Authors: Steve Jackson
Love Me To Death (13 page)
If Neal’s rationale sounded bizarre to the investigators, they didn’t let it show on their faces. “Why did you choose to do this to Suzanne?” Aceves asked.
“As a warning,” Neal answered. “And at this time, I don’t want to go further into that, but it was a warning to other people to keep their mouths shut.”
Aceves pressed to know who these other people might be and why they needed to be warned. But Neal was coy and refused go any further, other than to say the investigators “should be concerned.” There was a strong possibility, he said dramatically, that he was “going to get hit. And I have a real concern about it. Not because I’m scared to die. It’s not that. But I’m scared that I’ll die before I can get the truth out.” His warning, he said, was meant for some of his acquaintances, especially Jimmy Gerloff. “I hope he takes it serious and you do; this way I wash my hands of it. I can’t be there to protect him. . . . I believe there’s a possibility Jimmy Gerloff will die, and I don’t want that on me.” He hinted darkly that some of the danger might be connected to the drug trade.
Neal turned to the matter of picking up Angela Fite that evening at Fiddlesticks. It was his suggestion, he said, that she take the kids to the baby-sitter before meeting him. “I wanted to make sure the children were in no way directly involved in the scene. And I’d like to make a statement for the record for myself to you that there was no intention of harming Kayla or Kyle in any way. The purpose in getting them to the baby-sitter was to make sure some adult was taking good care of them so that they were not involved in this thing with Angie.”
Having tried to make himself sound somehow noble for not involving the children, he told the investigators that when Angie got into his truck for the drive to the town house, he told her that she was going to “meet some friends, family, and that we were going to go over to this house that I had talked to her about.”
The investigators were curious though about who the mysterious friends and family might have been. Neal avoided those questions and noted that he’d also led her to believe that she was going to own the town house. “I let her know with what I said that I did not want anyone knowing, her family or her friends or Matt or anybody other than herself knowing that she was going to be getting a house. That she would die if she disclosed that information.”
Beth Weeks told investigators that Neal had said to her that he’d killed Fite because she was reconciling with Matt Rankin. But Neal denied that he was jealous. He said that he’d told Fite that “if her and Matt ended up wanting to get back together, that was fine,” but he didn’t want anybody to know that the house was coming from him.
“And what I found out before she died was that she had been running her mouth about that and a few other things as well. And that’s one of the reasons why Angie died. Fair warning. . . . She brought up that she didn’t believe that I was totally legit, meaning that I was involved in bad things. She said she had been around things because of Matt’s jail record and things . . . that she could handle it, and that she would never disclose anything that her and I did.
“Candace never saw Rebecca’s body, you see, before she died because she would have leapt out of there and fought like a cat.
“But Angie, I allowed her to see it and also see that there was somebody there living. I wanted to confront her. She was going to die for opening her mouth. . . . That’s why Jimmy Gerloff is going to die, and that won’t be because I’m the one. If I could stop it right now—that’s what I’m trying to do—I would do it.”
Neal claimed that he told Fite, “Because you’re a snitch, you die” before he killed her. It was a claim that he’d never made before and one that Scott had not remembered. He continued with his new fantasy of having given fair warning. “I mean, I can’t give you any clearer warning than that. And she did, and she died.”
Aceves interrupted. The investigator wanted to pin Neal down on his frame of mind at the time of the killing, an important issue when trying to convict him of premeditated first-degree murder. “What’s going through your mind?”
“I’m very clear and calm,” Neal replied. “I was totally comfortable.” When he was out picking up Fite, he was a little worried about Scott being discovered, “but I wasn’t bouncing off the wall. . . . Angie couldn’t even tell anything was wrong with me.”
“Was it like an adrenaline rush?” Aceves asked.
“No, it wasn’t an adrenaline rush there,” he said. “The adrenaline rush would come when I would kill somebody, like being a Highlander.”
