by Stephen Hand
The more I discovered about the Hewitt case, the less I knew.
The first thing I had access to was the victim dossier.
I got a full list of names and details. There were photos attached: family pictures, graduation portraits, lots of smiling optimistic faces. But then I saw the scene-of-crime photos. The victims had been mutilated and butchered almost beyond recognition as human beings. And I began to understand why the county supervisor had acted the way he did. Even in our mass media age of twenty-four/seven televised atrocities, some crimes are perhaps best left in the dark.
I tried contacting some of the families of the victims but no one wanted to talk. I was just stirring up too many painful memories. Nor was there much they could actually tell me. The police had told the relatives of the deceased nothing more than they’d told the public.
In any event, my real target was Thomas Brown Hewitt.
From the moment I first started my renewed investigation, I kept coming across a bizarre name: Leatherface.
I later learned that this was a nickname given to Thomas Hewitt. But I didn’t know where the name came from until I spoke to one of the attendants at the killer’s autopsy.
She told me Hewitt’s body had been riddled with bullet holes, all of them inflicted by police firearms. But what really set her talking was the fact that Hewitt’s corpse was wearing a leather facemask that turned out to be made of human skin.
I asked if there were any photos of Hewitt’s body at the crime scene and she helped me locate a picture of Hewitt wearing the mask, sitting in an armchair. It was grotesque. He was clearly wearing a mask of some description but the top of his head had been blown wide open. As revolting as this image was, there was something far more disturbing about it, something I couldn’t put my finger on.
So I checked my old file from 1973, and found what I was looking for. It was an old newspaper, local edition. The headline ran: MADMAN GUNNED DOWN BY POLICE—TEXAS HOUSE OF HORRORS COMES TO AN END.
The paper carried an interview with County Supervisor Nash, held at the funeral of Detective Tom Adams. Nash had spoken to the press to assure people that the detective’s death had not been in vain. But I had to read the interview three times before the full implication of what the county supervisor had said fully sank in.
“I lost two guys down there. But we tracked the killer down and, while attempting to escape, Mr. Hewitt took a shotgun blast to the face. And that day, the State of Texas won.”
But the damage on the picture I’d seen didn’t look like it had been caused by a shotgun—the face in that repulsive mask was far too intact. Also, it seemed strange that Nash had said Hewitt had been caught trying to escape because in the crime scene photo I had, Hewitt was clearly sitting in an armchair inside what looked like the Hewitt house.
Clearly I needed to talk with Franklin Nash.
So I made an appointment to see him at his office and if I was puzzled before, I was completely lost afterwards.
Nash didn’t really want to talk and he wouldn’t let us film him. But I made an audio recording of our brief conversation.
“Of course the case was closed,” he said loudly. “Anybody who tells you that we got the wrong man is mistaken. I was the senior officer. I can assure you that absolutely everything was handled completely by the book.”
Now prior to him saying that, I never once suggested he’d got the wrong man. So clearly there was more to this issue than even I was aware of. And then, when Nash then showed me his scene of crime photo of Hewitt, I positively knew something was wrong.
Nash’s photo showed Hewitt sitting dead behind the wheel of an automobile. There was blood everywhere and the corpse’s face had been obliterated.
So now I had seen two completely different photographs of Hewitt’s body. Both originated from official sources but their images and corpses contradicted each other. The moment I tried to question Nash about this, he terminated the interview.
* * *
It was at this point that I decided to change my approach.
The paper trail was becoming of increasingly questionable value, so I needed to get closer to the crime itself. And the only way to do that was to find someone who’d been on the ground.
The duty roster for the time in question was pretty thorough and after a week or so of intense phone calling, I managed to find Roger Church, retired police officer.
When I met Church, it was evident that retirement had not been kind to him. I treated him to a bottle of bourbon and asked him to tell me everything he knew. Unfortunately, he didn’t know that much. Church had been on cordon duty so didn’t get to see any of the bodies or the events leading to the shooting of the main suspect. However, he did have some very strong opinions, which he said were based on conversations with his fellow officers. And he also had an amazing revelation to make.
“Yeah, we botched the case. Anybody with half a brain knew the crime scene wasn’t sealed properly. There’s a film in the Hall of Records you need to see. Shows the whole damn thing.”
The prospect of a previously undiscovered film showing anything from the Hewitt investigation was almost too unbelievable for words. I made immediate arrangements for a viewing at the Hall of Records but had to wait an unbearable two weeks before finally meeting the clerk.
I can’t begin to describe how I felt when he dropped a dusty old sixteen millimeter film can in front of me and said, “I don’t think this film’s seen the light of day for over thirty years.”
I had no idea what I was about to see but I felt like Lord Carnarvon must have done when he first opened the tomb of Tutankhamun. The wait, while the clerk spooled the film onto his old cine projector, was torture. Then he pulled down a small white screen, turned down the lights and switched on the machine.
Detective Tom Adams stepped into frame in front of the entrance to a gloomy farmhouse.
“Okay, we’re rolling,” said an unseen officer holding the camera.
