My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays

by Davy Rothbart

  During his trial, the prosecutors played the tape for the jury, and handed each juror a transcript so they could make out Byron’s words in places where the recorder had failed to pick up his voice. If you were innocent, the prosecutors said to the jury, and someone called and asked why you’d killed someone, wouldn’t you say, “You’re crazy! I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Why would Byron instruct Kelly to obfuscate the truth? Why not just tell her to be honest and tell the cops everything that had happened? Though Byron had never explicitly said he’d shot Anastasia, they argued, his vague answers, his efforts to convince Kelly not to cooperate with the authorities, and his general lack of response to some of her most pointed questions could be seen, in combination, as a tacit admission of guilt. In their brief three-hour deliberations, the jury asked to hear the tape again, and to study the transcripts of the call, and then they emerged and convicted Byron of Anastasia’s murder.

  I’ll be honest. Though I’d never heard the actual tape, I’d read the transcript of that conversation dozens of times, and had long struggled to reconcile my belief in Byron’s innocence with some of the things he says during that phone call. It just looks bad, there’s no way around it. I’d often explained it away to myself this way: Byron had a terrible flu, he was sick of Kelly calling him in the middle of the night saying crazy things, and just wanted to get off the phone with her as quickly as possible. “We shouldn’t talk about this” doesn’t necessarily mean “We shouldn’t talk about this because, yeah, I’m the one who killed Anastasia and we need to keep it hush-hush”—it could also mean “We shouldn’t talk about the death of our friend, because you’re bat-shit crazy and I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  Still, my own doubts lingered. Though I could talk about any other aspect of the case with Byron, I never asked him to explain the taped call of him and Kelly. Sometimes I wondered if maybe he was truly guilty. I’d let my doubts recast everything I knew about the case in a new light, and even though I trusted him and loved him as a friend and felt I knew him deeply, it was possible to imagine the story that Kelly had told on the stand as the truth. And if Byron was guilty, what of my friendship with him? Somehow, for me, the question of his guilt or innocence was secondary. I’d glimpsed his kind and compassionate qualities, his suffering, his gentle humanity, and had also shared much of myself with him over the years, and even if he’d done what some believed he’d done, that didn’t mean he wasn’t deserving of my love and friendship. In a sense, though I held on to a belief in his innocence, I’d already forgiven him for the things he might have done. Of course, I recognized that this was easier for me to do since I’d never known Anastasia. If she’d been my daughter, sister, cousin, or niece, and I believed Byron was the killer, I knew forgiveness might have been out of the question.

  Recently, though, new revelations came to light about Byron’s taped phone call with Kelly. A guy from Long Beach, California, named John Allen got in touch with me; he’d been researching Byron’s case, he said, and writing a book about it, and had discovered some of my online postings about Byron. Could we meet?

  A couple of months later, I found myself walking down basement steps into a Polish restaurant called the HMS Bounty on Wilshire Boulevard, just west of downtown L.A. It was two in the afternoon and the place was completely empty, except for one table in the back. John Allen got up to greet me. He was in his sixties, gray haired and hefty, a retired engineer, with a kind, confident air. He introduced me to his wife, Lynn—friendly, gracious, and seated in a wheelchair—and his niece, Lauren, who was in her early thirties and incredibly, mind-meltingly hot, in a tight black sweater, with long black hair and a mischievous glint in her eye. Throughout our lunch, Lauren kept smiling at me and holding my gaze, making me drunk and dizzy.

  John gave me some background. A few years before, he’d been a juror in a child molestation case. The rest of the jury had been in a rush to convict, but John, guided by a scientist’s finely tuned skepticism, felt that the prosecution’s case was full of holes, and that they’d failed to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. His resistance to go with the flow eventually resulted in a hung jury, and during a retrial new evidence was introduced which pointed toward the defendant’s innocence, and the man walked free. John was relieved at the outcome, but bewildered and dismayed by the lack of inquisitiveness shown by his fellow jurors. They seemed to take everything that the police and prosecution said at face value and discount the words of the accused. How many trials had been resolved unjustly, he wondered, by juries that had no skeptical voice to rein them in?

