Seeing a clear opening, Locke asked, “What about your dad? What kind of soul does he have?”
“Well, I know Catholics don’t believe in it”—actually, Catholics do believe in it—“but I think he should go to Purgatory for a little bit and then go to Heaven. Purgatory is for a Christian to pay a penalty.”
“I’m familiar with Purgatory,” Locke said.
“I think, overall, he was a good, good man, because I think he—if—I wonder whether this all would have happened if Mom stayed alive, if Mom hadn’t smoked, stopped smoking, you know, would have lived, because I think most of it can be attributed to—”
“That time in Purgatory, would that be for what he did to you?” Locke asked.
“Yes . . . and any wrong that he did to the rest of society—anything else that none of us know about, that he kept in his heart, because I don’t think to my knowledge that he ever went and confessed or whatever. . . .”
Clara didn’t sound like the admitted atheist that she claimed to be—apparently, she believed in some of the tenets of the Church.
Locke wanted to know where Clara saw her soul.
“My soul is on earth.” Then she went on to say that she believed her soul would one day end up in Purgatory, too—once again contradicting her disbelief. “But . . . Kyle will go straight to Hell. But that the others will spend a couple of millennia in Purgatory . . . I mean, Mike did help him, so Mike will go to Hell, but I think Kate will spend time in Purgatory and then go up to Heaven.”
Just about five hours after they started, Locke indicated he was done.
CHAPTER 79
IT WOULD TAKE some time, but by February 1, 2002, Investigator John Russ obtained a first-degree murder warrant for Clara. Russ, along with Greg Locke and Mike Grau, took a ride to JMU and were told by campus police that Clara was inside her dorm room. Like most of the time, she was probably alone.
As soon as Clara opened the door—she was on the phone at the time—and saw Russ standing there, she tried closing the door in his face.
Russ said, “Come on.” He stepped in front of the door so it couldn’t close all the way. “Don’t you do that. Get off the phone now, please, Miss Schwartz.”
Clara played stupid. “I thought you were a reporter,” she said, opening the door and letting the investigators in.
“That’s nice,” Russ said. “You are under arrest, Miss Schwartz. . . . Get your shoes and coat on.”
Locke looked on as Russ read Clara her Miranda rights. Inside Clara’s dorm, Locke noticed, “were items indicative of Wiccan and gothic ceremonies.” For Clara, nothing had changed since her father’s death and the pressure the LCSO put on her. She was still practicing her witchcraft, thinking she was the high priestess of the new order.
Russ escorted Clara to a waiting car outside; the others followed behind. Along the way, Clara asked Russ what she was being arrested for.
“First-degree murder!” Russ said.
On the way to the JMU Campus Police barracks, sitting in the backseat of the cruiser, handcuffed, Clara said, “I want a lawyer.”
Too little, too late, but what the hell!
Sitting by her side, Locke explained her rights again. Then she asked why they were headed to the campus police station and not the LCSO?
Locke said she would have to be booked there on campus first.
Protocol. Jurisdiction.
After they settled up with the campus police and Clara used the restroom, they headed out to the LCSO. En route, with Locke sitting again by her side, Clara, without being prompted, said, “I had a dream that I was going to be arrested.”
“Yeah . . . ,” Locke responded.
Clara stared out the window and watched the trees go by as cars passed. Men and women were out in the world going about their daily routines. Life went on. Clara, though, was going to jail. Was it real to her by this point?
“I also dreamed that my father’s grave was desecrated,” Clara added when Locke didn’t say much in response. “The only difference [in my dream] was that I was arrested at the Stone House.”
“We cannot ask you any questions,” Russ said from the front seat. “You’ve asked for an attorney, Miss Schwartz.”
Again, keeping the conversation focused on her and her life, Clara ignored the comment and instead babbled on about school and how she had cut back on her classes since going back. She mentioned something about a powwow at the Stone House coming up that weekend with Jesse, Michelle, and other family members, although she had chosen not to go.
