by Rick Treon
All those agencies had commented to me just after Heller’s trial. I pointed out in Cold Summer that the DA’s office and the FBI had ruled Jones out as a suspect, but Veronica had left that out. She’d already started her own narrative, subtly hidden in what had otherwise been a straightforward breakdown of the case.
Heller’s section of the story ended with a more personal touch. Veronica broke the fourth wall and told readers she visited Heller on Death Row at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston. She’d been allowed to film the interview, in which he talked about his life there for nearly two decades.
Heller then described what he thought would be his final day on Death Row, the drive from Livingston to Huntsville, and final hours just outside the execution chamber, where he spoke with a chaplain and ate his final meal.
He was saved by an eleventh-hour stay from the U.S. Supreme Court ten years after his arrest.
“I went through the whole dog and pony show,” Heller said. “I had my last visitors, was read my last rights, was served my last meal.
“They did everything but kill me.”
Heller’s last meal feels like it was ordered off a menu of favorites from each region of Texas: chicken fried steak, a salad with ranch dressing, fried catfish, three barbacoa tacos with refried beans and rice, a barbecue bacon cheeseburger, and a comically large chocolate milkshake. (In 2011, the state revoked the right to a custom last meal. They are now given the same chow as the rest of the inmates in the Huntsville Unit.)
Heller said he ate the meal while sneaking glances into the chamber. He could see the cross-shaped table and restraints where he was to spend his final moments.
“I could see my own ghost while I picked at my salad,” he said.
The man convicted of killing Summer Foster was about 10 minutes from having his death sentence carried out. One of his final acts was calling four people from his cell with the aid of a prison chaplain. Among those who received calls from Heller were two unnamed women he’d corresponded with through prison letters, an Ethel McDonough in rural Nimitz County, and newly sworn-in U.S. Rep. Grant Schuhmacher.
Heller, who claimed to be a born-again Christian, was read his last rights and said he’d taken “at least three steps” toward the execution chamber, which would’ve been about halfway there. Texas Department of Criminal Justice officials said he was never let out of his holding cell.
The Supreme Court granted his stay so more DNA testing could be done. The justices unanimously agreed with the Innocence Project’s argument that a significant amount of testing was skipped during the original investigation, though DNA had been the hot new scientific advance of the decade.
I thought back to the original trial. The prosecution brought in an FBI expert to explain the concept of DNA to the jury. It was easy to see that none of them understood the science, but they didn’t need to. All the jury needed to know was that Summer’s blood was found covering Heller’s hands and clothes when he was found on a neighbor’s porch that night.
But that was the only testing done. Heller’s advocates had pointed to several items at the crime scene, and an untested rape kit performed on Summer’s body. The Supreme Court agreed. But two years after the testing was completed, a judge from the Western District of Texas denied the appeal again. Though the judge didn’t explain his decision publicly, state prosecutors later leaked that most of the items tested were inconclusive, and a few items had Heller’s DNA on them.
The rape kit, however, showed she had sex with Heller and another man that day. Experts found no evidence of rape, so the existence of another partner strengthened the state’s proposed motive for the murder—that Heller thought Summer was cheating.
The third and final section of Veronica’s story was about the transformation of Hinterbach from small Hill Country town to a cultural hub and tourist trap. The screen’s background changed from Heller’s mug to a side-by-side comparison of downtown Hinterbach in 1999 and its present state. One side was desolate with a lonely stoplight and a couple of cars. The other was a bustling street that included hordes of foot traffic on sidewalks beside wall-to-wall shops. I didn’t love the section’s subhead—Forging their future—but the information below it interested me more than any other part of the story.
Veronica first dove into the municipality’s history. She even broke down the name in German, and explained the legend of that name, according to town elders.
The name Hinterbach is the collision of two German words: hinter, meaning behind, and bach, meaning creek (or brook, as many would argue based on the phonetics). The name seems geographically appropriate, as the later-named Freddy’s Creek bisects the town. However, if you ask about the name’s history at the few truly local coffee shops left, older members of the community spin a different yarn.
An octogenarian named Fern, who didn’t want to give her last name because “everyone already knows it,” said the town’s identity was borne from the Hinterkaifeck massacre of 1922 in the German state of Bavaria.
“You know the town wasn’t always called Hinterbach, right sweetheart?” Fern asked.
I smiled. Fern was right, both about the town’s name and everyone knowing her identity. Fern Falkner had been running a German bakery since my father had been a kid, so there was nobody left in town more qualified to explain the history of Hinterbach. I could hear her asking Veronica that question, like a matriarch about to share a secret family recipe with her daughters and granddaughters, then spending an hour asking more rhetorical questions and waving her graying hands.
The village was originally known simply as Neu Deutschland, or New Germany, until after World War I ended in 1918. According to local legend, many of the returning soldiers didn’t want to be reminded of Europe or the war they’d fought there. The town was hit hard by The Great War, with seven of its young men dying overseas. At some point, the creek that runs through town became an informal memorial to one of the village’s most popular fallen heroes, Frederick “Freddy” Fischer, and the young men took to calling their hometown Bachland, referencing the brook.
