Moody: Bill. She had sex with you.
Sapp: No. It wasn’t sex. It was torture.
Moody: What else did she do to you?
Sapp: Fucked me. She had sex with me.
Moody: How? What would she do to you?
Sapp (laughing and then whispering): Everything. I could go on for a long time. Cigarettes . . . lighters . . . needles . . . knives . . . What do you do when you’re a little kid? There ain’t one person in the whole world to look up to. The only two people you think you can trust—and one of them . . . I used to think, “It’s just a dream.”
Graeber: What kind of sex did your mom have with you?
Sapp: She would make me screw her. She would give me “jobs.” She would even sit down in my face. And then you got your people telling you: “You should’ve never been born.” So you see, prison’s nowhere. I’m nowhere. That’s where I need to be. (Continuing sarcastically) Hey, Springfield had her! She set the baby on fire, but she has psychological problems, so she gets to leave. Probation. One of my brothers . . . [she] watched him drown in a lake. Again—psychological problems. I know what she did. She told me. Bitch! (Looking at Graeber and then Moody) You can’t tell your dad. How do you . . . ? That bitch took everything he done all his life for his boys. Done without.
Moody (leaning toward Sapp and speaking softly, coaxing): Listen to me. We need to go back here. You’ve given up the biggest ghost in your life. Everything else is insignificant. You need to tell it right now—how Phree and Martha died.
Sapp (after a silence): They were turned over on their stomachs, facedown in the dirt. They took rocks. Everybody took a rock. One time each. That rock’s on Penn Street Hill. Yeah, it is. Only they just decided to go up there and push the damn dirt over on top of it. That’s what they did with the rock. Down to their uncle’s junkyard. Unless y’all got it.
Moody (getting up and telling Sapp to turn around for a second. Going to the cabinet and opening the doors. On one of the shelves lay a huge rock): It’s right there, Bill.
(Sapp shook his head no.)
Moody (voice low): Yes, it is. Bill, I’m going to tell you something. I’m going to tell you something and I’ll show you if I have to. That was left right on Phree’s head. That one right there. It’s got her blood on it. You want to see it?
22
He’s evil . . . but then again . . . to me . . . and to the other men and women who investigate homicides and try to learn all we can about people who do this . . . he’s an interesting evil. . . .
—Captain Steve Moody
Sapp stared at the huge rock lying on the top shelf of the cabinet.
“That ain’t quite the one,” he remarked.
Lieutenant Moody shut the cabinet doors and Sapp turned back around.
“That’s not the one. There’s another rock. I’m telling you, I know what that rock looked like,” Sapp insisted.
Moody sat back down. “Why? Because you had it in your hand?”
Sapp: We all had it in our hands.
Moody: You used it on their heads, didn’t you?
Sapp: Yeah.
Moody: Was that before or after you had sex with them?
Sapp: Before.
Graeber (leaning closer to Sapp): Bill, because of what your mother did, is that why “the bitches had to die”?
Sapp: Tell you the God’s honest truth—I never know when it’s gonna happen!
Moody: Yeah, you do—because this always follows something by some woman that’s wronged you. Your mom wronged you.
Sapp: Yeah, but I mean I just don’t go out there and deliberately . . .
Moody: Listen to me. Your mom wronged you. Ursula Thompson wronged you. She stole from you. She kicked you in the nuts.
Sapp: Ursula Thompson is a fucking . . . lying . . .
Moody: She had a foul mouth too, didn’t she?
Sapp: She’s a liar.
Moody: Phree Morrow had a foul mouth.
Sapp (mockingly): Oh, no. Phree Morrow was the innocent type.
Moody: We both know the truth to that, don’t we?
Sapp (whispering): John really loved that girl.
Moody: What’d you do to Phree with that rock?
Sapp: After they all just had a turn—there was this gurgling—just the damnedest thing! “You’ll be sorry!” “Like hell we will!” So I picked it up, held it over my head, and throwed it down. Trying to send the son of a bitch on the other side of the world!
Moody: Then what’d you do to Martha?
Sapp: I had to slam the rock on her. I think the rock hit her in the back of the head, by the neck. I wasn’t picking that rock up again. They wasn’t getting rid of that rock.
The huge rock in the cabinet was, of course, the one that had been left on Phree’s head. The other rock that Sapp referred to was, no doubt, the missing lava rock.
And he was obviously incorrect or confused about the order in which things happened because the enormous rock was not moved from Phree’s head. He claimed he “wasn’t picking that rock up again” when it was on Martha’s head.
