(Sapp nodded yes.)
Sapp: “Wasn’t gonna do nothing but grow up and be a little whore anyways” . . . “Dragging John down—corrupting him. . . .”
Moody: What’d she say to you?
Sapp: “I can’t believe that you would do this to John. That I expect out of his dad.”
Moody: Did you see her touch the girls? Did she help cover them up?
Sapp: I know she stooped down and took the necklace off of . . . one of them.
(Moody held the picture in front of Sapp again.)
Moody: Which one?
Sapp (looking closely at the picture and nodding his head): Martha.
Moody: Did you take anything from them?
Sapp: No. (Then Sapp pointed to the shorts.) Well, I guess I took them.
Moody: There’s no guessing about it!
Graeber: What happened to Phree’s underwear?
(Sapp cracked his knuckles and stretched his arms in front of his chest, then sighed.)
Sapp: They was in Dave’s pocket. I don’t know what he done with them. They should’ve went down into the “hole” with the rest of it. That’s why I said that stuff went down there.
Moody: Well, when you cut these pants off—what happened to the underwear? How’d they come off?
Sapp: They were ripped off.
Moody: Who ripped them off, Bill?
Sapp (whispering after a while): Me.
Moody: And where’d they go from there?
Sapp: In the air.
After establishing Wanda’s presence at the crime scene, the detectives resumed their questions pertaining to the events at the Lion’s Cage.
“Did you take the shorts down with you?” Moody asked.
Sapp thought for a while, then shook his head no, but he said: “Yeah, maybe I did. Maybe they were on me.”
Moody was incredulous. “Huh? They’re on you?”
Sapp barely nodded yes.
Moody: What’d you do with them?
(Sapp leaned back and stretched his arms.)
Sapp: That’d be after we threw the bike down. We climbed up the stairs—I wiped all the bars down that we might have even touched. Everything. I even wiped the bike down before it went down.
Moody: Did you throw the shorts down?
(Sapp nodded yes.)
Moody: What’d you do with the shorts, though, to try and make sure that we wouldn’t find them? When you threw them down?
Sapp: Threw them in the water, I guess.
Moody: Yeah, but you did something, man. You’re thinking. You’ve got it . . .
Sapp: Ohhh! Wrapped them in a rock!
Moody: Yeah! There you go! You wiped all that down, and you’re right! We got that bike out of there and there wasn’t a print on it! You did a good job! And you wrapped these up in a brick and we’ve got the brick. You were thinking!
Sapp (shrugging): Well . . .
Moody: You were in control, weren’t you? Somebody had to be in control.
Graeber: You know, when you guys went over there and dropped this stuff, where was John’s mother?
Sapp: I don’t know! She damn sure didn’t go with us!
Moody: Okay. So you got everything down and you wiped everything down. Once again you’ve taken control of the situation, man. You got rid of things. What happens then?
Sapp: Well, we pretty much . . . well, uh, started to get together what the hell we’re gonna do and say. I mean, that’s gonna be important. I mean, we have to say something if we got talked to, but we all had to sound the same without being the same story, so—words had to be kind of different.
(Sapp looked up, shrugged, and laughed self-consciously.)
Moody: So who decided . . . ? I mean, where’d you guys do that? Where’d you go when you got back in the car? Did everybody get back in the car?
(Sapp hung his head and nodded yes.)
Sapp: Went to a house down on Lagonda—in back. See, we got a shade tree, so you can sit right there and . . . It was kind of secluded, you know, nobody could really walk up on you. John—he likes fooling around in the grass anyways.
(This is the same house where John and Wanda later moved upstairs. At the time of the murders, Wanda was working downstairs, caring for Eleanor.)
Moody: What was the conversation?
Sapp: What to do—definitely, don’t go the hell back up there!
Moody: Who’s making sure everybody understands that?
Sapp (laughing): Well, I mean, you know . . .
Moody: Who’s taken control since the shit went bad? Who wiped everything down? Who told everybody not to go back up there?
Sapp: It didn’t work.
Moody: Why didn’t it work?
Sapp: ’Cause I believe John went the hell back up there.
Moody: When?
Sapp: The day they were found. As a matter of fact, I think he was probably one of the first up there. Which made me a little mad because he had told me, when he come back, that somebody had made a comment about “I survived the Penn Street Hill killings!”
Moody: You went back, didn’t you? You couldn’t help but go back.
Sapp (looking down): It was the next day.
Moody: Before they were found?
(Sapp shook his head no.)
Moody: After? Where were you standing?
Sapp: Behind the doctor’s office—the hill.
Moody: Looking down on us? Looking down on me?
(Sapp didn’t respond.)
Moody: Who were you there with?
(Sapp looked up at Moody and then back down.)
