Wages of Sin (32 page)

“And I cannot find it.” It was the laughter of a child at her first funeral who giggles simply because she doesn’t know what else to do. “I can’t find this Sandy Creek Park exit. I’ve”—she stuttered—“had been there a million times during the day . . . but—but I couldn’t find it. And we kept going back and looking, going and turning around. Finally it’s like two-thirty, three o’clock . . . and I say, ‘Oh, Lord, Will, I can’t find it.’

“So I say, ‘Okay, Pace Bend Park.’ We drive out there. That’s another good thirty minutes. All of this time he’s driving with the dead body in the back of his pickup. At one point, we saw a cop. . . . We panicked to ourselves, made sure we went the right speed limit. But it was no problem....

“So we get to Pace Bend. Now, it’s three, four o’clock . . . and I’m exhausted. When I got out to see him, because everybody was in the pickup, I don’t think he was very exhausted.” She laughed. “I think he was just perky.” She continued to laugh. “No, I’m not gonna say perky, but he didn’t seem tired or anything.... So we was just in the mode of okay, now we’re here, let’s get the body out.”

Martin then explained that she knew all the coves at Pace Bend Park because she’d been to them all. Pace Bend Park was where she had shot the Yellow Rose calendar.

“But I didn’t know which cove I was gonna go to, but when I drove by Kate’s Cove, I remembered that it was the . . . biggest and farther away than the other coves, and that you could keep going on it to a part that they didn’t camp on. So, that’s why I picked that one.

“We go as far . . . as possible as we can go. The water goes back into an inlet there, kinda. Park the car, get out, drag the body out the back of the pickup, and lay it on the ground, and put the fire—now we didn’t get any more firewood. We were going to try to get some out there. But,” she said, breathing a huff of disgust, “we didn’t find any. Scraps. So we were like, ‘Okay, let’s just use this.’

“We put what firewood we had in the fire and lit it . . . put the body down . . . put lighter fluid all over the body. Now, he did that the first time. And then threw a match on. We had a box of matches. It lit up decently.

“It burned through his clothes.... Now only his top half is on the fire. From his waist up . . . so his feet and his waist and below are not even hardly getting burned. We assumed”—she began to stammer—“that—that’s when I, that’s, um, Will, uh, assumed that he would have to cut the body up if it didn’t start burning, better.”

Martin seemed to stop herself. “I know that he never even planned to cut up the body. I don’t think he ever thought he was going to do it, even though he said he was.... Or maybe he thought he was gonna do it, and then he looked and realized he couldn’t do it.

“But he didn’t even make an attempt to cut up the body.” She sounded a tad angry. “He never even got the saw. . . . I think he wanted me to cut off the hands all along. He wanted me to do that. That’s what I think. I think he wanted me to do something.” Her anger seemed to grow with the memory. “To be tied into it more with him. Me do something grotesque since he had shot him. That’s what I think.”

She returned to the facts. “I helped put the lighter fluid on. I thought it was going to be a horrible . . . smell—burning flesh. It wasn’t. . . . It was a smell, but it was not gagging, horrible, because I’ve smelled burning flesh. One time I smelled . . .” She began laughing somewhat uproariously.

“That’s a whole ’nother story. I’ve smelled a cat burning before.” She laughed more. “I didn’t burn a cat. Me and my friends walked on leftover grounds where a cult had been. And there was leftover burnings of a cat. This was back in ’91, when me and my friends went out to that church. This is a whole ’nother story.” Then with giggles, she vowed she wasn’t a Satanist, to rebuke the investigator’s constant questions.

However, Martin admitted, “I had a run-in with a cult. It’s actually kind of funny.” She continued giggling. “There’s my bad curiosity. Gotta go out here,” she spoke as if telling a ghost story at a slumber party, “and see where this church has been that we’ve heard about.” Her voice matured. “And we ended up walking up on where we think a cult had been burning a cat. We saw the hair and the bones. We smelled that, and it was an awful smell.

