by James Renner
Every friend of Dan’s that police interviewed after the late night meeting in Dan’s basement had nothing but damning things to say about Kevin Young.
Becca Boatright gave her statement on September 15. She told police that on the afternoon after Lisa’s murder, she had gone to Arabica and found Kevin sitting there. “Somehow or other, I got onto the topic of rape,” she said. The news broadcasts were reporting that first day that Lisa had probably been raped. “Kevin said, ‘I don’t think she was raped.’ I told him that I had heard she . . . had been hit on the head with a blunt object. He said, ‘No, I think she was stabbed.’ ”
A classmate named Jennifer Margulies told police she had been sitting with Kevin at Arabica when he found out that Dan was out of the hospital. “Kevin said, ‘I have some unfinished business to take care of.’ ” Jennifer said she only realized Kevin was a suspect after she heard it from a friend of Becca’s.
“[Kevin] said that he was gonna get Lisa,” said Kim Rathbone, in her statement. “He’s scary, but you never think that anybody’s actually going to do something, even though they talk.”
“Okay, so this is what you’ve heard from other people?” the detective asked.
“Yeah.”
“Who has been talking to you about it?”
“Jennifer Margulies.”
* * *
Kevin Young denied ever threatening Lisa Pruett when he was brought into the station after 11 p.m., on September 15. He said the conversation with Shane McGee and John George never took place. He said after leaving Shaker Square the night of the murder, he returned home. Both his mother and father saw him go to his room around 11:30 p.m. At 11:45 p.m., he went downstairs and watched CNN because he couldn’t sleep.
But the detectives didn’t believe him.
From the supplementary notes of Detective Richard Mullaney: “Later in the interview of Kevin Young, he was confronted with the fact that he was the one who had killed Lisa Pruett. At that point, Young became indignant and vehemently denied that he could be the one who did that.” Kevin offered to take a polygraph to prove it. Instead, Detective Mullaney and his partner left him alone, to stew, while they observed him through a two-way mirror. “While Kevin was by himself, he became visibly intense and was taking deep drags on his cigarette. Young’s eyes were watering heavily and at times, he would draw his legs up underneath himself on the chair while turning sideways, and assumed what could be described as the ‘fetal’ position. Also at this time, Young, on two different occasions, stared straight ahead with an intense look and mouthed the words, ‘No, No, No,’ very slowly and deliberately.”
From this moment on, Kevin Young was the one and only suspect in the murder of Lisa Pruett in the minds of the detectives in charge of solving the case. They were particularly suspicious of inconsistencies in Kevin’s statement that didn’t jibe with the facts they already knew about the day of the murder. For example, Tex told Kevin about Dan’s Robo party at Arabica, but Kevin told police that conversation had taken place at the Shack, a restaurant nearby. Kevin had met Tex at the Shack the next day.
“It was there [at the Shack that Tex] was accusing Dan of Lisa’s murder,” Kevin said. “He was threatening to kill Dan if he found out that Dan killed Lisa.” According to Kevin, Tex also asked him to make sure the cops knew that they had been together until a quarter to 11, the night of the murder. Tex was worried that police wouldn’t buy his alibi—that he had returned to Dan’s and then walked to the rapid station, where he waited for 45 minutes for a bus. Tex had a knife which police might find if they searched the Dreiforts’ house. Deb had taken the knife from Tex after he got busted for truancy and had to report to a probation officer, so that he wouldn’t get himself in trouble for carrying a concealed weapon. But Tex had little reason to worry. His story checked out with the bus logs at the Regional Transit Authority, his mother said he was home before 12:30 p.m., Deb claimed she had taken the knife to school with her, and he passed a polygraph test.
Still, Kevin told police he had doubts. “I’m really worried that Tex did this,” he said. “I hope it’s not true. But if he did this for me, because of a crush I had on Lisa, back around the time of the Germany trip, this will be on my conscience forever.”
A search warrant was served at the Young’s house on September 16. Curiously, police evidence logs erroneously list the date of this search as September 14, again giving the false impression that Kevin was a suspect before Dan’s friends implicated him. What detectives found at Kevin’s house, however, didn’t help his case.
