“Dude, I lost my glove. I have no idea where it is!” The panic in Chris’s voice was apparent.
“Calm down.” Steven attempted to soothe his accomplice. “Do you have any idea where it might be?”
“No, dude. I don’t have a fucking clue.”
Steven’s patience was being severely tested. “Find it!” he snapped.
“Okay, okay. I’ll go look for it right now.”
“Call me when you find it!” Steven ordered, then disconnected the call.
Chris looked at the dead phone and started to search for his missing glove. He scanned the house, to no avail. He had no idea that he had dropped it earlier in the front yard, near the curb.
Steven sat nervously in the Pappadeaux parking lot, as he had no idea which dark SUV belonged to the Whitakers. He watched as group after group of people filtered out of the side door of the restaurant with their bellies sated. Steven began to fret, for he was certain they were not going to leave the building. As a result, he decided to focus his attention on one dark SUV, which he hoped was the right one. After more than an hour, he watched as four people exited the restaurant and made a beeline toward the SUV. He did not realize immediately that the group of people was Bart and the rest of his family.
The concept that three of these four people would possibly be dead in the next fifteen minutes no longer dissuaded Steven. He had made a promise to his friend, and he was going to live up to his end of the bargain.
Plus, he really needed the money.
Steven watched as the Whitakers piled into the TrailBlazer and drove out of the parking lot. He started his mother’s Camry and followed the Whitakers home. When Kevin pulled the SUV into their driveway, Steven continued on, down Heron Way, until he came upon a stop sign at Meadowlark Lane. He turned right and then took another right, onto Cardinal Avenue. He drove until he reached the house located directly behind the Whitakers’ home. He pulled the car up, alongside the curb, checked to see if anyone was eyeing him, realized they were not, and turned the car engine off, killing the lights. Then he sat and waited.
Suddenly his cell phone rang.
“Yeah?” he answered quickly.
“Dude, I think they’re here.” It was Chris.
“Yeah, they’re pulling up right now.”
Chris immediately hung up the phone.
Steven was not sure if Chris could still go through with it. He put his phone down in the passenger seat and waited. He assumed Chris was scared that he was going to leave him behind.
28
December 10, 2003, 8:00 P.M.
Whitaker Residence
Sugar Land, Texas
The Whitakers returned home to be greeted with gunfire.
Pop!
Pop!
Pop!
Pop!
Chris Brashear exited through the Whitakers’ back door into their neighbors’ yard. Surprisingly, Chris was rather cool with his gait. He strode confidently, yet briskly, toward Steven’s mother’s car.
Chris immediately opened the door and entered the vehicle.
“Is everything okay?” Steven asked his friend.
Chris appeared calm. He was not freaking out, just determined to get out of the Sugar Lakes Subdivision as rapidly as possible. “Let’s go, Steven,” he replied, and ignored the question.
Steven was not quite sure how to react. He did not hear any shots being fired, nor did he hear any screams. He was not even sure if the shootings had occurred. When Chris remained quiet, Steven drove the car off into the dark December Sugar Land night.
Chris made sure that Bart left his Glock in the glove compartment. According to Steven, Chris “did not want to be without protection.”
Neither young man spoke for the majority of the drive back to Willis. Chris began to rifle through his possessions to see what he had on him. He first pulled out his disposable portable cell phone. He then pulled out a small wad of cash.
“Where’d you get that?” Steven inquired as he saw the money.
“I found it in one of the closets in their house,” Chris replied. He held on to the money. Chris also had a plastic water bottle that he drank from.
Steven continued to drive, until they came upon 610 Freeway and Interstate 45, approximately twenty-three miles from the Whitakers’ home. He pulled the car underneath the freeway bridges, under the dark of night, grabbed his collapsible screwdriver, as well as his own license plates, and proceeded to switch them back. Chris got out of the vehicle to join him.
“So, what happened in there?” Steven wanted to know.
