Wages of Sin (30 page)

“Now, at this time that I went back, I got out of my car. I was too scared to go up to the Apartments.... I went kinda under the . . . sliding glass window, to try to see if I could hear anything, see if I could hear the TV, wondering if anybody was there. I didn’t hear nothing. It was just—nothing.

“I ran back to my car, because I was scared, got in it, drove around wondering what I was going to do, crying. I remember I said, ‘I’m gonna go back to my Apartments one more time, and if he’s not there, I’m gonna call the police’ ”—her voice was deep and serious—“ ‘or call my parents, or call Todd.’ ” Her voice lifted and lilted as she mentioned Brunner’s name. “You know, I didn’t care. I was scared to death. I thought they had killed him and they were gonna be after me. I wasn’t even thinking what crazy story it was gonna be, that I was gonna tell ’em.

“I probably would have just told them the truth . . . that he had gone over there looking for the money. I was gonna tell them that he had said that he was in the CIA. I was just gonna tell them everything.”

Martin didn’t mention the sleeping pills, which she had taken months to confess to Frank Bryan.

“But I think the person I was really gonna call first was my parents”—she paused—“before I called the police. But [it] had been in my mind that I would check my Apartments one more time, and then I would check his Apartments one more time, and then if he wasn’t there, I was gonna call somebody.

“I remember as I was driving back to my Apartments, I was crying so much, and I was so upset, I almost had a wreck.... It was the worst I’ve ever felt in my life. And when I went to the Apartments . . . I had to use the bathroom.” She huffed a breathy laugh.

“Funny the things you remember. I was so nervous, my stomach was so nervous, I had to use the bathroom, kinda like the stomach virus I’ve had today.” She giggled nervously. “ ’Cause I was in this kinda major panic attack, and I was crying. I . . . didn’t know if I wanted to go back and look one more time. I decided, okay. Because I always had in my head that night, I never completely one hundred percent thought he’s dead, but I was ninety percent afraid that he was.”

Doors slammed and slammed again in the prison. They slammed so often that they became white noise.

“I kept driving around, I kept looking, thinking I would see him, and by four, four-thirty, I was thinking he’s gotta be dead. Because Will was very punctual. If he ever said he was gonna do something, he was gonna do it. He was always on time.” Her speech was rapid-fire. “He was always the type of person that said he was gonna be, like at work, he would go early. If he ever said he was coming to the apartments sometime, he was very punctual. So I knew it was not like him to not come out of that apartment at two o’clock like he’d said.” She stopped to breathe.

“When I went back to the Apartments to look one more time, and there”—she paused—“I was five minutes”—she slapped the table—“from calling, my parents or the police. And, uh, there he was in his truck . . . in the front of the [Aubry Hills] Apartments, the very, very front. And I believe that’s where he had called me from,” referring to the call on her caller ID that Drew McAngus had identified, “because the phone, you know, the phone in the Apartments was out of commission.

“He was getting out of [his truck] to stop me. I pulled in, stopped my car, and rolled down my window, and I started screaming at him. ‘Where the fuck have you been? I thought you were dead! And you said you would come out by two o’clock, and I’ve been driving around crazy. I thought you were dead!’

“And the whole time he’s just staring at me. He’s calm as can be, saying”—and she whispered—“ ‘Be quiet, Stephanie. Be quiet. Calm down. Calm down.’

“I said, ‘How can I calm down? Where have you been?’ I was gonna be mad. I was mad. I was upset. I was relieved that he was alive.” Her voice cracked as if tears were about to flow, as if reliving the moment and the relief. “I couldn’t believe”—she then started to laugh—“I couldn’t believe he was alive. So I was relieved [and] at the same time angry because of the fact that he didn’t show any emotion.

“. . . And he walked out of that truck like it was just nothing. And I’m screaming and everything, crying, telling him I’ve been driving around all night thinking he’s dead, thinking they’re after me. I said, ‘I was just about to call the police or my parents—or Todd.’

“And he says, ‘Be quiet.’ He needs to tell me something.

“And I’m still, you know, whatever, hollering and everything, ‘What! What! What!’ you know.

