Dr. Schwartz stopped writing, looked up in the air, took a deep breath, and turned his head slightly, not looking Kyle in the eyes. Then his demeanor and tone changed as he stated: “What business is that of yours?”
“Because I’m her friend and I care about her!” Kyle said immediately, angrily. His manner had abruptly changed.
Game on.
Robert Schwartz stood. He turned and was now face-to-face with Kyle. According to Kyle’s recollection (the only source we have for this entire incident), the older man had a “slight grin” on his face at this point. With that, Dr. Schwartz took a moment and then said, rather sarcastically, “And?”
“I know your plans,” Kyle snapped back. He was getting antsy. His leg bounced. Kyle could feel a flood of adrenaline flowing throughout his body. He began to sweat. “I know you’ve been hurting her and you are not going to get away with shit like that.”
“Leave now . . . ,” Nicodemus urged.
Dr. Schwartz didn’t acknowledge Kyle’s statement with an answer. Instead, he turned his back to him.
“You will not get away with it!” Kyle said over the voices in his head.
Robert Schwartz’s response angered Kyle even more than Schwartz maybe telling him to piss off. So Kyle took a step closer to Schwartz on Schwartz’s left side. He was behind him now. They were standing near the kitchen.
“I won’t let you hurt her,” Kyle said loudly.
There has never been an indication in all of Robert Schwartz’s life that he was ever a violent man. Angry and intense, maybe. Short-tempered, perhaps. But violent? Not by any means. Yet, if we believe the only source available for this moment, Kyle Hulbert said later that it was when he stepped into Schwartz’s personal space that Robert Schwartz “backhanded me and made contact just above my left eye.” Kyle thought Schwartz must have been wearing “a ring of some sort,” because something with a hard steel edge caught Kyle and cut him. “I still have a scar to this day in my eyebrow from where the ring cut me.”
Robert Schwartz was now grinning, according to Kyle. Laughing at him.
“He had spun around and backhanded me fast, without me being able to even react. He was a big guy. It rocked me.”
Even sent Kyle back a few steps.
When Kyle got his senses back, all he could see was a man laughing in his face, demeaning him, making him feel less than a fool, less than a child. He was made to feel like some boy who thought he was going to protect his girlfriend, but he had now realized he had met up with a man.
“The level of clarity I have in recollecting the rest of this is frightening,” Kyle told me. “I can see every moment of this whole thing ... I mean every movement.”
For Kyle, the backhand, the shit-ass grin, the contemptuous attitude—it all amounted to a “confession.” He could see guilt in Schwartz’s eyes, as in, “Yeah, I did those things.... Maybe I am going to kill her . . . but if so, what the hell is some kid going to do about it?” Kyle’s mind was fluttering now, shattering into a frenzy of fragmented echoes. Nicodemus (or any of his other voices) was far out of reach. Kyle believed he was staring at the guilt of a man who had been abusing his daughter, all of which was flowing out of him. Kyle couldn’t handle it. Those demons he’d always talked about started to stir once again. The vampire in him became electric.
It happened in one fell swoop without Kyle feeling it arise, he claimed. “My mind didn’t even think about it.” Kyle had his sword in his hand, brandishing it.
Dr. Schwartz went after him.
They struggled, wrestling back and forth. The Schwartz family’s dining room/kitchen did not have a lot of room. It was close quarters. On the floor were two of those oval-shaped, braided throw rugs, which made it slippery.
The entire fight, Kyle later surmised, could have been avoided.
“I will say this before I go any further. Had he not struck me, had he not grinned in such a way that haunts me to this day ... I would have left and let him live,” Kyle later said in a statement of this incident he made to law enforcement.
Kyle wielded his sword in front of himself like Conan the Barbarian; then, rather calmly, with determination and confidence, he struck Dr. Schwartz on the back of his neck with a quick slash.
“I remember watching the blade of my sword go up into the air and come down,” Kyle explained. The blow Kyle planned on was a carefully focused laceration, meant to “incapacitate Mr. Schwartz.” Kyle had studied fighting styles and knew where to inflict a blow on the body without killing someone, but at the same rate would take him down instantly. “There are nerves and such in the back of the neck. You hit someone there with a strike of a blade and it will drop them, maybe even paralyze them.”
