“For what?” Steven wondered.
“For listening to me bitch about my family all the time. It’s really good to get it off my chest, and I appreciate you listening.”
“Don’t worry about it, Bart,” Steven reassured him. “That’s what friends are for.”
“No, I mean it,” Bart insisted. “You’re like the brother I never had.”
“You already have a brother,” Steven joshed back.
“Yeah, I know. But he’s worthless. I don’t really consider him to be my brother. I just cannot confide in him the things I have already shared with you. It’s important to be able to trust someone with my innermost thoughts and secrets, and I cannot do it with Kevin. But I can with you.”
Steven was a bit embarrassed. “Don’t mention it, Bart. Really, it’s no big deal. You can tell me anything.”
“I know, Steven,” Bart responded. “That truly means the world to me. It’s important that we both have someone we can trust explicitly. Someone we both can confide in and trust.”
Steven nodded as Bart carried on.
“You are my brother,” Bart added, “through thick and thin.” He sealed the deal with a firm handshake and a pat on the shoulder.
July 2003
Lake Conroe
FM Highway 830 Road
Willis, Texas
Bart met up with Steven after work, this time without their fellow employees.
“Hey, Steven. C’mon, let’s go for a ride.”
“Cool, where we going?” Steven asked.
“I’ll tell you when we get there” was Bart’s sardonic response, with a slight grin on his face. “I’d like to talk with you about something very important.”
“Sure, man,” replied the amiable Steven. “Let’s go.” Steven hopped into Bart’s Yukon and Bart drove up northeast on Lakeshore Drive to nearby Highway 830, hit the elliptical roundabout, until they reached the lip of Lake Conroe. The drive was less than one mile away. Bart pulled the SUV up to the end of the road, killed the engine, and got out of the vehicle. Steven joined him.
Bart walked to the edge of the lake and looked up at the partial moon hovering above him, its incandescent glow reflecting back on his pale face.
“Are you happy, Steven?” Bart suddenly asked his friend.
Steven snapped to and answered, “Kind of.” It did not seem very convincing, and he knew Bart picked up on it immediately.
“I mean really, truly happy?” Bart prodded.
“I don’t know,” Steven admitted.
“You know what makes me happy?” Bart shot back. “Not having to worry about anything.” He smiled as he turned toward his friend.
Steven did not respond.
“I like being successful,” Bart went on. “I like having money. I like knowing that I don’t have to worry about anything.”
Steven was not quite sure if Bart was finished talking about what made him happy, but after an interminable pause, Steven finally interjected, “Money makes me happy, too.”
Bart nodded vigorously as he turned to his friend. “It’s not just money, but the security that goes along with it. The knowledge that you can do whatever you want, whenever you want, however you want, is the ultimate power. It’s the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Bart began to circle around Steven, who stood still under the eerie moonlight—the wolf hypnotizing his wounded prey.
Steven nodded in agreement. He was not simply mesmerized by his friend; what Bart was getting at spoke to him directly. It truly was what he had always wanted, had always desired. The ability to know every morning he could wake up and not have a financial care in the world was the most important thing to Steven Champagne.
“It would not be that hard to make it happen,” Bart declared.
Steven stood silently. He was intrigued by the direction of Bart’s conversation.
“Do you want to be financially secure, Steven?” Bart inquired in a strong tone.
“Of course, Bart. Who doesn’t?”
“Are you willing to do whatever it takes to make sure you realize your dream, Steven?” Bart insisted.
“I guess so,” Steven replied.
“Well, you better be ready, because I am going to make that dream a reality, my friend. Just you wait and see.”
An hour later, Bart and Steven jumped back into Bart’s Yukon. Neither of them spoke another word on the ride home. Steven sat quietly, looking off into the pitch black through the SUV’s passenger window, while Bart showed only a hint of a smile.
After the excursion to the lake, Bart and Steven began to spend even more time together. Many times, the two of them would simply hang out on Bart’s porch, without their coworkers around. This was always the ideal time for Bart to begin making his plans for him and Steven.
Most of the time, Steven considered Bart to be a pretty straightforward guy. He believed Bart spoke clearly and said what he meant. However, Steven recalled, “There were times where you felt like he was leading the conversation in a [unique] direction, and you didn’t quite know what he was after, or what he wanted you to say.”
After Steven got to know Bart even better, the two developed a shorthand way of communicating with one another, if they were around a group of people. They did not want the others to know what they were talking about, so they would speak in “cryptic terms.” According to Steven, the two young men tended to act as if they were participating in a big inside joke. “We could be talking to another person and say something completely cryptic, that didn’t really give away anything during the conversation to other people, but we knew exactly what we were talking about.”
End of August 2003
Harbour Town
Willis, Texas
Just like they had with Adam Hipp and Justin Peters and Will Anthony, the conversations between Bart and Steven began to take on a darker, more sinister tone.
“I want to kill my parents.” Bart snorted derisively toward Steven one night out on Bart’s patio. No one else was around.
“I’m sure you do,” Steven tossed back in a sarcastic tone.