Sapp: Me and John. I think Dave was down there by Schuler’s. The other characters kind of like spread out. It bothers me why John didn’t say nothing about me.
Moody: Why do you think he didn’t say anything about you?
Sapp: I don’t know.
Moody: Well, you’ve got to have a feeling about it. Was he scared of you?
Sapp: No. I would doubt that very seriously.
Moody: Do you think it was out of a sense of loyalty? To you?
Sapp: I just treated him like he was normal. He is—to me. He’s my “brother.”
Moody (pointing to the shorts): You wrapped these up in a . . .
(Sapp reached across the table, picked up the shorts, and laid them on his lap.)
Moody: . . . in a brick.
Sapp stared at the shorts for a minute and then folded them. He held the shorts in his hands and stared at them for a long time, no doubt reliving the experience of cutting them off Phree. He finally looked up at Lieutenant Moody and put them back on the table.
“What were you thinking?” Moody inquired.
Sapp stared at the shorts. “I didn’t believe this shit could happen. I blocked it out! I don’t know how many times I went back to there—hoping it wasn’t true,” Sapp remarked.
Moody: Back to the pond?
Sapp (shaking his head): There at the cage. Stood on the cage—sometimes for hours. Just stood there waiting, thinking maybe somebody would come. I figured y’all would be watching the areas for a while.
Moody: You went back to where Helen was, didn’t you? You could stand on the cage and look [at] where Helen was.
(Sapp didn’t answer.)
Moody: I’m going to tell you something.
(Moody moved the shorts and the pictures out of the way so they could see the map.)
Moody: Here’s what we know: Here’s where you live—right here. Look at all the things that are happening around where you live. You come back from Florida. You burn the log cabin. The carriage house gets burned. The house on Harrison Street gets caught on fire. Phree and Martha. Helen’s right down here. What else we got, man? What else is down here?
Sapp (shaking his head): Nothing.
Moody: After the girls—this happens in August—you move up to Miller Street. Did that help you get away from that? You’re still drawn back down to this area, aren’t you? You’re standing on the cage. You’re going back to the pond. D
id you go back over and make sure if we missed anything at Helen’s?
(Sapp barely shook his head no.)
Moody: Between the time that Phree and Martha met you guys at the pond—then you did Helen by yourself—what else happened right down here? October 22, 1993.
Sapp (shrugging): I don’t know. What?
Moody: Here’s the pond.
(Sapp leaned forward to look at the map.)
Moody: Here’s Penn Street Hill. Right here. You’re walking down the street here and there’s a—one of the whores down there. You guys walk right up through—up the hill here—’cause she says she’ll trick with you. And then something happens.
(Sapp shook his head.)
Moody: You’re just another piece of shit again. Here’s another woman calling you a piece of shit.
(Sapp shook his head again.)
Moody: And later that morning, we find Caitlin Levalley right here.
Sapp: No.
Moody: Now I’m going to tell you: She’s alive—just like Helen. She survived. She survives. She’s got the same—it’s the same deal as Helen, man.
Sapp (exclaiming): You got two motherfuckers out there doing the same thing then, ’cause that wasn’t me!
Moody: We’re sitting here and you know as well as I do, the worst things we’ve talked about, we’ve talked about today.
Sapp: Yeah. But I don’t know nothing about that area right there.
Moody: It’s right across—if you stood there, you could look right across to the pond. Right across Penn Street, right to the pond.
Sapp (shaking his head): I don’t know nothing about that area, though.
Graeber: Well, it’s the same area.
Moody: It’s the same area.
Moody (looking Sapp in the eye): There’s more things we’ve got to talk about, Bill. Isn’t there?
Sapp (nonchalantly): No. Not really. But he (Graeber) said we was probably going to talk about something, so . . .
(Sapp laughed and looked at Moody.)
Moody (matter-of-factly): There’re more things we have to talk about. Are you hungry?
23
To get across to people that no matter what life they may have lived . . . what race they are . . . what station they’re at in life . . . we take homicide very personal. . . . It’s a personal thing.
—Captain Steve Moody
“Who else’s family can we help deal with what happened to them? That their daughter might have wronged you—insulted you,” Lieutenant Moody pressed.
Sapp shrugged and shook his head.
“Let’s get things squared away. What else have you done that we need to know about?” Moody challenged.
Sapp looked at Moody. “Nothing,” he answered.
Moody: Now we both know—I’m looking right at you—and we know that’s not true.
Sapp: I ain’t got nothing here.
Moody: Yeah, you have! And I guess I thought we were beyond this—not being straight with each other. The worst part of this is over with. Put yourself in our seat. We’ve got to straighten out what else you’ve done.
