Savage Son (26 page)

Felcman referred to the report. “What kind of doublespeak is this?” he queried in regard to Bart’s statement at the time. “
I’m hiding burglaries, but I want them to know about it”?

“I didn’t mean it to sound like doublespeak. I just meant that it was something that Peter, David, and I sort of discussed toward the end there, that we were going to get caught. I knew that couldn’t be ignored by my parents. It would have to be something where they would look, and I would be able to say, like a big neon light, ‘Hey, look, I’m here! I did this! I’m not invisible.’”

“You think your parents treated you as an invisible person.”

“That’s how I felt at the time.”

“Well, they didn’t, did they?”

“No, not at the time.”

“Do you find anything dangerous about this? Do you have any perception [of] reality at all here, Mr. Whitaker?”

“Yes, sir, I do. I think my ability to look back and see these things as they truly were in those days, rather than how I perceived them, means I’ve grown some.”

There were a few noticeable mutterings in the gallery.

Felcman returned the focus of his questions back to Bart’s halcyon youthful days of indiscretion. “You actually rented a storage unit to keep this stuff in there,” he asked in regard to the computers and other equipment Bart stole from his school.

“Yes, we did,” Bart answered, making sure to include his companions in his response.

“What were y’all going to do with the stuff?”

“We had no intention of selling it. As far as I know, everything was returned.”

“So, literally, you were taking taxpayers’ money, stealing their computers, just because you thought it was fun.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So it was fun, not a cry for help?” Felcman tripped Bart up with his comeback.

“It was both, sir,” Bart feebly responded.

“Fun, and a cry for help?”

“The adventure was the initial motive.”

“So we have a double motive on this one—it was fun for Bart Whitaker, and it was also a cry for help?” Felcman was able to delineate the pattern between Bart as a juvenile delinquent and Bart as an adult delinquent.

“Yes, sir.”

“So you cried out for help from your parents,” Felcman stated, refreshing Bart’s memory. “They sent you to the psychiatrist. Remember that?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“Well, the cries for help, did they stop or did you continue to cry for help?”

“I felt at that time their sending me to a psychiatrist meant that they didn’t want to deal with it themselves.”

“Where did you get that idea from, Mr. Whitaker?”

“I don’t know.” Bart slightly shrugged his thin shoulders. “I’m not saying it was the right idea. I know it was not the right idea. It’s just how I felt at the time.”

“You were seventeen years old. You didn’t think by sending you to a psychiatrist that they didn’t want to help you?”

“I thought that they didn’t want to discuss it with me themselves, [that] they wanted somebody else to do it.”

“They were trying to get you back into Clements High School, right?”

“No, I believe the letter was actually to allow me to withdraw from the school rather than to be expelled. I was already going to Fort Bend Baptist by that time.”

“They felt like you had gone off such a deep end that they needed to seek professional help for you?”

“Maybe, yes.”

“Yes or no?”

“I believe that was so.”

“But then you told the jury panel they wanted to wash their hands of you,” Felcman declared in regard to Bart’s parents.

“No. I know that that was how I felt at the time. That’s not how they were actually, or how things actually were.”

“You told Lynne Ayres one good thing about your education. You said you could charm the teachers into giving you A’s. What did you mean by that?”

“At Fort Bend Baptist, there was a lot of subjective grading—tests, multiple choice. There were a lot of speeches and presentations. So I guess I could…” Bart’s voice suddenly tapered off.

“Okay, go ahead,” Felcman prodded. “You could manipulate people to get what you wanted?”

“Well, I guess, if you mean by presenting something to someone to try to persuade them to a viewpoint, yes,” Bart responded in his most seemingly innocent voice.

“I’m sorry,” Felcman countered. “Explain to this jury panel, when you say,
I could charm the teachers into giving me A’s,
how that’s not manipulating people into doing what you want?”

“It’s sales, so I guess, yes, it’s manipulation,” Bart agreed.

“Sales?” Felcman asked, his eyebrow raised.

“I suppose, selling an idea.”