“This is August 20, 1973,” Adams announced. “Time is 3:47 pm. Location is the Hewitt property, the residence where Victim One was found. I will now begin the walkthrough.”
There was a jump edit in the film and the next sequence showed the camera descending down a concrete stairway with Adams out of shot. It was so dark that the camera was struggling for a picture. You could hear footsteps as they walked down the stairs, the detective continuing his narration off camera.
“We are descending stairs to the furnace room. I see scratch marks on both walls. On the western wall there is a brown stain with what appears to be a clot of hair. And an embedded fingernail.”
The image then moved into the furnace room. A light flickered in the ceiling showing intermittent glimpses of madness. The whole room seemed to be a chaotic mess of bodies, tools and objects that were hard to make sense of.
“There’s something moving behind those shelves,” whispered Adams. “South-west corner.”
Quickly the camera turned and moved in the direction indicated by the detective. Suddenly an arm swept into view, and the ceiling light went out, plunging the room, and the picture, into darkness. There was a scream. The cameraman!
“Something just happened!” came Adams’s voice.
Followed by a dull thud and a series of hysterical cries.
“What was that?” shouted Adams. “What was that?”
Someone turned on a night-light, and it was now possible to see that the camera was panning crazily in all directions, rendering the image almost useless.
Adams spoke, again off camera: “Oh my God—”
Then the sound cut and the camera turned to show Detective Adams lying on the ground, stunned and bleeding—before the final image of someone wearing a leathery mask and waving an axe in one hand, lashing out at the camera.
Cut.
* * *
I had the film digitized and prints made from the last few horrifying frames.
I had seen him, Thomas Hewitt, in action. And I found it hard to believe tha
t this crucial piece of film, showing the death of the two police officers, had been left to rot in the county archives. This incredible, shocking footage would form the most important part of my DVD documentary.
Not only because of the powerful, terrifying images contained within it, but also because the appearance of Hewitt in this film was different from the two dead Hewitts I’d seen in the two crime scene photos. This was new evidence, evidence which suggested Hewitt had never been found. But that couldn’t be right, could it?
The only way I could be sure was to find the soul remaining survivor from the Hewitt attacks—the person mentioned in the Nash ’73 public statement.
Again, this proved surprisingly easy.
For legal reasons, I am not currently permitted to identify the name or even the gender of the survivor. What I can say is that the survivor’s age is uncertain, but is somewhere in the fifties or sixties. The survivor lost an arm as the result of an attack by Hewitt and, unfortunately, the survivor has not spoken a single word since the day of the attack. Doctors describe the condition as near catatonia. However, the survivor is a compulsive eater of chocolates and candy which helps explain the obesity.
I showed the survivor an autopsy photo of the bullet-riddled body.
“They had a dead body with a mask,” I said. “And that was all they cared about. That was the end of their story. Do you remember anything? You haven’t said a word since that day. Can you try to remember?”
I got no response, just a floor full of candy wrappers. But I hoped that if I showed the survivor a photograph of the real Leatherface, I might be able to trigger something. So I took out the prints I’d made from the film—those last images of the masked Hewitt waving an axe. If that horrifying image didn’t get through, nothing would.
“Were you shown these police photographs?” I asked. “This is the only known footage of the man known as Leatherface. That’s him, isn’t it? The real one, I mean.”
Silence.
I arranged to meet with retired Officer Church again, and found out he’d already approached the survivor with exactly the same idea.
“You know what I did?” he chuckled. “I snuck out some of the autopsy pictures and showed them to that survivor. I guess I shouldn’t say that on your camera, huh?”
When I asked Church if the survivor spoke at all, his reply left me speechless.
“Why shouldn’t she?” he replied. “After all, she was the one causing all the trouble, telling everyone we’d got the wrong guy.”
Church was talking about someone else—another survivor. A woman who’d been saying they’d killed the wrong man, confirming every suspicion I’d been feeling.
Once more I found myself struggling to comprehend the implications of yet another part of the police investigation that had been kept hidden from everyone. How was it possible that a second survivor could have remained out of the public eye for so long?
The answer to that question came when Church gave me the woman’s details. She was in her fifties and had conveniently spent most of her life inside a mental institution. Her name didn’t appear on any of the initial police reports because she hadn’t been anywhere near the Hewitt place when the FBI broke in. She’d turned up a week or so later at a police station a few hundred miles away.
It was the FBI who’d made the connection so the woman never appeared on Travis County police records. She said she’d been at the farmhouse on August 18, and had escaped the following day. At first, there was some doubt as to her reliability as a witness but a plate check on an abandoned vehicle found near the farmhouse positively linked the woman to the crime scene.
So within three days of supposedly meeting the only living survivor of the Hewitt murders, I was going to meet a second. And the woman was prepared to appear on camera. In fact, she almost seemed relieved that I was there, as if a long burden was about to be lifted from her shoulders.
At first, her manner was shy and reserved, but I took my time and slowly we began to talk.
