Wages of Sin (12 page)

About the same time, Gage said to Martin, “Do you want to give me a statement?”

“Yes,” she answered. “Can I call my father?”

“You can do that later,” said the detective.

 

 

Lisa Pace was on the phone to Holly, and Holly Frischkorn was crying. “They killed him.”

“Who’s they?” said Lisa.

“Will. Will and Stephanie.”

“Who?” She knew Will, but Stephanie didn’t ring a bell. But nothing much rang a bell.

Lisa cried and cried and went to sleep.

 

 

At 9:25
P.M
., Busenburg signed his statement. Martin was still talking. Mancias and Sawa sat with Busenburg until the search warrants for Busenburg’s truck and Martin’s apartment were obtained. Busenburg repeatedly asked about Martin and repeatedly said how much he loved her and how he didn’t want her to get in trouble.

 

 

“I was going to report this after I talked to an attorney,” said Martin as she began her statement. “On Monday, January 9, 1995, at about two-thirty or three o’clock in the morning, I went to tell Chris that Will didn’t have as much money as he used to and I told him that I wanted him to give back the money. I told him that Will was too nice to take back the money because he thought Chris needed it.

“Then he started saying that he deserved the money, Will had money, and he didn’t know what it was like. Then he started saying that Will didn’t deserve me. He was drunk and he started pushing me against the wall saying that I took Will away from him. He started throwing me, pulling my hair, and slapping me in the face.” Martin nervously stroked her dark hair.

“He would hit me but mostly he hit himself and screamed about his problems. He said it was his girlfriend’s fault that he got kicked out of the Navy and he hated women. I tried to run but he kept pushing me and then he picked me up and threw me on the bed. He said that was the last place his girlfriend had been. And he started screaming and slapping me.

“Then he put a blanket on me to keep me from screaming. I tried to kick him in the nuts but he was too good.” She brushed her hands through her hair again. “I started to manipulate him, I don’t know how, he was drunk, he was sloppy and stupid. I started caressing him and then I saw the shotgun. I put his hands down like I was going to kiss him. He grabbed me and called me a bitch. I thought he knew I was faking and he was going to kill me. I tried again to act like I was going to be with him. That’s when I grabbed the shotgun and I cocked it and it didn’t go off. So I cocked it again and it went off.”

Martin stared at the wall and said she was cold; Gage gave her his coat.

“Then I puked and then I sat there in the corner for thirty minutes. I was in shock. I couldn’t move. I called Will and told him what had happened. I was in shock when I called him.

“I thought about everything. I couldn’t believe that nobody had busted through the door. I told him what happened, and he said to sit there and wait. He was concerned about me. The first thing he said was, was I hurt. Then he came over and he held me and he said I wasn’t going to go to jail for something that his roommate did to me.

“We sat there for a long time. I was in shock.” She still stared at the wall, only occasionally glancing at Gage for his reaction. “I couldn’t move. I felt like I was in a dream state, just floating there. We waited for the people to come any minute, but nobody ever came. I told Will that I didn’t want to go up there. He said we had to do it as quick as possible and that he would do it all. He didn’t want me to go in shock or do something crazy. He didn’t know what I would do.

“He went to Chris’s room and was in there for what seemed like thirty minutes. He told me that we had to drag the body into the bathtub. I couldn’t believe what we were doing. I kept telling him we should call the cops. It kept flashing in my mind that I was a dancer and people would not believe me. We dragged the body on a blanket and then we threw it in the tub. He did most of it. Will then threw something on the bed to cover the blood. We left and went home where we sat on the bed wondering what to do.”

Martin paused for a moment to wipe away tears. “He was scared for me and felt like it was his fault for what his roommate did. We stayed there in my apartment on Tuesday morning. Will went to work Tuesday afternoon and tried to do everything normal. He was sick at work, so he left early. I couldn’t take it anymore. About eleven
P.M
., we went to the apartment and I tried to make myself hate him. I didn’t want to go to jail. I’m stupid and naive.” She looked directly into Gage’s eyes.

“Will and I put Chris’s body in a tarp and then put him in Chris’s truck. He drove Chris’s truck and I drove my car. We stopped at Albertsons on one-eighty-three where we got firewood and lighter fluid. Will knew from the Army that we had to burn the body to get rid of him. Will is strong because he has been through a lot, and I knew that he knew the best thing to do.

“We drove everywhere and went to different campsites and finally found Paleface at about three
A.M
. Wednesday morning. He rolled the body out of the pickup.”

“How?” said Gage.

“I don’t know how, I was still in shock. Otherwise, I would never have put a body on a fire. Will started the fire and I helped him. Chris’s body wouldn’t burn well, so we poured more lighter fluid on it.