“And he says”—she paused—“he shot him.” She thumped the table. She swallowed loudly and dryly. “Exactly those words.” She thumped the table again. “He said, ‘I shot him.’

“Actually, I asked him, ‘Where’s Chris?’ I asked him, you know, as I was, you know, when he was saying, ‘Be quiet. Be quiet. I have something to tell you.’ I’m like, ‘What happened? Wher-wher-, where’s Chris?’

“He says he shot him.

“I said, ‘You shot him?’ I didn’t believe him. ’Cause he said it so calm. Plus, there was no mention of shooting him. There had been no talk of shooting Chris.” She stopped for a moment.

“Of course,” she said with a bitter laugh, “the detective—” Her voice was froggy and needed clearing. She started over.

“The detectives and the prosecutors don’t believe—half of them believe I was there and that we had planned to shoot him, he had planned to shoot him. There was no talk of shooting Chris. There was talk of sleeping pills.”

Will Busenburg had told Bryan and Wetzel that he and Martin had spiked the burrito with rat poison.

“That’s something Will made up,” Martin said emphatically. She laughed. “That’s something that Will came up with clear after two years after we had been in the county [jail]. And I had been set to testify against him. And, when he took that forty-year plea, two weeks before his trial, then they asked him, ‘If we took her to trial, are you gonna testify?’ He said yes, that [Stephanie] was the one that shot him. My lawyers came to me sometime between then and before I took my plea, and told me he’s saying bad things about me. He’s making it worse.

“He’s making me look like this horrible person. Grotesque person. That really, really wanted to kill someone and wanted to do horrible things to the body. He even told them I said I wanted to have sex with the dead body.”

On the burrito note detectives found in Hatton’s apartment, there was a second notation by Busenburg about eating the burrito.

“Yeah, he said horrible, gruesome things about me. And I guess to him . . . the way he thinks, now that I try to figure him out, he thinks that society did this to him. . . .” She mumbled for words. “It was always poor Will, poor Will, and he ended up blaming me, putting all the blame on me and saying I was the mastermind, and he just went along with it.”

To the contrary, prosecutor Frank Bryan believed Busenburg’s last version of the homicide implicated Busenburg more than any of the other variations of the story.

“After I was gonna testify against him—I think he really felt like I’d betrayed him, and he must’ve been trying to really get me back, or take me down with him.”

Martin was warned by a guard about time constraints.

“I gotta get through this, Miss Mays,” Martin pleaded.

“Girl, are you begging me?” the guard laughed, then left.

Stephanie Martin returned to standing outside the Aubry Hills with Will Busenburg on the night Hatton was murdered. “My first reaction was, ‘You shot him?’ I didn’t believe him.

“He says, ‘We need to park your car and go into the Apartments. ’

“When we go up to the Apartments, and I walked up there—”

The guard interrupted again, briefly. Martin barely reacted.

“Now, at the point that I’m walking up the stairs . . . at this point I didn’t go into any kind of shock.” She still didn’t believe that Busenburg had shot Hatton, she said. “I was in the shock already of crying all night. But I was still in that state [of] . . . ‘I can’t believe you’re standing here, Will.’ I said, ‘I can’t believe you’re alive.’

“It’s almost like I didn’t even almost hear him when he told me he shot him. And so when I went to the Apartments, I didn’t know what he was, you know, what we were going to do. But he had told me that . . . we had to go into the Apartments.”

A prison door crashed closed.

“I was just always saying, ‘I can’t believe you. I can’t believe you. I can’t believe you’re standing here and you didn’t come out.’ And he was very, very calm, very, like I said, joblike. You know, when I look back now, I think he was kinda in the mode that this was a hit.

“So when I went up to the Apartments, I still didn’t know what to expect. Then I actually remember starting to kinda get scared, wondering if they’re both playing some kind of joke on me. I never really was scared of Will, even though I knew he did that for a living, but that night—after everything I had been through—believing that he’s, you know, and then being paranoid of these people—as I was walking up those stairs, I considered there was some kind of joke being played on me.”

