Don't Tell a Soul

by M. William Phelps

  “What are you doing?” April asked, startling KC.

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “Why are you going through my bills?”

  “I wasn’t, April.”

  April was astounded. She’d caught KC red-handed, and she denied the entire thing.

  “Yes, you were!” April said again.

  “No, April, you’re mistaken.”

  “You know what, Kim, get out of my house. You are not welcome here any longer.”

  “I’m not leaving,” KC said. Then a look came over her. Anger brewed from a place deep within, preparing to boil over. April knew the look; she’d witnessed it as a child and later as an adult. However, she wasn’t backing down.

  “You’ve overstepped your boundaries in my house and you’re leaving,” April demanded.

  “No, I am not!” KC seethed.

  KC walked over and stood on the threshold of the sliding glass door inside April’s house. She made herself perfectly clear: “I. Don’t. Have. To. Leave.”

  April recalled KC “threatening” her, though she didn’t say how.

  “I’ll call the police,” April told her.

  KC did not move.

  April picked up the phone and dialed her husband, instead. She explained the situation—though, for mostly everyone who knew KC, all you had to do was mention her name and that person knew exactly what you were dealing with.

  “I’m on my way,” he said.

  “My next-door neighbors heard [us arguing] and they’ve never heard me, in over seventeen years, raise my voice or anything,” April recalled.

  KC finally left. It was the last time April allowed her into the home.

  Why KC reached a point in any social situation where she felt the need to become loud, violent or aggressive, April later explained, was something those who did not know KC could not understand. Yet, there never was a why with KC. She became angry, mostly, when she didn’t get her way and the people around her failed to submit to her control. KC had not told April she could leave on the day she reached through the open window inside April’s vehicle and broke the directional blinker off the steering column. There was no way KC was going to allow April to go off on her own without KC telling her she was no longer welcome. That’s just the way it was in KC’s world. You did what she said or you paid a price.

  KC’s outbursts would happen at bizarre times. She might be laughing and joking, then boom! “She could turn on a dime,” yelling and screaming and flailing her arms or, in that one instance April witnessed, kicking a wall. April often thought: If she does this around me, what is she doing when nobody is around?

  There had been spans of time when April had not spoken to KC for as long as six years. Throughout their lives they’d go weeks, months and years without speaking a word.

  “It all depended on when she would allow us to see the kids,” April recalled.

  KC had power and control over that situation and she wielded it.

  * * *

  One day April was driving by KC’s apartment, when KC lived in Garland, Texas, not far away from April. They had been “neighbors” for a long time, but April had never seen the apartment or the kids. She decided that maybe she should stop, knock and say hello. They lived so close. The kids needed to see their aunt. April needed to check in on them.

  April had no idea which apartment KC lived in. She pulled into the parking lot, parked her vehicle behind several cars and got out. She started walking. Soon she came upon “this big open area,” a courtyard. The apartments were situated around an open, grassy area where residents hung out, had a BBQ, tossed a Frisbee, walked a dog, sat and enjoyed a nice day.

  As April walked around the courtyard of the apartment complex, where she knew KC lived, she ran into Blake, who was three years old then. He was outside, alone, in the courtyard playing.

  April was appalled by this.

  “Where’s Mommy?” April asked her nephew.

  “In the apartment,” Blake said.

  “Well, let’s go. You need to come with me.” April’s truck was illegally parked, she realized, and she needed to move it. She took the boy with her and found a different parking space.

  After April moved her vehicle, she asked Blake where he lived. “Can you show me where the apartment is?”

  “Sure, come on.”

  When they arrived, April knocked.

  No answer.

  Strange. Why isn’t KC answering her door?

  Her son was outside by himself.

  Blake assured his aunt that this was the right apartment.

  April knocked again—harder.

  Nothing.

  They made their way back to the courtyard and hung out.

  Some time passed and KC showed up.

  “She was shocked that I was standing there,” April later explained.

