applications filled out by Hatton and a William Busenburg.

“Do you have any idea who the new roommate was that he was referring to?” said Gage.

“No idea. Chris was evasive about that.”

“Do you know why Busenburg moved out? Did they have a fight or disagreement?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But they were two very different personalities. Chris was easygoing and easy to get along with. He was real quiet. Will was demanding and wanted everything done immediately.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“If there was something wrong in the apartment, it was usually Will who came to complain and then he wanted it repaired quickly. And he said it in a demanding way. He just generally had a poor attitude. But with Chris, if there was a problem, he wouldn’t ask. He was very timid about it.”

She offered the officers copies of the rental application.

As Mancias and Gage studied them, Gage noticed that two vehicles were noted on the application, a 1994 Dodge Dakota and a 1994 Chevy Cheyenne. “Do you know which vehicle belonged to which tenant?”

Trevino didn’t know. “Chris almost always rode his bicycle.”

Busenburg had written on the rental application that his previous employer had been the U.S. Army, where he had been a medical specialist, and his current employer was Intermedics Ortho, where he manufactured artificial implants.

Hatton’s previous employer was listed as the U.S. Navy, where his job had been BM—Special Warfare. His current job was entered as merchandiser for Capitol Beverage.

Mancias called the Austin Police Department and requested uniformed backup.

 

 

At 12:25
A.M
., Saturday, January 14, 1995, TCSO, APD, and Trevino approached Hatton’s second-floor apartment. It was toward the rear of the complex, next to an alley and a wooden fence without razor wire or electricity.

Gage knocked on the door. “Sheriffs department!”

There was no response.

Gage unlocked the door and opened it. “Sheriffs department!” He shouted it several times into the dark apartment.

Dawn Trevino waited a safe distance away. All of the officers entered the apartment, illuminating the room with their flashlights.

A single folding chair, a mess of items stacked against the wall, a can of Ajax cleaner, an opened box of Hefty Steel Sak, a
Playboy
magazine (the girls of the SEC issue), another adult magazine, and a plastic container for a tarp were all that filled an otherwise empty living room.
Disarray,
thought Gage.

A small divider wall or counter separated the living room and kitchen. On that wall was a note scribbled on an envelope: “Chris, I bought you a burrito and came by until Steph gets off from work, I’ll be back around two or so to say hi, Will.” And there was a later notation about eating the burrito.

There was also a pager, a guitar in a trash bag leaning against the wall, and plates on the floor.

In the kitchen sat an unopened box of tall kitchen trash bags and an open can of paint. In the dining area there were some cowboy hatboxes and cowboy boots on the floor and a dartboard on the wall.

The officers moved down the hallway. Gage entered a small bedroom on the left. He steadied his flashlight beam on a bed frame turned on its side. On the headboard were skull fragments with hair attached.

Mancias walked into the master bedroom. His light flashed across an almost empty room—no bed, but a computer desk, a pair of underwear, and a few boxes. He opened the closet. No one and nothing was there.

He met Gage in the small bedroom. Mancias noticed that there was no mattress or box spring. A large portion of three walls and the ceiling appeared to have been recently painted with a white-toned paint a few shades different from the old.

Gage pointed his flashlight onto a large stain that looked like blood. It was on the carpet next to a wall. Someone, it appeared, had tried to clean up the blood. A small bone fragment rested near the stain and headboard. Another bone fragment lay near the door.

The window was open. The blinds were drawn. There were a chest of drawers, a nightstand, and a brown folding chair.

The officers checked the closet. They checked the bathrooms.

They had the murder scene.

“Ms. Trevino,” the detectives called. “Would you come here?”

Trevino climbed the stairs to the apartment and entered the small bedroom on the left.

“Would you verify that this is not the condition the unit was in when they moved in?”

She did.

“Is it normally kept in such disarray?”

“I don’t think so.” She said the maintenance man would know better than she would. “He may have been in the apartment since I was. And he may know which vehicle belongs to Chris.”

“Would you call the maintenance man and have him respond to our location?”

Trevino said she would. Everyone exited the apartment, and the detectives closed the door, securing it with yellow crime tape. Sergeant Gage requested a crime lab technician.

At one in the morning, Technicians Tracy Hill and Dolly Day were paged.

 

 

While waiting for Hill and Day, Gage and Mancias began questioning the neighboring tenants. Allen Cooper, who lived in the apartment that shared a common wall with the murder site, hadn’t heard a thing. Most neighbors hadn’t.

But tenant Aaron Green had heard “two pops” late one night, one night during the middle of the week.

“Could you be more specific about the time of day?” said Gage.

Green couldn’t. “The sound of gunfire isn’t uncommon around here, so I didn’t give it much thought,” he replied. “But I was asleep when I heard it.”

Another neighbor, Mario Ybarra, told Mancias that Wednesday morning, around midnight or one o’clock, he had been awakened by something that sounded like a gunshot, one gunshot. Ybarra had waited. He’d listened. He hadn’t heard anything else, so he’d gone back to sleep.

Maintenance man Rex Dorsett arrived. He couldn’t tell Sergeant Gage which vehicle belonged to Hatton, but he could tell him that neither truck was currently parked in the lot.

 

 

Around 2
A.M
., Gage requested the blood splatter knowledge of Detective Tommy Wooley.

Fifteen minutes later, Hill and Day arrived, armed with still and video cameras. They entered the apartment with Mancias, Gage, and maintenance man Dorsett. He verified the apartment was not usually in this state of disarray and left.

