He was a stone fox and sweet to her most of the time, but . . . maybe he just didn’t love her like he used to. Maybe he had his eye on someone else. But who? One name came to mind immediately. Sabrina. She flirted with him all the time. And everybody knew she was a sure thing. Sabrina Henry. It had to be.
Are they sleepin’ together already? Is he distracted because he’s looking for her while he’s dancing with me? That’s why he’s been so understanding about waiting—because he hasn’t been.
Stop dancing and walk off the floor right now. Leave him here to—
But before she could, the song came to an end and he lifted her chin and kissed her tenderly.
“I love you so much, Janet Leigh,” he said. “Don’t forget you were my queen before you were theirs. I don’t know what I’d do without you in my life. Now what’s this surprise you’ve got for me? Is it a good surprise, or a real good surprise?”
68
I quietly flip through the witness statements, skimming each one in the faint splash of illumination provided by my reading light clipped to the murder book.
Beside me Anna is asleep. Her breathing and that of Taylor’s coming through the small speaker of the baby monitor are the only sounds beside the occasional creak in the too-quiet cottage.
Earlier in the evening, we had walked down and eaten pizza at 40th Street Pizzaria and Seafood. The pizza was some of the best we’d had in a while, and we brought a second one back with us to warm up for a snack—something we didn’t do, because Anna fell asleep before we could.
Our moonlit walk along the beach on the way back was romantic and buoying, and I figured we might go back out later for a swim or a longer walk, but when I came in from talking to Johanna on the phone a short while later, I found Taylor and Anna fast asleep.
I always miss Johanna, but it’s particularly acute tonight. Something about us being here without her just doesn’t seem right, and despite only being half an hour farther away from her, being out of my ordinary environment makes me feel less available for her somehow—even though on a rational level I know it’s not the case.
I console myself with the fact that we’ll be together again at the end of the week, but the constant dull and at times acute ache of missing her feels as though it’s slowly hollowing me out inside.
The witness statements are pretty much what I’d expected they’d be, though perhaps a little more directly contradictory than usual.
Most of the young people at the party said they never saw Janet there, but a few did.
A classmate of hers, Charles Fountain, the only black student at the farmhouse that night, swore she was there and that he saw her not once but a handful of times throughout the night. He even described in detail what she was wearing—a cream crinkle-textured blouse with a lace yoke and a camel, tan, and rust floral-print skirt with a deep flounce at the bottom.
Dad had written, How does a boy know so much about a girl’s clothes?
Answering his own question later, Dad discovered that Fountain planned to move to New York after graduation to study fashion design, and deduced that, although he couldn’t be positive, the thin, soft-spoken black boy was most likely homosexual.
Fountain’s only interest in Janet seemed to be as a friend—one mostly fascinated by her sense of fashion and her eye for photography.
Another witness, a young woman named Valerie Weston, who was actually closer to Janet—though not in each other’s inner circles, they were part of the yearbook staff together—said Janet was definitely not there that night, that she spent a lot of time looking for her because she wanted to congratulate her for winning the Miss Valentine pageant and show her a totally awesome photograph she had taken. She said she definitely totally was a no-show that night. And only totally stunned spazzes would say that she was.
Ann Patterson, a junior who shared one class with Janet, remembered seeing her briefly and described her as wearing an outfit similar to the one Charles recalled—though not nearly in as much detail.
Kathy Moore, either Janet’s best friend or biggest competitor depending on who was asked, said Janet did grace the party with her presence but only briefly, and that she never actually came inside the house.
This fits with what Gary Blaylock said. He said that while he was upstairs peeing, he looked out the window and not only did he see Janet but he saw Ben with her and the two of them drive off together in Janet’s car.
In his statement, Ben said she never came—that she was supposed to, that he waited and waited for her, but that she never showed. Said he figured she couldn’t sneak out, or fell asleep waiting for her family to go to bed. It had been a big, long weekend and she was exhausted. He was disappointed but he understood. Said he never saw her again after he took her home from the Sweethearts’ Ball and didn’t know anything was wrong until his mom woke him up the next morning saying that her stepdad was on the phone looking for her.
Though Ben never offered an alibi, he had one and it was offered for him. A girl named Sabrina Henry, who had always had a crush on Ben and who had always flirted with him and made sure he knew she was his for the taking, said he was with her, that they left the party together and were with each other the rest of the night.
The final witness from the farmhouse party wasn’t at the party at all. A loner with a violent juvenile record who graduated the year before named Clyde Wolf said he was watching the comings and goings of the party from the woods in back of the pasture. He never stepped forward or volunteered any information, but once it was discovered he had been there, he was brought in and questioned by the investigators. He too said Janet was there that night, but never went inside, and that Ben climbed into her car and left with her.
69
“Why didn’t you arrest Ben Tillman for Janet’s murder?” I ask.
“You finish the book?” Dad says.
“Finished the part where several witnesses have him leaving the party with Janet in her car—the same car she was killed in a short while later.”