  When he’d first begun to research Byron Case’s situation, John said, he thought Byron might very well have been guilty. The transcript of Byron’s phone call with Kelly was just too weird to ignore. But as he combed through each detail of the case, with help from Lynn and Lauren, tiny inconsistencies, one after another, began to appear: Kelly said Byron had shot Anastasia at a distance of five to eight feet, but the autopsy revealed that she’d been fired at point-blank. Kelly said that the murder weapon was a shotgun; Anastasia’s wounds suggested a handgun. Then one day John managed to track down the original recording of Byron and Kelly’s phone call, and used some free audio software he’d downloaded to enhance the sound of Byron’s voice. What John discovered was shocking—the transcript was riddled with inaccuracies and omissions that seemed intentionally misleading. In fact, in every instance the faulty transcript worked to Byron’s disadvantage. At moments when Kelly had asked Byron certain questions, the transcript merely said, “NO RESPONSE,” when actually Byron was responding for as long as thirty seconds at a time, though his words were subaudible and couldn’t be made out. According to the transcript, Byron had told Kelly, “We shouldn’t talk about this.” Actually, he’d said, “We should talk about this.” John was fuming. “The prosecutors couldn’t have hoped for a better tape. Since no one can hear much of what Byron is saying, they were able to just make up whatever they wanted, call it a ‘transcript,’ and pass it out to the jury. The jury listened to the tape, sure, but what they were really using as evidence was the transcript, as authored by the prosecution, and corroborated by Kelly herself. The whole thing’s a fiction!”

  Down in that homey Polish restaurant’s cool basement, I felt a thrilling surge of hopefulness and relief, not just because John’s discovery held real glimmers of promise for Byron, but also because he’d managed to douse my own lingering suspicions about Byron’s guilt. It was all I could do, at the end of the meal, as we said our goodbyes, not to give Lauren a powerful, celebratory kiss on the lips.

  It’s small, ragged bands of passionate believers like John Allen, Lynn, and Lauren, or Reuben “the Hurricane” Carter’s trio of kindly Canadians, who often help the wrongfully convicted find their way to freedom. But will John’s discovery of the flawed transcripts one day lead to Byron’s exoneration? It’s hard to know. No matter what, it’s going to be a long climb.

  *

  If Byron didn’t kill Anastasia, who did?

  In the visiting room this morning, while Peter and Evelyn play cards, me and Byron discuss that question. Byron says, “Well, I’m uniquely qualified to know that I didn’t do it, which helps me focus on the other possibilities. But it’s been ten years and I still can’t say I’ve solved it.”

  In the months after Anastasia was killed, gossip about her death ran rampant through her old high school and Kansas City’s goth scene. Some said it had been a game of Russian roulette. Others said the killer was a rival girl from a nearby town, jealous of Justin’s affections for Anastasia. Meanwhile, the police kept poking around the neighborhoods surrounding Lincoln Cemetery, with the idea that a stranger might’ve committed the crime. Long-haul truckers, vagabonds, and drifters had long been attracted to that stretch of Truman Road just off I-435 by its adult bookstores and cheap motels, and a large sex shop called Erotic City, four blocks down from the entrance to the cemetery. It wasn’t uncommon to see guys panhandling or sel
ling drugs at a gas station, or prostitutes walking the street, even in broad daylight. Perhaps Anastasia had wandered into Lincoln Cemetery, investigators imagined, trailed by some bad fucking dude. This, of course, was the failed line of defense that Horton Lance had tried to pursue in court.

  A couple of years after Anastasia’s death, a businessman was biking home along Truman Road from his office downtown when he was shot and killed in a parking lot. No one had spotted the gunmen; he’d apparently been fired upon from a line of bushes fifty yards away. Eventually, the police turned up his assassins—a pair of young locals in their late teens and early twenties. They hadn’t even known the guy on the bike. All they said by way of explanation was that the guy looked like a chump.

  Killings by strangers are rare but not unheard of. A few months after Byron’s trial, John Muhammad and Lee Malvo—the so-called Beltway snipers—shot and killed fourteen people in their cross-country spree. Could a stranger have killed Anastasia? Byron tells me he thinks it’s possible, but considers the odds remote. “Yeah, I suppose it could’ve been some creep from the neighborhood,” he says, “or someone just passing through town. They could’ve been long gone before her body was even found.”