  April asked where she had been. She explained how she and Blake had knocked on the door, but no one had answered.

  “I was in the bathroom,” KC said.

  April expressed how upset she was that her nephew was outside by himself. KC explained it away, April said later, by saying that she knew where the boy was the entire time and there had been other children outside with him at some point, which made it okay in her mind to leave him and go to the bathroom.

  April later talked about KC having a cunning, conning, calculating and scheming way of getting people to do things for her that they wouldn’t normally do. She could convince anyone to do anything; it didn’t matter if it was law enforcement, DFPS, the children, anyone. And if you didn’t do it the exact way KC had wanted, then watch out.

  KC had once asked April to feed the kids and then call the airport. April called the airport and fed the kids. KC snapped. She screamed at April for not doing the two tasks in the order she had demanded.

  When KC became angry (which happened often), she became another person, April acknowledged. She would shout at the top of her lungs; her eyes would gloss over and tighten into slits, her face red. KC became somebody else—and to April Pitts, KC’s own flesh and blood, she later explained who she thought that “other” person was.

  “It’s like seeing the Devil.”

  29

  MICHAEL DARWIN’S GIRLFRIEND ANSWERED the door and allowed two SCSO detectives, one of whom was Ron Rathbun, to enter her home. The SCSO had a few questions for Michael and his girlfriend. Most important, could they account for their whereabouts between the night Cherry Walker went missing and the day her body had been found?

  Michael worked for the town of Whitehouse. He’d met KC in 2004 while he and several coworkers were working on a water line in front of KC’s Waterton Circle home. She came out to chat with the workers, and Michael and KC struck up a friendship. He felt bad for her—all those kids, no man around the house, the chores not being done, KC working all the time. Or, at least, that’s the story he got out of KC.

  “We were on a talk-every-now-and-then basis,” Michael explained later. KC had needed a man’s help around the house after her recent split with her husband, and Michael filled that role. He started doing handyman work for her: plumbing, landscaping, lawn mowing. She’d take him out to eat sometimes or would pay him at others.

  “There was no romantic relationship,” he insisted. What’s more, his girlfriend knew about the friendship and had even befriended KC herself.

  During the early spring of 2010, Michael later said, he was receiving between “five and maybe eight texts a day from” KC. There weren’t many phone calls during that particular period, he said. KC liked to text. That was how they mostly communicated.

  He was mowing KC’s lawn regularly by then, but she had trouble paying him. He didn’t really mind. He felt he was helping out a friend. When they’d chat after he was finished with the lawn, KC would explain how financially strapped she was.

  “I’m behind on my property taxes,” KC said in early June. “I’m working a lot of overtime, but it’s all going to the damn taxes.”

  He understood.
“Don’t worry about paying me for mowing the yard, Kim. I have other work. Money ain’t no big thing. You’re a single mom, I get it.”

  Michael and his girlfriend became close with KC. In fact, she felt so comfortable around them that she came out one day and asked if they would mind undergoing a DFPS background check in order for them to become supervisors for her visits with Timmy. If they passed, he or his girlfriend would be sort of a chaperone for KC and Timmy. Either one would be present when the child was dropped off and picked up and during the entire visit.

  Once again KC was manipulating the system—placing allies in a responsible role that she would, obviously, later exploit in some fashion. Michael and his girlfriend didn’t know it, but they, too, were becoming pawns in KC’s narcissistic game of conning and tricking Timmy’s father.

  * * *

  Michael and his girl had rarely heard the name Cherry Walker from KC. She’d only mention Cherry in passing, saying that Cherry was someone who watched Timmy. Her comments would generally be accompanied by a remark about Cherry’s “issues” or state of mind.

  “There’s this woman who watches [Timmy],” KC said once in early June, “and she’s a little slow.”

  KC also mentioned how “afraid” she was of losing custody of Timmy. She made it clear to Michael on several occasions that the reason why she was so afraid of losing Timmy was because of “this Cherry lady, who was slow.” Cherry was all set to testify against her, KC indicated.