Stephanie Martin had been in the fields at 6:30
A.M
. Just before 8
A.M
., the sky turned charcoal-black. She prayed. It started to sprinkle. She prayed more. She wanted the day off. The wind banged, and a Texas gully-washer stormed through. Both inmates and guards were drenched to the bone as they raced for the indoors.

“It was fun,” said Martin. “I enjoyed it. I like doing stuff like that. It reminds you of being in the real world.”

Between black clouds, blue skies opened briefly. Even radio waves seemed confused as FM stations from more than two hundred miles away were picked up.

Perhaps, it was a warning. Stephanie Martin was confused and wanted answers. “I’d like to know why [Will] picked Chris of all the people in the world. Why they really fell out. Who, what he was doing those times when he was on the missions. I mean, I have no idea.”

Holly Frischkorn wanted to know why adhesive had been found on her nephew’s upper lip.

“No,” shouted Martin. “The prosecutor one time asked me, ‘Did you ever put anything over his mouth?’ And I was like, ‘No! We never put anything over his mouth after we took the body out....’ ” She momentarily stuttered and mumbled.

“Now, Will—I have no idea. He never said anything like that. And I don’t understand why he would or how he could.”

It all frustrated the hell out of her. “Well, I can’t play detective forever. I mean,” she said, lightly slapping the table once, “it’s almost pointless. It’s not going to get me out any earlier, but, yet, I wonder these things all the time. Yeah, I’m just doing fifty years of my life behind somebody that I don’t even understand why they did what they did. And it bothers me all the time.”

With that frustration vented, she was ready to finish telling her side of the story.

As Martin had walked up the steps to Chris Hatton’s apartment, as she had watched a very calm Will Busenburg, “like it’s all a big joke or something, I start actually having doubts of him. And that’s the first time I really have ever doubted Will —thinking that maybe he was setting me up for some kind of sick joke. Maybe him and Chris are in the apartment waitin’ and they’re gonna attack me or they’ve got somebody in there.

“I guess I was probably disoriented out of my mind, but in reality it kind of flashed to me as I was walking up those stairs that I’m really around someone’s who’s a—killer. . . . I didn’t trust him [Chris] anyway, he seemed so strange and, you know, wantin’ to kill people. So the whole thing just was not right, and I was walkin’ into the apartment—because I didn’t think Will had really shot him.

“When I went into the front living room, I didn’t see anything. I said, ‘Oh, okay. What kind of joke . . . are you playing on me? I wanta—let’s go. And because I didn’t see anything in the living room, I thought, well, it must be nothing. Because if he did shoot him, I figured this was kind of a struggle.... If Chris attacks, you know, I’ll do what I have to do and I’ll kill him, right. That’s why he brought the knife.”

The knife that Martin had earlier said she’d insisted Busenburg carry.

“So there’s nothing in the living room, so he says, ‘Let’s go back to the bedroom.’ I’m just following, talking the whole time.” Martin laughed heartily and began pounding the tabletop as she listed her conversation topics: there’s nothing here; I’m still upset with you; you didn’t come out of the apartment; I don’t understand what y’all are doing. The laughter stopped.

“And I go in there and it’s dark, so I didn’t see anything at first. And he moves to the side of the bed and says, ‘He’s in the bed.’ I go into the bedroom and I saw a figure laying there. At first, it looked like he was just sleeping. Then I kinda took a few steps forward, and that’s when I saw”—her voice grew quiet—“that he had blown his head off.”

Her voice rose to a normal level. “That was probably the worst moment of my entire life, because I walked in and saw that somebody was dead. And his head was gone from his—half of his face was still intact. It was gone like from here up.” She pointed from the nose up.

“So when I saw that, I said, ‘Oh, my God.’ I looked at Will, and I was like, ‘You really shot him.’ ” Her voice quieted again. “I said, ‘I didn’t believe you.’ I said, ‘I can’t believe you really shot him, you know.’

“And he says, ‘We need to move the body.’

“He’s like functioning . . . like he’s on a job, you know. Okay, you see, you believe, now let’s move the body. That’s what I remember now, when I look back on it, you know, how in control he was, like he was really had done something like that before.

