The Kill Jar

by J. Reuben Appelman

  After dinner, I went into my dad’s little office with him to look at his stuff. On the shelves sat pictures of his kids, books, old feathers in a small basket, the photo of my sister when she was in high school, wearing her boyfriend’s varsity jacket and my dad’s cowboy hat as a lark. The glass on that picture frame had gone dusty.

  “I had more books,” my dad said. “But I got rid of them.”

  Where the books used to be was a row of pill bottles. He’d been suffering from joint pain for a few years and had heart issues but never talked openly about his health or body. Underneath his abrasive exterior was an uncharacteristic modesty in matters of the flesh. I was in college before I’d seen him without a shirt on, for instance. I’d come to visit him without advance notice and found him sunbathing in the backyard in the middle of a workday. He’d seemed annoyed, maybe at getting caught loafing, but my feeling at the time was that he’d been embarrassed at his body having gone soft over the years, a body that, until then, I’d childishly viewed as more wood and stone than human and perishable.

  A part of me was excited at the chance to figure out my dad again during this trip, thinking that maybe he’d surprise me. The other part of me, the part that never knew him without having to guess, still felt slighted at the extent of what he’d show of himself: a few trinkets, some old photos meant to explain his passions, a regimen of plastic pill bottles indicating how much time he had left.

  Looking at my dad’s stuff, I made a mental note to study the Christopher Busch “suicide” photos. Snapped in his bedroom, the clutter might tell me as much as his DNA. What books had he read? What medications had he taken that kept him awake, or put him to sleep? Who had he been after all? What would Christopher Busch let me see?

  My dad and I made plans for breakfast in a few days. He joked, “Hug your mom good-bye.” I looked at his wife and blushed.

  I’M IN DETROIT for six weeks. It won’t be enough time to learn what I want, so I start quickly. In the mornings I go to the public library to check their microfilm, looking for relevant news articles from the first of the killings until after Christopher Busch’s death. It’s approximately a two-year span.

  I bring in a coffee from the Starbucks that first morning and sit in the viewing room in the dark, scrolling through film. I go month by month, and it takes two hours before I stumble onto a photograph of a gold-colored two-door Mercedes that’d been car bombed.

  In the photo, a detective stands in the background, trench-coated to his knees. It’s cold outside. His hands are in his pockets. His face is shriveled. His foot is frozen in the frame, a single black wingtip kissing at shrapnel on the ground, blasted out from the console in a spray of what’d become ashen already by the time of the photo.

  Short of a half dozen articles on child molestations by priests, which I send to the printer, nothing else stands out that I hadn’t already seen online in the past two years or received from Cathy. I make a note to get the case report on the car bombing.

  I doze in the darkness, and when I open my eyes again, I put my hand on the machine and I can feel it hum, the years passing away from me but in reverse, on hot cellulose and without color.

  IT’S LATE AFTERNOON by the time I leave the library. I have dinner plans with an old friend but not until eight o’clock. I have a good three hours to kill, so I drive into the city, taking Woodward Avenue instead of the freeway. I pass through Highland Park, the burned-out retail shops, a few of them still smoldering from recent arsons.

  I park near the Detroit River. There’s a ferryboat anchored. I get out of my car and a breeze off the well-oiled marina cools my skin. It feels good. I sit on a park bench across from two black men, both around fifty and eating chicken out of a bag. They nod at me. I nod back. One of them says, “You want one of these legs?” but he’s just fucking with me. I think, Idaho could use a few characters like these. I can see myself moving back to Detroit one day, if only to be around the variety of personalities and cultures again, that grit and vibrancy. Ellie would be here, too, though, and that would be a problem for me if I were trying to stay healthy.

  I stare across the river to Windsor, in Canada. It’s close enough to be just another part of Detroit, but after homeland security became an issue, you need a passport to get there. Windsor’s about a ten-minute drive through the tunnel, including checkpoints, a little longer if you take the bridge.