“I shot all of them,” Chris responded coolly. He was not agitated, nor did he seem upset or particularly disturbed by what he had just stated.
“I was standing in the kitchen, in the dark,” Chris continued on, “and I had just called you on the phone. Right after we hung up, I could hear someone fiddling with the keys to the front door, and the next thing you know, it was opening up. There was light coming in from the porch, and I could see Bart’s brother.”
Steven stopped what he was doing and focused on what Chris was saying.
“I saw Kevin walk inside, and he looked up and saw me.” Chris paused. “He smiled at me! Can you believe that? He smiled at me, like he knew it was me and I was his friend, just there to greet him.”
Chris stopped momentarily, kicked at the gravel, and resumed his recounting of the murders. “I walked right up to him and shot him at point-blank range, right in the chest. Then Bart’s mom walked in, screaming, and I shot her at point-blank range also. I think I hit her directly in the middle of the chest as well.”
Steven was transfixed by Chris’s story. He almost could not believe it had happened.
Chris was on a roll. “I saw Kevin slump down to the floor, and he was immediately followed by their mom. They both looked dead to me right away.” Chris seemed positive.
“The next thing I know, Bart’s dad is near the front door, trying to come inside. I think I shot him in the shoulder or something. To be honest with you, I’m not sure if he was dead or not,” Chris recalled. He sounded a bit nervous for the first time since the shootings.
“You don’t know if Bart’s dad is dead?” Steven replied, shocked. If Chris did not kill Kent Whitaker, then the whole plan would have been for naught. They needed all three of Bart’s family members to die before Bart would receive any life insurance claims.
“No, man. I’m sorry,” Chris pleaded. “I know I shot him pretty good. I just don’t know if he’s dead or not.”
“What about Bart?”
“It went down just like we had planned it,” Chris answered. “He ran into the house and acted like he was trying to tackle me, and I shot him in the shoulder, just like he wanted me to. That worked out perfectly.” A friend later recalled that Bart had taken a martial arts course supposedly so he could sharpen his mind and learn how to take a bullet without completely falling apart.
All of a sudden, Chris was visibly exhausted and stopped talking. Steven finished changing the license plates, hopped back into the Camry, and they continued on their way back to Willis.
The two young men did not speak another word for the rest of the ride.
One hour later, Steven pulled his mom’s Camry onto their street in Harbour Town.
Steven made a beeline for Bart’s townhome car garage. Chris got out of the vehicle, closed the garage door, and grabbed a handheld vacuum cleaner. He crawled back into the car and began to vacuum out the back of the vehicle. Bart had earlier told Chris to do this in the event that he may have transferred something from the Whitaker home to the car—fibers, hair, pet dander, blood. Chris set to work.
Steven gathered together the screwdriver, a flashlight, the license plates, and a few other items. He bundled them together and handed them to Chris, so he could get rid of them.
Chris grabbed two duffel bags, which Bart had left behind in the garage, and began stuffing them with the items Steven handed over. When he finished, he threw both bags into t
he trunk of Steven’s mother’s car. Steven opened up the garage door and climbed back inside the vehicle, then pulled out of Bart’s garage. Chris headed inside his townhome, while Steven drove to his driveway, parked the car, got out, and entered his townhome.
Steven walked inside and grabbed a glass of water. He could not believe that he had driven home a person who might have killed three people. He was neck deep in it now, and he understood the ramifications of his participation.
Steven finished off the cool glass of water and headed back over to Bart and Chris’s place. He let himself in, and could hear the water running in the bathroom. He waited while Chris finished showering.
After about ten minutes, Chris stepped out into the living room. He had removed his black clothes and had changed into something more casual. Chris took the murder clothes and stuck them inside one of the duffel bags.
The plan, as conceived and ordered by Bart, was for Chris and Steven to stow everything they used at the murder scene into the duffel bags; then they were to drive over to the bridge on Lake Conroe. Bart wanted them to toss both duffel bags into the murky waters below.