They found drawings of pentagrams; a devil face; a heart tattooed with a Christian cross, stabbed and dripping blood. And his diary wasn’t that of a well-adjusted young man. “This is day one of my diary. My Mom is a bitch and I hate her. I’ll explain tomorrow.” And then: “I just want to take over the world. Make the blacks and Jews, and the Slavs and the Latins and the yellows and the Semites subordinate to us. I am worth absolutely nothing.”
Detectives got samples of Dan’s writing, too. Inexplicably, they did not seem as interested in them, even though they are much more explicit.
In a letter to Lisa during his stay at the Clinic, Dan wrote, “I tried to kill myself. I need out of here. This place has fucked me up. After I get out, give me some time to return to normal. I don’t want you or I to make any poor decisions because of this place.”
In a note to Lisa, Dan quoted lyrics to her. “I’m sorry now I killed you. For our love was something fine. And till they come to get me, I shall hold your hand in mine.”
In another note to Lisa: “Some day, I’ll go too far and do something very bad and you’ll yell at me and be serious and I won’t be able to handle it. But you can’t let me get away with murder. I look at you and see what I’ve done to you. I’m a bad influence on people. Chris is another example of this. And believe it or not, I think I’ve made Kevin [Young] worse than he already was.”
Another note: “I wanna poke your eyes out with my favorite pocket knife.”
One letter ends, cryptically, with this code: IDTDODAFNDOT (H)KOBRT.”
Detectives also pulled Tex Workman and Debbie Dreifort’s phone records. They reveal that Tex called Debbie’s dorm at 12:19 p.m. and the call lasted until 12:54 p.m. The records rule Tex out as a suspect, but they also increase the amount of time Dan was alone, prior to anyone hearing Lisa’s screams.
But when detectives enlisted the help of trained psychiatrists, they were only interested in understanding one mental patient: Kevin Young.
* * *
On Monday, September 17, FBI Special Agent Dick Wrenn paid a personal visit to the Shaker Heights police detective bureau. At the time, Wrenn was the lead agent assigned to the unsolved murder of 10-year-old Amy Mihaljevic. Wrenn was anxious to see if there were any similarities between Lisa’s murder and Amy’s.
Shaker Heights police welcomed the assistance. After detectives read Kevin’s diary, they called Wrenn and asked if there was someone inside the Behavioral Science unit at FBI who could offer an opinion on what it said about Kevin’s nature. Wrenn recommended Special Agent James Wright, a profiler working out of the Academy at Quantico.
Wright told them, over the phone, that based on the diary, “Kevin Young has no ego, has low self esteem.” His personality “definitely fit that of a person capable of committing the crime.” He suggested that when detectives interviewed Kevin again, for the polygraph, they should interview him at night, “the later the better,” because Kevin was a night person. He warned the police not to be judgmental when they questioned him. That they should give him an “out” such as suggesting that maybe Kevin wasn’t in control of himself when he murdered Lisa and therefore not responsible.
On September 25, Shaker Heights detectives and Special Agent John Dunn flew to Quantico to speak to Wright in person. Agent Wright and his staff described Kevin as a “John Hinckley” type personality, someone who fantasized about women from afar. They suggested he might be a serial killer. A
gain, they went over strategies for the upcoming polygraph interview: have pop and cigarettes on hand, be prepared to question him for hours before getting a confession, use a “third person” approach when talking about the crime.
Meanwhile, Kevin had moved into a dorm at Ohio State. He started taking classes and began to think maybe this whole thing was behind him. Then, on October 26, 1990, while he was on the phone with his father, there was a knock at the door. It was Shaker Heights Police Sergeant Tom Gray. Kevin told his dad that he would call him back.
Sergeant Gray usually worked with juveniles. He had the “soft approach” that the profiler said was needed to get Kevin to confess. And in his later report of that night, it’s obvious Gray was not just playing good cop. Throughout the course of the long interrogation, Gray came to care for Kevin, even if he thought the young man was a cold blooded killer.
Before the polygraph was administered, Sergeant Gray spoke to Kevin, at length, inside a room at a Columbus hotel. On hand were plenty of cigarettes and soda.