As the strike went up into the air in motion, Kyle thought: Damn, this is not going to turn out right. I’m not holding the sword the way I should be. The handle was loose. Kyle had a bad grip on it.
This particular strike produced no blood. Kyle “believed” he had not “broken the skin” deep enough to inflict the injury he had wanted.
Dr. Schwartz put a hand on the back of his neck, swiped it across, and then looked at it—before shaking his head. He then stared at Kyle. In Kyle’s skewed mind-set, he again heard Mr. Schwartz say something to the effect of: “That did not do anything, kid!”
They fought—with Schwartz trying to grab hold of Kyle and wrestle him to the ground. But at some point, Schwartz wound up in the back of Kyle, one hand around Kyle’s neck; the other, unfortunately, was around the blade of Kyle’s dull sword.
Kyle stepped away from Schwartz; and as he did that, he pulled the sword through Schwartz’s hand, which made a deep, bloody gash across his palms.
“Somewhere in the back of my mind,” Kyle told police, “someone laughed at a fool who would grab an attacker’s blade.”
It meant a certain disadvantage to Robert Schwartz that he had cut himself badly and was in sharp, penetrating pain now; his palms were undoubtedly throbbing. Schwartz must have known now that this kid meant business. He was now in a fight for his life.
Kyle stood a few feet in front of Dr. Schwartz, with his back facing the man. For a moment, Kyle thought to turn around and face him like a warrior, the sword in a position to produce the most violent and deadly injuries imaginable. Instead, Kyle gripped the sword with two hands by its handle, the blade point still facing Schwartz (whose only defense was his hands, both of which were cut and bleeding profusely). Kyle pulled it out, as if preparing to stab himself in the stomach.
It was time, Kyle knew, to deliver a blow that would stop this man.
CHAPTER 51
ROBERT SCHWARTZ WAS standing in back of Kyle, facing Kyle’s backside, his hands out in front of himself like a high-school wrestler sizing up an opponent. He was trying to get away from the madman with the sword standing in his kitchen.
With his back to Schwartz, Kyle had the handle of his sword in both hands, the blade “going down the back of my arm.” In one motion, Kyle—not thinking about what he was doing more than (he claimed) reacting to the situation—then drove the sword, its point toward himself, backward, just above and to the side of his right hip bone.
The blow struck Schwartz, but Kyle could not tell where.
Kyle turned around and “I then slashed at him” before the two of them “started circling each other.”
“I was, at this point even, willing to let him live,” Kyle later told police.
To Schwartz, he said, “Back off, motherfucker, let me pass, and I’ll be gone!”
Dr. Schwartz did not back away. Or respond.
They continued to circle each other.
Kyle slashed again, this time breezing the back of Schwartz’s neck for a second time in the same spot as he had previously, when he tried to place that paralyzing blow but had missed. Unwittingly, without any sort of nefarious plan, Kyle had unknowingly carved an X in the back of Schwartz’s neck, which would be the cause of much speculation in the coming days. Many would presume this was some sor
t of ritualistic wound made by a vampire looking to leave his mark.
“No!” Kyle vehemently denounced that suggestion. “Not at all.”
Kyle was more interested in inflicting as much pain as he could. As he began to slash at Clara’s father, realizing the older man was not going to back off, he needed to stop him.
“I know anatomy,” Kyle said later. “I knew that stabbing him through the abdomen where I did at one point, I would pierce his liver and that would hurt. I’m not trying to kill him—you have to understand. My thought then was ‘This guy knows that I know that he is trying to kill Clara and he’s going to try and kill me.’ As strange as that sounds, that is the only thought in my head at the time.”
According to Kyle, Schwartz laughed at him as they stared each other down and walked in a circle. Kyle was the only one with a weapon, slashing Schwartz when he could. They had broken away from each other after Schwartz gave Kyle a manly shove.
“Step aside. I’m out of here. I don’t want to kill you,” Kyle told Schwartz. “I will leave.”
