Alligator Candy

by David Kushner

  And just like that, we were back in this as a family again. The years of silence had pushed away and left us here in a new kind of battle again. On the suggestion of Andy’s therapist—who was surprised by how little we had discussed Jon’s death as a family—we had a family therapy session. It would be the first time we’d discussed Jon so directly together in our lives. We made our way to the psychologist’s office. My parents and Andy sat on a soft leather couch, and I sat in a chair beside them. To be there together in this moment had a power that I can still feel as I’m writing this sentence now. It was a deep sense of presence, of stillness, the sadness and weight of the loss there between us.

  The session went on for two hours, and now resides in a place like a dream. There was crying, and stillness, as we went through the experience, but I have no idea what we said. All I remember is that at some point, Andy asked some question of my father, and my father said that he couldn’t go to the place that Andy was asking him to go. It was too painful. He’d spent decades trying to get out of that place, and he wasn’t going to go back. The session left me with a greater realization and understanding of how truly separate each of us was in our grief, in our relationships with Jon and Jon’s murder. But as separate as we were, we were always a family, and, now, bound together in this with love.

  While our parents entrusted us to the hearing, Andy and I agreed that there was one place we would go together as brothers without them. We wanted to know the full facts of Jon’s death. Though Andy and I never spoke much about the details of Jon’s murder, it was clear that he knew little more than I did. Just as I had been letting my imagination torment me all these years with what might have happened to Jon, Andy had been enduring that stress too.

  In a way, both of us had resigned ourselves to the experience of not knowing the truth, to compartmentalizing the horror of the murder as self-preservation. But that self-preservation—the self-delusion, in a sense—had come at a price. Because we didn’t know what happened, the mystery festered in our minds and souls. Maybe now, by learning the details, as horrific as they might be, we would find not only some peace but also, most importantly, the empowerment to speak out against one of the men who had done this.

  When the hearing was a few months away, we called a victim’s rights advocate and asked her if it was possible to hear the police report about Jon’s murder. She told us she could arrange it. We also began hitting the phone, tracking down former cops and lawyers who had been involved with the case. I pored over newspaper articles I’d long forgotten or missed. Andy and I both thought we knew the basic details —that Jon had been hit with a lead pipe, put in a trunk, suffocated to death, and then mutilated. But we didn’t know the details beyond that, and we wanted to be done with them now. I was tired of imagining what had happened to Jon. I wanted to know the truth.

  Soon I was traveling on an Amtrak train to Andy’s house so that we could be together when we heard the details from the case report. I sat there for what seemed like days, listening to the new Radiohead CD, OK Computer, over and over again like some kind of meditation. “Rain down, rain down,” Thom Yorke sang, as I watched the forest blur past the window. “Come on rain down on me. From a great height.”

  The next day, Andy and I descended into his basement office, a carpeted room with Andy’s musical equipment—guitars, a piano—and a shelf lined with books. He had a picture of Jon there, the school photo that had become so iconic, of him smiling, in the red shirt, his head tilted slightly, the red hair. Andy picked up his speakerphone and set it on a small table between where we sat.

  “Are you ready?” he asked me as he dialed the number.

  “Yeah,” I said, my heart beginning to race. Then the empathetic voice of the victim’s services worker, a woman, came on the phone. She began reading from a statement Tillman had made decades before when he had led the cops to the crime scene.

  For three decades, Jon’s story was the central puzzle of my life. I had a few pieces here, a few there, but the rest was missing. Now, after weeks of preparing, reading, talking, I pieced together the puzzle of Jon’s death inside my mind like never before. As I sat there in Andy’s basement, the walls began to fade to black, trees grew up from the ground around me, and I was there, watching my brother’s murder unfold.

  25

  WAKE ME UP if anybody comes through,” Witt told Tillman, according to court documents.

