“I have to come back here,” I say. “Take it easy on her.”
“Look,” he says. “I didn’t have much to offer, but what I did offer, you didn’t take.”
“Maybe,” I tell him.
“Which way is north?” he says. He knows I’ve never learned these things. He’s taking another jab at me.
I tell him, “Last winter, I got lost on one of those logging roads in the mountains, just out on a drive in the snow. It was stupid. I shouldn’t have been out there. But you know what I did? I searched Google Maps on my iPhone. Then I drove where it told me to.”
“Different generation,” he says.
“Maybe,” I tell him. “But I’m not hiking around Detroit with a compass and a canteen, for fuck’s sake.”
I eat my bacon and I tell him, “North is up.”
ENDINGS
A lot of people related to the case have stayed in Michigan. Nearly all of the cops, nearly all of the family members of the victims, nearly all of the family members of the key suspects, and some of the key suspects themselves.
On my list of those who have left, however, are the two writers who came before me, attempting to understand this case in greater detail.
One of them, now a professor living out east who had moved his wife and small children to the Detroit area in ’78 just after the murders ended, had a book deal in place with a publisher and, supposedly, open access to the police, but had left town within a year, taking with him the five hundred pages of a manuscript he said couldn’t be finished.
I’d spoken with him on the telephone prior to my own investigation and he’d seemed unwilling to say much, or maybe I hadn’t asked him the right questions.
“I haven’t talked about this in a long time,” he’d said.
“Why didn’t you finish the book?” I’d asked him.
He’d hesitated, then told me, “There wasn’t an ending.”
THE OTHER WRITER, Tommy McIntyre, had been a reporter in the Detroit area during the 1970s and written a book called Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: The Search for a Child Killer, published in the late 1980s. People in Detroit know about the book, whose equally well-known cover features a rendering of the hockey-striped blue Gremlin allegedly driven by the suspected killer. The book itself, knowing what we now know, is outdated and favors the hard work of the police detectives whom McIntyre was friendly with. It draws no conclusions.
I’d had a hard time getting a line on McIntyre but finally pieced together that he’d recently stepped away from his job as a crime reporter for the local pamphlet-slash-paper in a small retirement community in Florida. He’d apparently left one of the most crime-ridden cities in America to spend his years reporting on shuffleboard arguments and stolen golf carts. It either made no sense at all or it made perfect sense.
When I’m in the Royal Oak library, waiting for my turn on the microfilm machine, I think about sending an email, but I don’t even know what I’d say to McIntyre at this point. Even if he’d talk to me, I guess I’d only ask why he left. And even then, I think I’d already know the answer. The case is a scar on these writers’ hearts, I imagine, thickened by shortcomings. I feel this way because I can feel my own scar thickening, lengthening across my chest. How many years have these writers lived with the brutality of this story in their minds, obsessing in the darker hours about its grimmest details?
How many years will I?
I check the microfilm for the art dealer John McKinney. I find two articles about his murder and one about a sex scandal of the same period involving a priest in Farmington. Then I find a fourth article, about a single-engine plane that went down over Lake Michigan.
Outside the library, I sit in my car and send emails from my phone. I text Cathy about meeting up with her father, who’s planning on giving me more of the Freedom of Information Act documents, pages about the case I hadn’t known existed.
I read an email from the assistant to John Walsh, the guy from America’s Most Wanted, whose own son’s abduction-murder in the 1980s prompted Walsh’s work on these types of cases. We’d set up a phone call the week before, which he’d missed, and the assistant had emailed to set up another. She said she’d ping him a reminder this time.
I get a coffee and call Mark Wayno’s home. Wayno’s the boy whom the police had found riding his bicycle near the freeway, who’d lived down the street from the Stebbins family and gone missing but never spoken about it after he’d been found.
