Alligator Candy (15 page)

“For over ten years, I completely shut down and barely talked about it with anyone, including my own parents,” he said. “It was terrible going through my biggest growing years holding down, pushing down, such a deep, dark, horrible secret. Although I have since gotten lots of help, I am scarred for life. To this day, I struggle with many complicated issues. I hate knowing, with every fiber of my being, that the worst possible nightmare really can come true at any moment for me or any of the people I love.

“One of my favorite moments, though, is at night when my own child sits on my lap in a rocking chair with a little white stuffed dog, and together we listen and sing to a couple of songs. And then we give each other a big hug, a kiss, and I tuck them into bed. I look into my child's sweet, innocent eyes, and almost every time, a shudder goes tearing through me. How will I ever bear to let my children out into a world that I know can and has been so horrible and dangerous, where someone like Tillman can be waiting? What am I going to do when it's their turn to have a bike and ride it on their own?

“. . . Jon never got to be tucked in bed again or hugged and kissed. I don't get to watch with pride as he grows up. I don't get to have our relationship continue to build like it has between my other brother and me. Every holiday picture on my walls, since 1973, is missing a brother, someone's uncle, cousin, son, friend. I struggle to remember my little brother, Jon, in some of the sweet ways I described earlier, but it is so hard, because what I mostly see, in my mind, is him struggling helplessly against two strong grown men and being murdered and mutilated. I was only thirteen at the time, and for twenty-four years, I have suffered intensely and will continue to suffer for the rest of my life, as will my parents and brother and many close people around me.

“I cannot bear the thought that Tillman, this man who intentionally brutally murdered and horribly mutilated my little, barely eleven-year-old, brother might someday be released and allowed to live out a normal life with you, me, and the rest of society.”

Then it came to me. I had been through several drafts of a statement. Though Andy and I had been advised by a psychologist to speak about our own suffering—as a way to personalize our case and create more emotional impact—I felt uncomfortable drawing attention to myself this way. But I also wanted to do whatever I could to keep Tillman from being paroled. Underneath the table and away from view, I held Jon's lucky red rabbit foot in my hand.

“I'd like to show you a picture from 1970,” I began. I passed an old black-and-white photo up to the parole board. It was a picture of Jon, Andy, and me sitting in front of our family fireplace. I was between them with a huge smile on my face, my arms around each of them, pulling them close while they—visibly annoyed at my uncool display of affection—tried to slip free. “On the left is my older brother, who's here with me today,” I said through my tears. “I'm in the middle; on the right is Jon, my other older brother, my other best friend.

“Jon was extraordinarily playful and loving. He was a dream to me, taking me under his wing, inventing new games every day. He loved going to camp. He was creative and did hilarious Donald Duck impressions. He worked hard to overcome a learning disability and was making great progress. He loved riding his bike. On his eleventh birthday, he got a big new green bike from my parents. Six weeks later, for a reason we'll never know, he took his old red bike for one last ride into the woods to get me and him our favorite candies at 7-Eleven.

“Although I am sincerely grateful for the opportunity to speak here today, I am physically sickened by this experience. It disgusts me that I or anyone should have to explain why this savage who murdered and sexually mutilated my sweet, helpless brother should not be granted parole.

“Everyone who has been touched by this tragedy—the community, the law enforcers, the investigators, the friends and family—has suffered. It is impossible to express the depth of pain and loss my family and I have experienced. I suffer because of the terrifying week we had to endure while Jon was missing, because of the horror of how his body was desecrated after he died—and the fact that these sadists had intended to torture him while he was alive. I suffer from the vulnerability of walking around like an open wound, from fear, often irrational, for myself and my loved ones. Most of all, I suffer every day because I am without Jon. I cannot watch him grow up. I cannot share my life. I miss him.