“Will said we needed to cut his hands off because they could identify him by his hands. He didn’t want me to go to jail. Will was puking, so I cut Chris’s hands off with a saw blade and put them in the fire. Will cried,” Martin wept to Sergeant Gage.

“He couldn’t believe his roommate would betray him. He was sick and had pains in his stomach, so I knew I had to be strong and I told him we should go.

“That’s when I had to push the body more into the fire.” Martin’s body shook with the memory. “I hated Chris for doing this, and I started feeling very bitter. Will drove Chris’s truck to the Mobil station at Highway Seventy-one West and RR six-twenty, where he parked it.

“We went to my apartment where we finally got two hours of sleep. Will was sick and throwing up blood, so he couldn’t go to work. I started thinking that we had to fix up the apartment. On Wednesday night, around seven or eight
P.M
., we tried to cover it up. I went to my mom’s and we got paint.” She nervously stroked her hair again.

“There was blood on the carpet in the bedroom where I shot him. I didn’t realize what a shotgun would do. It was the only thing I had to use. We tried to soak up the blood with beer in the refrigerator and carpet cleaner. I’ve used the carbonation in beer before to get up stains. We took the mattresses and put them in Will’s truck. I thought there was a dump in Round Rock, but we threw them in a big trash can at some apartments on Highway seventy-nine in Round Rock.

“Saturday, we came to get the rest of Will’s stuff out. We thought everything was all right. When we saw Chris’s room, we just thought the landlord had been in there.” Martin looked up at Gage. “I was going to report this after I’d talked with an attorney.”

At 11:12
P.M
., Stephanie Martin read her statement, approved it by initialing each page, and signed the statement.

Gage walked out the door to tell Mancias and Sawa that the statement was completed. They were still waiting for search warrants, so Gage walked back into his office and pushed the phone over to Stephanie Martin. “You can call your parents now.”

When Stephanie Martin was in elementary school, the family cat, Kitty, disappeared. The Martin family sat devastated around the kitchen table, veils of gloom covering their faces. Kitty was renowned as the perfect pet.

“Shush.” The family went silent. “I thought I heard Kitty.”

They listened. They did hear him. The Martins flew to the door to greet Kitty with open arms.

Several months later, Sandra Martin, Stephanie’s mother, was cleaning her daughter’s room and putting away Stephanie’s Bible when she noticed a note sticking out of the Bible. Sandra pulled out the note and read: “Dear God, please help Kitty come home.” The note was in Stephanie’s schoolgirl handwriting.

 

 

Sandra and Robert Martin had always wanted a girl. So when Stephanie Lynn Martin was born on June 17, 1972, in Lake Charles, Louisiana, her father smiled and said to his wife, “Can we stop now, dear?” They already had two boys—Cid, nine years older than Stephanie, and Jeff, who was one day shy of being one year older than his sister.

Stephanie had a head full of shining black hair—and was full of independence. She became her daddy’s girl, with Robert Martin showing her off everywhere he went. She was easy to show off.

The Martins were having a party at their Lake Charles home, when Stephanie was three years old. Little Stephanie came barreling into the living room wearing nothing but her sandals. The guests looked up. The little girl jumped on her hobbyhorse and rode—bouncing on the toy with glee. The guests laughed, and the Martins photographed their daughter’s naked ride.

She was a happy, giggling five-year-old when they moved to Mississippi that summer. Stephanie began taking dance lessons and didn’t stop until her senior year, when the family moved from Oklahoma to Texas.

Stephanie spent most of her youth in Oklahoma. The family moved to Ponca City, Oklahoma, when she was in the second grade. Ponca City, which was named after the Ponca Indian tribe, was an oil company town just thirty miles south of the Oklahoma-Kansas border, a land where it was freezing cold in the winter and sizzling hot in the summer.

It was a fancy oil-company town with a company gym and indoor swimming pool, with well-educated white-collar workers toiling in research and development, computer support, and in the company’s business office. There was a lake nearby for camping and waterskiing, which the Martins did regularly.

Stephanie Martin appeared to live the quintessential Norman Rockwell life. Every summer the family traveled together throughout the United States—camping in Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. Every summer her mother took the kids to Midland, Texas, to see their grandparents. There the Martin children fed the chickens and gathered the eggs with their grandfather.

Stephanie Martin was especially kindhearted when it came to animals. She stood in her yard and stared down at a near-featherless, fragile baby bird, its fresh, cracked egg nearby. She looked up and spotted the nest from which the injured creature had fallen. Stephanie walked into her home, filled a shoe box with cotton, went back outside, and carefully placed the baby bird in the box. The bird didn’t last more than a day, but Stephanie Martin wept the big tears of a little child when he died.

