He says he remembers waking up on a gurney sometime later, tied four-point. He didn’t know where he was. He slipped a hand out of his restraints and was punched in the head several times until blacking out again. He woke up at the Clinton Valley Center hospital with cuts in his wrists from the handcuffs, his teeth loosened from the blows, and his eyes temporarily blinded from broken blood vessels.
SEBASTIAN SAYS NO charges were ever filed by either side. He moved a few miles away to Oak Park, just outside of the Berkley PD’s jurisdiction. He laid low for several years, working odd jobs, and sank further into depression.
Decades went by. Sebastian kept his mouth shut. Five years ago, he tells me, he moved back to his mother’s house to take care of her. In 2009, no longer afraid of speaking out, he called the FBI.
Only six hours after his call to the FBI, he says, Detective Garry Gray of the original task force called him and asked about the story. Sebastian told him every detail and mentioned that he’d called Timothy’s father, Barry King, as well. Gray told him to leave the King family alone.
After a few short breaths that suddenly turn into crying on his end of the line, Sebastian says to me, “There was another Sebastian in my hood when I was a kid. Looked just like me. Blond hair, same name, same hood.” He tells me through his sobs that the cop he’d seen with Kristine had hit the boy with a PD cruiser in June of 1977, the year Sebastian initially reported his story. “The guy is forty-three now,” Sebastian adds. “Mentally deficient from that wreck, and been in a wheelchair his whole life. Even then, I knew that guy was supposed to be me.”
A moment passes, and then he says, “This wasn’t no abduction. Not like you think. She left the store and got into that car on her own like she’d already been in it before.”
After a while, Sebastian says, “Almost everybody I’ve brought into this has been killed or their lives fucking destroyed.” He’s crying again, huge tears that I can hear across the phone line.
The 7-Eleven clerk from the day of Kristine’s disappearance, Sebastian remembers, has also died, and also from an apparent suicide, although Sebastian doesn’t remember when that occurred. A while ago, he tells me, he was working as a sandwich delivery driver, when he drove by the 7-Eleven and saw one of the cops who attacked him in the midst of a photo shoot related to this case. Sebastian had a Hungry Howie’s sign atop his car, was still poor and depressed after decades, and kept driving.
When I run Sebastian’s story by Cathy later, she tells me that Sebastian has also been in contact with a reporter in Detroit, an acquaintance of Cathy’s. That reporter has looked into his narrative, Cathy says, and she believes she has confirmed at least parts of it. Cathy tells me she thinks the reporter has also confirmed Sebastian’s medical records from the day he claims to have been pummeled into unconsciousness inside his mother’s garage, but when I call Sebastian on my cell, he says that he himself wasn’t able to obtain those records. Clinton Valley had told him their records didn’t date that far back.
Cathy prints off a few emails she’s exchanged with the reporter. I receive them from her in a manila file. I set them on the dash of my car and I drive out to a parking lot on the edge of the city and turn off my engine. I lock my car doors and read through the file of emails between Cathy and the reporter. I think again of all the ways we step away from the world and into our sadness, down the rabbit hole of narratives, and I imagine Sebastian in a fast-food-driven vehicle leading toward nowhere he’d likely have expected for his life.
CALL ME WHEN YOU’RE BETTER
I’m in the sauna at the gym downtown in my small city in Idaho, wearing a towel, my head resting against the wall. I’m listening to the drip of water onto rocks, the hiss of steam.
I haven’t exercised in months. I’ve lost ten pounds over the winter. I’ve had sex with a woman other than my wife for the first time in years. She was the twenty-nine-year-old every forty-year-old man is supposed to pine after, and the act had all the inspiration of my seventh-worst game of bowling: not terrible, but certainly not the stuff of mythology.
I can feel myself losing interest in the world, shedding it like the weight, just letting it drip and peel away, like waiting for death to come, how you just sit there in the end and hope it happens without any more pain than you’ve already gotten used to.
