Alligator Candy

by David Kushner

  John Wing, Parks’s son, told me of the time he fell from a tree at IDS, and how Jon was the only kid who stayed around to make sure he was all right. “He said, ‘You’re okay, just breathe deep,’ ” Wing recalled. “ ‘You just got the wind knocked out of you.’ That was what I remember about Jonathan . . . I thought about that a lot when he was missing; that was the image that I held on to and to this day.”

  I found Jon’s old friends Doug Chisholm and Paul Siddall. They were men now, weathered and aged, but still had sparks of precociousness as they recalled their childhoods with my brother. “Back then parents would say, ‘Get out of the house,’ and we’d be gone for two or three hours,” Chisholm told me. “There was no restrictions,” Siddall added. “You had no worries.” Even the one alligator rumored to be in the lake, Big George, wasn’t a threat. Neither was the trail to the store. “We used to sneak off to go to 7-Eleven,” Siddall went on. “We’d go under the bridge and straight down the trail.” They’d sneak off during physical education class to go there from school too. “If we wanted to and we weren’t supervised we’d go to 7-Eleven and get candy,” he said. “By the 7-Eleven, people would dump things,” Chisholm said, “like mattresses in the woods.”

  Parents knew their kids went into the woods, and mine were no different. They didn’t worry about abductions. “There was no sense of fear at all,” my mother recalled. We had gone through all the albums—the photos of Jon and me playing; of Andy and Jon and me in front of the fireplace; of Jon with the faraway look in his eyes at Andy’s bar mitzvah in his wide-collared suit.

  I always felt a weird sense of an impending storm as we progressed through the pages, as the year 1973 approached. The closer we got to that time, the more I began to read into the expressions on Jon’s face, the look in his eyes, the slackened jaw, the rest of us smiling. My mother saw this too. Perhaps we were reading into everything. Maybe it was just our brains seeking to make sense of what was coming. But we both had the feeling that it was almost as if Jon himself knew that his days were numbered.

  The photo album from 1973 went up through the summer, when Jon flew alone to visit his grandparents in Minneapolis. There are photos he shot of the clouds below. Then the photo album stops, and the rest of the pages are blank.

  34

  ON ANOTHER afternoon in Tampa, I went to the library downtown to look at the microfilm from 1973. The last time I had done that was in junior high, when I spent a week at lunch looking over the articles, trying to piece together the story that I was afraid to discuss at home. As I sat at the microfilm machine now, I felt a different sense of urgency. I wasn’t just there reading the stories about the search for Jon and the subsequent case. I was looking at everything—the ads, the football scores, the comics—soaking up the information in an effort to put myself back into the moment, to re-create the times.

  Once again, my brain began seeing strange patterns, began making connections in a way that felt almost improper or egocentric. I was not one to think that things were meant to be, that the universe somehow aligned its exterior world to reflect the experiences of individuals. The rain that seemed to always fall on two lovers in a sad scene was just movie rain. And yet, when I looked at the Sunday Tampa Tribune that sat on our kitchen table the morning Jon disappeared, I was struck by what I saw.

  An article headlined “What Are Our Children Missing?” opened with a quote from a local art teacher and mother of two. “Children today have been shortchanged,” she told the reporter. “When I was young, we could wander in the woods, we could breathe and run free.”

  She and other parents didn’t think that life in the early seventies was as adventurous as it seemed. Kids were getting overscheduled, they believed, confined by a regimen of after-school activities that was curtailing their independence and exploration. Children were watching too much television and doing drugs when they should have been adventuring outside, parents lamented. To drive home this point, the article was accompanied by an illustration of a happy, barefoot boy in a straw hat fishing with a line on a broken stick. What kids were missing, the picture implied, was this: wandering in the woods, breathing, and running free.

  When parents pine for the good old days, they often pine for the same thing: the days when kids would be playing out in the woods. What was so compelling about this in the first place? Perhaps it was just an extension of the country’s pioneering spirit. Kids, boys in particular, seemed expected to be outside with a pocketknife and a fishing pole, fending for themselves in the woods in preparation for their hunting and gathering to come as men.

  Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn roamed the woods along the Mississippi River. So did the kids of the fictional town of Mayberry, North Carolina, on The Andy Griffith Show. The woods promised adventure and discovery. Jim Hawkins sailed off to Treasure Island in Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 adventure novel. The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew solved crimes in the thickets. The woods held mystery and possibility, secret caves and forts, tree houses and buried fortunes, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. Maybe most important, the woods were where kids could get away from adults.

  But as much as kids were encouraged to venture into the woods, parents had their concerns. Fables and fairy tales warned what could happen to wandering kids in enchanted forests. Little Red Riding Hood met the murderous talking wolf; Hansel and Gretel, the child-eating hag. In the Tampa Tribune article, parents said that their kids’ imaginations were starting to run wild from all the violence on TV. “You should trust your children, and I trust mine,” said one parent, “but I’m afraid of what other people might do to them.”

  The kids who flipped to the comics page in the Tribune that morning found strips that, coincidentally, played on these fantasies and fears. In Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, Lukey warned Loweezy of trouble in the trees. A “mean ol’ wild boar is out yonder in them, an’ he’s on th’ rampage!!” Lukey said. Just below that strip, Archie was telling his dad how he and Jughead found a secret cave in the woods hidden behind bushes by the river. Hearing that the cave was covered in mysterious writings, Archie’s dad rejoiced, telling the boys that his paleographic society had spent months searching for “the lost cave tribes,” and this must be it. The punch line came when his dad ventured into the cave—only to see that the ancient writing was modern-day spelunker graffiti.

  Jon, an Archie fanatic who collected Archie comic books, may have read that strip that morning. And if he did, perhaps his mind might have filled with images of the caves that were supposedly hidden in the woods across from our house. The fact that no one had actually found any caves didn’t seem to matter, nor did the specter of wild animals in those woods—not boars, but pygmy snakes and water moccasins. The fact was, the majority of parents where we lived, despite what the article said, didn’t keep their kids from wandering in the woods at all. Kids were trusted and unleashed, set loose to disappear on their bikes, to breathe and ride free.

  That’s exactly what Jon intended to do that day. When I spoke with Andy and my mother about that morning, they both recalled it with their own filters of guilt. Andy was still haunted by what would have happened had he not skipped the ride to the synagogue and need Mom to take him. “I had guilt that if I hadn’t done that, she wouldn’t have gone, and he wouldn’t have gone,” Andy recalled. “We’re looking for a sense of control.”

  “And blame,” my mother said.

  “We’re trying to bring control—even in a negative, blaming way—to a situation that was out of control.”

  “And if you had been home,” my mother told Andy, “maybe you would have gone with him. There are a lot of what-ifs about what could have happened.”

  “The ifs are literally infinite,” Andy said. “It’s so random.”

  “We all live with it,” she said

  But there was more to the story that neither of them could tell me, the parts that I, for reasons unique to me, needed to know: the story of Jon’s killers, how the community came together, the sto
ry of everything. And, after many months of research, reading the court documents, and tracking down family friends, the police, and volunteers, the missing pages I’d been seeking my entire life finally appeared.

  35

  THE PROBLEMS with Johnny Paul Witt began at the start. Born on January 13, 1943, he grew up a troubled boy. His father, John H. Witt, thought his son showed signs of mental and emotional problems by the age of seven, often “nervous, disturbed, and confused.” The boy was placed under psychiatric care. Witt’s alcoholic father, however, was part of the problem. According to Johnny’s wife, Donna, Witt Senior would tell the boy that “he was no good and would never amount to anything.”