As she grew older, when folks commented on her looks, Stephanie often told her mother that she didn’t like that, that she didn’t know how to handle it. She also told her mother that she didn’t want people to just think of her as pretty.

To Sandra Martin, Stephanie was more than pretty—she was sweet, loving, and tenderhearted. She was the type who always wanted to stop the car to give money to a panhandler.

“Oh, Stephanie, you can’t believe all those people,” her mother often said to her.

In Ponca City, Stephanie won the dance competitions she entered. In her mother’s mind, Stephanie liked school, made good grades, liked to go to church, liked to sing in the church youth choir, and had plenty of friends. They were in church almost every Sunday morning and many Sunday nights.

In her father’s eyes, Stephanie hated the church they attended. She thought the kids were snobs. She begged and pleaded to switch churches because all of her friends went to First Baptist Ponca City. Her father finally said she could attend First Baptist, while her parents stayed at the small church Stephanie abhorred.

At twelve years old, Stephanie Lynn Martin was baptized.

 

 

“Wanna play house?” said Stephanie to her sixth-grade friend.

The girl giggled yes.

Stephanie took her by the hand and led her into the bathroom, locking the door behind them. The girls then rubbed their bodies together, kissed, and touched each other.

In seventh grade, Stephanie attended Falls Creek summer church camp. Her best friend, who she’d met in seventh grade and who went to camp with her, was Roxy Ricks. Roxy was a tiny, lively, hyper young girl, whom the Martins didn’t approve of. A girl who some might consider to be from the wrong side of the tracks and the wrong income bracket, the Martins thought she was simply too wild for their daughter.

Roxy was just a troubled orphan. Her father had been killed by the police. Her mother and baby sister had been killed in a car wreck. Roxy had been in the car with them. At five years old, she had been the lone survivor coping with the trauma of survivor’s guilt.

Roxy had been physically injured in the wreck so severely that she was told she’d never walk again. With the help of her devout, churchgoing grandmother who reared her, Roxy went on to swim and dance. With Stephanie Martin, Roxy learned to laugh again.

The girls went inner-tubing—a ski boat pulling their tube so fast over the water that it skipped, bounced, and flipped over every rough ripple. They screamed, water spraying hard in their faces, as they clung to each other. The tube flipped, nearly throwing Stephanie into the lake. Roxy grabbed her and tugged her back onto the tube. It seemed like they were fighting for dear life—a team, them against the boat driver. They had to win. The boat turned, they flipped, and fell off together.

“Let’s do it again!” they screamed into the air.

At school, Stephanie and Roxy were two popular kids. Their friends roamed the income brackets and the cliques from hoodlums to preps. They were renowned as “spazzes,” two girls who ran around making stupid faces at each other and photographing those faces to determine who could make the silliest.

While Stephanie’s parents didn’t approve of Roxy, Roxy’s grandmother didn’t approve of Stephanie—Stephanie Martin was the ringleader of the girls’ troublemaking escapades. She was the one who said, “Let’s go vandalize this.”

Stephanie and Roxy used thick red marking pens to write on the seventh-grade school hallways: the principal “is a booty-head.” They called their principal “Lester the Molester” because he made the girls bend over and grab their ankles before paddlings. In their minds, he took an awful long time staring at their bottoms before beginning the paddlings.

Roxy and Stephanie often got “swats,” as well as detention. After the red marker incident, they were threatened with expulsion. Ordered to sit out of class and clean the wrestling room, they spent the time doing gymnastic flips across the room. Stephanie and Roxy never picked up a mop or a broom.

The church camp–going girls repeatedly got into trouble for typical, silly things like toilet-papering houses and talking too much. They got into trouble for sneaking out in the middle of the night to meet on their bicycles at the Dixie Dog drive-in restaurant to talk girl talk. Stephanie quietly crawled in and out of her basement window those nights.

“Stephanie,” her father yelled, “you can’t do that! You can’t go out at one o’clock in the morning!”

“Oh, yes, I can!”

She and Roxy constantly wrote each other notes in their notebooks, drew silly cartoons, wrote about sex. Stephanie’s mother found one such notebook. In Roxy’s eyes, it increased Mrs. Martin’s disapproval of Roxy. Mrs. Martin eventually forbade the girls to see each other. In Roxy’s eyes, it was rather silly because she believed neither adolescent had any experience with sex.

In seventh grade, Stephanie arrived at school wearing a denim miniskirt. “Look,” said a laughing and excited Stephanie to Roxy, “look at my underwear.”

Roxy squinted her face at Stephanie like her friend was crazy.

“Just go down and look,” begged Stephanie. “I have on these really funny underwear. Look, just go down and look.” She kept laughing.

Roxy reluctantly looked. Her head popped up with eyes wide. “Stephanie, you don’t have any underwear on.”

“Oh,” Stephanie exclaimed.