By mid-February I’ve lost all memory of great chunks of the case. I’ve been told it’s the depression coupled with poor nutrition leading to impaired cognitive function.
I have to go back and reexamine my notes before I can write, which I’ve gone months without doing, focusing on my kids instead but with tremendous effort. They can tell that I’m overcompensating again, trying to be the perfect dad, the way I used to be when I was fighting the urge to drink. My kids are hurting from the breakup and they don’t need French toast as much as they need me to just sit with them, relax into the moment instead of asking every thirty seconds, “Do you need anything? Are you okay? Are you hungry? Can I make you food?”
My kids need a parent in me, but a partner in me, too, someone they can talk with, and I’ve been offering them a rapidly deteriorating hotel concierge instead as a substitute for lasting emotional leadership. But I’m not a concierge at a great hotel: It’s like a Motel 6 around here and I’m the old guy whose only job is to refill the Lucite cereal dispensers.
When I step out of the sauna at the Y, I get on a scale for the first time in years and feel light-headed when I look at the numbers. When I get dressed, I can see my ribs in the mirror. I lean over to pull my socks on, get dizzy, and have to sit down to finish changing.
I lie on my couch for two days. At some point I call a friend.
“You don’t sound so good,” he says. “Are you okay?”
I just sort of breathe out a “No” into the phone.
Neither of us speaks for twenty seconds. I’m sure he can hear me breathing and I can hear him typing on his laptop absentmindedly before he says, “Listen, man, just call me when you’re better.” I don’t hear from him for another three months.
2:00 A.M.
Two weeks later, when my kids are gone, I force myself to make a pot roast, which I’ve bought with the food stamps I had to apply for, and I eat it for three days.
I start jogging and doing push-ups to prepare myself for hitting real weights in the gym again. Toward the end of that week, I feel stronger already. I’ve gained a few pounds back and started taking ginseng and ginkgo supplements. My head seems clearer.
But then two in the morning comes like a knife stuck under my chin one evening, adrenaline shooting through me. I tie on my running shoes, zip up a hoodie, and sprint the two miles between my rented house and the old home I’d failed at making a life in.
It’s pitch-dark and once again I find myself in the street out in front of my neighbor’s house, no knife in hand this time, but so furious with adrenaline that I could easily break through his front door, drag him into the street, and cut through his neck without even a weapon, with just my fingers.
I am so unhinged right now. I know it and I don’t care. And now I have my strength back to go with it.
The streetlamp cuts across me the way it used to cut across the neighbor’s car pulling up after a long night hidden away at a bar or hotel room or wherever he was with my wife. It cuts across me the way a knife would cut across the screen on his window and allow my entry into his home, as he had metaphorically entered mine, during all the seasons I imagine I’ll still want to enter it but can’t, knowing that violence removes both the victim and perpetrator equally from those that love them.
My father’s fists, I imagine, would have punched a hole through this man’s teeth, though—would’ve done it months ago if the decades had been reversed. I can see my father’s hands dragging this man into a welding shop somewhere and keeping him with chains and a D ring, clenched to the floor.
Certainly I want to do the same thing, yet I also understand in this moment that my own power over the situation must come
from somewhere else, from my grasp on the OCCK case, which is all I have—putting a bullet to the temple of these crimes might feel the same as putting a bullet to the head of the man who came into my house.
They have become the same being, the murderer on one hand, and the adulterer on the other. Although I, in turn, have become some version of my father at his worst—I am a predator now—I can use my strengths to cull not the weakest from the pack but the most insidious among us.
CLOWN
It’s early summer. I’ve been lifting weights and eating right. I’ve gained back ten pounds of muscle, which I’ll soon lose again, but right now I’m in better shape than ninety percent of adult males my age, and my kids and I have settled into a routine.
