Alligator Candy

by David Kushner

  After they gave me their insurance details and left, I invited Dave inside. I told him everything, how I had gotten high and my imagination had run away with me. Then my voice kind of trailed off. Despite the fact that my family’s story was so well known in Tampa, I rarely, if ever, discussed it with my friends. It was just too personal, too intense, and I just didn’t want to call attention to our history—perhaps thinking that if I didn’t, I could be as “normal” as anyone else. But by the way Dave reacted, by his patience, his understanding, by the fact that he didn’t make fun of me, as boys often do with each other—all that told me that he probably knew what was going on after all. This gave me an incredible sense of comfort. Even in my craziest moments, I realized, I didn’t have to be alone.

  But I never considered myself religious. How could there be a God who would let a child be murdered? Reluctantly, I accompanied my parents to the synagogue’s annual cemetery service. We stood outside with a few dozen other congregants under a tent that barely kept out the heat and humidity. It brought back a lot of old feelings standing there, feeling like an open wound, some hideous gash of a person being picked at by everyone around me. They all knew our story. Generations knew our story. And I hated the attention—everyone loses someone—we just lost someone in a particularly brutal and sensational way. Death is death.

  I half listened to the rabbi’s sermon until something he said caught my attention. He kept mentioning the word remembrance. This was a memorial service, a service about remembering. “We consecrate this hour the memory of our departed” . . . “We recall” . . . “We remember” . . . “May their memories endure among us as a lasting benediction” . . . “In tribute to their memory, I pledge to perform acts of charity and goodness.” The name of this service in Hebrew was Yizkor—it meant “remember.” Remembering was divine. We were there to participate in that divine act.

  But I felt like an amnesiac. The few memories I had of Jon, particularly my most vivid and meaningful one on the sidewalk, were suspect. All I really had were memories of his death: the newspaper articles, the fear, the silence, the crying, the tranquilizers, the screams, the needing my parents to wait for me at the sliding glass door while I took out the garbage at night, the little brown box of his possessions high up on the shelf in his old room, the conviction that I or someone close to me would die a gruesome and horrible death, that we wouldn’t live long, that something always had to go wrong, that though one killer was sentenced to die and the other to life behind bars, their rampage would continue. So much was missing.

  The service ended. My parents and I made our way over to Jon’s headstone. It was a small grave beneath a tree—one of the few shaded spots in the cemetery. The Jewish custom is to put a small rock on a headstone to show that you’ve been there. I fumbled around for just the right rock, as if there were just the right one. We came to the site and set the rocks on the headstone. My mom and dad cried. But I never cried at this spot. I never felt anything. Jon was cremated after he died—a decision made with the help of the rabbi, because my parents couldn’t fathom the pain of burying him—and his ashes were spread over Tampa Bay by a family friend in a helicopter. My family erected this headstone in Jon’s honor. But when I looked down at the grave, I saw nothing. I could get down on my knees, claw through the dirt, the rocks, the roots, but he wouldn’t be there. No matter how hard I tried, I would not find a trace of my brother.

  23

  ONE DAY in March 1985, I got caught at high school forging guidance office passes. I was a senior, and had used a fake pass to pull a girl out of class and ask her to the prom. I thought it was a clever way to ask her out, but it backfired. Not only did she turn me down because she already had a date, but she also told her teacher what I had done, and I got busted. The school suspended me for a day—the same day, it turned out, that Johnny Paul Witt, the older of the two men who’d killed my brother, was scheduled to be executed.

  Witt’s execution had become politically charged, a national story and a precedent-setting case in the burgeoning debate over capital punishment. Two years earlier, his sentence had been overturned by the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit after it was revealed that a prospective juror was dismissed for failing to reveal her opposition to the death penalty. Later, following a debate at the US Supreme Court, the court reinstated the sentence with a historic vote that made it easier to remove such jurors from capital punishment cases. The night before Witt’s trip to the electric chair, nicknamed “Big Sparky,” Thurgood Marshall and two other justices lost their bid to postpone it. Witt would become just the twelfth person executed in Florida since the state reinstituted the death penalty in the 1970s.

