Love Me To Death (14 page)
Authors: Steve Jackson
“Eventually, it just kept getting worse. She wouldn’t take no for an answer with me. It was almost like a fatal attraction.”
“Of those three women, Rebecca, Candace, and Angie—” Zimmerman had started to say.
“Yes,” Neal anticipated.
“Which one do you think you were the most attracted to?”
“Angie,” he answered almost before she finished the question. “Rebecca and I had a sexual relationship, but I was too much for Rebecca.”
Suddenly Neal said he had to use the rest room. “If I don’t go,” he said with a grin, “I’m going to be doing your carpet.”
When he returned, Aceves wanted to read him his rights a second time.
“Do we have to go through that again?” Neal protested. “I’m fine with talking to you guys.”
But Zimmerman picked up where her partner left off. “You realize you have the right to your lawyer at any time you want. And you have the right to stop at any time you like.”
Neal sighed. “Yes.” He looked at Aceves, who was Hispanic, and asked him if there was American Indian in his family. “Do you know about covering tracks?” he said. “I was good at covering things or putting so much shit out, pardon the French, that everybody—they thought they knew me, and they ain’t even stinking close. They don’t even know the first color of my hair. How do you know this ain’t dyed?”
Zimmerman replied, “I think I’ve heard you had blond hair for a while.”
Neal smiled. He could change his appearance easily, he said. “I’m growing a goatee,” he said, then teased, “It’s for me escaping, you see.” The investigators looked surprised. He quickly added, “I’m just kidding.”
He said that he’d once grown a goatee when his mother was in the cancer ward before her death. “I said I wasn’t going to shave my goatee until she was in the Lord’s arms. And she said, ‘You and Sir Walter Raleigh.’ ” His mother had asked him then to get her out of the ward, so he took her home to die. “So that’s why I’m growing this is because I plan on dying. Chances are I’ll be executed for this one. I deserve to be, not because I’m suicidal, I’m not.
“If I end up being that way, I know the people to call because I plan on going to Heaven, all right? That’s just my own religious belief. I do, because He’ll forgive those things. I mean, you know, it’s like you hear . . . the jailhouse thing: you get in trouble and you go to God. Well, that’s sometimes the only time that He’s able to get through your skull, all right?”
Neal hesitated when asked more about his relationship with his mother. “My mother killed me, OK, period,” he said as he choked up and wiped tears from his eyes.
“What do you mean she killed you?” Zimmerman asked.
“It’s love,” he sniffed. “You’ve just got to not talk about my mom.” He stopped, unable to go on. At last he whispered, “Let me catch my breath, OK? Do you mind? I’m sorry, I just, I don’t have a lot of patience for a lot of emotion with all the weight that I got on me.”
With a little prompting from the investigators, however, he admitted that after his mother’s death, he forged two checks against her account and stole some of her jewelry—because his siblings were “trying to cheat me. My mother let me know that they were going to write my ass off as soon as she was dead. Meaning she was the only thing that was keeping the wolves away from these greedy little children she had. She asked me what things of hers I wanted. And I said, ‘All I want is you, Mom.’ And that’s honestly what I wanted. I didn’t want her money or her furniture. I wanted my mother living, OK?”
If his mother were still alive, he said, she would have been there for him “in a heartbeat” despite what he’d done. “Now she would not pat me on the back. She wouldn’t dance and kick her heels. She would not say, ‘You did the right thing, killing those people.’ It would have probably killed her, but she would have still stood with me.”
Neal said that his mother had died on October 11, 1995, “just prior to me meeting Candace.” He wiped again at his eyes and apologized for the emotional display.
Zimmerman commiserated. “There’s nothing wrong with it, Cody.”
Aceves asked Neal if he believed his own lies. “No,” Neal replied. “I know the truth, all right? You know, my brother was the one that said, my brother, Phil, and I love him dearly, that I couldn’t con him. That’s bullshit. I’ve been conning him all my life.”