We are in his new, immaculate, white extended-cab GMC truck, but unlike any other time we ever have been, I am driving.
It’s Tuesday afternoon and we are driving to Marianna to try to talk to Ben Tillman. We are coming from Dad’s bone marrow test at his doctor’s office in Panama City—something Anna set up and insisted he do sooner rather than later, something he agreed to when I told him we’d work the case for the remainder of the day once the test was done.
Dad is turned in the seat, leaning on his side, keeping pressure off the hip that was used for the aspiration and biopsy. So far it’s sore but not extremely so, and though the wound is seeping, it has yet to soak the bandage or the loose jeans he’s wearing.
“Maybe I should have,” Dad says. “Came close to it more than once during the investigation.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“It’s kinda complicated,” he says. “There wasn’t just one reason. Bottom line is I didn’t stay with the case as long as I should have. I should’ve seen it through, but . . . you kids were young, your mom and I were havin’ a pretty rough time of it, I had my own department to run.”
He doesn’t say anything else but I sense there is more—other reasons why he stopped working the case when he did.
“I worked it as long as I could and then turned everything over to the state’s attorney’s office. He convened a grand jury. I think it was a tough decision for them, but the decision not to indict was theirs.”
“Did you turn over the case to the state’s attorney before you were finished investigating it thoroughly?”
I’m pressing him and I expect him to become defensive, but instead he just nods.
“I’m pretty sure I did,” he says. “I didn’t think so at the time—or I didn’t want to think so, but even then part of me knew I was.”
“So take me through why you did. I’m not understanding.”
“I told you why.”
“There’s got to be more to it than t
hat.”
He shakes his head and I can tell that’s all I’m going to get. I file it away to revisit later.
“The thing is, by the end of the investigation I didn’t think he did it,” Dad says. “I’m just wondering now if I was wrong.”
“So what said he didn’t do it?” I say.
“The girl, Sabrina Henry, swore under oath he was with her. She never wavered and we were never able to break her. There was no physical evidence against him—beyond a few fingerprints in her car that could be explained by him being in it at an earlier time. As her boyfriend he would’ve been. Would’ve been far more suspicious if there hadn’t been any. His mom said she got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and looked in on him, and he was in his bed sleeping soundly. We knew what he wore from pictures taken at the party. We tested his clothes, which were still on the floor of his bedroom, and didn’t find any blood or other evidence on them—and they hadn’t been washed. Still had beer that he spilled at the party on them. And I thought then and I still think now there’s a very good chance Ted Bundy did it.”
Marianna is an interesting place. A small town of less than seven thousand people, it’s a naturally beautiful place—like so many in North Florida—with a diverse landscape of massive old oak trees, their spreading branches draped with Spanish moss, tall North Florida pines, the Chipola River, Blue Hole Spring, and the Mariana caverns, a series of dry, air-filled caves with stunning formations of limestone stalactites, stalagmites, soda straws, flowstones and draperies.
Unlike my flatter part of Florida, Marianna is hilly, the large farms surrounding it consisting of sloping croplands and pastures of rolling hills.
Founded in 1828 by a Scottish entrepreneur named Scott Beverege who named the town after his wife Mary and her friend Anna, it became the county seat the following year.
Platted along the Chipola River just below the Alabama state line, Marianna and the broader Jackson County is known for extremely fertile soil, which is why so many plantation owners from other states like North Carolina relocated here back then.
And it’s not just the soil, Marianna is rich with history too. It’s where the Confederate governor of Florida, John Milton, is buried. It’s the scene of a Civil War battle between a small home guard of boys, old men, and wounded soldiers and a contingent of some seven hundred Federal troops. It is also the site of the savage torture and brutal lynching of Claude Neal, an African American man accused of rape and murder in 1934. Marianna is also the home to Dozier School for Boys, an infamous reform school operated by the state of Florida, which for a time was the largest juvenile reform institution in the United States. Throughout its over one-hundred-year history, the school was a place of brutality, of abuse, beatings, rapes, torture, and murder. Marianna is, of course, also the place of the Broken Heart Miss Valentine Murder of Janet Leigh Lester, which to this day remains unsolved.
Looking at Marianna’s quaint main street of restored old buildings, its historic district of ancient churches and antebellum homes, and its breathtaking natural beauty, it’s hard to fathom so many horrific things have happened here.
70
Ben Tillman was Marianna High School’s star baseball player, taking his team to state during his junior year, coming just two runs short of bringing home the championship.
It was believed he’d do the same in his senior year, only more successfully, but then his girlfriend was murdered, he was suspected, and his life unraveled.
Before the Broken Heart Murder case, Ben was popular and respected.
Ben was cute in a boyish way, but it was his genuine niceness that caused most of the girls at Marianna High to find him so attractive. That said, he was strikingly photogenic and model good-looking in the many photographs Janet took of him over their years together. Nearly all in black and white, Janet’s photographs of Ben were dramatic and artistic and revealed a depth and complexity Ben rarely revealed to anyone else.