  On the morning of March 6, I woke early and walked out to the patio to sit with my dad, who was listening to the news on a transistor radio. I’m not sure where my mom was. Andy was off at college. I opened the sliding glass door and saw my dad sitting on a white plastic chair, smoking a cigarette and staring off into the trees. “Maybe you were meant to be home today,” he said as I pulled up a chair.

  Up until that point, my dad and I still didn’t talk much about Jon. Perhaps I was being overprotective of him, hesitant to bring up the topic. But my brother’s death still seemed too painful for him—even given his involvement with the grief support groups. And none of us ever talked about Jon’s killers. The killers existed in some dark fog—out there, but not out there, monsters too nightmarish to conjure. It got to the point where I didn’t even know what my parents knew at all. Did they know what had really happened to Jon? Did they know why he was chosen? As we sat on the patio waiting for the hour of the execution to come, my father said it was time I learned the full story.

  “I don’t know how much you know about what happened to Jon,” he began. I told him I remembered that Jon had been hit in the head, gagged, and then suffocated in the trunk of the car. I had also heard something about mutilation, but that was it. Because Jon had never called me as he’d promised, I assumed he had been abducted on his way to the 7-Eleven that morning. This would also explain why no one reported finding the candy that I had asked him to get me.

  But it didn’t take long for my story to unravel, as my dad told me his account of what happened. Jon had made it to the store, he said. On the way back, Witt and Tillman hit him with the pipe. They gagged him and threw him in the back of their car’s trunk. They drove to a secluded spot in the woods in another part of town and removed Jon from the car. They were startled to find that he had suffocated and died. They had planned to torture him alive.

  Off in the woods, the two of them raped his dead body. They cut off his genitals, which they buried in a small bag as a souvenir. Then they left him in a shallow grave in an orange grove. Sometime later, my dad said, Witt’s wife turned him in. That day, the sheriff on the case, Sheriff’s Major Heinrich, climbed up a ladder and onto the roof of a burger place where Witt was working. Heinrich, who became very close with my family, later told my dad that he put his hand on his gun as he approached Witt. If the suspect so much as raised his wrench, the sheriff said, he would have shot him dead.

  But Witt, to what I took to be Heinrich’s and my dad’s disappointment, didn’t resist. He was arrested and found guilty of murder. Tillman, his accomplice, received a life sentence because he was diagnosed as schizophrenic, and the lawyers feared that if they tried for a death sentence, he’d get off on an insanity plea. But Witt’s final day, today, had come at last, twelve years after the crime.

  Learning all this felt terrifying. For years, I’d heard awful rumors about Jon’s death and never knew what to believe. Now, at sixteen, I realized some of the most terrible stories were true. When I told my dad, for the first time, about my last memory of Jon, sadness and compassion filled his eyes. The memory wasn’t real, he said gently. When Jon left, I had been inside the house playing. The last person to see him alive was my dad.

  What? My mind reeled. I had spent my childhood building a narrative around that final exchange wi
th my brother, imbuing it with meaning. I had been so much wrapped up in that memory because it connected me to Jon. It also filled me with guilt. For years, I had harbored the shitty feeling that maybe if I hadn’t asked him for the candy, he wouldn’t have gone to the 7-Eleven that day. I even remembered giving my deposition to the cops, telling them what Jon wore, what he said, where he was going. How could all that be wrong?

  Maybe my dad had the story wrong, I told him. But he was sure he was right. In fact, he went on, when they found the candy that Jon had bought that day, there wasn’t any Snappy Gator Gum. There were just a few things Jon had bought for himself, and also something he had bought my mom and dad. How could this be? I wondered.

  Maybe Jon knew what I wanted but didn’t get it. Suddenly I felt something primal: sibling rivalry. How could he not get me what I wanted? The anger, rather than leaving me feeling guilty, felt strangely comforting. It was just an honest brotherly emotion, and all my life I just wanted to feel any kind of emotion involving Jon, even this.