Neal promised that he was going to “separate for you what’s lies and what is the truth. And I will tell you that I have told you some hellacious lies at times, all right, to cover my ass, so I don’t disclose other areas that I don’t want you looking in yet, OK?”
The prisoner kept diverting into vague generalities, but the investigators pressed on. Aceves asked Neal how he was making a living in 1998.
“All the money I was getting was illegal,” Neal replied. He claimed to have been a cat burglar who stole jewelry, diamonds, and gold from stores and homes but would supply no specifics.
“Did Rebecca know that you were taking money out of her account?”
“Oh, yeah,” he answered. “She would make checks out to me, and I would cash them.”
When Aceves asked how much money he’d stolen from Holberton, Neal stalled. The detective pressed and the prisoner growled, “Be careful how many times you ask me for more, all right?”
Neal immediately thought better of copping an attitude, saying that he didn’t mean to be aggressive, and admitted to “better than twenty grand.” Aceves wasn’t letting him off so easy: “Based on our investigation, Cody, is it more like fifty, sixty grand?”
“It could be, sir,” Neal replied. He would need to spend some time focusing on Holberton to make sure that was accurate, he added.
Neal said that he was trying to avoid a jury trial because it might reflect on his victims’ reputations. “The public deserves to know there was a crime committed, and that I’m guilty,” he said. “But they don’t need to know about Rebecca’s sexual habits or how dirty she liked keeping her town home. . . . I wasn’t the only pig, OK?”
The money he used for strip clubs and limousines: “I think the only month that I ever counted how much money I blew in a month was twenty-two thousand dollars at a strip club. Just like, poof.” He boasted that he’d throw money over the rail onto the dance floor at the country-western bar, The Stampede, and laughed at the people below scrambling to pick up the money. “Then they’d look up and they’d see me there with some beautiful babes. See, people don’t want to be down there picking. . . . The smart ones don’t want to pick it up; they want to have it to throw.
“And then when I would throw that money, it’s like an investment. I would take a chance. I would throw this money, and a victim would come up, somebody that I could use, manipulate, get more money out of, you see?”
Neal admitted to taking money from Holberton’s account on the day that she died. Aceves asked him what it was used for and he replied, “Luring Suzanne and Angie and finishing this thing.”
He’d been thinking of how to carry out the murders for a week, maybe two, before he put his plan into effect. Part of what put him into “a tailspin,” as Aceves had described it, was being “stalked” by Candace Walters, though he denied that he was worried about Walters’s threat to contact Holberton, who was just a roommate, he’d told her, not a lover. “I warned Candace if she kept pressing it, she was going to die, OK? And Candace wouldn’t let go, man. She would not let up. She wanted a piece of my ass.”
The rumor that she wrote a letter in case something happened to her, Neal complained, was another instance of Walters breaking her promise not to talk about him. He said Walters was too angry to take his threat seriously.
A more important reason for the murder of Holburton, he claimed, was actually an act of kindness. He wanted the investigators to know, “I was never mean to Rebecca, never hurt Rebecca, never beat on her.”
In fact, he was doing Holberton a favor when he killed her. “I was trying to spare Rebecca the nightmare that her financial world might be coming to a close. Not that she was totally going to die, just her financial stability. She worked all her life to have that. . . . She was greedy; she wanted to retire from the phone company.” She had about $40,000 in taxes due that August and “Rebecca was going to wake up to this one-hundred-thousand-dollar nightmare and never be able to pay it back until she was sixty-five. She was going to be a slave. And, you know, I grieve over that.”
Aceves asked Neal how he viewed his sexuality.
“I don’t have a healthy sexuality,” Neal answered, “and I don’t believe that anybody could after being raped or molested, all right? I don’t even know what normal is; I haven’t known what normal is since childhood.”
“Do you feel a hatred towards women?” Aceves asked.
Neal furrowed his brow. “No, not that I am aware of,” he said, then paused before adding, “I mean, it’s not in my conscious mind. A psychiatrist might say deep down I hate women.”
“Do you have a hatred towards men who like other men based on what’s happened to you?”