From what the detectives already knew, Martha was undoubtedly killed—or, at the very least, rendered unconscious—first, with very little struggle, and was probably already dead when the large rock was dropped on her head. But Phree had fought them, as much as a twelve-year-old child can fight five grown men.
Moody: Phree was defiant right up to the end, wasn’t she? She was going to show you guys.
Sapp: She was strong.
(Sapp told the detectives that he and John took a shirt and wiped the sides of the pallets, to eliminate any fingerprints that may have been left on them.)
Moody: Whose idea was that?
Sapp: That was mine. I just killed somebody. I’m not stupid.
Moody: No, you’re not. Just to make sure we’re clear on something: you have sex with them—each one of them—before or after you drop the rock on their heads?
Sapp: One was before. One was after.
Moody: Who was “before”?
Sapp: Martha.
Moody: Before you started covering them up, what else gets done here?
(Sapp didn’t answer. Moody went to the cabinet and brought back a picture of the girls’ bodies and laid it in front of Sapp and pointed to something in the picture.)
Moody: What’s laying there?
Sapp: Tennis shoes.
Moody: Who puts those there?
Sapp (finally): I guess I did.
Moody: There’s no guessing about it—the truth. Who’s in control? Who’s got to straighten things out?
Sapp: How do you straighten things out like this?
Moody: You did the best you can. That’s what you been doing all your life. You did the best you can under the circumstances.
Moody (pointing to the picture): Who does this?
Sapp: Me.
Moody: All right. You have the shoes there. You have Phree and Martha there. Start putting the brush on them, right?
(Sapp sounded tortured as he told the detectives that he carried one of the pallets from the dock over to where the girls were and laid it on top of Martha. He helped John with the second pallet and they laid it on top of Phree, slightly overlapping the first one.)
Moody: Okay. At this point in time, they’re covered. Who all’s still at the pond?
Sapp: Me, John, and Dave. Everybody else is running back to the car.
Moody: Who would that be? That ran back to the car?
Sapp: That would be the Neanderthal. . . .
(Sapp turned his head and stared at the floor, then looked up and motioned toward the picture of the girls’ bodies.)
Sapp: I don’t have to look at that anymore, do I?
Moody (ignoring him): Who else ran back to the car?
Sapp (looking down): The Neanderthal and Jamie.
Moody (laying the picture closer to Sapp): So you and Dave and John were here, right?
Sapp: Yeah. We’re here.
Moody: So what
happens then?
Sapp: We started gathering shit up and Dave’s got the bike and he says he’s going to meet me over here by the church on the hill. And I had to haul ass around there.
(Moody moved the pictures so they could see the map.)
Moody: Where are we talking about?
Sapp: The church on the hill.
Sapp: And Dave said he had a place to get rid of it. We all went over there.
Moody: What’d you have with you?
Sapp: The shirt and the shorts.
Moody (pulling the shorts from underneath the map): You left your name on them, didn’t you? You’re not going to let this go too far from you, are you?
Sapp: I don’t know if I had them with me or not. Man, I guess.
Moody (tapping Sapp on the shoulder): Okay. So come on up here. Let’s look at the map. You turned down this road right here (beside the railroad tracks). Here’s the bridge. Then what’d you guys do?
Sapp: We parked the car under the bridge (leaning forward and pointing to a place on the map). Yeah, this little area right here, I guess. . . . It’s all grown with scrubs, so it’s kind of hidden. We just went along this little roadway here—’cause this is a little path that goes all the way around here.
Moody: What’s back there? What’s that called?
Sapp: I don’t know what they call it.
Moody: What do you call it?
Sapp: Lion’s Cage.
(Moody went over to the cabinet and got some more pictures. He laid one of them in front of Sapp.)
Moody: How’d you get down in there?
Sapp: Climbed down the ladder and I handed the bike down to John.
Moody: You went down there too?
Sapp: Yeah.
Moody: What else went down there?
Sapp: The clothes . . . I thought the shorts, the shirt, and the underwear went down there. They used to keep that place clean. It was fun watching the water go down in it.
Moody (laying another picture in front of Sapp): Like that?
Sapp: Yeah, but a lot worse.
Moody: What’s down there? What do you see down there?
Sapp: I see a wheel, a frame, a seat of a bike.
Moody: Who tossed it down there?
Sapp: I tossed that down there.
Moody: What else did you throw down there?
Sapp: All the stuff.
Moody (taking the picture away and laying the shorts on the table): You know what you threw down there? You threw your name down there. What’d you throw down with it? So your name wouldn’t be found?
