As the train slid to a stop at Court Street, the girl was still enthusiastically endorsing the podcast. I felt so blindsided that I doubted I could stand, let alone climb the subway stairs and, laden with groceries, walk the final stretch to our apartment. My knees buckled as I rose, but I managed to propel myself through the crowded underground hallways and up aboveground. In my dazed state, I used the wrong exit, emerging on the far side of Borough Hall, and walked two blocks in the opposite direction of home before I came to my senses. Reorienting myself, I managed to place one foot in front of the other enough times to reach home.
I slid my key in the lock and hesitated. I had spent the weeks since Caleb left hating the resulting stillness of our apartment. I missed his mild chaos. I found myself resenting the way everything remained exactly where I left it. Caleb’s running shoes, trailing across the living room floor with shoelaces stretched out like tiny arms, hadn’t tripped me in weeks. I was no longer finding half-drunk mugs of coffee in the bathroom, dog-eared books stuck between the couch cushions, or the clock radio softly playing classic rock to an empty bedroom. I could feel his absence in the lack of these minor domestic annoyances, and they tugged at my heart each time I entered our home.
But, with my hand shaking as it held the key in the lock and my father’s name ricocheting around my brain, I welcomed the solitude of our apartment. I needed to be alone.
Dropping the groceries in the entryway, leaving the veggie burgers to slowly defrost on the ground, I rushed to my laptop. I typed my father’s name into a search engine with trembling fingers. Bile climbed up my throat when I saw the number of hits. There were pages upon pages filled with a startling parade of news articles, opinion pieces, and blog posts—all dated within the last two weeks. I clicked the first link, and there it was: the podcast.
Reconsidered: The Chuck Buhrman Murder was splashed in bold red letters across a fuzzy black-and-white picture of my father. It was the headshot he had used for work, the one where he looked less like an actual college professor and more like a caricature of one, with his tweed jacket, crooked eyeglasses, and thick black beard. The faint twinkle in his eyes threatened to undo me.
Daddy.
I slammed the computer shut and buried it beneath a pile of magazines. When all I could see was Kim Kardashian staring up at me from the cover of a glossy tabloid I had shamefully bought waiting for the train one day—more evidence of how everything fell apart without Caleb around—I was once again able to breathe normally.
My cousin Ellen didn’t answer her phone when I called, and I left her a voicemail demanding that she tell me what she knew about the podcast. After twenty minutes of sitting on the couch willing my phone to ring, I gave up and began searching for tasks to distract myself: I put away the groceries, I wiped up the puddle the veggie burgers had left in the entryway, I ran a bath but then drained it before climbing inside, I started painting my toenails but abandoned the project after only three nails had been polished a gloomy dark purple.
Red wine was the only thing that helped. Only after sucking down a juice glass full of the stuff was I calm enough to revisit the podcast’s website. I refilled my glass and pushed the magazines aside. Gingerly, I opened the computer.
The website was still there, still advertising a podcast that promised to “reconsider” my father’s murder. I frowned, confused. There was nothing to reconsider. Warren Cave murdered my father. He was found guilty and he received his punishment. How could this Poppy Parnell, this woman whose name made her sound more like a yarn-haired children’s toy than an investigative journalist, spin an entire series out of this? Taunting myself, I hovered my cursor over the Download Now button for the first of the two available episodes. Did I dare to click the link? I chewed my lip as I wavered, took another gulp of wine to steel myself, and clicked.
Ellen called just as Episode 1 finished downloading. Gripped by morbid fascination, I nearly declined the call in order to listen to the podcast, but I shook it off and answered the phone.
“Ellen?”
“Do not listen to that podcast.”
I exhaled a breath I didn’t know I was holding. “Is it bad?”
“It’s trash. Sensationalized trash. That pseudo-journalist is turning your family’s tragedy into a commodity, and it’s disgusting. I have Peter looking into whether we can sue her for defamation or slander or whatever it’s called. He’s the lawyer; he’ll figure it out.”
“Do you really think he can do that? Put a stop to it?”
“Peter can do anything he puts his mind to.”
“Like marrying a woman half his age?”
“Not really the time for jokes, Josie,” Ellen said, but I could hear a hint of laughter in her voice.
“I know. It’s just nerves. Please thank your esteemed husband for his help.”
“I’ll let you know more as soon as I do. How are you handling it?”
“Well, for starters, I wish I hadn’t found out by overhearing a teenager on the train. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I was hoping I wouldn’t have to. I’d hoped it would all just blow over, but apparently America has an appetite for that brand of opportunistic, sensationalist reimagining of the truth.”
“I can’t believe this is happening. What am I supposed to do?”
“Nothing,” Ellen said firmly. “Peter’s on top of this. And I’m still not convinced this won’t burn out on its own. How much ‘reconsidering’ can she really do of an open-and-shut case?”
• • •
Even though Ellen emphatically warned me not to listen to the podcast, I remained tempted, the same way one was tempted to pick at a scab or tug at a torn cuticle until it bled. I knew nothing good could come from listening, but I wanted—no, I needed—to know what this Poppy Parnell person was saying. How could she possibly justify “reconsidering” my father’s murder? And how could that be the premise for an entire series? I could effectively summarize the case in one sentence: Warren Cave killed Chuck Buhrman. End of story.