Sapp: Goddamned tennis shoes, isn’t it? It wasn’t the pants—this time. It was the goddamned tennis shoes!
Moody: Tell us how it went, man.
Sapp (answering softly, finally): I’d never seen her before, but sure was pretty. I don’t know how to explain her. Blond. Kind of long hair. Pretty body. Pretty face. She had a real pretty face. Kind of round. Full cheeks. She wasn’t the dope head they said she was. At least she didn’t look like she was strung out.
Moody: How often had you seen her around?
Sapp: That was the first time.
(Sapp told them that when he first noticed her, she was walking by Deborah’s Attic, a vintage-clothing store around the corner from his house. Lieutenant Moody patted Sapp on the leg as he got up to go to the cabinet again. He brought another map back to the table and spread it out in front of Sapp.)
Moody: Here we go! All right? Let’s get it done. The girls (Phree and Martha) were August of ’92 and you moved in here (Miller Street) September 7, 1992.
(It was one year to the day after Sapp moved to Miller Street that Belinda Anderson disappeared.)
Moody: September 7, 1993. And it was a mild fall. So, it was almost springlike. So tell me what . . . How’d you first meet her?
(Sapp told them that he was out in his backyard with his dog, Fangs.)
Sapp: Then I seen her. She come around the corner. She looked not too happy at first. Fangs ran over toward [her].... I asked her where she lived at and she said she didn’t live around here. I’m not quite sure—I think Bellefontaine. I took the dog upstairs. I don’t know where Karen was at, at the time. And then I come back down and she was still around. We just kept talking. We must have talked for—God, I don’t know—thirty, thirty-five minutes. Just shooting the shit. I don’t know. Something . . . somehow I got the impression that maybe she might be a [prostitute] . . . and I asked her if she dated. I asked her how much she usually charged. She said, “How about forty bucks?” Whew!
Moody: Did she say for what?
Sapp: Yeah, for everything. You know, that was steep, but I don’t know—somehow I just knew she was clean. Different. Jeans and white tennis shoes—maybe pink tennis shoes. Jacket—pink jacket—I believe it was a pink jacket.
Sapp related their conversation to the detectives:
I asked her, “Well, you got a place to go to?”
She said, “Well, don’t you?”
I said, “Yeah, but I don’t know when Karen’s coming home.”
Sapp: I mean, you know.
Moody: That could be touchy, huh?
Sapp: Well, it wouldn’t be too good. So we started up the alley.
Again, Sapp related their conversation:
She said, “Why don’t we go in a garage?”
I said, “I’m not walking in somebody’s yard and going up in their garage.”
She said, “Don’t have to. You can crawl through the hole.”
Sapp: Climbed through the back—through the hole. It’s pretty dark, but it’s not, you know, real dark.
Graeber (pointing to the garage on the map): What happened in there, Bill?
Sapp: She started giving me a blow job after I paid the money. Seems like that’s all she wanted to do. That she wasn’t doing the rest now.
Moody: She’s got your forty dollars in her pocket?
Sapp: Yeah.
Moody: And she’s not going to do what she said she was going to do. Does she?
Sapp: “I’m gonna go get John” or somebody like that. Or “Bear,” or some strange name like that. To beat my ass! She was a strong girl. She can hit!
Moody: She wasn’t a lightweight, was she?
Sapp: No.
Moody: Did it surprise you?
Sapp: There’s no need in it. Started fighting . . . Don’t know what the hell it was she picked up, but I remember she picked it up to keep whacking the fuck out of me with it—on my elbow.
Moody: Did it bleed?
Sapp: Yeah, it bled. Hell yeah, it bled! Took it to what was laying on top of one of the cabinets. Pushed it into her where she never would work. It’s a piece of pipe. I swung the motherfucker at her. I thought she’d step the fuck back! Somewhere in the head—side of the head. She dropped. Figured I was going to get what I paid for. Or I was getting my fucking money. But, you know . . . I never did get it.
Moody: Get what?
(Both detectives had leaned forward in their chairs because Sapp was talking so softly they could barely hear him.)
Sapp: I never did take her—take it.
Moody: Are you telling us you never had sex with her? Other than the blow job? Did she finish you on the blow job?
Sapp: No. She got up. Well, she was gonna start to get up. She said, “I’m gonna go up here and call the police. I won’t get you now. While you’re in jail, I’ll come back and get your wife and your kids.” All of a sudden I just felt hot—real hot.
Hot like I was on fire inside. I, uh, this old piece of metal—steel—or something—hit her about twice. That’s all it took—that time. (Sapp looked up at Lieutenant Moody.) I didn’t know what to do. I crawled out the back. I was in a daze for a day or so. I think it was the next day or after that, I went back.
Hometown Killer Page 24