I'd Kill for You

by M. William Phelps

  Kyle said he’d do anything for Clara. “She loves her father, but he doesn’t love her. He’s abused her. He’s made death threats against her and given her lemons with sulfuric acid.”

  Both investigators kind of looked at Kyle as the interview progressed, as if to say, “Right, kid.” They didn’t even need to tell Kyle that Clara had already given him up. After a period of staring and not much being said, Kyle, instead, offered, “Okay, you guys want to know the whole story, right?”

  Of course, they did. It would make things much easier.

  Kyle took a moment. He was caught.

  “I knew that they had me,” Kyle said later. “So I told it like it happened.”

  He focused on the six voices plaguing him, the constant belief that Clara was going to die if she went to the Virgin Islands, and that pork chop story. He said Clara vomited once after eating something her father had prepared. He told the story of how he knocked at the door and how he walked in. He recounted how Schwartz got nasty with him and how Schwartz smiled at him. He detailed how Schwartz laughed in his face and backhanded him.

  The scuffle.

  The sword.

  The blood.

  “I’m a vampire.... When I got a taste of his blood in my mouth, I went into a rampage.”

  Washing his sword.

  “Katie knew what was going to happen. With Mike, I told him the less he knew, the better. Katie cleaned [the blood off] my face in the car. . . . It had to be done.” He then told them where they could locate the evidence to back up what he was saying.

  When he was finished writing out a full confession (in which he signed his name followed by the word “Demon”), Kyle was told he would be indicted on first-degree murder charges—they could sort out the details and decide if he was crazy at a later date.

  As Kyle sat in his cell by himself, he thought about the events. Why hadn’t Clara come to visit him? Where was she in all of this?

  I’ll do three years in a mental hospital and be out! Kyle told himself. I feel deserted. He’d found out after the murder about the inheritance Clara was set to get. Clara is going to get that life insurance money and count me out of it.

  That quilt made up of the four of them was already coming apart.

  “I never knew about Clara’s [so-called] inheritance until after I was locked up,” Kyle claimed. Although Clara had told Mike and Katie and Patrick that she stood to receive almost a half-million dollars when the OG died, she never once mentioned it to Kyle (according to him). “Then I find out there is, like, millions in liquid assets and all sorts of money and it hits me. I finally knew why I was locked up!”

  The sucker.

  Clara was very careful whom she told about the inheritance. She revealed it to those people she knew might bite at the chance to get their hands on some of it by participating. But with Kyle, she had to make an emotional plea. She knew that if she ever told him about the inheritance, he might figure out he was being used.

  CHAPTER 72

  CLARA WAS STEWING. As those days after she was grilled by investigators passed, there was an always-looking-over-her-shoulder feeling surrounding everything she did, everywhere she went. In her journal, dated December 13, Clara wrote about Patrick and his family being her “new family” and “I love him.” Strange she wrote this about a guy who—with his parents in tow—told her to her face that he wanted nothing to do with her anymore.

  It had been the “first time in days,” Clara wrote, that she didn’t have to “lock” her door for fear of her own safety. She claimed that her family was treating her like a killer: I might as well have done it. . . .

  She raged about not ever changing the way she was—for anybody. She would never become somebody else to make another person happy.

  On December 14, the Washington Post named Clara as being connected to Mike, Kyle, and Katie, just stopping short of calling her a “suspect.” Post writers Josh White and Maria Glod reported, Law enforcement sources said detectives are investigating whether [Dr. Schwartz had been murdered because] he would not allow Clara to associate with [Kyle, Mike, and Katie]. Clara Schwartz has not been accused of any wrongdoing.

  What pissed Kyle off when he saw the newspaper was that the Post had reported that he “was known to some as ‘Demon.’” This was a name that Kyle wanted to keep private at the time. Kyle’s biological father was interviewed for the article and told reporters Kyle had “serious, serious mental issues” and had been off his meds for quite some time.

  The LCSO was working diligently behind the scenes, subpoenaing phone records, writing warrants, and getting ready to dig deep into Clara’s life to see how much she was involved in her father’s murder—if at all. Did she sanction the murder? Did she convince Kyle to do it? Was she an unsuspecting victim in it? Did her fantasy world clash with a man who could not interpret reality from fantasy? Had Kyle taken it upon himself to kill Dr. Schwartz without her knowledge? These were all questions the LCSO had to answer before bringing an arrest warrant to prosecutors with Clara’s name on it.

  Locke and Spitler believed she was as guilty as Kyle. The circumstantial evidence alone was overwhelming. Spitler wrote up one of the warrants to search Clara’s dorm room and get that computer of hers into the forensics lab so they could get inside and see what she had been up to online. Everything, whether you delete it or not, can be extracted from a computer’s hard drive—the only safe way to destroy data is to drill holes through the drive itself. Save for Clara taking a Black & Decker to hers, they were going to find a cache of evidence.

  The main probable cause for the warrant, Spitler pointed out, consisted of the communication between the players: Mike, Katie, Kyle, and Clara, and how Clara hadn’t told anyone she knew her father was dead and who might have done it. Clara knew her father had been murdered, the warrant spelled out, as early as December 9. The LCSO believed that the information they could get from Clara’s dorm room and her computer would further prove that she was involved. Kyle had told them that he spoke to Clara about the murder online, in chat rooms and via e-mails.