  Witt’s difficulties grew worse when, around age eighteen, he had a head injury during a car crash. Following this accident, his father thought that his son was even more challenging to control. Witt later entered the US Marines, where he was a private first class. But his troubles continued. As a psychiatrist determined later, Witt suffered from “emotional instability reaction, chronic severe; manifested by history of unstable family background and home environment (alcoholic father), difficulties in adapting to figures of authority and school, chronic headaches and feelings of tension and anxiety, and recent impulsive antisocial behavior; predisposition, lifelong history of emotional instability under minimal stress; precipitating stress, routine stress of military duty at the present time.” Witt was ultimately deemed unfit for duty and discharged from the marines.

  Witt’s complications followed him into his marriage at the age of twenty-one to Donna, a woman one year younger who had a two-year-old boy, Troy, from a previous marriage. Donna was prone to depression and felt ignored by Witt. She often wanted to go out, but he wouldn’t take her. One night he went to a movie by himself, and she was so upset that she overdosed on aspirin. After having her stomach pumped, Witt had her committed to a mental institution for a few days, a move, she thought, that was done simply to get rid of her—especially when the hospital doctors told her she was fine. “It seemed to me like he wanted me out of the way,” she told the police later.

  Donna had reason to believe this. She discovered that while she was in the hospital, Witt had been out with her best friend. One night, coming home from a bar with him, Donna confronted him about her jealousy. Witt, who’d been drinking, began choking her. He was now five foot eleven, 155 pounds, with brown hair and blue eyes. Witt grabbed her hands and began squeezing them until they bled. Another time, he got so angry that he drove his fist through the headboard, breaking his thumb.

  Witt soon got into the refrigerator repair business with his father, but the pressure of working together often got the better of him. Witt became prone to outbursts around his house, tossing over the kitchen table, and throwing plates and food around the room. Witt would storm out of the house, only to return and claim that he didn’t remember his rampage. When Donna, who worked for an answering service, suffered a miscarriage, Witt became even more despondent, as medical bills piled up.

  The stress grew worse when Troy, then seven, and another young boy were walking down a sidewalk when Troy darted across the street suddenly and was struck by a car. He was thrown seventy feet before coming to a rest. His shoes were knocked off his feet. The injury was so severe it left him brain damaged with a metal plate in his head. Donna had to quit her job to care for him while he spent several months learning to walk and talk again. I was shocked to read that Troy’s accident occurred on October 28, 1971, two years to the day before he and Tillman killed my brother. There was never any indication as to whether this was a motivation for Witt that day, but either way, it filled me with a sense of fear and foreboding.

  Witt, who had often spanked his stepson in the past, didn’t change his behavior after the accident, according to Donna. One day, Witt came home and told the boy not to wake him if his boss called, then went to sleep. But Troy woke him anyway when the phone rang, and Witt’s employer was on the line. Witt grabbed the boy angrily, and, when Donna found out afterward, she berated him. If the metal plate moved in Troy’s head, she said, it could kill him. Witt stopped spanking Troy then, but he soon found someone who shared his temperament: Gary Tillman.

  With a father who spent two decades in the army and air force, Tillman, as I read in articles and court documents, grew up on the move, shuttling between military bases across the South. Often the new kid in town, Tillman became known as a loner who dreamed of living on a mountaintop as a forest ranger. By ninth grade, his parents noticed that there was something amiss in their son, who “would say things that would maybe not sound right,” as his father recalled. “There were other things that just didn’t add up to normal thinking.” Friends said he had a “keen interest” in poisons, gasses, torture, and other people’s suffering.

  Tillman was failing classes, lashing out at his father for being too strict, and claiming that he was, as a psychologist noted later, “the king of a secret society.” After a childhood friend died, he would regularly march into the woods to play trumpet in tribute to her. In 1971 seventeen-year-old Tillman was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and briefly institutionalized—until he ran away from the facility. The family continued with outpatient treatment and, later that year, moved to Tampa, where Tillman’s father had taken a job as an airline pilot. After graduating high school, Tillman took a menial job at a local shrimp processing plant, where his supervisor found him a slow learner who “seemed uneasy in trying to carry on any other type of conversation” than talking about his favorite hobby: archery.

