Wages of Sin (28 page)

Martin’s trial date was just weeks away. Stephanie Martin and her parents knew that the attorneys were telling the truth.

On the table was the offer of a plea bargain—capital murder lowered to first degree murder and fifty years of incarceration—ten years more than what William Busenburg had been offered.

Robert Martin shook his head. “What about conspiracy?”

“Yeah, they’ll try us on capital,” the attorneys replied. “And if they don’t get a conviction, they’ll try us on conspiracy to commit capital murder.”

“Why don’t they just ask for life and we can go to trial and get this over with?” asked Robert Martin. “Where are we going with this?”

“This is not bad. This is only twenty-f ive years before parole.”

“Yeah,” Robert moaned facetiously. “What does that mean? Forty years’ serving time, maybe. Let’s go to trial. We can prove that Will lied. He lied all the time. Nothing about him was real.”

“This is why . . .” Stephanie couldn’t keep quiet. She’d made at least half a dozen inconsistent statements. They had the letters she’d sent Busenburg. She’d gotten in trouble at Del Valle time and again—knocking off a sprinkler head, playing a radio, passing notes, holding hands with an inmate. “And this is why. . . .”

“What about the truth?” said Sandra Martin.

“In most trials, the truth never comes out. It’s perception.”

Stephanie Martin was scared. She’d read in the newspaper too many cases where it’d been his word against her word ending in life sentences. She feared if she went to trial she’d get life.

Her attorneys didn’t think it helped matters any that their client was scared. “It’s too risky.”

Stephanie Lynn Martin pleaded guilty to first degree murder. Ira Davis held his sobbing client as she stood in court and said, “I shot Chris Hatton.”

 

 

On Tuesday, April 29, 1997, construction noise outside the courtroom muffled the words inside. Stephanie Martin still understood that she had to stand in front of William Hatton, Chris Hatton’s grandfather.

Rage flowed from Hatton’s hands as he reached for his handwritten statement. He looked at his words. He looked at Martin. “Stephanie Martin, you and your accomplice . . .” But Mr. Hatton’s words faltered. He tried again. “You and your accomplice, William M. Busenburg, did murder Christopher Michael Hatton in January 1995. And in your twisted minds, you committed this heinous crime with malice of forethought.”

He talked about how his grandson had “stood no chance of defending himself ” and how Martin and Busenburg “blew his head off with a 12-gauge shotgun,” and “hacked off his hands.” Hatton began to weep, his words barely able to flow through his tears.

“You received 50 years. That’s not enough for what you have done. You have shown a wanton disregard for a human life and really deserve the death penalty. Were I your judge, you would receive the same death sentence you committed on Christopher Michael Hatton.”

Tears flooded Martin’s cover girl face as Chris Hatton’s grandfather spoke of her “sick mind” and the Ten Commandments—“Thou shalt not kill.” His own tears returned. His voice choked and provoked long moments of silence. “You have killed a beloved family member who will not be able to live and propagate the family name.” He spoke of his nightmares and monetary loss.

“I cannot express the anger and hate my family has for you . . . I will just say . . . repent your sins.... And if and when you come up for parole, there will be a Hatton present . . . to refresh the parole board’s mind on the heinous crime of murder you committed and detail how it happened.... And may God have mercy on you because the Hatton family doesn’t have any.”

Martin covered her mouth and was led weeping out of the courtroom. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

 

 

After the door closed behind her, Will Busenburg was escorted in. He stood, as always, emotionless.

“Mr. Hatton, do you wish to speak to Mr. Busenburg?”

“No.”

Judge Lynch looked taken aback. “Would anyone else like to speak? The Martins, do you have anything to say?”

They sat in stunned silence.
Will, you’re the biggest coward, the worst coward, I have ever known,
Sandra Martin thought.
And all of your stories about being such a brave, courageous hero were total lies. And you’re letting a girl, Stephanie, take the rap and take the blame for what you have done.

Sandra or Robert Martin didn’t get up and say a word. Sandra Martin recalled her daughter’s words to her. “There’s always hope, Mother. There’s always hope that maybe something will happen, and they’ll find out. Maybe Will will talk some time. Maybe . . .”