“I almost threw up, I remember. It kinda rose, and I kinda felt weak and dizzy and everything, because when I saw the blood, it was splattered all over the walls. Of course, it was still dark. The lights weren’t on, but I could see it.

“We didn’t turn on the lights that night—because there was light from the . . . streetlamps, you know. And I could see when he . . . when I looked up I could see there was blood splattered on the walls. That part wasn’t so disgusting because I couldn’t really see it, but it was realistic. Gosh, you know, he blew his head off and there was blood splattered all over the walls.

“The most horrible part, disgusting, grotesque part that I remember is next—when he tells me we have to move the body to the bathroom. So he puts . . . oh, . . . he did put plastic . . . over part of the—it was some kind of bag, like from H-E-B [the grocery store], and he did that because of the blood. I can’t remember if he pulled it out right there.... I think he must’ve already had it because he never left the room with me once I was in there.”

At that point, she said, Busenburg was referring to his dead friend’s body as Chris—we have to move Chris to the bathroom.

“So he puts this bag on the head, and when he moved him—when he rolled him over to put him in the blanket—there was comforters on the bed and one of them was thrown back. He was actually in a . . . sleeping bag. I guess Chris had been laying on his sleeping bag, and then there was a comforter on the side. And the comforter was white. So it was soaked with blood.

“And when he rolled the body over to put him in the sleeping bag, I remember that’s when you could hear the blood gushing. . . . But that’s the truth because I remember that. I’ll never forget it. I could hear the blood coming out of him when he moved him over. Gurgling. I mean, you know, this—this is probably gallons of blood this person is losing . . . out of the top of their head, what was left, out of his neck, almost.”

She paused.

“Now, do I think I went into shock? Yeah. I think”—she chuckled nervously—“I went into shock. I think during this whole time, for the next two days, I think I was in shock because I really couldn’t think, move, do much. I kinda just became this pawn. Whatever he said I needed to do, I did.”

He rolled the body over, said Martin. “And I helped him put the comforter over it, because there was so much blood. So we dragged it off the bed. I never touched the body. I never had to touch the body. He was wrapped up in blankets at this time. We had wrapped him up.”

Tonya Williams had told Frank Bryan that Martin had said she’d stuck her hand inside Chris Hatton’s open head.

“That was a lie,” Martin laughed. “It was like a year and a half to two years after I had been locked up. I had told them everything. There was nothing left to tell.” The inmate, said Martin, left TCCC and got her charges dropped. “And I think this is why she did this—because she wanted something to give the DA. She went to the DA and told them these things. She knew that they wanted to pin me down by saying I was there.

“So, she told the DA that I said I was in the apartment and I could hear—we could hear Chris breathing, and we were in the other room deciding how should we kill him. I can’t remember the rest of what she said, but I remember her saying that I said we could hear him breathing before we shot him. Then she said I had said that I did something . . . like . . . put my hands in the head.... But, no, I never touched the head. Never had to touch the actual body.”

Her voice was deep. “What on earth, what . . . reason would I have to put my hands in the head? Now Will sort of did because he was putting the bag on the head, but he didn’t actually put his hands in the head.”

Martin recalled that for fact. But other things, she couldn’t recall. “Certain things you can’t remember. I don’t know if I was so out of it when it was happening, but I remember that we did drag the body.... I don’t even remember putting the body in the bathtub, but we did. But I remember cleaning up some blood that had gotten on the floor, like a little string of it.”

Her voice changed from deep and serious to high and almost questioning as she said, “He would always have me do those things, like clean this up. Had me cut off the hands.... Had me go—and I don’t know if this was . . . he wanted me to be more involved with it or what, but he had me, uh, go into the front room and put the gun in the gun case. When I got there, the gun was in the front room next to the gun case.” She meant a cloth carrying case, not a furniture case. “Now, when I went in, I don’t remember seeing the gun”—seemingly contradicting herself—“but when he—when we had put the body up he said, ‘Go to the front room. There’s the gun laying there. Put it into the case.’ So I did.

“Now, thank God my fingerprints never came up on the gun.” She laughed lightly. “I mean, I wondered—the way Will’s mind thinks, I wondered did he want me to purposely have my fingerprints on the gun? But then he wiped his off, too.