“But this smell, maybe it was me, maybe it was because I was in shock, whatever, but I didn’t smell anything horrible.... In fact, it was”—she stopped and sighed as she thought—“it smelled just like burning wood almost.... The smoke was black, though. Dark smoke. It wasn’t real windy. So it kinda went up. Maybe that’s why we didn’t smell it too bad because it wasn’t real windy. It was very still. Very”—she stretched out the word—“still. Well, you have to remember it’s four o’clock in the morning. That’s a still time.

“When I got out there . . . before we even took the body out of the truck, I remember looking out at this place [and thinking] how peaceful it was. And, then,” she stuttered, “I-I almost, you know, felt like we weren’t even doing anything crazy. Then it flashed on me, oh, my God, we have this dead body . . .” She laughed lightly. “. . . and we’re about to burn it. Maybe I was delirious.” She laughed again, breathily.

Martin admitted she always laughed in embarrassing or serious situations.

“We’ve been there about thirty minutes burning the body, and it’s not burning. It’s gonna take a barn fire to burn this body. I remember asking Will, ‘I thought you had done this in the CIA, right?’

“And he said, ‘Someone else always did it.’ That he just shot ’em and left ’em for someone else to do that.... He says, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong. Maybe we don’t have enough firewood. ’ Blah, blah, blah. ‘It’s not gonna burn.’ He says, ‘But before we go, you do need—we do need to get rid of the fingerprints.’

“So I go and take the lighter fluid to pour on the fingerprints and think we’re gonna light the fingerprints, and he says, ‘No, I need you to cut the hands off.’ ”

“I say, ‘Cut the hands off! Why can’t we just burn the fingerprints like this?’

“He says, ‘No, that’s not good enough. You can still see them.’

“Which is a lie,” Martin simmered. “He doesn’t know. He just wanted me to . . . do something. So I said, ‘Why can’t you do it? I thought you were gonna cut the body up.’

“He says, no, he’s not gonna do that. He can’t do it. He’s feeling sick. Now”—she slowed—“this is a pretty important phrase he made. He said he couldn’t do it because he was sitting there and it dawned on him that that was his friend.” She paused, as if for punctuation. “Now, he didn’t show a whole lot of emotion when he said this. He didn’t cry. He didn’t break down.

“He just said, ‘It’s kinda dawning on me that this is my friend. I don’t want to do anything else.’ He said, ‘I need you to go and get that saw and cut off the hands.’

“I said, ‘Will, I don’t wanna do that. That’s hor—I don’t wanna do that. I can’t do it.’ ” Her voice was almost soft and distant.

“And he said, ‘No, you’re gonna have to do that before we go.’

“Now, I don’t know if you take that as a threat or what,” she laughed. “At the time, I didn’t know what to take it as. I mean, he was so calm about everything. He didn’t actually make threats, but he gave orders.” She mentioned the word menacing. “That’s a good word. Everything he said was so bitterly calm. I don’t know how to describe it.

“So, I said, ‘Okay. I’ll try.’ So I get the hacksaw.” While wearing surgical gloves, she said, she began to saw. “It’s kind of hard for me to describe because I kinda blocked it out. But I do remember that I had to hold on to his hands”—she paused—“with my hand, and I just started cutting at the wrists. And there was no blood.... It was dry,” she said in shock, or awe. “It was dry. I remember,” she stammered, “I do remember that. When I was cutting through his wrists, there was no blood.”

Martin’s voice moved from soft to firm. “ ’Cause I expected this to be a horrible thing, that blood was gonna come out, you know. I didn’t think I was gonna be able to do it.... Now, the gross part, the part that made me, I mean—not almost be able to do it was . . . when I hit the bone.”

As if for tension relief, there was a knock on the prison door. Martin muttered, “Shit,” as she realized how little time she had left to tell her side of the story.

