Are you kidding me? Kyle said to himself. He looked at Katie and Mike with a pompous gaze; both of them waited for a response.
It took some time, but Kyle finally said: “Nobody is home.”
“What?” Mike asked.
“Nobody. Is. Home.”
“He told us very seriously, twice,” Katie said later. “I knew [then] he had done things to Mr. Schwartz.”
Kyle tossed his sword into the backseat of Mike’s car. He realized if he was going to do what Nicodemus had suggested and get the hell out of there fast, he had better roll up his sleeves and get to work moving the car out of the mud. Thinking the cops were going to be barreling down the driveway any minute was not at all on Kyle’s mind. The murder had been rather quiet, as these things go. The closest neighbor would have trouble hearing a gunshot, let alone an argument and a stabbing. Still, Kyle wanted to distance himself from the scene. It was beginning to affect him. He was thinking about what he had done. Not that he was yet remorseful, but he had literally just taken a man’s life. A great responsibility came along with having done that, Kyle felt.
“Get in,” Kyle told Mike.
Kyle stepped in back of the car and pushed as Mike revved the engine and pressed the gas pedal to the floor.
“He looked like he was shaken up,” Katie later explained. She stood nearby, watching. “[It was] like he had just ridden a really scary roller coaster or something, and aggravated at the same time, like something bad had happened.”
As Mike hit the gas and Kyle pushed, the car’s tires burrowed themselves even deeper into the mud. The mud was now all the way up into the wheel wells.
Kyle then noticed the trench coat he wore kept getting in the way, so he took it off and tossed it on the backseat before resuming pushing.
Katie sat inside the car. She stared at the coat on the seat. She saw a “reddish tint smear” all over the front of it, Katie later explained to police. This “confirmed” for Katie that there had been “blood drawn” back at the house. In her confusing way of explaining her thinking back then, she added how she wasn’t “sure Mr. Schwartz was dead.... I hoped he wasn’t, but in the back of my mind, I knew he was.”
Kyle later disputed Katie’s recollection. “First of all, I had a black oilcloth [coat] on—a full-length trench coat, the kind you might see in cowboy movies. It was dark out. Rainy. There is no way in hell that she saw blood on it.”
Mike and Kyle worked at getting the car out of the mud for about ninety minutes. Katie stalled the car several times while Mike and Kyle pushed and the vehicle sank deeper into the mud. There was no use, really, even trying anymore. The car, without some sort of mechanical muscle, was not leaving that ditch.
“Fuck this,” Kyle said. He walked up the road in the opposite direction, away from the Schwartz home, toward a neighbor of Mr. Schwartz’s.
“Where are you going?” Mike asked.
“I have to call a tow truck or we’ll never get this thing out.”
By now, Kyle was covered from the waist down in mud. There was dirt and debris all over his face and upper body, too.
When he got to the neighbor’s house, he knocked, looking around to see if anyone followed him or there was anyone outside.
The entire incident, Kyle later said, felt as though he was “watching this” and was not part of it. Not necessarily an out-of-body experience, but more like a film. “I could hear myself talking. I could hear myself being very nice and pleasant ... but I am not feeling it.”
“Come in,” the neighbor said after Kyle asked to use their phone.
He sat down and explained how they had gotten the car stuck.
“You must be cold,” the neighbor’s wife said. They were an old couple. Very kind. “Would you like some tea?”
Kyle said he would.
The woman made him sage tea.
“I sat there like nothing had happened. Like nothing at all had happened. I deserved an Oscar, only I wasn’t acting. But I really looked like a guy who had just got stuck in the mud.”
Not nervous, or wired, or paranoid—like someone who had just butchered another human being. But, rather, cool, calm, and tired.
Kyle said it was not born out of any type of diabolical design or sociopathic behavior. It was, he explained, “me on autopilot. I had just simply detached from the situation. I just did this. The murder. I am now in full-blown psychosis. This is where it goes from me being borderlined to me being royally fucked up. No medication. I’ve just gone berserk. This is me . . . broken.”
CHAPTER 55
KYLE RETURNED ABOUT twenty minutes later.
“A tow truck is on the way. It’s going to cost you about one hundred dollars,” he told Mike. “But that depends on how long it takes him to get us out.” There was now a cockiness to Kyle’s walk and talk. He spoke with a different, more confident tone. “That’s at least what they told me.”
Mike didn’t know how to respond.
Sure enough, the tow truck arrived and Kyle jumped out and kept him at bay. Meanwhile, Katie explained, “we put the sword in the trunk.” She said they didn’t want to “scare” the guy.
Katie waited inside the tow truck as Mike, Kyle, and the tow truck driver worked to get the car out of the ditch.
After the car was pulled from the mud, Kyle and Mike followed the tow truck in Mike’s car, while Katie rode along with the tow driver in his truck. They drove to the closest bank so Mike could use the ATM to pay the guy.
“What brings you guys out here tonight?” the driver asked Katie as they bounced along the back roads toward that Leesburg bank.
“Oh, well, um, we were visiting friends. See if one of our friends, Clara, was at home. And we, um, we sent Kyle to the door because we didn’t want to upset her dad.”
