Wages of Sin (29 page)

Her voice rose. “He always told me that that’s what they did in the CIA. . . . He told me his job was to shoot ’em and that that was where he stopped and another guy would come in and burn the bodies. That’s the way they got rid of the evidence completely.” She paused and began to laugh somewhat facetiously. “Which now contradicts itself . . . Why would he have to burn the bodies if this is ordered by the government when they want to see the person dead to confirm it?

“I’m not sure if he said that all of the bodies were burned, that that’s what they did with all of them, but he mentioned that. The night that it happened, he . . . wanted to burn the body. There was no other route. No throwing it over the bridge. No burying it. ‘We have to burn the body.’ ”

She stopped herself, realizing she was getting ahead of her story.

“This was the plan. We’re gonna go over there, but I’m gonna be in my car. And as we’re talking [in my apartment], we’re pouring out the Sleepinal into a little packet . . . mini Ziplock packets.” It was the same size packet that dealers use to package cocaine by the gram, she clarified.

“It only came to me later, what was he doing with that packet because, well”—her voice deepened—“my lawyer thinks he might have sold drugs on the side and that’s where he was all those times he told me he was in the CIA.” She laughed slightly. “Because he claimed to me he didn’t do drugs.”

 

 

“And here was the plan—for him to go over there. For me to be in my car, behind him, and to go to the apartments. Will would go in. He didn’t want me to go with him to do all of this because he said Chris was suspicious of everything already because he’s paranoid. Will says Chris knows that he knows that he’s after him.” She again chuckled facetiously, almost under her breath. “Which is ridiculous, because he knows there’s no such thing.

“And plus, they had been falling out and having problems, so he said he was going to have to go there and try to talk to him and act like it’s about trying to get along again since they supposedly had been friends for a long, long time. But really Will hated Chris.” Busenburg was going to pretend he was trying to reconcile with Hatton, she said. “And that was going to be while he was putting the sleeping pills in his drink. So he was gonna fake and act like his friend.”

She stopped to think. “He went over there about eleven-thirty. He said he would come out by two
A.M
. and get me. He said that’s when we would go inside and look for the money. Now this is Saturday night. I had my dog with me that night. And I had a bottle of pepper spray”—she laughed—“for my own protection, in case something went wrong, which I never told Will that. I just did it on my own, ’cause I was a little scared.

“I told Will to bring a knife. Because I was—he was all calm like it was nothing because he said he could always take anyone out no matter how many people there are. He’s that good. But I was scared, so I told him to at least bring a knife.... He got the knife out of his truck.... The seat where the crack is, he kept a knife right there all the time, along with his sawed-off shotgun underneath the seat.

“So he took the knife. He said, ‘Okay, I’ll take it for you, in case something happens and I have to use it.’ He told me it was the knife he used for some of his killings, but now I think it was just a deer knife.”

She rambled about the knife and her attorney, trying to recall what Ira Davis had told her about the knife, before moving on.

“There’re three nights we go over there. The first night he comes out at two o’clock. He’s laughing and joking and says he’s drunk. He says he put the pills in Chris’s drink and nothing happened. He said [Chris] yawned a few times but he didn’t seem like he was gonna be passing out.

“Now, do I know if he really gave Chris the sleeping pills that night? No, I don’t know. But if he didn’t, then he got rid of the packet. But he says he put the sleeping pills in his drink. He said it was no problem. [Chris] didn’t see them. He didn’t suspect anything. So, he says we’ll try it the next night.

“The next day was when we decided to go look for the money in his bedroom during the day while he’s at work.... I believe Will picked his lock because Chris’s bedroom door was locked, which is very strange—because the fact that he was keeping his bedroom locked and I believe that Will had said that’s because he must be keeping the money in there.”

Busenburg had made no mention to the prosecutors of picking any lock.

“He picked the lock, and we went into his room and looked everywhere.”
They,
she said, looked under Hatton’s bed. Busenburg had told the prosecutors that
she
had looked.

“When we were in the closet, [Will] came across his file box.” She meant Will’s file, a tiny box only about the size of a recipe box. “But the file box now was in Chris’s closet, and Chris had put all his things in it. Credit cards. Receipts of things. Bills. Personal letters. Okay. So whose file box is it? To this day, I have no idea.”

Prison doors slamming could be heard as Martin spoke.

“There’s a fly in here.” She looked at it momentarily distracted. “This one has an odd color.

“First he’s mad that he finds his file box in there. ‘Oh, that asshole, he’s got my file box. He’s got the nerve to steal my check and then he just wants to use my things.’ ” Busenburg said Hatton had taken Will’s personal items out of the file box and put in Chris’s papers, Martin recalled. “And I’m sure this was all set up by Will.” She snorted an irritated snort.

