Here was a group of wayward kids going nowhere, doing nothing, living in a bubble of melancholy and darkness, and Kyle, an exact match, had found a place to fit in just weeks after walking out of court an emancipated man. They got up in the morning, called each other, hung out, walked through the local malls, and basically shifted from one place to the next, complaining about life, embracing the dark moods overtaking their days.
Then, quite unexpectedly, as though he fell from the sky, along came this animated, over-the-top, eccentric kid. He was dressed from head to toe like a black cat (Kyle wore only black and generally a trench coat), living out the life of that costume. He was talking and talking and talking about everything he could think of, immediately relating to what these three kids were feeling regarding how society had not understood who they were. For Mike, Clara, and Katie, they had found their Gandalf, their spiritual leader.
“The word you’re looking for is ‘emo,’” Kyle explained, describing this group that he was now an intricate part of—that is, he added, if a label needed to be put on who they were.
Most people believe that being emo is equivalent to being lonely, depressed, isolated, and dark. Perhaps being emo is partly living within that framed, profiled, labeled structure. But those who actually live it claim it is a way to express their inner artistic creativity: through music, poetry, reading, writing, and art, all of which can influence the way they present themselves to the world. The safe truth of the matter is that emo—like the label “hipster”—can mean different things to different people.
But emo, alt, goth—all those brands people put on kids these days—Kyle Hulbert noted, did not best describe who he was when he ran into this group randomly and became a central part of their inner circle. Nor had it described or labeled who Mike, Katie, and Clara were. At this time of his life, Kyle said, as he got to know Katie, Mike, and Clara, there was one word that best defined who he was—or, rather, who he believed he was.
“Vampire.”
CHAPTER 7
KATIE INGLIS HAD a wired look about her, more frenzied than natural. She looked like the girl next door; though when she spoke, you immediately knew she wasn’t the girl next door. Her brown eyes were wide and globelike, as though she was whacked out on mind meds. Katie also wore big-framed glasses, which gave her the look of a cross between a modest librarian and a chick on the run from something. Her blond hair was straight and flat like seaweed. She didn’t say much of anything, except maybe after being asked. Katie had this weird way of coming across as a girl who could pass for fourteen (and you’d believe it) or a woman of twenty (and you’d believe that, too). In other words, she could pull off either look, if she had to.
“What are you into?” Katie asked Kyle as they wandered round the festival. They had broken away from the others. In fact, Mike was so concerned after not seeing Katie for some time that he had gotten everyone he could muster together to form a search party to find her. But Katie was off with Kyle, whom she was totally infatuated with the moment she met him. According to one account, Katie thought Kyle, or what she could tell of him through his costume, reminded her of Joe Perry from Aerosmith, her favorite band.
“Katie was just loose,” Kyle said later.
Kyle knew what she meant when Katie asked what he was into: “Dungeons and Dragons,” he answered.
The way Kyle told it, he said Katie then asked him if he wanted to “check out” her “regimentality.”
Kyle presumed that meant her vagina, and he smiled at that thought.
According to what Kyle told me, Katie took his hand and moved it underneath her dress. She wasn’t wearing any panties.
They kissed.
Kyle, greatly aroused, began to finger Katie, he later claimed.
She moaned, getting into it.
Her promiscuity was bizarre, Kyle later said. As they walked around the festival, for example, and he and Katie broke off from the others, she was all over him aggressively. They had just met. Later, Mike would explain to Kyle that he had met Katie and they slept together just a few days later.
“It’s something I regret now,” Katie said later, confirming that she had gone to the festival with her boyfriend, Mike, but had snuck off with this new kid, Kyle.
“She was Mike’s girl,” Kyle said. He was clear to point out that this hindsight image of Katie he now had was terribly biased because of what would happen within the group in the coming months and the division that grew among them after that. “But she didn’t care.”