  Meanwhile, Clara detailed in her journal what was going on around her. She claimed they had “raided” her dorm and “stole” her computer.

  I will not be so stupid in the future, she wrote.

  She went on to note how “they” had “likely raided” her storage unit, too, adding how she was going to “demand” her “religious staff” back. Oddly, she then mentioned: They have discovered ‘the other.’ I will die for my religion. She believed law enforcement was tapping her phone. Yet, beyond this, it was her own family, she complained, that the police would have to protect her from the most: [Because one of them] threatened to kill me + make my life miserable. He also choked me + placed his finger on my windpipe. She said because of that and the treatment they had shown her, none of them would ever be “invited to a wedding, if there is one.”

  CHAPTER 73

  HERE’S THE THING about the unexpected, abrupt end of a life: To those who truly loved the person, his bodily presence might be here one day, gone the next. However, in those days right after the death, the unbearable pain of his memory is permanent, raw, and palpable. Robert Schwartz’s favorite shirt was still hanging in the mudroom of his home. His shoes, with horse shit and dirt still stuck into the cracks of the soles, his hat, his keys, his closet filled with his personal belongings, and his wallet—all of the things in life that defined him were still there in the Stone House for those loved ones to touch and feel. The kids could smell him and see him as they walked from one room to the next. They could feel his bold personality resonating throughout every room of the house. His things, indeed, were there, but Robert Schwartz himself was still missing.

  Patrick, Robert’s younger brother, was down at the Stone House during those days right after Robert’s savage murder. The place was being cleaned. Pat did some dishes. Then he got on his hands and knees and scrubbed his brother’s blood off the wooden floor.

  “I threw out the last ca
n of beans that my brother ate,” Pat Schwartz recalled later.

  Clara came by.

  “You want to go for a walk?” he asked. He wanted to be there for his niece and comfort her during such a terrible time.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  As they walked, Clara opened up. “Do you know that he was trying to poison me?” she said. “On several occasions, he tried.”

  Pat was taken aback by his niece’s statement. In truth, he didn’t know what to say. “I saw this as she didn’t know what reality is,” he commented later.

  The main problem with Clara’s accusation, her uncle Pat surmised, was that Robert Schwartz was a biophysicist. “He’s professionally trained. He’s a smart guy. If he wanted to poison her, he would have poisoned her.”

  She’d be dead.

  “Look, Clara,” Uncle Pat said as they walked. “This doesn’t ring true with me.”

  “But . . . but ... this is my life. I had to be careful about everything he was doing, because he was trying to kill me.”

  Paranoid, Pat considered, listening to his niece. She’s paranoid.

  And delusional.

  Over the course of the few days that Patrick Schwartz and his wife spent with Clara after Robert’s death, he observed how Clara was going in “ten different directions at the same time.” She had “confused thinking patterns. . . .”

  And this caused great concern for Robert’s brother and sister-in-law. They wondered what Clara was going to do, and they worried that she’d harm herself.

  CHAPTER 74

  AS ROBERT SCHWARTZ was memorialized and laid to rest on one end of town, Kyle Hulbert appeared in front of a magistrate on the other side of town. During that brief December 18 proceeding, Kyle talked about his condition of suffering from hallucinations for as long as he could recall, and spending the last ten years of his life in and out of mental institutions and foster homes. He claimed that Schwartz’s murder was “not premeditated.” He explained that he should have had “more control” over his emotions, but he had snapped. He said Mike and Katie “did not know” what he was going to do.

  Kyle, Katie, and Mike were charged with murder. Mike and Katie had buried themselves by telling law enforcement they had been involved in the planning, getaway, and cover-up. They were all being held in Leesburg Jail without bond.

  During that memorial mass held for Robert Schwartz, his son, Jesse, spoke highly of a man “who wouldn’t want to be remembered as a murder victim.” There were approximately 150 people in attendance, so it was clear to anyone there that Robert, despite what Clara had said about him, had touched the lives of many.

  Monsignor Thomas Cassidy put the pain everyone was feeling into context and words by saying how it was the “way in which he was slain [that] leaves everyone bewildered and horrified.” The good priest then likened Schwartz’s death with the World Trade Center attacks, saying how it “mattered little whether the assault on human dignity occurred” in New York City, at the Pentagon, or “in the bucolic hills of Mount Gilead. Such heinous realities appall our sense of human decency. . . .”

  “I remember him not as a man who won awards,” Jesse Schwartz said of his father, holding back the tears, standing in front of the large crowd, “but a man who wore an oil-stained shirt with blue jeans.”

  Michelle Schwartz was a wreck. Her world had crashed and burned with the death of her mother and now her father. She spoke of a man she adored, loved, and honored. She told the crowd that she was her father’s daughter, his little princess.