  But as the anger and guilt passed, I was left sitting outside with something else coursing through my brain: confusion. Why would I go to such lengths to make up this story to myself about Jon? Maybe I had written my own piece of fiction as some weird kind of consolation. I felt lost, but also sickened by the details my dad told me about Jon’s murder. I thought about all those years of kids telling me that Jon had been cut up and put in a pickle jar, and realized that they were sort of right. What else were they right about? I wondered. What else did they know that perhaps my family didn’t know?

  The new details raised only more questions: Who were these killers? Why had they done what they did? Why did I tell myself this elaborate lie? How could I find the answers? A new world of mystery opened before me, and I had no idea how to solve it. I felt disconnected from my community, my father, my family, myself—even from Jon.

  At 7:10 a.m., the moment of Witt’s electrocution, my dad checked the time. “He’s dead now,” he said.

  Part 3

  24

  BEFORE LONG, I was off to the University of Maryland, and the distance opened up a new dialogue with my father. Though we were always close, the space between us that represented Jon didn’t fill until I was gone, and my dad could put his feelings in words in letters to me.

  Sometimes it was a national tragedy that inspired him to write about Jon. In August 1990 a serial killer murdered five students at the University of Florida. “I think of the parents,” my father wrote me, referring to the mother and father of one of the murdered girls. “The parents weren’t allowed to view the body because it was mutilated,” he went on, “and of course we’re all brought right back into our own experience. It isn’t very far beneath the surface, is it? Doesn’t take a whole lot to bring it up, still raw, so painful.”

  A few months later, on October 29, he wrote Andy and me on the seventeenth anniversary of Jon’s death, which had come the day before. “It kind of sneaked up on me, as sometimes happens,” he wrote. “Sometimes I await it for weeks, looking for the weather to change too. Very often, it seems, just days before the 28th, it begins to get a little cooler here, sometimes a lot cooler . . . Anyway, yesterday was 17 years, hard to believe, in one sense, and, as ever, not so hard to believe at all, seems so very long ago, and yet, I can still, if I focus on it, relive much of it . . . So, here we all are, having survived Jon’s death willingly or unwillingly, and I hope we’ve each of us somehow learned from it something to help us continue living . . . And now back to the workday world. It’s always strange realizing the world doesn’t know or care, by and large.”

  Other times, he’d suggest books on grief for me to read, such as Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, which he described as being “aimed at transforming (not transcending . . .) suffering, i.e., suffering (loss, grief, etc.) disorganizes one’s life. Everything’s a shambles, no structure, no meaning. So, one has to find meaning, says Victor. Other folks say one has to find structure. Others say the love of a person or several. Others say God. The common matter is suffering, as you said, and searching for meaning is one way to transform it into something positive.”

  One fall day five years later, Andy and I received a letter from Dad that took me aback. “Enclosed is a letter received right before the holiday weekend,” he wrote. “At the moment I tend to think Mom and I will not write a letter, we certainly won’t attend the hearing, although I’ll find out when it will occur. But I don’t really know at this point, we might decide to write something. In any case, you each are free to do what you wish about this. Love, Dad.”

  Stapled to his note was a letter from the Florida Parole Commission regarding Gary Tillman. It had been twelve years since Witt was executed, and Tillman was serving his life sentence. “I regret having to bring up the past and memories that I am sure you would just as soon not have to deal with all over again,” the victims’ services administrator wrote. “However, as a victim, you have a right to be heard in the parole process. The inmate will be interviewed by the Commission in May 1997 and then the Commission will hold a public hearing to set a tentative parole date for him.” We were invited to attend the hearing and, if we so desired, write a letter or speak. “Once the Commission sets a parole date for the inmate, they must review the case at least every two years to determine if any change of his date is warranted.” The victims’ services administrator concluded by apologizing “if this letter upsets you—and I can certainly understand how it would—but I do want you to know of your rights as a victim.”

