Alligator Candy (21 page)

“Both of them would come out and in effect take care of the community because they could really see that each of those couples and each of those individuals was going through their own [experience],” Ball recalled. “I just remember the picture of your mother moving so gracefully among people, touching them, hugging them. She had this manner of simply putting them at ease, not only themselves but giving them the chance to see that she was coping with this.”

Jim Bradley, the principal of IDS at the time, recalled seeing my mother comforting a woman who was breaking down in our house. “She was doing the soothing and the strengthening,” he said to me. “Your family was a pillar of strength.”

As I heard these stories, I began to realize what precisely enabled, among other things, my parents to survive: the unexpected reserves that both had within themselves and the unexpected reserves that came from our community. “In the face of this kind of event, a serious loss,” Ball said, “I will promise you, you can't even imagine the resources that you have. There is a strength that is in there that you can't even imagine.”

S
TUDENTS FROM
USF, which had partly shut down to help with the search, made the rounds with fliers. It had a picture of Jon from the yearbook. It read “$5,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of Jonathan Kushner,” along with a description of what he was last seen wearing, based on my recollection at the time. “Help us find this boy,” the flier concluded. It soon papered the town: the Speede Shop, the In and Out Food Store, Kash n' Karry, McDonald's, and so on.

“This has been the greatest response we have ever seen,” Sheriff Malcolm Beard told the local paper, “and we covered territory in a few days that would have taken the department several weeks.”

The media was constantly at our doorstep, the press coverage just another extension of the search. “I welcomed all of that,” my mother recalled. “I felt they're here to help us.” The support extended beyond the house to the school Jon was attending at the time. On Monday morning, the FBI was on campus, pulling teachers and students out of class to speak with them as helicopters circled overhead. A nationwide broadcast went out to all police agencies.

As the hours unfolded, the cops began going around the neighborhood to talk with the kids. One ten-year-old told the cops he'd seen my brother the day before his disappearance, playing in an abandoned house wearing a football jersey. Another said he saw him playing in a creek near a dead-end road. Another said he'd seen him coming out of a Christmas shop, but, clearly, because we were Jewish, was confused.

As they spoke to the kids, a picture of Jon's behavior emerged. One kid described Jon as “a quiet and shy boy, and is not the type to initiate a conversation. However, he will speak when spoken to. He is very organized and neat in his habits. He will occasionally throw a temper tantrum with cause but is not of a mind to run away from home.” Jon was on the soccer team. Jon was very agile. He had a loud voice when he played sports but was otherwise quiet. One girl told the police she heard the whole thing was “a joke” and that Jon was staying with friends.

Fear and guilt began infecting people there. Sandra Parks, the teacher who was also the mother of one of Jon's friends, struggled to make sense of what had happened. Jon, she told me, was a “trusting soul,” and she wondered if he would have gone off with strangers willfully. She also realized in horror that, just a day before Jon had gone missing, she had been at school, and had a group of students who asked if they could go to the 7-Eleven during a break, something that was not uncommon.

“We put emphasis on creating independent learners,” she recalled. “It was our practice, during off-hours, to let kids from IDS follow the path to convenience stores to get ices.” But that day, she had said no, because there wasn't time. And she reeled in horror to think that perhaps those kids would have suffered the same fate too.

“Children wanted to help,” recalled Principal Bradley. Though he and the others were convinced that Jon would not be found on campus, they decided to empower the students by letting them search the area. “It was just some way to make them feel a little less impotent about the whole thing,” he said.

As I learned later, however, the kids were going through traumas that were similar to mine, as they tried to grasp this bizarre and frightening reality. There had been a monster movie,
The Legend of Boggy Creek
, the year before, and John Wing, my brother's friend, felt an eerie connection to what was happening around him. He thought about a scene in which a boy gets chased out of the woods as the beast screams behind him. “To us, that was indicative of the whole situation that we were witnessing,” Wing recalled, “You had this sinister woods off in the distance, where one of us had been gobbled up by who knows what. It was kind of like Hollywood fiction come to life for us.”

There were other fears around campus too: that one of their own might be responsible. The cops suspected that a particular teacher might have been involved in the crime. The teacher was rumored to have spent time with kids after school. He would take them for sleepovers and show them his model train set in his house. The cops went to Jon's friends Chisholm and Siddall for information. Siddall said the teacher had spent the night at his house, taking care of him while his parents were away. The cops asked if the teacher had made any “homosexual advances” toward him, but Siddall said no. Chisholm, who had been at the teacher's house to go swimming after school, said the teacher hadn't come on to him either.

After word spread about a teenage boy who had been spotted reading a book on witchcraft, he was interviewed by the cops. The boy told them he was studying the subject and had heard that there was a group of Satan worshippers north of Tampa, which, he surmised, might be capable of kidnapping someone for a human sacrifice.

No matter how outlandish the stories, the police had to explore every possible lead. My father had to answer the phone at the house every time it rang. There were prank calls, people claiming to have or even be Jon. One person called the cops and said, “If you want to find the Kushner boy, check the first house east of Dale Mabry on the Van Dyke Road.” Then he hung up. The lead went nowhere.

The local police hadn't experienced anything like this either. “This was the first time to see something of this magnitude,” recalled James Walker, then a twenty-six-year-old officer who had been working on school safety programs when he heard the news. “Heinrich pulled in everyone to work on that case,” Walker told me. The case was unique because Jon's bike had been discovered so early on, which immediately suggested foul play. “It was a big mystery,” Walker said. Instead of having the normal one or two detectives on a missing-person case, there were dozens.

