I'd Kill for You

by M. William Phelps

  “Maybe,” she offered. “I’ve been out of it, like I said. You know, he didn’t give a date—just that, ‘I did it.’”

  “What do you think should happen to Kyle?”

  “He should go to prison.”

  “For how long?”

  “Life, probably.”

  “You think he’d kill again?”

  “He might for a just cause,” Clara said.

  That was an extremely telling answer for Investigator Locke, who took this as a clear indication that Clara believed there could be “just cause” to murder.

  From that point forward, Clara explained one of her theories. She said Kyle might have gone through one of her journals and had taken what was written and had blown it all out of proportion to suit his own twisted needs. She called Kyle the “warrior type.” Then she described how she had been in and out of the hospital for terrible migraines recently. She said she wasn’t at all angry with Kyle because “I don’t get angry anymore.” Since her mother passed, Clara said, she’d had a tough time with relationships in general. She would sometimes take friends out to her mother’s grave and introduce them to her. She called Kyle a “loner,” adding that she could relate to aspects of herself in him. She said Katie was her “twin sister,” whom she “truly loved.” She then talked about the fact that Mike liked weapons, although he was a nonviolent, “philosophical” person.

  “We’re social within the antisocial,” she said, referring to the four of them.

  After being asked, Clara said Mike and Katie should get “suspended” sentences or even “parole” for their roles in her father’s murder.

  “You know, I thought Kyle could do it, but really didn’t think he would.”

  Typical for Clara, she then changed the subject abruptly, saying, “I carry runes.” Runes are stones, letters, or even symbols, generally used in Viking or Nordic and Celtic tradition.

  After Clara said this, she reached into her pocket and “rattled” something, Locke heard, but he couldn’t see what it was.

  “This whole semester,” Clara continued, “I felt like something would go wrong.... I had an epiphany in early to mid October, near the twenty-third of the month. I also had a vision of my mom dying before she did. I have also been having terrible nightmares.”

  Locke asked about her supposed visions.

  “Well, my vision recently stated, ‘Your dad is going to die within two months. . . .’”

  Locke stared at Clara. There sat this young woman in her frumpy clothing, rumpled, unkempt hair, no (or very little) makeup, working her smarmy attitude, as if she could somehow sit down and explain everything away and her life was just going to go on as it had. Clara was narcissistic to the core—her hubris so overwhelming that she didn’t even notice how stupid her answers sounded coming from her lips. This conversation was all about Clara and what the people in her life had done to her: Poor Clara Schwartz. No one understood her. No one treated her right. No one understood what she was feeling. No one cared. She lived in darkness.

  Thus far, Clara had never once said she was sad or upset that her father had been brutally stabbed to death, that he was dead, and his life cut short. She never once said she hated her supposed friend Kyle Hulbert for killing her father. She never once stated that she wished it had never happened. Instead, Clara sat there in front of these cops and believed she was talking circles around them.

  “I think Kyle snapped,” Clara explained. “He even told me he was a danger to everyone.”

  “Has Kyle, do you think, ever killed anyone before your father?”

  “He said he has. He mentioned it before.”

  “What did he tell you about your father’s death?”

  “He said my dad asked, ‘Why?’ And he told my father, ‘Because you hurt my sister.’”

  “Your father asked, ‘Why?’”

  Clara said: “He just smiled at Kyle.”

  The conversation turned into a rapid-fire back-and-forth exchange. Locke was keeping up the pressure as Clara began to fall on her words and simultaneously added details to the items that Locke found most interesting.

  “I wish Kate never met Kyle. . . . All of this could have been avoided. Kate and Mike are good people, but Kyle can be very persuasive. I bet he either persuaded them to drive him to my house or he paid them. I even gave Kyle a check to start a bank account.”

  “When was that?” Locke wondered. This was significant. Clara had known Kyle for several months. In all of that time, when was it that she “gave” him the money?

