I'd Kill for You

by M. William Phelps

  It took a few minutes, but the judge was able to find a clerk of the court to read Kyle’s confession.

  And there it was for everyone to hear: Kyle’s detailed account of killing Robert Schwartz, tasting his blood and going into a feverish “frenzy,” stabbing him repeatedly, all because Clara Schwartz had asked him to do so, and had convinced him that she was being abused and Mr. Schwartz was going to kill her.

  Wexton and Basham looked at each other and said nothing after the clerk was finished with the read.

  What would Clara do now?

  CHAPTER 88

  INVESTIGATOR JAMIE KOONTZ was next up for Basham and Wexton. Koontz had uncovered the sword inside Mike’s house that Kyle had used in the murder. Wexton and Basham offered up photographs of the sword and where it had been found. If you looked close enough, Koontz noted as the photographs were displayed, you could make out “droplets of moisture” on the blade. That would be “moisture,” indicating that “someone may have washed or cleaned it,” Koontz testified.

  After Koontz, John Russ sat and answered questions. Wexton asked him several inconsequential questions about evidence collection to establish how the chain of evidence had been followed to a tee. Then he cut him loose.

  Both investigators had set a tone for the state’s next witness.

  Patrick House.

  Clara’s ex-boyfriend, the first appointee to the ambassadorship of the Underworld’s top assassin, was of average height and had red hair. His goatee and mustache were still part of his look. In the scope of it all, Patrick was a good kid. He’d gone through that stage of Dungeons & Dragons and fantasy worlds and come out of it okay, maybe even still dabbling just a tiny bit in it all. Patrick had had his share of issues and problems, certainly; yet he was smart enough to know serious trouble when he ran into it. And just last year, Patrick would say, in not so many words, that trouble came knocking in the form of a cerebral-looking, goth, gloomy girl he thought maybe he could see himself with for the long term—that is, before she started talking about him murdering her father.

  Patrick spoke of meeting Clara and the beginning of their friendship and the Underworld she was so fascinated with and had created on her own. He called Clara the “dungeon master” of that world, and he had soon been given the roles of “assassin” and “bard.”

  “How about Clara’s father? Did he have a role in the game?” Wexton asked.

  Patrick shifted in his seat. It was an uncomfortable question.

  “No, ma’am,” he said.

  Wexton rephrased it: “Was there a character that was made to represent Lord Chaos’s father?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Patrick was a detail-oriented witness. That was a good sign. He further explained that Clara had created his role in the game. He said his job was to protect her from those who wanted to kill her, one of whom was the OG, adding how the term “ ‘tay’ was an acronym that she used for the word ‘kill.’”

  “Did she often speak in acronyms?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Important fact in this case.

  Wexton asked if this language Clara used was central only to the Underworld game.

  A second important fact.

  “Not particularly,” Patrick said, exemplifying Wexton’s point. “It was more something that she used on a general basis.”

  “Did she tell you . . . why it was that OG needed to be killed?”

  “She would ... She used references to poisoning, among other things.”

  Wexton wanted to know if Clara had made several requests of Patrick to kill the OG, or was it just one time.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, meaning several.

  They next discussed how Patrick’s character Path had the sole job of taying the OG, and how he and Clara had an agreement about this.

  “And can you explain what the particulars of that agreement were?” Wexton wanted to know.

  “The agreement was when the assassin had met her character’s father an equivalent number of times to the times her father attempted to kill her.”

  They talked about Clara’s journals and how Patrick would sit and sometimes read them: how Clara had written that her dad had tried to kill her. Not the OG character in the game, but her real father. Patrick explained further how her journals might have started off as a map and narrative of the Underworld game, but as time went on, “toward the end of August and September, I was seeing more of the journals that had less to do with the game.”

  Patrick hit every note the prosecution needed from him. He spoke of talking to Clara about killing the OG. How the lines between reality and fantasy blurred into all reality, and he eventually realized she actually wanted him to kill her father. And how “she made reference to money she would get from her inheritance.”

  Question after question, Patrick spoke of a young adult who was obsessed with the notion of seeing her real father die. He told jurors about that time inside her dorm when Clara handed him that herbal medications book and had it opened to a chapter on poisoning. It was about then that he realized, “She no longer appeared to be inside the game. It appeared to be all reality to her then.”

  After Patrick talked about those times that they went out to eat and Clara freaked out, thinking the OG had somehow gotten into the kitchen of the restaurant and had poisoned her meal, Wexton moved on to postmurder questions. Patrick said that one day he did talk to Clara at a time after the murder had been in the news; he asked her why she had involved Katie in it at all.

  “What, if anything, did Clara respond?”

  “Her response was that she didn’t mean to.”

  There was a bench conference regarding several online conversations investigators had uncovered from Clara’s computer that she’d stupidly saved. They were between Patrick and Clara. The argument was that asking Patrick about a lot of that material would be leading. If they were both “in character” during the conversations—not even using their real names—how could jurors expect to take what was said as reality?