  As he got to know KC more intimately, he realized that maybe there was more to her story. Perhaps it was a good thing, he began to think, that she didn’t keep the child.

  * * *

  One day Michael went with KC on a ride to her mother’s house to pick up Timmy, who had been visiting his grandmother. They were in KC’s car. She drove. Being one of her confirmed DFPS supervisors now, Michael had to be there.

  When getting into KC’s car, he later explained, you had to move all sorts of trash out of your way in order to get comfortable and make room for your feet on the floorboards. It was littered with piles of garbage: fast-food bags, coffee cups, plain old trash of all types piled as high as the seats! It smelled. It was disgusting. But this was how KC lived.

  “Most of it was Burger King and McDonald’s,” he later recalled. On top of that, he said, you couldn’t miss seeing all of the little Dairy Fresh coffee creamer cups—they were everywhere inside her car.

  During this trip to KC’s mother’s, Michael and KC were laughing, joking around, talking about normal, everyday things. KC seemed loose, in a good mood. But then he said something that KC, apparently, wasn’t prepared to hear.

  “Hey, just wanted to let you know that I am not going to be able to spend the whole day with you and [Timmy] today.” KC knew that without Michael around as a supervisor, she couldn’t have Timmy. It had been the first time during many visits he’d supervised that he had done this to her—cut the visit short. It wasn’t planned. But something in his life had come up and he had to make an early dash. He wanted KC to realize this before they got the child.

  First, KC got “loud,” Michael said. Then she began to beat herself in the leg with a blunt object. Hard. After that, she placed her hands over her face and screamed into them. She was having a fit—all while driving the car.

  “What are you doing?” he asked. He was terrified. It was as if she wanted to crash the vehicle to teach him a lesson. “Drive the car,” Michael said. Her behavior, he later related, scared him. She had shifted her demeanor entirely from happy to angry to self-destructive, while he sat, helpless, next to her.

  KC went back to hitting herself in the leg before slapping herself across the face. It was beyond bizarre, he felt. She had no one around to unload her anger on, so she was taking it out on herself. He’d never seen such a thing.

  “You cannot fucking do this to me, not right now!” KC raged. “You cannot do this to me. You cannot do this to me.” Slap, slap, slap. “Not now. Please.” Slap.

  “What are you doing? Stop it.”

  Michael later said he would have gotten out of the vehicle if possible, but she was traveling too fast.

  30

  MICHAEL’S GIRLFRIEND SAT DOWN WITH SCSO detectives and said she would help any way she could.

  “We went to Jacksonville, [Texas], on Saturday night,” his girlfriend, Cara, explained after Detective Rathbun asked where she and Michael had been over the weekend of June 18 through June 20. “We played pool.”

  On Friday nights, Michael Darwin would later explain to police, he and his girl went down to Jacksonville to a certain pool hall and spent the night playing pool with friends. It was a routine of theirs. Jacksonville is about a twenty-five-minute ride due south of Whitehouse. It was the only pool hall around that allowed children. Michael and Cara liked it because they both had kids and they liked to bring them.

  “Can you tell us about Friday night?” Rathbun asked.

  That would have been June 18, the night Cherry went missing.

  As Michael would later recall (and as his girlfriend and several others verified during their interviews with the SCSO), “We had a cookout at my girl’s house. After the cookout, we all got into about three vehicles and we drove down to Jacksonville to the pool hall, and we shot pool.”

  Still, Michael needed to explain a few things. For one, KC had texted him on June 18, 2010, at 6:33 A.M. It would be the first of many texts throughout that June weekend: Call me when you can or stop by about 8:30 P.M.

  Then, at 9:43 A.M., on that same Friday, KC texted him again: Text me a time I can call you today.

  At 2:13 P.M., KC sent another text to him: Please call me ASAP. I’m on break.