  “On December sixth,” she said. “I sent it next-day delivery so Kyle would have it for that Friday.”

  “Why?”

  “So he could start an account! He said he would pay me back soon.”

  “Does Mike or Kate owe you any money?”

  “Mike owes me, like, fifty-five, and Kate owes me, like, thirty.”

  Locke took a moment. He thought this thing through a bit. Then he asked, “Now, explain to me why, again, you would overnight a check to Kyle?”

  “I don’t understand how Western Union works, but I do know how to send a check.”

  “Why did Kyle want this money again?”

  Clara changed her story—again, adding more to it.

  “To buy a do-rag and some gloves.” She then laughed and said, “I told Kyle, ‘I don’t know any black people. . . .’” More seriously, she then said, “Maybe Kyle was planning something ?” She said this as though figuring it out just then as she explained it to Locke. Like the entire scenario Kyle had instigated and it had just now made sense to her. “He said something about getting gloves and something for his head. He told me that he needed something for his head so he wouldn’t leave anything at the scene. I blew him off. I was tired. I really wasn’t paying much attention. All I remember was that he was going to use the money to charge up his phone card. It sounded like he was rambling.”

  In his report of this interview, Greg Locke underlined and made bold this entire section where Clara admitted that Kyle Hulbert explained to her that he needed the tools to cover up the murder of her father and that he needed Clara to send him the money to buy those tools. Her explanation for this, as she told Locke and his colleague, was that she didn’t quite hear him or take it all in because she was tired.

  “What were you doing on December eighth?” Locke asked next.

  “I slept from about eleven in the morning to four that afternoon.” She claimed to be at JMU.

  “Which night was it that you spoke to Kyle about this check and the gloves?”

  “Either Tuesday (December 4) or Wednesday. I called him. The reason I recall not paying attention is because I remember the tiredness.”

  They talked about the check and an e-mail Clara received that same week from one of her professors regarding one of her grades being extremely low and how worried she was to tell the OG about it.

  Locke was piecing this thing together. It felt like a conspiracy. It had all the makings of a murder-for-hire plot. There was motive and means and muscle.

  It all fit.

  “If you didn’t think that Kyle was serious about killing your father,” Locke asked, “why did you send him a check?”

  Clara didn’t hesitate to answer: “I zoned in when he started talking about the check. . . .” She then must have realized how rash that sounded as it came out. She added: “I think that you are trying to get information about this while I am tired.... Some of that money was for Mike to buy gas to go and pick Kyle up in [Maryland] and bring him back.”

  Sounded to Locke like Clara Schwartz funded the entire plan.

  “You need to take a break?” Locke asked.

  “Yes,” Clara said.

  CHAPTER 69

  CLARA TALKED ABOUT feeling “abandoned” in her journal entry dated December 12, 2001. She felt “segregated” and “locked in a cell” with a “sentence” of “solitary confinement.” There was that common word she used repeatedly to describe her life: “isolated.” The
pessimism and sadness she experienced, however, was not because her father was gone and now she was totally parentless. According to Clara’s own words, it was because she had “witnessed the demise” of three horses “years ago.” Those memories came flooding back, “plaguing” her, Clara explained. She now blamed herself for the death of one horse in particular, Kee, who had been acting strange all that day, especially when Clara went to feed it. But then Clara said she “forgot to check” on the horse on the night it died. She thought she might have been “able to save” the horse, but it died, anyway.

  CHAPTER 70

  THEY TOOK A ten-minute break, Locke knowing that his time with Clara was now limited. She was fading. He didn’t want an abrasive interview to follow. He needed Clara fresh. He had her on the ropes, however, and now was a good time to poke her with serious questions that seemed directed at her potential guilt.

  Locke brought up Kyle as soon as they sat back down. He wanted to understand the conversation Clara said she’d had with Kyle about the gloves, the do-rag, and the money.