“Why?” Locke asked.
“Because of everything going on with the family.”
“Was that because of the Washington Post article?” Locke wondered. It was clear from that published article that Clara and her siblings were at odds and Clara was somehow being ostracized. Again, the article fell just short of naming Clara as a suspect in her father’s murder. Her family knew, however.
They spoke of menial things for a time; then Clara asked, “What will happen if this is all determined to be a misunderstanding ?” She was almost smirking, laughing out of the corner of her mouth, as if to say the charges would never stick. It was that Gen X sense of entitlement that she seemed to possess. Clara could not stifle it, no matter how hard she tried.
“Not quite sure what you mean,” Locke said. “But there are several steps in this process. You’ll go before a magistrate tonight. They will determine if there is a bond.” Then Locke explained how there would be a preliminary (like a probable cause) hearing, a grand jury, and then a trial, if it went that far.
“What are my plea-bargaining possibilities?”
Locke shook his head. Here she was, on her way to being processed for first-degree murder, already trying to cut a damn deal.
“You’ll have to discuss that with your attorney, Clara.”
“What are the different types of offenses as applied to my case?”
“You are being charged with first-degree murder.” It was as if she just didn’t get it. Locke explained the lesser charges associated with homicides: second-degree murder and manslaughter. “But you need to discuss all this with your attorney, not me.”
As they pulled into the magistrate’s office on East Market Street in downtown Leesburg, Clara said, “Huh, this is where I went to see a shrink.” She recognized the building.
“Come on, let’s go,” Locke said, helping Clara out of the vehicle.
The magistrate saw Clara right away. He explained the process more clearly than Locke had. There would be no bond. Not now. Probably not ever. Clara was going into the local county lockup until her case was given to a prosecutor and her attorney—appointed or hired by her family—and the process of justice was initiated.
“Do you have any dependencies on drugs or alcohol, ma’am?” the magistrate asked as a final question.
Clara didn’t speak right away. She stood, silent. Then, after a few moments, she said: “No.” It seemed she was finished, but then she added, “Wait . . . although it can be debated as to whether I have a mental illness.”
They all looked at each other. What a strange comment to make right after you were processed on first-degree murder charges for having a role in your own father’s death.
Clara was released to the county jail, where, it being Friday night, she would spend the weekend before any action in her case went forward.
CHAPTER 80
PUNXSUTAWNEY PHIL WAS busy in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, searching for his shadow northwest of where Clara was being held on Saturday, February 2, 2002. She was in the tank with several other inmates, who were waiting to be sent to a state prison or let out on bond. One woman watched as Clara made a phone call to a student friend at JMU. The woman cozied up near Clara so she could hear the call—or at least Clara’s side of it.
Clara tried the same number several times, but the boy was not around. When she was finished, she sat down next to the woman.
“I met him after the murder,” Clara said, referring to t
he boy she was trying to get ahold of. “He knows all of the secrets.”
“Why are you locked up?” the woman asked.
“I messed up. I was five minutes late to the movies on the day my dad was killed and I didn’t have a ticket stub.... I told my friend Kyle I was being mentally and physically abused by my father and he took it upon himself. . . . He was going to take the blame because he could be ruled mentally insane. I was going to introduce Kyle to a game. This game is led by this person named Mike, but he’s in Russia.” Clara paused. Then, as an afterthought, she felt she needed to add what was the only truthful thing she might have told this woman on this day: “After I got what I needed out of them (Mike, Katie, Patrick, and Kyle), I get rid of them.”
The woman was staggered by this last comment. Clara’s case had been big news in town, so most everyone knew the bare facts. The woman was reeling from what Clara had just told her, but then Clara added, “We talked about the homicide before. . . .”
“Who do you mean ‘we’?”
“Kyle and me . . . we had planned ... to go into the house and kill him, my dad.” But Kyle went alone, she elaborated. There was some indication that Clara decided she didn’t want to go through with it.