The tow truck driver didn’t respond.
“And when Kyle came back and said no one was home, we . . . we turned around and got stuck.”
“Oh, come on . . . I know why you went out there,” the driver said.
Katie’s chest tightened. Her stomach twisted.
“Why?”
“You and Mike wanted to make out!”
Katie laughed.
After they arrived at the bank, Mike went over to the ATM and paid the guy. Katie and Kyle sat in Mike’s car and talked.
“He try anything on you?” Kyle asked. He seemed angry, looking for a fight.
“No. No,” Katie said.
They were quiet for a time. While Mike stood outside talking to the tow driver, Katie asked: “What happened?”
They both knew what she meant.
Kyle was reserved. After thinking about it, he said, “The OG was down on his knees when he asked me, ‘What did I ever do to you?’ Then I ran him through!”
“I don’t remember him ever asking me anything like that at all,” Kyle said, adding that it’s quite possible he could have said that to Katie. Some of that night is completely scratched from Kyle’s memory. “Personally, with Katie, I think she later said whatever she needed to say to get out of it.”
Katie was thinking back on several conversations she’d had with Clara over the past few months, even during a time before Kyle had entered the picture. She remembered how Clara had been banging the same drum, over and over: The OG was the bad guy who was holding her down. When Kyle arrived on the scene, however, the rhetoric changed slightly. Katie recalled one time at JMU that now held some significance in the context of what Kyle had just admitted to her on December 8, 2001. On that day at JMU, Mike was loading the car so they could leave. Katie and Clara had a moment alone together.
“Maybe Kyle can help me with my father,” Clara told Katie.
Katie never told police how she responded, or if Clara had elaborated on what she exactly meant or what kind of help she believed Kyle could offer. But Katie certainly later implied that she believed Clara was talking about Kyle making her problems with the OG disappear for good by doing something to him.
AFTER HE SETTLED up with t
he tow truck driver, Mike got into the car and drove the three of them back to that same friend’s house where he, Kyle, and Katie had gone the previous night to hang Christmas decorations and eat pizza. The friend had been calling, saying she was worried about them because it was so late and they hadn’t shown up. Apparently, Katie had said they’d stop by much earlier.
When they returned to Mike’s parents’ house early the next morning (or the middle of the night), Sunday, December 9, Kyle spent some time on the phone. Clara had been looking for him. She was desperate to get details of what had happened. Kyle knew this, so he called her.
“Your father’s dead,” Kyle told her. “I’m sorry. I killed him.”
“Okay,” Clara responded.
Kyle wondered: Why aren’t you crying? Why aren’t you saying something? I just told you your father is dead! Why aren’t you reacting to this?
Indeed, according to Kyle, Clara said nothing more than “okay.” It was as if her reaction meant: “Thank you for the information. Now move on to something else.”
Katie said that after Kyle hung up with Clara, they discussed what they were going to tell the police if they came knocking. By this time, about three in the morning, Clara, Mike, Katie, and Kyle knew that Kyle had killed the OG. Maybe not all the details of the murder, but they all knew the outcome of what had happened inside Clara’s house.
“We decided to tell police that we went up to Clara’s house to get some notebooks for her and we got stuck in the mud,” Katie explained later. She talked about how they’d say they never even made it to the house. They got stuck before they could even go knock on the door. Realizing they were stuck in mud, they’d tell police that they decided Kyle would walk up to the house to ask Schwartz for help, but he knocked and knocked and no one answered.
It was after Kyle had called Clara and told her the news, Katie said, that she and Clara talked about planning a Christmas party and chose a date so the two of them could exchange gifts.
CHAPTER 56
“HI, ROGER, BOB hasn’t shown up for work today—and that’s very unusual,” a coworker of Dr. Schwartz’s said after calling one of Schwartz’s neighbors, a guy they both knew.
“Huh,” the perplexed neighbor said.
“Yeah, and he didn’t call in. We had a one o’clock meeting, which was very important, that he didn’t make. This is very much out of character for Bob. Can you maybe go over and check in on him to see if he’s okay?”
It was about one-fifteen on Monday afternoon, December 10, 2001. As promised, Schwartz’s neighbor drove over to the Schwartz house, which was about a mile away from his, to look in on him. What he noticed first was that the Schwartz driveway was “under construction or being bulldozed, or whatever.” There were men out there working. The neighbor recognized one of the men as another neighbor.
“Hey, how’s it going? . . . Listen, you seen any signs of activity at the Schwartz house today?”
“I’ve been here since seven-thirty this morning and haven’t seen anything,” the construction worker neighbor said.
“Would you mind riding up to the house with me—I need to make a welfare check on Bob?”
“Sure,” he said, hopping in.
When they arrived, both men got out and the neighbor walked around to the back of the house to approach the kitchen door; the construction worker went to the front. The neighbor knocked “real hard” on the door.
The door vibrated, which told the neighbor it was not locked.
“I didn’t open the door at that point.”
He walked around to the front to see if the other guy had gotten any response.
