Wages of Sin (4 page)

Gage came back in and searched the wall. He noticed what appeared to be painted-over BB holes. It looked as though more shotgun pellets were embedded there.

Mancias aimed his knife at the drywall. He bore out a triangular-shaped piece and handed it to Hill for collection.

He then left for TCSO headquarters—he had a meeting. Gage’s thick Texas accent was becoming thicker with exhaustion. Friday had turned into a long beginning of a Saturday.

From the dining room floor, Hill collected a hatchet and knife in a leather case. In the dining room closet, she and Day found and tagged a white-colored U.S. Navy cap with “Hatton 9153” written on it, just like the sleeping bag recovered days before; a red cassette-tape holder, also with “Hatton 9153” written on it; a Winchester model 1300 box; and one small blue dot—like those found near the fire ring at Pace Bend Park.

From the kitchen, rubber gloves with blood on them, trash cans, a Coke bottle, a cleaning rag, and an Oshman’s Sporting Goods receipt were collected. The Oshman’s receipt was for a shotgun. There were also letters to Will Busenburg from an attorney representing Oshman’s demanding payment for the gun.

Hill collected a sales ticket for a $19.99 skull mask; stained paper towels; a flashlight; Coke cans; and a butter knife with paint on it. The knife lay in the sink.

She and Day tagged a three-quarters empty can of glossy white Rustoleum paint, a steel wool pad, the three-liter Dr Pepper bottle that had a white paint fingerprint on it, an Ivory soap bottle, a container of Copenhagen tobacco, a roll of duct tape, and an empty vacuum cleaner bag.

A honing stone with honing oil for sharpening a knife was also tagged.

In one bathroom, they collected a rug with stains, a small burgundy towel, and a cigarette butt from a trash can. She took two swabs for blood from the sink.

From the master bedroom, she and Day photographed and tagged the shotgun boxes and a green table box containing photographs. Also in that room was a plastic Halloween sickle, like the one carried by the Grim Reaper.

In the master bath, Hill and Day photographed and collected a blue-striped shower curtain and swabbed for blood on the side, back, bottom, and caulking of the tub.

Then they moved into the murder scene bedroom. They took close-up photographs of the blood, which dripped from the headboard. They photographed and collected the paint-covered folding chair. From a nightstand, they took a can of Lysol, a can of Woolite upholstery cleaner, and a bottle of All detergent.

From the drawer of the nightstand, they tagged a green address book, one empty 12-gauge shotgun shell, and an insurance packet containing a doctor’s receipt. Also in that nightstand was a military photograph. Paperback books, including a book of poetry, were scattered throughout. A poster was on the bedroom door. There was a plastic milk carton full of change.

Near the nightstand stood a white bucket filled with milky-looking water, a red scrub brush, a red-handled paintbrush, and a blue-handled paintbrush. They collected it all.

They bagged bone fragments from the headboard and the floor, Krylon paint from the dresser, men’s black Hanes underwear from the dresser drawer, and two Round Rock High School annuals on the floor near the dresser. Photographs of Hatton and Busenburg were in the annuals.

They took the headboard with blood on it and a portion of the brown metal bed rail. Gage broke them down to be removed.

A red Hoover vacuum cleaner sat in the closet. Still plugged into an outlet just outside the closet, it was stuffed beneath a high school letterman’s jacket and crammed next to a fishing pole. Hill disconnected the vacuum’s hose and found it to be filled with bone fragments and dried blood. She could see how the blood had dripped through the connections.

Hill then collected a piece of paper marked with a bloody shoe print.

Throughout the two-bedroom, two-bath apartment, she found twelve latent fingerprints on everything from the can of Krylon paint to the can of Copenhagen tobacco.

 

 

Sergeant Gage made sure that a surveillance team was requested. He wanted someone there to catch the killer when he returned.

At 7
A.M
., Deputy Richard Hale was called. When he arrived on the scene, Hale told Gage, “I’ll need backup for the surveillance.”

About the same time, Detective Wooley returned with a date of birth, “10-22-72,” for William Michael Busenburg. Busenburg became an official suspect.