  Tillman soon found someone who shared his passion: Witt, whom he called J.J. They met in 1973 at Tampa Technical Institute, where Tillman was studying drafting and Witt was pursuing electronics. Known around the school as a quiet pair of poor students, the two became friends, and began going hunting together using bow and arrows. Witt enjoyed archery, joining the Gasparilla Bowman’s club on a ranch. He went there for tournaments, and began collecting a variety of arrows around the house. They never came home with any game, though. As far as his wife knew, the only thing he shot was an armadillo. The owner of another archery shop frequented by Witt and Tillman told police later that Witt’s “hands seemed to be dirty all the time.”

  One day, Tillman called the Witts and told Donna that his parents were throwing him out of the house. Tillman had left a note on his pillow that morning for his mom and dad. “Since I was asked to leave, I have,” he wrote. “You can probably guess where I’m at.” Tillman took his calico cat Tiny and began sleeping on the couch at Witt’s trailer in Thonotosassa, a rural area north of Tampa.

  It didn’t take long for Donna, who was now working as a lab technician at Tampa General Hospital, to notice that her husband’s young friend displayed odd outbursts. One day Troy accidentally knocked down a model airplane, and a little piece broke off. When Tillman saw this, he picked up the plane and began tearing it into shreds. “Give it to me!” the boy pleaded.

  “Any time something of mine is torn up,” Tillman said, “I just tear it up.” He had done the same thing when the cat knocked over a model car and broke off a wheel. Yet another time, when Donna moved one of Tillman’s arrows to a corner, the feather accidentally got mashed down. Tillman picked up the arrow and snapped it in half. He became even more despondent when his cat Tiny was stolen out of his car one day.

  Witt was still acting out too. Donna had a black cat that always greeted her at the front door when she came home. One day before going to work, the cat had been jumping at their pet bird, which had flown out of its cage. When Donna came home that day, her cat wasn’t there to greet her. Donna began searching around the house, with the help of her son, to no avail. She saw that Witt had left a big foam target in the kitchen, which he had been shooting with his bow and arrows. Donna had a bad feeling and called her husband at work. “John,” she said, “where’s my cat?”

  “I’m sorry, baby,” he replied.

  “What did you do? Kill it?”

  “Yeah.” He tol
d her he’d choked the animal and then shot it with an arrow. Donna could still see the bloodstain on the carpet.

  Witt seemed to be growing more indifferent to her recently. The couple had gone from having sex almost daily to nothing at all for the past month. Donna didn’t know what to make of it. Witt was increasingly introverted and preoccupied. Unbeknown to Donna, Witt and Tillman had hatched a plan: to go, as Tillman put it later, “people hunting.” According to the police, “Their prey were human beings.”

  Witt had killed before, Tillman claimed later, though there was never any evidence to support this. Tillman said Witt had told him that he had killed a man and buried him on a construction site that was later paved over. Witt recalled how the pavement buckled up because of the bloated corpse and needed to be steamrolled back down.

  The two drove around town, picking up female hitchhikers—one of whom dove out the window at a red light when she had grown scared. They began heading out to different locations around town, forgetting which they’d been to before, but never found a good victim or didn’t have the right opportunity. In mid-October Witt drove to the patch of woods near a 7-Eleven, which was across the way from an archery range they frequented. As he waited in the woods, he saw a young girl playing alone. Witt later told police that he “ran a little girl away from the area I was in; I told her she might get hurt, to leave.” Perhaps he feared what he might do to her.

  But he returned with Tillman later and told him he thought it looked like “a good spot to hunt.” Shortly after, the two came back to the location, as Tillman recalled later, and parked their car while waiting for a girl to come through the woods. That day, however, they failed to find a girl by herself and, after four hours of frustration, gave up and left. The next week, the week before Jon disappeared, they returned to the 7-Eleven again in Gary’s car. “They were stalking for young girls,” the police report read, “and again they were disappointed after not being able to have a good opportunity taking one.”