Felcman shook his head and moved on. “The burglaries that you committed were quite sophisticated, were they not? I mean, you planned them out far in advance, right?”

“Not really.” Bart shook his head.

“Well, you had pagers, you had ropes. I think you had crowbars. You had cars available, you had a place to store the items. Tell the jury how they could reach any other conclusion than that these were well-planned burglaries?”

“We had all that stuff available, incidentally. It wasn’t something that we planned out months or even days ahead of time. But, yes, they were planned. I don’t mean to give the impression that we didn’t go over it. It just wasn’t something that we hashed over.”

“Mr. Whitaker, my question was, they were planned, right?”

“Yes, sir, they were planned.”

Felcman asked Bart about getting arrested and spending a night in jail for the school burglaries. “And your father had to bail you out?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Anything about that jail time that changed your mind about
Maybe this is not something I want to do with the rest of my life
?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Really?” Felcman feigned shock.

“For sure.”

“It changed you?”

“No, not significantly, but it did affect me.”

Felcman asked Bart to inform the jury how it had changed him.

“Sometimes something has an effect on us and it lasts for a while, but if you’re not rooted in a moral system that says that [the] thing was wrong, eventually it just sort of fades away.”

“It didn’t change you?”

“For a period of time, it did. But, no, the overall change was…no.”

“I don’t understand this doublespeak. Did it change you or not?” Felcman wanted a clear answer.

“I’m trying to answer as best I can, sir,” declared a miffed, but still rather cool, Bart. “I believe, yes, it did. For a period of time, it did change me.”

“How did it change you?”

“I was very remorseful for what I had done. I tried to have a relationship with my parents, tried to get myself on a good track, but I think that lasted for a while. I think it lasted for a year, maybe two.”

“A year or two?” Felcman looked at Bart like Bart was delusional.

Bart simply nodded his head.

“You certain you want to say a year or two?” Felcman gave Bart an opportunity to amend his statement.

“Somewhere in there. Yes, sir.”

“Because within two years, you’re plotting to kill your family!” Felcman exclaimed, and shook his head while looking toward the members of the jury.

“It was a little later than that,” Bart began to correct the prosecutor, “but I’m not going to argue dates with you.”

“There was nothing about jail, being put on probation, standing in front of a judge, where you could go to the penitentiary, that scared you, was there?”

“Absolutely, it scared me,” Bart disagreed.

“How did it scare you?”

“I was seventeen,” Bart answered, which confused Felcman. “I was seventeen,” Bart repeated. “The idea of going to prison was pretty scary.”

“If you kill your parents, you go to the penitentiary.”

“By the time I had gotten to that place, I didn’t care what happened to me afterward,” Bart attempted to explain.

“Well, yes, you did care about what happened to you, right?” Felcman wanted to know.

“Not really.”

“You’re trying to get Adam Hipp to lie to these people.”

“The momentum of all of that, yes, I did lie about that.”

“And you also cared about yourself, because you sent the people you care most about letters when you ran. You told them in those letters,
Don’t tell the police because then I can get away better.
”

“I shouldn’t have put that in there.”

“Can you tell me how anybody can misinterpret the statement
The longer you keep anyone from knowing I am gone, the better my chances are
?”

“The purpose of that comment shouldn’t be misinterpreted.”

“It shouldn’t what?” Felcman was unclear as to what Bart meant by his answer.

“It can’t be misinterpreted, that part of the comment,” Bart insisted.

Felcman switched gears yet again, this time fast-forwarding to Bart’s initial days in college in Waco. “You get put off of probation and then you go to Baylor. Now tell me something in here,” the attorney said, referring to Bart’s probation report. “It says,
I never felt loved by my parents while I was growing up.
Is that true?”

“No. I did [feel that way], but I always felt it was conditional on me being something,” Bart replied.

“Mr. Whitaker, didn’t you see your father testify in this case?”

“Yes, I did.”

“How much more unconditional love could you possibly have from a man?”

“Couldn’t,” Bart replied succinctly.