(Highlander
was a movie and television show in which the hero, an immortal who has been alive for hundreds of years, must fight other immortals who sought to absorb his life force and he theirs.) “You know, he feels when he just sits there and he kills somebody, and he raises his hand.
(Highlander
was a movie and television show in which the hero, an immortal who has been alive for hundreds of years, must fight other immortals who sought to absorb his life force and he theirs.) “You know, he feels when he just sits there and he kills somebody, and he raises his hand.
“I’m not being funny about it. I’m just saying that in order for me to deal with killing . . .” Neal stopped and searched for the right words. “These three murders were not like that with me, OK? This was different to me, all right? Because I cared about them.”
Zimmerman asked if he thought that he was a controlling person. “You know, I’m learning about that issue right now,” he said, nodding. He said that he’d read where his sister Peggy told the investigators that “nobody controls Bill,” and acknowledged that was probably correct.
“But I don’t think in an evil sense. I’m a strong-willed person. I mean, if somebody has to make a decision, let it be me, because right or wrong, I’m going to make it. Somebody has got to be a leader.”
“That’s right,” Zimmerman agreed, wanting him to go on.
“I was trained that way,” Neal boasted. “But I was also hurt that way, being a sheep and taking it and then saying: ‘Enough, I’m not [to] be led no more. Nobody is going to rape me no more. Nobody is going to hurt me no more. Nothing. OK? And if you do, you die.”
Neal changed the subject to note that he wasn’t happy with some of the things that he’d been reading in the press about his case, or some of the things that his family and past acquaintances had told the police. He said that it was the press who misrepresented his service record, contending that he never told reporters that he was a member of the elite Airborne Rangers, something that had since been disproved. “I said I was with an Airborne Ranger company,” he said. “I didn’t lie. I was there and trained with them and went to the field with them. I did everything while waiting to go to Ranger school.”
Neal said his army career was cut short when he was only seventeen after being raped by his sergeant. The incident, he claimed, happened one evening after he’d returned to the barracks following a hard day in the field. “I was exhausted, and he told me I could finally lay down and go to sleep. I was lying on my stomach, and I woke up to having him on top of me.”
Neal said that he didn’t want to discuss what happened any further. He noted that while Suzanne would be “getting therapy for a long, long time” for what he had done to her, nobody had ever offered the same counseling to him. It was because of the rape, he said, that he decided to drop the Airborne Ranger idea and go elsewhere. “Because of the rape, I chose to go elsewhere because everybody was calling me a faggot and I was fighting. I was beating people up.”
The rape in the army wasn’t the first time he’d been sexually assaulted, Neal said, getting back to the story of the older, married woman who’d taken advantage of him as a boy. There’d also been a minister who molested him. He conceded again that he’d turned the tables and molested a younger girl.
After several hours, Neal asked for a coffee break. When they returned and the tape recorder started up again, Neal asked the investigators how they could sleep at night. “I’m not trying to be nosy or disrespectful,” he said. “It’s just that, you know, it’s enough of a horror for me, let alone what you see in your everyday jobs.”
Aceves shrugged. “You deal with it and you do what you need to do,” he said. “It’s part of your job, and you learn to keep it separate from your home life.”
Neal nodded. “This past couple of months has been a real eye-opener for me,” he said. “But I haven’t run from it. That’s one thing they’ll never take from me. I didn’t run from it.” He congratulated the investigators on their professionalism, but he did wish that the next time they met, they’d bring him a pack of cigarettes. Merit 100s. He promised he would “really open up” if they brought the cigarettes.
Zimmerman cut through the banter by asking Neal to tell her, “Who is Cody? . . . I want to know the whole story. You know, part of it is my own personal curiosity. . . . There’s a lot that’s gotten you to this point in your life. We can get some of it from other people—family, friends, your military records, and so on. But there’s a lot of it, Cody, that I can’t get except out of your head and your heart.”
Neal liked this approach. He nodded and, choking up, said, “I want that, to be honest with you.”