The officers loaded up the crime lab van, and Hill and Day returned to the TCSO crime lab. Gage pulled down the yellow crime scene tape and purposely dropped it just to the left of the front door. He, Hale, and Wooley left to try to search out fingerprints for Will Busenburg and to access a call roster to find someone to work backup for Hale.

They didn’t find fingerprints, but they did find an address for Busenburg. It matched that of the murder site. They also found a vehicle registration for a 1994 Chevrolet pickup truck, Texas license plate number KW3-883, in his name.

 

 

Detectives Manny Mancias and Mark Sawa walked into the office of Dr. John Schilthuis, DDS. It was about 9:45
A.M
., Saturday, January 14, 1995.

Dr. Schilthuis looked at the X rays he’d made of the murder victim and those the detectives had brought from Dr. Robert Jansa. In Schilthuis’s opinion, the X rays matched. But the detectives needed more confirmation. They took the X rays and teeth from Dr. Schilthuis and drove to the county morgue.

They handed the X rays to Dr. Roberto Bayardo. It was then official. The burned, handless, near-headless murder victim was Christopher Michael Hatton.

On April 11, 1972, Christopher Michael Hatton was born in Dadeville, Alabama, a town of fewer than 3,000 residents living in the lush foothills of the Appalachian Mountains and swimming in the clear waters of Lake Martin. It was a community where crosses were burned in yards and white police officers refused to ride with black police officers.

The baby’s mother, Rhonda Hatton, was a pretty, dark-haired, thin, young woman from a large family of Native American descent, most of whom grew up to own their own successful construction companies. Christopher Michael looked just like his mother, and he grew up to hate that. He was short, handsome, dark-featured, and had thick dark hair with a widow’s peak. He was, in all eyes, a beautiful child.

In his eyes, he felt his mother didn’t want to touch him; she didn’t even want to bathe her baby. She rarely hugged him, or told him she loved him. He believed his mother had only had children to suit his father.

His father, who was named Michael Hatton, was a tall, handsome man from a military family—the son of a sergeant major and a mother who had been a World War II POW in Poland. That background provided Christopher Michael’s father with impeccable manners and a strong work ethic.

Together, he and Rhonda—who had dated Michael’s brother Bill in high school—had Christopher Michael, and several years later, another son, Brian. Michael Hatton took his children to church, taught his sons to open doors for ladies, to respect their elders, to say “yes, sir” and “no, ma’am.”

Still, Christopher Michael could speak disrespectfully of other races. He used the “n-word,” and, as he got older, he often made negative comments about his mother. But the young boy felt he had his just reasons, and they had nothing to do with race. Rhonda Hatton had a reputation for picking on her eldest son and spoiling her youngest.

In the fall of 1986, Michael Hatton—who worked two jobs, held the family together, clothed them, fed them, and got the boys up for school—fell ill with a fever. As his temperature hit 105 degrees, he entered the hospital. Concerned Hatton family members flew to Alabama to be with him.

On the third day of the fever, Michael Hatton began hallucinating. When he became violent in the hospital hallway, the police were called. They struck him while subduing him, some of the blows hitting Michael Hatton in the head. That night, his fever broke. The following day, he was taken for X rays, and later the same day, died.

No one ever clearly determined the cause of death—fever, hospital staff negligence, or police brutality. But Michael Hatton was dead.

With her husband’s death, Rhonda Hatton had two young sons, the boys’ Social Security income, and, according to her son and other family members, a severe case of alcoholism.

 

 

Soon thereafter, Round Rock, Texas, police officer Holly Frischkorn married Travis County, Texas, deputy sheriff William Hatton. It was her second marriage, his third, and it got off to a rough start. The Bill that Holly married was not the Bill she had dated. A man who kept his emotions bottled, he changed the day his brother, Michael, died.

From Texas, the Hattons repeatedly called Child Protective Services in Alabama about Christopher Michael and Brian. Repeatedly a CPS worker drove out to Rhonda Hatton’s home and sat down with the mother and boys. She questioned them about the allegations of abuse. They denied them all. With their mother sitting beside them, the boys couldn’t tell the truth.