There’s a woman’s voice on an actual answering machine announcing the Wayno residence. I hang up without leaving a message, because even though I’ve been working this case for so long, I’m still tentative about interrupting lives. I’m hoping the voice belongs to Wayno’s wife, though. When I think about it, I’m glad he has a family, a home telephone number. I’ll be able to find him again if I need to, which is great, but it also feels good to know that he has a life in place when everything is stacked against so many others.
Maybe that’s all I care about regarding Wayno. It seems like Wayno’s story has an ending when so many of the other stories don’t. There are so many starts and stops, like the writer who went home. It’s frustrating, and yet, didn’t I just do the same thing by hanging up on Wayno’s answering machine? Am I failing myself, or are there parts of the story that I wasn’t meant to know—that none of us were? Did those other writers know this, before I got here?
WHAT I’M DOING
I spend the morning in my hotel room skimming over the thousands of pages I’d copied out of Barry King’s case files at a FedEx Office. I’m waiting for something to catch my eye. In the afternoon I go to a Starbucks on Orchard Lake Road in West Bloomfield. I get a coffee and I sit outside on the hood of my car. Across the parking lot, a plainclothes cop is leaning against his vehicle, watching me.
I text Cathy about it.
Take a picture of him, she texts back. That always fucks them up.
I hold my phone up and snap a picture of the cop. He stares at me a beat before getting into his car. He starts the engine, circles through the lot, and then parks about a hundred yards away, behind an SUV with clear windows that he can see through.
I get into my car and drive it closer to him, parking about four spaces away. I get out of my car again and walk back to the Starbucks and sit on a curb, sipping my coffee and watching the cop until he leaves. On his way out of the parking lot into traffic, he glances back at me.
Rabbit holes, I think. You can enter them, and never come out. Maybe I don’t know what’s real anymore.
I’m still at Starbucks, reading documents much later, when Cathy calls me to say that Kevin Dietz, a local reporter, will be on the six o’clock news announcing that a grand jury has been called in the OCCK case for the first time ever. In thirty-five years, nobody has attempted prosecution.
“What do they have?” I say.
“What could they have?” she says. “It’s a fucking smoke screen. These scumbags have been lying for thirty-five years.”
THAT NIGHT, I have dinner with Teresa. I’m sitting in a booth at another Middle Eastern restaurant, this time in Southfield, and I’m texting on my iPhone when she comes in and sits down looking beautiful and windswept.
We order. We talk about her boyfriend right away.
I ask her, “What are you doing?”
She sips from a Diet Coke, sets it aside, and says, “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
After a while I say, “If I’m interested in you, it’s because I think I can learn from you. You’re in a stable relationship. But that doesn’t make sense if you’re sitting here with me.”
“It means I can be in one,” she acknowledges.
I sip my own Diet Coke and then I say, “If I’m not interested in you, it’s because you scare the shit out of me.”
“You don’t mince words,” she tells me. “What could be so scary?”
“You getting found out,” I say.
And then she says again, after a while, “I don’t know
what I’m doing, do I?”
We eat and she says, “I want to see you again.”
I don’t know what to think. We have so many years of history. The history that I’ve always wanted to build, that I’d been building with my family, but never with a woman separate from that. And yet I know that I am in the wrong, sitting here with her, taking away energy from my marriage and from Teresa’s relationship with her boyfriend. I’ve done this before and know how it ends.
I drive back to my hotel after dinner and call my kids.
After I talk to them, I’m sitting on the edge of the bed and I want to get fucked up so bad. The TV is muted, the blue glow of it flickers against the room during a break from the Tot Mom trial. I want to hit something, put my elbow through the drywall, crack my head against the mirror. But I don’t know why, and that part scares me as much as the wanting.
I put on my jeans and a hoodie and get into my rental car and drive down 9 Mile, then cut into Detroit. It’s dark out. I cruise past single-door taverns, a few prostitutes out front whom I slow down to watch. They’re so alone on the streets. They were girls a long time ago; some of them probably still are, but in the glow of streetlamps they’re on a stage when I drive by. They’re staring back at me, into the lens of my window, and I feel like a creep.