  Michael was at work inside the town garage, loading things into his work truck at the time that “ASAP” message of urgency came to him. He looked down, read the text and, at first, wanted to ignore it. But as he thought about it, he couldn’t shake off the resolve KC had used, as if there was something wrong and she needed to speak with him. KC had never texted him with “call me ASAP” before. He figured something was going on.

  Michael stepped away from his colleagues and called KC. He had a break at 2:20 P.M. and used it to make the call.

  KC was livid about something, he recalled. He realized this as soon as he got her on the line. She was not her normal self.

  The gist of the call—Michael did not remember specifics when later asked about it—centered on, he “thought,” Cherry Walker testifying against KC in court that coming week, on June 23. KC was ranting that Cherry was going to destroy any chance she had to regain custody of Timmy. This hearing was going to be the final nail and she would lose custody for good. KC was certain of this.

  They talked for about twenty minutes and he said he needed to get back to work.

  On that Friday night, Michael, his girl and their children all played pool for “about four hours” after arriving at the Jacksonville pool hall, near nine o’clock. They also brought along a friend of his soon-to-be daughter-in-law. The pool hall staff and other friends would all verify his and his girlfriend’s account. Receipts from that night would further prove where they were.

  * * *

  The next day, Saturday, after spending the night at Cara’s house, Michael, Cara and and the kids went to a nearby lake. They loaded the grill and a cooler and some supplies into Mike’s truck and took off for the day, with the intention of having an old-fashioned family picnic.

  They stayed at the lake on Saturday until dark. When they got home, he said, the kids, exhausted, sat in front of the TV, lazed around, texted friends. He and his girl got themselves “cleaned up,” he explained to police, and got ready to go out to “do our thing that we normally do on Saturday night”—hang out at the local VFW bar, have some innocent fun with friends.

  The kids, however, wanted to eat.

  “Burger King?” Michael asked.

  Yes!

  He and Cara went off to the local Whitehouse Burger King to grab some food. As they w
ere entering, he turned and looked toward the drive-thru window.

  “Hey, look,” he said to his girl.

  It was KC. She was at the window.

  Michael got her attention and waved to her.

  After KC left the drive-thru, she pulled over in the parking lot. He and his girl walked up and stood on the passenger side of KC’s car. She rolled the window down.

  “Hey, guys, what’s going on?” KC asked.

  The first thing he noticed as he leaned in through the rolled-down window, his head nearly inside KC’s vehicle, was how clean KC’s car was. It seemed as if she’d spent all day scrubbing and shampooing and polishing. Not only the inside of the vehicle, but the outside, too. Even the tires, he noticed, were “shiny” and the outside of the car had a brilliant glow to it. The dashboard, the console, the rugs—everything was spotless.

  “Wow!” he said through the open window. “Your car is so clean. You finally got some time to have it cleaned. I almost don’t recognize the car.” He was serious. The change was that remarkable.

  KC laughed.

  “She was in a good mood,” Michael remembered. Quite a bit different from the woman he had spoken to the previous day on the phone. That person was extremely agitated and upset and manic and freaking out, he later said—all because of Cherry Walker testifying against her. Now, suddenly, KC didn’t seem to have a care in the world. To boot, she’d gone and cleaned her vehicle as though she was going to be displaying it at a car show.

  * * *

  The SCSO was interested in what Michael and Cara had done that Sunday. Had they seen KC? Had he spoken to her? Had she texted him?

  Michael had plans for that Sunday, June 20, to drive out to Red Oak and spend some time with family, as they normally would do on Father’s Day. Red Oak is directly west of Whitehouse, about a two-hour drive, 121 miles on the 20. It’s a little town of about ten thousand that is considered part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Michael also had planned on seeing KC on Sunday. He had texted with her and promised he’d mow her lawn. What sparked that conversation was a rather strange text, or, at least, it seemed so when he looked at it later in context of that entire weekend. KC had texted: You didn’t stop by Friday night after 8:30 or Saturday morning. Just wanted to say thanks again for everything and say Happy Father’s Day in person. Hope that means you and [Cara] have special plans.