“Did your father fight?” the woman asked.
“Oh yes.”
As Clara talked about not wanting to go through with the murder, the woman wanted to know, “Why didn’t you call your dad?”
“I didn’t really believe him (Kyle). If someone told you they were going to kill your dad, would you believe him?”
“If I had friends like you, I would!” the woman said.
“It was all because I was mad at my father. [Kyle] called me, you know, and he told me that he killed my father with a one-piece ninja sword. You can go online and look at Atlantic Cutlery and you can see the sword there that he used. I don’t like that type of sword, actually, the one-piece. I like a staff better.”
The woman listened.
“He (my father) was abusing me because he didn’t like me. You know why he didn’t like me? My intelligence far surpassed his. I’m smarter.”
After they were finished, the woman was sent to another jail. Clara stayed in the holding pen. Once the woman had a chance, she asked to speak with LCSO investigators in charge of the Schwartz case. She had one hell of a story to tell.
CHAPTER 81
AFTER SEARCHING CLARA’S dorm room under a warrant, the LCSO uncovered more incriminating evidence of her involvement, including instant-messaging conversations with Kyle and Patrick, Katie and Mike. Clara, with her narcissism so fatefully blatant, had saved them all in a file marked with Kyle’s name!
As the noose tightened, group loyalty began to dissolve. Katie was talking the most, tossing Mike aside like garbage in order to save her own ass. By February 13, 2002, defense attorneys got into the public forum by discussing the case with the media. Clara’s attorney, Corinne Magee, went after Kyle and his mental-health history, an undoubtedly argumentative issue of this case. Magee wanted Kyle’s entire mental-health history so she could evaluate what she and Clara were dealing with. The statements Kyle had given police would be put to the test under a legal dispute that Kyle was probably not stable enough to give such incriminating statements.
A judge denied Magee’s request for the prosecution to turn over such records so early in the judicial process. Then the judge placed a gag order on all parties involved. During the hearing, Clara sat wearing leg shackles and did not speak a word. She looked tired and more morose than usual. The few weeks she had been jailed were taking their toll. If she hadn’t thought any of this to be serious before her arrest, she most certainly now realized that it was not part of her Underworld fantasy, but she was looking at real time behind bars.
ON MARCH 17, 2002, Kyle, Mike, and Katie were brought before a judge inside the Loudoun County General District Court and formally charged with first-degree murder. Loudoun County was a place that had posted a mere six homicides in all of 2001. This was the country. Leesburg, in fact, is one of those East Coast towns, just out of the Washington, DC, Beltway, that comes to mind when one thinks of the Founding Fathers and how America was once a nation, however young, built by men and women unafraid to fight—often to the death—for what they believed. The Revolutionary War had roots in and around Leesburg. It was a place where people rarely thought about a distinguished doctor of biophysics being brutally murdered inside his own home. It was unfathomable that it could be carried out by a group of Wiccans playing in the dark corner of the universe, apparently thinking there was no penalty for meandering within the blurred lines of fantasy and reality.
Asked to enter a plea on the charges, all three pleaded not guilty and were prepared to take their cases to trial. That meant four separate trials for four defendants.
This was a judicial fiasco—not to mention a major burden on taxpayers.
To no avail, Clara’s attorney kept beating the defense drum that “prosecutors did not prove my client had prior knowledge of the crime.” Yet, during a probable cause hearing that same week of March 17, 2002, Greg Locke testified that, indeed, Clara Schwartz did have prior knowledge. She had admitted as much to him.
It was up to a grand jury to decipher if there was enough evidence to charge the four and indict; no sooner had they convened, did those indictments come raining down.
After Mike, Katie, Clara, and Kyle were formally indicted, Clara’s co-counsel, James Connell, told reporters that Clara was innocent. Prosecutors were “casting a wide net and have no unified theory of what happened.”