  It was around twelve thirty in the afternoon on Sunday, October 28, 1973, and Tillman and Witt were parked in Witt’s yellow Plymouth Satellite Sebring in the woods behind the 7-Eleven. They’d been there for a short time, snacking on Twinkies, Cracker Jacks, and Cokes while they waited for a victim. Witt said that he preferred a girl, thirteen to fifteen, but he’d take “whatever came along.” If they got a girl, he wanted to slit her open from her crotch up with a knife. If they got a boy, he wanted to shoot him full of bows and arrows. Witt wanted to rape the child too.

  Witt had climbed into the backseat to nap and told Tillman to wake him if he saw someone they could get. Witt grew irritated with the volume of Tillman’s chewing. “Be quiet and let me sleep,” Witt told him, “and stop making noises like a pig with your food.”

  Tillman soon began to doze off too, until he saw Jon pedal up to the store on his red bike and go inside. When he roused Witt and asked him if he wanted to attack this kid, Witt replied, “Might as well; I can’t sleep.” Grabbing his bow and arrows, Witt climbed from the car and handed Tillman a foot-long metal bit from a drill. “When the boy comes back,” Witt told Tillman, “you know what to do.” Tillman was to hit the kid, and if he missed, or if someone else came along, Witt would shoot the victim with the bow and arrow.

  He pointed Tillman to a spot in the weeds nearby, where he was to crouch and wait. “You know what these kind of weeds do to me,” Tillman said.

  “You’re sneezing because you won’t get medicine for hay fever,” Witt replied, and he chastised Tillman’s condition for often screwing up their hunting missions. “You know, we might be able to find some game once in a while if you would get off your ass and get some medicine.”

  Jon soon left the store and began pedaling back “like he was trying to race somebody,” Tillman recalled later to the police. As the boy approached, Tillman leapt from the bushes, and hit him on the back of the head with the drill bit. Jon coasted on for another ten feet or so before falling off his bike. Tillman quickly ran over to my brother, placing his hand over his mouth as Witt came over and began choking him. Afraid that Jon would draw attention to them, they bound him with plastic line and, on Witt’s suggestion, gagged him with a T-shirt from a motorcycle shop. Witt propped up Jon’s bike against a tree and rubbed off his fingerprints. Then they put Jon in the trunk of the car on an old yellow and blue rubber raft, and drove off.

  They went up Busch Boulevard and then stopped at another 7-Eleven, where Witt bought a pack of cigarettes. Then they drove on a few miles, turning down a desolate road until they pulled up to a trash dump in an orange grove. When they opened the trunk, Tillman recalled later, Witt felt for a pulse. “Bet he’s dead,” he said. Then: “He is dead.” Witt, who’d wanted to shoot him with arrows and torture him alive, was disappointed that that gag seemed to have suffocated him. “Dumbass,” Witt told Tillman. “You tied it too tight.”

  As Tillman lifted the body from the trunk, Witt grabbed his bow and arrows. After checking the area to make sure they were alone, Witt searched Jon’s pockets and was disappointed to find only three cents. He pulled off Jon’s pants and cut his underwear loose with a six-inch hunting knife. Then he used the knife to start digging a hole, dumping the dirt in a bucket that they carried and emptied nearby. He handed Tillman the knife and told him to keep digging. While Tillman dug, he saw Witt trying to have sex with the dead body. The anus was too small, so Witt asked Tillman for the knife, and cut it open to make it larger. Tillman told police later that he didn’t think Witt was able to complete the sex act. He also said that he tried to have se
x with the corpse as well.

  The two sat there for about fifteen minutes. Then they decided just to bury him in the shallow grave. At one point, they heard what sounded like a truck door close, and Witt scurried up a tree to look while Tillman kept digging. After laying the body in the hole, Witt took the knife and cut off Jon’s penis and scrotum, putting them in a plastic bag. Tillman cut off the green and white Camp Keystone patch, which had a little blue owl on it, and kept it. “It was just a natural thing to do,” he told the cops later. Concerned that the body would bloat above the earth and be exposed, they made small cuts in Jon’s stomach. Tillman pushed too hard at one point, and the intestines spilled out onto the body. They threw dirt over the corpse, covering it as best they could, and went to leave.

