Wages of Sin (22 page)

Six months after the murder of Christopher Michael Hatton, the Round Rock Police Department decided that Corporal Holly Frischkorn did, indeed, need psychological testing.

They decided that after she had sent thank-you gifts of engraved gold pens to the TCSO detectives who were working on Chris’s case.

However, even after the Round Rock Police Department tested her, even after they deemed her unfit for duty, they never provided her with counseling.

Without realizing it, Holly Frischkorn was suicidal over the death of her ex-nephew. She knew she had a trial to get through, so suicide wasn’t an option but Demerol was. She gave herself another shot, and once again zoned out in her chair for the night.

Eventually, due to Michael’s death, Holly Frischkorn lost her job with the Round Rock Police Department. Since she was five years old, she had dreamed of being a cop.

 

 

On July 3, 1995, Mac Opara wrote Will Busenburg a letter telling Will that the DA, Will’s arresting officer, and a private investigator had been to see him. He said they “called me out to help the innocent girl out. . . .” He told Busenburg that the Martin family was “begging” him to make a statement for Martin to “help her out of the death penalty.”

What Opara failed to tell Busenburg was that the prosecutorial team had sat down with Opara at Opara’s request.

Still, he assured Busenburg that he, Mac Opara, was not an informant, despite the officers of the court offering him “all kinds” of deals.

In truth, no deal of any sort was offered to Opara.

Opara “bluntly” had told the investigators that he had only ninety days to his discharge, he wrote Busenburg. “So they said how about money. I told them that I am not a poor black man.”

No money had been offered him, either.

Opara told Busenburg that he had even slammed his hand on the table to emphasize that he could not be bought, and that that slam on the table had scared Frank Bryan.

Busenburg answered Opara’s letter on July 6, 1995. He wrote that it was “pretty shitty” that the DA and all of Stephanie’s attorneys came to Opara. He expressed his astonishment that Martin was trying to place the murder on him. “Teach me to love someone again. How can anyone be so cold?”

He added, “. . . to think this is a girl I was going to marry. Makes me sick.” Busenburg wrote that he would never have been in jail and Hatton would still be alive if it weren’t for “Stephanie killing him. . . .” Busenburg inserted the word “asking” just before “killing.”

Later Busenburg asked Opara when he might be able to talk to Opara’s attorney. He was considering getting a new attorney since he had phoned Chris Gunter after receiving Opara’s letter. According to Busenburg, Gunter had refused his call.

Busenburg closed the letter with various German phrases and “Remember: Anger is the wind that blows out the candle of the mind.”

 

 

At 8:45
A.M
., on Friday, July 28, 1995, Detective Mancias drove in the opposite direction of Austin’s rush hour traffic.

Mancias was headed south, then east, to Del Valle to pick up Stephanie Martin.

The day was already steamy with Texas heat and humidity, and Martin was nervous. She was scheduled for her second polygraph test, this one arranged by prosecutor Frank Bryan, at the encouragement of Ira Davis.

Mancias escorted the thinning young woman in her orange jailhouse jumpsuit to the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) office. They met briefly at 9:05
A.M
. with attorney David B. Fannin, an associate of Davis’s and cocounsel for Martin.

Mancias stepped a few feet away to give attorney and client time to talk. Sergeant Peter Heller, the polygrapher, arrived.

The four chatted and Fannin left, as he wasn’t allowed to attend.

There were three chairs in the polygraph suite. Martin was motioned to one of them. She sat down, with the other two chairs less than two feet away.

Heller read Martin her rights. She initialed each line, indicating she clearly understood her rights, then signed the document. Signing away her rights was becoming “old hat” to Martin.

Heller read her a consent form so that he could give her the polygraph test. She signed it, too, with Mancias witnessing her signature. Mancias went to the next room to observe through a one-way mirror and listen through a speaker.

Heller explained the polygraph test to Martin and discussed her case. From that conversation, Heller told her, they would both create several yes/no questions that she would answer during the polygraph.