Kyle said Schwartz smiled at him, but did not say anything. And the fact that Robert Schwartz was so resilient and resolved and not cowering—well, this made Kyle turn even more aggressive.
“I slashed him twice, once in the belly, his hands are bleeding—and the guy smiles at me,” Kyle recalled.
Dr. Schwartz “advanced” on Kyle, grabbing him. They wrestled. Kyle lost his sword. So he improvised and drove an elbow into Schwartz’s face, causing him to bleed. As they struggled for control, there was a moment when Kyle got some of Schwartz’s blood in his mouth.
In the background, whatever Schwartz had been cooking had all but burned up by that point. The stove burner was still on, the pan sizzling.
“And this drove me into a frenzy and I became incoherent,” Kyle would later tell police. “I see blood and I go berserk.”
Kyle began now to “thrust” and “stab.” He recalled, “I am not even caring.... I am just stabbing and stabbing and stabbing. . . .”
That metallic taste of blood on his tongue sent a man who was already crazy into an entirely different realm of insanity. Kyle claimed he lost control of his senses—if he, indeed, had any at the time—and blacked out in a violent rage.
When he “came to” several moments later, the first thing Kyle later recalled was “withdrawing my sword from his back.”
Robert Schwartz was on the floor, facedown. Kyle had, he told police, “apparently stabbed him several times after [Schwartz fell] facedown on the ground.” There was that moment when he came out of his blackout when Kyle said he “could feel the blade tip nick the wooden floor below him—I remember feeling the impact of the blade hitting the floor”—this, mind you, as it pierced through the doctor’s body.
Standing over Schwartz, who was now totally incapacitated and not moving, Kyle pulled his sword out of the wooden floor and stood.
He heard something.
Sizzling.
“I can smell blood.”
For good reason.
“A droplet had made it to the front burner and it was cooking.”
All six of his voices, Kyle later said, were “now yelling at me.”
CHAPTER 52
KYLE HULBERT CLAIMING he stabbed Robert Schwartz “several times,” as he did in his statement to police, was a gross underestimation. It did not give a complete picture of what happened during that time Kyle said he went somewhere else in his mind and lost memory of those violent, bloodiest moments. In total, the medical examiner reported thirty-one stab wounds inflicted to Schwartz’s torso—several of which went entirely through Robert Schwartz’s body. Some of these wounds seemed to be meticulous in their delivery—meaning, there was a pattern. A pattern that Kyle later said “was of no conscious design by me.” Several wounds were in a sequence of lines, as if Kyle had carefully placed each wound where he believed it belonged. In fact, on the back of Schwartz’s neck, clearly visible, there was that large X carved rashly into his skin with the tip of Kyle’s sword. But Kyle claimed that this clear X, which marked a spot, was not something he did out of any type of intention to leave his mark.
Quite gruesomely, there were three particular wounds on the front of Schwartz’s midsection, all of which made the shape of a triangle: one just below his belly button, one just near his right armpit, and the other near his left armpit. This created a triangular symbol.
“I never intended to do that,” Kyle said.
Kyle had passed his sword entirely through Schwartz’s body several times. On the front of Schwartz’s left hand were several defensive wounds, along with the slice Kyle had said started things off when Schwartz carelessly grabbed hold of the blade.
On Schwartz’s right hand was the same: several defense-type wounds.
On Schwartz’s face, Kyle left several abrasions and lacerations, including two “superficial incised wounds” on Schwartz’s left earlobe.
To consider all of these wounds and study the crime scene photos, there is only one conclusion to make: Kyle Hulbert went mad and repeatedly stabbed this man to death in a frenzy of slashes (much like one of his fantastical delusions or fantasies). But then, strangely enough, he took his time to place several stab wounds in specific places on Schwartz’s body, as well as carving an X the size of a cell phone in the back of his neck.
Robert Schwartz was lying on his stomach in the kitchen of his home, pools of blood all over the wooden floor around him. The scientist’s clothes were blood-soaked, and sword holes were distinctly visible through his shirt wherever Kyle had stabbed him. The bottom of Robert Schwartz’s white sweat socks were entirely saturated with blood, which meant there was a struggle of some sort after copious amounts of blood were present. Schwartz had stepped in his own blood while trying to fight off his killer.