“Though I know I will never hold my brother again, I have had some peace of mind knowing that one of his murderers has been executed and the other is spending his life in prison. I never imagined that Gary Tillman could actually be considered for parole. I appreciate and respect your roles as commissioners, but I also appeal to you as brothers, sisters, children, and parents. Would you want your child riding a bike while this murderer takes a stroll through the park? No one should have to suffer even a moment of fear as a result of this hearing. Twenty-four years ago, the sanctity of the people of Tampa was shattered by this case; they will surely know if that happens again this morning.

“As you are aware, if Tillman were to commit the same crime today, he would not even be eligible for parole. Florida now has a law that, thankfully, protects us. The only reason we are here is because he beat the clock when he staked out, attacked, murdered, and sexually mutilated an eleven-year-old boy. For the sake of society, my family, and my dead brother, Gary Tillman should not benefit from his good timing. He does not deserve one day of freedom for the lifetime he brutally denied Jon.”

Finally, the representative from the state's attorney's office spoke last—and summed up the case against Tillman. When he recapped what the defense had said about Tillman's various accomplishments in prison, he concluded by saying, in a booming voice, “So what?!”

It was in the hands of the commission now. Everyone sat silently, looking up at them when Commissioner Maurice Crockett, a middle-aged African American man, removed his glasses, bowed his head, and wiped his eyes. “This has probably been the most difficult case for me to deal with emotionally,” he said, looking at Andy and me. “My heart goes out to you.”

It was time to set Tillman's release date. With their microphones off, the parole board broke into a discussion. I had no idea what they were talking about; it sounded like legalese. After a few eternal minutes, I could hear them adding up numbers—years, I gathered—that they were tacking onto Tillman's sentence. The numbers were coming at random—three, two, one, four; I couldn't keep track—until finally the state attorney leaned over and whispered, “He's never getting out.”

“We're going to need a calculator,” Crocket said finally. They began adding up the years. Years for the brutality and heinousness of the crime. Years for the rape and sexual mutilation. Years for trying to hide the crime by burying Jon in the orange grove. Finally, the parole board announced its verdict: Tillman was sentenced to another 102 years in prison, or to the year 2096. He would still be eligible for parole every five years, but those hearings—I was assured later—would be just a formality.

After the hearing, various people came up to Andy and me and expressed their sympathy. They congratulated us for testifying and said how important it is for the families of victims to be present, to say something, to honor the memory of the departed. Someone has to speak for the dead. A huge cop with a crew cut came up to me with tears in his eyes and said that he, too, has to go to parole hearings to speak for his murdered brother. It knocked me out: to connect with this guy at this moment in this place, to connect with all these people around me who rallied together on my brother's behalf, just as the people of Tampa had joined hands to search the woods by the 7-Eleven.

Outside the courtroom, we called our parents and told them the news. I don't remember what was said, other than sharing a tremendous sense of relief among the four of us. But for me, the story wasn't done. I wanted more. More connection. More details. There was still so much I didn't know. The rest of the story. I wanted to know everything I had never known before: I wanted to know more about my brother's killers. Why had they done this? How exactly did they get caught? What really happened during that week when Jon was missing? How did the community face the ultimate nightmare? How did my parents survive? I also wanted to know something that I had always been too overwhelmed to find out: Who was Jon when he was alive?

I wanted the reality to be more real, more complete, convinced that the more I knew, the more complete I would feel too, and the more I would be connected with my family—with Jon. Maybe this was some fundamental nature of life; something that applied to everyone. Maybe we can't feel complete until we know enough to tell our stories. But learning our stories isn't something we can do alone.

T
HE FEAR
first hit at a carnival. It was 2002, and I was in Davis, California, visiting family friends with my wife and my two kids, a three-year-old and a newborn. We were riding the wild carousel of early parenthood: the donkey rides and cotton candy, the face painting and sand art. Our friends had young kids too, born around the same time as ours and raised for a few years down the block in Brooklyn until they moved out west. We had known them since we were teenagers, and marveled at our new roles as moms and dads. Life had transformed from dive bars and Dead shows to Chuck E. Cheese's and the Wiggles.