In the spring of 1999, women in white prison clothes and black boots drove tractors along the edges of a central Texas farm road, while guards on horseback patrolled. This was the Hobby Unit, Stephanie Martin’s prison home on the outskirts of Marlin, a tiny farming town just minutes from Waco.

The Hobby Unit consisted of acres of crops and orchards, more acres of industrial-like square buildings, beds of landscaped flowers, and razor wire fences.

Behind the razor wire, Stephanie Martin sat in an interview room. Thin and tanned from hoeing crops, she picked up the phone and rolled her eyes as she mentioned she’d met earlier in the day with a minister from Round Rock. Martin’s makeup was no longer the natural look of the Yellow Rose calendar, but the bright hues of a country church-girl.

She looked through eyeglasses and a glass partition. Martin hadn’t spoken face-to-face in more than four years. “The truth,” she stated, “never came out when I took that plea ’cause, you know, everything got shut off then. I never got the chance to get up in court and tell what really happened.

“So that was always hard for me, because the prosecutors always thought I was there, always said I was there.” She lightly, repeatedly slapped the countertop. Martin was ready to dispute stories.

“I was shocked,” she said as she focused her memories on Yellow Rose patron Jon Noyes. “He came forward and made a statement that I had . . . seen him in the Yellow Rose after I met Will and told him all about Will. I told him that he said he was a sniper, and that he was in the CIA, and that, he had a rifle in his car, in his truck, and said that was one of the weapons he used.

“And, [Jon] just listened. He didn’t say, oh, oh, he’s crazy or anything, you know. He listened. And, I don’t know what else I said, but he made a statement saying that I . . . also said if someone came into my apartment and tried to burglarize me, I would shoot ’em.

“And I think back to that, and . . . I never said that. And . . . I know I didn’t say it in the exact words that he said, but I did . . . say that if someone ever tried to get me, I know Will would take care of ’em.”

Martin stopped. “I think about that.” She brushed her long brown hair with her hands. “Why . . . would [Jon] come forth and make a bad statement about me? I didn’t do anything to him. Maybe he was mad because I didn’t have sex with him.” Martin guffawed. “I think that must be it.”

Her big, sexy smile was no more. She had a broken, white Chicklet of a front tooth. Another inmate had socked Martin in the mouth.

She was embarrassed about her tooth, keeping her hand carefully over her mouth as she spoke. She turned serious, her thoughts steadying on the apartment Realtor who had turned Martin’s date book over to the sheriffs department.

“I did have a conversation with her, she said. “And we were walking by . . . the fence, the security fence around the apartments. She says that I said, ‘I don’t really need a security fence because I have a boyfriend’ ”—Martin chuckled—“ ‘because I have a boyfriend that would shoot anybody that came near—tried to burglarize me.’ Okay. I probably said it.” Martin slapped the tabletop. “I probably said that.”

She slapped the table often, sometimes for emphasis, sometimes for joking, sometimes for nervousness. She talked about how she’d always had a reputation for being gullible and trusting. “Is there a reason? . . . I don’t know. Maybe it’s the way I was raised. Maybe because I was”—she thought for a second—“I was raised good by my parents when I was little and, um, maybe I just had a good upbringing. . . .”

Martin then adamantly denied any abuse in her background. However, she eventually noted, “I’ll tell you what I was—verbally abused by my parents when I was a teenager because they told me that I was a sinner ’cause they were so religious.”

 

 

Her thoughts moved to Will Busenburg, a young man she described as so mesmerizing that she couldn’t resist him. “He wasn’t like this hot, macho boy. He was—what attracted me to him was his eyes. He had beautiful eyes.” And with those eyes, she said, he looked directly into her eyes. “And he would listen to me so intensely.”

Stephanie Martin was not a girl who had been seriously listened to a lot.

“He made himself sound like a hero, like he did it for the country. Ooh,” she called, “that’s what he used to tell me. ‘I do it for my country.’ ” She laughed.

“He used to go into deep, long discussions with me about how he felt. He started feeling bad after killing these men. Even though they were bad men from other countries . . . he would go into these things about how he felt. He had a conscience about killing them but he did it for his country.