They conferred and decided the best thing to do was to open the back door and go in and check things out.
The neighbor walked in slowly, undoubtedly sensing something was askew. No sooner had he opened the door and taken a few steps, when he found the father of three, a widower, lying in a pool of his own blood. He had been gruesomely butchered to death by what seemed to be a series of stab wounds. What became immediately obvious—even to the neighbor in this frenzied, terrifying moment—was how there had not been any type of forced entry into the Schwartz residence. Whoever had murdered Robert Schwartz, even to the neighbor’s eye, had walked into the home without a problem, as if he or she lived there.
He called out to the construction worker, “He’s dead!”
They ran back to the car and dialed 911. Turned out, the neighbor knew the dispatcher who answered the phone.
“Did you check for a pulse?” the guy asked.
“No . . . he’s dead.”
“But you didn’t check for a pulse?”
“No. Do you want me to go back and check?”
“Yeah!”
All the neighbor had to do was place his hand on Schwartz’s back; there was no need to check for a pulse.
“He was cold and stiff.”
A posse of law enforcement soon arrived to begin assessing the situation. Murder like this in these parts of Virginia was about as uncommon as a bear attack.
CLARA JANE SCHWARTZ had known for no fewer than twenty-four hours that her father was lying dead on the floor in their home, his corpse decomposing in the cold December air. Yet, she did not call anyone or do anything about it—same as when her mother had died.
“We’re all stunned,” Schwartz’s boss, Anne Armstrong, the president of the Center for Innovative Technology, told the Associated Press when the story hit the wires and reporters tracked down where Schwartz had worked. “We don’t know anything. What we’re assuming is maybe he walked in on something.”
It had been Armstrong who sounded the alarm when Schwartz didn’t show up that Monday for his usual meeting.
CHAPTER 57
IN HER DIARY, Clara once listed several “carnal sins”—but probably meant “cardinal.” In any event, on the top of that list was “witnessing false accusations, either to others or myself.” Another was someone “hitting” her on the “right side” of her head. One of the most important, apparently, was someone “trying to assert dominance” over Clara. Yet, the most significant of the bunch was “betrayal of any info,” unless you were an “authorized” person within Clara’s world.
For her, she surmised that to “experience” death, which Clara claimed she was close to at that time, might be like falling into “ice water.”
The first time the bite of it drowns you and bids you under, she wrote.
She said when that occurred (the drowning), you should “just give up.”
She wrote this particular undated entry after meeting Kyle, because he was mentioned later on in the same paragraph. Before talking about the regular gang—Patrick, Mike, and Katie—Clara waxed poetic about the ramifications of dying a slow death.
It feels like you’re drowning + then you regain control for so long. She claimed to be there now: Everything is personal.
I just want my cat. . . .
Next, in what seemed to be a portent of things to come, Clara wrote: Everyone wants me to take a semester off. . . . However, she saw this type of break from school to be “too much trouble”—interestingly, she had contrarily written before that this was something she desperately needed, but the OG would freak out if she even mentioned it. She wondered whether, after leaving school or taking a sabbatical, she would “move off campus” with Patrick and Mike and Kate.
Many of these entries were written as questions. It was as if Clara was trying to figure out her life and where she wanted to take it next. Decisions about school business and where to live were complex issues, she seemed to suggest in this entry. She didn’t want to be a burden on Mike, Katie, or especially Patrick. Yet, the final sentence on the page was where Clara allowed herself some solace in coming up with a solution: Kyle will spare all.
What did that mean?
Kyle will spare all.
Sounded like Kyle was the answer to everyone’s problems. Kyle would lift the burden because he would be getting rid of the problem.
&n
bsp; Kyle later told police with regard to taking Robert Schwartz’s life: “I do pity Robert, for he was a living creature. But only so much. He deserved to die. Maybe not in the way I delivered it, but somehow, nonetheless. I still hear his voice and see his smile when I told him that I knew. . . .”
It was that “and?” Schwartz had supposedly muttered to Kyle as they talked about Clara that riled Kyle the most.
“I will never forget that. Clara is now safe. Robert will never harm her again. Whatever happens to us, we will survive.”
CHAPTER 58
LOUDOUN COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE investigator Greg Locke had just joined the LCSO in August 2001, after a career that had started out as Locke wanting to dedicate his civil-service life to fighting fires. That career path began back in 1974, when Locke was inspired to join the local Fairfax, Virginia, fire department as a junior member. From there, Locke followed along a path that took him to the police academy so he could qualify as a firefighter. It was a requirement. As many dedicated cops later say, one thing led to another, and Locke found himself chasing felons instead of flames.
Locke was actually in school that day, taking a weeklong class, when he took a call on his pager about the crime scene developing over at the Schwartz residence.
“Look, you guys got that place pretty much secured and under control,” Locke told his supervisor, who was at the crime scene. “Why don’t I begin by canvassing the neighborhood and talking to neighbors?”
His supervisor told him to go for it.
Since Locke had transferred from the crime lab to the homicide division that August, this was his second homicide case. The first had been the tragic shooting of an elderly woman in Frederick County.
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