  They hashed it out and Wexton, after Connell objected several times, handed Patrick over to Clara’s team. Patrick had done his job for the prosecution, anyway. He told jurors that Clara had asked him to kill her father. He believed it was a genuine request. Once he realized she was serious, he ran. Everything else he added to that had been gravy.

  CONNELL BEGAN BY asking Patrick if he had been involved with other “role-playing” games at the time, besides the one with Clara.

  He said he had.

  Then Patrick was asked to explain what a role-playing game actually was, just in case jurors didn’t know.

  And he did.

  “Now, in real life,” Connell asked, “you are not an assassin—is that right, sir?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You never killed anyone?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Your character might go and kill monsters or people as part of the adventure, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  As the discussion carried on, the point was that the life Patrick had with Clara, either online or in person, always had elements of fantasy, so there was no way Patrick could have deciphered whether Clara was talking real world or Underworld. And then, regarding those online conversations, Connell made a point: “On any particular occasion, you could not be one hundred percent [sure] that the person using [Clara’s onscreen name] was Clara sitting at the other end of the computer as opposed to some . . . hacker, correct?”

  “Generally, the conversations I had with her, yes, I could be sure.”

  If the goal for Connell was to confuse jurors, or show them by example how close the line was between the game and reality, he did a fair job of it by bantering on and on, asking Patrick all sorts of Underworld-related questions regarding lizards and dragons and spells cast upon people in the game, magic, and Patrick’s “practice and belief.”

  Then Connell brought up how Patrick, as the four were charged with murder, went out and hired himself an attor
ney—one that had “negotiated with the commonwealth” for him.

  “Yes,” Patrick said.

  “And you agreed to testify in exchange for not being charged—is that right?” Connell wanted to know.

  “It was agreed that I wouldn’t be charged for anything. . . .”

  Connell paused. He looked up. He tapped a finger on the table. Then: “Is there a spell that would have protected you against being charged?”

  “No, sir.”

  Connell indicated he was done.

  Wexton had one question on redirect. It pertained to Connell bringing up the notion that Clara’s computer could have been hacked, which might give jurors pause to think that someone might have set her up for a fall.

  “In your experience within the Underworld,” Wexton said, “who generally hacked into other people’s accounts?”

  “The only person that I was aware of that was actually hacking into other people’s accounts was Clara.”

  Nothing but net!

  CHAPTER 89

  AS THE TRIAL carried on nearly two hundred miles north of where Kyle Hulbert was being housed in Waverly, Virginia, he felt detached from the entire process. He’d spoken and had pled the Fifth. Had done as his lawyer, according to him, had told him to do. Now he’d have to wait his turn. And Kyle’s plan, he later claimed, was to mount an insanity defense once his case came up. It was the only option he saw, the only way for him to explain what had happened.

  “I wasn’t really thinking about Clara’s trial at all while it was going on,” Kyle explained to me. “Around this time period, I was pretty detached from everything. It was easier for me to focus on other things.... It all felt so out of my hands. I didn’t feel as though there was anything I could do.”

  As far as an insanity defense went, Kyle believed he had a solid case.

  “You know, seventy thousand pages of mental-health history,” Kyle said, with a contemptuous laugh behind it, “I thought that was a pretty good . . . lock for insanity. That’s what I thought was going to happen.”

  Kyle had gone through several psych evaluations since his arrest. He’d sat with doctors and psychologists and told his story ad nauseam, or until he just couldn’t tell it anymore. It never changed. In all of his psych evaluation reports, it’s clear that Kyle had stuck to the same narrative, by and large, where his life story was concerned. He told lies, no doubt about it. But they were lies to explain things away, not to try and get out of things. By all accounts, he was hearing voices and seeing dragons and having violent thoughts all his life—whether this was, in itself, all lies—well, that’s another argument. If there was ever a case for insanity—which is very hard to win in a court of law in the United States, anyway—Kyle had a fairly good crack at it based solely on his case history.

  His lawyer came to him one day, Kyle explained.

  “And my lawyer told me, ‘If you go to trial, if you fight this, you will be found guilty and you will be given a life sentence.’”

  So Kyle had that to think about as he contemplated what to do next. According to him, the alternative was that if he pleaded his case out and avoided trial, he was told that he’d be given twenty years.

  “I asked my lawyer, ‘What do I do?’ My lawyer told me Judge Horne has seen mental-health cases. ‘If you fall on your sword’—and I told my lawyer not to use that phrase ever again—‘and admitted to what you’ve done, Judge Horne, who has seen mental-health cases before, would understand....’ So I’m thinking, ‘Okay, a guaranteed life sentence at trial or up to twenty years?’ I was told there was no plea bargain. I was pleading guilty to murder. This is what I was looking at. I looked at it as I didn’t really have a choice.”

  It was a decision that would have to wait, however, until Clara’s case was concluded.

  CHAPTER 90

  KATIE INGLIS’S TESTIMONY could go two ways for the prosecution: make jurors believe that she was an innocent party in all of this—as Patrick had already intoned—or she could come across as someone just saying what she was told in order to save her own hide.