They chucked the two duffel bags in the back of Chris’s red Ford Ranger and began the haul, with Steven behind the wheel. Bart had asked them not to drive the Ranger to Sugar Land because it would have stood out due to its candy apple color. Chris begged off from driving, so Steven drove to the bridge on FM 1097 Road West, until they reached the top. He pulled the truck onto the shoulder and parked the car. The men got out of the vehicle. Steven moved toward the front of the truck to lift the hood, to make it look like they were stopped due to an engine malfunction, and hopefully not raise suspicions. While Steven tended to the engine, Chris removed the two duffel bags and tossed them over the side railing of the bridge.
Again, neither young man said anything as the deed was completed. They simply got back into Chris’s Ford Ranger, and Steven drove back onto FM 1097, but with a different destination in mind. Instead of heading back to their townhomes in Harbour Town, Steven kept driving all the way to Houston. He pulled up to a local haunt known as The Ginger Man, a favorite college hangout for Rice University students, located on Morningside Drive, in Rice Village, near Rice Stadium, home to the perpetually hapless Rice Owls college football team.
Ensconced inside, Steven and Chris ordered the first of many beers. They were going to need some serious cooling off that only a cold brew could initiate. Beers paid for with the money stolen from the closet of the home of Kent and Tricia Whitaker.
Steven and Chris stayed at the bar for nearly three hours. They drank the entire time they were there. They never once mentioned what they had just par-taken in. It was strictly a time for crawling inside the bottle.
Around midnight, Steven started to get paranoid. He was afraid that since they had been drinking that if they went out on the road and got pulled over by police officers, they would, at the least, get popped for a DWI. At the worst, they would get nabbed as accomplices to murder.
“We gotta go, man!” Steven blurted out.
“Calm down, Steven,” a fairly inebriated Chris snapped back at him. “Be cool, man.”
“No, we gotta get out of here,” Steven responded. “We’ve got to get the hell out of Houston right now. I don’t want to get too drunk and have to drive all the way home. C’mon, let’s get out of here.” They paid their tab and left. Steven drove back toward Willis, but not until they first stopped in another bar, in The Woodlands, to continue their drinking binge.
Finally, at 2:00 A.M., as the bar was closed down, Steven and Chris were forced to head back to their homes. Steven pulled Chris’s Ford Ranger into the driveway, and the two young men went to their separate residences to finally call it a night. They both went to sleep, even after having possibly participated in triple murder.
Surprisingly, both Steven and Chris slept well that night. They both went about the following day as if it were simply just another ordinary, run-of-the-mill day in their lives. They purposefully avoided watching the news on television, because they did not want to hear anything about the murders. Later that evening, Steven hooked up with his girlfriend to go out on a date. He called up Chris and invited him along. The trio headed out to another bar and began drinking again. Neither one of them talked about the previous night’s events in front of Steven’s girlfriend.
While sitting in the bar, nursing yet more drinks, Steven received a call on his cell phone from a close friend of his. The friend had called to tell Steven that he had heard his friend and boss, Bart Whitaker, had been shot, and that at least two of his family members were dead in Sugar Land. Almost simultaneously, Steven’s mother also called him on the cell phone to share the same news. She had just watched a report on a local affiliate news broadcast and had immediately perked up when she heard the Whitaker name, since she knew Bart. Steven hung up his phone and played dumb in front of his girlfriend by telling her and Chris that Bart had been shot. The trio gathered their belongings and went back to Steven’s townhome.
The following morning, Steven made a trip down to the hospital to check in on Bart. When he arrived, he noticed that many members of Bart’s family were there, as was Bart’s girlfriend, Lynne Sorsby. Steven had not seen Bart since he followed him from the restaurant to Bart’s parents’ house. He had no idea how Bart was doing. He realized that they would not be able to discuss what had happened because of the present company, so he simply played the role of the concerned friend.