  Witt later transferred the penis and scrotum into a small brown Sinutab bottle, which he’d filled with alcohol to “pickle it,” as he told Tillman. He had also told Tillman that if they had gotten a girl, he wanted to cut off her nipples and make a bracelet out of it. Five days later, on Friday, November 2, the two drove up to Withlacoochee State Forest, near a campsite they had frequented in the past. There by a fencepost, they buried the jar as a souvenir.

  Three days later, on November 5, Witt’s wife, Donna, turned in her husband after he’d made a drunken confession. And she had evidence. “Ms. Witt said that Witt and Tillman had brought home salt water taffy and Snappy Gator candy on 10/28/73,” the police report read. “The deputies recalled that this was Jonathan’s favorite candy, and he was going to the store to get some for his brother when he disappeared.”

  26

  I WAS ON the same train riding home to New York City, watching the same trees, listening to the same Radiohead CD. I was in the same body, spinning on the same planet in the same universe. But I was different. I wasn’t the same me. I could feel myself changing, unsettled by the details of Jon’s murder and the evidence—the candy—that they had brought back to Witt’s trailer.

  I still didn’t know if I’d had that conversation with Jon on the sidewalk as I had long recalled, or if it had been a figment of my imagination, as my dad suggested. But now I knew that he had at least bought the stuff at the store and that, horrifically, it had been found in Witt’s home. This bizarre fate of the candy felt almost as sickening as the gory details; it was all so evil, so distressing, an even darker version of what had long felt like a Grimm’s fantasy made real.

  My mind blended the images disturbingly: the candy and my brother, Jon’s neck being squeezed as his mouth gaped open with a T-shirt gagged inside, the candy neck being squeezed as the gator jaws opened with gumballs inside. As hard as I tried to fight off the images, to stop making this twisted connection in my imagination, they tormented me.

  As I rode home on the train, the details were chemicals injected into my bloodstream, reshaping my mind, my memory, my consciousness. The movie wouldn’t stop playing in my head. It adopted a soundtrack, the Radiohead song “Paranoid Android.” Now when the slow part came, when Thom Yorke sang, “Rain down, rain down . . .” I kept seeing the same thing: the two men in the woods retrieving a plastic bag with pieces of my brother inside.

  All my life, I had wanted the details. The details would kill my imagination, I’d hoped. Imaginations run wild without details. Imaginations imagine the most unimaginable things. Knives, bows, arrows, car trunks, bogeymen, bicycles, a little boy, a gag. Now after hearing excerpts of the police report, and later reading it myself, I had the facts. Things I thought I knew became corrected. He wasn’t hit with a lead pipe, as I’d always thought, it was a foot-long drill bit. I took solace in knowing that Jon had not suffered long. He had died because the gag was too tight, and he had choked on his tongue. But now I knew where the killers had parked, how they waited, how they crouched, how they attacked, how Jon struggled, how they put him in the trunk, the disappointment they felt over his death, the knife, the mutilation, the necrophilia.

  And the more I knew, the worse I felt. I didn’t want to know anymore. I wanted to know again what it was not to know. I wanted to go back to the simple narrative I had long accepted: hit in the head, died in the trunk, abstract mutilation, the silvery blur of a knife in the air. I wanted to imagine a story that ended in darkness; the story I had grown up with all along. I wanted the version where I watched Jon pedal away, and his death came quickly in shadows. I wanted to be wrapped in the familiar blanket of darkness.

  I wouldn’t remember how I reacted sitting there in Andy’s basement hearing the police report. I wouldn’t remember if I cried, or what I asked, or what Andy and I discussed in the moments after the victim’s services woman hung up. It was only the next day, sitting in the Amtrak train as the woods blurred by, that realizations set in like a flood. First, I thought about the kids at school, the ones who’d told me about a bow and arrow, and what I hoped were other rumors at the time. They had been right, more or less. Witt had brought a bow and arrow to the murder scene, but just hadn’t ended up using it. They had known what I didn’t know. I had warded them off with silence, with pretending not to hear, but I was warding off the truth. I was defenseless.