  But the evidence, Byron points out, suggests that Anastasia knew the person who shot her. Though her purse was missing, there’d been no sign of a struggle or any attempt at a sexual assault. She’d been shot in the face, point-blank, staring into the eyes of the person who shot her, with no effort made, it seemed, to flee or defend herself.

  “What about Anastasia’s dad?” I ask Byron. “Robert WitbolsFeugen.” I tell him I’ve heard that over the years WitbolsFeugen has shown signs of aberrant behavior. In a police interview, his ex-wife, Betsy Owens—Anastasia’s mom—reported that he’d regularly beaten her, sometimes so badly she’d ended up in the emergency room, and that he’d left welts on Anastasia as well. After Anastasia’s death, when police had tentatively called it a murder-suicide and moved on, WitbolsFeugen harangued them to continue their investigation. In fact, his harassment grew so intense—he sent a hundred and fifty messages to the lead investigator’s personal e-mail account in the span of a few months—that the investigator sent him an official request asking him to back off. To me, all of this seemed like the natural (if overbearing) response of an angry and grieving man whose daughter had been killed and felt the full story of her death hadn’t been uncovered. But even after Byron’s conviction, WitbolsFeugen’s campaign of harassment toward police and public officials continued. His constant presence at public board meetings, often bearing handmade protest signs, spooked county clerks and councilmen; some quit their posts, fearing for their safety. He was eventually arrested at a meeting after disturbing the peace and assaulting a cop. There’s something weird enough in his obsessive tendencies, I tell Byron, that I’ve wondered if I should feel suspicious.

  Byron mulls over his response. “You know, there’s something not right about Bob WitbolsFeugen. And it didn’t start with Anastasia’s death. He was always a scary guy, and I know sometimes she was scared of going home. That’s why she loved Justin so much, she felt safe with him. But no matter how much I try to make the pieces fit, I can’t really believe that he could’ve done it, that the guy could’ve killed his own daughter. He may be a bit off—maybe a lot off—but I believe he loved Stasia with all of his heart. The guy was just broken when she died, unhinged.” Byron looks at me. “You know, the pressure he put on the cops to make an arrest is probably a part of why I’m here today. But as much hatred as I feel toward him at times, I mostly just feel sadness for what he’s been through, losing a daughter. I guess I just can’t imagine him killing her. It had to be somebody else.”

  In the end, there may be a more obvious answer. John Allen, after a year of intense research, believes that Anastasia was killed by Justin Bruton as part of a suicide pact he’d made with her. “It’s Occam’s razor,” he told me during our lunch in L.A. “The simplest explanation is generally the correct one.” He laid out his case for me: At the time of her death, Anastasia was clearly suicidal; as John had come to learn, she had recently tried to slash her own wrists. When that failed, she asked her dad for sharper razor blades. The week of her death, she’d asked her mom to help her get pills so that she could kill herself. She even left a suicide note of sorts on Justin’s computer, a journal entry that said, among other things, “I never wanted to feel life.” Justin, too, was suicidal, and had attempted suicide at least once before. The night before Anastasia was killed, he’d gone to a gun show, and it was there, presumably, that he’d picked up the handgun he’d used to shoot her inside Lincoln Cemetery.

  But if Justin and Anastasia had vowed to off themselves together, I asked John, why the lag time between her death and his? John’s not sure. But he knows that hours after Anastasia’s body was discovered, Justin walked into a gun store, bought a shotgun, and was eventually found in the countryside, an hour away, having taken his own life. After a long, emotionally draining, on-again, off-again relationship filled with two years of vicious squabbles, the troubled teenagers were dead, both at the hands of Justin, John Allen believes, just as the cops had suspected for years.

  I share John’s take with Byron and he drops his head. “I’ve always understood why other people would think it was Justin,” Byron says. “But he was my best friend. My best friend. I knew him better than anybody. And I’m telling you, for the longest time I couldn’t imagine that he could’ve been capable of hurting her, of hurting anyone. I simply didn’t believe he could’ve done it. I gave it real thought, plenty of times over the years, and in the end I always ruled it out completely.” He lifts his head to look at me, welling up with emotion, his voice going soft. “But you know,” he says, “there’s nothing else that makes sense. I still can’t accept it myself, I can’t say, ‘Justin did it,’ but if that’s what other people believe, I can’t try and argue with them.”