At first, he let Kevin lead the conversation. They talked about the growing trouble in the Middle East and the threat of a draft. Gray told Kevin about how, when he was a teenager, he had to worry about the Vietnam draft. He listened while Kevin explained how Iraq could be saved using nonviolent economic means.
Then, Gray asked Kevin to put himself in the place of the person who killed Lisa and explain what he thought happened.
“Just between us?” asked Kevin.
“Yeah, just to kind of help me think through the thought process,” Gray said.
Kevin told him that he thought Lisa had been riding her bike when the person grabbed her off the bike and it rolled into the bushes. He said that the person who did it didn’t really think about it ahead of time. That he was just walking around that night and saw Lisa, and when she got close something snapped. Kevin said that he was sure that whoever did it would never kill again because he was so scared when Lisa died, that he couldn’t do it again.
It seemed like a confession. But when Gray pushed for more details that only the killer would know, Kevin couldn’t help him. Still pretending to think like the killer, Kevin told him that the man probably stabbed Lisa from the front just a couple of times. But Lisa was stabbed mostly from behind, a total of 21 times.
Gray tried to turn up the heat by implying the police had evidence against him, which they did not actually have. “Is there any reason we might find your fingerprints on Lisa’s jeans?” he asked.
Kevin told him to take his fingerprints, if that’s what he believed. He said there was no way his prints could be on Lisa’s clothes. He said again that he would take a polygraph, if they didn’t believe him.
It was 2 a.m. by the time Kevin was strapped into the lie detector in an adjacent room of the hotel. Polygraph expert Tom Kohanski asked Kevin the following questions:
Do you know for sure who killed Lisa?
The person who killed Lisa, do you know their first name?
The person who killed Lisa, do you know where they live?
When Lisa was killed, were you there?
The weapon used to kill Lisa, did you throw it away?
Did you ever hurt Lisa?
Did you kill Lisa?
In Kohanski’s professional opinion, the results of questions 1 and 4 were inconclusive. On all the other questions, he found “minor deception.” He told Sergeant Gray that Kevin seemed fatigued and should rest before being questioned again. So Gray let Kevin sleep. But the interrogation wasn’t over.
In the early afternoon, Gray treated Kevin to lunch at a nearby Pizza Hut. They split a pepperoni pie and talked about college life. When they got back, Kevin returned to the polygraph room with Kohanski and took two more tests. Kohanski left the room this time to talk to Sergeant Gray.
He told Gray that Kevin showed deception on most of the questions dealing with Lisa’s murder. Kohanski had even confronted Kevin about this, and Kevin had started crying. “I didn’t do it,” Kevin had said. Gray returned to the room to talk to his suspect.
“I told Kevin that I had enjoyed the time with him but that it had been a long day and that I had to get back to the real world,” writes Gray in his notes. “I told Kevin he had to get back to the real world, too. I told him that until this was resolved he couldn’t go back to Shaker because everybody in Shaker would think of him as being a suspect. I told him he couldn’t go back until he told the truth. Kevin reacted. He looked me right in the eyes, and with tears welling up in his eyes and deep emotion in his voice, he said he could have told me he did it, spent a couple years in a hospital, then got on with his life. But, he said, ‘I’ve got to tell you the truth.’ ”
Then, according to Gray, Kevin said, “I am scared. I feel suicidal. I have nothing to live for.” He said he wanted to be hospitalized. Gray told Kevin he should call his parents, but Kevin called his doctor, instead. The doctor agreed to commit Kevin, but only if he talked to his parents, first, for insurance purposes. And so Kevin called home to discover that police had executed another search warrant there during his interrogation. His mother put Kevin in touch with their attorney, and the interview was over.
“Kevin, with tears in his eyes, asked if this meant I couldn’t visit him in the hospital,” Gray wrote in his report. “I simply told him that he needed to make those arrangements with his parents and attorney. He gave me a hug as we waited for the elevator.”
That night, Kevin was admitted into Laurelwood hospital, where he remained for two months.
At the urging of his lawyer, Kevin took another lie detector test, administered by renowned expert Bill Evans (who has been used by both prosecutors and defense lawyers). This time, Kevin passed. The method used by Shaker Heights had been “debunked” in 1982, according to Kevin’s attorney.