On one hand, it was incredible pressure—the feeling of having to provide and care for these little human beings, to make money, to make a home, to keep them alive and clean in the storm of mayhem and meltdowns. But we embraced the joyful chaos. As we pushed our overstuffed strollers around the suburban fair, sticky sippy cups and ragged baby dolls spilling from our arms, we did so with the harried insanity and good-humored amazement that every new parent knows. I wanted my kids to have the same sense of freedom and adventure that my parents had given me, despite the nightmare of Jon's murder, and I didn't ever want to stand in the way.

But, as I learned in a flash that afternoon, the freedom comes with fear, too. All of a sudden I realized that my three-year-old wasn't beside me. I asked my wife where she was, and she didn't know either. Panic shot through my veins, a kind of paralytic seizure that immobilized my body and mind.
Where is my kid?
The crowd seemed to thicken around me, the people replicating in numbers to obstruct my view and block my path.

The fear turned to adrenaline as I pushed my way through the families and called my child's name. As my feet quickened and my words became louder, the fear grew, enveloping me and distorting the surroundings. The sun grew brighter and rides more blurry. The music turned deafening and the fair grotesque; the man churning kettle corn and the woman twisting balloon dogs completely oblivious to the fact that I couldn't find my little girl. Time slowed terrifyingly, the carousel of joy just a moment before grinding down to a halt.
Where is she?

As I shouted her name, I could see the faces of other parents turning toward mine in slow motion, the slow motion of disconnect. This wasn't happening, was it? Could it happen again? A stranger snatching my child, just as strangers had snatched my brother. The sanctity of statistics had long been a comfort for me in my own life, the near-impossible likelihood that what had happened to Jon could happen to me or my brother. But now it felt like it was happening again. With each leap, it didn't even feel like something I was imagining, it felt like something real. My daughter was gone. She was gone. Gone forever. Taken. Whisked away. In the back of a car, a truck—I had no idea—but I knew it. I was convinced. She was gone. It was happening. This was real.

In the panic, I caught a glimpse of my wife's stricken face; she felt it too. She hadn't even been through what I had been through in my life, but by marrying me, she was a part of it now. She was a trauma victim, turned inside out from the knowledge that the ultimate nightmare is real, that it can happen, that it does happen, that it happened to my family, to my parents, to me—and now to her. For so long, she had felt like an interloper, like the horror was not hers, like she didn't have the right to share the shock, the fear, the grief. But she did. And, I soon realized, she was suffering from the same plague of silence that had isolated me. She had been selective in whom she told about Jon's death, just as I had been. But by doing this, she felt estranged from her peers, unable to have the other moms understand just why she might have felt more hesitant to let her kid out of her sight than they did. But she had every right to feel and own her pain. Trauma is a virus, and it infects the people who love you. It is intergenerational. She loved me, and she was traumatized, just as, I knew, my own children would experience their own unique experience of their uncle's death too.

Finally, that day at the fair, I caught sight of my girl. She was with her friend by the pony ride, oblivious, smiling, laughing. She must have just run off for a moment, despite knowing better. Then she got separated, drawn perhaps by the sound of the other children riding on the animals' backs. The fear that had so devoured me in the last few minutes gave way to a rush of relief, a cascade of warmth flooding the cold inside me as I ran up to her and lifted her in my arms and said, “Where were you? What happened? Where'd you go?”

She had no idea why her father was acting this way, why he seemed so scared and so strange, why his face had this look of devastation, this weird mix of distress and release. And as I held her, I talked myself down as best I could. I told her never to run off like that again, to always stay beside us, to be careful in crowds, not to dash off without us knowing. And for a moment, she looked into my eyes and said, “Okay, Daddy, I won't.”

Then she pointed to the ponies and asked if she could have a ride. And I was reaching into my pocket, taking out some cash, handing it to the man with the reins. And then I was standing there with my wife, still shaken, as we watched our daughter ride in circles on the pony. We saw the way she was delighting in the feeling of motion, the strong animal carrying her around, the country music on the radio, the smell of cotton candy, the freedom of the moment and the feeling of life.