“I’m serious,” Bart declared.
Steven was unsure if his new friend was serious, or if he was merely gauging him for a reaction. He assumed it was the latter. Steven did not respond. Instead, he just nodded as if he understood and continued to let his friend get his feelings out in some healthy way. Inside, Steven believed Bart was joking. There was no way this smart, handsome, successful young man would ever get involved in something as risky, and off the radar, as murdering his own family.
When Steven did not respond immediately, Bart dropped the subject.
After that initial broaching of the topic, Bart turned his future conversations into more generalized versions of killing people. Bart’s conversations examined the various methods of how to murder someone—and, more important, how to get away with it.
“There was one incident where he was describing how you can kill someone,” Steven remembered, “and it could be totally random, and no one would ever know you did it.” Steven remembered clearly how Bart talked about murdering one of their coworkers at the Bentwater Country Club, and how he would go about doing it without being detected.
According to Steven, their coworker “was addicted to drugs,” and Bart “looked at him as if he was worthless. Like he was a drain on society.” But Bart had a plan to deal with societal dregs. Bart told Steven, “You take him out into a field,” referring to their coworker, “and shoot him in the head.” Bart seemed rather nonplussed to Steven as he spoke of brutal execution. “There’s no motive. No one would ever know you did it.” He grinned slightly at the thought.
Steven looked at Bart and said, “You’d never get away with it.”
“Oh, really?” Bart responded. “Why is that?”
“Because we work with the guy,” Steven answered in a rational manner. “At the least, we would be questioned as potential suspects or witnesses, because we knew him and worked with him.”
Bart did not say anyth
ing.
Over time, the random people that Bart wanted to kill included his brother, Kevin. “It seemed like he started taking the feelings that he had toward people in general and placing them onto his family members,” Steven opined.
Bart’s main target of his frustration was his younger brother. According to Steven, “He felt like his brother was worthless, that he was just draining his parents of money.”
Like most everyone else who encountered Kevin Whitaker, Steven liked the young man. “I had met him once over at Bart’s place. They were playing poker. I saw him with Bart, and said hi.” Steven also recalled one time when Bart asked him to pick Kevin up and bring him back to Willis. Kevin needed to drop off his car, and Bart was going to bring him back home, so Steven picked him up in the interim.
Steven did not quite fully understand Bart’s hatred for his brother. To him, Kevin “seemed like a normal kid.”
Bart’s constant hinting around at killing his brother, and possibly his entire family, soon took a more serious turn. “He’s worthless,” Bart stated in exasperation. “He’s just a lazy mooch that never earns his keep. I tell you, Steven, he’s going to drain my family dry. I can’t let him do it.”
Steven, once again, just assumed Bart was blowing off steam.
“My parents have a lot of money,” Bart declared to Steven, as if it were the first time he realized that fact. “I should just wipe out my entire family and collect all of the insurance money. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about my annoying brother, and I would never need to worry about being financially secure ever again.”
As usual, Steven kept his mouth shut.
“What do you say?” Bart asked his friend. “Are you in?”
“Am I in for what?” Steven asked, knowing full well where the conversation was heading.
“Are you in for making a lot of money and never needing to worry about whether or not you can pay your bills, or what kind of car you can drive?” Bart quizzed him again. He seemed somewhat giddy—at least for Bart, it seemed giddy.
“Of course,” Steven assured him. “I want to be well-off and financially secure. Who wouldn’t want to be?”
“Well, that’s exactly where we can be in our lives,” Bart declared, his excitement and momentum building. “And the way we can do it is to kill my family. I collect the life insurance money, and I would give you a cut for helping me out. You’ll have more money in one fell swoop than you would if you worked at the restaurant for the next twenty years.”
“I don’t know, Bart.” Steven shrugged. “Yeah, I want financial stability, but these are your parents and brother you’re talking about. You shouldn’t joke around about stuff like that.”
Bart stopped any further discussion of specifically killing his family. He did, however, continue to discuss various methods of killing people—and how best to avoid getting caught.
“So, hypothetically”—Bart smirked—“what would be the best way to kill a small family?”
“I don’t know, Bart.”
“What about a car crash?” Bart pondered. “Could we conceivably kill multiple people in a car crash?”
“Sure, you could.” Steven nodded.
“But what would we have to do to make it happen?” Bart asked rhetorically. “We’d have to stage it so it would look real, obviously. Probably the best way would be to drive someone over a cliff, or to have their vehicle burn somehow.”
And on and on, the conversation continued. Steven was still never quite sure if Bart was serious. His friend had such a dry and morbid sense of humor, Steven was unable to discern if Bart was simply messing with him.
As these morbid conversations continued over time, Steven never really questioned their morality. He simply wrote it off as Bart venting, and needing a friend to lend an ear. “I felt like he had anger inside him, like he needed a friend to confide in. I didn’t feel like we were making plans to kill anyone. It was more about trying to help him.”