A mysterious man, using the pseudonym “Bob” and speaking only through an attorney he acquired in Detroit, has come forward to report intimate knowledge of the case. His claims are reminiscent of my own: that multiple perpetrators were involved in the killings, that a cop was possibly central to a cover-up, and that there were possibly more than four kids killed by the entities referred to collectively as the OCCK.
Bob, through his attorney Paul Hughes, announces a press conference slated for the coming weeks. I immediately get emails from strangers who have been following my work on the case, asking me if I am Bob. I had received a few small grants to continue my work, with subsequent news articles mentioning me, so I guess some readers made a connection that wasn’t there. I don’t know how people find my email address, but it’s not too difficult to find most things if a person is motivated. This keeps me on edge.
I send an email to Paul Hughes, requesting an interview with the mystery man he represents, and Hughes forwards my email request to Bob.
Bob, in turn, responds, via Mr. Hughes. In his email, Bob has turned down my request for an interview, but instead of Mr. Hughes simply relaying that message to me, or pasting the relevant portions of Bob’s response in quotes, he forwards Bob’s entire email.
In the forward sent to me by Mr. Hughes, Bob wrote, “If you want to speak with him, you are more than welcome. But not me. I’d rather kill myself first. Hope you get what I think of this clown.”
I’m the clown in this scenario.
I would stew about him calling me a clown but I don’t worry about that, because underneath his signature, as a postscript, is a series of questions overriding any annoyance I might momentarily feel. Bob has addressed the following questions to Hughes:
1. Did you hear anything back from Danto’s daughter?
2. Did the State Police get served?
3. Did you copy and delete emails?
I’m sitting at my dining table, where I write, when I read the email. My daughter is in her room playing records. My son is out back shooting an arrow through a box. I stand up to watch him out the screen window. He’s pretty good at it, but all I can think is, Danto?
DR. DANTO
After Kristine’s body was found on Bruce Lane, there was a lot of public speculation about Dr. Bruce Danto’s involvement in the killings. Many thought the area psychiatrist was guilty of the crimes. More believed in a theory that the serial killer was lassoing Danto’s reputation into the mix, due to Danto’s academic studies on violence. Danto was an easy target for the obsessions of a killer, it was thought, and by entangling him with the OCCK case, maybe the killer was carving out a fast track to even greater celebrity than he’d already acquired with the murders themselves. The killer was making himself legendary, like the great serial killers before him, was the thinking at the time. The celebrity being branded equally fast, however, might have been Danto’s.
After the body was found on a street bearing his name, Danto’s smarmy intellectual-sitting-in-a-chair photo was blasted repeatedly throughout the papers and on television as the good doctor took interview after interview from reporters and hair-sprayed frontmen with only half of Danto’s intellect. The media came to him like ants, and he fed them their sugar in the form of sound bites, much of it seemingly in service to boosting his own reputation as a psychiatrist of high position and caliber.