* * *
Even with a “failed” polygraph test, the Shaker Heights police department could not get the prosecutor’s office to take their circumstantial case to a grand jury. While they waited, Kevin’s name was leaked to the media as the main suspect in Lisa’s murder. And when reporters discovered that Kevin’s father, J. Talbot Young, was a law partner of Steve Alfred, the mayor of Shaker Heights, all hell broke loose. Reporters implied that the mayor had called in a favor for his friend. They suggested the Youngs were hiding Kevin inside the mental unit at Laurelwood. Investigative mug Carl Monday staked out Kevin’s house, waiting for him to return.
When Kevin was finally released from Laurelwood on December 12, the media frenzy kicked into high gear. No one could understand why the police were not arresting this young man if every detective who spoke on the condition of anonymity said he did it. The city hired Wyse-Landau Public Relations to work damage control, and police detectives consulted with another psychiatrist to try to help them elicit a confession from Kevin before Shaker Heights ripped itself apart.
Detectives provided copies of Kevin’s statements, interviews, writings, and polygraph results to Dr. Murray Miron, a professor of psychology at Syracuse University who frequently advised the FBI regarding the workings of the criminal mind. On June 11, Shaker Heights deputy chief James Brosius spoke with Miron, along with the university’s chief of security, over the phone.
Miron: “You know, at some point the kid should have said, ‘Hey, listen, I’ve answered all your questions. I can’t go any more. Stop this nonsense.’ ”
Brosius: “We couldn’t get him out of there.”
Miron: (Laughs)
Brosius: “He just wouldn’t leave.”
Miron: “I might have been tempted at some point to say, ‘You fucking bore me. Just go away, you bore me. I don’t want to sit here and masturbate. When we want you, we’ll come fetch you.’ Our problem now of course, is he’s represented by attorneys.”
Miron suggested that Kevin suffered from multiple personality disorder, and was able to dissociate himself from the event of Lisa’s murder. People with true dissociative personalities can beat lie detector tests, because th
ey are able to fool themselves into believing the crime never occurred.
Miron: “Where are you with him right now? What’s happened?”
Brosius: “Right now we’re hung up with zero evidence. We haven’t been able to put this kid on the scene.”
Chief of Security: “Was he known to carry a knife?”
Brosius: “No. Everybody thinks he’s kind of weird, well, we talked to the rest of the kids in this group. They’re all weird. Even the girl’s boyfriend was described by Jim Wright as sort of a paranoid schizophrenic, and he just got out of a mental institution the day of the murder.”
Chief of Security: “The boyfriend did?”
Brosius: “Yeah.”
Later, Miron hedges his opinions on Kevin, since he has not been able to view the material related to any other suspect.
Miron: “Understand, I’ve got a spread of one. You’ve given me no other suspects. The boyfriend, anything you have, please send that along just for the sake of completeness of the file, if nothing else. Until another suspect drops out of the sky, I’d say this is a logical suspect.”
At this point, even Brosius seemed to question his opinions.
Brosius: “We’re doing just as much investigation on Dreifort as we did on Young . . . and the parents could have fashioned this whole story about him coming and hearing the screams and grabbing him and going outside and all this kind of stuff, but I don’t know . . .”
Miron: “Well, nobody said it was gonna be easy.”
* * *
On July 17, 1991, after the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office again refused to bring the evidence against Kevin in front of a grand jury, Shaker Height’s law director, K.J. Montgomery, held a press conference. Hopefully, she wasn’t following the advice of Wyse-Landau PR, because it didn’t go well. Cleveland’s godfather of journalism, Dick Feagler, blasted the city of Shaker Heights in an editorial commentary on Channel 3, later that night.
“Now, I’ve never seen anything like it so that makes it news to me,” said Feagler. “Shaker Heights is up in arms, full of rumors, anger, unease, about who killed 16-year-old Lisa Pruett. Sleep well, they tell the citizens of Shaker Heights, the murderer is still at large. We know who he is, we just can’t prove it. Well, the murderer of Lisa Pruett is still at large but whether Shaker Heights Police know who he is, is a matter of some dispute.