by Fred Rosen
Vazquez immediately had Officer Pochran and Trooper David Seip drive the teenager down to the Eastern Salisbury Firehouse for an interview. The time was 10:45 P.M. While Liste was being whisked in for questioning, across town in two homes, the grieving was beginning.
Linda Solivan and Sandy Lettich had just finished talking to detectives. They had loved their sister Brenda dearly and were shattered by the news of her violent death. The deaths of Dennis and their nephew Erik made it all that much more difficult to bear. Yet, they were devout Jehovah’s Witnesses.
This was an attack directly from Satan. Only Satan could wreak such havoc on the Freeman household; only Satan could kill them so violently. But Satan could not, would not win, because they were killed as Jesus was. To die for being a Witness is the ultimate joy. As such, their death was not so much a tragedy as an honor. Brenda, David, and Erik were martyred Jehovah’s Witnesses in the same way that the Christians were martyred in the Coliseum and the Jews at Masada.
Trooper Seip, though, was not concerned with affairs on the spiritual plane; his job was to get to the bottom of a triple homicide and get the perpetrators arrested. He began questioning Harry Liste.
“Where do you go to school?” Seip began.
“At Salisbury High School with Bryan. And David.”
“How’d your picture wind up in their house?”
“Well, I’m a friend of Bryan’s. We’re regular friends, me and Bryan,” he added.
“How long have you known Bryan?” Seip asked.
“About two years, though we hardly ever do anything outside of school. We pal around at school.”
“Sort of like school friends,” Seip, repeated.
“Yeah. We have some of the same classes, and we both go to Vo-Tech in the afternoon. Bryan’s taking automotive classes.”
“How well do you know his brother David?”
“Not well at all. I met David through Bryan.”
“Did you ever hear either make any threats toward their parents?”
Liste nodded.
“Bryan said a couple of times that he wanted to kill his parents.”
“When did he make these threats?”
“Bryan’s been saying that he wanted to kilt his parents for the past two years. Bryan said that he had beat up his father in the past.”
“Did he ever indicate why he hated his parents?”
“No, he never said,” Liste replied. “He also said he hated his little brother, and he would beat him up as well.”
“How long were they skinheads?”
“About three years.”
If Liste was right, it meant that Bryan had been a skinhead since he was fourteen-years-old and his brother since he was twelve.”
“Did Bryan have any of those tattoos the skinheads usually have?”
“He had several.”
“Describe them.”
“Well, he had the word ‘berserker’ tattooed across his forehead. Then there was a swastika made of bones on his neck, and a man, half black and half white, on his right arm. That means something in skinhead lore, but I don’t know what.”
“When was the last time you talked to Bryan?”
“On Friday. At school. It was in the morning sometime. I said I’d see him between classes and at lunch.”
“Do you know how Bryan was doing in school?”
“He was in trouble, at least on Friday, because he wrote some obscene stuff on a state test he’d been taking. That had gotten him suspended for five days. Bryan told me that he didn’t care if he got into trouble.”
“Had he said anything to you about his plans for the weekend?”
Liste shook his head.
“What kind of mood was Bryan in on Friday?”
“Bryan seemed pissed off. I saw him trying to scrounge lunch money off somebody. The principal saw him and grabbed Bryan. Bryan pushed him away. That was the last time I saw him.”
“Do you have any idea where Bryan might have gone to?”
“Well, about two weeks ago, Bryan said he was trying to get some money to go to Florida. He wanted to go there because of the mostly white population.”
Seip didn’t tell Liste that Bryan had been misinformed. Florida has a significant Hispanic and African American population.
“Bryan always talked about an uncle he liked a lot.”
The uncle lived in Florida, but Liste didn’t know his name.
“Did you see David on Friday?”
“Yeah. In the hall. He seemed OK.”
“Now, Mr. Liste, about that picture we found in the house. It was of you, and on the back there was a swastika.”
Liste explained that he had drawn the swastika on the back.
“Are you a skinhead?”
“No way,” Liste said. “I just wrote that stuff to be Bryan’s friend.”
“So what did you guys do when you palled around? Out of school, that is.”
“It was about two months ago at the Whitehall Mall. It was me, Bryan, David, Beth, that’s another friend of Bryan’s, and Ben, his cousin. There were about twenty skinheads altogether.”
The Freeman Brothers tried to pick a fight with some kid.
“They got bounced out of the mall,” Liste continued.
“So where do you think they’ve gone to?”
“Like I said, they had this uncle they liked, and they also said they liked their grandfather. Me, I think they took off, and they’ll keep going.”
“Do you know if they have any weapons?”
“Bryan has a pocketknife with a blade. David might have a shotgun. Bryan said they’d been shooting the shotgun recently and that they got their shells at the hardware store last week, maybe Thursday or Friday. A kid named Allan Hayward works there and might have sold them the ammo.”
“Any idea what kind of car they’re driving?”
“Bryan used to drive a gray Camaro, but his parents sold it about two weeks ago. He’s been taking the bus since then. I think Bryan’s driving a big, blue Cadillac now.”
“How’d he get it?”
“I think David bought it, and Bryan was driving it until David got his license.”