Bart and Steven would often talk about what they would do with the Whitaker inheritance, if they were actually to receive anything. “I would like to buy a nice home in Houston,” Bart declared. “And a couple of really nice cars.” Steven said he wanted the same things, too.
After a few more casual conversations like this, Bart escalated the plans. “He started bringing more details to the table,” Steven recalled. Bart started talking about “the times it should take place. Bart started talking about exact methods of killing, how we could do it, and how we could get away with it.”
Bart was determined that the murders should occur during the Christmas holidays. “If we do it around Christmastime, it would look more like a botched burglary, like someone breaking into my parents home to steal Christmas gifts. That way, the police would be less suspicious and wouldn’t think of it as a setup crime. We can do this, Steven.”
It was then, and only then, that Steven knew that Bart was truly serious about killing his family. “It was when his conversations turned from ‘this could happen’ to ‘we can do this,’ I knew he was for real.”
Strangely enough, Bart never came straight out and asked Steven to help him murder his family. But he would always include Steven in his hypothetical plans of plotting the murders.
The conversations picked up and were engaged in every day for several days. By the end of August, Steven Champagne realized that his new friend wanted his help to wipe out his entire family. Unsurprisingly, Steven was completely against the idea.
One night in the beginning of September, at a bar in Conroe, Bart finally came out and directly asked Steven to help kill his family.
“I need your help, Steven,” Bart stated, almost as an afterthought. “I cannot do this without you.”
“I know, Bart. I get it,” Steven responded, somewhat annoyed. He felt like Bart was simply pestering him now, and he was getting upset.
“So, can I count you in?”
“No!” Steven declined vehemently. “I don’t want anything at all to do with this!”
“C’mon, Steven, don’t you want to rest easy, knowing that you have all the money you need?” Bart cajoled.
“Bart, I don’t want to talk about this,” Steven replied sternly. He was trying to concentrate on a game of darts.
Bart, however, persisted. “I know you want to try this. I know you want to see if we can pull this off,” he interjected in between Steven’s dart throws.
Steven tossed a dart, which went askew and stuck into the bar’s wall. He turned around, obviously infuriated, and yelled at Bart, “I don’t want to look over my shoulder for the rest of my life!” Other patrons in the bar stopped to take notice. “I don’t want to have anything to do with it!”
Bart calmly nodded his head and ignored the nearby customers. He was certain they had no idea what the two young men were talking about.
Steven hoped his outburst would put Bart on the spot, that someone in the bar would know he was up to no good, and that Bart would finally let the whole thing disappear. He believed it worked when Bart finally dropped the subject, grabbed his things, and took off from the bar.
22
September 2003
Harbour Town
Willis, Texas
Just a few days before Bart and Steven got into it at the Conroe bar, Chris Brashear moved in with Bart at the townhome. Chris was going through a difficult patch in his life, mainly because he had lost his job at the Bentwater Yacht & Country Club.
Bart had a spare bedroom in his townhome, which he gladly offered up for Chris to crash in until he was able to pick himself back up.
Steven thought Chris Brashear was a “normal, regular young man.” He also believed him to be a bit of a “slacker and a goof,” based on Chris’s wardrobe preference, which consisted of baggy T-shirts and baggy blue jeans. He also described him as “kind of laid-back,” but “a hard worker” when it came to his job at the restaurant. It came as a surprise to Steven that Chris quit.
Steven liked Chris when they first met at
Bentwater.
He noticed, however, that Chris seemed to have changed after spending time living with Bart. It was not necessarily for the worse, though. Steven noticed that Chris had begun to change his style and his personality to resemble Bart more closely. He dressed nicer, in what Steven deemed “preppy clothes,” such as well-pressed slacks and button-down long-sleeved oxford shirts. He was wearing clothes that were much more expensive than what Steven was used to seeing him in, which he found unusual since Chris was no longer employed.
Steven also noted that Chris “started to carry himself in a more intelligent manner.” He described Chris as being “more disciplined” and that he had been “speaking different, proper,” or more intelligently. Steven also noticed how Chris was even beginning to mimic many of the things that Bart did or said. It was like watching a little Stepford buddy.
Steven definitely considered Chris to be more of a follower, not a leader. He was definitely a follower of Bart Whitaker.
With Chris living on the same street as Steven, the two young men began to spend more time together. Though Steven sensed that Bart was closer to Chris than he was to him, Steven and Chris became friends as well.
The two young men bonded over guitar. Chris knew how to play and Steven had always wanted to learn, so the two started hanging out a lot together, with Steven learning a few licks from Chris.
Bart always seemed to be working, so Chris and Steven were able to spend lots of time together, developing a friendship. Steven soon felt as if his relationship with Chris was even better than the one he had with Bart. Indeed, he considered Chris to be a better friend than Bart.
23
September 2003
Harbour Town
Willis, Texas
Steven Champagne stood in the middle of his patio, smoking a cigarette. He was simply enjoying a bit of peace and quiet for the evening. As he took another drag off his cigarette, he spied Bart and Chris heading in his direction. His two friends seemed somewhat serious. They approached Steven as if it were simply a regular evening together.
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