Aceves jumped in, saying that the FBI wasn’t going to get more involved unless Neal could “throw them a bone,” give them some exact incidents rather than just his hints that there might have been other crimes, other victims.
Neal hedged. He wanted all that, too, he said. But he had other things to consider . . . other lives and the possibility that the police would “drop the ball” and the truth would be lost. Whatever that meant. He said that he couldn’t talk to his defense lawyer “about all of this because he’s trying to defend me.
“I need prosecution. I need justice to be served because I’m representing three dead people, as well as a rape victim. I want justice to be served and the truth to be known so that people can get on with their lives. And that’s why we’re here today.”
Aceves tried to steer Neal back to how he was able to get the women to trust him so well. “Cody, you mentioned control. . . . How did Cody manage to control?”
Neal replied that he sometimes controlled people by molding himself to be what they wanted or needed him to be. “It’s like if you want a raise, you’re going to have to look a certain way, do your job a certain way, smile at a certain person instead of saying, ‘You stinkin’ asshole’ when you want to. Or you let somebody think you like them when you don’t. . . . I mean, an illusion, taking advantage, finding a weak point in a human being—you know, greed, lust . . . to get my own way.”
Zimmerman asked what weaknesses he found in Rebecca Holberton, but Neal shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about Rebecca Holberton at this time, OK?” he said, his voice cracking with emotion.
“Were you closer to her than the others?”
“Oh, yeah,” he replied. “I don’t want to lose it talking about Rebecca.” But, of course, then he went on and talked about her. He claimed that they had sex at the party where they met, and he moved into her town house on West Chenango Drive soon thereafter. Four months later, the relationship was no longer sexual. They sometimes still shared the same bed, or he’d sleep downstairs, he said, “but we were just friends.”
“What was Candace’s weakness?” Zimmerman asked. “I mean, what did you find weak about her that you could manipulate?”
Neal hesitated, then said, “First of all, I’m not saying that I manipulated Candace Walters, OK? I honestly liked Candace Walters, and I’m talking about at the beginning when I met her.
“I found her to be a charming lady, along with the other bartenders that have worked there. We had a really beautiful conversation just sitting in that little booth there when she was off. . . . She was easy to talk to. Then as I got to know her, I found a very troubled person, which I could relate to because I’ve been very troubled in my life, too.”
“What do you think she was troubled about?” Zimmerman asked.
“I think she was troubled about men . . . how she had been treated by them in the past. . . . She had told me she had been raped. . . . Whether you want to believe that or not, I’ll swear to [it] that Candace felt she was raped by Jimmy Gerloff.” He said the accusation was a warning to Gerloff. “Jimmy, you’ve got to own up. You did something you shouldn’t have done with a woman that said no and meant no. No means no.”
Aceves steered him back to how he controlled Walters.
“Candace saw me with a lot of money,” he answered. “I always like throwing it and giving it because I remember what it felt like when I didn’t have it. . . . And look at me now, you know, I can’t hardly even get a stinkin’ stamp. All those people I took care of, and then where are they? I mean, nowhere. They’re like, poof, gone, including my family. Steve Grund . . . He promised to be over here, and he ain’t here, OK?”
The investigtors noted that Grund and the others might be witnesses in the case and therefore shouldn’t have contact with him. Neal said he’d thought that might be the reason, too.
In the beginning, he only intended his relationship with Walters to be a “platonic friendship.” He was not sexually attracted to her. But after the incident with Gerloff, both to protect his friend and to show Walters that “not all men are pigs,” he took her to a hotel room and treated her to a bubble bath. “And there was no sexual contact that night.”
The relationship changed, Neal said, after Walters began “stalking” him. “She started calling me more, paging me and paging me.” He took that as a type of threat. “Then eventually her and I had sex. But it wasn’t attraction sex to me. It was like me as a . . . almost like a sexual slave, saying: ‘I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this woman just to give her what she wants to get her out of my life,’ OK?
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