Shortly after Danto’s fame began to blossom, he called the PD to report a mysterious package that had been sent to his office containing a typed, two-page letter from a man claiming to be the Oakland County Child Killer’s roommate, begging for help. The letter, grammatically disastrous and in chopped syntax, read, verbatim:
DR. DANTO
I AM DSPERITE AND NEARLY GONE CRAZY AND HAVNT GOT NO PLACE LEFT TO TURN. I AM GOING TO COMIT SUICIDE IF YOU CANT HELP ME. PLEASE DONT GIVE UP THE KILLER TO THE POLICE. YOU MUST HELP ME AS THERE IS NO ONE ELSE I CANT TURN TO. THIS IS FOR REAL I KNOW WHO THE KILLER IS, I LIVE WITH HIM I AM HIS SLAVE. HE WHIPS ME AND BEATS ME ALL THE TIME. AND HE WILL KILL ME IF HE FINDS OUT THAT I HAVE WRITTEN THIS LETTER. I HAVE BEEN WITH HIM IN HIS CAR WHEN WE GO OUT LOOKING FOR BOYS BUT I SWEAR I HAVE NEVER NEVER NEVER BEEN WITH HIM WHEN HE PICKS UP THE ONES HE KILLSED BUT I AMIN IT IN IT SO DEEP I AM JUST AS JUILTY TO THE LAW AS HE IS I STAYED WITH THEM HERE HERE RIGHT HERE IN OUR APARTMENT DURING THE DAY WHILE HE IS WORKING. THAT MAKES ME JUST AS GUILTY. AND NO ONE CAN HEAR THEM AS THEY GAGGED ALL THE TIME. YOU KNOW HE BRINGS THEM IN STUFFED INCLOTHES HAMPER NO ONE HERE KNOWS THE DIFFERENCES. YOU KEEP SAYING OAKLNAD COUNTY NOT TRUE. HE HAS DELIVERY ROUT IN OAKLAND AND BIRMINGHAM PLACES BUT WE LIVE IN DETROIT. YOU WANT TO KNOW PEOPLE IN THIS BUILDING? PIMPS AND HOOKERS AND FAGS, YOU NAME IT. LIKE ON GREMLIN HE HAD IT SURE GRIMLIN UNTIL LAST BOY BUT NO ONE STOPS HIM IN DETROIT. HE JUNK IT OUT IN OHIO TO NEVER BE FOUND EVER. I TELL YOU WHAT MAKES HIM DO IT IT VIETNAM, WE WERE THERE TOGETHER, FRANK AND ME, OH FRANK NOT HIS REAL NAME I CALL HIM THAT HERE. NAM SCREW UP YOUR MIND DOC, IT GOTTA BE FUCKIN NAM. YOU EVER BE OVER THERE? ITWOULD SCREW UP YOUR MINDTOO. TELL YOU SOMETHING ELSE HE KILLED LOTS OF LITTLE KIDS THEN WITH MEDALS FOR IT. BURNED THEM TO DEATH BOMBED THEM WITH NAPALM IT’S REAL BECAUTIFUL THERE DOC. HE WANTS THE RICH PEOPLE LIKE PEOPLE IN BIRMINGHAM TO SUFFER LIKE ALL OF US SUFFERED TO GET NOTHING BACK FOR WHAT WE DID FOR OUR COUNTRY. HES NOT A MONSTER LIKE YOU THINK HE RALLY LOVES CHILDREN ESPECIALLY THAT LITTLE GIRL FOR 3 WEEKS NOT DOING IT BECUASE HATES CHILDRENS BUT DOING IT BECAUSE HATES EVERYBODY ELSE OUT THERE AND THIS BE HIS WAY TO GET EVEN AND GET BACK AT EVERYBODY.
BUT I CANNOT DO IT ANY MORE HE SAYS HE WONTS BUT I JUST KNOW HE IS GOING TO KILL SOME MORE. I SWEAR I HAD NO IDEA NO IDEA HE GOING TO KIL THAT FIRST LITTLE BOY THE ONE WITH BLOND COLRD HAIR. I SHOULDN8T EVER NEVER HELPED BUT TRAPPED TOO LATE HELPED HIM STAY UNCAUGHT, I AM JUST AS GUILTY AS HE IS. I CANT GO ON LIKE THIS I FELL I FEEL LIKE TO DIE.