(Sapp leaned back and looked at Moody and then at the shorts.)
Moody: Do you remember throwing these down there?
Sapp: I thought I threw down a shirt and panties down there.
Moody: Well, you can see that you didn’t throw their shirts down there. Because they still got their shirts on.
Graeber: Who do you think the shirt belonged to?
Sapp: My shirt? I threw my shirt down there?
Moody: Ah, we’re asking you, man. Whose shirt did you throw down there?
Sapp: Maybe it was my shirt, but I thought I was wearing a T-shirt, though.
Moody: Do you want me to go to the cabinet?
Sapp: Yeah! (He laughed.) Seriously!
Moody: When you threw that shirt down there—why did you throw it down there? What’d it have on it? That you knew you had to get rid of it?
Sapp: Probably blood.
Moody: When you hit them in the head with the rock—what happened to their heads?
(Sapp hung his head and didn’t answer.)
Moody: When you took that rock and tried to “send it to the other end of the world”—you tell me what happened.
Sapp (barely whispering): I guess blood was everywhere. Shit just sprayed out all over the place.
Moody: What were you wearing that night?
Sapp: Tennis shoes, a pair of jeans, white muscle shirt. I want to say a flannel shirt, but—or a blue shirt. Blue keeps coming to my mind.
Moody: Did you get blood on you?
(Sapp barely nodded yes.)
Sapp: My face.
Graeber: When you got blood on you, what did you do?
Sapp: I ran to the water.
Graeber: When John got blood on him, what’d he do?
Sapp: He wiped it off. Some of it.
Graeber: When Jamie got blood on him, what did he do?
Sapp (shaking his head): I helped John wipe off.
Graeber: What did the biracial guy do?
Sapp: As far as I know, they just kept wearing their clothes.
Moody: What’d Jamie do? When he got blood on him?
Sapp: Started just hopping around a little bit. He wanted to get the blood off of him. (Sapp laughed softly a couple of times, then smiled.) He jumped—he jumped in the pond!
Graeber: Would you believe we already knew that?
(Sapp laughed harder.)
Moody: You can still see it, can’t you?
Sapp: That’s my dude.
Moody: Who? Jamie?
Sapp (serious again, whispering): Yeah.
Graeber: Where’s Phree’s underwear? Panties?
Sapp (after a very long silence): I don’t know.
Moody: Where’d Martha’s go?
Sapp: Somebody’s went down the “hole.”
Graeber: So where’d Martha’s panties go?
Sapp: That I don’t know.
Graeber: You don’t know where either pair of panties went?
Sapp: I believe it went down in the “hole,” but that I’m not for sure.
Once again they questioned Sapp about who was at the pond “at the end.” The detectives knew he had left someone out.
“Did anyone leave and come back with anyone, Bill?” Graeber asked.
Sapp didn’t answer. But then after a long silence, Sapp, answered, “It’s kind of hard to get John calmed down. Y’all know that, don’t you?”
Moody: Yes, we do.
Sapp: Seems like his old woman can do that pretty successful. I don’t know who left. I mean, you know, you got to run around trying to get shit covered up and took care of. So you don’t pay too much attention then. Your head’s rushing too fast. The woman that—it was an older-type woman.
Moody: You knew who it was. There’s only one person that can calm John down. Who came back up there and calmed him down?
Sapp: He said it was his mom.
Moody: Tell us what happened when she got back there, Bill.
(Sapp didn’t respond.)
Graeber: Hey, Bill!
(Sapp looked up at him.)
Graeber: What’d she say?
Sapp (hanging his head again): Just a lot of stuff. Cussing Dave out for bringing John back and getting him involved, and this other dumb shit. And, uh . . . she was trying to find out what was going on.
Moody: What is going on? I mean, at this point in time, are Martha and Phree covered up yet? When she gets there?
Sapp: No.
Moody: ’Cause you got your hands full with John, don’t you? They’re already dead, aren’t they?
Sapp: Yeah. No sense in it.
(Moody held the picture of the girls’ bodies in front of Sapp’s face.)
Moody: They’re already right here, aren’t they?
(Sapp looked away.)
Moody: Bill? Are they or aren’t they?
Sapp: Yeah.
Moody: What’d she do? Did she walk around?
Sapp: Yeah, she was up around them.
Moody: What did she do?
Sapp: She was calling them—like she knew them—by personal names. Like, I don’t know, maybe it was all over because of John being there. I don’t know . . . “Little tramps” and that she “needed to die.”
Moody: That’s what she’s saying?
Hometown Killer Page 23