Martin recounted the same story she’d told everyone since the day she’d retracted her confession to the private investigator Drew McAngus—she’d only heard about Chris’s murder, then helped cover it up. “I didn’t have anything to do with the shooting.”

They formulated ten questions, six control questions that would illicit a lying response, and four relevant questions. The responses to the relevant questions, Heller would compare to the control questions.

At 10:45
A.M
., about an hour and fifteen minutes after Heller and Martin had sat down together, Martin was hooked up to the polygraph machine. She felt the humidity of the day in her jail clothes and the air-conditioned cold of the room on her skin.

“Before 1995, have you ever lied to protect someone from going to jail?”

“No.”

“Prior to this year, have you ever lied to cover up for a crime?”

“No.”

Those were control questions.

“Were you physically present when Chris was shot?”

“No.”

“Did you personally shoot Chris?”

“No.”

Heller kept his eyes on the polygraph printout, marking it as she answered. “Did you see Chris get shot?”

“No.”

“Did you pull the trigger of the gun that was used to shoot Chris?”

“No.”

Martin’s fingertips were sweating and her blood pressure was rising. She was asked the questions three times, with a minute or two break between each series of questions. For the third round of questions, Heller told her that the order of the questions would change, some questions she would hear twice, some she wouldn’t hear at all.

“Did you personally shoot Chris?”

“No.”

Heller unhooked Martin from the polygraph machine at 11:10
A.M
. In his office, he scored the results.

“Deceptive,” Heller told Mancias.

The DPS officer knew he was required to let Martin explain the reason for the failed test. He walked back into the polygraph suite.

“You failed the test,” said Heller.

“That’s impossible because I told the truth. I didn’t shoot him and I wasn’t there.”

He asked her more questions, question after question.

Martin felt intimidated and confused. She felt like he hated her. She said she’d left something out—that she had “intentionally planned to kill Chris.” Hatton was to die from an overdose of sleeping pills, which Busenburg was to slip to Hatton. It was supposed to look like suicide.

“I never planned on Chris to die by being shot,” she said.

Heller listened and took notes.

Mancias watched again through the mirror.

“We went and got some sleeping pills,” said Martin. That was at a Randalls grocery store on FM 2222, a road that wound from near her apartment, which was just blocks from Interstate-35, through the flats of central Austin, around the hills of west Austin, and finally out toward Lake Travis, the dump site for the body.

But that was about five days before the murder, and the sleeping pills she and Busenburg purchased as they stood side by side in the grocery store line were Sleepinal. The plan, she said, was to kill Chris and steal the money that Will believed was in the apartment.

“We went to Chris’s apartment,” she continued. They slipped him the pills. “But that plan did not work when we tried it.” Not at all. “He didn’t even go to sleep.”

The Sunday prior to the murder, they went to Albertsons grocery store on Highway 183, the main thoroughfare that separated the Aubry Hills Apartments from the Yellow Rose. At Albertsons, Martin and Busenburg bought a different brand of sleeping pills, Unisom, plus more Sleepinal. They went to the Hatton apartment in two vehicles.

“Why two vehicles?” asked Heller.

“Just in case Chris looked outside.” They didn’t want him to become suspicious if he saw her sitting in Busenburg’s truck, she explained. “I was to wait outside for thirty minutes. Then Will was going to come out and talk to me.” She drove around for about thirty minutes and waited for Busenburg to come out and tell her that Hatton was “dead or out.”

After two hours and no word from Busenburg, Martin feared her lover had been killed. Busenburg, she said, had previously told her that there might be a struggle.

“I got out of my car. I went up to the apartment.”

Heller noted that that contradicted her earlier statement to him when she had said she never left her vehicle.

“I looked through the window.” She said she leaned close and listened for any noises inside. She went back to her car, and she drove around the complex. She saw Will, and he said, “I just shot Chris.”