  Then I thought about the strangulation. For years, my family had been told that Jon didn’t suffer, that he had been knocked unconscious and suffocated in the trunk, that he didn’t know what was happening to him. But this didn’t seem to be the real story. Perhaps my family had been spared. Perhaps in a moment of incredible sympathy, in an impulse of humanity, the cops had gathered to discuss how much to tell my mom and dad, and they chose to leave out the hardest part of all: that the boy had been aware, if only for seconds, that he had struggled, that the large and murderous hands gripped his small neck.

  Now that I had this information, what was I going to do with it? I felt horrified at having to share it with my parents. The roles now felt reversed. They had spent years protecting me from the details, sparing me from learning things that might haunt me. They loved me dearly, so dearly that they thought sparing me would make life easier somehow, less terrifying, less paralyzing. And now I was the parent, and they were the children. I was in the blinding sun, and they were in the shadows.

  I wanted to keep them there. I wanted them to live the rest of their days just as they had done so far, taking sanctity in the comfort that their boy had not suffered. Because to have suffered was to have been aware, and to have been aware was to have known that—in that familiar thicket of woods so close to home, while his little brother waited, and his father watched football—he was being killed. I decided not to say anything; at least, not unless they asked. And if they asked, I supposed, I would figure out what to do then.

  But in that decision, I felt a kind of loneliness I had never felt before. The loneliness of the protector. The loneliness of being an adult, stuck inside your own head, aware of things that you cannot control, aware of details altering your biochemistry, lacerating your insides, rearranging that which had already seemed to be arranged, reassembling you in a new form, like some Cubist painting, your eyes and ears shifted on your face, your foot where your head should be. It was the loneliness of returning to the world you had always known in a form you did not recognize or desire. And the only thing that felt lonelier was that to everyone else, you most likely looked the same.

  I returned to Brooklyn as a transparency. I was clear through, like a paramecium, a thinly perceptible outer layer, gelatinous and elastic, a swirl of images folding upon itself inside me—trees, limbs, blood, bicycle, two men—a spinning tornado of nightmare scenes, like the vortex in The Wizard of Oz—pieces of a broken home, a cow, a witch on a bike, spinning into the darkened sky.

  And because I felt so stirred up, I felt almost incapable of keeping my story to myself. I wanted to talk, to tell others, friends I hadn’t told, my in-laws. And to the ones I had told, I wanted to tell more. For years, I had spared telling others my story, partly because I didn’t know the whole story and partly because it felt too terrifying to tell. I chose my listeners carefully, requiring tha
t friends earn my trust and make me feel safe before I let them into the storm.

  I chose the moments to tell them the story even more carefully, plotting for a time when we would be alone, when we would have time to sit, to soak, to be humble. One time in high school, I sat under the night sky and told the story to a girl I had a crush on, watching her face slacken and eyes well. In that moment, I felt both close and guilty—guilty that I was enjoying feeling close to her; that I had somehow used my brother’s story to win her affection.

  But now there was no editing, no restraint. I cried with my wife as we sat in our apartment and relived the horror. I ordered beer after beer at a bar in the East Village, as I told a friend for what purpose the killers had used their knife. I sat around the white Formica table in the kitchen of my in-laws in New Jersey and recounted everything, taking pleasure in rendering them silent. I wanted the world to quiet. I wanted the world to stop. I wanted people to stop what they were doing, to hang up their phones, to put down their forks, to turn off their TVs, to log off the internet, and listen.

  I wanted them to see the evil my brother had seen, I wanted them to feel the grip of the hands around their necks, I wanted them to feel afraid, I wanted them to be humble, I wanted them to admit that life was not orderly, that endings weren’t always happy. I wanted them to live without denial, without darkness, without dissociation. It was almost aggressive on my part, emotionally murderous, violent. I wanted to shatter the sanctity of the worlds around me. I wanted them to feel what I was feeling. I wanted them to feel Jon. I wanted them to feel death. I wanted to feel less alone.