As Kyle got to know the group more personally, he viewed Katie as someone “who was just there.” She was part of the crowd, no doubt, but there was no vitality to her character. She never had anything of value to add to a conversation, Kyle said. She didn’t have her own ideas. She didn’t speak up. She was always spoken to, told what to do, where to go, and how to think. She didn’t do anything for herself, Kyle felt—with the exception, perhaps, of cheating on Mike.
“You know, she’s with Mike,” Kyle said, “but here she has this loose sense of fidelity.” Kyle had no idea that Katie and Mike were an item until the days following the festival, when Kyle and Mike started hanging out. “You’d never have known it that day.” And even then, Kyle found out that Mike was a guy who really didn’t care.
“His concept behind him and Katie was different,” Kyle explained. Kyle had asked Mike about Katie one day, how long they had been dating, how serious the relationship was.
“I don’t own her,” Mike said. “She’s her own woman.”
“Look, man, I respect that. She’s just a girl. We’re friends. I’m not going to be sleeping with her—even though I could.”
And Mike, Kyle said, was cool with that remark. It didn’t bother him.
After he felt comfortable enough, Kyle told Mike and Katie he was a vampire—a genuine, blood-drinking, night-prowling, sword-carrying, Twilight-type vampire. No one in the group had known an actual blood-drinking vampire, Kyle soon found out. In this respect, he came across as an intriguing figure, a bizarre display for them to be curious about and in awe of.
That was something Kyle absolutely adored.
CLARA SCHWARTZ WAS the different one out of the bunch—and Kyle began to see this as the four of them—Kyle, Mike, Katie, and Clara—talked and opened up to one another. The first thing about Clara that Kyle noticed was her gaze. Clara could look him in the eyes and not look away. Her stare was arresting, important, and fascinating. Her gaze was determined, definite, and confident. She was the quiet one, yes—the one who stood off to the side and checked you out from top to bottom before trusting you and allowing you into her strange, desolate world. But Clara also had an aura of self-reliance that Kyle picked up on right away. He appreciated it.
Back at the festival, Kyle remembered, while they walked around, as everyone else talked and joked and mingled, Clara flanked the group silently, like a leopard surveying her prey, not saying much of anything. Everyone was in character that day. And for the most part, they talked in character and referenced the era as well.
“She’s on the fringes of the group, just watching, being very quiet,” Kyle explained. “She had this intense stare. Never forget that.”
This intensity that Clara displayed spoke to Kyle. It told him a lot about who she was. He was attracted to this about her, more psychologically than anything else. Kyle wanted to know more about Clara, her philosophies on life, her thoughts about the world.
“A lot of people,” Kyle remarked, “if you look them in the eyes and you keep their gaze, they’ll turn away. Or look down. They won’t keep your gaze. It’s a self-conscious thing most people have. Not Clara. She did not flinch. That intrigued me.”
Clara was kind of frumpy (a description that Kyle later said he unquestionably agreed with). She had these chubby, infant-like cheeks that drooped like hanging pink water balloons. Clear, porcelain skin, chalky white, Clara carried an atmosphere of weightiness in her stride, and played up what was a total secrecy about her. When one
studied Clara, it wasn’t hard to determine that had she put a little bit of time and effort into her makeup and hygiene and looks, she would have been a beautiful young woman. But she chose to look natural, idle, like a girl who shopped at thrift stores and wore no cosmetics.
Clara came across as depressed, with a blue cloud hovering over her. Yet, at the same rate, Clara wasn’t a depressed person, once you got to know her. She enjoyed the attention this dark milieu gave her—or simply didn’t care what people thought. She wanted others to feel sorry for her, certainly. Although she never admitted it, she yearned for those around her to feel the pain she was going through. All of that was clear to Kyle as he got to talking to Clara in the days, weeks, and months following the festival. On several occasions, in writing, during instant messaging, and in person, Clara had even referred to her life in general as “living in a hellhole.” When Kyle met her, Clara was attending James Madison University (JMU), in Harrisonburg, Virginia. She was in her sophomore year. JMU was not an easy school to get into, tuition alone coming in at around $25,000 a year. Not bad for a girl who didn’t claim to have any prospects going on in a life she categorically loathed.