  I call my sister and leave a message that I know she won’t return. I doze on the bench for an hour, and when I sit up finally, the two guys are gone and I’m alone by the water. I think about Teresa, the woman I’m meeting for dinner. I saw her once for a brief coffee last fall, the day I was leaving Detroit for Idaho, but I’d been distracted that day and we’d barely gotten a chance to talk.

  Before that, we hadn’t seen each other in twelve years. My daughter had been three years old the last time we spoke. Teresa and I had met in the afternoon, and I’d felt ambushed by her dirty-blond, almost brown hair thinned by sunlight streaming into the bar. We’d drunk a few beers and then walked to a train tracks nearby. Teresa had taken my hand, and we’d pressed our backs against a retaining wall.

  “In a few minutes, the train will come by,” she’d said. “Don’t move.”

  I’d stood with my back to the wall, slightly buzzed, holding Teresa’s hand for the first time. We’d known each other since we were eleven. I’d always liked her.

  The train had roared by three feet in front of us. I’d felt my cheeks quiver. I haven’t felt beautiful like that in a long time.

  THIS TRIP, I meet Teresa at Anita’s Kitchen in Ferndale. It’s a Mediterranean place on Woodward Avenue with outdoor seating. Teresa’s early, sitting at a table outside, wearing gold-tinted aviator glasses when I arrive, also early. She’s checking her phone, her long, straight hair hugging her jawline while she looks at the messages in her lap. When she looks up at me approaching, I blush a little.

  We hug. She feels good.

  We spend three hours eating and catching up. Teresa tells me about the “nickel” she’d spent hanging out with bands like the White Stripes in the Detroit music scene, the five years she’d spent renting a room in a home down the block from crack houses.

  She tells me about the neighbors who’d gotten broken into twice in one month before buying a pit bull as protection.

  “A week later, somebody broke in again, only this time they stole the pit bull,” she says, laughing.

  We don’t leave Anita’s until they make us leave. Dipping in and out of my conversation with Teresa are thoughts of Ellie and my wife, but I’m compartmentalizing, telling myself that one thing is not affected by the other. I am wrong, of course, but I don’t know that yet. Teresa gets a carryout container, slides in whatever food we have left, and then hands it to me on the way out.

  “You look like you could use it,” she says.

  I walk Teresa to her car. The air is humid and thick in the streetlights. We stand next to her car door and the moment is suspended. She has a boyfriend. I have kids.

  I hug her good-bye.

  On the car ride home a few minutes later, I get a text from her.

  It’s good knowing you’re around, it says.

  THE WOMAN IN THE TRANSCRIPT

  I’m sitting on the bed in my hotel after returning from dinner, staring at a faxed transcript, nineteen pages of testimony to the FBI, given in 1992 by a now-grown female victim of heinous multiple molestations. The television is on mute and I’ve avoided calling home.

  In the transcript, the victim states that she and her sister witnessed the murder of a small boy, approximately five to eight years old, with blond curly hair. The boy knelt on the ground while the girls watched their father strike him in the head with a baseball bat. The boy was unknown to them. Her father and another man present discussed what to do with the boy’s body.

  The woman in the transcript describes another homicide, of a nine-year-old female, occurring in what the woman described as a doctor’s office of sorts.
The nine-year-old lay on an examination table. She had long, dark hair. She was molested on the table by a man who stabbed her in the stomach afterward. The nine-year-old fell off the table. Again there was discussion about what to do with the body.

  The woman in the transcript states that she believes her father to have been involved in a pedophile ring and that her father recruited members from St. Joseph Catholic Church in Dexter, Michigan. She states that the ringleader was not her father but a prominent and powerful person in the Ann Arbor community a few miles away, where Frank Shelden lived before fleeing the country. She describes the man as having a beard and dark hair and as being very large.

  Shelden didn’t look that way. Christopher Busch looked exactly that way, though. He was bearded and weighed 250 pounds at the time of his death, and children get confused.