  “He told me,” Clara blurted out. “We talked about it. I didn’t think that ... Look, maybe he would just scare him a bit . . . just talk. Kyle said he was going armed. Kyle said he went there armed.”

  “What was it that you thought your father and Kyle would talk about?”

  “The poisoning!”

  “Well, did you think that Kyle was trying to scare or intimidate your father?”

  “”Whatever!” Clara snapped angrily.

  “Okay, let me get this straight. Why would Kyle need gloves just to, as you said, ‘go and talk’ to your father?”

  Fair question.

  “He’s weird like that.”

  “Why do you think Kyle told you to give him money to buy gloves and a head covering and he would get your father out of your life?”

  Clara was agitated with this line of questioning. She was shifting in her seat more than ever, feeling the pressure Locke was putting on her. However, she didn’t back down.

  “I honestly thought he was going to use the money for the bank card.” Then, as an afterthought, “He did say something about borrowing gloves. About that check ... Kyle told me he was leaving [Mike’s] on Saturday and I didn’t want Mike to get the check.”

  There was a lull—a moment of quite repose. Clara was thinking . . . deeply. She knew she needed to come up with something that was going to get this cop off her back. Locke was in a perfect position to keep pressuring Clara for answers. She had contradicted herself so many times, he could ratchet up the weight of the circumstances by threatening arrest.

  But then Clara spoke again. “I want to go straight,” she said. “In my heart of hearts, I knew he was going to do that”—referring to Kyle killing her father, Locke wrote in his report—“though it would be more like . . .” She stopped. “It wasn’t like I was paying him to kill him. . . . [He] was using the money to pay back a friend. Kyle was supposed to give some of the money to Mike for gas. . . .”

  “So the money wasn’t necessarily to kill your dad, but you knew that Kyle was going to?” Locke wanted Clara to be clear on this very important point.

  “Yes. But he didn’t use the word ‘kill.’” She paused. She stared Locke in the eyes. “Does this make me a bad person? Sometimes I thought it would be better if he killed him.”

  “Did you think it was a matter of time before it was you or him?”

  “You are putting words in my mouth. I feel like you are pushing me into a corner. What would you have done if I didn’t come down today?”

  Locke didn’t answer.

  “I’m tired,” Clara said.

  They took another break.

  Clara dropped her head onto the table and slept. Fifteen minutes later, she popped back up. Locke noted that she appeared “refreshed” and “alert.”

  “I’m ready,” Clara declared.

  Locke looked at Investigator Spitler.

  Strange girl ...

  Clara explained that as she took her little catnap, she thought about how she could be of more help to Locke and Spitler. She said she’d gone through a lot of “what-ifs” since her father’s death. She again mentioned that vision she’d had, saying how “maybe deep down” she now believed that “maybe” Kyle had “done it. You have to understand Kyle. He’s controlling. He insisted that I call him every day.”

  “Okay, which day did you last speak to Kyle?”

  “I think it might have been Tuesday [after the murder]. I questioned everything . . . but thought he was bullshitting me. . . .”

  “When do you think Mike knew what Kyle was going to do?”

  Clara didn’t hesitate once again to offer up her friend Mike: “Maybe when he picked Kyle up on Thursday.”

  They talked about the prospect of Clara getting some counseling or if she had ever gone to see a therapist. She said she had tried it after her mother’s death, but it didn’t work.

  Locke asked, “Listen, Clara, how did it make you feel, you know, after Kyle told you what he had done to your father?”

  “I wasn’t listening. It’s like a horse I had when I was young.... If I had paid more attention to it, she would still be alive today. Same as if I had paid more attention to Kyle, my father would be alive.”

  Clara seemed to drift off. Locke noted in his report that she stared at him and Spitler oddly, as if looking through them. Then she randomly said, “The road has been fixed? Can I assume the road is better?”

  There was a “WTF” moment there as they tried to figure out if she was speaking in metaphor or had really meant what she said. Then it dawned on Locke.