“Now, when he put the body in the bathtub, we left all the—the comforters and the sleeping bag on . . . and then closed the shower curtain. Then we went into the bedroom, and he put clothes—there was blood all over the mattresses. I mean, you could tell it was just soaked in. He put jeans and clothes on that to cover it until he said we would come back. Now he didn’t mention to me we were gonna come back until we were driving home.”

Martin had told investigators and attorneys time and time again that she and Busenburg had been in separate vehicles.

“But he put [the clothes] on the bed in case for some reason somebody came in and went to the bedroom, you know. Of course, the body was in Will’s bathroom. This is the back bedroom bathroom. Then he closed that door. I remember he turned the temperature . . . down real cold, the AC. I guess that was so the body wouldn’t get hot and stink. It was winter already.”

It had been a warm winter. Martin, she said, had worn shorts the night they came up with the sleeping pill plan, three nights prior.

“Now this night I remember I had jeans on—or pants, I can’t remember.... Jeans. I had jeans on,” she confirmed, “I had on a pair of black jeans and a purple . . . turtleneck.” She sighed deeply. Will, she recalled, had worn jeans and a sweatshirt.

“After we were putting the jeans on the bed, I remember that’s when I first started thinking cops. And believe it or not, it didn’t even hit me until then because I was just so amazed that this had happened, that we were moving this dead body, and he had actually killed this guy. I started realizing, oh, my God, he just shot this guy in these apartments at four-thirty, four-forty-five in the morning, it’s four—where’s the cops? Then I started saying, thinking they’re going to be here any second, what are we doing?

“I started asking Will, ‘The cops are gonna be coming any second.’ ” She stuttered and stumbled for a split second. “And then I was like, ‘How did they not hear you?’ I told him, ‘I’m sure somebody has already called. We need to get out of here.’ And he’s just still as calm as can be.”

He didn’t even seem worried about it, said Martin. “ ‘Okay. Yeah. Be quiet. Don’t make any noise. Don’t turn on the lights,’ ” she quoted him.

“[He] gets whatever he needs to get. Maybe his wallet, his keys. And of course, I didn’t come in with anything. I left my purse in the car. And we leave.

“I get in my car. He gets in his truck. And we drive home to my apartment.”

 

 

“When we’re at the apartment . . . we’re being quiet, you know . . . I asked him, ‘Can we talk? I wanna know why you decided to shoot him?’ Because he was so . . . quiet and so reserved . . . and every time I tried to ask him anything, he just told me to be quiet and said wait . . . he’d talk to me later and just do what he says.”

It was the same way Busenburg had acted back at the Aubry Hills Apartments, said Martin. “ ‘No, no, no. Be quiet. Just help me move the body,’ ” she again quoted him.

He was somewhat cold to her. “Like this was like a-a professional thing he was doing,” she repeated, “and I was being loud or something by talking.... And now I look back and I realize he was probably acting it out, acting out what he wanted to do. He wanted to go do one of these CIA missions.

“So, he says he has to go to the bathroom.” She digressed for a moment with her litany of questions to Busenburg that preceded his need to go to the bathroom. Then she laughed and said, “. . . earlier in the evening I had had diarrhea because I was so nervous. Well, he had it, so I guess it did affect him. Guess he wasn’t so in control after all. He just kept it in. He actually had to go to the bathroom.

“So he comes out of the bathroom and he goes and lays down on my bed and covers up and rolls over. That’s funny I remember these things. I mean, I guess you can’t forget something like this. I go in there and lay down next to him. I said, ‘I want to know what happened.’

“He said he didn’t want to talk about it, but he’ll tell me that it’s something that he had to do, it’s part of his job, and he just felt . . . like this was . . . his moral duty, this was something he needed to do.

“I’m like, ‘Okay. We didn’t talk about this. You know, you didn’t tell me you were going to shoot him.’ We did talk about he would, could—I knew there was a possibility a death could occur because of the fact that he went in with a knife and he’d already told me that Chris was after him and there might be some kind of confrontation....