“It wasn’t as bad when I was doing skin, it was when I hit that bone.” She came down hard on the word “bone.”

“And it took me a good five to ten minutes to get through that bone.... It was hard.” For the first time, in a long time, she slapped the tabletop for emphasis and said “will” got her through it. Not Will Busenburg, but
self-will.
“I tell you it was hard. I was tired.” She laughed.

“I was exhausted. But I wanted out of there.” The laughter vanished and was replaced by determined words. “I wanted away from that dead body. I wanted out of that whole scene. And I wanted to go. And that was probably what it was”—a nervous chuckle arrived—“you know, that probably gave me some more strength to—” Martin’s laughter faded.

“And he watched,” she said, as if stunned. “He watched me do it.” Her words seemed shock-filled. “[Will was doing] nothing but staring, but you know what comment he made while I was doing it?” Suddenly anger dripped from Martin’s voice as she quoted, “ ‘You’re sick.’ And laughed. He said, ‘You’re sick,’ and laughed.

“I said, ‘You’re the one that wanted me to do it.’ Oh, I was mad at him . . . for this, for making me do that, because he had never said I was going to have to cut any hands off.... He was just staring, watching me. I didn’t really—we didn’t really talk. I just did it.”

Martin stopped talking. Then she gasped, “Oh!”

A long silence ensued as she contemplated her next words.

“I don’t know if I should—maybe it’s not right to say this about Will. Why not? He said horrible things about me that weren’t true.

“He made some jokes during this whole thing.” She stumbled over words. She stopped and thought. “He even made one joke at the apartment right after he shot [Chris], when he was wrapping him up. What was it?”

The prison was quiet.

“No head,” said Martin. “He said, ‘No head’ a couple of times as a joke.... He made a joke about him having no head, and this was during the time that he was rolling the body—after he first shot him. I remember. And then he made a comment, a joke out there at Pace Bend about him having no head then.”

She stopped. She was silent. She tried to recall more.

“Like he called him ‘Mr. No Head.’ I can’t remember exactly,” and with that, Martin slapped the tabletop with laughter.

She grew more serious. “I mean, it’s kinda funny that he said it later on, but it’s, it’s really crazy that he said it right then—right after he shot the guy. But that’s how he dealt with things.

“I’m over the hands and the body. The only thing that still bothers me is when I think about when I first went in and saw that blood and that dead—that’s what I remember the most. That was worse to me than cutting off the hands. Much worse. No one under—can believe that when I tell them. But I guess you have to be there to experience it. To walk in and see someone’s lifeless body in a bed, with blood pouring out of their head, and then to smell that smell of blood in the air . . .”—she paused—“that’s the worst. That was the worst of the whole thing.” She stopped again, then added, “And to know that he had done it.”

For the last interview session, Stephanie Martin looked sexier than usual. Her smile beamed, her makeup appeared more tasteful, and her eyes shone. She’d removed her glasses, she said, because she wanted to be remembered in a nice way.

“Why am I helping you get rid of this body?” she asked Busenburg as she cut off Hatton’s hands. “I asked him at this point, ‘Why can’t you call one of these guys that you’re supposed to be working with [at] the CIA? Why can’t they do this?’ That’s when he says when he got out of the CIA, he lost all them types of privilege.”

With those words in her head, Martin placed Hatton’s hands in the fire, under the body, she said. But realizing that the body wasn’t going to burn, they decided to bury it. “So, we were thinking that we were gonna have to go somewhere and get a shovel and come back and bury the body.

“Right at this point,” she said, slapping the table, “that we talk about burying the body, we hear dogs barking. And we hear a car. This is still far away. But we freaked out. Jumped in our cars and took off.” She laughed briefly. “We hauled ass out of there quickly.”

Martin fidgeted. “Later on, when I imagined, when it hit me what we had been—what I had been involved in and everything, what made me really realize it was”—she pounded the table—“I put my brother [Jeff] in his place.” Her voice went soft. “And then I saw his little brother. I didn’t even know he had a brother.