 

 

Robert Martin had never seen anything like it—the metamorphosis his daughter went through from sixth grade to seventh grade. Before, she’d been an easy child. After, she was a rebellious kid. Her exploits worried him. She had his attitude about having a good time.

Stephanie’s grades dropped, and while they weren’t bad, they included more B’s than A’s and a few C’s. She and Roxy sneaked out and took joyrides on Stephanie’s brother’s scooter. They took dishwashing detergent and spread it over cars to ruin the paint. They opened other people’s mail, then put it back in the mailbox. “Yeah, let’s do it!” Stephanie always cried, with a giggle in her eyes.

They “lusted” over Rob Lowe and Billy Idol. At school Stephanie was voted “most likely to become a bus driver.” She laughed. Roxy Ricks and Stephanie Martin laughed a lot with each other.

Stephanie had screaming, yelling, notoriously loud fights with her parents. Her father called them “violent arguments.” Her mother, an unctuously pristine housekeeper, constantly rode Stephanie about her slovenly ways, the magazines and the clothes that were strewn across her bedroom floor.

She was like her father in that she was quick and hot tempered, a nail-biter.

Her father often stepped in during these fights, sometimes slapping his daughter in the face. Ten to fifteen times, he slapped her, according to Stephanie. “He didn’t punch me, nor was it much physical pain,” she wrote a decade later. “But it was rough, and it was wrong. He’d tell me he was sorry afterward, then after he got help with his temper and some medicine, he never did it again.”

He pushed her and bellowed, “Get away! You’ve gotta stop!”

Stephanie never stopped. It was one of her character traits. She never seemed to understand why she couldn’t do something that might endanger herself—like being a child strolling the streets in the depths of the nights.

It was frustrating. Robert Martin pushed and dragged his daughter into her bedroom. “Stay in here and settle down! This can’t go any further! This is not working!”

Other times Martin physically picked up his daughter and dragged and carried his screaming child out to their corner yard. There were no neighbors close enough to hear her tirade.

“When you can settle down and talk, we’ll do it!” Martin yelled. Then he locked the door behind himself. It only made his daughter scream louder and longer.

Cid and Jeff heard it; they closed their doors and tuned out the battle. Indeed, Jeff often pointed the finger at Stephanie over a misdeed he had done.

That wasn’t the end of it. In front of her best friend, Stephanie and Robert got into a fight over a radio. The next thing Roxy heard was the sound of breaking and Stephanie’s screams. With a crazed look in his eyes, Mr. Martin was striking his daughter with the radio’s electrical cord.
What do I do now?
thought Roxy.
Call the police or what?

The Martins were devout Baptists, she knew. And it was hard for a child to hear the sermons of a loving Jesus while watching and feeling the repercussions of raging arguments by the very persons professing Jesus’ forgiveness and grace. Roxy refused to go to church anymore. She felt that religion caused a lot of problems.

Robert Martin ripped Stephanie’s rock ’n’ roll posters off her walls. The church burned her albums.

The Martins briefly went to counseling for their loud, physical battles between parents and daughter. They met as a family. They met individually. They met maybe twice a month for about six months. Robert Martin didn’t think it helped a bit.

 

 

Stephanie Martin wanted to do things with the older kids, but her parents didn’t think she was ready, especially for the older boys who were attracted to their young daughter. By then, she and Roxy had outgrown their “spaz” stage. Thin, stylish Stephanie exuded such sexuality that Roxy’s boyfriends took one look at Steph and wanted her instead. Robert Martin was nervous.

The Martins unloaded their pop-up camper at Beaver Lake in Arkansas. It was their annual summer vacation, and Stephanie was a fifteen-year-old who loved to lie outdoors in the night and watch the constellations.

She also liked to watch her brother Jeff’s best friend, Mike. Mike swung a ski rope high above his head like a lasso and tossed it into the water with a plop. He was a good-looking sixteen-year-old who constantly glanced and smiled at Stephanie.

As the sun set and the moon rose over the lake, Mike and Stephanie sneaked out of the pop-up and over to a picnic table to watch the stars. They kissed beneath the moon. They necked under the stars. They crawled to the ground with the lake water lapping nearby.

They pulled each other’s clothes aside and placed their lips on each other’s private parts. They also had intercourse. It was Stephanie Martin’s first time.

The sex was pretty good, thought Stephanie, but it wasn’t like she dreamed—like with a guy she loved. But that was one reason she went with Mike; it was easier with him because she didn’t know him that well. Her boyfriend back in Ponca City knew her too well, so she feared what he might think.

Stephanie’s mother found out about Mike. She exploded. Robert Martin led his daughter outside, sat with her on the swing, sipped a soda with her, and talked to her about boys and sex—about what boys really wanted.