Sheriff's Major Heinrich was, as Walker recalled, “very intense as far as his determination to solve this. He was pulling people off their normal duties, calling the air force to dispatch heat-seeking planes. I'd never seen these kinds of resources before.” Walker took on the job of coordinating volunteers at the University of South Florida, where my dad worked. Every morning, forty or fifty officers, FBI agents, and others gathered in a classroom there to get briefed on the latest leads and coordinate their plan. Volunteers began lining up at the university; each one was registered and given an area to go door-to-door around town canvasing for leads.

Walker felt odd being there among the same students whom he had restrained during an earlier demonstration against the Vietnam War. “I was out there throwing tear gas at them across campus,” he recalled. “It was kinda alien, you felt outta place, but the spirit of cooperation there was on both sides.”

As the investigation continued, it spread among the children, spreading the story, spreading the fear like a virus. Something was changing. The world they'd taken for granted was coming into a dark new light. Assemblies were held at local schools, as a deputy explained the story and asked for any information on Jon or stories about kids' adventures on the path where he'd disappeared.

A girl said she'd been on a horse in the woods when she saw a white man lingering by a car with rusted headlights. A boy said he had been walking when he saw two men who were hunting in the area and told him to go away. Another girl said she was walking along a wall near the store when a man grabbed her by the ankle and started laughing before letting her go.

On November 2 the police interviewed a girl who didn't know Jon but said that, a couple of weeks earlier, she had been walking along the trail to the 7-Eleven with a friend, when, as the cops reported, “she observed a w/m in the wooded area, standing beside a yellow vehicle, and holding a bow and arrow. States the subject pointed the bow at them and told them to leave the area, which they did. States she cannot describe the subject. No further information.”

O
N
S
ATURDAY
, November 4, seven days after my brother went missing, Donna Witt was working the late shift again at Tampa General Hospital, when she saw a sign taped up on a wall. It was a flier announcing that a group of volunteers was going to help search for Jonathan Kushner that afternoon, and anyone else who wanted to assist could come along. Donna, like most others in Tampa, had been following the saga all week. One day she had been sitting in her trailer with her husband when the story came on the TV news. “That's awful,” Witt had said, and then told Troy to get up and change the channel.

Donna wanted to join the search party, but after working all night, she wasn't up to it, and she drove home to her husband. When she got back, Witt had just returned from camping overnight with Tillman. But he hadn't just gone camping the night before at all. He was up at Withlacoochee forest with Tillman, burying the jar with Jon's penis and scrotum, which he had been hiding at the house in a small bottle, by a fence post. Donna made herself comfortable and told Witt about the sign she'd seen in the hospital. “If I hadn't worked all night,” she said, “I think I would have gone today.”

“You don't want to,” Witt said. “There's too many snakes and things.” It was just the thing to dissuade her. “I'm frightened to death of snakes,” she told the police later.

But the pressure had been wearing on Witt all week. “Depression hit me, and I couldn't stand the emotions that were on my mind and stomic [
sic
],” he wrote later in his statement to the police. He kept having his stepson change the TV channel whenever the news of my brother came on, and tried not to listen at work as people discussed the missing boy. At one point, he admitted later, “I wanted to give myself up but did not because the boy's body had been cut.” But by now, the stress had proven too much. “After a week of pure hell, I desided [
sic
] that I would tell my wife, knowing she would turn me in,” he wrote later in his statement. “And to make sure she did, I tell her everything.”

The next night, Witt had Donna make him several highballs, and the drunker he got, the more sullen he became. Finally, he stumbled into the kitchen while she was washing dishes, and said something about hating people. Then he asked her a question: “Would you hate me if I had done anything?”

“No,” she said.

“Then he sit down at the table,” Donna recalled later, “and he looked funny, you know . . . like something was bothering him, and he couldn't know whether to tell me or not to tell me.” She tried to reassure him. “Just tell me anything you want to,” she said. “You know I'm always with you, stay with you.”

Finally, Witt spoke. “Do you know where the candy come from?” he said, referring to the Snappy Gator Gum and taffy.

“Why, no. Why don't you tell me?”

Then he hesitated. “The candy I brought Troy that night.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know where I got it?”

“Just what you said.”

“Well, it come from somebody. You know that little boy that's missing?”

“Yeah.”

“You know how it feels to sit at work and hear the guys talking about ‘I wonder where he's at' or ‘What's happened to him?' ” He paused. “I'm the one that done it.” He went on. “You hate me, don't you?”

“No, you can tell me anything you want to. What did you do to him?”

Witt told her he'd shot him with a bow and arrow, an odd lie that admitted his killing but not in the manner in which it had actually happened. “You're going to turn me in, aren't you?”

“No,” Donna said, as she tried to keep him talking. “Well, where's he at?”

“He's in a safe place nobody can find him.”

“Where?”

Witt said he was camouflaged and buried out in the woods. As Donna persisted in questioning him, Witt spun his story more, telling her he'd shot the boy in the stomach and then cut the arrow free. And that Tillman was with him. “We buried him,” Witt said.

“Well, how?”

“You see that knife laying in there?”

Donna recognized the blade. It was Tillman's old hunting knife that they used to slice bacon. “Yeah.”

Witt picked up the knife and showed it to her. It seemed different now, she thought—brightly metallic, as if it had just been cleaned. Witt told her they had used it to cut the arrow from the boy's stomach and that Tillman had then used it to dig the grave. All the digging had made it dull now, even though they'd polished it up, he told her, handing her the blade. “See how shiny it is,” he said. “But it won't cut a thing now.”

“I took it and ran it up my arm,” Donna told the police later, “and it wouldn't cut the hairs, and used to, it would. It wouldn't do anything.” Donna began to grow increasingly anxious, pressing him for information on where they buried the body, and fearful that there was evidence in her car that they had used. “That means you had to put him in the trunk,” she said. “Wouldn't there be a lot of blood?”