Alligator Candy

by David Kushner

  “Let’s forget about it,” he said. “It’s old business.” Then he rolled over and went to sleep, as Donna lay awake the rest of the night, pondering what to do. The next morning, she fixed Witt breakfast as usual and told him she had errands to run: take Troy to school and then stop at the bank. “I’ll be gone for quite a while this morning,” she said.

  Witt didn’t make anything of it and went off to work. As soon as he left, Donna left her boy in the kitchen with breakfast and went outside. Popping open her trunk, she took out the raft and dragged it into her bedroom, shutting the door behind her. Donna began looking for spots of blood, taking a wash rag and rubbing off a few stains to see if they were red. Then she went into Tillman’s things and began searching for the patch. Troy came up behind her. “What are you looking in there for?” he asked.

  41

  BY NOVEMBER 5, now eight days after Jon vanished, we were losing hope. The organized search of the area, after extending so far from where Jon could have been, was called off. The investigation continued, but we were on the verge of becoming another statistic, another family who would have to bear the unbearable possibility of having no resolution at all—a fate perhaps even more difficult than finding that a child had been killed. Without answers, one can imagine anything, and that is a hell all its own.

  At one point, my parents agreed to let the psychic come to the house, despite their skepticism. “I said ‘Fine,’ and I talked to her,” my mother recalled, “and it was like anybody come in. ‘You got a Seeing Eye dog, bring him in!’ Anything.” The psychic said she thought Jon had been taken by four men as vengeance for some kind of drug deal. When she said she sensed hope, my brother greeted the news not just with skepticism but also fury. “I was feeling hopeless and angry,” he recalled.

  In Jon’s room, my father drew the blinds shut, something we rarely did during the day. My mother, still trying to cling to hope, reacted with dismay. “When your dad would do that, I would never want him to do that,” she recalled. “I would want him to open blinds and not be a house of mourning.” But we were running out of light. On the evening of November 4, my father went on the local news to plead for information. Maybe someone would finally step forward.

  The next morning, Deputy Walker was at the Hillsborough Sheriff’s Department when a woman called saying she had information on the Kushner boy. After a week of fruitless leads, he wasn’t optimistic. But when he saw the expression on the cop who was fielding the call, he knew this one was different. “I remember sitting and seeing the intensity on his face,” Walker recalled. “I knew it was important.”

  The woman said that her husband had made a drunken confession about killing the missing boy, and that there was evidence in her trailer: candy and a Camp Keystone patch. To aid the investigation, the police had refrained from releasing certain details about the case—such as what Jon had bought at the 7-Eleven and the patch on his shorts. This way, if a caller mentioned these items, they would know the call was legit.

  “I just got to find out two things,” the woman went on. “About the candy, because he had emphasized that’s where the candy came from. The type. I knew what type I ate, and that’s why I called. I wanted to know about it. And I wanted to know about the patch because he said it belonged to the little boy.” The more she spoke, however, the more nervous she seemed to become. The cops, who couldn’t trace the call, feared she might panic and hang up, and they struggled to ascertain her location.

  “Where you at?” the cop on the phone asked.

  She told him an intersection in West Tampa, and the cops sped on their way. When they arrived, however, she was gone—along with their first, and only, tangible lead all week. They feared the worst as they searched the area to no avail, and began driving away. But as they went down the road, they noticed a car broken down on the side of the street. When they pulled over to help the person, they realized it was their caller. Her name was Donna Witt. “Just to show you how the Lord works,” the cop later recalled “she tried to leave, but she had a flat tire. Had she been gone, we might not have ever solved that one.”

