Alligator Candy

by David Kushner

  In my small home office, I sat at my desk and tried to write the statement that I would read at the parole hearing. It came in fits and spurts. Andy had been doing research, and been advised that we should describe our suffering. We should talk about how the murder affected us, how it debilitated us, how we experienced this loss. It was the ultimate writing assignment, and I felt like I was failing. I thought about the person who’d written the police report: how dispassionately he told the story of Jon’s death; how he asked all the right questions and noted the answers dutifully on his page. I was nothing compared with him. I was not that writer. That writer had the courage to face and report the facts. I could not face anything.

  I began to see the color red everywhere I looked. Not a hallucination but a reminder of Jon. I thought about how my mother had once told me that she decorated each of our bedrooms in colors that expressed our personalities. My room was blue. Andy’s was brown. Jon’s was red, red like the color of his hair, red like his bike. Red, I thought now, like his blood.

  I began keeping a journal in a red notebook, writing only with a red pen. I saw redheads walking the street. One night, with the hopes of distraction, I went to Brooklyn’s Prospect Park to see a performance of Spalding Gray, the monologist, but red followed me there. Spalding usually told his own stories, but on this night, he was going to take some selected audience members onstage and interview them about theirs.

  The first interviewee was a clean-cut guy in his thirties whom Spalding had chosen because he had seen the man eating a protein bar called Smart. Spalding was fascinated by this product’s name and assumed that it somehow made its consumer more interesting. It didn’t. The guy didn’t have much to say beyond his one- or two-word answers, and Spalding, and the audience, shifted in their seats. The next person was even less memorable, and Spalding seemed restless.

  Then he called his final interviewee on stage. With each person, the overhead lights shifted color, and this time they bathed the band shell in red. A small boy bounded onstage and took a chair opposite Spalding, who asked his age. “Eleven,” the boy replied—the age of my brother. Spalding asked him a few questions about life at his age, and all I could think of was Jon. This is what Jon was like. This age. This brain. This consciousness. And then Spalding asked him one last question: “What do you think happens when you die?” Whatever the boy’s answer was, I wouldn’t recall, but I would remember that when he gave it, everything was red.

  27

  PRIOR TO the hearing, Andy and I learned that despite the high-profile nature of this case, the state attorney’s office didn’t even know that Tillman was up for parole. When Andy spoke with the lawyer down there, the lawyer couldn’t believe the news and was disgusted that this had somehow fallen through the cracks. People began coming out of the woodwork and retirement to help us prepare: deputies, lawyers, a representative from the state attorney’s office.

  The media found out and reported with astonishment how Tillman could possibly be up for parole. Reporters tracked down my parents. Andy, too. The spotlight was back on and, with it, our irrational fear. To protect our privacy, Andy and I wore hats low down over our faces when we got off the plane in Orlando, Florida.

  But we were not in this alone. The police and investigators were right there by our side. They, too, were caught by surprise that Tillman was even eligible for release. At our hotel the night before the hearing, Andy and I met with Captain James Walker, a compassionate older man who’d worked with Sheriff’s Major Walter Heinrich on the investigation following Jon’s murder. “Heinrich called me into his office,” Walker recalled later, “and said he wanted me to go over and represent him, and I said, ‘It’s been a long time; I’m going to need to get the reports.’ He said, ‘Go get them all.’ ”

  He told us that Jon’s murder was the most horrible case he and his colleagues worked on in the history of their department. They had never been involved with anything so brutal. “Was there anything else you wanted to know?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. I told him how I remembered, as a kid, giving a deposition to a cop about what Jon was wearing and how I had asked him to go to the store to get me the candy. I told him how my father insisted years later that that wasn’t the case; that he was the last to have seen him. Walker’s eyes looked sympathetically at mine. “No,” he said, “you’re right.” I had given a deposition that week, he recalled, in which I described standing with Jon on the sidewalk before he rode off into the woods.

  My mind reeled, and the next question came without my even thinking about it. “What about the candy?” I asked. “We heard that they found it in Witt’s trailer.”

  “Yes,” he said, “Witt had given it to his son.”

  It took a few moments for this to sink in. I had been on the sidewalk. I had had that conversation with Jon. He had gotten me the candy. Witt had killed him and taken it. And given it to his son? He had a son? He gave my brother’s candy to him? The candy of the boy he had just killed?

  It was too much, too real, too terrible. At once, I felt connected and disconnected, heartened by the fact that my memory had not been a lie, but disgusted at the new knowledge I had obtained. I was angry. Furious. Vengeful. I was so caught up in my emotions that I barely heard the deputy when he said he had a question for us. He wanted to know how dramatic we wanted him to be at the parole hearing the next day. Plenty, we said; we wanted to do whatever we could to keep this guy in prison. The deputy reached into a gym bag and pulled out a large, heavy metal rod—the exact kind of drill bit that Tillman had used to strike my brother. He said that, during his statement, he could take out the drill bit and crash it on the table to show the parole board what Jon had endured. We told him to go for it.