I WILL TURN HIM IN IF YOU WILL SE SWEARNTO HELP ME I DONT WANT ANY OF REWARD I AM SO AFRAID IF I TURN HIM IN I BE KILLED OR DO FOREVER TO JAIL FOR WHAT SOMETHING I DIDN8T WANT TO OR DIDN’T START. IF YOU BE REAL DOCTOR YOU MUST HELP ME. IF YOU PROMISE AND WHAT REALLY PROMISE THAT YOU NOT PUNISH ME LIKE YOU CALL IT IMMUNITY I MEETING WITH YOU THIS SUNDAY NIGHT, I SWEAR, I SWEAR I TELL YOU ALL OF IT EVERYTHING I HAVE TO TELL SOMEONE HAVE TO TELL SOMEONE. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE NOT PRINT THIS IN PAPER HE FRANK KILL ME. I AM HIS SLAVE AND HE OWNS ME LIKE WHATEVER HE WANTS ALMOST KILLED ME ONCE. I BE ONLY ONE ALIVE KNOW IT HIM. NOBOYD ELSE KNOW. I SO SCARED ALL THE TIME POLICEMAN COME TO DOOR NEVER HAPPEN. HE SAY WE NEVER BE CAUGHT BY I AM SCARED TO DIE. I BE GUILTY TOO. I NOT GE BE CALL YOU ARAID POLICE TRACE ALL YOUR CALLS BACK TO HERE. BUT IF YOU WILL ONLUY PLEASE PLEASE HELP ME HELP ME AND PROMISE ME NOT TO GO TO JAIL IN WRITING I TELL YOU ALL OF IT EVERYTHING EVERYTHING AND IT ALL BE OVER. I NEVER NEVER WANT IT TO BE LIKE HTIS WITH LITTLE CHILDREN DEAD. IF YOU WILL HELP ME PLEASE PLEASE. THERE BE NO TOHER HOPE. YOU TELL ME IT BE ALL RIGHT WITH CODE IN SUNDAY PAPERS, THIS SUNDAY, NEWS FREEPRESS. YOU DO LIKE OTHER LETTER YOU WRITE ON FRONT PAGE OF PAPERS, THIS SUNDAY, IT BE TO SAY, WEATHER BEUAU SAY TREES TO BLOOM IN 3 WEEKS—YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT I TO SAY TO YOU, IT BE CODE I KNOW YOU GET MY LETTER AND YOU UNDERSTAND. YOU MAKE IT TO SAY TREES BLOOM IN 3 WEEKS, I KNOW YOU GET MY LETTER AND UNDERSTDNA
. IT MEAN I CAN TRUST YOU, I SET UP MEETING WITH YOU, NO MORE LITTLE CHILDRENS DIE. PLEASE HELP ME PLEASE. I FEEL SO BAD LIKE GARBAGE NOT DESERVE TO LIVE ANYMORE. MAYBE I KILL SELF FIRST MUST GET OUT OF THIS SOME WAY. PLEASE HELP ME.
I SINGND ALLEN
The PD went to Danto’s office, retrieved the letter, and began working with Dr. Danto to disseminate the information and lure the mysterious “Allen” out of hiding.
Danto, who had received a small amount of police training ancillary to his studies on violence, seemed overly eager. He requested a permit to carry a pistol in his boot. This was denied. He volunteered to have his home telephone tapped in anticipation of further contact.
A notice about the trees blooming in three weeks, per Allen’s request, was placed in the Sunday paper by the police. The morning the paper came out, Danto received a phone call at home, spoken in chopped English like the letter. The call was recorded. Allen’s end of the conversation follows:
I want [unintelligible] immunity. I want it by tomorrow night I mean tomorrow 9:00 [unintelligible]. You be at Seven Mile and Woodward you know where Pony Cart Bar, you listen to me this only time I’m calling you [unintelligible]. You want hang up, you hang up [unintelligible] but this is what I’m telling you [pause]. You be Pony Cart bar tomorrow night at 9:00 with letter from governor of Michigan giving me total immunity in return I give you Polaroid pictures proving he kill them [pause]. That’s all I’m going to say [pause]. You be there [pause]. This is a bar [pause]. Jesus [unintelligible]. Seven Mile near Woodward [pause]. Be there [unintelligible]. Pony Cart Bar [pause]. You be there, no police [pause]. I know everybody in there [long pause]. You no bring police you be there by yourself [pause]. You be there 9:00 tomorrow [pause]. No it’s a bar you stu [unintelligible]. You be there 9:00 tomorrow [pause]. You no bring police I prove he kill them. That’s all I say.
The Kill Jar Page 18