This struggle persisted for years, and Texas maps made between 1918 and 1922 use both names. The fight got heated enough that it was taken up by the state Legislature in late 1922.
By then, six people had been brutally slain at the farm in Germany known as Hinterkaifeck.
The family and their new maid were killed by blows to the head with what Texans would probably call a pickaxe, though the technical term is mattock. The months leading up to the murders are shrouded in possible supernatural events—if you believe that sort of thing—and the murders are still unsolved.
Several suspects have emerged, including two men rumored to have been sleeping with the widow of Hinterkaifeck’s owner, Viktoria Gabriel. Perhaps the most intriguing suspect was her late husband, Karl, whose body was never recovered from a World War I battlefield. No matter the killer, the murders were the stuff of horror movies. In fact, films were made depicting the murders, and the Hinterkaifeck massacre has been made famous again in recent years via the podcast and television series Lore.
I knew the story well and had heard several versions of it in high school. When my friends and I were fourteen and fifteen—when we were trying to make out with girls but none of us could drive—the cool parents would let us have movie nights. During these gatherings, any newcomers were told the story, the details becoming gorier and more terrifying with each version.
When Lore featured the Hinterkaifeck massacre, I was one of many who listened and later watched. I wondered if my classmates also compared the evils that existed in that town to the one that existed in Hinterbach. Was it the people who were bad, or had the towns infected them?
The Bavarian story was so shocking that, in theory, a Neu Deutschland resident or member of the Legislature could have heard about the murders. If they wanted to honor the war heroes’ wishes and include “bach” in the official name, marrying “hinter” and “bach” may have seemed reasonable.
> “Now, doesn’t that make more sense than anything you’ve ever heard?” Fern asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said out loud. “It sure does.”
Official records indicate Hinterbach was suggested by several members of the town and voted the official name in a close decision.
But it’s almost too tantalizing to consider Fern’s version, given what happened on July 4, 1999.
Veronica then recounted Hinterbach residents’ reaction to the crime in the days following the discovery of Summer Foster’s body, as chronicled by the local daily paper. That segued into the general media coverage, which was swift and mountainous. The story even made it to The New York Times, which sent a reporter to recount the “blundering investigation” and “rushed” arrest of Butch Heller. The reporter also criticized the town itself: “its appearance, its atmosphere, its general vibe. Hinterbach might as well have a billboard on the highway into town that reads, ‘White trash ONLY’ and one on the way out saying, ‘So glad you decided to leave.’”
The journalist, who was more courteous in person than his writing suggested, had naturally conducted a lengthy interview with me for his piece. I couldn’t remember much about him, except that he was wearing a corduroy jacket and a long-sleeved shirt in the middle of July. Even though we spoke inside my air-conditioned house, beads of sweat dripped from his forehead, smudging the notes he’d scribbled in blue ink on his bright yellow legal pad.
In an obvious response to this negative press, and to rid the town of its black eye, the city council—led by Mayor Schuhmacher—began a campaign called Taking back the Bach. They immediately passed resolutions to revitalize downtown. Part of the initial series of ordinances outlawed trailer houses within two square miles of what had suddenly become an historic courthouse. That meant Summer’s dirty yellow doublewide, which had remained vacant after it became a crime scene, was moved. The town also went all-in on its German heritage, granting massive tax breaks to any business using a German name and peddling German goods and food.
I was an unofficial part of the city council’s reformation effort. The mayor essentially organized the group that encouraged me to write Cold Summer. He led a contingent of locals—my parents, our high school counselor, and Hinterbach High’s junior and senior English teachers—in convincing me to talk with an agent he met after the murder. The book would have to have a happy ending that included the redemption of Hinterbach, thus repudiating the earlier negative accounts of the town.
I probably should’ve asked more questions, but they were offering me As in all my language arts classes while I worked on the book. It violated state education standards and common sense. But with a hundred-thousand-dollar advance on royalties, which all but assured me a college education and money to get my writing career started, that seemed like a small concession to my family and me.
Two decades later, Hinterbach is one of the top tourist spots in the state, particularly when folks are on their summer vacations. Main Street now has five places to taste locally brewed beer, four storefronts occupied by local wineries, three places to get a bedazzled pet rock, at least two local candlemakers, and a full art gallery.
That stretch of road is where I re-entered Veronica’s story. I was a source that could speak about the murder and subsequent investigation. I was also a resident who could discuss the town’s changes. I indulged her and, to remind the world that I still existed, went back to Hinterbach. I walked alongside her as we discussed the massive transformation with a Ledger cameraman a few yards in front of us. Though my quotes were once again measured and benign—a practice I found safest when speaking about that summer—I made one joke as we walked near downtown.
I skipped ahead to my favorite part of the video.