As Kyle would learn, the unhappiness Clara carried—however transparent he would come to see it—might have stemmed from losing her mother years ago. As it were, when Clara wasn’t living at school in her dorm and attending classes, she stayed with her dad, fifty-seven-year-old Dr. Robert Schwartz, who worked long hours as a respected DNA biophysicist, researcher, and scientist. Clara made it clear that she didn’t get along with him at all. In fact, there was a good indication—and Kyle picked up on it immediately—that Clara hated this man with a passion rarely seen within the father-daughter relationship.
There was one time in the tenth grade when Clara sat in class and realized how smart she was and that the work was easy for her. In this way, she took after her intelligent father. Yet, being smart was not enough, she realized after having an epiphany on that day: I wonder sometimes if life’s this easy, she wrote in one of her journals, and I’m that smart, why do I wanna die so much?
This occurred in 1998, when Clara was still trying to figure out her role in life without a mother. She claimed then that all her father ever did was yell at her and put her down for “knowing nothing.” She wrote that being “rich” was “synonymous” with being “well-brought-up” and a “loving family”—though there was no evidence to prove that Clara and her family were rich, whatever that term means in this day and age. According to her writing, she yearned for normalcy, but then she did everything she could to come across as abnormal and to lead an anomalous lifestyle. She claimed to have an IQ of 196 and wrote that she still got yelled @ for doing homework. If only, she concluded in her writing, I had a loving home, my life’d be perfect.
Clara wore baggy men’s clothes, for the most part. She had dark brunette hair, stringy and fraying in sections, parting it unequivocally down the middle, the remainder curling down past her modest breasts. Clara had an intellectual quality to her, right from the get-go, which Kyle noticed and took note of. She came across as a shy recluse, sure; but by talking to her, Kyle could tell Clara Schwartz knew exactly what she was doing.
As their friendship blossomed, Kyle would come to see that Clara’s introverted nature was born out of being a girl who had been severely bullied in high school. She was an outcast. Made to feel like she didn’t belong—less than others. Of course, Kyle nestled up to this feeling, as if they had been split at birth.
“Kids hated me,” Clara told Kyle that day at the festival.
Kyle laughed. “I know how you feel!”
She’s quiet and shy because she doesn’t have a lot of self-worth, Kyle thought. Yet, I like her.... She’s cool. My kind of people—intelligent, perceptive. He knew right away they were going to connect.
Along with a brother and sister, Clara grew up on a property that her family, which had owned it for more than six decades, called “The Stone House,” near Mount Gilead Road, just outside Leesburg, Virginia. Set back from the main thoroughfare, very secluded, this creepy-looking property, which would work nicely in any 1970s-era drive-in horror film, had been the base for Clara’s family on her mother’s side. The yellowed, stone-face-textured home was covered with overgrown brush and unclipped tree limbs in desperate need of an arborist. There was a smaller addition attached to the main home. It appeared to be so run-down and weak, it might fall over with the slightest touch. Clara and her dad kept several horses on the property. From the outside, the place appeared to have been badly neglected, in need of a total makeover and some serious reconstruction. Inside was no different: the walls were shoddy and poorly maintained; the wooden floors were dirty and in great need of sanding and refinishing; the cabinets in the kitchen were old, rickety, and falling apart. The entire house, from top to bottom, could benefit from a bulldozer and a new beginning.
If we are to take as family gospel what Clara’s aunt (Clara’s mother’s sister) later wrote to the court, My story in this house parallels Clara’s. There are patterns of isolation and abuse that are family secrets.
With regard to Clara’s mother, the aunt had always been told that she was “prettier” than Clara’s mother; yet, the aunt always felt “inferior” to her sister, Joan (Clara’s mother), because the kids were often told that Joan might not have been given the looks, but she was smarter than the rest of them—and a mind would go a hell of a lot further than a body.