“So, I . . . I got very depressed for days. For weeks. I became suicidal, ’cause I realized that we had—I had been—what I had been involved in, and someone’s life had been taken. I was pretty much equally, almost equally responsible, because I could have stopped it. But, anyway,” she said, “that’s a whole ’nother story. . . .”

 

 

She moved forward to Wednesday after the murder. “And we took—oh, gosh, that’s when,” she exclaimed, “oh, gosh. That’s when . . . I saw my dad. This is Wednesday, right. And this is when we remembered we had got the couch. On Chris’s credit card....

“It’s hard to believe. And it’s funny, if you were to read this story, you would say, when they got this furniture, they knew they were gonna kill this guy.” She tapped the prison table with her finger, in rhythm to anxious, nonstop knocking at the door. “But it wasn’t—that didn’t—I don’t think that even had anything to do with his death. I really don’t.

“Now, I can be honest when I say I didn’t know he was gonna be killed when we were getting the furniture. Maybe Will did. I don’t know.”

Martin returned to the Wednesday night with her father. They called Robert Martin because they believed they needed to get the couch, she said, because they feared Levitz might call Hatton’s employer. “ ‘Look, you’ve got a couch and when are you gonna come pick it up.’ You know what I’m saying? Track him down to get the couch, so we thought we’ve gotta get the couch so that . . . they’re not tracking somebody down.”

She called her father to get him to help them move the couch. Martin noted that when she phoned her dad, Busenburg stood right next to her. “He didn’t trust me. Obviously, or he wouldn’t have stood right there and listened.... He thought I might say something, because after I got off the phone, he said, ‘Don’t call them anymore.’ He said, ‘Don’t use the phone unless you tell me first.’ ”

When her father arrived at the apartment, they moved the couch, then shared a drink and visited. “After he left, me and Will were talking to each other, thinking, ‘My God. If he only knew. If only he knew that we had just moved a body, [that] you had just shot your friend.”

Martin and Busenburg then ordered Chinese fast food, she said. All the while, they never thought to glance at the newspapers or TV. “We thought that the body wouldn’t be found for weeks. Because this was in the middle of winter, we didn’t think anyone would be fishing, or out there....

“Thursday was the day that I went to my parents, by myself, during the day, and got the paint and the paintbrushes.” That night, they returned to Hatton’s to clean. She stopped and thought back. “Oh, that’s when we found Chris’s camera.... They were wondering why we took those pictures.” Just as she had told Bryan and Wetzel, she again said she had no idea where those pictures ended up.

“I just remember that we found Chris’s camera, and—” Martin began to stutter and stumble badly. Finally she got out, “And that we were seeing if it worked.”

With very light laughter in her voice, she said, “I don’t remember. They say there’s pictures of us cleaning up. They say there’s pictures of it, and they were thinking that we were sick and demented, thinking that we’re cleaning up while I’m saying, ‘Look what we did. We’re cleaning up. Let’s take pictures. ’ ” Martin chuckled. “But that’s not the case.”

She added, “And the mood, we were—to be honest—kinda joking around, you know. I took a picture of him. He took a picture of me. . . . By this time the mood was a little bit lighter. We had slept. We were . . . talking more. The conversation was a little bit better. Getting the body out there, I guess, lifted something off our shoulders.

“But still, you know, we’re in the apartment cleaning up blood and membranes, I guess, tissue, membranes, and bones. But I didn’t see bones—Will found the bones. They were laying all over, different places, and he put ’em in a bag. I remember he showed ’em to me, ’cause he said, ‘Look, here’s part of the skull.’ ”

She continued, “Now the blood, the only thing we were cleaning up, really, was some spots and then that big clod. That big, big clod of blood. And first,” Martin said as in wonder, “he had to just take his gloves and kind of pick it up. It was thick. I mean, who knows what was in there? It could have been part of his brain.