  Andy and I returned to our hotel room and stayed up late talking about what we had learned, going over our speeches for the next day. At one point, the room was dark and Andy was sleeping, but I still felt awake. I looked over and saw the closet door open, and the blur of two people running inside it: Jon and Tillman. I couldn’t move, couldn’t scream, could only feel some invisible force pulling at my feet, the blanket peeling off of me as I floated off the bed toward the darkness of the closet, midair, shutting my eyes. When I opened my eyes, I realized I had been dreaming. The closet door was shut. The darkness was gone.

  The next morning, we woke to newspaper headlines about the hearing. The hearing had brought back the coverage, and memories for those who had worked on the case. “The way some longtime residents remember it,” wrote the St. Petersburg Times, “the murder of 11-year-old Jonathan Kushner was when Tampa seemed to lose its small-town innocence.” Heinrich, now retired, told the reporter, “We’ve had some other major cases, but I think in this particular case the emotions of the community were unbelievable.” He went on, “I guess I’ve seen so much of it over the years. But I think I got caught up in the emotion of this one. There’s only a few cases where that happened to me. He was so innocent, you know?”

  The room of the parole hearing was packed. A camera crew was set up with lights. It was hard enough for Andy and me to have to make our statements at all, let alone while being filmed for the evening news. I asked a reporter if he could please not film us. He said his boss wouldn’t let him get away with that. But maybe he could just shoot us from behind, showing only the backs of our heads.

  We listened to the testimony of Tillman’s mother and brother. They didn’t have much to say beyond that Tillman was working hard on his studies, and they hoped the parole commission would let him out. Their attorney followed by recounting all the rehabilitation programs that Tillman had been involved with, how he had gotten good grades in prison classes. He was leading a Bible study group. He was studying to get some kind of degree and had gotten good grades.

  Prior to the hearing, Andy had discussed the order of our presentations with Walker, so that we would have maximum impact. It was decided that Walker would go first, mapping out the crime and the case against Tillman, followed by Andy, t
hen me, and, finally, the prosecutor. Walker stood beside us and addressed the court, calling the case “the most brutal and sadistic homicide of a child that I have ever been assigned to.” He recounted the abduction, the attack. When he got to the part about the drill bit they had hit Jon with, he held up the long metal rod as the room looked on in horror—and then he slammed it on the table for emphasis. He also noted that, months after incarceration, he was transporting Tillman along with a lieutenant when the prisoner told him he had a list of people he wanted to kill, including the assistant state attorney at the time, a detective on the case, a chaplain, his attorney, and a sergeant in the jail. “Eleven-year-old, eighty-five-pound Jonathan Kushner didn’t get a chance at life because of Gary Tillman’s brutal and sadistic acts,” Walker concluded, saying that Tillman should never be released.

  I watched Andy next, leaning forward toward the microphone on the table as he held his speech in his hands. Andy and I had always been best friends, and going through this experience together had brought us even closer. Our experiences with Jon’s murder were so different—given our own personalities and our difference in ages at the time of his death—but we were united in our grief, and anger.

  “For over ten years, I completely shut down and barely talked about it with anyone, including my own parents,” he said. “It was terrible going through my biggest growing years holding down, pushing down, such a deep, dark, horrible secret. Although I have since gotten lots of help, I am scarred for life. To this day, I struggle with many complicated issues. I hate knowing, with every fiber of my being, that the worst possible nightmare really can come true at any moment for me or any of the people I love.

  “One of my favorite moments, though, is at night when my own child sits on my lap in a rocking chair with a little white stuffed dog, and together we listen and sing to a couple of songs. And then we give each other a big hug, a kiss, and I tuck them into bed. I look into my child’s sweet, innocent eyes, and almost every time, a shudder goes tearing through me. How will I ever bear to let my children out into a world that I know can and has been so horrible and dangerous, where someone like Tillman can be waiting? What am I going to do when it’s their turn to have a bike and ride it on their own?

  “. . . Jon never got to be tucked in bed again or hugged and kissed. I don’t get to watch with pride as he grows up. I don’t get to have our relationship continue to build like it has between my other brother and me. Every holiday picture on my walls, since 1973, is missing a brother, someone’s uncle, cousin, son, friend. I struggle to remember my little brother, Jon, in some of the sweet ways I described earlier, but it is so hard, because what I mostly see, in my mind, is him struggling helplessly against two strong grown men and being murdered and mutilated. I was only thirteen at the time, and for twenty-four years, I have suffered intensely and will continue to suffer for the rest of my life, as will my parents and brother and many close people around me.

  “I cannot bear the thought that Tillman, this man who intentionally brutally murdered and horribly mutilated my little, barely eleven-year-old, brother might someday be released and allowed to live out a normal life with you, me, and the rest of society.”

  Then it came to me. I had been through several drafts of a statement. Though Andy and I had been advised by a psychologist to speak about our own suffering—as a way to personalize our case and create more emotional impact—I felt uncomfortable drawing attention to myself this way. But I also wanted to do whatever I could to keep Tillman from being paroled. Underneath the table and away from view, I held Jon’s lucky red rabbit foot in my hand.