“And that made me look at it as almost okay. That’s how I didn’t just think that he was this hit man going out and picking his targets and killing them.... But it was all very exciting to me. Dangerous. Secretive. Like he was a spy.”

There was also the sympathy factor—his physical and sexual abuse. “Now, if you want to know if this is true or not, yes, he was sexually and physically abused. His mom and sister told me that his dad abused all the kids. So I believe them.

“And I believe that that’s the one thing true that he told me about because he used to have nightmares all the time.” Martin drifted off and talked about Busenburg’s tale of killing his father when he was nine years old. “Now that’s a serious thing to tell somebody. Especially your second night you meet ’em. And I believed him.”

Sitting in the Travis County jail, she recalled, thinking about that lie day after day, night after night, caused her to want to tell her truth. “I couldn’t get over how he could lie about something like that and take me in front of this man who [he] called his uncle who was really his dad,” she explained.

“And then I couldn’t get over the lying about the CIA missions. And, then, when my lawyer started bringing to me all this information that Chris really didn’t steal this money, that Chris wasn’t going to be a French assassin, that Chris had a family, that they lived in Round Rock, that’s when reality started hitting me.”

Contrary to what Will Busenburg had told Frank Bryan and Allison Wetzel, contrary to what Stephanie Martin had told Sergeant Gage, she now insisted that Will Busenburg was in the Yellow Rose alone the first night she met him, not with Chris Hatton. “That right there should have made me think twice—to see someone alone in a titty bar.” She laughed, then turned serious. “My lawyers have said . . . he hurt his back on a job in Montana, and the money he was spending when he first met me was what was left of a settlement he got.

“I found out after I was arrested that the guy was working in the bottom as a factory worker, you know. . . . He could’ve just told me that to begin with, but he always wanted to tell big, dramatic stories.”

“He was actually twenty-one when I met him, and had been to my high school.... I was shocked about everything they told me, but when they told me he went to my high school, I just couldn’t believe it, because if I had opened up . . . that yearbook and looked at him and seen that he was twenty-one, that would have led me to finding [out] about all of his lies, and this may have never happened.

“You know, I think about stuff like that all the time.”

Inside, the prison was cold and steel. Outside, inmates were hot, sweaty, and tired. Just barely in their view, wine cup wildflowers bloomed over gently rolling terrain.

Back in Austin, the sweet scent of the spring air drove men and boys to the shores of Lake Travis and the firepit barbeque where Chris Hatton had been found. At the Hobby Unit, a hot, sweating inmate stood outside and barbecued dinner for the prisoners. She wiped her brow of sweat.

Martin huddled her body for warmth. She sat in baggy white prison scrubs that hid her figure. She pointed again to her broken front tooth, which, she said, made her look like white trailer-park trash.

It also made Stephanie Martin look more like a growing six-year-old than a woman who pleaded guilty to first degree murder. Without a smile, she began talking about the sleeping pill plan. It had been her father’s and her experiences with sleeping pills that helped her and Busenburg decide what brand to buy, she said. Unisom had knocked her father right out. Sleepinal hadn’t done much for her.

“So when we considered what the Sleepinal would do to [Chris], I suggested Sleepinal because they were more natural. [Will] really had a disregard for life. He believed that Chris was after him and to the point that he didn’t care. My response to that . . . well, I didn’t actually agree but I didn’t actually disagree.

Martin stared at the prison wall.

“The only time [Will] had mentioned killing [Chris] was . . . when he found the check missing. And that’s when he said he wanted to kill him, when we were on our way home from his apartment back to my apartment.”

They were driving, she said. “And he was in this rage, which is not much for Will because he doesn’t ever show his feelings when he’s angry. He never raised his voice at me, but he would get very red-faced. And you could tell he was just holding it all in. He said, ‘That was it. That was the last straw.’ ”

Martin looked weak and clutched her stomach; she was suffering from a stomach virus.

“The truck conversation was very short, and it was really not even real. He said, ‘I should kill him for what he did. He stole my check. I think he’s after me for my money. I think he’s jealous of me. He’s crazy already. He wants to kill people. ’ . . . And he says, ‘I should kill him.’