“Then we took the mattresses—oh, it started storming. Thundering. Lightning. And storming. Pouring down.” It was evening, she recalled.

As Martin sat in the interview cubicle, she began to say her neck hurt. Seconds later she was back to the business at hand—covering up the murder of Christopher Michael Hatton.

“It starts pouring down [rain] because when we took the mattresses and put [them] in the back of the pickup, it was pouring. We used some type of paint to spray all over the mattresses to cover the blood. There was actually a few things we did that were halfway smart, but most of it was really stupid. We left a lot of things, as you know. You can’t cover up a murder. Well, I guess some people can, but we can’t.

“But there’s just things you forget.” She enumerated the receipts and the sleeping bag. “And then the teeth. The teeth,” she repeated. “I didn’t think about the teeth. Neither did he. When we left that place, we thought that body was unidentifiable.

“But now I know dental records because I’ve read all them true crime books and I’ve read cases. Back then, you didn’t know much about dental records and how they identified bodies. I didn’t. And when this was happening, I couldn’t think of anything.” Martin inhaled and coughed.

“Of course, he, the expert, was supposed to know all this. But he wasn’t the expert. He was a liar. So that’s why he didn’t know.”

She stopped to recall where she was in her story. She explained that they tried to drop the mattresses at a dump she’d been to before with her father. “But once again, I can’t find it.” Martin sounded frustrated with herself. “So here’s what we did.” They tossed the mattresses in an apartment Dumpster, just to get them out of the back of the pickup, she stated.

“Now, here comes the drama.” Martin snickered. “Here comes”—her laughter grew—“Will’s next acting spree. We started arguing. We hardly ever argued. We were driving home in the rain after we had got the mattresses out of the pickup, and I’m sittin’ there. And all of a sudden, things started dawning on me. . . . I start thinking . . . why am I helping him and not some CIA guy. And I asked him that again.

“ ‘Okay, you say you don’t have contact in the CIA no more because you’re not in it, but you still have friends that you say owe you favors. Why couldn’t you call one of them?’

“He starts saying, ‘Why are you asking me questions? Do you doubt me?’

“. . . I never doubted him. But if I ever did, the slightest bit, he got very offended. And he said you don’t ever call him a liar. Because [once] I called him a liar. And it wasn’t about the CIA or nothing. It was about something simple.

“And he said, ‘Don’t ever call me a liar.’ He said, ‘I don’t ever lie.’ He got very offensive [sic] and ignored me for a couple of hours.”

Martin tried to remember why she’d called him a liar. She had it on the tip of her tongue, then started laughing. “No, that was when he caught me lying. Sorry.”

She explained her “lie”: Brunner was at her apartment when Busenburg phoned, and she didn’t tell Busenburg that Brunner was there. “And he came home . . . and said, ‘I know that Todd was here.’

“And that’s why—most people laugh at me, but I feel like Will was somewhat psychic.” She laughed. “You know these crazy people have these psychic powers.... I think he read my mind. Because I don’t know how he could have known Todd was there.”

She still tried to remember why she had called Busenburg a liar. She thought it had something to do with family. “And he said don’t ever call me a liar. That’s the worst thing. He’ll leave me if I ever call him a liar, and he ignored me for a couple of hours.... He got so offended. Yeah, that’s because he was a pathological liar,” said Martin, bitterly. Then she laughed. “Liars are defensive.”

She returned to their night in the rain. She said she asked Busenburg about Hatton’s friends who had been after Busenburg. “ ‘Where were they, and . . . why haven’t they noticed that Chris is missing? Aren’t they gonna come looking for him?’ ” She said she started thinking rationally for the first time in days.