I decided to open the conversation with a discussion of my reservations about the way the police had conducted the case—something to which she readily agreed.
“After police interviewed me about what happened,” she said, “one officer admitted that things were mishandled from the beginning.”
I let her talk about this for a while before gently asking her if she could tell me what had happened in August 1973. But she shook her head and looked at the floor. So I changed the subject and asked her if she could remember being visited by Officer Church. Could she remember him showing her any photos of the body in the morgue?
When she answered me, she began slowly but then, almost as if I had unlocked something in her mind, the rest just started to pour out. And before I knew it the disheveled woman was telling me her story.
“Yeah, I saw the autopsy photos . . . I guess he was trying to make me feel like it was all over . . . Closure . . . But it wasn’t him . . . I know he’s still out there. I never sleep through the night . . . I remember it all. It was terrible . . . A terribly hot day . . .”
ONE
A scream ripped up the heat of the sweltering midday sun.
Up close, the full throttled shriek could have been the bloodied cry of a terrified animal. Or it could have been the two-stroke, gasoline powered wail of a forty-seven inch chainsaw. It was all noise: jagged, piercing, deafening. Only by moving away from the source was it possible to tell that the roar was actually the turbocharged thunder of an automobile engine.
It was August 18, 1973, and the customized van was steadily making its way along the deserted rural highway that cut for miles through the wide open plains of Travis County, Texas. The road was long and narrow, bordered either side by great swathes of subtropical grasses that flourished in spite of the punishing sun.
Every now and then the van would go by a tree of some kind—mesquite, cottonwood—and there were places where these bleached trunks grew in number and huddled into dense, tangled groves, having learned to adapt to the bone-dry texture of the sandy soil; its arid quality made plain by the thick clouds of dust kicked up in the van’s wake.
On one level the scenery was beautiful—green grass, the leaves of the tall trees, a clear blue sky with hardly a cloud—and at times you could see right over to the horizon. But in some peoples’ eyes, the prairie could be intimidating. It was vast and untamed, even after years of agriculture. You only had to drive through this baking sprawl to realize that the road map, with all its fancy words and symbols, really told you nothing about the place.
Break down out here and you’d be lucky to get picked up for hours, maybe even days. And there was something unsettling about the road itself—it was just too damned long. The unmarked strip of tarmac went on forever, making you feel like you were going nowhere. No matter how far you drove, the route just kept straight on ahead of you. You could join the highway at any point and you wouldn’t have a clue where the hell you were until you saw a sign. It was as if the neglected route was stagnant in time, you felt like you’d die before you reached the end of the road.
And then there was the heat. The unrelenting, sweltering heat. In some places along the way the air had been dry, in others it was humid, but all day long the heat had been a bitch. Constant late summer of ninety-two and climbing. Yes sir, with each passing minute, the road through the ass-end of Travis was getting hotter.
The van was cruising, barely tapping the true potential of its finely tuned engine. Sure, it could rip the tarmac at the push of a pedal, but the driver was in no hurry. Kemper was damned proud of his bad-ass baby and driving it was his third greatest pleasure. When the vehicle had come off the factory line it had been a plain old production standard Chrysler Dodge A-100 Wagon. But to look at it now . . .
The van had been raked—lifting the rear of the chassis to give the wagon the hunched, road-hungry tilt of a rod. The wheels had been revamped, their gleaming chrome rims wrapped in four massive tires that didn’t so much grip the
road as strangle the damn life out of it. And the exhaust ended in two machine gun side-pipes encased in perforated heat shields that ran along the bottom of the van, one each side. But all this candy-coating would have meant Jack shit if the truck hadn’t also got a turbocharger slamming air into the engine like some kind of haul-ass Hiroshima.
An old joke went something like: “You know you’re a redneck if you think John Deere Green, Ford Blue, and Primer Gray are the three primary colors.” Well, Kemper was Texan born and bred and the Dodge was spray painted from roof to wheel-arch in primer gray. So what?
Make no mistake, Kemper loved his girl and there was no goddamn way he would ever let anyone else get behind her wheel. Ever. And he didn’t give a shit about redneck jokes either. Ask any Texan who a redneck is, and chances are he’ll say it’s the next guy. But neither Kemper nor any of his four traveling companions genuinely met the criteria—they didn’t even carry firearms. And there wasn’t a redneck alive who would travel in Kemper’s van as long as it had those decals on the fender—one showing a peace sign, the other the national flag of Mexico.
Mexico, for Christ’s sake! Did 1836 mean nothing to these coon-shit kids?
Music filtered out through the open windows of the van. It was Southern Rock, the guitar chords blending with the understated thrumming of the powerful, customized engine. And someone, a young woman sitting in the front passenger seat beside Kemper, was singing along with the track. She was Texan and her accent was a perfect match for the singer of the band, but she stank. Her singing was shit. Not that she cared. The music was loud and she was having the greatest time, dusting this awesome countryside at a steady fifty mph with her friends. It was a fine day—God damn it, filing her nails had never been this good! They were going to the show.