“He says, ‘Well, let’s spend his credit cards. I’ll get some of my money back like this.’ ” The girl who was brought up in the Baptist church confessed that she honestly, absolutely had no qualms about stealing Chris Hatton’s credit cards and using them. “I was no saint during this whole thing. Trust me. I don’t claim to be.” She did claim, at the moment, to be ashamed of everything that had happened.

“Like when [Will] mentioned killing [Chris], I didn’t freak out and say, ‘You don’t do that to people that just steal your money or are after you.’ . . . My mom thinks I was brainwashed. A lot of people think I was brainwashed. I think I was partially brainwashed. He kind of dehumanized Chris to me to the point where I didn’t even—I started to see him as like—like when Will talked about his orders to do a hit”—her voice briefly cracked, ever so slightly–“he made me start to see him as the enemy. That he just did these lousy things. Stealing his money. Fixin’ to go out to be a French assassin and he doesn’t care . . . And [Chris] had gotten that notion that he would just go off and be a French assassin and see when his fate was. If he died, he died. That’s what [Will] told me.”

She returned to the credit cards. “I personally myself haven’t stolen other people’s credit cards except my mom’s. I snuck my mom’s credit card when I was young, like everybody does, and got some clothes.” She snickered at herself. “That’s the only time I ever took anybody’s credit cards. Then she caught me, so I didn’t do it anymore.” She laughed nervously. “And that was kind of bad, really. Disrespectful to my parents.”

Martin thought for a moment and spoke of Busenburg. “I said, ‘I agree. We should take his credit cards and go get what we can.’ Plus, I was mad, kinda. Will had told me he had all of this money. Then he slowly tells me he doesn’t.” She rambled for a moment. “Since he’s saying, well, you know, let’s spend these credit cards, maybe I was kinda more for it because it’s kinda like Will spending something on me. . . .”

Prison personnel believed Stephanie Martin was easy and well behaved when not in love, but a manipulated and manipulating troublemaker when in love. The description backed both the prosecutors’ and Martin’s versions of the murder of Chris Hatton.

“We went to the Levitz store and got furniture,” Stephanie Martin continued, “. . . on Sunday night.” Their purchases, she said, were a bit Southwestern-looking, in off-white with splashes of pastels. “It’s sorta kinda like something my mom would have. It wasn’t all that much my type, really. I think we were just in a hurry to spend something.”

As they drove away, recalled Martin, she listened to a football game on the radio. Stephanie Martin loves football.

“Oh, this is the night we also went over to Lynn Carroll’s . . . the night we went to Albertsons and got a different brand of sleeping pills because he said he’d given him the Sleepinal sleeping pills and they didn’t do anything.

“We thought we would try a different brand, which we got Unisom. Really there’s not very many brands of sleeping pills. There’s maybe two or three. So, we got that. I think that’s the only thing we got,” she said, rapping the tabletop.

She kept rapping. “Okay, I had talked to Lynn already.... She had wanted me to come see where she lived.... And I brought my dog with me because she had wanted to see my dog. . . . Okay, so we went over there.” After they’d bought the sleeping pills. “We stayed for about an hour.” Martin patted the tabletop. “So I told her we could only stay a little while.

“We mention Chris. And we didn’t tell her about the sleeping pills, but I had already told Lynn that Chris had stolen some money from Will—like a week before. Right after it had happened, I told her. I was like, ‘He’s no good.’ ”

“And Lynn had met [Chris], too, I think once and he was kinda rude. Wasn’t very sociable,” said Martin. So that night, when we were about to go back to do the rest of the plan, I told Lynn, ‘We’re trying to get the money back.’ ”

“Now this is the part that’s—it’s not funny, but it’s strange. [Lynn] said, ‘Y’all aren’t gonna kill him, are you?’ And she said it as a joke. Me and Will just looked at each other . . . and when we got in the car, he said, ‘Did you say that I had mentioned that about him last week?’ ” Martin almost whispered. Then her voice rose to its usual level. “He got kind of paranoid because he had made the comment about killing him. I said, ‘No. She was making a joke.’

“That comment really didn’t have anything to do with anything. She just totally said it as a joke. Like the night that she said to him, ‘You’re going to kill me now that I know that you’re a sniper.’ She was joking. And he said, ‘No.’ ”

Again, Martin emphasized that Carroll had been joking. “She had a little smile on her face . . . and she kind of said that to Will because Will did the CIA hits.”

The comment concerned Busenburg enough that he brought it up as he and Martin drove back toward Austin. “He asked me had I mentioned anything he had said about Chris the week before. And I said, ‘No. She must have been saying it on her own.’