If true, one story, which depicted how neglected the kids were, was frightening and spoke to what Clara would later detail in her own journals and diaries. According to Clara’s aunt, her and Joan’s brother once went missing. He was gone overnight. He had gotten lost in the woods. He screamed and cried out, he later told the family, walking around, trying to find his way out of the forest. Eventually he slept under a tree when no one came to find him. The following morning, the child found his way back home, only to find out that nobody had even noticed he was gone. He was eight years old at the time.
CHAPTER 8
EVERYONE IN THE group knew Darcy (pseudonym), the girl whom Kyle had come upon and scared with his cat costume inside the weapons tent on the day they met at the festival. Kyle had felt that these new friends were his kind of people, which was why he walked over in the first place and introduced himself, however sneakily, to Darcy. He knew they’d all click on certain levels. Never once had he thought that as they got to know each other and chatted during those days following the festival, he and Clara would connect on more violent and fantastical planes than Kyle could have imagined.
“I make friends easily,” Kyle explained to me during our twenty-plus hours of interviews in 2013 and 2014. “I’m quick to engage people. I laugh. I joke. I am always grinning ear to ear. That’s me. So when I get around people who I think are actually interesting, I can have a really good time.”
At the end of that festival day, Kyle and Mike had a chat. Along with Darcy, there was another guy who came to meet up with them, who was actually Clara’s boyfriend, Patrick House, Kyle learned later. It had been Patrick who introduced Mike to Katie. Mike and Patrick had met inside the office waiting room of a psychiatrist one day the previous year, according to one report. When Mike started working at Walmart in July 2001, he ran into Patrick again and they started hanging out. Clara would tag along at times. Mike found Patrick a bit on the odd side, he later told one reporter, but he liked him. According to Jason Cherkis, who wrote a Washington City Paper article about Mike, Patrick often talked of how he once “cast a spell that killed thirteen people who were trying to kill him.”
“I wanna kill Clara’s father,” Patrick told Mike one day. It was the summer of 2001. Clara had filled Patrick’s head with so many ideas about her father by then. She talked about the nasty things her father did to her so often, Mike was tired of hearing it. “I don’t like her dad,” Patrick concluded.
When Patrick talked like that, Mike told Cherkis, he “just listened.”
T
HE RENAISSANCE FESTIVAL had been a fun day all around. Kyle met a half-dozen new friends—Patrick, Mike, Katie, and Clara, among them—and got a girl’s phone number. He was stoked to hang out with Katie, Mike, and Clara, especially in those days following the festival. They had exchanged numbers, e-mail addresses, and instant-messaging tags.
“Let’s chill,” Mike Pfohl suggested. “Call me, Kyle.”
“Yeah, man, no doubt. Definitely.”
One did not have to twist Kyle’s arm to get him to hang out, suffice it to say, if he liked your company. Kyle was always ready and willing. On top of that, Kyle still hadn’t found a place to call home. He essentially was bouncing from friend to friend, even staying at a shelter or in the woods inside that tent he carried with him inside a backpack. With more friends in the mix, that meant more places to crash.
Speaking with writer Jason Cherkis, Mike later recalled a different version of how Clara and Kyle had met. Mike did not think Clara was there at the festival that day. Mike told Cherkis that when Katie and Kyle took off, Katie had told Kyle, “You need to meet my friend Clara,” and so they made plans to meet and hang out after the festival.
Kyle had said sure.
The foremost truth in all of this is that Kyle and Clara eventually did become very good friends, with shared interests and tremendously similar ways of looking at the world. Within Kyle, Clara saw something—something she could use to her advantage in the near future.
CHAPTER 9
CLARA, KATIE, AND Patrick had birthdays coming up. It was mid-September.
“Applebee’s in Leesburg,” Clara suggested.
They were pumped.
Mike picked everyone up (as usual he was the driver). Clara had just turned nineteen, so had Katie. Patrick’s nineteenth birthday was in a few weeks.
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