  That afternoon, Sheriff’s Major Heinrich told Stan Rosenberg he had a run to make, and asked if he’d like to tag along. “Sure,” Stan replied, always eager to learn more about policing. “I’m enjoying riding with you.” The two had become unlikely friends over the week, and Heinrich showed his appreciation by letting Stan call him by his first name. At one point, Heinrich had walked up to Stan and squeezed his arm. “Ah, you’ll do fine,” he said and then walked away. “I didn’t know what he was talking about,” Stan recalled. But he found out in the weeks to come. After our case, Heinrich offered Stan the opportunity he’d long wanted: to become a cop and come work for him. With his wife’s blessing, Stan accepted. As they rode off in Heinrich’s police car on November 5, Stan asked about the destination. “Where we going?”

  “Well,” Heinrich replied, “I think we got one of the guys.”

  They arrived at the Shady Grove Mobile Home Park in Thonotosassa, and walked inside a beige trailer with brown trim and a TV antenna on top. Tearfully, Donna Witt told them everything she knew, and the police knew they had found their men. They seized evidence: two stains scraped from the trunk of the Plymouth, one stain cut from the trunk mat; one rusted bowie knife; one long drill bit; forty-six arrows, four bows, one crossbow; a book, Engineering Drawing and Design, with the Camp Keystone patch between pages eight and nine; a two-man yellow and blue raft; and two Snappy Gators, one red, one blue.

  At two thirty, police cars pulled up to the Singleton Shrimp Company in Tampa, where they found Gary Tillman in the employees’ locker room and arrested him. At three thirty, Heinrich, two other police officers—Lieutenant Arnie Myers and Roebuck—as well as members of the FBI, and Rosenberg pulled up to the Burger Chef fast-food restaurant, where they had been told Witt was working. Roebuck climbed a ladder in the back and spotted the suspect working on an air-conditioning unit on the roof. Witt, seeing the officer with a gun at his side, stood quickly and raised his pipe wrench over his head.

  Roebuck told him to drop the tool, but Witt still held it, looking around nervously. Again Roebuck told him to drop it, but to no avail. Heinrich, who had climbed up to the roof as well, then ordered Witt to drop the wrench or he could get hurt. Finally, Witt complied, and as soon as they got him down the ladder, he was cuffed and advised of his constitutional rights. “That was the first time in my career that I wanted to pull my gun and kill somebody,” Heinrich told Stan later.

  When Walker heard of the arrests, he knew that all their hard work, all the media attention, and the actions of the community had helped to wear down Witt and, ultimately, his wife. What seemed like “an impossible” task, as he put it, was not insurmountable after all. “His wife saw that it wasn’t going to go away,” Walker recalled. “We were going to keep the intensity, and no matter how insignificant the lead was . . . that had a lot to with her coming forward.”

  After Tillman led the cops to the crime scene, the case against him and Witt moved quickly. Now in custody, Witt asked the lieutenant to tell his wife he loved her, then he sat down to write his confession. He ran out of paper and asked for more so that he could continue. He asked how to spell definite, and decision, and bicycle. Finally, he set down his pen and began to cry. “Why didn’t the boy wait ten minutes?” he said. “I was getting ready to go home.”

  The cops asked Witt if he and Tillman had planned to kill someone that day. Witt said they had planned to do this, but, as the police report explained, “not anyone in particular, as they were just hunting and that when rabbit hunting, you don’t pick a certain rabbit to kill, but rather take what comes along.” Later he asked to talk with the jail chaplain, who came in and offered to share a prayer. “I don’t believe I’m worthy of a prayer because of what we did,” Witt said.

  “Let the Lord be your judge,” the chaplain replied.

  Tillman, for his part, put the blame on Witt. “I do what John tells
me,” he told the police, “because he is a friend; he will not tell me to do anything that is wrong.”

  Witt and Tillman were soon taken to the Hillsborough courthouse for their hearing. Heinrich dispatched a decoy car there, to divert the throng of reporters and onlookers who had gathered for the hearing. But with the case having received so much attention, a crowd of sixty people gathered outside to leer and jeer. Heinrich led Witt, who was dressed in his white short-sleeve air-conditioning-company shirt, from the car. Witt shuffled inside in his shackles, sullen and pallid. Tillman, dressed in a long-sleeve Yamaha motorcycle shirt, was led in behind him, as the police warded off the crowd.