The ensuing weeks after the murders led to upheaval in the three young men’s lives. Bart, of course, underwent surgery; then he moved back to Sugar Land and into his former home with his father. The two men planned on supporting one another as they dealt with their grief over the loss of Tricia and Kevin. As a result, Chris Brashear was forced to move out of the townhome he had shared with Bart, and back home with his parents in Lake Jackson.
Bart did not want his townhome to go belly-up, so he asked Steven if he wanted to move in while Bart lived with his father. Steven, who was sleeping on his mother’s couch at her place, jumped at the opportunity. He moved into Bart’s townhome.
29
January 2004
Whitaker Residence
Sugar Land, Texas
After the murders, Bart moved back into the house where he grew up. Every day he would cross over the threshold where his family was slaughtered. He claimed he moved back home to help his father sort out everything and to be there for him, if needed.
More than one month after the murders, both Kent and Bart began their intensive physical therapy on their shooting wounds. According to Kent, his “was a mess.” Apparently, the bullet that he was struck with “broke into high-velocity shrapnel” when it hit him “that shredded the muscle mass in [his] chest and upper arm before shattering [his] humerus bone.” He added that he would “always have a hollow cavity beneath the bullet hole in my shoulder, where the tissue was destroyed beyond repair.” Kent was kept immobile for nearly seven weeks, which led to “significant (and potentially permanent) loss in [his] arm’s range of motion.” Kent’s painful therapy included rebuilding muscle mass by focusing on “scar tissue [that] had to be painfully stretched and pulled apart before it became too set.” If he did not undergo the rigorous therapy, he might have to spend the “rest of [his] life with a severely restricted and weakened right arm.”
According to Kent, the therapy could be torturous at times. Kent shared that he was assisted by a physical therapist who was a “huge guy who would have me lie on my stomach as he pried his fingers under my shoulder blade and…tried to pull it off. I felt like a Thanksgiving turkey as he yanked and pulled.”
On the other hand, Bart’s wound was much less severe, so his regimen was far less taxing and painful than his father’s.
Kent believed the physical therapy sessions, combined with helpful gifts from God, would lead him on a healing path of recovery—of the physical, spiritual, and emotional kind.
30
January 7, 2004
Harbour Town
Willis, Texas
Steven Champagne lay in his bed, provided to him—generously enough—by Bart Whitaker. He was much later to rise these days. A combination of general malaise and guilt mixed together to create a certain sense of ennui, which seemed to glue his backside to the bed. He had no desire to wake up anytime soon.
He had no choice.
Steven was awoken by a loud rapping on the front door of the townhome. The disheveled young man tossed on some sweatpants and a T-shirt to go check and see who was waking him up so ridiculously early in the morning. He was definitely not a morning person, and whoever was making an early-morning house call was certainly not endearing themselves to him. He shuffled to the door, unlocked it, and opened it up to see the nonsmiling visages of two Sugar Land police detectives. Needless to say, Steven was caught off-guard and completely surprised.
“What can I do for you?” Steven asked the detectives.
“Good morning, sir, my name is Detective Marshall Slot, from the Sugar Land Police Department,” the medium-sized lead detective, with the crew cut, proffered. “This is Detective Glenn White,” he said as he nodded toward his fellow detective. “We’d like to come in and talk to you about the owner of this townhome, Bart Whitaker.”
Steven appeared confused at first; however, he somehow managed to regain his composure. “Certainly, Detective,” he acquiesced. “Please come on inside.” He stepped back from the door to allow the two detectives unencumbered entrance. As the men stepped through the main opening, Steven asked, “Is everything okay with Bart?” He was trying to play it cool.
“He’s fine, son,” Detective Slot responded as he stepped inside.
“That’s good,” Steven acknowledged.
“I’m sorry, son. What is your name?” the detective asked.
Savage Son Page 15