“I’ll never forget that comment she made, and then it actually happened. I’m sure the whole thing freaked her out when she heard it on the news.”

Martin spaced out for a few seconds. Then she recalled watching Busenburg, with a bottle of Jim Beam in his hand, walking up to Hatton’s apartment later that Sunday night.

“When we drove in—I was in my car, he was in his car . . . I still had my dog. . . . I felt safer with her. Because this whole thing is scary to me . . . it was all the excitement and the scariness.... I think that these guys are after Will but he’s going to handle himself if something happens. But yet I was still scared because I brought my pepper spray”—she laughed at herself—“and my dog, and I felt a little better with her there in case somebody crept up on the car. When I was sitting out there in my car for that two hours waiting for him to come out, I was nervous—for Will, for me.”

She just sat in the car, waiting, quietly listening, she said. “Because I was always afraid somebody would drive up to the apartments and it’d be one of those Navy SEAL friends or somebody like that.”

There was knocking outside the prison interview room, and a door buzzed open.

“I just had my radio on, barely. Very low. And I would turn it down, turn it up, turn it down, turn it up.

“Now, on Sunday night, Chris wasn’t there. [Will] went in and Chris was not there. He waited for about an hour, in the apartments, while I was sitting out in a parking space. He comes back out and says it’s been an hour, he’s not gonna wait.

“Will had brought something to eat, to take over there. His excuse to go see him [Chris] the second night was to share something with him.” She laughed nervously.

“Tacos, I believe, and burritos and chips . . . And that was his reason to go see him again a second night because he didn’t want Chris to think that he was coming over there looking for his money.

“I didn’t mention this [earlier, but] the first night, his excuse to go over there was to talk to him, you know, as a friend but also because me and Will were having problems. He was saying that I was at work these nights, that I was working and we were kind of arguing and he needed a friend.

“The second night he goes over there and says he’s by himself while I’m at work again and he wants to share his food with him and have a couple of drinks.

“So he left after about an hour that night and said, ‘We’ll try it again tomorrow night.’ Nothing else happened that night. We went to my apartment and watched TV or ate or something. I don’t remember.

“Now, the next day, which was Monday, Todd came by from his snow skiing trip and got the dog. . . . It was in the morning, like ten
A.M
. . . . He mentioned to me later that he remembers looking at Will and Will looked at him crazy.” She chuckled again. “Which he probably did....

“This is the day that Will went to work, at three. And before he went to work, we went and spent the jewelry card, at Kay’s Jewelers.”

“We were in a hurry that day, too. We had actually forgot about the jewelry card and came across it maybe like two hours before Will—like we didn’t have anything to do or something and he said, ‘Remember the jewelry card, you know?’ And we went to, ah, to get the jewelry, and, yes, I picked it out and I liked it. But I think we were only there for maybe thirty minutes total.”

She sniffed as if suffering from spring allergies, then went silent.

“I was just thinking about how his mood was that night when he went. The first night he was more upbeat, you know, we’re going to get my money back, you know, came out laughing saying he was drunk, then got the bike.

“The second night he was more quiet, calm about it. It seemed . . . kinda like . . . he started to be confused. . . .” She seemed confused herself. “I’m not sure. But I think, the first night, oh, it had been exciting, going and getting the pills, we’ll look for the money. Then the second night it was kinda like oh, here I go again.

“Then the third night . . . which was the night he actually shot him, he seemed more determined.... When I look back at it now, I think he—now we don’t know if he went in knowing that he was going to shoot him.

“But if he did know, I think he was . . . like . . . it was a job.” She huffed a small laugh. “He was in a very serious mood that night. And it’s either because I think he knew what he was going to do, or he was confused about what he was going to do. And he just didn’t talk to me much. But he was kind of distant.” She repeated herself. “He was kind of distant that night. And this is just my opinions, you know.”

She clarified that at that time, she didn’t have those thoughts. They came only after she had been jailed, she said, and she tried, and still tries, to figure out what happened.

Her
mood, though, the first two nights had generally been excited, she said. By the third night, “I’m not going to say it was boring, but it was kinda a hassle, maybe.” She added, “Now things change when I get to the apartments. I got scared. Everything changed then. When we drove over that night, and I was in my car behind him, Chris’s truck pulled in right after us.

“This was an old beat-up truck, which made sense to me about him going to the French assassins, because I figured he wasn’t going to buy anything fancy, since he’s about to leave the country. And I think Will had said Chris had said the truck was maybe fifteen hundred dollars. So we knew that there was forty-five hundred, five thousand dollars left. And some new cowboy hats.” She slapped the table.