  Clara did not speak. Instead, she documented the day in her journal later that night, mentioning how she had observed a “distinction” during the burial that “bothered” her “a lot.” She felt that everyone in her family was “accepted,” but her. She felt shunned that their “boyfriends” were “welcome,” but hers was not. I am evil and to blame, she wrote. In conclusion, Clara reckoned, I am not to trust anyone I did before....

  Clara had taken her father’s last moments on earth during his burial and—once again—made it about her.

  CHAPTER 75

  A COLLECTION OF evidence was uncovered inside Mike’s home. Law enforcement seized what seemed to them to be the makings of a group of dark and twisted kids playing around with the occult. Investigators found various knives, documents, and swords, which they claimed had been used in “killing and human sacrifice in a Wiccan fashion.” Although quite erroneous and rather over-reported by the media, the case was turned into a “coven” of witches running around the Leesburg region in search of fresh blood and violent confrontations. A story like this, even in its infancy, could send the media into a frenzy of speculation and wonder—and it certainly did.

  The X that Kyle had haphazardly carved in the back of Schwartz’s neck became the talking point of the murder having “occult overtones,” and seen as part of a much broader, more organized satanic religious cult that involved Kyle, with members Katie, Mike, Clara, and several others standing right behind him. This was, of course, all blown way out of proportion. But the fact remained: All eyes were on the Schwartz home and Clara’s possible connection. Had Kyle, acting as her assassin within this group of occultist peons, murdered her father under orders from the high priestess? Though the media stopped just short of describing Clara as a suspect, word was that law enforcement had been gathering evidence of a conspiracy to murder Robert Schwartz—his Wiccan witch daughter leading the pack, barking out orders, running the entire operation.

  Perhaps sensing this same finger being pointed at her, Clara called the LCSO on December 19. Investigator Greg Locke wasn’t around. He returned the call later that same day when he got back to the office.

  Locke recorded the call. He and Spitler had a strong suspicion that the more they spoke to Clara, the more they’d uncover her involvement. It was all there; the LCSO just needed to pull it out of her.

  “How are you doing?” Locke asked Clara’s sister, Michelle, who answered the phone.

  “I’m fine.”

  He asked for Clara.

  “I’ll get her for you.”

  Clara said she’d just remembered some information that might be useful and wanted to share it. The feeling was that Clara had been experiencing the pressure of becoming a suspect. She felt it inside her home, in the community, and certainly within herself. So Clara became proactive on her own behalf, hoping to put out fires before they became downright blazing infernos.

  She first explained that she had a “thyroid appointment” the following day and could stop by the office if he wanted, or simply over the phone tell him what she remembered.

  Locke told her to spit it out now. After all, tomorrow, he knew, she could be lawyered up.

  “In talking to Jesse about this event, my memory is not incredibly good anymore,” Clara explained. She went on to add that she had been speaking with Jesse that previous weekend and “asked him what would happen if he was to end up in jail, and he said something about since he’s a danger ... he would end up in solitary confinement.”

  Locke was confused.

  She’s talking about Jesse?

  “I think this happened Sunday or Monday. . . . I think we were talking about the murder weapon, but I thought they were doing more like hypotheticals, because with . . .” She was stumbling over her words, clearly bouncing around, not making much sense. “I remember saying something like, ‘If the sword smells bad, then perfume it,’ because I think we were doing stuff like, ‘What if the sword smells bad?’ and ‘What if the blade is damaged from heat of something?’”

  Locke piped in, “Now, let me back up just a minute.... Was this Kyle you were talking about?” (Clara had mentioned “Jesse.”)

  “I think it was Mike,” she said. Then she explained that she believed they were talking about the murder weapon—that was the hard point here.

  Locke wanted clarification about the timing. Was this before or after the murder?

  Before, she said.

  Clara continued, saying how she thou
ght Mike, at one point that weekend, said, “ ‘I think your old man is dead.’ And I said, ‘I don’t believe you. I won’t believe you until the cops come knocking at my door.’”

  This was great. Clara was setting herself up with an alibi. Locke made sure the phone call was indeed being recorded.

  It was.

  As Locke tried to ask questions, Clara kept interrupting. The argument she was trying to get across was that Mike and Katie and Kyle had told her that her father was dead, but she did not believe them.

  So Locke asked if she had called her father that weekend.

  “I had no reason to,” she answered.

  Strange—they’re telling her that her father is dead, yet she’s now saying she had no reason to phone him?

  Locke made a note.

  They talked about Clara’s schedule that weekend and when she was expected to call home and when she expected the OG to pick her up at school or come and meet her for dinner. She tried to say that calling home cost a lot of money, so she only did it when absolutely necessary. This had been a contentious issue between Clara and her father. There had been a phone bill for $1,000 once and he had gotten really pissed at her.

  This led them into a discussion about money and her father providing her with funds to live on. She had a job that summer at Bob Evans, but it didn’t amount to much.

  Then they talked about who owed Clara money and how much. She said she had never lent Kyle any money, besides that one time she sent him the check for $60.

  Locke maintained a calm, peaceful, content-to-listen demeanor that clearly made Clara feel comfortable. She kept talking.

  “Do you remember Kyle talking to you about other victims ?” Locke asked when he found an opening.

  “No,” she responded, “I don’t think he mentioned anything else.”