“Did you ever see either brother driving a black Sunbird?” the detective asked.
“No.” On thinking further, Liste recalled, “Oh, yeah. It was a convertible. I only saw Bryan’s mother driving it. I did see Bryan in the car, but only with his mom.”
“You think Bryan killed his parents?”
“He hated them with a passion. Yeah, I think he killed them.”
“What about David and Ben?”
“Maybe David did, too, but I don’t know about Benny.”
“When was the last time you saw Benny?”
“About two to three months ago at the Whitehall Mall. I didn’t know him that well. I do know that Bryan and Benny got a job at a Wendy’s on Tilghman Street. They started there last weekend and Bryan had to shave if he wanted to work there.”
“You ever call Bryan?”
“Never.”
“Do you know where Benny is?”
“No. And I don’t know how to find him, and even if I did, I don’t think Benny’d talk to you.”
“How about friends, girlfriends who might know where they are?”
They were sometimes a good source of information.
“There were two girls, Maryann Galton and Jennifer Greener. They were skinhead girls who went to school with Bryan. Galton had a shaved head.”
“Tell me something, did you ever hear of Bryan and David, as skinheads, doing any harm to people?”
“Two or three months ago, Bryan told me that he, David, and maybe Benny were driving in Allentown. They hit a black kid walking down the street with an eight-ball in a sock.”
That would make it a hate crime, which upped the penalty.
“You know anything else about that incident?”
“No.”
“You said earlier that the last time Bryan said he wanted to kill his parents was
Friday?”
“Yeah.”
“About what time? Can you narrow it down?”
Liste thought for a moment.
“Sometime like between 10:30 and 11:00. At lunch.”
“Why did Bryan hate his little brother?”
“Because he was a Jehovah’s Witness, like his parents.”
The interview was over.
The next morning, newspapers across the country, from The New York Times in the east to the Oregonian in the west, had the story on their front pages. And despite all that coverage, despite their pictures being all over the place, no one knew where the boys were. No one knew where they were headed.
TWO
At the crime scene, Trooper Vazquez had discovered that the Freeman brothers knew a boy named Marshall Fallon. Thinking that Fallon, like Liste, might have information on their whereabouts, Trooper Seip was dispatched to bring him in.
Fallon lived at a hotel on Hamilton Street. Seip brought the seventeen-year-old to the Salisbury Township police department for questioning.
“Yeah, I’ve known David and Bryan since May of 1994. I’m one of their closest friends,” Fallon bragged.
“When was the last time you saw them?” Seip wondered.
“Haven’t seen either in the last week or two. I’d tried to get together with them, but ever since their parents sold their cars, we got no way to get together. They used to give me a ride to work.”
“Don’t you have a license?”
Although the legal driving age in Pennsylvania is sixteen, the seventeen-year-old did not have one, which meant he also didn’t have a car he could drive to work.
“The brothers, they’d drive me and sometimes pick me up at work.”
Fallon went on to relate that within the last month, the Freemans had changed.
“They’ve been talking about bizarre things lately. Like two weeks ago, the Freemans were talking to me about robbing a gun store, killing a cop, and splitting down South. That’s what they said, ‘splitting.’”
What were the Freeman brothers, 1960s “beatniks?” The term “splitting” became common in the 1960s. It was almost like their cultural references, because of the way they had been raised, were decades behind the times.
“They also talked all the time about how much they hated their parents, the principal at their high school, and other “skins,” Fallon continued. “They talked about destroying these people and about getting ‘berserker’ tattooed on their forehead.”
Seipe picked up.
“What about those tattoos? What else did they say about them?”
“They said that when they had ‘berserker’ tattooed on their forehead, it would be the final straw.”
If nothing else, the Freeman Brothers could coin a metaphor.
“That tattoo would mean that they no longer cared about anything, that they would go on a path of destruction,” Fallon eloquently explained.
“What do you think about the Freemans now?” Seipe wondered.
“They’re out of control! They’ll hurt anybody who gets in their way.”
“Including—”
The detective didn’t even get a chance to finish his sentence.
“Police, yeah, including police. See, in the Skinhead Nazi organization there’s a point system for certain crimes,” Fallon explained. “You receive one point for killing a parent or a family member, killing a cop, and raping and killing a woman.”
Fallon added it up.
“So the Freemans, they got three points each.”
One for Dennis, one for Brenda, and one for Erik, even though he was underage. In death, at least, he counted.
“Do you know Benny Birdwell?” Seipe wondered.
“Yeah, but I don’t like him. I really don’t know him much at all.”
“Have either of the brothers called you since the murders?”
“No, but I’m staying at a hotel, and last night into this morning the pay phone in the hall rang all night. I didn’t answer it, but I feel it was probably the Freemasons calling me.”
“Where do you think they’re going?”
“Either down to North or South Carolina or Florida.”
No, not really.
While everyone was looking for them in the South, the Freeman Brothers and their cousin Ben Birdwell had gone west into the Ohio Valley. The boys had chosen to stay in their room there at the Truck World Motor Inn, but by 10 A.M. they had gotten bored.