“So, when we drove in, Chris’s truck drove right [up] after us. I started to panic. I thought that Chris had been following us, you know. Will had already mentioned to me Sunday as we were driving somewhere, whether to the gas station, to my apartment, to the Levitz store, whatever, that he pointed a car out and said that he thought that looked like one of Chris’s friends in the car that he had been in the Navy with. So he would throw in these . . . things to get me scared, to make me believe that Chris and these people are after him.

“When I pulled into the Apartments, and Chris pulled in after me, I thought, he’s been following us, and I got scared.”

She got even more afraid, she noted, as they drove to the back of the Aubry Hills, where Hatton’s apartment was. “I remember seeing a car with some guys sitting in it, and it looked like they were just sitting, you know, waiting for something. I thought, you know, that these people are after Will. And I waved for Will, I kept driving, I didn’t stop, and I waved for Will to keep going, from my car. Right? And he didn’t. He stayed.

“And him and Chris, their trucks pulled in side by side.”

She explained, “I was behind Will’s truck. Will kept driving by the Apartments, went around—there was no parking places . . . and came on the other side. I drove past Will, because I’m not supposed to even be there.... I was waving for him to come follow me. When I was going to see him, I was going to say, ‘Forget it. I’m scared. Let’s forget this. We’ll try to just get the money another way, you know.’ Or maybe I was gonna say, ‘Let’s take off, you know, leave somewhere, go—’ Because I was thinking these people was really after Will when I saw that he pulled in after us and then when I saw that group of guys sitting there, and I didn’t want him to stay and go in that apartment.

“And he stopped, so I went on. But I was waiting at the front gate, looking back to see if he was coming. He wasn’t coming. . . . Him and Chris stopped, and whatever discussion there was, they ended up going into the apartment.”

Her accent was slow and Oklahoma thick.

“So I went to my apartment thinking that maybe he was just gonna go in and come back out. Because I figured that he would be suspecting something and nervous, too.

“I went to my apartment, waited there for about twenty, thirty minutes.... When I came back this time, I saw Chris’s truck. But I didn’t see Will’s truck.... I’m trying to think . . . if I saw Will’s truck. There was some confusion about where the trucks were parked, because at first I didn’t see both of their trucks, then I saw one of their trucks. And because I didn’t see both, that’s when—this was like an hour, two hours later—that’s when I had thought, ‘Oh, my God. That’s it. These guys have killed my boyfriend and—’ ”

She again tried to remember which truck she saw, Chris’s or Will’s. She wanted to refer to her attorney’s notes. “Because its been a few years for me.” She continued debating with herself about the truck. Then she rapidly rapped the tabletop. “Okay, now I know exactly. I never saw Chris’s truck until the next day when Will pointed it out to me, and that’s why I had panicked.... And I thought if he and Will had gone into the Apartments together, why wouldn’t his truck be right there in front? But actually, he’d parked it somewhere else because there’s no parking places.

“But I did see Will’s truck, and he wasn’t in it. Now I never got out of my car, because I was scared. And I wouldn’t go up to the Apartments, because I was too scared. But I would keep driving around, and I would keep driving around. When I went to my apartment the first time, and I came back, I left the car running and I sat far enough away from the window where I could see. They had that sliding glass door.”

As the car engine ran, she said, she tried to see if there was a light on. “I couldn’t see a light. It looked like the TV might be on. . . .

“The nights before this, I had been . . . a little nervous, but it was nothing . . . I was just, you know, supposed to be off waiting until he came out and got me. Well, this night, everything changed.” She rhythmically pounded the table. “I was in a panic. I wanted out. I wanted us away from this whole thing.

“I’d gone to my apartment. About thirty minutes later, I had gone back and sat there with my car running, and I decided to wait till two, like he said, to see if maybe he would come out because he said that he would come out by two.”

That was about 1
A.M
., said Martin. And it had been around 12:00 or 12:30, she said, when she had first spotted Hatton at the Aubry Hills.

“When I first went back over there and I saw his truck,” Martin continued, “but not Chris’s truck, I had started to have . . . a . . . panic [attack] a little bit.... So I sat there and I waited, until two o’clock, thinking maybe he was in there and he would come out. Then comes two-thirty. So I did sit there at least an hour, an hour and a half. . . . I would drive around the Apartments because I got nervous sitting there, because I had these thoughts that maybe [Chris] had gotten to Will and he was going to be coming after me.

“Now I remember three o’clock coming, and by that time, I was crying. And I was sure that he had killed—”

Martin then stated that she feared he had been killed. “And I was [in] full-blown panic attack. Couldn’t hardly breathe. But I drove back to my apartments to keep looking, I went in, real fast. I came out. I went back to the Apartments.