  The woman in the transcript states that a doctor from Dexter, Michigan, performed an abortion on her sister, who was pregnant due to incest. The woman in the transcript was forced to watch this abortion being performed so that she would recognize the seriousness of the procedure and avoid becoming pregnant.

  The woman had a brother who was also questioned by the FBI. He stated that both sisters were indeed molested and that those molestations had been photographed. He had several photographs in his possession, presumably having kept them over the years as evidence.

  The woman in the transcript states to the FBI that when the pedophile ring came together, they would usually occupy a shed near a gravel pit in Dexter. Gregory Greene had stated himself, in testimony before his sentencing on the molestation charges, that he and Busch would exchange children at an isolated, nondescript gravel pit that they both had easy access to.

  The woman will refuse any interviews by the cops working in Dexter, or by any other Detroit-area police personnel, she says, as she feels that during the time of her own abuse, occurring from 1975 to 1976, several local police officers were somehow involved.

  She states that when she was six years old she was made to have sex with men in her living room while her father watched. Often there were “parties” attended by other prepubescent girls and other old men alongside them.

  The woman in the transcript states that she and her sister were driven to a two-story office building in Ann Arbor, where they were taken into a white room and photographed together. She said this happened approximately twice a year for four years, and that other men occasionally showed up for photographic sessions with other girls. The photographer was always the same photographer, she said.

  WHEN I GET out of the hotel shower the next morning, there’s a phone message from my sister. She wants to see me, she says, but today she’s busy. She wants to see me tomorrow instead.

  I call her back. She doesn’t answer my call and her voice mail is full. I drive to her neighborhood, eat breakfast for two dollars in a diner, then sit in my car down the block from her house and call her again. She doesn’t answer but texts me that she’s busy. I can see her car in the driveway, a black Mercedes.

  The next day I get back on the freeway and eventually sit inside a Dunkin’ Donuts near my hotel, going over the Fox Island files I’ve brought along in my computer bag to link-chart the pornography syndicate. There’s a photocopied bank check accompanied by a receipt from a hotel restaurant in Port Huron. The bill was for sixteen dollars, paid for by the William Angell Foundation, as noted on the check. I push the photocopies around on the table in front of me, stare at them while I eat a donut.

  I do a little research, pirating a wireless connection, and find that William Angell had been the president of Continental Motors, a defunct automobile engine manufacturer that turned to producing aircraft engines, previously headquartered in Muskegon, Michigan, where suspects Christopher Busch, Frank Shelden, and John all had occasionally spent time in the summers. An ancestor of his, James Burrill Angell, had been the third president of the University of Michigan and the longest serving, spanning thirty-eight years from 1871 to 1909.

  The William R. Angell Foundation, established to provide scholarships in biology, had also owned North Manitou Island, a stone’s throw from the Fox Island porn ring. The foundation had sold the property to the National Park Service in 1984, the same period that Fox was sold off.

  THE NEXT DAY I drive over to rural Dexter, an hour from my hotel, to find what I believe to be the gravel pit mentioned by the woman in the FBI transcript.

  There are many gravel pits, of course, but this particular one had been frequented by earth science classes in the 1960s and 1970s on field trips to explore the natural habitat and varied geological ecosystems. As gravel pits go, it was a known meeting point.

  Once called the Whittaker-Gooding pit, the land was purchased by Mel and Betty Fox in 1973. Mel Fox was an entrepreneur in the medical industries, which interests me because many of the wealthier of the Angells’ ancestors were in the medical field, and the FBI transcripts also mention a medical office where the girl witnessed the multiple sex crimes and possible murders.

  I don’t yet know if Mel and Betty’s last name is related to the Fox Islands. All I have are my notes and a hunch, but I do know that the land, which is sprawling, is now named the Fox Science Preserve.

  I also know, more importantly, that this might be the only gravel pit that makes sense. Suspects Greene and Busch could possibly have been here as kids.