  “I’d like to show you a picture from 1970,” I began. I passed an old black-and-white photo up to the parole board. It was a picture of Jon, Andy, and me sitting in front of our family fireplace. I was between them with a huge smile on my face, my arms around each of them, pulling them close while they—visibly annoyed at my uncool display of affection—tried to slip free. “On the left is my older brother, who’s here with me today,” I said through my tears. “I’m in the middle; on the right is Jon, my other older brother, my other best friend.

  “Jon was extraordinarily playful and loving. He was a dream to me, taking me under his wing, inventing new games every day. He loved going to camp. He was creative and did hilarious Donald Duck impressions. He worked hard to overcome a learning disability and was making great progress. He loved riding his bike. On his eleventh birthday, he got a big new green bike from my parents. Six weeks later, for a reason we’ll never know, he took his old red bike for one last ride into the woods to get me and him our favorite candies at 7-Eleven.

  “Although I am sincerely grateful for the opportunity to speak here today, I am physically sickened by this experience. It disgusts me that I or anyone should have to explain why this savage who murdered and sexually mutilated my sweet, helpless brother should not be granted parole.

  “Everyone who has been touched by this tragedy—the community, the law enforcers, the investigators, the friends and family—has suffered. It is impossible to express the depth of pain and loss my family and I have experienced. I suffer because of the terrifying week we had to endure while Jon was missing, because of the horror of how his body was desecrated after he died—and the fact that these sadists had intended to torture him while he was alive. I suffer from the vulnerability of walking around like an open wound, from fear, often irrational, for myself and my loved ones. Most of all, I suffer every day because I am without Jon. I cannot watch him grow up. I cannot share my life. I miss him.

  “Though I know I will never hold my brother again, I have had some peace of mind knowing that one of his murderers has been executed and the other is spending his life in prison. I never imagined that Gary Tillman could actually be considered for parole. I appreciate and respect your roles as commissioners, but I also appeal to you as brothers, sisters, children, and parents. Would you want your child riding a bike while this murderer takes a stroll through the park? No one should have to suffer even a moment of fear as a result of this hearing. Twenty-four years ago, the sanctity of the people of Tampa was shattered by this case; they will surely know if that happens again this morning.

  “As you are aware, if Tillman were to commit the same crime today, he would not even be eligible for parole. Florida now has a law that, thankfully, protects us. The only reason we are here is because he beat the clock when he staked out, attacked, murdered, and sexually mutilated an eleven-year-old boy. For the sake of society, my family, and my dead brother, Gary Tillman should not benefit from his good timing. He does not deserve one day of freedom for the lifetime he brutally denied Jon.”

  Finally, the representative from the state’s attorney’s office spoke last—and summed up the case against Tillman. When he recapped what the defense had said about Tillman’s various accomplishments in prison, he concluded by saying, in a booming voice, “So what?!”

  It was in the hands of the commission now. Everyone sat silently, looking up at them when Commissioner Maurice Crockett, a middle-aged African American man, removed his glasses, bowed his head, and wiped his eyes. “This has probably been the most difficult case for me to deal with emotionally,” he said, looking at Andy and me. “My heart goes out to you.”

  It was time to set Tillman’s release date. With their microphones off, the parole board broke into a discussion. I had no idea what they were talking about; it sounded like legalese. After a few eternal minutes, I could hear them adding up numbers—years, I gathered—that they were tacking onto Tillman’s sentence. The numbers were coming at random—three, two, one, four; I couldn’t keep track—until finally the state attorney leaned over and whispered, “He’s never getting out.”

  “We’re going to need a calculator,” Crocket said finally. They began adding up the years. Years for the brutality and heinousness of the crime. Years for the rape and sexual mutilation. Years for trying to hide the crime by burying Jon in the orange grove. Finally, the parole board announced its v
erdict: Tillman was sentenced to another 102 years in prison, or to the year 2096. He would still be eligible for parole every five years, but those hearings—I was assured later—would be just a formality.

  After the hearing, various people came up to Andy and me and expressed their sympathy. They congratulated us for testifying and said how important it is for the families of victims to be present, to say something, to honor the memory of the departed. Someone has to speak for the dead. A huge cop with a crew cut came up to me with tears in his eyes and said that he, too, has to go to parole hearings to speak for his murdered brother. It knocked me out: to connect with this guy at this moment in this place, to connect with all these people around me who rallied together on my brother’s behalf, just as the people of Tampa had joined hands to search the woods by the 7-Eleven.

  Outside the courtroom, we called our parents and told them the news. I don’t remember what was said, other than sharing a tremendous sense of relief among the four of us. But for me, the story wasn’t done. I wanted more. More connection. More details. There was still so much I didn’t know. The rest of the story. I wanted to know everything I had never known before: I wanted to know more about my brother’s killers. Why had they done this? How exactly did they get caught? What really happened during that week when Jon was missing? How did the community face the ultimate nightmare? How did my parents survive? I also wanted to know something that I had always been too overwhelmed to find out: Who was Jon when he was alive?

  I wanted the reality to be more real, more complete, convinced that the more I knew, the more complete I would feel too, and the more I would be connected with my family—with Jon. Maybe this was some fundamental nature of life; something that applied to everyone. Maybe we can’t feel complete until we know enough to tell our stories. But learning our stories isn’t something we can do alone.