Commonwealth’s Attorney (CA) Owen Basham would not comment when Connell accused the prosecution of throwing poo “against the wall” to “see what sticks.”
The indictment claimed that Clara had been “trying since June 2001” to get someone to kill her father—several months before she had even met Kyle.
Finally, after Connell kept talking to the press, Basham spoke to reporters, offering a statement that finally shut the defense up: “I won’t comment on specific evidence,” Basham said, “but these charges are conservative, and the defense team should wait and listen to my opening statement.”
Things went quiet for months. A long winter turned into a warm, sultry spring; by June, as Katie faced possible years and years behind bars for crimes she kept saying she had no knowledge of beforehand, the prosecution went to Katie with an offer.
One that Katie could not refuse.
CHAPTER 82
IN THE LETTER of immunity that Katie Inglis’s attorneys brokered with the Commonwealth of Virginia, Katie agreed to testify against everyone. She would tell all she knew about the murder, before and after, and leave no stone unturned so the prosecution could go after those who they believed had plotted, planned, and carried out this horrible crime: Mike, Clara, and Kyle. Once Katie could pass a polygraph and answer the state’s questions “truthfully” (that word was printed in bold in the letter), she would be released on a $100,000 bond.
More important than all of that, if she passed the polygraph, Katie would not only be awarded bond at a special hearing, but during that hearing the state would amend her murder charge to “accessory after the fact.” Katie would be looking at perhaps a few years behind bars, at most.
On June 4, 2002, with her hand shaking like a skid row alcoholic’s, Katie Inglis signed that deal. She would have been an idiot if she hadn’t.
Katie dished on it all. She changed up her story just ever so slightly, but the gist of it was there: Clara conspired with Kyle to murder the doctor; she and Mike knew about it all, but did nothing to stop it and actually helped to cover it up afterward. In doing this, Katie was saying Mike was a willing participant with Kyle in the murder.
Katie was obligated under this agreement to testify against Clara and Mike and Kyle for both the prosecution and the defense whenever called. The only crime it appeared Katie had committed, according to the deal, was not doing anything after the fact—not telling anyone what she kne
w. And in all fairness to Katie Inglis, this was probably true.
CHAPTER 83
THROUGHOUT THE MONTHS of July, August, and September 2002, both sides hammered out details of an imminent trial for Clara, which everyone agreed would begin that fall. At first, it was thought they would be ready by August; but when Investigator Greg Locke had to undergo major back surgery that summer, October looked more likely. Mike and Kyle would be tried after Clara.
In an interesting development, as Clara’s attorneys fought for bond in July and early August, Clara’s family got together and signed a letter to the court. Not to support her and ask for the judge to sincerely consider bond, but rather it was to say they did not agree it was a good idea to release Clara. In total, nineteen members of Clara’s family signed a letter that stated Clara might harm herself or someone in the family if released on bond. Clara’s attorneys were trying to get Clara released to her aunt and uncle, Dr. Schwartz’s brother and sister-in-law.
Loudoun Circuit Court judge Thomas Horne, who would be presiding over the trial, said no dice. There was not a chance Clara was getting out of jail before her trial.
The family breathed a sigh of absolute relief.
One of Clara’s cousins, Dr. Schwartz’s nephew, was the most outspoken of the bunch. He came out and said that if Clara was released: “I feel she would attempt to flee and have no scruples about the method she would use to accomplish this act.”
With that comment, it was clear where Clara’s family came in on whether they believed her tales of woe and abuse.
CHAPTER 84
JENNIFER WEXTON BEGAN her career with the Commonwealth of Virginia, Loudoun County, and quickly became the go-to prosecutor in cases ranging from simple and major felonies to misdemeanor criminal and traffic charges, all the way up to cases of sexual assault and domestic violence. Wexton had a soft spot for mental-health issues. She felt this was an important part of the justice system that needed constant scrutiny and attention. People needed to keep an open mind about the mental-health crisis affecting the country.
I'd Kill for You Page 28