  There’s something incredibly moving about Byron’s loyalty to Justin and the faith he still clings to in his friend, even though it may have been Justin’s actions that have doomed him to a decade—and counting—in prison. While I know it’s neither here nor there, I tell Byron about a dream I’ve often had of Justin writing a suicide note in which he admits he’s killed Anastasia, and hiding the note in a book on his shelf. In my dreams, I explain to Byron, I’m always clawing apart thousands of books—a whole library full—searching for Justin’s confession.

  Byron looks at me, unsure, it seems, how to respond. “That’s nice,” he says at last, drily. “I guess that would be helpful. Let me know if you find it.” He rubs his cheeks, looking from me to Peter and Evelyn, who by now have been drawn into our discussion.

  “We may never know exactly what happened to Anastasia,” Byron goes on, wearily. “All I know is that I didn’t do it. But some way or another, I really believe one day the truth will come out, and everyone will see that I’ve been innocent all along.” He flashes a strange, sad smile, and looks around the room at the other inmates huddled around neighboring tables with their own families, the guards at the front of the room, killing time themselves, the giant classroom clock hanging above the door, and the yellow wall where the painted mountain range used to be. He slumps back in his chair, and spreads his arms wide. “For now, though, I’m here.”

  *

  Evelyn cries softly in the backseat of my van all the way to Lathrop, where we always stop for Subway. It’s the saddest sound in the world, but I know there’s nothing I can say to relieve her heartbreak, though I try. Byron’s sentence has become a sentence for her, too. She’s told me that she longs to move home to Germany, but would never leave the area while Byron’s still locked up. She’s his anchor, and her weekly visits are what keep Byron going strong. Yes, he’s got other friends and loved ones on the outside, but I can’t help but wonder, in dark moments, how he’d fare if Evelyn ever got too old or sick to visit him at Crossroads, or if she passed away. It hurts to imagine just how alone he’d
be.

  We grab subs and punch it south, driving in silence straight to our show at the Record Bar in Kansas City. Peter hauls his guitar and sound equipment inside, and while Evelyn helps me set up a table with our Found books and Tshirts and CDs, my brother plays the Bon Jovi song “Wanted Dead or Alive” to the empty room to warm up his voice. God, I think, what a beautiful fucking song. I head back to the van to put my stack of found notes in order and get some drinking done.

  An hour later I head in, more bent than usual. The place is packed. Evelyn’s at a table in front with Napo, Byron’s old cellmate Pablo, and ten other friends of hers and Byron’s. I pick up a couple more drinks at the bar, get up on the microphone, and do what I do. Each found note and letter I read to the crowd feels doubly piercing, and when it’s Peter’s turn to perform, he seems to sing with more emotion than ever. Throughout the show, I’m on the edge of tears.

  Before we’re finished, I find myself making a half-drunken impromptu speech about the injustice of Byron’s fate and pleading with the crowd to check out his website and spread the word. I pull my hat off my head and get it going around the room, collecting money toward Byron’s legal expenses.

  Afterwards, Evelyn gives me a hug, and tells me she loves me, and I tell her I love her, too. We say goodbye. Me and Peter pack everything up and square up with the club owner, and I head around the corner to another bar to hang out with two girls who work at the local public radio station while Peter crashes out in our makeshift bed in the back of the van.

  At the bar, the girls ask me more about Byron, and I try to impress them by telling them about my visit with him earlier in the day—having a friend in prison serving a life sentence, I imagine, makes me appear more edgy and hard-core than I really am. For half an hour, I keep downing drinks, ranting on and on about Byron’s situation, explaining everything in explicit detail. The girls listen raptly, asking questions here and there, moved, it seems, by my devotion to him. Finally, one steps out to smoke a cigarette, and I quickly fuck everything up with the other. I try to kiss her, and she drops her chin and turns away, and I end up kissing her glasses instead. “I’ve got a boyfriend,” she says. “Sorry. You should’ve gone for Celeste. She’s single. Hold on, I’ll be right back.” She joins her friend out on the sidewalk in front of the bar, and when they come back in, they say they’ve got to go, they’ve got an early start at work the next morning.