  I had no idea that Tillman—whose name I could still barely say or think—was even eligible for parole. With Witt having been executed ten years before, we took solace in knowing that Tillman, at least, would never get out. But once again the memories I thought to be true were proven to be wrong, just like the memory of talking with Jon on the sidewalk the day of his murder. There’s a terrible, emptying feeling that sucks the air from you when you learn that something you held true and meaningful isn’t true at all. For me, the vacuum filled with old fears and paranoia. What if Tillman actually got out? Would he come after my family again, or me?

  It also felt like history repeating itself because, just as my parents were having a peak year when Jon was killed, it had been, up until this moment, a peak year for me. Now twenty-seven, I was finally feeling like I was living my dreams. I had recently married and moved to a one-bedroom apartment on a leafy street in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn. I was writing for Rolling Stone and other magazines, a goal I’d had since reading Hunter S. Thompson in college, and was covering the nascent digital culture after having worked for an early internet start-up. But none of that mattered now. I was back on the sidewalk with my brother again, looking into the woods.

  When I called my parents, they said that they were as surprised by the news as me. We spoke quietly, and with long pauses. Perhaps it was part of the post-traumatic stress, but, to some degree, I was still dissociating from Jon’s murder, living my life, pursuing adventures, riding a bike in my imagination far away from the woods by my childhood home in Tampa where he died. But moments like this brought it all back, the weight of the murder and how it subdued my parents’ voices, the sort of humbleness we felt to the chaos of life, the evil that existed, the brother and son who was swallowed alive.

  My parents told me they had already spoken with Andy, who said he wanted to attend the hearing and make a statement on behalf of the family against Tillman’s release. But, again, they weren’t going to go themselves. I didn’t need to ask why. I knew that this was too painful for them, that they didn’t want to relive it at the hearing, and that, of course, they were putting no pressure on us.

  My next call was to Andy, who was now working as a musician and had a family of his own. Though my brother and I had grown up eight years apart, we’d become closer in recent years. We had caught up on lost time, discovering a shared taste in music, movies, and food. There was something ineffable between us, a bond that went d
eep through the loss of Jon and connected us. I know that he’d had his own unique struggles to deal with the horror of Jon’s murder in a way that didn’t cripple him or prevent his own child from getting the most out of life.

  When I reached him by phone, Andy was as floored as the rest of us; completely caught off guard by the letter and hearing. He had already made a few calls to Florida Commission on Offender Review’s Victims Services department, and learned that the parole hearing was a result of a legal loophole. Though Florida law now denied the possibility of parole to such murderers, Tillman had been sentenced before that law was put into effect and was therefore eligible for release. Since his incarceration, Tillman had a clean prison record, Andy told me, except for one sexual offense. There was no way of knowing how the court would rule. So Andy had decided to fly down for the hearing in a few months and say whatever he could to keep Tillman in jail. I didn’t have to go if I didn’t want to, he added, it was up to me.

  But I already knew my answer: I wanted to go speak too. After a lifetime of feeling impotent about my brother’s murder, I was suddenly in a position to take action. Andy and I were just kids when Jon died, after all. There was only so much we could do then. Andy had done what he could at thirteen: he joined the search party, combed the woods, took me trick-or-treating while Jon was missing to give me a sense of normalcy. All I could do at the time was try to make sense of the senseless. But now here we were: grown men, grown brothers, best friends. And we could do something if we wanted. We could speak. It felt like we were walking into the schoolyard to defend our brother against the neighborhood bully. It was time to fight.

  Soon after our decision, our dad wrote us a letter. “How very tough all this is on all of us,” he wrote. “We’re so struck with your willingness to appear at that dreadful situation and can understand why you each want to be there. My appearance on TV, my answering our phone that was being monitored by the FBI and talking to all sorts of maniacs who called, etc etc was all my effort, I guess, to try to do something, so I certainly understand your concerns and am grateful for them, so is Mom, we feel like we’re in the middle of a castle with very strong walls and you guys are out there on your horses in armor defending us.”