Later that night, they went back to the apartment, stole a camera, a Walkman, and some jewelry. “This was to get even,” she told Heller. She added that she and Busenburg talked about pawning the goods in order to have money to leave the state.

While inside the apartment, they rolled up the body in a comforter, put the body in the bathroom, and left. They didn’t return until the next day.

When they did return, Will convinced her that they had to take the body out and burn and mutilate it because “that’s the way they did it in the CIA.” She agreed, and they took the body to Pace Bend Park. There, she poured lighter fluid on the body and cut off the hands because “Will told me to.” She was convinced by Busenburg that this was part of a government killing.

Stephanie Martin still denied that she shot Chris Hatton.

Detective Mancias came in and pulled a chair up close to Martin so that they sat almost knee to knee. “Are you absolutely sure that this is what happened?” he asked kindly.

She watched him from behind her eyeglasses. She could almost feel his calm pulse, he sat so close. “Yeah,” she answered, and physically backed away a bit.

Mancias noted her movement.

“What I told Sergeant Heller was the truth.”

He steadied his stare on her body. Her legs were crossed. Her arms were crossed. The more yes/no questions he asked her, the tighter and more defensive her body language became.

He reached over and physically uncrossed Martin’s legs, then slipped his knees between her knees so that she could no longer hide behind her wrapped-tight body language.

“Did you kill Chris Hatton?”

Martin never answered his question. She only wept.

Mancias leaned back. To him, that was the same as saying yes.

“I wasn’t there,” Stephanie Martin wept as Mancias drove her back to county jail. “I’m an awful person for drugging Chris with sleeping pills.”
It’s hopeless,
she thought.

Ira Davis was enraged. Time and again he’d warned Martin to answer only the polygraph questions and ask for her attorney if the test showed deception.

“Well, I don’t remember you telling me that,” said Martin.

“Well, you should have known better!”

For months and months, the Martins’ attorneys argued what the Martins felt was a solid loophole, that Stephanie Martin had been denied an attorney on the night of her confession and arrest. After months and months, the judge disagreed. Martin had asked for her father, not an attorney. No rights had been violated.

 

 

On August 1, 1995, Will Busenburg sat down with a bag of Chee-tos, his prison sustenance, and wrote Mac Opara another letter. Busenburg said he was trying to get his court dates reset until mid-October: “May Buddha walk with you through all hardships and keep you healthy and fit.”

By August, Stephanie Martin was in love with another inmate.

On Friday, September 1, 1995, Busenburg wrote Opara to tell him he had converted back to Christianity. “Pretty cool, huh?” By September, Will Busenburg was lusting over another woman.

 

 

About a year after Chris Hatton’s death, Lisa Pace phoned Brian Hatton, then living in Alabama. She asked Brian to take a photograph of Chris’s headstone and mail the photo to her.

He couldn’t do that, he said. There was no headstone; the family, he said, hadn’t been able to afford one. When he turned eighteen, Brian was going to get some money from an insurance policy Chris had left him. With that money, he said, he was going to buy his brother a headstone.

About that same time, Holly Frischkorn and her therapist finally realized that Holly was abusing Demerol. Realizing this was not what her nephew Michael would have wanted, Frischkorn cleaned herself up.

Lisa Pace received subpoenas for court appearances. After every subpoena, just days before the scheduled court date, she received a follow-up letter or phone call telling her the court date had been moved or cancelled.

Her frustration grew as she heard conversations regarding the prosecutors’ and deputies’ quandary over who actually pulled the trigger, Will or Stephanie.

On Wednesday, January 24, 1996, the pretrial hearings finally began. Detective Manuel Mancias was the sole witness. He testified to the basic facts of finding the body and searching the Aubry Hills Apartments. The defense attorneys began laying out their plan to insinuate that the officers had made an illegal entry and search of the apartment.

On February 6, 1996, Detective Mancias was back in court, again testifying about the basic facts, and again the defense attorneys tried to hint that the search of Chris Hatton’s apartment was illegal.