Alligator Candy (23 page)

A twelve-member jury deliberated for two and a half hours before coming back with a verdict for Witt: guilty of first-degree murder. When a psychiatrist who had interviewed Witt was asked if Witt had shown remorse after the crime, he replied: “He said the only mistake they made was getting a kid whose old man was famous.” Sitting in the courtroom was Donna Witt. Though she had been the one to turn in her husband, something that our family appreciated deeply, there was never any contact between us. She sobbed as the verdict came in. The next day, Witt was sentenced to die in the electric chair.

Three months later, Tillman pled guilty for his role in the murder, enabling him to receive life in prison instead of the electric chair. In the weeks leading up to his trial, Tillman had been ingesting metal in his cell, perhaps to act more insane or even to commit suicide—it was unclear. At one point, on the way back to jail from court, Tillman told the deputies that, as they reported later, “numerous persons should be very concerned if he [Tillman] ever escaped, as he would seek revenge.” The people on his list included members of law enforcement, as well as his parents and sister. “Tillman stated that he would start revenge at the bottom of the list so that the people on the top would worry more,” the report concluded.

Given his schizophrenia, there had been much deliberation behind the scenes among the prosecutors and friends of our family about this. People feared that pursuing the death penalty for Tillman could result in an insanity plea, one that could, ultimately, see him being released from a mental institution and back on the streets at some point. “The decision to accept a sentence of life imprisonment rather than risk his early release from a mental institution has been reached with a deep sense of public responsibility for the safety and security of the people of this state,” the Hillsborough County state attorney said.

Later, when the cops asked Tillman why he did it, he said, “I didn't have anything better to do.” He said his intention the whole day was pleasing Witt. “The only thing I was interested in was keeping him happy,” he said. When they asked him why he cut the patch from Jon's shorts, he said, “Nobody should ever throw away a patch like that; they are too hard to get.”

Tillman's family was struggling to make sense of what he had done, and discussed approaching my family—something they never got the strength to do. “How do you go up and knock on a man's door and say, ‘I'd like to talk to you for a moment and apologize for my son being one of the accused murderers of your son?' ” Tillman's father, Lige, told a reporter. “I think that they know—I hope to God they do—how sorry we are about this. There's nothing in the world we wouldn't do to undo what has been done. There is no way to do it. I wish to God we could.”

Long before the widespread fear over abductions spread around the country on cable and local news, Tampa, in the years following Jon's murder, was reeling. “That was a seminal event in that ability of kids to simply get on their bikes and go,” recalled Dr. Ball. “All of us became more careful.”

“You start telling your kids, ‘Don't go down to the corner, don't go down the street,' ” Madelyn Rosenberg recalled. “You have this thought in your head: you can only play in our yard, you can't go anywhere else.”

IDS stopped letting kids go to the convenience store. It was a radical impact on the place that so exemplified and cultivated the freedom of the times. “It was such a safe and loving place,” recalled Parks, “these people were themselves innocents. In the middle of all this innocence, lurking just a hundred yards from this cocoon we all lived in, was this perversity. I mean, that was the end of innocence and the belief that if you associated with like people, and you were loving and you were nurturing of one another, that somehow you weren't going to be touched by evil. And yet here was Jonathan, who was kind of the major symbol of that, living right at the edge of the campus itself, the most innocent among us. It was staggering.”

The police department began a campaign to create safe houses for kids in trouble. They distributed blue stickers in the shape of hands that homeowners were to affix to their windows in case anyone was ever in trouble. But while Ball limited how far his own children could go after this tragedy, he already sensed that that fear was coming at a price. Despite the horror of what happened to our family, he knew, children were more likely to die from an accident inside the home than to get abducted and killed. “That's where danger is,” he told me, “but that's not where danger is in the minds of the parents. It's sad for children because of that inability to get the proper distance from parents in order to feel ‘I can stand on my own two feet.' ” He feared that, with the rush to schedule after-school activities rather than let kids roam, kids would suffer “the loss of that independent play.”

Sometime after this, Ball penned my parents a letter. “I hope you're doing well,” he wrote, “and Lord knows I don't know day in and day out how you're coming with this, but I will tell you that for the rest of my life there will never be an October that I don't think of Jonathan.”

F
OR YEARS,
I had been tormented by what I didn't know; my imagination had run wild. I struggled to reconcile the snippets of information I picked up from kids at school, from newspaper accounts, from my family's occasional comments around the house. My brain had worked overtime, sometimes self-destructively, as it sought to provide the missing pieces, the empty pages, the scattered strips of film.

Jon's murderers had long not even been real to me. They were faces from which I turned away, bogeymen who lurked in the bushes outside the sliding glass door. Learning their stories, their backgrounds, their plans, was something that, as painful as it was at times, settled some of my fears and worries. I could put faces to them now, hear their conversations. Perhaps I had never really wanted to look at the faces of evil, to acknowledge that evil truly exists and lurks in places we least suspect. Perhaps I had never really wanted to feel this in all its terrible reality, to know that people can be so monstrous, that monsters are among us, and, yet, knowing this, to find a way to survive and live.

This was a question I returned to, at last, with my mother sometime after I had concluded most of my research. How did you survive? I asked. How did you live? This wasn't just a question on my mind. It had been posed by our rabbi, Sandy Hahn, during the memorial service for my brother shortly after his death, as he faced a crowd of over a thousand people at our synagogue. “We have gathered here to search for some meaning in what's happened,” he said, “if that's possible.”