I’ve been avoiding so much of the work I’m supposed to be doing for the case. I’m frozen up inside, afraid of maybe finishing, of burning out in failure. There’s an incredible pain that keeps grinding deeper into my chest. Maybe it’s the recognition of having spent so many years with my wife and still being alone somehow in the end. Maybe it’s the nature of the work, like any work that takes you away from your children for lengthy periods. Or maybe it’s the sadness that comes with acknowledging that my children, too, no matter how much love I give to them, may be hurting for more inside.
Maybe at the end of the day, I just want my father to have loved me properly back then, in a time that I can’t return to, to make it right.
I pull over a few blocks from Comerica Park and I walk and put my hoodie up and stuff my hands into my pockets. It’s hot out, and I’m sweating inside the cotton.
At some point I’m standing in front of my friend Josh’s building, staring up at it and wishing I would get shot in the head by a stranger, someone who would just say to me, “Look, man, you’re done,” and then butt his small pistol to the edge of my ear just under the hood of my sweatshirt.
I don’t know how it would feel, if it would hurt for that second before I fell, but it can’t hurt any worse than what I feel in this moment.
I am so alone, I am so alone, I keep thinking, and if it weren’t for my children, I know that I would allow the indifference of this night to take hold.
And I am muted by those thoughts, and ashamed.
BLOOD, SEMEN, SALIVA, PRINTS
That night at three a.m., back on my hotel bed, I’m flipping through documents that might untie the ribbon on this case. Spread out on the bedsheets are dozens of pages that seem to irrefutably point to not only the cover-up of crime scene evidence but the intentional deflection toward a “lone killer” by the police in those early days.
According to what I’ve found, on February 20, 1976, evidence collected from the Mark Stebbins scene was received by Charlotte Day at the Michigan State Police crime lab and reported on March 2, 1976.
As chronicled in that report, on the body of Stebbins: his blue parka with bloodstains on the hood; blue jeans soiled with dirt and oil from the parking lot where he was found; trace fibers of white wool, red wool, blue wool, and yellow or gold carpeting; one human hair whose source was other than Stebbins; rodent hair and dog hair on all outerwear; an unknown source of decorative blue paint on Stebbins’s left rubber boot; urine and fecal stains in his underpants; soil and perspiration stains on his T-shirt; bloodstains on the T-shirt; and Stebbins’s red sweatshirt, stained by blood.
A subsequent report, prepared by Lourn Doan of the Southfield PD, states: “No blood in hair or clothes . . . indicating clothes and hair had been washed.”
Lourn Doan’s name shows up again at the top of a handwritten note, accompanied by the name of a Ferndale officer, Tom Cattle. Halfway down the note on the Stebbins evidence, it reads: “Sodomized. Sperm found in throat.”
A supplemental report filed by the Livonia PD indicates that the autopsy of Stebbins, conducted by a Dr. Patanga, uncovered specimens of semen from both “the anal and oral cavities . . . Slides of the semen obtained from Dr. Patanga [were] transported to the Michigan State Police Crime Laboratory at Northville for blood type and secretion analysis.”
The same report indicates that Stebbins was bound at the wrists and ankles by what was determined to have been “approximately 1/8" or 1/4" Bell Telephone Type wire.”
A later report by the Michigan State Police indicates high levels of amylase, an enzyme found in saliva, on Stebbins’s underpants, and another report indicates seventeen latent fingerprints on the body and clothing, none of which were his own.
Each report shows the cataloguing process and chain of custody of evidence associated with the Stebbins scene. Each report also shows this same cataloguing and chain of custody for additional fibers sampled from both a 1965 Pontiac and a 1965 Chevrolet (not a Gremlin), as well as fibers and other trace evidence from an unnamed suspect in relationship to that same vehicle.