“I said, ‘Okay, Will, how are you going to do that?’ And that’s really all I remember of that conversation. Then he said, ‘I don’t know,’ but he could taste [Chris’s] blood. Whenever he talked about killing he said he could taste their blood.”

Just as Busenburg had told the prosecutors that the check had been for a payment on his truck, he told Martin, she said, that the payment was for his Lamborghini truck. “That Lamborghini made these special trucks that were millions . . .” She trailed off. “There’s probably no such thing. And I asked him, ‘Was there such a thing? I never heard of such a car.’ He said, ‘They’re very, very rare.’ ” She uncomfortably chuckled at the memory. “Everybody laughs at that part, at those types of things.”

She returned to the check. “He said that, ‘Chris has to be the only one that coulda took it because he’s the only one that knew where the key was to the box.’ ” He meant a lockbox in their shared apartment.

“He also said there was a bomb on the box that Chris knew how to detonate. Will told me he had a bomb in the back of his pickup in case of an emergency.” He told her he kept it in the huge tool compartment that rode the width of his truck bed. “He never showed me his bomb, of course. I don’t think he even ever opened that tool compartment.”

She urged herself forward in the story. “Now me and my lawyer always had trouble with this. I honestly couldn’t remember. [Will] thought up the idea of getting [Chris] drunk. I remember mentioning, ‘Well, Chris drinks a lot, and you don’t. So aren’t you going to pass out before he does?” He said, ‘Well, maybe I should try something else.’ I said, ‘Well, maybe sleeping pills.’ I’m not for sure, but I believe I’m the one that suggested the sleeping pills.

“He said, ‘Well, how am I gonna do that?’ . . . Will said he could put it in [Chris’s] Jim Beam . . . and he probably wouldn’t taste it and that would knock him out.” She took a breath.

“He wanted to take him camping and go fishing because Chris had said he’d been wanting to go fishing.” That idea came about, Martin explained, as she and Busenburg walked at Twin Falls, a popular Austin swimming hole.

“It was a nice night. It was warm. We were wearing shorts. I had my dog with me, so I wanted to take her for a walk. . . .” She was actually referring to Brunner’s dog. “It was wintertime, but it was warm. You know how it is in Austin. And that’s where the conversation about the sleeping pills came up and the idea that he’d take him camping and that he would look for the money.

“But I said, ‘No. I want to help you look for the money.’ I saw this as like some secretive-type thing, and I told him that I wanted to go in with him and help him look for the money. And I didn’t want him to go camping because I was also scared of Chris [being] after him. I didn’t want him to be out there in the open with Chris, with these people supposedly that had been after him. Because he’d been telling me that Chris and what he said were [Chris’s] Navy SEAL friends had been following him.

“We would actually be driving and he’d point out a car and say he thinks that’s one of Chris’s friends following him. So he had me paranoid of that. Plus, he had me paranoid of the CIA wanting to get rid of him because he had all of this information and he had left the CIA.”

“After the discussion at Twin Falls . . . Friday night, we go back, go to eat, do something, didn’t talk about it anymore.” Busenburg had decided to stick to his decision to take Hatton camping, she said. “So he gets . . . some firewood for the camping trip.”

In rhythm to the words, Martin began to slap her palm against the tabletop. “We get the sleeping pills, the stuff for the camping trip, he goes to his apartment to say he’s gonna look for the fishing poles, the tent equipment. He comes back and says—he went to his mom’s to get this stuff, right—he says half of it’s not there where he remembers it. ‘It’s too much of a hassle.’ So he’s just gonna ask Chris if they can hang out at the apartment. I don’t think he ever intended to go on the camping trip.” She slapped the tabletop again. “That’s my opinion. He just came back and, and it was like, ‘Oh, no. I’m not gonna worry about all of that. It’s too much of a hassle.’ No telling what he was doing that time while he was gone, like all those other times.”

“So [Will] got some beer.” She explained that the beer wasn’t purchased at the same time as the sleeping pills and firewood, as well as some lighter fluid. “All this stuff was used later. So this came in as very incriminating evidence. That’s why I don’t think Will ever intended to go camping. I think he knew that he was going to shoot him and that he wanted to burn the body because that’s what they did in the CIA.”