  “Hanging is too good!” shouted one man.

  “Dirty creep!” a woman yelled. “They ought to shoot ya!”

  Inside, after a five-hour hearing in which the two pled not guilty, a Hillsborough grand jury indicted Witt and Tillman for the murder of my brother. The court clerk burst into tears while she was reading the indictment and had to have the circuit judge continue for her. An FBI agent was seen later at a church pew, pale and forlorn, his eyes welling. “You just won’t believe it when you hear the whole story,” he told a reporter. “It’s incredible.”

  Witt and Tillman were tried separately. After being interviewed by psychiatrists, Witt was found to have a “long-standing personality disorder” including “extreme sexual perversion,” but was not deemed insane. Psychiatrists found, however, that he had, according to court documents, “an incurable propensity to commit future violent crimes,” and that he was a “menace to society” and “a sexual pervert.”

  During Witt’s trial in February 1974, his attorney tried to pin the murder on Tillman, who had struck and gagged my brother. “My client is guilty of sexual perversion,” he conceded. “It’s shocking. It’s gruesome. It’s filthy. It’s abominable. I shudder at the thought when I think of my three boys. I’m not asking you to forget it. I’m asking you to remember when the boy died and to try and show intent in relation to these events. It has nothing to do with if Johnny Paul Witt intended to kill this boy . . . you don’t get electrocuted for sexual perversion, and you can’t kidnap a dead person.”

  But the assistant state attorney who handled the prosecution wasn’t having any of it. “He [Witt] knew that whoever was coming down that path was a dead man,” he said. “He knew that from the beginning. I will submit it was a partnership with one common plan: to kill Jonathan Kushner. Afterward there was a constant intent to conceal a crime, a very good plan, and not a man who was panicked.”

  A twelve-member jury deliberated for two and a half hours before coming back with a verdict for Witt: guilty of first-degree murder. When a psychiatrist who had interviewed Witt was asked if Witt had shown remorse after the crime, he replied: “He said the only mistake they made was getting a kid whose old man was famous.” Sitting in the courtroom was Donna Witt. Though she had been the one to turn in her husband, something that our family appreciated deeply, there was never any contact between us. She sobbed as the verdict came in. The next day, Witt was sentenced to die in the electric chair.

  Three months later, Tillman pled guilty for his role in the murder, enabling him to receive life in prison instead of the electric chair. In the weeks leading up to his trial, Tillman had been ingesting metal in his cell, perhaps to act more insane or even to commit suicide—it was unclear. At one point, on the way back to jail from court, Tillman told the deputies that, as they reported later, “numerous persons should be very concerned if he [Tillman] ever escaped, as he would seek revenge.” The people on his list included members of law enforcement, as well as his parents and sister. “Tillman stated that he would start revenge at the bottom of the list so that the people on the top would worry more,” the report concluded.

  Given his schizophrenia, there had been much deliberation behind the scenes among the prosecutors and friends of our family about this. People feared that pursuing the death penalty for Tillman could result in an insanity plea, one that could, ultimately, see him being released from a mental institution and back on the streets at some point. “The decision to accept a sentence of life imprisonment rather than risk his early release from a mental institution has been reached with a deep sense of public responsibility for the safety and security of the people of this state,” the Hillsborough County state attorney said.

  Later, when the cops asked Tillman why he did it, he said, “I didn’t have anything better to do.” He said his intention the whole day was pleasing Witt. “The only thing I was interested in was keeping him happy,” he said. When they asked him why he cut the patch from Jon’s shorts, he said, “Nobody should ever throw away a patch like that; they are too hard to get.”

  Tillman’s family was struggling to make sense of what he had done, and discussed approaching my family—something they never got the strength to do. “How do you go up and knock on a man’s door and say, ‘I’d like to talk to you for a moment and apologize for my son being one of the accused murderers of your son?’ ” Tillman’s father, Lige, told a reporter. “I think that they know—I hope to God they do—how sorry we are about this. There’s nothing in the world we wouldn’t do to undo what has been done. There is no way to do it. I wish to God we could.”