This is in strong contrast to the public relations story about lack of evidence in the Stebbins case. To reiterate the stance of the police, ongoing since February of 1976, nothing was found on either the body or clothing of Mark Stebbins to indicate trace or hard evidence. According to public reports, the body and clothing had been meticulously scrubbed of any signs of the crimes committed against Stebbins during captivity and there was no reason to believe that the crimes were sexually motivated. All attention, according to police, should have been focused on profiling a lone serial killer of unknown motivation with both the highest intellect and intimate knowledge of criminology that would prompt him or her to finely scrub away any presence of physical intrusion upon the victim.
Compared to the actual case reports, it is easy to see that the truth of the Stebbins abduction and murder was quite the opposite of what police had advertised. There was nothing special about the Stebbins case, historically, other than the vast, improbable amounts of information being hidden, either in service to investigative efforts, as the police will have claimed, or, as I am increasingly assessing, in service to the continued obstruction of justice. Mark Stebbins was raped, murdered, and then dumped in plain sight—not by somebody taunting the police with the boldness of his body placement in that well-traveled retail district parking lot, but by somebody who just didn’t give a fuck or know better.
Blood, semen, saliva, and fingerprints were found, Stebbins was filthy, and the PD who had a chance to bring this to light simply didn’t.
They led us to look for an evil genius, but why?
DIAMOND EARRINGS. SUGARLESS GUM.
Since I’m in Detroit, I meet up with my dad’s second wife, Paula, for the first time in years, at a diner full of up-tempo Jews, movers and shakers mostly Paula’s age, off Orchard Lake Road. A lot of diamond earrings in here, a lot of sugarless bubblegum cracking. Everybody uses a coupon, orders an omelet, talks about the trainers at their gym. Diners like this, with their Lexus-heavy parking lots, are all over the Bloomfield area, filled with the mothers of the wealthier kids I went to high school with, the ones who drove Corvettes, partied in hotel rooms, ran pyramid schemes, gambled on baseball games, and sold club drugs or started businesses by the time they were eighteen if they weren’t going to law school or geared to become doctors.
Paula was the boss’s daughter when my dad started working for the Mercury Paint Company in the mid-1970s. At the time, Mercury was a sixteen-store retail chain catering to housepainters, a behemoth in Detroit in the era prior to Home Depot. My dad had two master’s degrees in psychology but in the end he’d stocked shelves and spent
his days bullshitting with blue-collar workers, which he was more suited to. He’d had jobs working with kids in psychiatric wards like the now-closed Lafayette Clinic, but at some point my father had been fired and one of his uncles had gotten him the Mercury gig, which stuck.
Paula was ten years younger than my dad, came from money, and had an East Coast attitude that my mother simply couldn’t compete with. The affair started when I was five. Paula would sometimes call the house, asking for my dad. My mother knew what was going on but couldn’t stop it. She’d wear her bathrobe around the house and cry a lot.
I was ten when my dad and Paula married. Contrary to what I’d expected, Paula was warm and fun to be around. She smiled at me a lot, which my dad rarely did, and she’d gone to high school for a year with Madonna. She talked about New York, where one of her sisters was making a stab as a choreographer, and she took no bullshit on the phone in her business dealings, not from anybody.
I admired and was thankful for Paula, not for screwing over my mom, but for opening a door through which I vaguely sensed was a world bustling with people who’d managed to escape the fatigue of circumstance. My father probably felt the same way about her. Paula gave him an out, a chance to live extravagantly.
It’s hot out when we meet, and I’m wearing cutoff army pants, a T-shirt, and two-dollar flip-flops. Paula tells me after we order, “You look like you’re from California. You look relaxed.”
“I feel fucked,” I tell her.
“I know,” she says. “But you don’t look it.”
She tells me she was at a party the night before and had met one of the assistant prosecutors for Oakland County. He’d given her his card to pass on to me but I know he was just being polite. None of these people will talk, not ever, not before or after grand juries convene—not even on their deathbeds, it seems, as plenty have slipped away without a word. I tell Paula I’ll call him in a couple of weeks, after my kids have come and gone from a brief visit we’d planned in my despondency over leaving them.
The Kill Jar Page 13