I topped off my wine and wished Caleb were home. I ached for the calming sensation of his big, warm hands on my shoulders, and his soothing voice assuring me that everything was going to be all right. I needed him to fix tea and turn on that odd reality show about toothless men making illegal whiskey. If Caleb were home, I would have been comforted and protected; I would not have been gulping wine alone in the dark, electric with terror.
And yet part of me was relieved by Caleb’s absence. The very idea of having to tell him about the podcast, and thereby being forced to admit all the lies I had told, filled me with liquid dread. I desperately hoped Ellen was right, and that the podcast would fizzle out on its own before Caleb returned from Africa.
I didn’t listen to the podcast, but I could not stop myself from obsessively Googling Poppy Parnell all night. She was in her early thirties, not more than two or three years older than myself. She was midwestern, like me, and held a BA in journalism from Northwestern. I also saw she had once run a popular crime website, and had a long list of bylines in publications like the Atlantic and the New Yorker. When I had exhausted that, I switched to an image search. Poppy Parnell was a thin strawberry blonde with angular features and wide, almost startled eyes—not conventionally attractive enough for television, but too pretty for radio. In most photographs, she wore too-large suit jackets and leaned forward, her mouth open and one hand raised, mid-gesture. Poppy looked like the kind of girl I would have been friends with a lifetime ago.
Scowling at Poppy Parnell’s smiling face, I poured the rest of the wine into my glass. I reached out to slam the computer shut, but something stopped me. The podcast was still open in another tab.
Daddy.
Cursing Poppy Parnell and myself, I pressed Play.
Excerpt from transcript of Reconsidered: The Chuck Buhrman Murder, Episode 1: “An Introduction to the Chuck Buhrman Murder,” September 7, 2015
I didn’t know what to expect when I first met Warren Cave
. By the time we were formally introduced, I’d spent several long afternoons with his mother, Melanie, a classically beautiful woman of enviable style and impeccable poise. Melanie’s son is one of her favorite topics, and she speaks highly of him, extolling his warmth and generosity, his skill with computers, and above all, his faith.
In addition to—and in contrast with—Melanie’s glowing characterization of her son, I had done my homework on Warren Cave. I scoured the police notes, trial transcripts, and articles profiling him.
Like most people who have even a passing familiarity with the case, the image I had of Warren Cave was that of a skinny kid with stooped shoulders and acne, his hair stringy and dyed black. Photographs depicted him perpetually clad in all black and never making eye contact with the camera. Warren Cave was the kind of teenager most of us would cross the street to avoid.
I had difficulty reconciling that image with the young man his mother had so favorably described. Had her maternal love blinded her to her son’s true nature? Or was the hardened image of his youth nothing more than posturing? Did the truth lie, as it so often does, somewhere in the middle?
When I first met Warren Cave in the Stateville Correctional Center, the maximum-security prison near Joliet, Illinois, where he’s been living for the last thirteen years, I didn’t recognize him. He has embraced weight training and replaced his skinny frame with hulking muscles. As he explained to me, his weight-training regimen is more for necessity than pleasure. In prison, he says, one cannot afford to be weak. This is a lesson Warren learned the hard way: his face is marred by a scar stretching across his left cheek, a harsh reminder of an attack by a fellow inmate one year into his sentence.
Warren, who keeps his hair close-cut and natural ash-blond now, still avoids eye contact. His expression is usually guarded, but he smiles warmly when I mention his mother. Melanie drives two hours every Sunday to visit her son, and he says that she is his best—and only—friend. Aside from his mother and Reverend Terry Glover, the minister at First Presbyterian Church in Elm Park, Warren has no other visitors. Andrew Cave, Warren’s father, left the family shortly after Warren’s arrest and died from prostate cancer eight years ago. None of Warren’s friends from his youth have kept in touch.
I don’t waste any time getting to the important questions.
POPPY:
If you didn’t kill Chuck Buhrman, why would his daughter say she saw you do it?
WARREN:
That’s a question I’ve asked myself every day for the last thirteen years. And you know what I’ve come up with? Diddly-squat. The Lord works in mysterious ways.
POPPY:
Are you saying she made it up?
WARREN:
Well, I didn’t kill Chuck Buhrman, so, yeah, kind of. But I guess I can kind of see how she might’ve gotten confused. Back then, I had strayed really far from the path. I was using a lot of drugs and listening to music with satanic themes. The beast had its claws in me, and I have to wonder if she saw that somehow. It must’ve confused her. She was just a kid.
POPPY:
You were just a kid yourself then.
WARREN:
I was old enough to know better.
POPPY:
Had you spent much time with her or the family before Chuck was killed?