Will you look at that, I’d said as I pointed to a row of cars parked next to each other. One Porsche, two Porsche, red Porsche, blue Porsche.
The camera focused in on a line of four Porsche Boxsters—white, then black, then red, then blue.
When I lived here growing up, we couldn’t spell Porsche, let alone imagine seeing one drive down the street.
Most of our conversation got cut, and I caught some flak from the Hinterbach Chamber of Commerce for those comments. But they didn’t sue, and neither did the Volkswagen Group. And even if they had, I’d said the cars are synonymous with wealth. That ought to make them happy, right?
I scrolled to the last line of Veronica’s article. It was a decent way to wrap up the twentieth anniversary, though this time I read it with an eye toward her future intentions.
Many current and former residents of Hinterbach are waiting for one last chapter before they can close the book on Summer Foster’s brutal murder: the mid-September execution of Butch Heller.
The piece seemed to end with some finality. She didn’t ask whether Heller was innocent or hint that another stay of execution was possible. I assumed a principled news editor would take that kind of opinion out, though she’d said an editor had assigned her this new investigation. And she’d be looking deeper.
But why did she and the Ledger feel the need to re-investigate what had been—no matter how heinous or savage—an easily solved murder?
5
I woke up to Jorge shaking my right shoulder, which had been sore to the touch for months. I was an old man in my new line of work. Exacerbating my age was the fact that I’d led a mostly sedentary life for more than fifteen years.
“Beck, didn’t you tell that chick you’d call her back tonight?”
I took in a deep breath and opened my eyes wider to try and focus. “What time is it?”
“It’s almost eleven.”
It took a moment for his words to register. When they did, I sat up and put on my glasses, which had fallen on the matted carpet. “Yeah, thanks.”
“Tell her I said her voice is sexy.”
I shook my head. Veronica was going to expand upon the theory that Franklin Jones, not Heller, had killed Summer Foster—a theory that completely ignores my eyewitness testimony. I helped put Heller on Death Row, and I needed him to stay there. I also could not allow Veronica to use her platform to write anything negative about me or Cold Summer, whose sales had already nosedived again after the anniversary bump.
I’d fallen asleep working out the details, but there was a chance I could avoid both of those bad scenarios.
I picked up my phone and saw that I had a text. Hi Mr. Beck, it’s Veronica Stein with the Lone Star Ledger. Wanted to remind you about getting back to me tonight. Thank you.
I tapped on her name.
“Mr. Beck, thank you so much for calling me back.”
“Not a problem. And it’s just Beck.”
“Of course. Have you thought about what we discussed?”
I wanted to tell her that I was upset about being called a liar. But that wouldn’t help my cause. More than anything, I needed her to stop working on the story. “I have, and I want to pitch an idea that might seem radical, but it’s in your best interest.”
“I don’t understand. Are you going to provide a comment for my story, or not?”
“No, and it should be obvious why. But, if you give me a few minutes, I think you’ll like my idea.”
“Why would it be obvious? You don’t even know what angle I’m taking.”
“It doesn’t matter what angle you take. If you’re investigating the case any further than I already did, you’re saying I am lying, or that I don’t know what I saw that night, or that what I wrote was untrue or inexhaustive in some way.”
Fingers tapped computer keys. “Hey, we’re not on the record,” I yelled. “I already said I’m not commenting for your story.”
Jorge peeked his head into the living room and put his finger to his lips. The girls were sleeping. I mouthed sorry, and he disappeared back into the hallway.
“That’s not how it works,” Veronica said. “When you’re talking to a reporter, you’re always on the record unless we both agree you’re not. I should also let you k
now that Texas is a one-party consent state, which means I don’t have to tell you if I’m recording our conversation.”
“You know, shit like that makes people hate journalists.”
“Okay, you know what? I don’t have to take this.” Now she was the one yelling.
I turned my head away from the phone and took a deep breath. I needed to keep her on the line, or my idea was shot. I tried hard to sound sincere. “You’re right. I apologize. Can we talk off the record, please?”
“See, was that so hard?”
“You didn’t say yes. Are we off the record or not?”
Veronica laughed. “You’re a quick learner, Beck. Yes, we are now off the record.”
“Thank you. I want to reiterate that I have no comment for any story that will contradict what I wrote in Cold Summer and points to any killer other than Butch Heller.”
“That sounded fine. Why wouldn’t you want that on the record?”
“Because it makes me sound defensive. And, if you’re out to prove someone else killed Summer, it’ll make me look like I’m involved in a coverup.”
“Writing that you declined to comment will have the same effect.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
Veronica paused. “I’m lost again.”
“I want to dissuade you from writing whatever story you have in mind about the murder. But, in return—”
“Are you freaking kidding me? I’m done with this conversation.”
I blurted out my idea as if it were one long word. “There was a copycat murder yesterday where I work, and I can get you inside access to the investigation.”
Silence. I pulled the phone away from my ear and checked the screen. The call timer was still counting. “Are you still there?”