“Let’s go next door to the mall and look around,” Ben said.
On their way to the mall, they passed Frank Converse, a trucker on his way to Pennsylvania. Gazing down from his eighteen-wheel rig, he noticed the three skinheads. They were hard to miss.
After the mall, the boys came back to their motel room, where Jesse Capece kept a sharp eye on them. They hung out in the lobby for a while, then went back to their room. Since they were paying in cash, a record was kept of their phone calls.
One was to a local Domino’s Pizza. The other was to Michigan.
“This is Bryan from Pennsylvania,” Bryan said into the phone.
“Bryan who from Pennsylvania?” the guy on the other end said.
“Remember in Detroit? You got my number.”
On the other end of the line, Frank Hesse thought back to the last time he’d been in Detroit. It was only a few months before, at a New Year’s Eve concert. He had gone to Detroit to hear a few white supremacist rock bands. That’s where he had met Bryan, he remembered.
“I’m in Ohio,” Bryan continued. “I got a couple of days off from work,” he lied, “and I’m going up to Detroit and thought I’d stop up.”
“Well stop over,” Frank said, “and we’ll have a beer together.”
As John gave the directions to his house, Bryan repeated them and David wrote them down on the hotel room receipt.
It was 7:58 P.M. when they checked out. Jesse watched carefully as they pulled their Sunbird out onto the road.
One state over in Pennsylvania, the police interviews with friends of the Freeman Brothers and their cousin Benny Birdwell were continuing.
“I’ve known Bryan and David Freeman for years,” fifteen-year-old Deborah Thompson told Trooper Archer. Then she revealed something really significant.
“Bryan was an ‘A’ student until about six months ago, when he began drinking alcohol constantly.”
“Why?” Archer wondered.
“He seemed to start drinking constantly when his cousin Benny dropped out of school.”
She said she had been Bryan’s girlfriend until about two months earlier.
“Why’d you break up with him?”
“He got these tattoos, that and the excessive drinking,” Deborah answered. “It had gotten to point where Bryan was drinking beer before he went to school.”
She added that Bryan had spoken of killing his parents around Christmas. He was upset that his parents didn’t believe in giving Christmas gifts. She also remembered that Bryan and David didn’t like their Aunt Valerie. They tormented her by “pissing in her shampoo bottle” and wanted her to leave their home.
As for their skinhead beliefs, Deborah thought that Bryan Freeman was the leader and David and Ben Birdwell were followers. She said they also had a friend named Clark Hessler, who was a skinhead living in Allentown and drove a red Honda XL.
Next up for an interview by police was Joe Johnson, another fifteen-year-old. He immediately informed the detective that he was a skinhead and he had known the Freemans for about three years.
“I got David to become a skinhead two years ago. David got Bryan and Benny Birdwell to be skinheads afterward,” Johnson explained. “David and Bryan hated their parents because they were Jehovah’s Witnesses. Their mother had rules of no smoking or drinking alcohol in her house. Their parents had just sold Bryan’s car recently.”
And it got much worse.
“David said a couple of times recently, ‘I would like to kill that fat bitch.’ He was talking about his mother.”
“Did Bryan say anything?”
“He said, ‘We’ll be out of here soon,’” Johnson answered.
“How about his younger brother? Did either of them say anything about him?”
“David called his brother ‘a piece of shit.’ Oh, they also had beer in the fridge in their home and their mother would throw it away.”
Johnson related that he had heard a student named Mark Simon received a call from someone who said “Mark” and hung up. He said that Simon believed it could have been the Freemans. He said that the last time he’d spoken to the Freemans had been yesterday.
David had called and said he might stop by the bowling alley where he was going to be. But David never had. Johnson then said that recently he had been at a party at the Acorn Hotel, and the Freemans had jumped him, saying he was Polish and not “pure White.”
He said that the Freemans and another skinhead named Clark Hessler were his enemies.
By midnight, Frank Converse had reached Murray, Pennsylvania. He took a coffee break at a truck stop and bought a newspaper. On the front page, he saw the pictures of the three young men wanted for the murders of Brenda, Dennis, and Erik Freeman. Frank immediately dialed “911.”
“Hey, I just saw those guys,” Frank said excitedly.
“What guys?” asked the 911 operator.
“Those three guys you’re looking for.”
“Which three guys?” the dispatcher said with exasperation.
“The skinheads.”
The dispatcher’s voice took on a new edge.
“Where?”
The police in Murray, Pennsylvania, immediately called the Salisbury Township Police and told them that a trucker had spotted their suspects at the Truck World Motor Inn in Hubbard, Ohio. When Vazquez called Truck World, he spoke to Jesse Capece.
“Yes, they were here,” Jesse acknowledged over the phone. “I knew there was something wrong with them.”
She was asked where they had gone to.
“I don’t know. They just pulled out of here a couple of hours ago. But they did make a call, to someplace in Michigan.”
Vazquez alerted the Michigan State Police that the Freeman Brothers and Ben Birdwell, suspects in a multiple-homicide case, were coming their way. He gave them their Pontiac Sunbird’s tag number. They were to be considered armed and extremely dangerous.