If it was Clara Schwartz’s desire—as she had written about, time and again, in her journals and stated to certain friends—for her father to feel excessive amounts of pain, to suffer greatly, then there could be no doubt that her wish had been accomplished. The autopsy report, combined with Kyle’s mad tale of a vicious and violent murder, proved that this man had indeed endured suffering for an extended period of time before falling to the ground and breathing his last breath. Robert Schwartz had experienced a lifetime’s worth of physical agony in just a few brutal moments.
CHAPTER 53
KYLE HULBERT, AN eighteen-year-old man who claimed to have murdered other men before Robert Schwartz, stood over his victim on the evening of December 8, 2001. The first thing he later recalled was the smell of Schwartz’s blood sizzling on the stove.
Kyle took a look at all the blood, the tossed-over furniture, the evil mess he had left behind in the wake of this incredibly ferocious murder. It didn’t seem real in that moment. The Stone House was now lonely and vacant, devoid of life, like a beach vacation home during the cold and stormy winter months when everyone is gone. The steely aroma of all the blood, metallic and salty, permeated the stuffy air inside this strange place that had seen so much darkness—even before this terrible moment—throughout its history. But this savage murder of a man who had been trying to make a better life for his youngest daughter by disciplining her and merely wanting what was best—a man who had been on the verge of making groundbreaking discoveries that would have bettered the world (discoveries he’d made already in DNA that would come into play during the investigation of his own murder)—had to be the darkest day the old homestead had ever been through. This murder would define the house from this point on. Kids for generations to come would meander through the forest with their buddies, perhaps playing cops and robbers, and stumble upon this dreary monument, stopping in their tracks. “That’s where that guy was murdered! I hear there are ghosts inside.” Stories would be made up about the place. Tales told. And yet the agonizing truth was that they would all be true: Evil had taken place inside the Schwartz home, and it could never be overshadowed.
Kyle stepped over Schwartz’s blood
ied corpse and walked up to the sink. He turned the water on and washed the blood off his sword. Like a warrior finished with battle, he could only now think about getting out of the house.
Confident his sword was clean, Kyle shut off all the lights in the house (a detail in his police statement he later said he could not recall), except for those in the living room.
Out of the six voices begging Kyle to run, Nicodemus spoke loudest: “Make haste! Leave now.”
“I’m going,” Kyle whispered.
“The OG’s soul has departed,” Nicodemus said. “He’s not here anymore—he’s gone now.”
Kyle stopped at the door. He took one last look. He sheathed his sword in its scabbard.
Then he left.
CHAPTER 54
KATIE AND MIKE were facing a troublesome predicament—that is, if “haste” was in the cards when Kyle Hulbert returned from murdering Robert Schwartz. Mike had turned the car around while Kyle was gone and had backed into a ditch. Due to the rain and mud, well, Mike’s car was stuck like a pair of legs in quicksand. The car was not budging from the suction of the slick and cold mud now encompassing the back portion of the car’s wheel wells.
Both Mike and Katie tried “everything possible,” Katie later explained to police, but nothing worked. The car would not move. The tires kept spinning and spinning.
The time was between 7:10 and 7:30 P.M. Kyle had been gone a little over an hour.
As Katie and Mike thought about what to do next, Katie heard the subtle sound of footsteps off in the distance: brush crunching, twigs cracking, boots splashing in water.
“All I can remember about going back to the car is branches slapping me in the face,” Kyle said. “It was dark. I heard the car as I got closer to it—Mike was accelerating. The engine was really loud. The tires were spinning.”
Kyle was back.
Mike got out of the car; Katie followed. Mike sounded panicked and alarmed. “Kyle . . . go back up to Mr. Schwartz’s and ask him to come and help us.” Mike explained that he and Katie had tried like the dickens to get the car out of the mud, but the tires had submerged themselves deeper and deeper. They were going to need a tow truck or a pickup to pull them out. Maybe Mr. Schwartz could help them.
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