For my mother, the search began at some point during the awful days that followed the news of Jon's death. On one hand, there was resolution that the murderers had been caught and that justice was going to take over. Though my parents had not been active supporters of the death penalty, there was a conviction that Witt's sentence was best for society. “I felt personally that this was like a nuclear threat,” my mother told me. “This is the biggest thing that can happen to people, we must all be protected from this monster . . . to put him in jail, who knows how long he'd be there or what would happen in the future, it was the best protection for society just to get rid of him.”

But despite Witt's death sentence and the fact that Tillman had gotten life, this didn't resolve the loss. For each of us, that time was a dark blur of individual suffering, each of us dealing with it in our way, just as everyone deals with death in a personal manner. My parents had to not only find some way to survive this themselves but also to support and nurture Andy and me through the chaos as well.

“You had something severed from you,” my mother told me. “Jon and you, you just adored him, and he just adored you, and then it was just ripped from you. And there you were, four years old and all this tumult and craziness. How do you explain what happened to you? You were confused, you were scared. I remember siting in the living room when we found out what happened, and Andy was there, and you, and just protecting you and loving you.”

We couldn't talk about Jon, couldn't even say the word
murder
—not even in the decades to follow. I had always wondered why we were so silent about Jon, but my mother explained the obvious answer: “It was too scary,” she said.

“It was just too painful,” Andy told me as well.

But there's a price for living in silence: the isolation that comes with grief. I had experienced this myself for so long, the consequence of silence, the pain of it. My family was a family of storytellers, repeating tales of our lives over and over again, refining them along the way. But this story of Jon was never told. Death leaves trails of mutes. People don't know what to say to others who are grieving. They fear upsetting them, they don't know how to behave. But as my family learned, people who are grieving are desperate for support, for connection. It's always better to reach out to someone and just say simply, “I'm sorry,” to let them know you're thinking about them, to give them a hug, and feel assured that that alone is enough.

As I heard my mother tell me of her struggles, of their efforts to transform their personal pain into social action, I began to appreciate even more how the three
C
s—community, compassion, and connection—are, perhaps, the fundamental ways that people survive not only death but also any kind of struggle and horror in life. But with the death of a child, this gets even more challenging. And it was challenging for my parents despite their activities. “I remember guilt when I laughed; how do you laugh?” my mother recalled. “How do you get into life and enjoy it, and when you laugh you feel guilty about it?”

One day my mother handed me some old yellowed papers to help me understand firsthand how she endured this question, how she struggled for answers, for meaning, for hope. It was the journal she had kept over the first few years following Jon's death. I read them in one sitting, following her early months of suffering, her dreams of Jon, her desire to speak out, to hear his name. As I read, I realized that she had been on a journey similar to my own. She didn't want to lose Jon to the annals of the past. She wanted to preserve his story, get it down before it disappeared. “How good that we're doing this,” she wrote in July 1975, “making a record of our memories of Jon, our feelings, all of this helping to save Jon, to hang on to him, not forget.”

Many times, she had despaired over the taboo surrounding death in our culture, the fear that prevented even the most compassionate people from discussing memories and feelings. “Why are people so afraid that talking about, thinking about, looking at a picture of a dead person is morbid?” she wrote. “It's so wrong and painful to live that way. Let's celebrate Jon. Let's laugh about him. Let's remember him. He is still part of our lives. Why can't we learn a different way to deal with death?”

There had been times she wanted to scream his name out loud, from the top of the Skyride at Busch Gardens, from the back of the synagogue, to remember him, to celebrate him, and to exorcise the pain inside her. “You'd think the body, the head, would split apart during the most intense grieving,” she wrote. “But then tears and tears, building up and bursting out over and over, spasms of grief, constant and exhausting.” And yet she could feel the pain becoming a part of her, finding its indelible groove but never vanishing. “Time goes by,” she wrote, “days spill on, routines, appointments, diversions, some fun, a trip, somebody sick, on and on, time goes and grief finds a niche, a place, and settles in and goes along, too, included in everything. ‘I'm here,' says Grief. ‘Never mind me, just go about your business.' ”

Jon's murder was real, it was permanent, part of our family, part of our community, and we had the responsibility to survive. “We must live,” she wrote on October 28, 1975, on the second anniversary of Jon's death, “We must live with this pain of no Jon, for each of us all, Andy, David, especially, for Gil and me, for my parents, for friends who need to have us show them we
can
live with horror.” And more than anything, it was our shared survival of the murder that enabled us to live. “I think that is the only way to make it, really, when all is said and done,” my mother wrote the following October, “to have love and support from humans who breathe love and hug comfort.”

Toward the end of her journal, her entries became less frequent. Life resumed its pace. There were joys and sorrows, births and deaths. There would never be closure, but there was something else that came with the passing time, as I read on the last page of her journal, from August 1977, nearly four years after Jon died: a way of living with death that brought new meaning to life.

“I treasure what I treasure,” she wrote. “I am aware of the temporariness of relationships and life itself. I am aware of what matters and turns me on. Did Jon give me this gift? I believe so. My sweet, sweet, sweetness. I thank you for that. I carry you with me forever unseen now, just as I did when you were snuggling in my uterus through the streets of Jerusalem, unseen but filling my belly and my mind, part of our family even before you were born . . . part of our family now after your life. Thank you for this capacity to love and understand. Do you still know that you are loved?”

F
OR SO LONG
, I had felt a disconnect with Jon's death, perhaps because I was so young at the time. It was my family, but it wasn't my family. It felt so unreal, as though the story had happened to someone else. But reading my mother's words, after all my research and interviews, made me feel more connected than ever before. This wasn't just some mother who had lost a son, this was my mom. And it wasn't just the thoughts and feelings of the mother of a murdered child, it was a document on the taboos that still exist around death and dying, the aloneness that people endure, and how, in the end, it is other people who can help us survive.