  “The road out to your house ... oh, yeah, it appeared to be better than it was.”

  “Clara, I have to ask you, are you under the influence of drugs or alcohol right now?”

  “No.”

  She was finished for the day.

  Locke escorted Clara into the break room inside the LCSO, where her sister and brother were waiting. As they walked into the room, Clara turned to Locke and said, “I need to ask you a question.”

  “Go ahead. . . .”

  “No, in private.” Then to Michelle: “Do you mind if I talk to him alone for one moment?”

  “No, go ahead,” Michelle said.

  Locke took Clara out to the main lobby. Nobody was there.

  “Is this okay?” Locke asked.

  “Yeah . . . ,” Clara said. Then: “Can she cut me out?”

  “I’m not really sure what you’re referring to?” Locke asked. It was an odd statement.

  “If my sister is pissed at me, can she cut me out of the will?”

  “Again, Miss Schwartz, I am not really certain what you mean.”

  “My sister is the executor of the estate, and some of my family is really upset with me. If Michelle is upset with me, too, can she cut me out of the will?”

  Before Locke could even respond, Clara broke into a rant about her father’s estate and its worth, saying how the house was recently appraised at a “half million and Dad said we could probably sell it for six hundred thousand. His stocks are worth about seven hundred thousand. That’s about one-point-two million! That would be almost four hundred thousand each. Could she cut me out of that? I mean, the money would go into a trust until I was twenty-five, but I would probably leave it there longer. I’ll probably buy a house or something.”

  “I’m not familiar with the details of wills and estates—you’d be better off asking an attorney about that.”

  Clara hugged Locke and then walked back to the break room.

  As Clara reunited with her family, Locke could only think that Clara was picking up on doubts that her sister must have had about her potential role in the murder. Locke had a feeling even since first talking to Michelle that she had questions surrounding her sister, Clara.

  “Am I going to be able to get any money if my sister thinks that I am involved in this?” Locke believed Clara was asking herself.

  “And that told me o
ne thing—she’d had something to do with it.”

  CHAPTER 71

  KYLE HULBERT WAS in custody and talking. On the same night Clara gave him up, Kyle told investigators that on the previous Saturday night, his plan consisted of nothing more than to “go see Mike, Katie, and Clara.”

  Murder was not on the agenda.

  Kyle told them when and where he met Clara. During his “oral statement” to LCSO investigators John W. Russ and Mike Grau, Kyle said all his friend Mike did was drop him off at the fork in the road near the OG’s house. Kyle said he went to Mount Gilead that evening to see Clara. He had no idea she wasn’t going to be home. He explained how he had knocked on the front door, but there was no answer. So, instead, he went around to the back of the house, where he saw the OG’s truck. After knocking on the glass door and getting no answer there, “I walked back to Mike’s car and found that they were stuck.”

  While they were trying to free the car from the mud, a rock flew up and cut his eyebrow, Kyle explained, giving a reason why he had a gash there.

  “That’s how I got this injury,” he added, pointing to it.

  Not a bad lie.

  Kyle next said he went to the OG’s neighbors. Called a tow truck. They got the car out and hit the ATM. Then he, Mike, and Katie went to Katie’s friend’s house to hang out. Beyond that, not much else happened.

  Kyle talked about being in foster care and how he was protective of people he viewed as “family,” meaning Mike and Katie and Clara. He claimed to have been taking his medication regularly. Because he took the drug Neurontin, an anti-hallucinogen, he was in good spirits, generally speaking. If he ever felt as though a violent episode was in his future, Kyle stated, he would simply seclude himself somewhere until it passed. He had control of his emotions, he seemed to say.

  Investigators asked about Clara and his relationship with her.

  “I spoke to her last Tuesday. . . . She sounded like she had been crying. She said her sister was hysterical because they had just found out that their father was dead. The school was watching Clara, afraid that she would hurt herself because she had done it in the past.”