  As I drive down the rural road toward the gravel pit, I remember being at a winter camp with my school: I’m about eight years old and we’re there to cross-country ski and snowshoe, build survival shelters, and study the winter stars through telescopes. We stay in cabins for three days. Our chaperone is a volunteer, about nineteen years old. In my cabin, it’s me and about ten other boys from my class. One of them, a boy named Aaron, has hearing aids.

  We’re all wearing long underwear, preparing a skit for the final night’s talent show, and Aaron keeps messing up his lines. The chaperone is frustrated with him. Aaron laughs at something, I don’t remember what, and the chaperone side-kicks him in the stomach, sending Aaron, a seventy-pound half-deaf kid, across the floor and into a wall.

  Aaron starts to cry. Time stops. Then the chaperone says to all of us, “You better not tell anybody I did that.”

  And so we don’t.

  PLACEMENT

  I’m waiting for my lunch at a Coney Island restaurant that backs up to the parking lot where victim #1, Mark Stebbins, was found. I’ve ordered a Coney dog and a Diet Coke.

  I’ve just come from walking off a path the Oakland County Child Killer might have taken before placing Mark Stebbins’s body on the brick wall outside, a hundred yards away. I held my Flip cam while walking the perimeter.

  A slight mist fell on me, the clouds having gone grey in a way most Detroiters recognize. A man came out of a hat store, watched me pace off the distance from a Dumpster to a wall. He smoked a cigarette.

  Later on, in my playback, he looks a little like Detroit-area champion boxer Thomas Hearns, my father’s hero, skinny and angular in the frame.

  I’VE BEEN BOTHERED lately by the placement of the bodies, all of them in public locations, viewable but only from particular angles. Passersby could see them, surely, but not all passersby. The bodies were either placed strategically or simply dumped as fast and near as convenience would allow.

  Was it a coincidence that both Mark and Jill were deposited within shooting range of the Michigan State Police and the Troy Police Departments, respectively? It’s possible that the drop locations were indeed random, of course: whatever was easiest at the time. In the Stebbins case, his drop was only a handful of miles from the abduction site. It’s entirely possible that the OCCK took a regular route through that area for unrelated business. Stebbins, possibly kept nearby during captivity, was perhaps unloaded hard and fast from the killer’s vehicle, which may have been backed up to that wall.

  The press said the killer was taunting the police, but maybe he was actually caring for the victims by getting them back to their hom
es faster, placing them in a location readily discoverable. Had he felt that he’d been tucking them safely back into their world again, their purpose already served?

  I’M HAVING BREAKFAST with my dad the next day, in a diner at seven a.m. at the corner of 9 Mile and Southfield Road, across from Southfield High School. My dad’s been flirting with the waitress, predictably. She’s maybe twenty years old, fifty years his junior. He’s sucking on a toothpick that he’d pulled from behind his ear.

  He makes fun of the way I’m eating my bacon, picking off the rubbery fat with my fingertips, eating only the meat.

  He says, “Bacon is good because it’s fucking fat, you asshole.”

  He gets quiet after I don’t respond. He tells me that he wasn’t a great dad, but he’s old now, he says, and because of this he has a lot to offer.

  “Advice on eating bacon,” I say.

  “Look,” he says. He pushes his coffee. “You got a chip on your shoulder.”

  “I’m just here to have breakfast and you’re calling me an asshole.”

  After a while he says, “It takes somebody like you to find this killer. You’ve got real balls going after this guy.”

  Then he says, “Let me ask you something. What makes you so interested in this?”

  I don’t answer him right away, because I’m thinking about the two cruisers who’d pulled behind him back in ’77, how he’d watched the two cops get out with guns drawn, slinking toward both sides of his vehicle.

  He sips his coffee then slides it aside and says, “Everybody has ghosts, you know.”

  Then he takes his toothpick and chews on it while I eat. When he pays our tab, he flirts with the waitress again.