Within a year or two of his father’s death, Christopher Michael, who went by “Mike” and “Michael,” dropped out of school. He spent his days hanging out in the woods of Alabama. He spent his nights stealing stop signs and construction signs, then decorated his bedroom with them. It was easy for Mike to do this; his mother often went a week without seeing him.

When Rhonda Hatton finally walked into her eldest son’s bedroom and saw his collection of traffic signs, she called the cops. The police showed up on her doorstep, took the signs from Mike, and laughed off his case. They knew too well his home situation.

Mike soon grew strong enough to fight back against his mother, so she sent him to live with his uncle Bill and aunt Holly in Texas.

Bill and Holly became Mike’s legal guardians so that they could enroll him in Round Rock High School. His return to school was a stipulation of his move. Mike wanted simply to get his GED.

“It’s school or nothing,” Holly had said.

Holly was charmed by Mike. The 1988 day that she and Bill drove Mike home from Austin’s Robert Mueller Airport, she picked up the young teen’s luggage to carry it into the house. Mike ran to the front door, swung it open, and ran back to grab the luggage from Holly.

“Aunt Holly, you’ll never have to carry anything again. You don’t have to worry about anything anymore. I’m here.” And he smiled.

Holly thought the polite, handsome boy was a godsend. She was a tall, kindhearted woman with a good smile, who had always wanted kids and couldn’t have any.

Round Rock was a bit different from rural Alabama. It was in the process of forsaking its own rural, farming past to become a high-tech, booming suburb full of solid-income, churchgoing Republicans who flocked to the community from states north and west.

Its community leaders took pride in their urban sprawl and chain restaurants that popped up faster than weeds in the nearby sorghum fields. Its parents believed in protecting their children by banning books in the schools and preaching against abortion. They expected their children to grow into God-fearing, college-educated successes who married the opposite sex and produced athletic babies.

At Round Rock High, Mike Hatton decided to leave his Alabama past behind by changing his name to Chris. But he couldn’t change his sweet, soft Alabama accent that Texans had a hard time understanding. And he couldn’t bring himself to tell his family that at school he was called Chris. To Holly, Bill, and Brian, he was still Mike, the Mike who wore only Levi’s 501 button-fly jeans.

“Michael, you’re going to have to get away from those Alabama things. There’s no sheep around here for you to sneak up on in those button-up jeans,” Holly teased.

“Oh, Aunt Holly.” He began to blush. “I can’t believe you said that.”

“Well, what the hell do you not want a zipper for?” she laughed.

His blush flamed beet red. He was very teasible, and Holly liked to tease the boy she now loved like her own.

“You need to call your mom. It’s her birthday,” said Holly.

He only phoned Alabama without prodding when he called to check on his little brother, Brian.

 

 

Hatton was quiet, shy, and kept his worries and thoughts to himself. Because of that, he didn’t have a lot of friends and spent much of his time with family. Often he rode patrol with Holly in her squad car. Often he ran two to six miles a day, sometimes with his uncle Bill. Mike was a sprinter on the track team.

But he wasn’t comfortable at school. He was older than most of his classmates, due to his lost time as a dropout. He struggled with his studies, particularly math and English. He wasn’t good at getting his homework done. He was a slow reader, although he loved to read James Bond-like books and stories about mercenaries and military missions. Following in the family tradition of military service, he joined the Junior ROTC.

In June 1991, Mike Hatton was scheduled to go on a ROTC trip to California. But he was running late, which wasn’t uncommon. Often he slept through four and five alarms and fell asleep in the shower. This time, though, there had been a mix-up in communication as to who was supposed to drive him to the bus, Holly or Bill.

Mike frantically called Holly, who drove him in her squad car, police sirens blaring. Mike acted like he shrugged it off as no big deal. But to the ROTC students at Round Rock High, it
was
a big deal.

“Oh, my God, what’s happened?” said fifteen-year-old sophomore Lisa Pace, staring wide-eyed at the flashing blue lights. “The bus is going to be detained by the cops. We’re never going to get to Disneyland. We’re never going to get to California,” she panicked to her girlfriend.

Then she saw nineteen-year-old senior Mike Hatton step out of the police car. With his thick dark hair and ROTC body, he was teen idol gorgeous. And he
had
thought about doing some modeling.