  Katie didn’t look any longer like the old-school goth chick—Mike’s trampy girlfriend—at least she didn’t on this day. She presented herself well and played up that librarian look she had tried to work in the past.

  Owen Basham asked Katie when she and Clara had become tight—you know, BFFs.

  “We . . . didn’t really become friends until our senior year in high school,” Katie said.

  As they talked through the relationship Katie had with Clara after high school, Katie told jurors several things that contradicted what Clara had been saying since the LCSO focused on her as the ring leader plotting and planning the murder of her father. Katie said, for example, that she had never seen bruises on Clara, but Clara talked about how her father had hit her. She also intimated that “on occasion” Clara would say she wished her father “was dead,” giving context to the argument that Clara, long before she had met Kyle, wanted her father to die.

  There were several conversations, Katie explained, that she had overheard between Patrick and Clara that told her they were planning on doing Dr. Schwartz harm. In one, Katie testified, “It was like, ‘When are you going to help do something about my father?’”

  Katie talked about that meal they had, when Clara thought her steak was poisoned. How Clara told Patrick he needed to see her father “one more time if [her dad] was going to die before Christmas. . . .”

  Basham asked about the money—had Clara ever mentioned a monetary gain by her father’s death?

  “Yes,” Katie answered. “She said she would inherit a third of a million dollars from her father.”

  Next came the times Katie said she spoke with Clara on instant message about her father dying.

  As Katie testified, Kyle’s name came up. Katie told jurors how they met him at the festival. She said Kyle would often sleep over Mike’s house and sit in his room while she and Mike slept. Kyle spent most of his time talking on the computer to Clara. And as soon as Kyle became part of the fold, Katie added, he and Clara got closer and closer, nearly pushing her and Mike out.

  “She started telling Kyle how her father had abused her and poisoned her and pulled out some of her journals and show[ed] them to him. . . .”

  Katie’s testimony was like a slow-moving dump truck full of allegations against Clara that picked up speed with each new question Basham asked. Through answer after answer, Katie told jurors that her onetime best friend had obsessed about the death of her father. What might have started out for Mike and Katie as a friend talking about a fantasy game—and the hatred a friend had for her father—became an all-out plan to kill the man. Yet, what was also clear in Katie’s testimony was how she listened to this over a period of time; and as she began to believe it was real, she never once told anyone. She simply let two people plan a murder and sat by and did nothing to stop it or report it to someone who could.

  Her testimony moved on to that night they dropped Kyle off at Clara’s and he camped in the woods. She talked about how that check was sent to Mike’s house and they brought Kyle to the bank to open an account. Then she went on to how she and Mike went with Kyle to the Schwartz home on December 8, dropped Kyle off, waited, got stuck in the mud, and then went to a friend’s house for pizza while decorating a Christmas tree.

  Katie gave jurors details about December 8: the times, Kyle’s demeanor when he returned from the house (“Shaken up . . . scary . . .”), how he sounded, and the comments he made. It was the first time during the trial that a first-person account of the night Schwartz was murdered had been given to jurors. Here was a girl who had spoken to the murderer minutes after he committed the act.

  One conversation Katie told jurors she had with Clara was perhaps the most damaging testimony Katie could offer. While they were loading Mike’s car shortly after she met Kyle, Katie said, Clara once stated, “Maybe Kyle can help me with my father.” Yet, Katie admitted, “I don’t know what kind of help she was referrin
g to.”

  WHEN CONNELL’S CO-COUNSEL, Corinne Magee, got a crack at Katie not long after she made that comment, she began by asking what Katie was getting out of testifying for the prosecution. Magee pointed out: “Instead of the twenty-to-life offense, you’re facing a one-dollar fine and twelve-months-in-jail offense?”

  “And the eleven years for the conspiracy charge!” Katie snapped back.

  Magee wanted to know if Katie had gotten involved with Clara’s Underworld game.

  She said she had. Most of the time she played, though, was online, chatting with Clara. The testimony became tedious as Magee had Katie focus on screen names and where computers were located and who would use whose computer. Katie brought in several other names of friends that played the game with Clara, Mike, and her. Magee brought in transcripts from those e-conversations revolving around the game and showed, perhaps, by example, just how confusing it all was while they talked about fantasy and mixed the game with reality.

  Katie was a bit scared of Kyle, she said. He came across as aggressive: a guy who would lie in order to pump up his reputation and ego. He didn’t seem genuine. She said Mike drove Kyle everywhere and she didn’t like it. She said Mike and Kyle became really tight. Katie said how she would get mad, even, when Kyle demanded to sit up front in the car with Mike. She’d have to tell him that her place was beside her boyfriend, in the front seat.

  “Do you remember Saba, Ordog, [and] Nicodemus?” Magee asked Katie.

  “I remember him mentioning Nicodemus. . . .”

  “And were those [names] in relationship to his [imaginary friends] or something else?”

  “I don’t know what he was referring to. It could have been his pet dragons. He just had names for them.”

  “You didn’t actually hear him speaking to his dragons as he was riding in the car?”