  Long before the widespread fear over abductions spread around the country on cable and local news, Tampa, in the years following Jon’s murder, was reeling. “That was a seminal event in that ability of kids to simply get on their bikes and go,” recalled Dr. Ball. “All of us became more careful.”

  “You start telling your kids, ‘Don’t go down to the corner, don’t go down the street,’ ” Madelyn Rosenberg recalled. “You have this thought in your head: you can only play in our yard, you can’t go anywhere else.”

  IDS stopped letting kids go to the convenience store. It was a radical impact on the place that so exemplified and cultivated the freedom of the times. “It was such a safe and loving place,” recalled Parks, “these people were themselves innocents. In the middle of all this innocence, lurking just a hundred yards from this cocoon we all lived in, was this perversity. I mean, that was the end of innocence and the belief that if you associated with like people, and you were loving and you were nurturing of one another, that somehow you weren’t going to be touched by evil. And yet here was Jonathan, who was kind of the major symbol of that, living right at the edge of the campus itself, the most innocent among us. It was staggering.”

  The police department began a campaign to create safe houses for kids in trouble. They distributed blue stickers in the shape of hands that homeowners were to affix to their windows in case anyone was ever in trouble. But while Ball limited how far his own children could go after this tragedy, he already sensed that that fear was coming at a price. Despite the horror of what happened to our family, he knew, children were more likely to die from an accident inside the home than to get abducted and killed. “That’s where danger is,” he told me, “but that’s not where danger is in the minds of the parents. It’s sad for children because of that inability to get the proper distance from parents in order to feel ‘I can stand on my own two feet.’ ” He feared that, with the rush to schedule after-school activities rather than let kids roam, kids would suffer “the loss of that independent play.”

  Sometime after this, Ball penned my parents a letter. “I hope you’re doing well,” he wrote, “and Lord knows I don’t know day in and day out how you’re coming with this, but I will tell you that for the rest of my life there will never be an October that I don’t think of Jonathan.”

  42

  FOR YEARS, I had been tormented by what I didn’t know; my imagination had run wild. I struggled to reconcile the snippets of information I picked up from kids at school, from newspaper accounts, from my family’s occasional comments around the house. My brain had worked overtime, sometimes self-destructively, as it sought to provide the missing pieces, the empty pages, the scattered strips of film.

  Jon’s murderers had long
not even been real to me. They were faces from which I turned away, bogeymen who lurked in the bushes outside the sliding glass door. Learning their stories, their backgrounds, their plans, was something that, as painful as it was at times, settled some of my fears and worries. I could put faces to them now, hear their conversations. Perhaps I had never really wanted to look at the faces of evil, to acknowledge that evil truly exists and lurks in places we least suspect. Perhaps I had never really wanted to feel this in all its terrible reality, to know that people can be so monstrous, that monsters are among us, and, yet, knowing this, to find a way to survive and live.

  This was a question I returned to, at last, with my mother sometime after I had concluded most of my research. How did you survive? I asked. How did you live? This wasn’t just a question on my mind. It had been posed by our rabbi, Sandy Hahn, during the memorial service for my brother shortly after his death, as he faced a crowd of over a thousand people at our synagogue. “We have gathered here to search for some meaning in what’s happened,” he said, “if that’s possible.”

  For my mother, the search began at some point during the awful days that followed the news of Jon’s death. On one hand, there was resolution that the murderers had been caught and that justice was going to take over. Though my parents had not been active supporters of the death penalty, there was a conviction that Witt’s sentence was best for society. “I felt personally that this was like a nuclear threat,” my mother told me. “This is the biggest thing that can happen to people, we must all be protected from this monster . . . to put him in jail, who knows how long he’d be there or what would happen in the future, it was the best protection for society just to get rid of him.”