“Who is that guy? He is so cute,” said Lisa, panting like a groupie.

“You don’t know who that is?” said her friend Debbie.
“That’s
Chris Hatton.”

Round Rock High was so large that first-period ROTC members didn’t know third-period ROTC members. But Debbie knew all the cute boys.

“Oh, he’s really cute,” moaned Lisa.

Lisa Pace was a tall, dark-haired, voluptuous flirt, and at that very moment, she set her sights on Chris Hatton. Despite a little schoolgirl voice, Lisa Pace could be domineering.

Hatton stepped onto the bus.

“Oh, special you. You got a police escort,” the students ribbed. “Yeah, we were holding the bus just for you, Mr. Important.”

By the time the bus rolled back into Texas one week later, Chris Hatton and Lisa Pace sat side by side, holding hands, as they slept on each other’s shoulders. When they stepped off the bus, Lisa made sure she had his phone number.

Hatton later asked her if she could get her friend Katy to go out with his best friend, Glenn Conway. It would be a double date. The foursome went to SPSJT, a Round Rock live country-music bar. Hatton nervously looked around. Through the din of smoke, couples shuffled roper boots against a wooden floor, their arms wrapped around waists and necks. Chris looked away. He was a rotten dancer.

Lisa grabbed him and dragged him onto the floor. She was a great dancer. He looked at his feet and he tried to shuffle in rhythm. He just couldn’t do it. They wouldn’t go where he wanted.

Where he wanted was to go to the movies. Hatton loved action-packed, thriller-killer, blow-’em-up movies. From that night on, he and Lisa spent most of their dates at the movies, alone.

 

 

In September 1991, just months after Chris and Lisa started dating, Lisa’s father was diagnosed with cancer. Chris held Lisa in his arms as she cried. “I know you’re having a hard time,” he whispered. “This is a thing, you know—people die. And you have to get through. My dad died, and I got through it. Everything will be okay.”

She continued to weep and hold onto him. “You don’t have to talk,” he comforted. “You don’t have to say anything. I’m here. And I’ll be here for you. Just think about all the good times.”

 

 

Lisa walked into her backyard, looked for a perfect rose, found it, clipped it, and took it to school for Chris, for no reason at all.

“This is so pretty.” He nearly wept. “Nobody’s ever given me flowers. Nobody’s ever given me a rose or anything.”

 

 

For her first birthday with him, October 10, 1991, Hatton gave Lisa a pair of opal earrings, a Garfield bookmark, and a carefully picked card telling her how special she was and how important she was to him. They constantly traded love notes between classes.

The following month, Lisa gave Chris her body, something she’d wanted to do for months. She believed she was his first because he wouldn’t answer her questions as they drove through the Texas nights, cruising the country roads, listening to country music.

“Have you ever had sex in a car?” she asked, giggling.

“Yes.”

“In a boat?”

“I don’t know,” he said, frustrated, embarrassed. “Stop asking me all these questions.”

She believed she was his first because on their first two dates, he’d been all over her. “Slow down. Calm down,” she’d told him. After that, Lisa had always had to make the first move.

 

 

That fall, Chris Hatton walked into a recruiter’s office and signed up to join the Navy.
Awesome,
he thought. He dreamed of being a Navy SEAL.

Glenn Conway thought it was awesome, too. They planned on reporting together right after graduation.

“Excuse me?” said Lisa Pace. “We didn’t discuss this, and we’re supposed to be together?”

“What?” said his aunt Holly. She didn’t want him that far away from her. It seemed like she’d just gotten him. She tried to talk him out of it.

But the female pleas fell on deaf male ears.
Navy SEAL.
The thought made Chris Hatton break into a smile that charmed. And no female could resist his smile.

 

 

“Every time my mother writes or calls, and that’s not even once a month, all she does is say, ‘I don’t know how I’m gonna pay my bills. I’ve been working two, three jobs. I’m sick. I need somebody to help me. I can’t do it on my own.’ ”

Chris’s dark hair draped toward his dark eyes. He took a swig of Dr Pepper, then reached for Lisa’s hand.