“So, what you’re telling them,” Felcman directed Bart’s attention back to the jury, “is that your touch with reality is not there, is it?”

“I know that my dad is a different man now than he was back then, but my touch with reality was, I don’t want to say out of touch, but it was…” Bart could not complete his thoughts. “I really don’t know how to look at those days. I wasn’t seeing things as they were.”

“You heard your uncle Bo Bartlett testify that your mother loved you, and that her whole life was you and Kevin. But then you tell me that you never felt loved by your parents?”

Bart nodded his head as he responded, “Yes, sir.”

“Do you find anything scary about this, Mr. Whitaker?”

“There’s something tragic about it.”

“How do you jump [hypothetically] from ‘I’m not living up to expectations’ to ‘I’m going to kill my mother and brother and father’?” Felcman theorized.

“It wasn’t a gradual thing,” Brad answered. “I know that after high school when I got to Baylor, I knew pretty early on that I was not happy there, and I tried to talk to them about that, and it just seemed like everything I was saying was going in one ear and out the other. And all the time, the hate grew, all of the disconnected feelings I had with them grew into hate.”

Felcman countered, “Because you didn’t want to go to Baylor, you decided, ‘I’ll kill my parents’?”

“I don’t know, sir. It was more than that. It was about expectations and how I was supposed to be living my life. It was about everything that I was feeling at that time. It wasn’t just one thing.”

“What did you expect they wanted from you?” Felcman queried Bart in regard to his family.

“I don’t know,” Bart answered, shrugging his shoulders. “Everything. They wanted me to be perfect, [that] is the way I felt.”

“You really thought your father wanted you to be perfect?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You know that’s not true, right?”

“Yes, sir. I know it’s not true now, that that was not what he was sending me. That’s how I was perceiving it.”

“Therefore,” Felcman’s inquiry went unabated, “even if the person is not doing that, they just love you unconditionally, Bart Whitaker may interpret that [as] ‘Huh-uh, that’s not the way, and I need to kill them’?”

“That’s how I saw it at the time.”

“If somebody interacts with Bart Whitaker, it can be on a totally innocent basis and you decide to perceive it different, you could kill that person?”

“No, I could not.”

“You killed your mother and brother on totally false circumstances, right?”

“Yes, sir. I was a different person then.”

“I know,” Felcman smirked. “So, at Baylor, how did you go about deciding you’re going to kill your parents again?”

“I don’t know exactly how the conversation came up,” Bart attempted to describe how the genesis of the familicide came to fruition. “I believe that me and Adam had discussed, or began to discuss, things like that. But I don’t honestly remember the first time or how. I can’t even imagine how it was brought up initially.” Bart shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I know that once the ball got rolling, it was easier to talk about, and it got to the point where it was very easy to talk about.”

“Did you have Adam Hipp or Justin Peters do anything so you could test their trustworthiness?”

“I believe by that time I pretty much trusted both of them.”

Felcman skipped forward to the night of the massacre. “On the actual killings, you had Steven Champagne and Chris Brashear do things to confirm their trustworthiness, right?”

“I believe I trusted them from the experiences we had at work.”

“You sent them out to do a few things, didn’t you? Sent them out to see if they would steal stuff or follow certain instructions from you?”

“No, sir, I did not.”

Reverting back to his previous attempts at killing his family, Felcman asked Bart, “So, what Adam Hipp testified to and what Justin Peters testified to was the absolute truth?”

“We remembered some things differently,” Bart recalled.

“What parts do you remember differently?”

“Nothing that takes the blame off me in any way.” Bart fell on his sword yet again.

“That’s not what I asked you, Mr. Whitaker,” Felcman pointed out to the defendant. “I just asked you, what was different?”

“There were just things that they said. I don’t recall them all now, but I just remembered them a little differently.”

Felcman again steered Bart back to the previous murder attempt, back in April 2001. “Where were you going to go that night?” the prosecutor asked in regard to Bart’s fleeing Waco.

“The night when Justin left for Sugar Land, I was in Waco. I stayed in Waco,” Bart clarified.