WARREN:
No. We moved to Elm Park in 2000, so we’d only been living there for two years by the time Mr. Buhrman died. I wasn’t exactly the block-party-attending type, if you know what I mean. I mostly kept to myself. I don’t think I ever spoke to Mrs. Buhrman. Sometimes I’d spot her in the garden, but other than that she basically never left the house. She was kind of weird, you know. She joined a cult, right? I did talk to Mr. Buhrman once, though. One afternoon my mom was having trouble with the lawn mower. My father was traveling for work, and I was too much of a jerk then to help her out so Mr. Buhrman came over to give her a hand. He and I ended up talking about the Doors for a while. He seemed pretty cool.
POPPY:
Did you know your mother was having an affair with Chuck Buhrman?
Maybe it was the abruptness of the question or maybe it was the strength of his religious beliefs which condemn adultery, but Warren visibly tensed when I asked this.
WARREN:
My mother is not an adulteress.
POPPY:
So you had never witnessed anything that made you wonder whether your mother was sleeping with Mr. Buhrman?
WARREN:
Don’t come here and insult my mother.
POPPY:
I didn’t mean to offend you. I’m only trying to get to the truth. I understand that, at that point in time, your father was frequently away on business and your parents were having marital problems.
WARREN:
Can we move on?
Warren was rigid and almost noncommunicative for the remainder of our meeting. His strong reaction left me with a bad feeling. Had Warren known that something was going on between his mother and Chuck Buhrman? There’s no question that Chuck was having an affair with Melanie—she herself admitted to as much on the witness stand, her husband left her over it—but it’s unclear whether the affair was common knowledge at that time.
This is an important point. The affair is, after all, the motive the State ascribed to Warren. The State argued that Warren, already a troubled teen, was so upset about his mother taking up with the neighbor and destroying what was left of his parents’ already strained marriage that he killed the object of her affection. But an impartial reading of the trial testimony shows that the State was unable to prove that Warren had known about the affair, and it had difficulty producing witnesses who could testify to widespread knowledge of it.
In the end, the State’s failure to prove motive didn’t matter because there was an alleged eyewitness. But a question continues to nag at me—and not just for the reason that you might think. Did Warren know about the affair? And if Melanie’s family knew about the affair, what about Chuck’s? What exactly did his wife and children know?
Excerpt from transcript of Reconsidered: The Chuck Buhrman Murder, Episode 2: “The State’s Evidence—Or Lack Thereof,” September 14, 2015
The most troubling thing about Warren Cave’s sentence is that the evidence used to convict him was so scant. He’ll spend the rest of his life behind bars based on nothing more than a few fingerprints and a hefty dose of character assassination.
The linchpin of the State’s case was Lanie Buhrman’s eyewitness testimony. Without it, the remaining “evidence”—and I’m using quotation marks around that word—could rightly have been dismissed as circumstantial, or would likely not have been enough to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.
I get it, of course: Lanie was a conventionally attractive, articulate girl, and she was clearly devastated by her father’s death. Contemporaneous accounts describe her as breaking down on the stand and looking generally heartbroken. She tugged at the jury’s collective heartstrings, and they wanted to believe her.
On the other hand, eyewitness testimony, while eliciting an emotional response in the jury, is notoriously unreliable. Many factors can impact the accuracy of such statements. Consider, for example, that the story Lanie told on the witness stand—that she had gone downstairs for a glass of water and happened upon her father’s murder—was not the story she told at first. Initially both Buhrman twins claimed to have been asleep before being awoken by the sound of a gun firing.
Former detective Derek McGunnigal was one of the first people on the scene, and he described his interaction with Lanie Buhrman to me.
McGUNNIGAL:
First order of business was talking to the girls. Let me tell you, it wasn’t easy. They were really shaken up. We had a hell of a time just getting them to open their bedroom door for us. It took a good fifteen minutes of coaxing before they let us in, and then they clasped hands and refused to separate. Official procedure requires interviewing witnesses independently, but I could tell there was no way they w
ould talk without each other. They barely spoke as it was, telling me they had been asleep and hadn’t seen or heard anything until the gun went off.
Shortly after I finished with the girls, officers returned with Erin Buhrman, who had been spending the night with a friend who was recovering from oral surgery. I didn’t want the poor lady to have to watch us process the murder scene, so I brought her upstairs to the master bedroom. Her daughters heard her arrive and made such a fuss that I let them in with their mother against my better judgment. It wasn’t by the book, but I didn’t have the heart to make them leave.
I shouldn’t have let them remain in the room, but Erin wasn’t offering us much other than tears so it didn’t seem like it was hurting anything. I was trying to get her to remember as much as she could—had she seen anyone suspicious around the neighborhood over the last couple of days, was anything missing, that kind of thing—and she was getting more and more worked up. Just when I really thought the lady was going to break down on me, Lanie said, “I saw it.”
Everyone in the room just froze. Since this was the first I’d heard about it, I was immediately suspicious. You wouldn’t believe how many folks insert themselves into a police investigation just for the drama of it. That goes double for teenaged girls—I’m not being sexist or anything, that’s just my honest-to-Pete observation. I didn’t want to scare her off, but I wanted to be certain she wasn’t just jerking me around, so I asked her to describe exactly what she’d seen. And that was when she named Warren Cave as her father’s murderer.
POPPY:
I’ve read that a witness’s first utterance is usually the most truthful one. What made you believe Lanie’s second statement?
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