“Oh, I did,” Neal agreed. “My brother will tell you I hated homosexuals with a passion.”
“You were never homosexual prior to the—” Aceves didn’t get to finish his question.
Neal was angry. “Never,” he growled. “Uh-uh. Hell no! No way!” But he quickly calmed down. To prove his point, he boasted that he lost count of his female sexual conquests “at a thousand” while still in his midtwenties.
Zimmerman asked if, perhaps, he was bitter toward Fite because she was trying to reconcile with Matt Rankin. Neal shook his head. “Angie didn’t die because she went and spent the night with Matt. That is not why Angie died, all right?
“I’ve had my wives. . . . All except for one wife cheated on me, OK? But Angie didn’t die because she cheated on me.”
One of his ex-wives, Jennifer Tate, he said, was lying to them when she claimed that he’d made almost no attempt to see their little girl since their breakup. “She has never let me see her,” he contended. “I have tried over and over again to see her. She is a liar. She has always punished me, thinking I cheated on her. She doesn’t deserve to be with me. I want to be free to do my shit.”
Neal described himself as loyal and felt bad that he “cheated” on Angie with Beth Weeks; he was also an attentive and sensitive lover. “Look, I’m not a womanizer. I’m not here to use you sexually. I have feelings and care for you, but if you think I’m using you and just sleeping with everybody else, take yourself and your bad ass out of here. I’m not here just for a piece of ass. I’m here for somebody to love me and love somebody else one on one.
“I was sensitive to them. I wouldn’t ask them to do something they didn’t like. But because of my experiences sexually, I could take them wherever they wanted to go and bring them back. I mean, I’ve been very open-minded with sex, or I would have been a stinking rapist and raping women, you know, and murdering them like Ted Bundy, so to speak, all through the years.
“I raped a woman. . . . If Suzanne were the only crime I ever did in my life, I would hope you would execute me for it. That’s how I feel about rape, OK? It was so wrong. Nor, like I told her, would it happen again. Nor am I a rapist. I don’t believe that I would ever rape another woman after the taste that I got on this issue, all right? It’s something that I can never feel like I’ve washed myself enough, just like them. I know what it felt like for it to happen to me. I felt dirty all my stinking life.”
He denied that tying Suzanne Scott to the mattress was a “bondage” thing. “Understand, it was meant to restrain a victim.” However, he conceded that he’d been into “light bondage” in the past.
Neal denied being sexually stimulated by the murders. “You know what?” he said, smiling as he shook his head. “That’s the most off-the-wall question I could think of. But, I mean, I’m sure it’s a good one in your business. First of all, murder and sex to me . . . I’m totally, like, ‘Wow, man!’ I mean, I never ever considered they go together . . . other than rape.
“It’s not like I had a woody raising the ax up and killing them, all right? Waste another second on that and you’re spinning your wheels. I executed them. I wanted them to go as quickly as possible.
“I was not thinking of sex in any way when I murdered Rebecca, Angie, or Candace. It had nothing to do with saying, ‘Look, bitch, for all the other ones who cheated on me in the past.’ . . . Now that would relate to sex. . . .”
Again Neal said that he “executed” his victims. “I wanted them to go as quickly as possible. And I believe that you both know that they had to have died very quick.”
Actually, the investigators knew that Neal’s assertion that his victims had died quickly with the first blow was not borne out by the examination of the bodies by forensic pathologist Ben Galloway. He did determine that Holberton probably died within the first few moments; the damage to her skull and brain had been devastating. However, Galloway had ascertained that both Candace Walters and Angela Fite had lived for several minutes after the attacks. How much pain they were feeling—what, if any, thoughts or fears may have gone through their minds—was anybody’s guess.
Zimmerman asked why he had picked a maul as the murder weapon. “Why that versus just an ax or just a sledgehammer?”
“Well, you know, I don’t know how to answer this,” Neal answered. He pondered the question for a moment longer, then asked, “Have you ever murdered anybody?”
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