The detectives showed Hill and Day what needed to be photographed. As Hill photographed the living room, Mancias watched from outside. He noticed a waist-high blood smear on the front door frame and pointed it out to Gage and Hill.

Hill finished photographing the living room, so Mancias reentered it to take a better look. A TV and VCR sat on a stand against the living room wall. Nearby lay a stack of magazines with
Soldier of Fortune
on top.

Hill photographed the kitchen, the countertops, the stove, the floor, the overflowing trash cans. The countertops were a mess—a Halloween decoration sat on one, a Dr Pepper three-liter bottle sat on another. Christmas cards hung along one of the dividing walls/counter.

Mancias walked to the rear of the apartment. He stared at the huge bloodstain on the aquamarine-colored carpet of the smaller bedroom. The red blood on aquamarine carpet mixed to a near black in the stain’s most soaked center. On its outer edges, the blood looked more like a large, spilled can of Hawaiian Punch.

Mancias stared at the walls and the fast, sloppy, unfinished paint job. It was obvious that blood would be splashed between the two white paints—one flat, one semigloss—like spaghetti sauce between two slices of bread.

Mancias focused his attention on the headboard, which was turned on its side but still attached to the bed frame, then on the closet door. A paper nametag with Chris Hatton written in bold black ink was stuck to the door frame.

Detective Tommy Wooley arrived and looked at the blood-splattered bedroom while Hill photographed the dining area, the items on the dining room floor, and a closet in the dining area.

She began to move to the bedrooms when she overheard Mancias and Wooley talking. “Do you think we should get a search warrant?” said Wooley. They decided they should. Hill ceased photographing the apartment.

Wooley and Mancias left for downtown Austin and TCSO headquarters to prepare an affidavit.

 

 

At 5:08
A.M
., on Saturday, January 14, 1995, municipal judge David Spencer signed the search warrant for the apartment on North Lamar Boulevard in Austin, Texas. Two minutes later, Wooley let Gage know they had the warrant.

At 5:15
A.M
., Hill and Day returned to the crime lab to mix up a batch of Luminol, the chemical that makes blood glow in the dark.

At 5:25
A.M
., Mancias and Wooley arrived back at Aubry Hills, and Wooley began his close inspection of the apartment. In the master bedroom, he noticed that the boxes on the floor were empty gun boxes, one for a Winchester 1300 Defender 12-gauge shotgun, the other for a Savage .243-caliber rifle.

In the small bedroom, he noted cans of white spray paint sitting on a dresser. There was a large white fingerprint on the bed frame, another white fingerprint on a brown folding chair splattered with white paint. There were no blood splatters that could help the investigation.

The piece of skull on the headboard, however, told him that the murder victim had been lying in bed when he was blasted in the head by a shotgun, exploding his head.

Wooley left Aubry Hills to run checks on Chris Hatton and his roommate, Will Busenburg.

 

 

Hill and Day arrived back on the scene around 6
A.M
. They completed photographing the apartment and began collecting evidence: a blue Lysol lid, a newspaper with a shoe impression on it, a VHS tape with “Chris 244-9739” on it, and two maroon T-shirts inside a Randalls grocery store bag, all from the living room.

From the dividing wall/counter separating the living room from the kitchen, they collected, among other things, the handwritten note to Chris from Will and the pager. The pager had five calls on it: 10:07
P.M
., 1:23
P.M
., 10:01
A.M
., 5:21
P.M
., and 11:15
A.M
. Two of the pages were from the same phone number.

Time was ticking away. Daylight was approaching. The Luminol tests had to be done while it was still dark. Evidence collection was put on hold so that the Luminol tests could begin.

At 6:15
A.M
., Hill sprayed the master bathroom with Luminol; then she turned out the lights. The showerhead glowed. The tile walls were illuminated. Foot marks on the wall shone. The dirty bottom of the bathtub glowed with blue light—the Luminol blue light of blood. The drain glowed. Gage saw the swirling path a gush of blood had taken as it washed into the drain.

Photographs were made of the Luminol blood glow.

Hill continued spraying. The outside of the tub glowed with large, running blood drips. The bathroom floor glowed in swirling mop marks, as if the blood had been scrubbed from the floor.

The vividness of the bloody cleanup stunned Sergeant Gage. The Luminol shine, he thought, told the story. The lack of shine also told the story. When Hill sprayed the hallway, there was no blood glow. Gage knew that the body had been dragged on a comforter or sleeping bag from the bedroom to the bathroom. Either had obviously caught the blood. Both had been found at Pace Bend Park.

Finally Hill sprayed the bedroom with Luminol. The walls and ceiling flashed like lightning. It was the quick glow of the blood beneath the fresh paint. Gage had never seen anything like it. Flashing blood. The sheer amount of splatter.

Hill sprayed again. The blood flashed again, streaking like electricity burning the sky, burning Gage’s memory.

He thought about the living room and the dining room, the packed boxes, the stacked dishes on the floor.
The killer was packing up the apartment to move.
His mind went back to the bedroom; the blood must have dripped like a waterfall.
He spent a lot of time with all that wet blood, scrubbing, painting. He returned more than once.
Gage shook his head and walked out the door for a cigarette. He knew the killer would be back. The job wasn’t finished.

Mancias and Hill returned to the bloody bedroom. He helped her cut out a piece of blood-coated carpet. The bottom of the carpet was saturated with blood, too. Between the carpet and baseboard, they found four lead pellets, shotgun shell BBs. Hill collected them.