“He says, ‘I don’t know, Stephanie. I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe they . . . took off.’ ”

Martin admitted, “Uh, I don’t remember what he said. He didn’t have an answer.... For once in his life, he had no answer.” Martin chuckled again. “He usually had an answer for everything. And he got flustered. He started saying, ‘Do you doubt me? Are you accusing me? Do you think I’m a liar?’ ”

She seemed to be saying almost the exact same words she’d told the detectives the night of her arrest. “If you’re accusing me of something. . . .”

To Busenburg’s question, “Do you think I’m a liar?” Martin said she answered, “ ‘Yes. I think this is weird.... Nothing makes sense. I don’t understand why you shot him. I don’t understand why I’m helping you get rid of the body. I don’t understand why you say you have no more money.’ ”

She snickered. “I just got this major attitude. I don’t know where it came from. Maybe I was just irritated with the whole mess.... But I started going off on him.

“So he says, ‘Be quiet. I don’t want to hear any more. Don’t say anything else.’ He said, ‘When we get home, I’m leaving.’

“I couldn’t believe that.” She uttered the words as though still shocked. “I couldn’t believe he said that. I was like, ‘You’re leaving? Oh, you’re leaving. You just murdered your best friend . . . we just got rid of his body, and—and, you’re really gonna leave me?’

“And he said, ‘Yeah, I told you to never call me a liar.’

“I said, ‘I didn’t call you a liar.’ Well, actually, I did.... And then I just got quiet. And we didn’t talk—all the way home. I got out of the car, and I went into my apartment. I thought he was gonna get out behind me, but he didn’t.” She spoke as if in wonder. “So, I was like, ‘Oh, my God. This . . . guy’s really gonna take off and leave me like”—she started snickering—“in the middle of this mess, you know. I actually thought he was. I didn’t know what he was gonna do. ’Cause so much had happened, I could believe anything, right.

“I was like where’s he gonna go, what’s he gonna do, come on, please.... And I went in my apartment. I’m like he’s not gonna leave, he can’t. And thirty minutes goes by, he doesn’t come in.

“I go out. I open my door. He was sitting on the top of his truck in Indian-style.” She giggled hysterically. “He’s on the top of his truck, on the top, the hood part . . . in the rain . . . it’s still raining . . . with his legs crossed like this.” Martin crossed her legs to demonstrate. “Looking straight ahead. And now I realize that’s yoga. ’Cause I do it. He was into Buddhism. . . . so I guess he was meditating. Thinking of what he was gonna tell me, because here’s what he told me when he came in.

“I said, ‘Are you gonna come in, Will? What are you doing? Why are you sitting on that car in the rain?’ ” Martin started chuckling again. “And I didn’t laugh or nothing because at the time, it’s funny now, but at the time I was just like, ‘Come on. Come inside.’

“So he waits another fifteen, twenty minutes, and he comes inside. He walks in, and I said, ‘You need to take your wet clothes off.’

“And he goes, ‘Don’t touch me.’ ” Martin giggled as she continued quoting Busenburg. “ ‘I don’t deserve to be touched.’

“. . . He starts crying. Sits down on the floor.” She sounded irritated. “Not on the couch. On the floor.... Like five or ten feet away from me. And he puts his head between his hands and starts crying.

“And I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ ” She said she tried to hug him. And again he replied, “ ‘Don’t, don’t hug me. Don’t touch me. I don’t deserve it.’ He said, ‘I’ve been lying to you.’

“And I go, ‘About what?’ ” Concern and sympathy tinged her voice, but then Martin began giggling. “And I thought he was gonna spill out with this story . . . about life or something.” Instead, he spilled out with a story about how he lost his money, she said. “That when he was in the CIA, back in January of ’94, they . . . put him in prison.” Martin tried to recall, but couldn’t, why he had been placed in prison.

“They were just gonna leave him there to rot, he said. And he was in there for, like, thirty days, and he had to get lawyers and bargain his way out of there. And they took everything he had. His accounts, his cars, his assets, everything but one car in Montana. That’s all he had left was the Lamborghini.” Martin laughed heartily.