The son of the sheriff of Jackson County, Ben was neither a bully, a punk, nor a rat. Although always careful not to break the law, except for a little underage drinking, he never made the other kids feel guilty or like they were being watched for the illicit or illegal activities they engaged in.
Loyal to his friends, faithful to his longtime girlfriend, Ben was liked by his fellow students and well-regarded by his teachers and the school administrators.
Apart from a few rumors about him having a pretty nasty temper, which was rarely if ever witnessed and not given much credence by most, Ben was believed to be about as perfect as an adolescent young man could be.
There is little left of any of that in the middle-aged man whose face shows the signs of a hard life or hard living, or both, standing before me now.
I can’t find even a trace of the effervescent and athletic young baseball player who was smart and attractive enough to steal Janet’s heart in the too-thin, brittle-boned, sun-damaged, unkempt husk of a man hunched from carrying the invisible weight of this across all these years.
Unable to ever really get over what happened, Ben hadn’t accepted the baseball scholarships he had been offered. He had never left Marianna, never attended college, never married, never had kids, never had a decent job.
Never had a job at all. Not really. No one in town would hire him.
He has spent decades mowing grass. He doesn’t even do it under a business name, just as a cash-only odd-job approach like a grammar school kid using his parents’ mower over the summer.
We find him at the old Marianna High School building loading his mower into a rickety and rusting old trailer hitched to his rickety and rusting old Ford Ranger.
He had started shaking his head the moment I got out of the truck and walked toward him.
“Told you I wouldn’t talk to him,” he says.
When I called earlier and told him what we were doing and asked if he’d talk to us, he had said he would never speak to Dad again, which is why I asked Dad to stay in the truck while I tried to speak to Ben.
“Will you talk to me?” I ask. “If he stays in the truck. Will you just talk to me for a few minutes?”
He shakes his head, but there’s no real conviction in it. He then looks from me over toward the truck. “He ruined my life.”
His life was ruined the night of February 12th—whether he killed Janet or not—and from what I could tell, Dad hadn’t done anything to make it worse, but I don’t say anything.
“Sure, he didn’t kill Janet and he didn’t arrest me, but he didn’t clear me, didn’t catch who really did it. Cost my dad the next election and left everyone around here to suspect me for the rest of my life.” He lets out a harsh laugh. “Haven’t had a life. Not really.”
This decimated man, this later iteration of Ben Tillman, has the skinny, bleak, raw-boned, bloodshot look of an alcoholic, and though it’s early afternoon and he’s at work, I can smell the cheap liquor on his breath.
“You think he did it intentionally?” I ask. “Or just failed to solve the case?”
“Comes to the same damn thing, don’t it? Either way. It’s the same.”
Violent crime, particularly murder, breaks people, makes hollowed-out shells of previously vibrant people. And it does so to the criminals and cops no less than the loved ones left behind in the vacuous absence of the victim.
I nod toward the brown brick buildings behind him. “This is where y’all went to school, isn’t it?”
He turns and looks at it and nods slowly.
We are quiet for a few moments.
The midday sun looms high above us, radiating stifling bands of heat that seem concentrated directly on us. He had been sweating when I arrived. Now we both are. Hair and clothes damp, skin moist and clammy, beads of perspiration trickling down backs and faces.
“Lot of people’s lives peaked here,” he says. “But mine didn’t.”
I wait but he doesn’t say anything else. “No?”
“My life didn’t peak in high school. It ended
.”
I nod. The truth of what he’s saying is etched in the lines of his face, written in the sad song behind his eyes.
It’s disconcerting to even think of this broken older man as the boy I’ve been picturing, the one dancing with Janet at the Sweethearts’ Ball, the one she decided to give herself to as they danced to “How Deep Is Your Love,” the one Sabrina Henry and so many other young women had such a crush on.
“Can we talk about that night?” I ask, not having to identify it in any other way.
For him and those like him, there is only one that night. For the truly fortunate, most of whom have no idea just how fortunate they are, there is no single night that is that night, that is the night by which life is divided into before and after.
He shakes his head. “Nothing to say. Said it all then, and a goddamn lot of good it did me. Got nothing to add. Janet didn’t show up that night. Period. I didn’t see her. I didn’t kill her. I didn’t have anything to do with it. I don’t know who did.”
“What about those who swore under oath they saw her there?” I say.
“Only two possibilities. They’re lying or mistaken.”
I don’t point out that another possibility is that he is.
The August heat draws the sour smell of booze and cigarette smoke and body odor out of his pores as if vapors from precipitation after a recent rain, and he smells like an old diesel engine converted to now run on rotting food byproducts.
“More than one person said they saw you leave with her,” I say.
“See previous answer. They couldn’t have seen me do something I not only didn’t do, I couldn’t do—because she wasn’t there. She stood me up. Broke my heart at first. Then I figured she was just tired and fell asleep. Later I realized while I thought she was blowing me off or sleeping through what was supposed to be the best night of our lives because being crowned queen two nights in a row took too much out of her, she was actually being murdered.”
True Crime Fiction Page 29